tragedy the nearest approach to the arias of our opera, in which the chief actors express the excitement of grief, or fear, or hope, with the aid of music. One form, the commos, a funeral lament, in which the chorus joined in alternate strains with two actors, is common as a closing scene in Æschylus and Sophocles; but Euripides extended the lyrical expression of emotion, and applied it to various situations. Thus some of his plays, like the Ion and the Andromeda, opened with such a monody. In the Ion also there is a magnificent soliloquy of Creusa, set in the same form. The excitement of Iphigenia (in Aulis), as that of Sophocles' Antigone, finds vent in the same hurried irregular metre, wild imagery, and musical cadence.[1] Indeed the musical improvements of the age seem to have been so considerable, that the poet was tempted to exaggerate this side of tragedy, and provide a new æsthetic delight for his audience apart from mere tragic emotion. It may have been the same sort of change as we have seen from the spoken dialogue of the older opera to the carefully orchestrated recitatives of our own day, which provide the audience with musical pleasures quite apart from the formally numbered airs or concerted pieces.
This combination of a considerable proportion of lyric verse with quiet iambic dialogue is one of the features in which Greek tragedy—from many points of view so much simpler than our drama—obtains a greater lightness and variety. Any English reader may prove it for himself by comparing Mr, Browning's Alcestis (in Balaustion's Adventure) with his Raging Heracles (in Aristophanes' Apology). In the former he has neglected this variety, in the latter he has reproduced it. There can be no question as to the general effect. It is remarkable that among the many varieties of pathetic metre we have but one passage in elegiacs, the lament in the Andromache (vv. 104–116); thus
- ↑ I have above (§ 48) noticed the exceptional iambic scene in the Medea.
