rising of Sirius-the time when his rising first becomes visible in the morning twilight-which is not till he is about fifteen degrees in advance of the Sun: in other words, when the Sun is about fifteen degrees below the horizon, at the time of the rising of the Star. The cosmical rising of Sirius (the time when he rises with the Sun), is therefore about fifteen days earlier than the heliacal. Intermediately, the Star, being in the path of the Sun, is lost in the splendour of his rays. At Athens, in the time of Euripides, the heliacal rising of Sirius, by an approximate computation, occurred in the beginning of July the cosmical, consequently, just after the middle of June. It occurred, therefore, before the close of the period within which the nightingale sings: the season distinctly marked in the beginning of the tragedy, vv. 41-45. Immediately before his cosmical rising, Sirius, as we have said, poetically considered, was close behind the Solar chariot. Ιππεύειν is used for riding in a chariot. Ηλιος ἀνιππεύων, in the prologue of Ion, is the rising Sun. If we were to make a picture in our minds of the position, we should place the chariot of Sirius behind the chariot of the Sun, a little on one side: the horses of Sirius abreast of the solar wheels: Sirius, not as a dog, but as a sidereal deity; and Helios standing by him in the chariot, on the side nearest to Phaethon. HORE DRAMATICÆ.-No. 3.* M. S. O. [Published in Fraser's Magazine for October, 1857.] THE FLASK OF CRATINUS. Prisco si credis, Mæcenas docte, Cratino, The first two numbers appeared in Fraser for March and April, 1852. The writer had not then leisure to work out his design. No water-drinker's verse, if faith you give Hor. Epist. 1. 19. UMBERLAND translates IIurin flagon: but, as it had a wicker coat, it was more properly a flask; much larger, however, than anything we are accustomed to call so. It was, in fact, a flask in construction, and a flagon in capacity; a sort of pocket-pistol for Pantagruel. The loss of this comedy is one of the greatest in the wreck of the Greek drama; not merely from what must have been its intrinsic value, but from the remarkable circumstances attending its production. Aristophanes, in a parabasis of the Knights, reproached the Athenians with their neglect of their most illustrious comic poets when they had grown old and past the power of dramatic production; and instanced Cratinus, who had once, amidst their tumultuous applause, rushed along in an irresistible torrent, uprooting oaks, and planes, and enemies; when, in all festivals, nothing was heard but some of his choral songs; and now that his intellect was dimmed, and his lyre was unstrung, and his coronal was dry, and himself as dry as his coronal, perishing with thirst, they had no pity for him; whereas, for the sake of his former victories, he ought to be drinking in the Prytaneum, and seated in becoming apparel in the most honourable place of the theatre. Cratinus, less grateful for the honour done to his past achievements, than indignant at the disparagement thrown on his present decline, produced, at the age of ninety-seven, his comedy of the Flask, and carried off the first prize against the Clouds of Aristophanes, which, in the judgment of Aristophanes himself, was the best of all his comedies. Aristophanes was third in this contest, Amipsias being second with his Konnos.* *Konnos was the preceptor of Socrates. The purpose of this comedy, like that of the Clouds, was probably to laugh at Socrates. In the Flask, Cratinus introduced Comoedia, as his wife, seeking a divorce from him on the ground of his having neglected her, and given himself up to his mistress, Metha, which signifies not drunkenness, but addiction to drink; the Beuverye of Rabelais.* Here, as in many other Greek dramas, the taste of the Athenians for judicial pleadings may have been largely indulged, in the advocacy of their respective claims by Comoedia and Metha, each holding that Cratinus belonged exclusively to her. The fragments of this comedy are few and brief; but they throw some light on its scope and progress. The first two in order are from a speech of Comoedia. I. Now I would turn attention to this question, Whether, being thus devoted to a rival, To her, and for her he calumniates me? Old age and wine have wrought this change upon him, II. Once I was his dear wife, but now no more so. The Athenians mixed water with their wine, and to this practice that of Cratinus