I OLD COMEDY 39
citizens, which provides the poet with place and time and
people, with their thoughts and feelings, their daily needs,
and the events of social existence
It is perhaps the greatest secret of the poet's art that he has
contrived to blend two such different and even conflicting
atmospheres in one picture, which despite all its variety is
homogeneous. Something of the secret of his art may be
revealed to us when we examine the nature of some of the
'heroes' of the comedies, in whom unreal intentions and actions
are combined with a real private existence. Unimportant and
ordinary people turn the order of the world upside down.
World-reformers such as Peithetairos and Praxagora aim, in
their ingenious folly, at changing the political and social con-
ditions in ways which are grotesquely Utopian. Similarly
these conditions are reduced ad absurdum by exaggeration of
their unsoundness. This is most admirably accomplished, for
instance, by the sausage-seller in the Knights. It is to be sup-
posed that the conditions which are to be changed are, accord-
ing to the poet, bad and in desperate need of improvement.
He does not, therefore, depict the conditions with an objective
mind; they are not real, but the negative cause of imaginative
dreams which were suggested by his wishes, and realized in
the sphere of supra-reahty.
That means that the conditions of Athenian life are de-
scribed in comedy in two ways, now with intentional distortion
in detenorem> then again, and this to a large extent uncon-
sciously, simply as the reflection of reality In the distorted
representation of real conditions and abuses we have, so it
seems, the link joining and uniting the real and the unreal
It remains, of course, a problem every time we use a passage
from comedy how to determine where reality ends and carica-
ture or fantasy begins. One essential point, frequently over-
looked, is that the situation on the stage, which is naturally
part of the plot, must not be used as evidence for historical
facts. It is the situation behind the plot which counts, the
conditions of life against which the events and characters of
the stage stand out. Sometimes doubts remain. Any con-
clusion then must be based on the existence or the lack of
logical coherence with the general background picture which
we are trying to draw.
The assertion made before that the comic poet's distortion