the ghastly farrago. It is one of the immediate duties of archæological research to set us right again where archæological text-books have set us so miserably wrong.
Still our undoubted literary tradition does contain strong elements of conventionalism. The characters are all saga-people;[1] they all speak in verse; they tend to speak at equal length, and they almost never interrupt except at the end of a line. Last and worst, there is eternally present a chorus of twelve or fifteen homogeneous persons—maidens, matrons, elders, captives, or the like—whose main duty is to minimise the inconvenience of their presence during the action, and to dance and sing in a conventional Doric dialect during the intervals. The explanation of this is, of course, historical.
We have seen above (p. 99) how the Silenus-choir of the Centaur-like followers of Dionysus was merged into the Satyr-choir of wild mountain-goats in the suite of the Arcadian mountain-god Pan. 'Tragos' is a goat; 'tragikos choros' a goat-choir; and 'tragôidia' a goat-song. The meaning of the word only changed because the thing it denoted changed. Tragedy developed from the Dorian goat-choirs of the Northern Peloponnese—those of Arîon at Corinth, and of the precursors of Pratînas at Phlius, and those which the tyrant Cleisthenes suppressed at Sikyon for "celebrating the sufferings of Adrastus."[2]
- ↑ The best known exception is the Flower* (or Antheus) of Agathon. Agathon left Athens (about 407) at the age of forty, when he had already won a position inferior only to that of Sophocles and Euripides, but before his individual originality and his Socratic or Platonic spirit had a permanent effect on the drama. Aristophanes had assailed him vehemently in the Thesmophoriazusæ and Gerytades*—a testimony to his 'advanced' spirit in art.
- ↑ Hdt. v. 67.
