"...Aristophanes is the lord of all who take life as a gay adventure who defy all efforts to turn life into a social economic or moral abstraction. Is it therefore just that the critics who by some dark instinct unerringly pick out the exact opposite of any creator's real virtues as his chief characteristics should praise him as an idealistic reformer? An "ideal" state of society was the last thing Aristophanes desired. He wished certainly to eliminate inhumanities and baseness; but only that there might be free play for laughter for individual happiness.Consequently the critics lay the emphasis on the effort to cleanse society not the method of laughter. Aristophanes wished to destroy Cleon because that demagogue failed to realize the poet's conception of dignified government and tended to upset the stability of Hellas. But it was the stability of life the vindication of all individual freedoms in which he was ultimately interested..."