Greek tragedy

CHAPTER I

THE LITERARY HISTORY OF GREEK TRAGEDY

All the types of dramatic poetry known in Greece, tragic, satyric, and comic, originated in the worship of Dionysus, the deity of wild vegetation, fruits, and especially the vine. In his honour, at the opening of spring, were performed dithyrambs, hymns rendered by a chorus, who, dressed like satyrs, the legendary followers of Dionysus, presented by song and mimic dance stories from the adventurous life of the god while on earth. It is from these dithyrambs that tragedy and satyric drama both sprang. The celebrated Arion, who raised the dithyramb to a splendid art-form, did much[1] incidentally to aid this development. His main achievement in this regard is the insertion of spoken lines in the course of the lyrical performance; it seems, further, that these verses consisted of a dialogue between the chorus and the chorus-leader, who mounted upon the sacrificial table. Such interludes, no doubt, referred to incidents in the sacred story, and the early name for an actor (ὑποκριτής, one who answers) suggests that members of the chorus asked their leader to explain features in the ritual or the narrative.

At this point drama begins to diverge from the dithyramb. With comedy we are not here concerned.[2] The drama of the spring festival may be called tragedy, but it was in a quite rudimentary state. Its lyrics, sung by fifty satyrs, would altogether outshine in importance the dialogue-interludes between chorus-leader and individual singers; the theme, moreover, would be always some event connected with Dionysus. Two great changes were necessary before drama could enter on free development: the use of impersonation in the interludes and the admission of any subject at will of the poet. The first was introduced by Thespis, who is said to have invented one actor. The second was perhaps later, but at least as early as Phrynichus we find plays on subjects taken from other than Dionysiac legends. It is said that the audience complained of this innovation: What has this to do with Dionysus?[3]

Another great development is attributed to Pratinas—the invention of satyric drama. The more stately, graver features and the frolicsome, often gross, elements being separated, the way was clear for the free development of tragedy and satyric into the forms we know. But satyric work, though always showing playful characteristics and a touch of obscenity, was never confounded with comedy. Stately figures of legend or theology regularly appeared in it—Odysseus in the Cyclops, Apollo in the Ichneutæ—and it was a regular feature at the presentations of tragedy; each tragic poet competed with three tragedies followed by one satyric play. When the latter form changed its tone slightly, as in the work of the Alexandrian Pleiad,[4] it approximated not to comedy but to satire.[5]

The Dorians claimed the credit of having invented both tragedy and comedy.[6] There seems little doubt that they provided the germ, though the glories of Greek drama belong to Athens. Arion, whose contribution has been described, if not himself a Dorian, worked among Dorians at Corinth, which Pindar,[7] for example, recognized as the birthplace of the dithyramb. Moreover the lyrics of purely Attic tragedy show in their language what is generally regarded as a slight Doric colouring.[8]

Aristotle[9] sums up the rise of tragedy as follows: Tragedy ... was at first mere improvization ... originating with the leaders of the dithyramb. It advanced by slow degrees; each new element that showed itself was in turn developed. Having passed through many stages, it found its natural form, and there it stopped. Æschylus first introduced a second actor; he diminished the importance of the chorus, and assigned the leading part to the dialogue. Sophocles raised the number of actors to three, and added scene-painting. It was not till late that the short plot was discarded for one of greater compass, and the grotesque diction of the earlier satyric form for the stately manner of tragedy. The iambic measure then replaced the trochaic tetrameter, which was originally employed when the poetry was of the satyric order, and had greater affinities with dancing.... The number of ‘episodes’ or acts was also increased, and the other embellishments added, of which tradition tells.

We have but meagre knowledge of the drama before Æschylus, whose vast achievement so overshadowed his predecessors that their works were little read and have in consequence practically vanished. Tragedy was born at the moment when, as tradition relates, Thespis of Icaria in Attica introduced the actor. Arion, as we saw, had already caused one of the chorus to mount upon the sacrificial table or the step of the altar and deliver a narrative, or converse with his fellow-choristers, concerning Dionysus, using not lyrical metre, but the trochaic tetrameter.[10] Thespis’ great advance was to introduce a person who should actually present the character to whom Arion’s chorister had merely made allusion: the action, instead of being reported, went on before the eyes of the audience. This change clearly at once begets the possibility of drama, however rudimentary. By retiring to the booth while the singers perform their lyric, he can change his mask and costume and reappear as another person; by learning and discussing what has been said by his supposed predecessor, he can exhibit the play of emotion or the construction of a plan.

