As soon as tragedy, disparaging the mysteries of the fables had transformed them into historical facts, it needed only a step to raise historical facts to the rank of subjects of tragedy. Phrynichus was, it is said, the first who had this audacity. He produced in the theatre, the _Conquest of Miletus_.[166] The people of Athens, with a whimsicality which is characteristic of them, condemned the poet to a very heavy fine, for having disobeyed the law and crowned him because of the tears which they shed at the representation of his work. But this was not enough, confounding thus reality and allegory; soon, sacred and profane things were mingled by forging without any kind of moral aim, subjects wholly false and fantastic. The poet Agathon, who was the author of this new profanation had been the friend of Euripides.[167] He proved thus that he knew nothing of the essence of dramatic poetry and makes it doubtful whether Euripides knew it any better. Thus, in the space of less than two centuries, tragedy, borne upon the car of Thespis, elevated by Æschylus to a nobler theatre, carried to the highest degree of splendour by Sophocles, had already become weakened in the hands of Euripides, had lost the memory of its celestial origin with Agathon, and abandoned to the caprices of a populace as imperious as ignorant, inclined toward a rapid degeneration.[168] Comedy less reserved did not have a happier destiny. After having hurled its first darts upon the heroes and demi-gods of Greece, having taken possession of certain very unguarded allegories, to turn even the gods to ridicule[169]; after having derided Prometheus and Triptolemus, Bacchus and the Bacchantes, after having made sport of heaven and earth, of the golden age and the seasons[170]; it attacked men in general and in particular, ridiculed their absurdities, pursued their vices, real or imaginary, and delivered them both unsparingly, without pity, to derision and contempt.[171] Epicharmus, who gave certain rules to the indecent farces of Susarion, was followed by Magnes, Cratinus, Eupolis, and a crowd of other comic poets, until Aristophanes whose bitter satires no longer finding sufficient influence in certain obscure ridicules, applied themselves to disparaging science and virtue, and twenty years beforehand, prepared and envenomed the hemlock by which Socrates was poisoned. It is true that some time after, Menander tried to reform this terrible abuse and gave to comedy a form less revolting; but he was only able to do so by detaching it completely from its origin, that is to say, by severing it from all that it had preserved, intellectually and allegorically, and reducing it to the representation of certain tableaux and certain events of the social life.