disregard popular opinion in a very flagrant manner. Some of the old scholiasts say that a poet was not allowed to exhibit till he had reached the age of thirty or forty.[196] But this is clearly a mistake. The only limit of age in any of these Bacchic contests was that which prohibited a man under forty from serving as choregus to a chorus of boys. As for the dramatic poets, they were free to compete as soon as they had reached twenty, passed their dokimasia, and been enrolled as full citizens. Most of the great poets seem to have begun their career at a very early age. Aeschylus was only twenty-five when he made his first appearance. Sophocles began to exhibit at twenty-eight, Euripides at twenty-six,[197] while Aristophanes must have been even younger when he brought out the Knights.[198] It was not uncommon at Athens for a poet to have his plays produced by a friend, instead of coming forward in his own person. Various motives might lead him to do so. A young poet, feeling diffident about his powers, might wish to make his first experiments anonymously. This was apparently the reason why the first three plays of Aristophanes—the Banqueters, Babylonians, and Acharnians—were brought out by Callistratus.[199] It was not till 424, when the Knights was exhibited, that Aristophanes applied for a chorus in his own name. In the parabasis to this play he explains that the reasons which made him keep in the background at first were caution and timidity, and a feeling that one ought to proceed warily in the business of comic writing, and advance by slow degrees, just as a steersman begins by serving as a rower.[200] Sometimes, again, a poet wrote a play for his son, and allowed him to bring it out and get the credit of the authorship, so as to give him a successful start in his dramatic career. Aristophanes for this reason entrusted his two last comedies to his son Araros; and Sophocles is said to have entrusted his son Iophon with tragedies.[201] It occasionally happened also that a wealthy citizen, with literary ambitions, bought a play from a clever but needy author and exhibited it as his own. Plato, the poet of the Old Comedy, is said to have made an income by sales of this kind.[202] Probably, however, the commonest reason for vicarious production was the mere desire to escape trouble and responsibility. The older poets had superintended in person everything connected with the bringing out of a play. In later times, as play-writing became more and more a purely literary pursuit, it was natural for authors occasionally to transfer the theatrical part of the business to other shoulders. They hired stage-managers to look after the rehearsals, and they got theatrical friends to make the necessary arrangements with the archon. Aristophanes, in the middle of his career, entrusted many of his comedies to Philonides and Callistratus.[203] The Autolycus of Eupolis was brought out by Demostratus; Philippus, son of Aristophanes, is said