If this was done by Thespis, he was the founder of European drama. His floruit may be assigned to the year 535 B.C., the date of the first dramatic competition at Athens. But little is known of him. Aristotle in his Poetic[11] does not mention his name. Far later we have the remarks of Horace, Diogenes Laertius,[12] and Suidas. Horace tells[13] that Thespis discovered tragic poetry, and conveyed from place to place on waggons a company of players who sang and acted his pieces, their faces smeared with lees of wine: Diogenes Laertius says that Thespis discovered one actor. Suidas gives us the names of several plays, Phorbas or The Trials (ἆθλα) of Pelias, The Priests, The Youths, Pentheus. We possess four fragments alleged to belong to these, but they are spurious. Aristotle,[14] moreover, affirms that Tragedy was in the first place a matter of improvization. The conclusion seems to be that Thespis did not write plays in the modern sense of the phrase. He was much more like those Elizabethan dramatists who provided the words for their actors, and for whom printing and publication were only thought of if the play had achieved success upon the boards. He stood midway between Æschylus and the unknown actor-poets before Arion who improvized as they played.

The next name of importance is that of Chœrilus the Athenian, who competed in tragedy for the first time during the 64th Olympiad (524-1 B.C.) and continued writing for the stage during forty years. He produced one hundred and sixty plays, and obtained the first prize thirteen times. Later generations regarded him as especially excellent in the satyric drama[15] invented by his younger contemporary Pratinas. To him were attributed the invention of masks, as a substitute for the wine-lees of Thespis, and more majestic costume. We know by name only one of his works, the Alope, which is concerned with the Attic hero Triptolemus. A fragment or two reveal an unexpected preciosity of style; he called stones and rivers the bones and veins of the earth.

Pratinas of Phlius, in the north of the Peloponnese, is said to have competed with Æschylus and Chœrilus in the 70th Olympiad (500-497 B.C.). His great achievement, as we have said, was the invention of satyric drama. Fifty plays are attributed to him, of which thirty-two were satyric. Hardly any fragments of these are extant, but we get some conception of the man from a hyporchema in which he complains that music is encroaching upon poetry: let the flute follow the dancing revel of the song—it is but an attendant. With boundless gusto and polysyllabic energy he consigns the flute to flames and derision.

At length we reach a poet who seems to have been really great, a dramatist whose works, even to a generation which knew and reverenced Æschylus, seemed unworthy to be let die—Phrynichus of Athens, son of Polyphradmon, whose first victory occurred 512-509 B.C. It is said that he was the first to bring female characters upon the stage (always, however, played by men). The following dramas are known by name: Egyptians; Alcestis; Antæus or The Libyans; The Daughters of Danaus; The Capture of Miletus; Phœnician Women (Phœnissæ); The Women of Pleuron; Tantalus; Troilus. The Egyptians seems to have dealt with the same subject as the Supplices of Æschylus; so does the Danaides; these two dramas may have formed part of a trilogy. The Alcestis followed the same lines as the Euripidean play; it is probable, indeed, that the apparition of Death with a sword was borrowed by Euripides from Phrynichus. The Antæus related the wrestling-match between Heracles and his earth-born foe. The manner in which Aristophanes[16] refers to the play shows that the description of the wrestling-bout was still celebrated after the lapse of a century. The Pleuroniæ treated of Meleager and the fateful log which was preserved, and then burnt in anger, by his mother Althæa.

Two plays were specially important. The Phœnissæ (produced in 476), celebrated the victory of Salamis, had Themistocles himself for choregus, and won the prize; its popularity never waned throughout the fifth century. We are told that the prologue was spoken by an eunuch while he placed the cushions for the Persian counsellors; further—an important fact—that this person, at the beginning of the play, announced the defeat of Xerxes. The Capture of Miletus, less popular in later days—no fragments at all are to be found—created even more stir at the moment. Miletus had been captured by Darius in 494 B.C., Athens having failed to give effective support to the Ionian revolt. While the distress and shame excited by the fall of the proudest city in Asiatic Greece were still strong in Athenian minds, Phrynichus ventured to dramatize the disaster. Herodotus tells how the theatre burst into tears; they fined him a thousand drachmæ for reminding them of their own misfortunes, and gave command that no man should ever use that play again.[17]

