298 WAR AND PEACE XI
war, and that was to treat it as something unreal. When the
comic poet was pleading for peace, he could not do justice to
the achievements and exploits of the war; and since comedy
was comedy. It could not deal with the horrors Nevertheless,
we may be able to find some facts behind the silence and
distortion.
One of the outstanding features of comedy is that the
comedians, in order to decry their own generation, recall the
soldierly traditions of the greatest period of the past, the time
of the Persian Wars This epoch is usually treated as if it were
contemporary After sixty, seventy, eighty years have gone by,
veterans of Marathon are still brought on the stage, with a
happy disregard of chronology.1 Various events of the past are
confused: in the general pictures of the Marathonomachat are
included the naval war of 480 and some events of about 47o,2
the famous runner of the time of the Persian War, Phayllos of
Kroton,3 and the politician Thoukydides who was active in the
'fifties and 'forties of the century, or even, on the other hand,
events of the last decades of the sixth century 4 The old men
of the chorus In the Wasps boast of having fought in the battle
for Attica; they tell of the sky darkened by the enemies'
arrows, a story that is well known from Herodotos, where the
reference, however, is to Thermopylae 5 Furthermore, the old
men in the Lyststrate^ that is in 411, are proud of their part in
the expulsion of the Spartan king Kleomenes from the Acro-
polis in the year 508, and even of their part in the battle of
Leipsydnon which took place in 513.* The idea of war was
closely associated with the memory of the past, in particular of
the Persian War, and sleep which overcame a man could there-
fore be said 'to have attacked him like a Mede'.7
For the purpose of our investigation it matters less why and
how Aristophanes used those ancient warriors in his comedies
than to state the very fact of their poetical existence, which
1 A 179$*, 692$; K 1334, C 985f, W 711, io6off, frg 413, Hermipp. 81
2 A.677 — W 236, 355.
s A 214!", W 1206 I do not think we should assume that there were two
runners of the same name, the man of Kroton of 480 who did not win at Olympia
(Pans. X, 9, 2), and a kter Olympiomies. Rightly: A Raubitschek, P -W. XIX,
1903.
4 A.703 — L 6i6ff, 630$; 664iF. In general, cf my Ost und West,, 97f
5 W io76ff - Herod VII, 226, i
8 L 272ff, 665 7 W iif,cf also 1124