Comedies of Aristophanes Author:Aristophanes Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: GENERAL NOTE THE CLOUDS. I Have now completed my undertaking, and present to my readers the comedy of the Clouds entire. Conscious that every original must... more » suffer by translation, I have only to request allowances may be made for my author, as well as for myself; still 1 presume to hope I have caught enough of his spirit, style, and meaning, to add something to the reputation of these Essays, without taking from that of the author of this celebrated drama. Let us for a moment assume what the poet lays down as the moral of his comedy, viz. that the doctrines of the sophists were pernicious to society, and the scheme here adopted for rendering them both ridiculous and detestable, will, I trust, be acknowledged most apposite and most excellent: Letus suspend for a while our enthusiasm for Socrates, and we cannot withhold our praise from Aristophanes. It was not the practice of the writers of the old and personal comedy, to be strictly regular in the conduct or construction of their fables; yet in this drama, if we except his address to the spectators, and, perhaps, his scene between the just and unjust declaimer (which is, in some degree, though not altogether, episodical) we find our poet strictly adhering to all the best rules of composition. His plot, simple, clear, and sufficiently interesting, opens upon the audience in a very masterly and striking style, is wrought up and supported by a variety of comic incidents through the middle scenes, and in the catastrophe closes with great spirit and strict poetical justice, administered to the several characters which it employs. Of these, Strep- siades is the most prominent; a character ingeniously contrived to reflect the greatest possible ridicule upon the pedantry and chicanery of the sophists, by the comic contrast of his w...« less