Few lost works are so sorely to be regretted as those of Phrynichus. The collection of fragments merely hints at a genius who commanded the affection of an age which knew his great successors, a master whose dignity was not utterly overborne by Æschylus, and whose tenderness could still charm hearts which had thrilled to the agonies of Medea and the romance of Andromeda. The chief witness to his popularity is Aristophanes, who paints for us a delightful picture[18] of the old men in the dark before the dawn, trudging by lantern-light through the mud to the law-court, and humming as they go the charming old-world honeyed ditties from the Phœnissæ. In another play[19] the birds assert that it is from their song that Phrynichus, like his own bee, took his feast, food of the gods, the fruit of song, and found unfailingly a song full sweet. One or two snatches survive from these lyrics, lines from the Phœnissæ in the greater Asclepiad metre which is the form of some of Sappho’s loveliest work, and a verse[20] from the Troilus which Sophocles himself quoted: the light of love on rosy cheeks is beaming.

It is clear that for most Athenians the spell of Phrynichus lay in his songs; succeeding poets he impressed almost equally as a playwright. It has already been mentioned that Euripides seems to have borrowed from the Alcestis. Æschylus, especially, was influenced by his style, and in the Persæ followed the older poet closely. Indeed the relation between the Persæ and the Phœnissæ is puzzling, but ancient authority did not hesitate to say that the later work was modelled on the earlier.[21] It is no question of a réchauffé to suit the taste of a later age, like the revisions of Shakespeare by Davenant and Cibber, for the two tragedies are separated at the utmost by only seven years; rather we appear to have a problem like the connexion between Macbeth and Middleton’s Witch. Perhaps the soundest opinion is that the younger playwright wished to demonstrate his own method of writing and his theory of dramatic composition in the most striking way possible—by choosing a famous drama of the more rudimentary type and rewriting it as it ought to be written. Two features in the Phœnissæ seem to lend support to this view. Firstly, the prologue was delivered by a slave who was preparing the seats of the Persian counsellors. The Persæ expunges the man and his speech, presenting us at once with the elders in deliberation. Nothing is more characteristic of the architectonic power in literature than the instinct to sweep away everything but the minimum of mere machinery; at the first instant we are in the midst of the plot. Secondly, the prologue at once announced the disaster. Nothing was left but the amplification of sorrow, a quasi-operatic presentation by the Phœnician women who formed the chorus. Here again the Persæ provides a most instructive contrast.

From the fragments, from ancient testimony, and from the recasting of the Phœnissæ which appeared instinctive or necessary to Æschylus, we gain some clear conception of Phrynichus. A lyrist of sweetness and pellucid dignity, he has been compared[22] to his contemporary Simonides; the graceful phrases in which Aristophanes declared that Phrynichus drew his inspiration from the birds recall to us the native wood-notes wild of Shakespeare’s earlier achievement. As a playwright in the strict sense he is, for us, the first effective master, but still swayed by the age of pure lyrists which was just reaching its culmination and its close in Pindar—so greatly swayed that the episodes were still little more than interruptions of lyrics which gave but a static expression to feeling.

Æschylus, the son of Euphorion, was born at Eleusis in 525 B.C. At the age of twenty-five he began to exhibit plays, but did not win the prize until the year 485. The Persian invasions swept down upon Athens when Æschylus had come to the maturity of his powers. He served as a hoplite at Marathon[23] and his brother Cynegirus distinguished himself even on that day of heroes by his desperate courage in attempting to thwart the flight of the invaders. That the poet was present at Salamis also may be regarded as certain from the celebrated description in the Persæ. He twice visited Sicily. On the first occasion, soon after 470 B.C., he accepted the invitation of Hiero, King of Syracuse, and composed The Women of Etna to celebrate the city which Hiero was founding on the slope of that mountain. Various stories to explain his retirement from Athens were circulated in antiquity. Some relate that he was unnerved by a collapse of the wooden benches during a performance of one of his plays. Others said that he was defeated by Simonides in a competition: the task was to write an epitaph on those who fell at Marathon. According to others he was chagrined by a dramatic defeat which he sustained at the hands of the youthful Sophocles in 468. A fourth story declared that he was accused of divulging the Eleusinian Mysteries in one of his plays, and was in danger of his life until he proved that he had himself never been initiated. These stories are hard to accept. Possibly he wrote something which offended against Eleusinian rule, and was condemned to banishment or possibly to death, which (as often occurred) he was allowed to escape by voluntary exile. We cannot suppose that he pleaded ignorance[24] seriously; a man of his genuinely devout temperament, and a native of Eleusis, must assuredly have been initiated. A second visit to Sicily was taken after he had again won the prize with the Oresteia. He never returned. Story tells how he was sitting on the hillside near the city of Gela when an eagle, flying with a tortoise in its claws in quest of a stone whereon to crush it, dropped its prey upon the bald head of the poet and killed him. He left two sons, Euphorion and Bion, who also pursued the tragic art—a tradition which persisted in the family for generations.

