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GREEK TRAGEDY

GREEK TRAGEDY

BY
GILBERT NORWOOD, M.A.
FORMERLY FELLOW OF ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, CARDIFF

METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

First Published in 1920

PREFACE

This book is an attempt to cover the whole field of Greek Tragedy. My purpose throughout has been twofold. Firstly, I have sought to provide classical students with definite facts and with help towards a personal appreciation of the plays they read. My other intention has been to interest and in some degree to satisfy those “general readers” who have little or no knowledge of Greek. This second function is to-day at least as important as the first. Apart from the admirable progress shown in Europe and the English-speaking world by many works of first-rate Greek scholarship, in the forefront of which stand Jebb’s monumental Sophocles, Verrall’s achievements in dramatic criticism, and the unrivalled Einleitung of Wilamowitz-Moellendorff,—the magnificent verse-translations of Professor Gilbert Murray, springing from a rare union of poetic genius with consummate scholarship, have introduced in this country a new epoch of interest in Greek drama among many thousands who are unacquainted with the language. Even more momentous is the fact that the feeling of educated people about drama in general has been revolutionized and reanimated by the creative genius of Ibsen, whose penetrating influence is the chief cause of the present dramatic renaissance in Great Britain.

Two important topics have been given more prominence than is usual in books of this kind: dramatic structure and the scansion of lyrics.

It might have been supposed self-evident that the former of these is a vital part, indeed the foundation, of the subject, but it has suffered remarkable neglect or still more remarkable superficiality of treatment: criticism of the Greek tragedians has been vitiated time and again by a tendency to ignore the very existence of dramatic form. It is a strange reflection that the world of scholarship waited till 1887 for the mere revelation of grave difficulties in the plot of the Agamemnon. Examining boards still prescribe “Ajax vv. 1-865,” on the naïve assumption that they know better than Sophocles where the play ought to end. Euripides has been discussed with a perversity which one would scarcely surpass if one applied to Anatole France the standards appropriate to Clarendon. Throughout I have attempted to follow the working of each playwright’s mind, to realize what he meant his work to “feel like”. This includes much besides structure, but the plot is still, as in Aristotle’s day, “the soul of the drama”.

Chapter VI, on metre and rhythm, will, I hope, be found useful. Greek lyrics are so difficult that most students treat them as prose. I have done my best to be accurate, clear, and simple, with the purpose of enabling the sixth-form boy or undergraduate to read his “chorus” with a sense of metrical and rhythmical form. With regard to this chapter, even more than the others, I shall welcome criticism and advice.

I have to thank my wife for much help, and my friend Mr. Cyril Brett, M.A., who kindly offered to make the Index.

GILBERT NORWOOD

CONTENTS

GREEK TRAGEDY

CHAPTER I
THE LITERARY HISTORY OF GREEK TRAGEDY

All the types of dramatic poetry known in Greece, tragic, satyric, and comic, originated in the worship of Dionysus, the deity of wild vegetation, fruits, and especially the vine. In his honour, at the opening of spring, were performed dithyrambs, hymns rendered by a chorus, who, dressed like satyrs, the legendary followers of Dionysus, presented by song and mimic dance stories from the adventurous life of the god while on earth. It is from these dithyrambs that tragedy and satyric drama both sprang. The celebrated Arion, who raised the dithyramb to a splendid art-form, did much[1] incidentally to aid this development. His main achievement in this regard is the insertion of spoken lines in the course of the lyrical performance; it seems, further, that these verses consisted of a dialogue between the chorus and the chorus-leader, who mounted upon the sacrificial table. Such interludes, no doubt, referred to incidents in the sacred story, and the early name for an actor (ὑποκριτής, “one who answers”) suggests that members of the chorus asked their leader to explain features in the ritual or the narrative.

At this point drama begins to diverge from the dithyramb. With comedy we are not here concerned.[2] The drama of the spring festival may be called “tragedy,” but it was in a quite rudimentary state. Its lyrics, sung by fifty “satyrs,” would altogether outshine in importance the dialogue-interludes between chorus-leader and individual singers; the theme, moreover, would be always some event connected with Dionysus. Two great changes were necessary before drama could enter on free development: the use of impersonation in the interludes and the admission of any subject at will of the poet. The first was introduced by Thespis, who is said to have “invented one actor”. The second was perhaps later, but at least as early as Phrynichus we find plays on subjects taken from other than Dionysiac legends. It is said that the audience complained of this innovation: “What has this to do with Dionysus?”[3]

Another great development is attributed to Pratinas—the invention of satyric drama. The more stately, graver features and the frolicsome, often gross, elements being separated, the way was clear for the free development of tragedy and satyric into the forms we know. But satyric work, though always showing playful characteristics and a touch of obscenity, was never confounded with comedy. Stately figures of legend or theology regularly appeared in it—Odysseus in the Cyclops, Apollo in the Ichneutæ—and it was a regular feature at the presentations of tragedy; each tragic poet competed with three tragedies followed by one satyric play. When the latter form changed its tone slightly, as in the work of the Alexandrian Pleiad,[4] it approximated not to comedy but to satire.[5]

The Dorians claimed the credit of having invented both tragedy and comedy.[6] There seems little doubt that they provided the germ, though the glories of Greek drama belong to Athens. Arion, whose contribution has been described, if not himself a Dorian, worked among Dorians at Corinth, which Pindar,[7] for example, recognized as the birthplace of the dithyramb. Moreover the lyrics of purely Attic tragedy show in their language what is generally regarded as a slight Doric colouring.[8]

Aristotle[9] sums up the rise of tragedy as follows: “Tragedy ... was at first mere improvization ... originating with the leaders of the dithyramb. It advanced by slow degrees; each new element that showed itself was in turn developed. Having passed through many stages, it found its natural form, and there it stopped. Æschylus first introduced a second actor; he diminished the importance of the chorus, and assigned the leading part to the dialogue. Sophocles raised the number of actors to three, and added scene-painting. It was not till late that the short plot was discarded for one of greater compass, and the grotesque diction of the earlier satyric form for the stately manner of tragedy. The iambic measure then replaced the trochaic tetrameter, which was originally employed when the poetry was of the satyric order, and had greater affinities with dancing.... The number of ‘episodes’ or acts was also increased, and the other embellishments added, of which tradition tells.”

