have developed at the cost of so much effort. On the other hand, as the President has so well said, a form of world organization such as is presented by a League of Nations signifies in reality a disentangling of alliances, and eliminates for all time to come those secret cabals and understandings in the machinations of which war has its origin.

The choices which the United States must make today are not the choices of 1789 or of 1823, but are the choices of a nation whose growth in resources and power has made her an integral and important part of a world situation. Unless she plays that part completely and unreservedly, she destroys the conditions that are most favorable to her own growth, she renders impossible the full fruition of those democratic institutions which promise so much to the future of the world, and she relinquishes the high and noble mission which she is manifestly called upon to perform as the standard-bearer of international right and as the leader in democratic development.

ARISTOPHANES AND THE GREAT WAR

BY H. LAMAR CROSBY

Assistant Professor of Greek and Director of the Summer School

It is indeed a far cry from the days of Aristophanes, the great comic poet of Athens, to our own immediate present, and yet I trust that the title of this talk may not prove wholly fantastic. There is a tendency all too prevalent in our generation to adopt a patronizing air toward problems and activities of earlier ages, to feel that our own life has been so altered and advanced by scientific invention and scientific theory that we have nothing to learn from men of old. It is suggested in no uncertain language that the record of their experiences should be thrown upon the scrap pile, or at any rate consigned to some out-of-theway place so as not to block the wheels of progress. It is forgotten that in a world of change one thing at least is strangely free from change, the human heart and its behavior.

The very remoteness of antiquity serves only to clarify the picture and to enable the observer to view men and events free from prejudice. The student of the past finds not only instruction but encouragement in the record-encouragement in the realization that the future looked black long, long ago, that there are few problems confronting society today that are wholly new, that in spite of blunders the world somehow moves on. How can one familiar with the past be other than a confirmed optimist? And surely optimism, intelligent, constructive optimism, was never more needed than today.

When one hears of the Great War, one naturally thinks of the cataclysm that burst upon an unsuspecting world in the summer of 1914. It was the fate of Aristophanes to live through another war, one that as truly deserves the epithet of greatness both in respect of duration, of attendant horrors and atrocities, of mighty issues at stake, and of momentous consequences.

the forces engaged seem insignificant when compared to those of our world war, if they had no U-boats, no aircraft, no poison gas, no "big Berthas" that from safe cover miles away dealt death and confusion to a civilian population, nevertheless the struggle was quite as intense and ruthless in its way.

The Peloponnesian War brought into opposition the two ieading powers of the day-Athens, the forerunner of England, mistress of the seas, and Sparta, in to many respects comparable to Prussia, supreme on land. Each was the head of a powerful alliance, and it is interesting to note how lamentably the theory of balance of power failed to preserve the peace of Hellas. The underlying causes of the war were clashing commercial interests, political ideals, and philosophies of life. The immediate pretext was hardly more serious than the assassination at Serajevo; and yet the fighting raged, with one brief interval of only seeming peace, for almost thirty years, and its ever-widening eddies threatened to engulf most of the then known world.

The future historian of the disaster of 1914 will have at his command an appalling mass of material-books without number, magazine articles, newspapers, government reportsall the apparatus of scientific historiography: but it is safe to predict that the picture that he draws will fall far short of the vividness and verisimilitude and charm achieved by Aristophanes. Historians all too often are absorbed in the greater movements, the more imposing personages. It was so with Thucydides. the world's first scientific historian, who wrote of this same Peloponnesian War. We should like to know more about the common people their hopes and fears, their domestic difficulties, their reaction toward politics and politicians, the scandals that they passed from mouth to mouth; all those details that alone can make history a thing of life and meaning.

It is just there that Aristophanes is preeminently successful. He brings upon the stage representatives of every social class and every calling-statesman and wardheeler, tragic poet and

poetaster, illustrious general and pettifogging lawyer, sturdy farmer and scurvy knave, the hard-working, patriotic housewife and the bedizened, painted lady of the demimonde. We hear the chit chat of the corner drug store and the club, charges of corruption in high places, jests at war profiteers of questionable antecedents and social aspirations, the latest fad in slang, the absurd lisp of Alcibiades, the real secret of the stunning figure of a famous dandy, the superstitious weakness of a commanding general, the scandal of the slacker. Nor are there wanting reflections upon such timely topics as the high cost of living and the servant problem. No phase of the life of the Athens that he knew and loved so well is slighted. One could not even list them all in one brief hour. It will be possible in what follows only to scratch the surface, to touch upon only a few of the many points that seem of interest in our present situation.

One is surprised first of all to find that Athens preserved throughout the long death grapple its interest in the drama. It is not so strange that they should have had the patience to attend comedies, although some of the topics treated by Aristophanes might find a modern audience rather cold; but each year the tragic poets brought out a total of twenty-four new plays, none of which, it is safe to assume, could be classed with "Oh, Lady, Lady" or "The Better 'Ole," not to speak of the offerings of such favorites as Charlie Chaplin and the acrobatic Fairbanks, however delightful they may be. How many serious plays could New York or London boast of in war time? When one remembers that the Athenian stage was a state enterprise and that there were many times when the treasury found it difficult to equip its forces and pay its fighters, the determination to maintain the drama unimpaired appears all the more notable. The poet himself boasts of the achievement in one of his later plays.

That the average Athenian took his drama seriously, and that sober tragedy did not depend for its existence upon a select and small group of intellectuals, is amply attested by the comic poet. In a play produced early in the war, a

simple hearted rustic in balancing his pleasures and his pains declares:

"Then I'd a Tragic sorrow, when I looked
With open mouth for Aeschylus, and lo,

The Crier called, 'Bring on your play, Theognis.'
Judge what an icy shock that gave my heart!"*

Aeschylus had then been dead a quarter of a century. We should hardly have expected to find his plays so live an issue. There is also a most amazing abundance of quotations, parodies or other allusions to the drama in all the plays of Aristophanes. He clearly assumed that his audience would recognize such references and would experience that peculiar self-applause that we all have had on such occasions. "The Frogs," a play presented just before the disaster at the Dardanelles that resulted in the final overthrow of Athens and the end of the war, is a case in point. Both Sophocles and Euripides had just died, and, as Aeschylus had been buried a full half century, tragedy had fallen upon evil days. Dionysus, god of the drama, visits the lower world with the purpose of bringing back one of the three to resume his career in Athens. Most of the play consists of a contest between Aeschylus and Euripides, as a result of which Dionysus is converted from his stubborn partisanship of the latter and carries off the triumphant Aeschylus. Surely such a plot might well be classed as a dead issue. Would it not seem venturesome on the part of the playwright to handle such a theme when there were so many live topics that must have pressed for attention? His judgment of his audience, usually unerring, seems to have been abundantly vindicated, for there is a tradition that the play was so well received that it was accorded the unusual honor of a second hearing. It should be noted that it was at this very period that the state was most in need of funds. The following excerpt from the debate between Euripides and Aeschylus deserves quotation because of the

This and the other metrical versions in this paper are taken from The Comedies of Aristophanes, edited, translated and explained by Benjamin Bickley Rogers. G. Bell and Sons.