CHAPTER V.
EXTERNAL CONDITIONS—CHOICE OF FABLE.
It is unnecessary to dwell here at any length on the external conditions of representation to which Athenian tragedy owed much of its peculiar form—the size of the open theatre, the performance by daylight, the small number of the actors, the continual presence of the chorus. These and other circumstances may be said to have conspired with the genius of Greek art to combine grandeur with simplicity and unity. The addition of the third actor, with which Sophocles is credited, enabled him to add something of complexity without introducing confusion.[1]
But there is one limitation, of a less absolute kind, to which attention may be particularly directed—that of the choice of subject.
The time when an audience would cry, on seeing a new hero, "This has nothing to do with Bacchus," was indeed long since passed. But so also was the period of novel enterprises, in which a drama like the Persæ had been possible. After that brief excursion into the region of contemporary history, tragedy had returned within the cycle of Hellenic legend. The art in fact stood on the border-line between two worlds: that of heroic tradition, which to the people's imagination was still real, and which they had begun to connect with existing political relations, and that of philosophic thought, which was still in that early phase
- ↑ For a full outline of this part of the subject the reader is again referred to Mr. Jebb's Primer of Greek Literature.