We have but meagre knowledge of the drama before Æschylus, whose vast achievement so overshadowed his predecessors that their works were little read and have in consequence practically vanished. Tragedy was born at the moment when, as tradition relates, Thespis of Icaria in Attica introduced the actor. Arion, as we saw, had already caused one of the chorus to mount upon the sacrificial table or the step of the altar and deliver a narrative, or converse with his fellow-choristers, concerning Dionysus, using not lyrical metre, but the trochaic tetrameter.[10] Thespis’ great advance was to introduce a person who should actually present the character to whom Arion’s chorister had merely made allusion: the action, instead of being reported, went on before the eyes of the audience. This change clearly at once begets the possibility of drama, however rudimentary. By retiring to the booth while the singers perform their lyric, he can change his mask and costume and reappear as another person; by learning and discussing what has been said by his supposed predecessor, he can exhibit the play of emotion or the construction of a plan.

If this was done by Thespis, he was the founder of European drama. His floruit may be assigned to the year 535 B.C., the date of the first dramatic competition at Athens. But little is known of him. Aristotle in his Poetic[11] does not mention his name. Far later we have the remarks of Horace, “Diogenes Laertius,”[12] and Suidas. Horace tells[13] that Thespis discovered tragic poetry, and conveyed from place to place on waggons a company of players who sang and acted his pieces, their faces smeared with lees of wine: “Diogenes Laertius” says that Thespis “discovered one actor”. Suidas gives us the names of several plays, Phorbas or The Trials (ἆθλα) of Pelias, The Priests, The Youths, Pentheus. We possess four fragments alleged to belong to these, but they are spurious. Aristotle,[14] moreover, affirms that Tragedy was in the first place a matter of improvization. The conclusion seems to be that Thespis did not “write plays” in the modern sense of the phrase. He was much more like those Elizabethan dramatists who provided “the words” for their actors, and for whom printing and publication were only thought of if the play had achieved success upon the boards. He stood midway between Æschylus and the unknown actor-poets before Arion who improvized as they played.

The next name of importance is that of Chœrilus the Athenian, who competed in tragedy for the first time during the 64th Olympiad (524-1 B.C.) and continued writing for the stage during forty years. He produced one hundred and sixty plays, and obtained the first prize thirteen times. Later generations regarded him as especially excellent in the satyric drama[15] invented by his younger contemporary Pratinas. To him were attributed the invention of masks, as a substitute for the wine-lees of Thespis, and more majestic costume. We know by name only one of his works, the Alope, which is concerned with the Attic hero Triptolemus. A fragment or two reveal an unexpected preciosity of style; he called stones and rivers “the bones and veins of the earth”.

Pratinas of Phlius, in the north of the Peloponnese, is said to have competed with Æschylus and Chœrilus in the 70th Olympiad (500-497 B.C.). His great achievement, as we have said, was the invention of satyric drama. Fifty plays are attributed to him, of which thirty-two were satyric. Hardly any fragments of these are extant, but we get some conception of the man from a hyporchema in which he complains that music is encroaching upon poetry: “let the flute follow the dancing revel of the song—it is but an attendant”. With boundless gusto and polysyllabic energy he consigns the flute to flames and derision.

At length we reach a poet who seems to have been really great, a dramatist whose works, even to a generation which knew and reverenced Æschylus, seemed unworthy to be let die—Phrynichus of Athens, son of Polyphradmon, whose first victory occurred 512-509 B.C. It is said that he was the first to bring female characters upon the stage (always, however, played by men). The following dramas are known by name: Egyptians; Alcestis; Antæus or The Libyans; The Daughters of Danaus; The Capture of Miletus; Phœnician Women (Phœnissæ); The Women of Pleuron; Tantalus; Troilus. The Egyptians seems to have dealt with the same subject as the Supplices of Æschylus; so does the Danaides; these two dramas may have formed part of a trilogy. The Alcestis followed the same lines as the Euripidean play; it is probable, indeed, that the apparition of Death with a sword was borrowed by Euripides from Phrynichus. The Antæus related the wrestling-match between Heracles and his earth-born foe. The manner in which Aristophanes[16] refers to the play shows that the description of the wrestling-bout was still celebrated after the lapse of a century. The Pleuroniæ treated of Meleager and the fateful log which was preserved, and then burnt in anger, by his mother Althæa.

Two plays were specially important. The Phœnissæ (produced in 476), celebrated the victory of Salamis, had Themistocles himself for choregus, and won the prize; its popularity never waned throughout the fifth century. We are told that the prologue was spoken by an eunuch while he placed the cushions for the Persian counsellors; further—an important fact—that this person, at the beginning of the play, announced the defeat of Xerxes. The Capture of Miletus, less popular in later days—no fragments at all are to be found—created even more stir at the moment. Miletus had been captured by Darius in 494 B.C., Athens having failed to give effective support to the Ionian revolt. While the distress and shame excited by the fall of the proudest city in Asiatic Greece were still strong in Athenian minds, Phrynichus ventured to dramatize the disaster. Herodotus tells how “the theatre burst into tears; they fined him a thousand drachmæ for reminding them of their own misfortunes, and gave command that no man should ever use that play again”.[17]

Few lost works are so sorely to be regretted as those of Phrynichus. The collection of fragments merely hints at a genius who commanded the affection of an age which knew his great successors, a master whose dignity was not utterly overborne by Æschylus, and whose tenderness could still charm hearts which had thrilled to the agonies of Medea and the romance of Andromeda. The chief witness to his popularity is Aristophanes, who paints for us a delightful picture[18] of the old men in the dark before the dawn, trudging by lantern-light through the mud to the law-court, and humming as they go the “charming old-world honeyed ditties” from the Phœnissæ. In another play[19] the birds assert that it is from their song that “Phrynichus, like his own bee, took his feast, food of the gods, the fruit of song, and found unfailingly a song full sweet”. One or two snatches survive from these lyrics, lines from the Phœnissæ in the “greater Asclepiad” metre which is the form of some of Sappho’s loveliest work, and a verse[20] from the Troilus which Sophocles himself quoted: “the light of love on rosy cheeks is beaming”.

