Now in the scurrility of the primitive (non-literary) comus Professor Navarre (_op. cit._, p. 248) would recognize three stages. In the first, the ribaldry of the comus received no answer from the crowd of spectators. This is doubtless to be explained by supposing that all who were competent to participate were already members of the comus; the spectators consisted only of women and children, who frequently had no more right of speech in religious ritual than in law. So Dicaeopolis’ wife is present but speechless in Aristophanes’ _Acharnians_ (see p. 36, above). In the second stage, the bystanders retorted to the assaults of the comus revelers. This probably indicates that membership in the comus has been restricted in some way, leaving others free to retaliate in kind from the crowd. The third stage was reached when this new element was formally recognized and brought within the comus itself, which was thus divided into antagonistic halves for mutual recrimination. Thus may be explained a peculiar feature of Old Comedy. Its chorus was a double chorus of twenty-four members, always divided into two semi-choruses, which often were hostile during a large portion of the play. Sometimes this division between them was shown by their masks or costumes, as when the chorus represented men and women, horses and their riders, etc. But sometimes the division was one of sentiment—one semi-chorus, for example, favoring peace and the other being opposed to it. The result of this division of the early comus revelers into semi-choruses is a parallelism of structure in certain parts of comedy, ode being matched by antode, and the epirrheme of one chorus leader by the antepirrheme of the other. It is clear that all the divisions which show this duality of arrangement descend from the comus.[96] One of these divisions is the parabasis (4). Though one of the most ancient features of Old Comedy, it was also one of the first to decay: complete in Aristophanes’ earlier plays, it is always mutilated in some way during his middle period and in his last two comedies has disappeared entirely. We have seen (p. 37, above) that the essential characteristics of the phallic ceremonies were the induction of the good influences by invocation and the aversion of the bad by vituperation. Now in the epirrhematic syzygy which constituted the second half of the parabasis, even as late as Aristophanes, when it naturally must have changed considerably in function, “the ode and antode normally contain an invocation, either of a muse or of gods, who are invited to be present at the dance, the divine personages being always selected with reference to the character of the chorus. The epirrheme and antepirrheme often contain the other element of satire or some milder form of advice and exhortation.”[97]