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THE LYSISTRATA 103
and arguments oddly familiar to modern ears ;
and, in the interest of those ears, it may be
worth pausing a moment to consider the
circumstances in which it was produced.
Some eighteen months earlier towards the
end of 413 B.C. had come news of the most
stunning
disaster that was to befall Athens
till the final catastrophe at Aegospotami.
The greatest armament ever assembled by a
Greek state had been annihilated, literally,
before Syracuse :
the city, itself, was in danger.
For that not the less wa& Aristophanes per-
mitted to produce in the state theatre at the
public cost his fiercely anti-militarist and
anti-imperialist play. Was it the best, or
one of the two or three best, comedies of the
? That was what the Athenians wanted
year
to know. If it was, of course it ought to be
presented.
During this long and horrible war (it lasted
twenty-eight years), power, as was to be
expected, slipped into the hands of vile and
violent demagogues, of men who by rhetoric
and intrigue induced the people more than
once to reject on fair occasions reasonable
terms, who in 420, guided by Alcibiades,
contrived by an infamous stratagem to upset
the Peace of Nicias, and by a combination
of evil motives private interest, public vanity,
vindictiveness, greed, and sentimentality