Æschylus is too great a dramatist to receive detailed treatment in the course of a general discussion; a separate chapter must be allotted to this. At present we shall consider only his position in the history of tragedy.

The great technical change introduced by Æschylus was that he first introduced a second actor; he diminished the importance of the chorus, and assigned the leading part to the dialogue.[25] The two last statements are corollaries of the first, which describe a deeply important advance. It has been said above that the drama was founded by the man who invented one actor; at the same time it is easy to realize how primitive such drama must have been. The addition of another actor did not double the resources of tragedy, rather it increased them fifty-fold. To bring two opposed or sympathetic characters face to face, to exhibit the clash of principles by means of the clash of personalities, this is a step forward into a new world, a change so great that to call Æschylus the very inventor of tragedy is not unreasonable. This meagre equipment of two actors was found sufficient by two of the fifth-century masters for work[26] of the highest value. The further remark of Aristotle that Æschylus diminished the importance of the chorus follows naturally from the vast increase in the importance of the episodes.

Revolutionary as Æschylus was, he did not attain at a bound to a characteristic dramatic form of his own and then advance no farther. In his earliest extant play, the Supplices, the alterations mentioned above are certainly in operation, but their use is tentative. The chorus is no doubt less dominant than it had been, but it is the most important feature, even to a modern reader. To an ancient spectator it must have appeared of even greater moment. The number of singers was still fifty, and the lyrics, accompanied by music and the dance of this great company, occupy more than half of our present text. We have left Phrynichus behind, but he is not out of sight.

It is necessary at this point to give some account of the life of Sophocles and his position in dramatic history, though a detailed discussion of his extant work must be reserved for a separate chapter. He was born about 496 B.C., the son of a well-to-do citizen named Sophillus, and received, in addition to the usual education, more advanced training in music from the celebrated Lampros. The youth’s physical beauty was remarkable, and at the age of sixteen he was chosen to lead the choir of boys who performed the pæan celebrating the victory of Salamis. Nothing more is known of his life till the year 468, when he produced his first tragedy. One of his fellow-competitors was Æschylus, and we are told[27] that feeling ran so high that the Archon, instead of choosing the judges by lot as usual, entrusted the decision to the board of generals; they awarded the victory to the youthful Sophocles. For sixty years he produced a steady stream of dramatic work with continuous success. He at first performed in his own plays—his skill in the Nausicaa gained great applause—but was compelled to give this up owing to the failure of his voice. The number of his plays was well over a hundred, performed in groups of four, and he won eighteen victories at the City Dionysia; even when he failed of the first prize, he was never lower than the second place.[28] His genius seems even to have increased with advancing age; he was about ninety when he wrote the Œdipus Coloneus. Sophocles took a satisfactory if not prominent part in public life,[29] being twice elected general, once with Pericles and later with Nicias. He served also as Hellenotamias—a member, that is, of the Treasury Board which administered the funds of the Delian Confederacy. It is an interesting comment on the early part of the Œdipus Coloneus that the poet acted as priest of two heroes, Asclepius and Alcon. He had several sons, the most celebrated of whom was Iophon, himself a tragedian of repute. A famous story relates that Iophon, being jealous of his illegitimate brother, brought a suit to prove his father’s insanity, with the intent to become administrator of his estate. The aged poet’s defence consisted in a recitation of the Œdipus Coloneus which he had just completed, and the jury most naturally dismissed Iophon’s petition. He died late in 406 B.C., fully ninety years old, a few months later than Euripides, and not long before the disaster of Ægospotami. The Athenian people mourned him as a hero under the name of Dexion, The Entertainer, or Host, and brought yearly sacrifice to his shrine.

