Page:Frogs (Murray 1912).djvu/135

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
COMMENTARY ON THE FROGS
127

This is ordinary philistinism. Aeschylus struck Aristophanes as being like Homer, not because they were both warlike, but chiefly because they were both great well-recognised poets of the past, whom he had accepted in his childhood without criticism. He attacks Euripides for making him think and feel in some new or disturbing way, or perhaps at a time of life when he does not expect really to think and feel at all. Probably the contemporaries of Aeschylus attacked him in just the same way. He made people think of the horrors of victory and of vengeance; he made a most profound and un-Homeric study of the guilty Clytaemnestra. But Aristophanes, when in his present mood, resembles that modern critic who is said to have praised Shakespeare for writing "bright, healthy plays with no psychology in them."

P. 77, l. 1036, Pantacles.]—A lyric poet, one of whose victories is recorded on an extant inscribed pillar (Dittenberger, 410). The "procession" was doubtless at the Panathenaea six months before.

P. 77, l. 1039, Lamachus.]—The general who died so heroically in the Sicilian expedition. He is attacked in the Acharnians as representative of the war party, partly perhaps because of his name ("Love-battle" or "Host-fighter"). He is treated respectfully in Thesm. 841.

P. 77, l. 1043, Stheneboia.]—Phaedra, heroine of the Hippolytus.

P. 77, l. 1044, A woman in love in one act of one play.]—An exaggeration. Clytaemnestra is in love with Aegisthus, as any subtle reading of the Agamemnon shows; but other passions are more prominent,