It is clear that for most Athenians the spell of Phrynichus lay in his songs; succeeding poets he impressed almost equally as a playwright. It has already been mentioned that Euripides seems to have borrowed from the Alcestis. Æschylus, especially, was influenced by his style, and in the Persæ followed the older poet closely. Indeed the relation between the Persæ and the Phœnissæ is puzzling, but ancient authority did not hesitate to say that the later work was “modelled on” the earlier.[21] It is no question of a réchauffé to suit the taste of a later age, like the revisions of Shakespeare by Davenant and Cibber, for the two tragedies are separated at the utmost by only seven years; rather we appear to have a problem like the connexion between Macbeth and Middleton’s Witch. Perhaps the soundest opinion is that the younger playwright wished to demonstrate his own method of writing and his theory of dramatic composition in the most striking way possible—by choosing a famous drama of the more rudimentary type and rewriting it as it ought to be written. Two features in the Phœnissæ seem to lend support to this view. Firstly, the prologue was delivered by a slave who was preparing the seats of the Persian counsellors. The Persæ expunges the man and his speech, presenting us at once with the elders in deliberation. Nothing is more characteristic of the architectonic power in literature than the instinct to sweep away everything but the minimum of mere machinery; at the first instant we are in the midst of the plot. Secondly, the prologue at once announced the disaster. Nothing was left but the amplification of sorrow, a quasi-operatic presentation by the Phœnician women who formed the chorus. Here again the Persæ provides a most instructive contrast.

From the fragments, from ancient testimony, and from the recasting of the Phœnissæ which appeared instinctive or necessary to Æschylus, we gain some clear conception of Phrynichus. A lyrist of sweetness and pellucid dignity, he has been compared[22] to his contemporary Simonides; the graceful phrases in which Aristophanes declared that Phrynichus drew his inspiration from the birds recall to us the “native wood-notes wild” of Shakespeare’s earlier achievement. As a playwright in the strict sense he is, for us, the first effective master, but still swayed by the age of pure lyrists which was just reaching its culmination and its close in Pindar—so greatly swayed that the “episodes” were still little more than interruptions of lyrics which gave but a static expression to feeling.

Æschylus, the son of Euphorion, was born at Eleusis in 525 B.C. At the age of twenty-five he began to exhibit plays, but did not win the prize until the year 485. The Persian invasions swept down upon Athens when Æschylus had come to the maturity of his powers. He served as a hoplite at Marathon[23] and his brother Cynegirus distinguished himself even on that day of heroes by his desperate courage in attempting to thwart the flight of the invaders. That the poet was present at Salamis also may be regarded as certain from the celebrated description in the Persæ. He twice visited Sicily. On the first occasion, soon after 470 B.C., he accepted the invitation of Hiero, King of Syracuse, and composed The Women of Etna to celebrate the city which Hiero was founding on the slope of that mountain. Various stories to explain his retirement from Athens were circulated in antiquity. Some relate that he was unnerved by a collapse of the wooden benches during a performance of one of his plays. Others said that he was defeated by Simonides in a competition: the task was to write an epitaph on those who fell at Marathon. According to others he was chagrined by a dramatic defeat which he sustained at the hands of the youthful Sophocles in 468. A fourth story declared that he was accused of divulging the Eleusinian Mysteries in one of his plays, and was in danger of his life until he proved that he had himself never been initiated. These stories are hard to accept. Possibly he wrote something which offended against Eleusinian rule, and was condemned to banishment or possibly to death, which (as often occurred) he was allowed to escape by voluntary exile. We cannot suppose that he pleaded ignorance[24] seriously; a man of his genuinely devout temperament, and a native of Eleusis, must assuredly have been initiated. A second visit to Sicily was taken after he had again won the prize with the Oresteia. He never returned. Story tells how he was sitting on the hillside near the city of Gela when an eagle, flying with a tortoise in its claws in quest of a stone whereon to crush it, dropped its prey upon the bald head of the poet and killed him. He left two sons, Euphorion and Bion, who also pursued the tragic art—a tradition which persisted in the family for generations.

Æschylus is too great a dramatist to receive detailed treatment in the course of a general discussion; a separate chapter must be allotted to this. At present we shall consider only his position in the history of tragedy.

The great technical change introduced by Æschylus was that he “first introduced a second actor; he diminished the importance of the chorus, and assigned the leading part to the dialogue”.[25] The two last statements are corollaries of the first, which describe a deeply important advance. It has been said above that the drama was founded by the man who “invented one actor”; at the same time it is easy to realize how primitive such drama must have been. The addition of another actor did not double the resources of tragedy, rather it increased them fifty-fold. To bring two opposed or sympathetic characters face to face, to exhibit the clash of principles by means of the clash of personalities, this is a step forward into a new world, a change so great that to call Æschylus the very inventor of tragedy is not unreasonable. This meagre equipment of two actors was found sufficient by two of the fifth-century masters for work[26] of the highest value. The further remark of Aristotle that Æschylus “diminished the importance of the chorus” follows naturally from the vast increase in the importance of the “episodes”.

Revolutionary as Æschylus was, he did not attain at a bound to a characteristic dramatic form of his own and then advance no farther. In his earliest extant play, the Supplices, the alterations mentioned above are certainly in operation, but their use is tentative. The chorus is no doubt less dominant than it had been, but it is the most important feature, even to a modern reader. To an ancient spectator it must have appeared of even greater moment. The number of singers was still fifty, and the lyrics, accompanied by music and the dance of this great company, occupy more than half of our present text. We have left Phrynichus behind, but he is not out of sight.

