means for revealing the inmost workings of the heart, for moving awe and pity in the highest degree and for impressing anew the old lesson of the sacredness of the family. In thus humanising an archaic horror, which, because archaic, had the stronger claim on the imagination, there remains a certain amount of inevitable incongruity; although much less than where a "crowner's quest" is spoken of in Denmark, or King Arthur is seen—
"like a modern gentleman,
Of stately port;"
less, too, than would appear if we ignored the fact, that legendary persons and events had an intense reality for the popular imagination, long after, such minds as Thucydides' had outgrown- them: a fact which is strikingly apparent in the orations of Lysias.
From the body of Greek legend, then, the poet had to select his theme. And, according to Aristotle, the range of choice was further narrowed, as the purpose of tragedy came, to be more clearly seen, until the subjects universally applauded were confined to the histories of a few royal houses, whose fortunes supplied characters, situations, and catastrophes, of an eminently tragic nature. It is clear, however, if we turn over the fragments of Sophocles and Euripides, that Aristotle is speaking, not of their entire works, but of those which in his time were esteemed as masterpieces.
How far each poet borrowed from the earlier literature, or to what extent he relied on oral tradition, such as may have still floated round the local worship of particular heroes,[1] we can never know. It seems probable, as Schneidewin has shown, that Æschylus adopted some things from the lyric poets, where So-
- ↑ The tragic poet was the ally of priests and prophets, and himself exercised a kind of priesthood. Such men were always learned in tradition (λόγιοι). And a worship like that of Dionysus at Eleutheræ, or of Demeter at Eleusis, was sure to become the focus of a body of tradition which must have lived orally, whether poets gave shape to it or not.