The personality of Sophocles stands out more definitely before the modern eye than that of perhaps any other fifth-century Greek. His social talent made him a noted figure whose good sayings were repeated, and of whom the gossips as well as the critics loved to circulate illustrative stories. He seemed the embodiment of all that man can ask. Genius, good health, industry, long life, personal beauty, affluence, popularity, and the sense of power—all were his, and enjoyed in that very epoch which, beyond all others, seems to have combined stimulus with satisfaction. Salamis was fought and won just as he had left childhood behind. His adolescence and maturity coincided with the rise and establishment of the Athenian Empire; he listened to Pericles, saw the Parthenon and Propylæa rise upon the Acropolis, associated with Æschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Thucydides, watched the work of Phidias and Polygnotus grow to life under their fingers. Though he carried into the years of Nestor the genius of Shakespeare, he was yet so blessed that he died before the fall of Athens. Phrynichus, the comic poet, wrote: Blessed was Sophocles, who passed so many years before his death, a happy man and brilliant, who wrote many beautiful tragedies and made a fair end of a life which knew no misfortune.[30] Sophocles’ own words[31] come as a significant comment:—

μὴ φῦναι τὸν ἅπαντα νικᾷ λόγον.

τὸ δ’, ἐπεὶ φανῇ,

βῆναι κεῖθεν ὅθενπερ ἥκει,

πολὺ δεύτερον ὡς τάχιστα.

Best of all fates—when a man weighs everything—is not to be born, and second-best beyond doubt is, once born, to depart with all speed to that place whence we came.

Of his social charm there are many evidences. He gathered round him a kind of literary club or salon. Some hint of the talk in this circle may be gathered from the fragment of Ion’s Memoirs which tells how when the poet came to Chios he engaged in critical battle with the local schoolmaster concerning poetical adjectives, and quoted with approbation Phrynichus’ line λάμπει δ’ ἐπὶ πορφυρέαις παρῇσι φῶς ἔρωτος. He was a friend of Herodotus, from whom he quotes more than once, and to whom he addressed certain elegiac verses. With regard to his own art, we possess two remarks of deep interest. The first is reported by Aristotle:[32] I depict men as they ought to be, Euripides depicts them as they are. It is excellent Attic for he is a realist, I am an idealist. Nevertheless, he esteemed his rival; when he led forth his chorus for the first time after the news of Euripides’ death in Macedonia had reached Athens, he and his singers wore the dress of mourning. The second remark is a brief account[33] of his own development: My dramatic wild oats were imitation of Æschylus’ pomp; then I evolved my own harsh mannerism; finally I embraced that style which is best, as most adapted to the portrayal of human nature. All that we now possess would seem to belong to his third period, though certain characteristics of the Antigone may put us in mind of the second.[34]

Apart altogether from his glorious achievement in actual composition, Sophocles is highly important as an innovator in technique. The changes which he introduced are: (i) the number of actors was raised from two to three;[35] (ii) scene-painting was invented[35]; (iii) the plays of a tetralogy were, sometimes at any rate, no longer part of a great whole, but quite distinct in subject;[36] (iv) it is said[37] that he raised the number of the chorus from twelve to fifteen, was the first tragedian to use Phrygian music and to give his actors the bent staff and white shoe which they sometimes used.

The points named under (iv) are of small importance save the change in the number of choreutæ, but that is a detail which can scarcely be accepted, Æschylus during part of his career employed fifty choreutæ, and it is extremely improbable that the number sank as low as twelve, only to rise slightly again at once. The invention of scene-painting is clearly momentous; it became easy to fix the action at any spot desired, and a change of scene also became possible. Æschylus, of course, in his later years made use of this development. The other two points are vital.

Though the stage gained immensely by the introduction of a third actor, little perhaps need be said on the point. An examination of the early Æschylean plays, and even of the Choephorœ or Agamemnon, side by side with the Philoctetes or Œdipus Coloneus, will make the facts abundantly clear. In the crisis of Œdipus Tyrannus (for example) the presence of Jocasta,[38] while her husband hears the tidings brought by the Corinthian, does not merely add to the poignancy of the scene; it may almost be said to create it.

The last change, that of breaking up the tetralogy into four disconnected tragedies, is equally fundamental. The older poet was a man of simple ideas and gigantic grasp. His conceptions demanded the vast scope of a trilogy, and perhaps the most astonishing feature of his work is the fact that, while each drama is a splendid and self-intelligible whole, it gains its full import only from the significance of the complete organism. Sophocles realized that he possessed a narrower, if more subtle, genius, and moulded his technique to suit his powers. Each of his works, however spacious and statuesque it may seem beside Macbeth, Lear, or even Hippolytus, shows, as compared with Æschylus, a closeness of texture in characterization and a delicate stippling of language, which mark nothing less than a revolution.