It is necessary at this point to give some account of the life of Sophocles and his position in dramatic history, though a detailed discussion of his extant work must be reserved for a separate chapter. He was born about 496 B.C., the son of a well-to-do citizen named Sophillus, and received, in addition to the usual education, more advanced training in music from the celebrated Lampros. The youth’s physical beauty was remarkable, and at the age of sixteen he was chosen to lead the choir of boys who performed the pæan celebrating the victory of Salamis. Nothing more is known of his life till the year 468, when he produced his first tragedy. One of his fellow-competitors was Æschylus, and we are told[27] that feeling ran so high that the Archon, instead of choosing the judges by lot as usual, entrusted the decision to the board of generals; they awarded the victory to the youthful Sophocles. For sixty years he produced a steady stream of dramatic work with continuous success. He at first performed in his own plays—his skill in the Nausicaa gained great applause—but was compelled to give this up owing to the failure of his voice. The number of his plays was well over a hundred, performed in groups of four, and he won eighteen victories at the City Dionysia; even when he failed of the first prize, he was never lower than the second place.[28] His genius seems even to have increased with advancing age; he was about ninety when he wrote the Œdipus Coloneus. Sophocles took a satisfactory if not prominent part in public life,[29] being twice elected general, once with Pericles and later with Nicias. He served also as Hellenotamias—a member, that is, of the Treasury Board which administered the funds of the Delian Confederacy. It is an interesting comment on the early part of the Œdipus Coloneus that the poet acted as priest of two heroes, Asclepius and Alcon. He had several sons, the most celebrated of whom was Iophon, himself a tragedian of repute. A famous story relates that Iophon, being jealous of his illegitimate brother, brought a suit to prove his father’s insanity, with the intent to become administrator of his estate. The aged poet’s defence consisted in a recitation of the Œdipus Coloneus which he had just completed, and the jury most naturally dismissed Iophon’s petition. He died late in 406 B.C., fully ninety years old, a few months later than Euripides, and not long before the disaster of Ægospotami. The Athenian people mourned him as a hero under the name of Dexion, “The Entertainer,” or “Host,” and brought yearly sacrifice to his shrine.

The personality of Sophocles stands out more definitely before the modern eye than that of perhaps any other fifth-century Greek. His social talent made him a noted figure whose good sayings were repeated, and of whom the gossips as well as the critics loved to circulate illustrative stories. He seemed the embodiment of all that man can ask. Genius, good health, industry, long life, personal beauty, affluence, popularity, and the sense of power—all were his, and enjoyed in that very epoch which, beyond all others, seems to have combined stimulus with satisfaction. Salamis was fought and won just as he had left childhood behind. His adolescence and maturity coincided with the rise and establishment of the Athenian Empire; he listened to Pericles, saw the Parthenon and Propylæa rise upon the Acropolis, associated with Æschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Thucydides, watched the work of Phidias and Polygnotus grow to life under their fingers. Though he carried into the years of Nestor the genius of Shakespeare, he was yet so blessed that he died before the fall of Athens. Phrynichus, the comic poet, wrote: “Blessed was Sophocles, who passed so many years before his death, a happy man and brilliant, who wrote many beautiful tragedies and made a fair end of a life which knew no misfortune”.[30] Sophocles’ own words[31] come as a significant comment:—

μὴ φῦναι τὸν ἅπαντα νικᾷ λόγον.

τὸ δ’, ἐπεὶ φανῇ,

βῆναι κεῖθεν ὅθενπερ ἥκει,

πολὺ δεύτερον ὡς τάχιστα.

“Best of all fates—when a man weighs everything—is not to be born, and second-best beyond doubt is, once born, to depart with all speed to that place whence we came.”

Of his social charm there are many evidences. He gathered round him a kind of literary club or salon. Some hint of the talk in this circle may be gathered from the fragment of Ion’s Memoirs which tells how when the poet came to Chios he engaged in critical battle with the local schoolmaster concerning poetical adjectives, and quoted with approbation Phrynichus’ line λάμπει δ’ ἐπὶ πορφυρέαις παρῇσι φῶς ἔρωτος. He was a friend of Herodotus, from whom he quotes more than once, and to whom he addressed certain elegiac verses. With regard to his own art, we possess two remarks of deep interest. The first is reported by Aristotle:[32] “I depict men as they ought to be, Euripides depicts them as they are”. It is excellent Attic for “he is a realist, I am an idealist”. Nevertheless, he esteemed his rival; when he led forth his chorus for the first time after the news of Euripides’ death in Macedonia had reached Athens, he and his singers wore the dress of mourning. The second remark is a brief account[33] of his own development: “My dramatic wild oats were imitation of Æschylus’ pomp; then I evolved my own harsh mannerism; finally I embraced that style which is best, as most adapted to the portrayal of human nature”. All that we now possess would seem to belong to his third period, though certain characteristics of the Antigone may put us in mind of the second.[34]

Apart altogether from his glorious achievement in actual composition, Sophocles is highly important as an innovator in technique. The changes which he introduced are: (i) the number of actors was raised from two to three;[35] (ii) scene-painting was invented[35]; (iii) the plays of a tetralogy were, sometimes at any rate, no longer part of a great whole, but quite distinct in subject;[36] (iv) it is said[37] that he raised the number of the chorus from twelve to fifteen, was the first tragedian to use Phrygian music and to give his actors the bent staff and white shoe which they sometimes used.

The points named under (iv) are of small importance save the change in the number of choreutæ, but that is a detail which can scarcely be accepted, Æschylus during part of his career employed fifty choreutæ, and it is extremely improbable that the number sank as low as twelve, only to rise slightly again at once. The invention of scene-painting is clearly momentous; it became easy to fix the action at any spot desired, and a change of scene also became possible. Æschylus, of course, in his later years made use of this development. The other two points are vital.

Though the stage gained immensely by the introduction of a third actor, little perhaps need be said on the point. An examination of the early Æschylean plays, and even of the Choephorœ or Agamemnon, side by side with the Philoctetes or Œdipus Coloneus, will make the facts abundantly clear. In the crisis of Œdipus Tyrannus (for example) the presence of Jocasta,[38] while her husband hears the tidings brought by the Corinthian, does not merely add to the poignancy of the scene; it may almost be said to create it.

The last change, that of breaking up the tetralogy into four disconnected tragedies, is equally fundamental. The older poet was a man of simple ideas and gigantic grasp. His conceptions demanded the vast scope of a trilogy, and perhaps the most astonishing feature of his work is the fact that, while each drama is a splendid and self-intelligible whole, it gains its full import only from the significance of the complete organism. Sophocles realized that he possessed a narrower, if more subtle, genius, and moulded his technique to suit his powers. Each of his works, however spacious and statuesque it may seem beside Macbeth, Lear, or even Hippolytus, shows, as compared with Æschylus, a closeness of texture in characterization and a delicate stippling of language, which mark nothing less than a revolution.

