Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1896) v2.djvu/21

but for twenty years, from 425 B.C. to the year after his death, Euripides was the objedl of the most persistent and merciless attacks from the comic stage. In play after play, from the Acharnians to the Frogs, Aristophanes made him the butt of the keenest and most telling wit that has ever stirred men to laughter. His lines were parodied, his characters were travestied, his plots were burlesqued, his morality was impugned, his friends were slandered, his mother was jeered at, he himself was represented on the stage in disreputable and contemptible situations. And all this was done with such exquisite fooling, with such irresistible drollery, that even the friends of the victim, we may well imagine, could not choose but laugh amid their indignation. Never has any writer endured such a purgatory of ridicule. A Cibber pilloried in the Dunciad, a Keats scourged by the Quarterly, may seem sufficiently unenviable; but no victim of modern satire is exposed to such crucifying publicity, is so utterly unscreened from the tempest of derision, has the mocking faces of a nation so thrust against his own, as he at whom Aristophanes gibed year after year in the great theatre of Athens. Of what iron endurance must have been the soul of the man who could uncrushed sit there, and see the faces of thousands upon thousands agleam with merry