That, with their debts and payments long since due,[1] 770
Have heard their friends insisting and repeating,
"Get off,"—"Keep out of the way;" like the huswife's warning,
That empties a nuisance into the street at night.
Lam. And must we bear all this,—in the name of democracy?
Dic. Yes, just as long as Lamachus draws his salary.
Lam. No matter! Henceforth I devote myself
Against the Peloponnesians, whilst I live,
To assault and harass them by land and sea.
Dic. And I proclaim for all the Peloponnesians
And Thebans and Megarians, a free market; 780
Where they may trade with me, but not with Lamachus.
The Parabasis, in which the Chorus was brought forward to speak in praise or defence of the author, was a portion of the primitive satirical undramatic comedy. In the times of the ancient or (as we should call it, from the name of the only author whose remains have reached us) the Aristophanic comedy, it seems to have been regarded as nearly superfluous; and is seldom introduced without some alleged motive, as in the instance before us; sometimes a burlesque one, as in The Peace.
The present, which is the oldest of the existing plays of Aristophanes, was, as he tells us, the first in which he had introduced a Parabasis. Since his alleged, and probably his real, motive was the circumstance to which he had already alluded when speaking in the assumed character of Dicæopolis, he had reverted to his
"sufferings past
From Cleon for my comedy last year" (p. 20).
This comedy (The Babylonians) seems, as far as we can judge of it from the few fragments that remain, to have been intended, in the first place, as an exposure of existing malpractices and abuses, and, secondly, as a reductio ad absurdum of the extravagant schemes of Athenian ambition; assuming them to be realised, and exhibiting the result.
- ↑ Monthly payments to their club.