Tradition tells that Euripides was born at Salamis on the very day of the great victory (480 B.C.); the Parian marble puts the date five years earlier. He was thus a dozen or more years younger than Sophocles. His father’s name was Mnesarchus; his mother Clito is ridiculed by Aristophanes as a petty green-grocer, but all other evidence suggests that they were well-to-do; Euripides was able to devote himself to drama, from which little financial reward could be expected, and to collect a library—a remarkable possession for those days. He lived almost entirely for his art, though he must, like other citizens, have seen military service. His public activities seem to have included nothing more extraordinary than a single “embassy” to Syracuse. Unlike Sophocles, he cared little for society save that of a few intimates, and wrote much in a cave on Salamis which he had fitted up as a study. The great philosopher Anaxagoras was his friend and teacher; several passages[39] in the extant plays point plainly to his influence. It was in Euripides’ house that Protagoras read for the first time his treatise on the gods which brought about the sophist’s expulsion from Athens. Socrates himself is traditionally regarded as the poet’s friend. Aulus Gellius[40] says that he began to write tragedy at the age of eighteen; but it was not till 455 B.C. (when he was perhaps thirty) that he “obtained a chorus”—that is, had his work accepted for performance. One of these pieces was the Peliades; he obtained only the third place. By the end of his life he had written nearly a hundred dramas, including satyric works, but obtained the first prize only four times: his fifth victory was won by the tetralogy which included the Bacchæ, performed after his death. His influence was far out of proportion to these scanty rewards.[41] On any given occasion he might be defeated by some talented mediocrity who hit the taste of the moment. When he offered the Medea itself he was overcome, not only by Sophocles, but by Euphorion; yet his vast powers were recognized by all Athens. Euripides was married—twice it is said—and had three sons. Late in his life he accepted an invitation from Archelaus, King of Macedonia; after living there a short time in high favour and writing his latest plays, he died in 406 B.C. He was buried in Macedonia and a cenotaph was erected to his memory in Attica.

Further light both on the career and works of Euripides has recently been provided by an interesting discovery. In 1912 Dr. Arthur S. Hunt published[42] extensive fragments of a life of the poet by Satyrus, from portions of a papyrus-roll found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt by Dr. Grenfell and Dr. Hunt. Satyrus lived in the third century before Christ: our MS. itself is dated by its discoverers “from the middle or latter part of the second century” after Christ. The most striking points are (i) Satyrus quotes the fragment of the Pirithous dealt with below,[43] attributing it, as was often done, to Euripides, and saying that the poet “has accurately embraced the whole cosmogony of Anaxagoras in three periods”;[44] (ii) there are new fragments, on the vain pursuit of wealth; (iii) the poet was prosecuted for impiety by the statesman Cleon; (iv) we read that Euripides wrote the proem for the Persæ composed by his friend the musician Timotheus; (v) Satyrus, in discussing peripeteia, mentions “ravishings, supposititious infants, and recognitions by means of rings and necklaces—for these, as you know, are the back-bone of the New Comedy, and were perfected by Euripides”.

A discussion of Euripides’ surviving work will be found in a separate chapter. Our business here is to indicate his position in the development of technique. Though he is for ever handling his material and the resources of the stage in an original and experimental manner, the definite changes which he introduced are few. That many of his dramas are not tragedies at all but tragicomedies, is a development of the first importance. Another fact of this kind is his musical innovations. The lyrics of his plays tend to become less important as literature and to subserve the music, in which he introduced fashions not employed before, such as the “mixed Lydian”; it is impossible to criticize some of his later odes without knowledge, which we do not possess, of the music which he composed for them and the manner in which he caused them to be rendered. Hence the loose syntax, the polysyllabic vagueness of expression, and the repeated words—features which irritated Aristophanes and many later students.

Another novelty is his use of the prologue. Since this is properly nothing but “that part of the play which precedes the first song of the whole chorus,”[45] prologues are of course found in Æschylus and Sophocles. The peculiarity of the Euripidean prologue is that it tends to be non-dramatic, a narrative enabling the spectator to understand at what point in a legend the action is to begin. It is from Euripides’ use of the prologue that the modern meaning of the word is derived.

Aristophanes in his Frogs makes a famous attack upon most[46] sides of Euripides’ art as contrasted with that of Æschylus. But it is often forgotten that, damned utterly as the younger tragedian is, Æschylus by no means escapes criticism. Many of the censures put into Euripides’ mouth are just and important; it seems likely that Aristophanes is practically quoting his victim’s conversation; the remark[47] about Æschylus that “he was obscure in his prologues,” is no mere rubbish attributed to a dullard. That Euripides did criticize his elder is a fact. The Supplices[48] contains a severe remark on the catalogue of chieftains in the Septem; the elaborate sarcasm directed in the Electra[49] against the Recognition-scene of the Choephorœ is even more startling. Besides this, Aristophanes seems to quote remarks of Euripides on himself and his work: “When I first took over the art from you, I found it swollen with braggadocio and tiresome words; so the first thing I did was to train down its fat and reduce its weight”.[50] His comment on dialogue is no less pertinent: “With you Niobe and Achilles never said a word, but I left no personage idle; women, slaves, and hags all spoke”.[51] Finally, there is the perfect description of his own realism[52]: οἰκεῖα πράγματ’ εἰσάγων, οἷς χρώμεθ’, οἷς σύνεσμεν, “I introduced life as we live it, the things of our everyday experience”. Such sentences as these reflect unmistakably the conversation of a playwright who was jealous for the dignity and the progress of his art.

