364 CONCLUSION
eager to segregate themselves from the 'uneducated'. A new
line of demarcation' was drawn through the population, and
one which came to be of increasing importance during the
succeeding centuries. On the other hand, we see from comedy
that the sophistic doctrines influenced very wide sections of the
people, and were able to do so because the people took a
lively interest in literary, artistic and even linguistic questions
Scepticism in religious matters spread, though it never ob-
tained a real hold on the majority of the people, who were
apt rather to fall into the opposite extreme of increased super-
stition and devotion to ecstatic and mystery cults. Rationalistic
criticism even in an 'age of enlightment' was not for the many, and
the more difficult and subtle the teaching of the sophists and
rhetors became, the more it was confined to a relatively small pro-
portion of the people, to the new upper class of the 'educated7.
The comic poets, although their affection was for the un-
sophisticated, were concerned with both classes among the
people This shows, especially in that age of change and tran-
sition, a certain definite attitude with a peculiar quality of its
own We have used comedy chiefly as an instrument, as a
source of evidence For we saw that it was a social as well
as a literary phenomenon, it expressed in a sense views which
were generally held, and its mirror reflected the people as a
whole. We have not, however, or only incidentally, asked
ourselves what spirit comedy can claim as its own. This spirit
must have shared in and expressed some general feelings, and
cannot have been only the individual spirit of comedy, still
less that of the various comic poets We do not propose to
speak of the literary character and high artistic quality of Old
Comedy; these are well known and, apart from that, not really
our concern. What we do want to stress is in the first place —
though this is not the first time it has been said — that comedy
was influenced by the economic and rationalist spirit of the
age in a much higher degree than one would be inclined to
believe in view of its general attitude and especially its criticism
of the new tendencies l What does it mean, in fact, all this
1 This lias been proved, for tlie special but important subject of rhetoric, by
C%T. Murphy, Harvard Studies in Class Philology, XLIX (1938), 69^"
Aristophanes, certainly a severe critic not only of the 'orators', but of the art of
rhetoric itself, especially in its influence on poetry, is described by Murphy as ca
Student and, in some degree, a contributor to the art of rhetoric',