Tradition tells that Euripides was born at Salamis on the very day of the great victory (480 B.C.); the Parian marble puts the date five years earlier. He was thus a dozen or more years younger than Sophocles. His father’s name was Mnesarchus; his mother Clito is ridiculed by Aristophanes as a petty green-grocer, but all other evidence suggests that they were well-to-do; Euripides was able to devote himself to drama, from which little financial reward could be expected, and to collect a library—a remarkable possession for those days. He lived almost entirely for his art, though he must, like other citizens, have seen military service. His public activities seem to have included nothing more extraordinary than a single embassy to Syracuse. Unlike Sophocles, he cared little for society save that of a few intimates, and wrote much in a cave on Salamis which he had fitted up as a study. The great philosopher Anaxagoras was his friend and teacher; several passages[39] in the extant plays point plainly to his influence. It was in Euripides’ house that Protagoras read for the first time his treatise on the gods which brought about the sophist’s expulsion from Athens. Socrates himself is traditionally regarded as the poet’s friend. Aulus Gellius[40] says that he began to write tragedy at the age of eighteen; but it was not till 455 B.C. (when he was perhaps thirty) that he obtained a chorus—that is, had his work accepted for performance. One of these pieces was the Peliades; he obtained only the third place. By the end of his life he had written nearly a hundred dramas, including satyric works, but obtained the first prize only four times: his fifth victory was won by the tetralogy which included the Bacchæ, performed after his death. His influence was far out of proportion to these scanty rewards.[41] On any given occasion he might be defeated by some talented mediocrity who hit the taste of the moment. When he offered the Medea itself he was overcome, not only by Sophocles, but by Euphorion; yet his vast powers were recognized by all Athens. Euripides was married—twice it is said—and had three sons. Late in his life he accepted an invitation from Archelaus, King of Macedonia; after living there a short time in high favour and writing his latest plays, he died in 406 B.C. He was buried in Macedonia and a cenotaph was erected to his memory in Attica.

Further light both on the career and works of Euripides has recently been provided by an interesting discovery. In 1912 Dr. Arthur S. Hunt published[42] extensive fragments of a life of the poet by Satyrus, from portions of a papyrus-roll found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt by Dr. Grenfell and Dr. Hunt. Satyrus lived in the third century before Christ: our MS. itself is dated by its discoverers from the middle or latter part of the second century after Christ. The most striking points are (i) Satyrus quotes the fragment of the Pirithous dealt with below,[43] attributing it, as was often done, to Euripides, and saying that the poet has accurately embraced the whole cosmogony of Anaxagoras in three periods;[44] (ii) there are new fragments, on the vain pursuit of wealth; (iii) the poet was prosecuted for impiety by the statesman Cleon; (iv) we read that Euripides wrote the proem for the Persæ composed by his friend the musician Timotheus; (v) Satyrus, in discussing peripeteia, mentions ravishings, supposititious infants, and recognitions by means of rings and necklaces—for these, as you know, are the back-bone of the New Comedy, and were perfected by Euripides.

A discussion of Euripides’ surviving work will be found in a separate chapter. Our business here is to indicate his position in the development of technique. Though he is for ever handling his material and the resources of the stage in an original and experimental manner, the definite changes which he introduced are few. That many of his dramas are not tragedies at all but tragicomedies, is a development of the first importance. Another fact of this kind is his musical innovations. The lyrics of his plays tend to become less important as literature and to subserve the music, in which he introduced fashions not employed before, such as the mixed Lydian; it is impossible to criticize some of his later odes without knowledge, which we do not possess, of the music which he composed for them and the manner in which he caused them to be rendered. Hence the loose syntax, the polysyllabic vagueness of expression, and the repeated words—features which irritated Aristophanes and many later students.

Another novelty is his use of the prologue. Since this is properly nothing but that part of the play which precedes the first song of the whole chorus,[45] prologues are of course found in Æschylus and Sophocles. The peculiarity of the Euripidean prologue is that it tends to be non-dramatic, a narrative enabling the spectator to understand at what point in a legend the action is to begin. It is from Euripides’ use of the prologue that the modern meaning of the word is derived.

