species of “dialogue.” Or, in other words, the leader of the chorus (coryphaeus), instead of addressing himself to the chorus, held converse with the actor. The chorus stood round its leader in front of the Bacchic altar (thymelē); the actor stood with the coryphaeus, who had occupied a more elevated position in order to be visible above his fellows, on a rude table, or possibly on a cart, though the wagon of Thespis may be a fiction, due to a confusion between his table and the wagon of Susarion. In any case, we have here, with the beginnings of dialogue, the beginning of the stage. It is a significant minor invention ascribed to Thespis, that he disguised the actor’s face first by means of a pigment, afterwards by a mask. In the dialogue was treated some myth relating to Bacchus, or to some other deity or hero. Whether or not Thespis actually wrote tragedies (and there seems no reason to doubt it), Phrynichus and one or two other poets are mentioned as having carried on choral tragedy as set on foot by him, and as having introduced improvements into its still predominating lyrical element. The step which made dramatic action possible, and with which the Greek drama thus really began, was, as is distinctly stated by Aristotle, taken by Aeschylus. He added a second actor; and, by reducing the functions of the chorus, he further established the dialogue as the principal part of tragedy. Sophocles afterwards added a third actor, by which change the preponderance of the dialogue was made complete.
If the origin of Greek comedy is simpler in its nature than that of Greek tragedy, the beginnings of its progress are involved in more obscurity. Its association with religious worship was not initial; its foundations lay in popular mirth, though religious festivals, and those of the Origin of comedy.vintage god in particular, must from the first have been the most obvious occasions for its exhibition. It is said to have been “invented” by Susarion, a native of Doric Megaris, whose inhabitants were famed for their coarse humour, which they communicated to their own and other Dorian colonies in Sicily, to this day the home of vivacious mimic dialogue. In the rural Bacchic vintage festivals bands of jolly companions (κῶμος, properly a revel continued after supper) went about in carts or afoot, carrying the phallic emblem, and indulging in the ribald licence of wanton mirth. From the song sung in these processions or at the Bacchic feasts, which combined the praise of the god with gross personal ridicule, and was called comus in a secondary sense, the Bacchic reveller taking part in it was called a comus-singer or comoedus. These phallic processions, which were afterwards held in most Greek cities, and in Athens seem to have early included a “topical” speech as well as a choral song, determined the character of Old Attic comedy, whose most prominent feature was an absolute licence of personal vilification.
Thus independent of one another in their origin, Greek tragedy and comedy never actually coalesced. The “satyr-drama,” though in some sense it partook of the nature of both, was in its origin as in its history connected with tragedy alone, whose origin it directly recalled. The satyr-drama.Pratinas of Philus, a contemporary of Aeschylus in his earlier days, is said to have restored the tragic chorus to the satyrs; i.e. he first produced dramas in which, though they were the same in form and theme as the tragedies, the choric dances were different and entirely carried on by satyrs. The tragic poets, while never writing comedies, henceforth also composed satyr-dramas; but neither tragedies nor satyr-dramas were ever written by the comic poets, and it was in conjunction with tragedies only that the satyr-dramas were performed. The theory of the Platonic Socrates, that the same man ought to be the best tragic and the best comic poet, was among the Greeks Tragi-comedy. never exemplified in practice. The so-called “hilaro-tragedy” or “tragi-comedy” of later writers, perhaps in some of its features in a measure anticipated by Euripides,[1] in form nowise differed from tragedy; it merely contained a comic element in its characters, and invariably had a happy ending. It is an instructive fact that the serious and sentimental element in the comedy of Menander and his contemporaries did far more to destroy the essential difference between the two great branches of the Greek dramatic art.
Periods of Greek Tragedy.—The history of Greek—which to all intents and purposes remained Attic—tragedy divides itself into three periods.
I. The Period before Aeschylus (535–499).—From this we have but a few names of authors and plays—those of the former being (besides Thespis) Choerilus, Phrynichus and Pratinas, all of whom lived to contend with Aeschylus for the tragic prize. To each of them certain innovations are ascribed—for instance the introduction of female characters to Phrynichus. He is best remembered by the overpowering effect said to have been created by his Capture of Miletus, in which the chorus consisted of the wives of the Phoenician sailors in the service of the Great King.
II. The Classical Period of Attic Tragedy—that of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and their contemporaries (499–405). To this belong all the really important phases in the progress of Greek tragedy, which severally connect themselves with the names of its three great masters. They may be regarded as the representatives of successive generations of Attic history and life, though of course in these, as in the progress of their art itself, there is an unbroken continuity.
Aeschylus (525–456) had not only fought both at Marathon and at Salamis against those Persians whose rout he celebrated with patriotic price,[2] but he had been trained in the Eleusinian mysteries, and strenuously asserted the value of the institution most intimately associated with the Aeschylus.primitive political traditions of the past—the Areopagus.[3] He had been born in the generation after Solon, to whose maxims he fondly clung; and it was the Dorian development of Hellenic life and the philosophical system based upon it with which his religious and moral convictions were imbued. Thus even upon the generation which succeeded him, and to which the powerful simplicity of his dramatic and poetic diction seemed strange, the ethical loftiness of his conceptions and the sublimity of his dramatic imagination fell like the note of a mightier age. To us nothing is more striking than the conciliatory tendencies of his conservative mind, and the progressive nature of what may have seemed to his later contemporaries antiquated ideals.
Sophocles (495–405) was the associate of Pericles, and an upholder of his authority, rather than a consistent pupil of his political principles; but his manhood, and perhaps the maturity of his genius, coincided with the great days when he could stand, like his mighty friend and the community Sophocles.they both so gloriously represented, on the sunny heights of achievement. Serenely pious as well as nobly patriotic, he nevertheless treats the myths of the national religion in the spirit of a conscious artist, contrasting with lofty irony the struggles of humanity with the irresistible march of its destinies. Perhaps he, too, was one of the initiated; and the note of personal responsibility which is the mystic’s inner religion is recognizable in his view of life.[4] The art of Sophocles may in its perfection be said to typify the greatest epoch in the life of Athens—an epoch conscious of unequalled achievements, but neither wholly unconscious of the brief endurance which was its destiny.
Euripides (480–406), as is the fate of genius of a more complex kind, has been more variously and antithetically judged than either of his great fellow-tragedians. His art has been described as devoid of the idealism of theirs, his genius as rhetorical rather than poetical, his morality as that Euripides.of a sophistical wit. On the other hand, he has been recognized not only as the most tragic of the Attic tragedians and the most pathetic of ancient poets, but also as the most humane in his social philosophy and the most various in his psychological insight. At least, though far removed from the more naïf age of the national life, he is, both in patriotic spirit and in his choice of themes, genuinely Attic; and if he was “haunted on the stage by the daemon of Socrates,” he was, like Socrates himself, the representative of an age which was a seed-time as well as a season of decay. His technical innovations