himself was not an exception. Comoedia, in the next fragment, represents him as so absorbed in his favourite beverage, that all his ideas, even of female beauty, were expressed in images drawn from it. III. Now if he looks upon a youthful beauty, In a fragment which appears to belong to it, Socrates is called "best of the few, and vainest of the many," and is praised, perhaps ironically, for his fortitude in going about with a threadbare cloak and worn-out shoes, yet, with all this manifest poverty, never condescending to flatter. Vain is here used, not in our ordinary sense of the adjective, but in that which we give it when we say adverbially in vain. Labour in vain. Coming to nothingness. This is the sense of "Vanity of vanities," in Ecclesiastes. Socrates is addressed as the best of the few-the few being the good; but at the same time, as a singularly useless member of the State; the most remarkable specimen of a man taking much trouble with no result. * Qui feut premier, soif ou beuverye? Soif: car qui eust beu sans soif durant le temps dinnocence? Beuverye: car privatio præsupponit habitum.-L. i. c. 5. Cratinus begins his reply by something like a forensic formula, of which several examples are adduced from Greek orators. IV. You see the preparation and the purpose. That is, you see how my adversary has got up the case against me. He then proceeds to repudiate the mixture of one to three, which had been assumed to be his taste. V. I like not one to three, but half and half. And then vindicates his taste for wine by the sentence : VI. A water-drinker brings forth nothing wise. This line has been preserved by the author of an epigram in Athenæus.* "Nought wise a water-drinker's brain can spin ;' But a whole barrel of the choicest quality. "Wine is the poet's Pegasus,' he said. Through all his house were Bacchic garlands spread, As an illustration of his proposition, the wine that is in him overflows in a splendid dithyrambic, which draws from one of the interlocutors the following expressions of admiration: VII. Oh, King Apollo! what a stream of words! The springs resound: from his twelve-fountained throat Unless some stop his mouth, the gushing torrent Will bear down all before it. After this, Comoedia appears to have been asked how, if judgment were given in her favour, she would keep her husband sober? VIII. -How, how can any one Keep him from drink? from too much drink? * P. 39, c. I will come down like lightning on his wine-tubs : So much unbroken as a vinegar-cruet. Meineke thinks that Cratinus becomes penitent, returns to his first wife, and dismisses Metha: which he infers from the next fragment : IX. I feel and own my wickedness and folly. But we cannot see more in this, than repentance for having altogether discarded Comoedia, and taken exclusively to Metha. No. Cratinus remained what he was to the last: or Aristophanes could never have said that he died of a broken heart on seeing the running to waste of a barrel of wine which had been fractured in a Lacedæmonian incursion. The other fragments are short, and throw little light on the subject, and we cannot state from evidence the termination of the fable. Nevertheless, we think the premises, as we have them, point to only one conclusion. Comoedia and Metha each severally pleaded her exclusive right to Cratinus: Cratinus demonstrated that his devotion to Comoedia would be unavailing without the inspiration of Metha; and they finished, like the heroines of a German tragedy, by agreeing to live in harmony with the hero and each other. There are some traces of a festival, in which Cratinus eats and drinks abundantly, and which probably, with its festal songs, wound up the drama. We may presume the comedy to have contained some choice dithyrambics, not only in the torrent of verse poured forth by Cratinus himself, and so singularly panegyrized in a passage previously cited, but in the choral odes; and that in these Bacchus was celebrated conjointly with the Athenians, as in the few fragments of the dithyrambics of Pindar which have been spared to us. The Greek Bacchic Chorus grew out of the songs of the vintage; recitations between the choral songs grew into dialogues, and progressively into the drama. Cratinus is justly regarded as the father of the Old Comedy. It is claimed for him, as for Eschylus in Tragedy, that he was the first who established order in the disposition of the scenes, limiting the number of the speakers to three which Horace |