pads, and cutpurses, and parricides, and housebreakers—a sort of men there is a vast quantity of in Hades—and they, hearing his objections and twistings and turnings, went stark mad and thought him the cleverest. So Euripides was elated, and laid claim to the throne on which Æschylus was sitting."
It has been remarked that in this thoroughly Athenian Hades, with its Prytaneum and Athenian law giving public maintenance to such as excelled their fellow-artists, "the under-world is an exact copy of the upper;" but the remark by no means exhausts the significance of the Frogs as an index to average Athenian notions of the future state. The treatment of the under-world as a mere reflection of Athenian life shows what little way the Athenians had made towards utilising the future state as the most solemn sanction for personal morality. Hercules, indeed, at the opening of the play, makes a passing allusion to those who "have wronged their guests, beaten their parents, sworn false oaths, or transcribed a passage of the dramatist Morsimus," as "lying in the mud" by way of punishment; but the jocular allusion to Morsimus is not calculated to make us think of the Athenian conception of future retribution as at all a serious matter. We must regard such theories as those of Plato in his Phædo as expressing the deep reflection of a very few who, like the philosopher, felt the need of sanctions for personal morality. But outside esoteric circles, such as the initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries, there was little opportunity for earnest belief in the moral sanctions of a future state; and one great obstacle to the popularity of such belief is to be found in Athenian slavery. The prominence of the slave in the Frogs, among all sorts and conditions of Athenian men and women in Hades, is a sharp reminder of this obstacle. How could the master
