Aristophanes and the Comic Hero

Normally one is chary of saying such a thing about a critical work, however distinguished the author; the more one looks down the long perspective of literary studies, the more one feels how much of what we are inclined to think of as the shattering discovery of our own generation is really the common insight of the ages, differently phrased to fit the fashion. But Professor Whitman offers something unattempted, so far as I know, from antiquity to the present day, and that is a full and systematic study of Aristophanes, not as a source for late fifth-century history and antiquities, nor as a document in the history of drama, nor as a pure spring of Attic vocabulary and syntax, but as a poet; a comic poet.