Though during his own time Euripides was hardly equal in repute to his two companions, scarcely had his Macedonian grave closed over him than his popularity began to overshadow theirs. Æschylus became a dim antique giant; Sophocles, though always admired, was too definitely Attic and Periclean to retain all his prestige in the Hellenistic world. It was the more cosmopolitan poet who won posthumous applause from one end of the civilized earth to the other. From 400 B.C. to the downfall of the ancient world he was unquestionably better known and admired than any other dramatist. This is shown by the much larger collection of his work which has survived, by the imitation of later playwrights, and by innumerable passages of citation, praise, and comment in writers of every kind. He shared with Homer, Vergil, and Horace the equivocal distinction of becoming a schoolbook even in ancient times. Nine of our nineteen plays were selected for this purpose: Alcestis, Andromache, Hecuba, Hippolytus, Medea, Orestes, Phœnissæ, Rhesus, and Troades. It is not easy to see what principle of selection prompted the educationists of the day: Andromache and Hippolytus do not strike a modern reader as specially “suitable”. Owing to their use in schools they were annotated; these scholia are still extant and are often of great value. In the Byzantine age the number was reduced to three: Hecuba, Orestes, Phœnissæ.

Among the numerous lesser tragedians of the fifth century five hold a distinguished place: Neophron of Sicyon, Aristarchus of Tegea, Ion of Chios, Achæus of Eretria, Agathon of Athens.

Neophron is an enigmatic figure. It would seem that he was an important forerunner of Euripides. Not only do we learn that he wrote one hundred and twenty tragedies and that he was the first to bring upon the stage “pædagogi” and the examination of slaves under torture; it is said also that his Medea was the original of Euripides’ tragedy so-named.[53] “Pædagogi” or elderly male attendants of children are familiar in Euripides, and the “questioning” of slaves is shown (though not to the audience) in the Ion.[54] As for the third point, we have three fragments which clearly recall the extant play—a few lines in which Ægeus requests Medea to explain the oracle, a few more in which she tells Jason how he shall die, and the celebrated passage which reads like a shorter version of her great soliloquy when deciding to slay her children. There is the same anguish, the same vacillation, the same address to her “passion” (θυμός). Such a writer is plainly epoch-making: he adds a new feature to tragedy in the life-time of Sophocles. The realism of everyday life and the pangs of conscience battling with temptation—these we are wont to call Euripidean. But some have denied the very existence of Neophron as a dramatist: the fragments are fourth-century forgeries, or Euripides brought out a first edition[55] of his play under Neophron’s name. Against these views is the great authority of Aristotle,[56] who, however, may have been deceived by the name “Neophron” in official records. An argument natural to modern students, that a poet of Euripides’ calibre would not have borrowed and worked up another’s play, is of doubtful strength. Æschylus, as we have seen, probably acted so towards Phrynichus. The best view is probably that of antiquity. We may note that Sicyon is close to Corinth, and that a legend domestic to the latter city might naturally find its first treatment in a playwright of Sicyon.

Aristarchus of Tegea, whose début is to be dated about 453 B.C., is said by Suidas to have lived for over a hundred years, to have written seventy tragedies, two of which won the first prize, and one of which was called Asclepius (a thank-offering for the poet’s recovery from an illness), and to have “initiated the present length of plays”.[57] This latter point sounds important, but it is difficult to understand precisely what Suidas means. For though the average Sophoclean or Euripidean tragedy is longer than the Æschylean, Aristarchus began work later than Sophocles and no earlier than Euripides. It has been thought that Suidas refers to the length of dramas in post-Euripidean times, but of these we have perhaps no examples.[58] Aristarchus’ reputation was slight but enduring. Ennius two and a half centuries later translated his Achilles into Latin; the same work is quoted in the prologue of Plautus’ Pœnulus. A phrase[59] from another play became proverbial.

A more distinguished but probably less important writer was Ion of Chios, son of Orthomenes, who lived between 484 and 421 B.C. A highly accomplished man of ample means, he travelled rather widely. In Athens he must have spent considerable time, for he was intimate with Cimon and his circle, and produced plays the number of which is by one authority put at forty. Besides tragedy and satyric drama, he wrote comedies, dithyrambs, hymns, pæans, elegies, epigrams, and scolia. He was, moreover, distinguished in prose writing: we hear of a book on the Founding of Chios, of a philosophic work, and of certain memoirs.[60] This latter work must be a real loss to us, if we may judge from its fragments. In the fifth century B.C. no one but a facile Ionian would have thought it worth while to record mere gossip even about the great; for us there is great charm in an anecdote like that of the literary discussion between Sophocles and the schoolmaster, or the exclamation of Æschylus at the Isthmian Games.[61] Ion would seem to have been less a great poet than a delightful belletrist; the quality is well shown in his remark[62] that life, like a tragic tetralogy, should have a satyric element. One year he obtained a sensational success by winning the first prize both for tragedy and for a dithyramb; to commemorate this he presented to each Athenian citizen a cask of Chian wine. He died before 421, the date of Aristophanes’ Peace,[63] wherein he is spoken of as transformed into a star, in allusion to a charming lyric passage of his:—

ἀώϊον ἀεροφοίταν

ἀστέρα μείναμεν ἀελίου λευκοπτέρυγα πρόδρομον.

“We awaited the star that wanders through the dawn-lit sky, pale-winged courier of the sun.”

His tragedies,[64] though they do not appear to have had much effect on the progress of technique or on public opinion, were popular. Aristophanes, for instance, nearly twenty years after his death, quotes a phrase from his Sentinels[65] as proverbial, and centuries later the author of the treatise On the Sublime[66] wrote his celebrated verdict: “In lyric poetry would you prefer to be Bacchylides rather than Pindar? And in tragedy to be Ion of Chios rather than—Sophocles? It is true that Bacchylides and Ion are faultless and entirely elegant writers of the polished school, while Pindar and Sophocles, although at times they burn everything before them as it were in their swift career, are often extinguished unaccountably and fail most lamentably. But would anyone in his senses regard all the compositions of Ion put together as an equivalent for the single play of the Œdipus?”

Achæus of Eretria was born in 484 B.C., and exhibited his first play at Athens in 447. He won only one first prize though we hear that he composed over forty plays, nearly half of which are known by name. That he was second only to Æschylus in satyric drama was the opinion held by that delightful philosopher Menedemus[67] the minor Socratic, the seat of whose school was Eretria itself, Achæus’ birthplace.

