corresponded to his literary characteristics; but neither in the treatment of the chorus, nor in his management of the beginning and the ending of a tragedy, did he introduce any radical change. To Euripides the general progress of dramatic literature nevertheless owes more than to any other ancient poet. Tragedy followed in his footsteps in Greece and at Rome. Comedy owed him something in the later phases of the very Aristophanes who mocked him, and more in the human philosophy expressed in the sentiments of Menander; and, when the modern drama came to engraft the ancient upon its own crude growth, his was directly or indirectly the most powerful influence in the establishment of a living connexion between them.
The incontestable pre-eminence of the three great tragic poets was in course of time acknowledged at Athens by the usage allowing no tragedies but theirs to be performed more than once, and by the prescription that one play of theirs should be performed at each Dionysia, The great tragic masters and their contem-poraries.as well as by the law of Lycurgus (c. 330) which obliged the actors to use, in the case of works of the great masters, authentic copies preserved in the public archives. Yet it is possible that the exclusiveness of these tributes is not entirely justifiable; and not all the tragic poets contemporary with the great writers were among the myriad of younglings derided by Aristophanes. Of those who attained to celebrity Ion of Chios (d. before 419) seems to have followed earlier traditions of style than Euripides; Agathon, who survived the latter, on the other hand, introduced certain innovations of a transnormal kind both into the substance and the form of dramatic composition.[1]
III. Of the third period of Greek tragedy the concluding limit cannot be precisely fixed. Down to the days of Alexander the Great, Athens had remained the chief home of tragedy. Though tragedies must have begun to be acted at the Syracusan and Macedonian courts, since The suc-cessors of the great masters at Athens.Aeschylus, Euripides and Agathon had sojourned there—though the practice of producing plays at the Dionysia before the allies of Athens must have led to their holding similar exhibitions at home—yet before the death of Alexander we meet with no instance of a tragic poet writing or of a tragedy written outside Athens. An exception should indeed be made in favour of the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse, who (like Critias in his earlier days at Athens) was “addicted to” tragic composition. Not all the tragedians of this period, however, were Athenians born; though the names of Euphorion, the son of Aeschylus, Iophon, the son of Sophocles, and Euripides and Sophocles, the nephew and the grandson respectively of their great namesakes, illustrate the descent of the tragic art as an hereditary family possession. Chaeremon (fl. 380) already exhibits tragedy on the road to certain decay, for we learn that his plays were written for reading.
Soon after the death of Alexander theatres are found spread over the whole Hellenic world of Europe and Asia—a result to which the practice of the conqueror and his father of celebrating their victories by scenic performances had doubtless contributed. Alexandria having now The Alexandrians.become a literary centre with which even Athens was in some respects unable to compete, while the latter still remained the home of comedy, the tragic poets flocked to the capital of the Ptolemies; and here, in the canon of Greek poets drawn up by command of Ptolemy Philadelphus (283–247), Alexander the Aetolian undertook the list of tragedies, while Lycophron was charged with the comedies. But Lycophron himself was included in all the versions of the list of the seven tragic poets famed as the “Pleias” who still wrote in the style of the Attic masters and followed the rules observed by them. Tragedy and the dramatic art continued to be favoured by the later Ptolemies; and about 100 B.C. we meet with the curious phenomenon of a Jewish poet, Ezechiel, composing Greek tragedies, of one of which (the Exodus from Egypt) fragments have come down to us. Tragedy, with the satyr-drama and comedy, survived in Alexandria beyond the days of Cicero and Varro; nor was their doom finally sealed till the emperor Caracalla abolished theatrical performances in the Egyptian capital in A.D. 217.
Thus Greek tragedy is virtually only another name for Attic; nor was any departure from the lines laid down by its three great masters made in most respects by the Roman imitators of these poets and of their successors.The tragedy of the great masters.
Tragedy was defined by Plato as an imitation of the noblest life. Its proper themes—the deeds and sufferings of heroes—were familiar to audiences intimately acquainted with the mythology of the national religion. To such themes Greek tragedy almost wholly confined itself; Subjects of Greek tragedy.and in later days there were numerous books which discussed these myths of the tragedians. They only very exceptionally treated historic themes, though one great national calamity,[2] and a yet greater national victory,[3] and in later times a few other historical subjects,[4] were brought upon the stage. Such veiled historical allusions as critical ingenuity has sought not only in passages but in the entire themes of other Attic tragedies[5] cannot, of course, even if accepted as such, stamp the plays in which they occur as historic dramas. No doubt Attic tragedy, though after a different and more decorous fashion, shared the tendency of her comic sister to introduce allusions to contemporary events and persons; and the indulgence of this tendency was facilitated by the revision (διασκυή) to which the works of the great poets were subjected by them, or by those who produced their works after them.[6] So far as we know, the subjects of the tragedies before Aeschylus were derived from the epos; and it was a famous saying of this poet that his dramas were “but dry scraps from the great banquets of Homer”—an expression which may be understood as including the poems which belong to the so-called Homeric cycles. Sophocles, Euripides and their successors likewise resorted to the Trojan, and also to the Heraclean and the Thesean myths, and to Attic legend in general, as well as to Theban, to which already Aeschylus had had recourse, and to the side or subsidiary myths connected with these several groups. These substantially remained to the last the themes of Greek tragedy, the Trojan myths always retaining so prominent a place that Lucian could jest on the universality of their dominion. Purely invented subjects were occasionally treated by the later tragedians; of this innovation Agathon was the originator.[7]
Thespis is said to have introduced the use of a “prologue” and a “rhesis” (speech)—the former being probably the opening speech recited by the coryphaeus, the latter the dialogue between him and the actor. It was a natural result of the introduction of the second actor that a second Construction.rhesis should likewise be added; and this tripartite division would be the earliest form of the trilogy,—three sections of the same myth forming the beginning, middle and end of a single drama, marked off from one another by the choral songs. From this Aeschylus proceeded to the treatment of these several portions of a myth in three separate plays, connected together by their subject and by being performed in sequence on a single occasion. This is the Aeschylean trilogy, The Aeschy-lean trilogy.of which we have only one extant example, the Oresteia—as to which critics may differ whether Aeschylus adhered in it to his principle that the strength should
- ↑ Anthos.
- ↑ Phrynichus, Capture of Miletus.
- ↑ Id., Phoenissae; Aeschylus, Persae (Persae-trilogy?).
- ↑ Moschion, Themistocles; Theodectes, Mausolus; Lycophron, Marathonii; Cassandrei; Socii; Philiscus, Themistocles.
- ↑ Aeschylus, Septem c. Thebas; Prometheus Vinctus; Danais-trilogy; Sophocles, Antigone; Oedipus Coloneus; Euripides, Medea.
- ↑ Quite distinct from this revision was the practice against which the law of Lycurgus was directed, of “cobbling and heeling” the dramas of the great masters by alterations of a kind familiar enough to the students of Shakespeare as improved by Colley Cibber and other experts. The later tragedians also appear to have occasionally transposed long speeches or episodes from one tragedy into another—a device largely followed by the Roman dramatists, and called contamination by Latin writers.
- ↑ Anthos (The Flower).