Aristophanes in his Frogs makes a famous attack upon most[46] sides of Euripides’ art as contrasted with that of Æschylus. But it is often forgotten that, damned utterly as the younger tragedian is, Æschylus by no means escapes criticism. Many of the censures put into Euripides’ mouth are just and important; it seems likely that Aristophanes is practically quoting his victim’s conversation; the remark[47] about Æschylus that he was obscure in his prologues, is no mere rubbish attributed to a dullard. That Euripides did criticize his elder is a fact. The Supplices[48] contains a severe remark on the catalogue of chieftains in the Septem; the elaborate sarcasm directed in the Electra[49] against the Recognition-scene of the Choephorœ is even more startling. Besides this, Aristophanes seems to quote remarks of Euripides on himself and his work: When I first took over the art from you, I found it swollen with braggadocio and tiresome words; so the first thing I did was to train down its fat and reduce its weight.[50] His comment on dialogue is no less pertinent: With you Niobe and Achilles never said a word, but I left no personage idle; women, slaves, and hags all spoke.[51] Finally, there is the perfect description of his own realism[52]: οἰκεῖα πράγματ’ εἰσάγων, οἷς χρώμεθ’, οἷς σύνεσμεν, I introduced life as we live it, the things of our everyday experience. Such sentences as these reflect unmistakably the conversation of a playwright who was jealous for the dignity and the progress of his art.

Though during his own time Euripides was hardly equal in repute to his two companions, scarcely had his Macedonian grave closed over him than his popularity began to overshadow theirs. Æschylus became a dim antique giant; Sophocles, though always admired, was too definitely Attic and Periclean to retain all his prestige in the Hellenistic world. It was the more cosmopolitan poet who won posthumous applause from one end of the civilized earth to the other. From 400 B.C. to the downfall of the ancient world he was unquestionably better known and admired than any other dramatist. This is shown by the much larger collection of his work which has survived, by the imitation of later playwrights, and by innumerable passages of citation, praise, and comment in writers of every kind. He shared with Homer, Vergil, and Horace the equivocal distinction of becoming a schoolbook even in ancient times. Nine of our nineteen plays were selected for this purpose: Alcestis, Andromache, Hecuba, Hippolytus, Medea, Orestes, Phœnissæ, Rhesus, and Troades. It is not easy to see what principle of selection prompted the educationists of the day: Andromache and Hippolytus do not strike a modern reader as specially suitable. Owing to their use in schools they were annotated; these scholia are still extant and are often of great value. In the Byzantine age the number was reduced to three: Hecuba, Orestes, Phœnissæ.

Among the numerous lesser tragedians of the fifth century five hold a distinguished place: Neophron of Sicyon, Aristarchus of Tegea, Ion of Chios, Achæus of Eretria, Agathon of Athens.

Neophron is an enigmatic figure. It would seem that he was an important forerunner of Euripides. Not only do we learn that he wrote one hundred and twenty tragedies and that he was the first to bring upon the stage pædagogi and the examination of slaves under torture; it is said also that his Medea was the original of Euripides’ tragedy so-named.[53] Pædagogi or elderly male attendants of children are familiar in Euripides, and the questioning of slaves is shown (though not to the audience) in the Ion.[54] As for the third point, we have three fragments which clearly recall the extant play—a few lines in which Ægeus requests Medea to explain the oracle, a few more in which she tells Jason how he shall die, and the celebrated passage which reads like a shorter version of her great soliloquy when deciding to slay her children. There is the same anguish, the same vacillation, the same address to her passion (θυμός). Such a writer is plainly epoch-making: he adds a new feature to tragedy in the life-time of Sophocles. The realism of everyday life and the pangs of conscience battling with temptation—these we are wont to call Euripidean. But some have denied the very existence of Neophron as a dramatist: the fragments are fourth-century forgeries, or Euripides brought out a first edition[55] of his play under Neophron’s name. Against these views is the great authority of Aristotle,[56] who, however, may have been deceived by the name Neophron in official records. An argument natural to modern students, that a poet of Euripides’ calibre would not have borrowed and worked up another’s play, is of doubtful strength. Æschylus, as we have seen, probably acted so towards Phrynichus. The best view is probably that of antiquity. We may note that Sicyon is close to Corinth, and that a legend domestic to the latter city might naturally find its first treatment in a playwright of Sicyon.