It has been suggested that the apparent disproportion of satyric plays written by Achæus is to be accounted for by his having written them for other poets.[68] He is once copied by Euripides and parodied twice by Aristophanes.[69] Athenæus makes an interesting comment on his style: “Achæus of Eretria, though an elegant poet in the structure of his plots, occasionally blackens his phrasing and produces many cryptic expressions”.[70] The instance which he gives is significant:—

λιθάργυρος δ’

ὄλπη παρηωρεῖτο χρίσματος πλέα

τὸν Σπαρτιάτην γραπτὸν ἐν διπλῷ ξύλῳ

κύρβιν,

“the cruse of alloyed silver, filled with ointment, swung beside the Spartan tablet, double wood inscribed”. That is, “he carried an oil-flask and a Spartan general’s bâton”. Aiming at dignified originality of diction Achæus has merely fallen into queerness. On the other side, when he seeks vigorous realism he becomes quaintly prosaic. In the Philoctetes, for instance, Agamemnon utters the war-cry ἐλελελεῦ in the middle of an iambic line.

A far more noteworthy dramatist was Agathon the Athenian, who seems to have impressed his contemporaries, and even the exacting Aristotle, as coming next in merit to the three masters. Born about 446 B.C., he won his first victory in 416 and retired to the Court of the Macedonian prince Archelaus some time before the death of Euripides (406). From contemporary evidence we gather that he was popular as a writer and as a social figure, handsome, and given to voluptuous living.

Three striking innovations are credited to him:—

(i) He produced at least one play of which both the plot and the characters were invented by himself.[71] The name of this “attractive” drama is uncertain: it may have been The Flower (Anthos) or Antheus. Agathon, here as elsewhere, shows himself a follower of Euripides. The master had employed recognized myths as a framework for a thoroughly “modern” treatment of ordinary human interests; his disciple finally throws aside the convention of antiquity.

(ii) Another post-Euripidean feature is the use of musical interludes. Aristotle tells us: “As for the later poets, their choral songs pertain as little to the subject of the piece as to that of any other tragedy. They are therefore sung as mere interludes—a practice first begun by Agathon.”[72] Our poet then is once more found completing a process which his friend had carried far. Sophocles had diminished the length and dramatic importance of the lyrics, but with him they were still entirely relevant. Euripides shows a strong tendency to write his odes as separable songs, but complete irrelevance is hardly found. Plays such as Agathon’s could obviously be performed, if necessary, without the trouble and expense of a chorus, which in process of time altogether disappeared. His interludes served, it seems, more as divisions between “acts” than as an integral part of the play. In this connexion should be mentioned his innovation in the accompaniment—the use of “chromatic” or coloured style.[73] His florid music is laughed at by Aristophanes as “ants’ bye-paths”.[74]

(iii) Occasionally he took a great extent of legend as the topic of a single drama, and it seems likely[75] that he composed a Fall of Troy, taking the whole epic subject instead of an episode. Agathon is trying yet another experiment—it was necessary for a writer of his powers to vary in some way from Euripides, but this attempt was unsatisfactory.[76]

In the Thesmophoriazusæ Aristophanes pays Agathon the honour of elaborate parody. Euripides comes to beg his friend to plead for him before an assembly of Athenian women, and the scene in which Agathon amid much pomp explains the principles of his art, contains definite and valuable criticism under the usual guise of burlesque; that Aristophanes valued him is shown by the affectionate pun on his name which he introduces into the Frogs (v. 84):—

ἀγαθὸς ποιητὴς καὶ ποθεινὸς τοῖς φίλοις,

“a good poet, sorely missed by his friends”. Plato lays the scene of his Symposium in the house of Agathon, who is celebrating his first tragic victory; the poet is depicted as a charming host, and, when the conversation turns to a series of panegyrics upon the god of Love, offers a contribution to which we shall return.

From these sources we learn as usual little about the poet’s dramatic skill, much as to his literary style. But under the first head falls a vital remark of Aristotle: “in his reversals of the action (i.e. the peripeteia), however, he shows a marvellous skill in the effort to hit the popular taste—to produce a tragic effect that satisfies the moral sense. This effect is produced when the clever rogue, like Sisyphus, is outwitted, or the brave villain defeated. Such an event is, moreover, probable in Agathon’s sense of the word: ‘it is probable,’ he says, ‘that many things should happen contrary to probability’.”[77] Agathon belongs to the class of playwrights who win popularity by bringing down to the customary theatrical level the methods and ideas of a genius who is himself too undiluted and strange for his contemporaries. Agathon’s relation to Euripides resembles that of (let us say) Mr. St. John Hankin, in his later work, to Ibsen. Of his literary style much the same may be said. He loves to moralize on chance and probability and the queer twists of human nature, with Euripides’ knack of neatness but without his insight. Such things as

μόνου γὰρ αὐτοῦ καὶ θεὸς στερίσκεται,

ἀγένητα ποιεῖν ἅσσ’ ἂν ᾖ πεπραγμένα

“this alone is beyond the power even of God, to make undone that which has been done,” and even the celebrated τέχνη τύχην ἔστερξε καὶ τύχη τέχνην, “skill loves luck, and luck skill,” give the measure of his power over epigram. His easy way of expressing simple ideas with admirable neatness may remind us of a much greater dramatist—Terence, or, in later times, of Marivaux.[78]

Plato tells us that he was a pupil both of Prodicus[79] and of Gorgias,[80] the renowned sophists, and we may trace their teaching in the fragments and in the remarkable speech which the greatest stylist of all time puts into his mouth in the Symposium—the rhymes, antitheses, quibbles, and verbal trickiness of argument. The parody, both brilliant and careful, which Aristophanes presents at the opening of his Thesmophoriazusæ is directed chiefly perhaps against his music, whereof we have no trace. The blunt auditor, Mnesilochus, describes it as lascivious.[81] The words set to it read like a feeble copy of Euripides—fluent, copious, nerveless, in spite of the “lathe,” the “glue,” the “melting-pot,” and the “moulds”[82] over which his satirist makes merry.

Agathon, then, marks unmistakably the beginning of decadence. The three masters had exhausted the possibilities of the art open to that age. A new impulse from without or the social emancipation of women might have opened new paths of achievement. But no great external influence was to come till Alexander, and then the result for Greece itself was loss of independence and vigour. And the little that could be done with women still in the harem or the slave-market was left to be performed by Menander and his fellow-comedians.[83] Agathon made a valiant effort to carry tragedy into new channels, but lacked the genius to leave more than clever experiments.

