A source-book of ancient history - The Search For Mecca

Cloudcuckooland 229
Piraeus, and the exiles were readmitted. And so they fell The exiles
to levelling the fortifications and walls with much en- garchs who
thusiasm, to the accompaniment of female flute-players, banished for
political
deeming that day the beginning of liberty to Greece.
reasons.
V. Choral Songs from Tee Birds
In this brilliant comedy Aristophanes pictures an ideal community
founded by the birds in Cloudcuckooland. It presents the earliest
known ideal state (414 B.C.), which in this case is a comic conceit,
but which was to take a serious turn in Plato's Republic and JMoore's
Utopia.
Awake! awake!
Sleep no more, my gentle mate!
With 3-our tiny tawny bill,
Wake the tuneful echo shrill
On vale or hill;
Or in her airy, rocky seat.
Let her listen and repeat
The tender ditty that you tell.
The sad lament.
The dire event.
To luckless Itys that befell.
Thence the strain
Shall arise again.
And soar amain,
Up to the lofty palace gate.
Where mighty Apollo sits in state;
In Zeus' abode, with his ivory lyre.
Hymning aloud to the heavenly choir.
While all the gods shall join with thee
In a celestial symphony.
The Hoopoo
to his Mate.
The hoopoo
and his mate
(the nightingale)
had
once been
human beings,
man
and wife.
The wife
had killed
her son Itys
and had
served him
as food to her
husband because
the
latter had
wronged her.
On Aristophanes;
Ancient
World,
241; Greece,
222 f.
Ye gentle feathered tribes.
Of every plume and hue,
That, in uninhabited air,
^le. hurrying here and there;
Oh! that I, like you,
O to be a
birdl