Aristarchus of Tegea, whose début is to be dated about 453 B.C., is said by Suidas to have lived for over a hundred years, to have written seventy tragedies, two of which won the first prize, and one of which was called Asclepius (a thank-offering for the poet’s recovery from an illness), and to have initiated the present length of plays.[57] This latter point sounds important, but it is difficult to understand precisely what Suidas means. For though the average Sophoclean or Euripidean tragedy is longer than the Æschylean, Aristarchus began work later than Sophocles and no earlier than Euripides. It has been thought that Suidas refers to the length of dramas in post-Euripidean times, but of these we have perhaps no examples.[58] Aristarchus’ reputation was slight but enduring. Ennius two and a half centuries later translated his Achilles into Latin; the same work is quoted in the prologue of Plautus’ Pœnulus. A phrase[59] from another play became proverbial.

A more distinguished but probably less important writer was Ion of Chios, son of Orthomenes, who lived between 484 and 421 B.C. A highly accomplished man of ample means, he travelled rather widely. In Athens he must have spent considerable time, for he was intimate with Cimon and his circle, and produced plays the number of which is by one authority put at forty. Besides tragedy and satyric drama, he wrote comedies, dithyrambs, hymns, pæans, elegies, epigrams, and scolia. He was, moreover, distinguished in prose writing: we hear of a book on the Founding of Chios, of a philosophic work, and of certain memoirs.[60] This latter work must be a real loss to us, if we may judge from its fragments. In the fifth century B.C. no one but a facile Ionian would have thought it worth while to record mere gossip even about the great; for us there is great charm in an anecdote like that of the literary discussion between Sophocles and the schoolmaster, or the exclamation of Æschylus at the Isthmian Games.[61] Ion would seem to have been less a great poet than a delightful belletrist; the quality is well shown in his remark[62] that life, like a tragic tetralogy, should have a satyric element. One year he obtained a sensational success by winning the first prize both for tragedy and for a dithyramb; to commemorate this he presented to each Athenian citizen a cask of Chian wine. He died before 421, the date of Aristophanes’ Peace,[63] wherein he is spoken of as transformed into a star, in allusion to a charming lyric passage of his:—

ἀώϊον ἀεροφοίταν

ἀστέρα μείναμεν ἀελίου λευκοπτέρυγα πρόδρομον.

We awaited the star that wanders through the dawn-lit sky, pale-winged courier of the sun.

His tragedies,[64] though they do not appear to have had much effect on the progress of technique or on public opinion, were popular. Aristophanes, for instance, nearly twenty years after his death, quotes a phrase from his Sentinels[65] as proverbial, and centuries later the author of the treatise On the Sublime[66] wrote his celebrated verdict: In lyric poetry would you prefer to be Bacchylides rather than Pindar? And in tragedy to be Ion of Chios rather than—Sophocles? It is true that Bacchylides and Ion are faultless and entirely elegant writers of the polished school, while Pindar and Sophocles, although at times they burn everything before them as it were in their swift career, are often extinguished unaccountably and fail most lamentably. But would anyone in his senses regard all the compositions of Ion put together as an equivalent for the single play of the Œdipus?

Achæus of Eretria was born in 484 B.C., and exhibited his first play at Athens in 447. He won only one first prize though we hear that he composed over forty plays, nearly half of which are known by name. That he was second only to Æschylus in satyric drama was the opinion held by that delightful philosopher Menedemus[67] the minor Socratic, the seat of whose school was Eretria itself, Achæus’ birthplace.

It has been suggested that the apparent disproportion of satyric plays written by Achæus is to be accounted for by his having written them for other poets.[68] He is once copied by Euripides and parodied twice by Aristophanes.[69] Athenæus makes an interesting comment on his style: Achæus of Eretria, though an elegant poet in the structure of his plots, occasionally blackens his phrasing and produces many cryptic expressions.[70] The instance which he gives is significant:—

λιθάργυρος δ’

ὄλπη παρηωρεῖτο χρίσματος πλέα

τὸν Σπαρτιάτην γραπτὸν ἐν διπλῷ ξύλῳ

κύρβιν,

the cruse of alloyed silver, filled with ointment, swung beside the Spartan tablet, double wood inscribed. That is, he carried an oil-flask and a Spartan general’s bâton. Aiming at dignified originality of diction Achæus has merely fallen into queerness. On the other side, when he seeks vigorous realism he becomes quaintly prosaic. In the Philoctetes, for instance, Agamemnon utters