The poet Aristophanes is the first to raise his voice against the change. A few months before the utter ruin of Athens, he produces the _Frogs_, which really repeats the attack of the _Clouds_, with Euripides instead of Sokrates for the defendant. The poet is attacked as at once the prophet of the new culture of the Sophists and of the new artistic standards. The following are some of the chief faults which Aristophanes finds with the new school represented by Euripides:[702] (1) an undignified style of music, worthy only of the bones as an accompaniment; (2) its habit of mixing all sorts of incongruous musical rubbish together, “lewd love-songs, drinking catches of Meletos, Karian flute-music, dirges, and dances”; (3) its trills or shakes, as in εἰειειειειλίσσετε [eieieieieilissete]; (4) its mixture of incongruous pictures, “dolphins, spiders, halcyons, prophet-chambers, and race-courses,” pathos and bathos, commonplace and solemnity; (5) bad metre, licenses of every sort, and frequent “resolved” feet. As a parody of its habitual incongruity Aristophanes gives: “O God of the sea, that’s what it is. O ye neighbours, behold yon monstrous deed: Gluke’s gone off with my cock. Nymphs, ye daughters of the hills! Mary Ann, lend a hand.” Aristophanes’ voice comes with a certain pathos, for the play is the last utterance of Periclean Athens, just at the point of falling and trying to find a scapegoat on whom to lay the responsibility of its ruin: and the scapegoat chosen is the new artistic and musical standard. The Ionic temperament had, in fact, broken away from all restraint. The Doric canons of order, symmetry, regularity, and solidity were thrown aside. Everything antique was treated with disdain; all authority was rejected with scorn. No standards, ethical or artistic, were tolerated. Perpetual change, daily novelty, became the one desire of Athens. The foundations of belief, the bases of the moral code, were broken down. The whole world seemed to be crumbling away, and nothing was arising to take its place. Spectators became dizzy with the eternal fluctuations. What wonder if they turned longing eyes towards the one centre of gravity in Hellas, towards the one place where politics, art, and ethics retained their old stability, towards Sparta? So Sparta becomes the philosopher’s ideal, and it is the Spartan canon that Plato tries to reimpose on Ionicism running riot.[703] The fault which he finds with contemporary art and music is that they simply try to please and amuse the audience, not to educate and improve it.[704] They are like parents who try to soothe a fractious child with sweetmeats when his health requires castor oil. But the poets and artists are the slaves of the mob which pays them. They must be freed from this control, and made the servants of the government. Strict canons must be drawn up, which they must follow on pain of being expelled from the State. The canons must be drawn up by