On a lower plane of achievement stands Critias, the famous leader of the “Thirty Tyrants”. Two tragedies from his pen are known to us, Pirithous[84] and Sisyphus, both at one time attributed to Euripides; but he is too doctrinaire, too deficient in brilliant idiomatic ease, for such a mistake to endure. The Pirithous deals with Heracles’ descent into Hades to rescue Theseus and to demand of Pluto Persephone’s hand for Pirithous. Of this astounding story we find little trace in the fragments, which are mostly quasi-philosophical dicta. For instance:—

A temper sound more stable is than law;

The one no politician’s eloquence

Can warp, but law by tricks of cunning words

Full often is corrupted and unhinged.

In strong contrast to these prosaic lines is Critias’ superb apostrophe to the Creator, which may be paraphrased thus:—

From all time, O Lord, is thy being; neither is there any that saith, This is my son.

All that is created, lo, thou hast woven the firmament about it; the heavens revolve, and all that is therein spinneth like a wheel.

Thou hast girded thyself with light; the gloom of dusk is about thee, even as a garment of netted fire.

Stars without number dance around thee; they cease not, they move in a measure through thy high places.

From the same hymn probably comes the majestic passage which tells of “unwearied Time that in full flood ever begets himself, and the Great Bear and the Less....”

In apparent contrast to this tone is the remarkable passage, of forty-two lines, from the Sisyphus. It is a purely rationalistic account of religion. First human life was utterly brutish: there were no rewards for righteousness, no punishment of evil-doers. Then law was set up, that justice might be sovereign; but this device only added furtiveness to sin. Finally, “some man of shrewdness and wisdom ... introduced religion” (or “the conception of God,” τὸ θεῖον), so that even in secret the wicked might be restrained by fear. The contradiction between these two plays is illusory: Critias combines with disbelief in the personal Greek gods belief in an impersonal First Cause. It is too often forgotten that among the “Thirty Tyrants” were men of strong religious principles. The democratic writers of Athens loved to depict them as mercenary butchers, but it is plain from the casual testimony of Lysias[85] that they looked upon themselves as moral reformers. “They said that it was their business to purge the city of wicked men, and turn the rest of the citizens to righteousness and self-restraint.” Such passages read like quotations from men who would inaugurate a “rule of the saints,” and if their severities surpassed those of the English Puritans, they were themselves outdone by the cruelty which sternly moral leaders of the French Revolution not only condoned but initiated. Critias was the Athenian Robespierre. But the one revolution was the reverse of the other. The régime of the Thirty was a last violent effort of the Athenian oligarchs to stem the tide of ochlocracy, to induce some self-discipline into the freedom of Athens. They failed, and Critias was justified on the field of Chæronea.

The most successful tragic playwright of the fourth century was Astydamas, whose history furnishes good evidence that after the disappearance of Euripides and Sophocles the Greek genius was incapable of carrying tragedy into new developments. While prose could boast such names as Plato and Demosthenes, the tragic art found no greater exponent than this Astydamas, of whose numerous plays nothing is left save nine odd lines. There were, moreover, two Astydamantes, father and son, whose works (scarcely known save by name) it is difficult to distinguish. But it seems that it was the son whose popularity was so great as to win him fifteen first prizes and an honour before unknown. His Parthenopæus won such applause in 340 B.C. that the Athenians set up a brazen statue of the playwright in the theatre; it was not till ten years later that the orator Lycurgus persuaded them to accord a like honour to the three Masters. We learn from Aristotle[86] that Astydamas altered the story of Alcmæon, causing him to slay his mother in ignorance; and Plutarch[87] alludes to his Hector as one of the greatest plays. He was nothing more than a capable writer who caught the taste of his time, and probably owed much of his popularity to the excellence of his actors.

Only one fact is known about Polyidus “the sophist,” but that is sufficiently impressive. Aristotle twice[88] takes the Recognition-scene in his Iphigenia as an example, and in the second instance actually compares the work of Polyidus with one of Euripides’ most wonderful successes—the Recognition-scene in the Iphigenia in Tauris. It appears that as Orestes was led away to slaughter he exclaimed: “Ah! So I was fated, like my sister, to be sacrificed.” This catches the attention of Iphigenia and saves his life. Polyidus here undoubtedly executed a brilliant coup de théâtre.

During the fourth century many tragedians wrote not for public performance but for readers. Of these ἀναγνωστικοί[89] the most celebrated was Chæremon, of whom sufficient fragments and notices survive to give a distinct literary portrait. Comic poets ridiculed his preciosity: he called water “river’s body,” ivy “the year’s child,” and loved word-play: πρὶν γὰρ φρονεῖν εὖ καταφρονεῖν ἐπίστασαι.[90] But though a sophisticated attention to style led him into such frigid mannerisms, he can express ideas with a brief Euripidean cogency: perhaps nothing outside the work of the great masters was more often quoted in antiquity than his dictum “Human life is luck, not discretion”—τύχη τὰ θνητῶν πράγματ’, οὐκ εὐβουλία.

The only technical peculiarity attributed to him is the play Centaur, if play it was. Athenæus calls it a “drama in many metres,”[91] while Aristotle[92] uses the word “rhapsody,” implying epic quality. It may be that the epic or narrative manner was used side by side with the dramatic in the manner of Bunyan. Here is another proof that by the time of Euripides tragedy had really attained its full development. Attempts at new departures in technique are all abortive after his day.

A delightful point which emerges again and again is Chæremon’s passion for flowers. From Thyestes come two phrases—“the sheen of roses mingled with silver lilies,” and “strewing around the children of flowering spring”—which indicate, as do many others, Chæremon’s love of colour and sensuous loveliness. It was his desire to express all the details of what pleased his eye that led him into preciosity—a laboured embroidery which recalls Keats’ less happy efforts. But he can go beyond mere mannerism. A splendid fragment of his Œneus shows Chæremon at his best: it describes the half-nude beauty of girls sleeping in the moonlight. One can hardly believe that Chæremon belonged to the fourth century and was studied by Aristotle. In this passage, despite its voluptuous dilettantism, there is a sense of physical beauty, above all of colour and sensuous detail, which was unknown since Pindar, and is not to be found again, even in Theocritus, till we come to the Greek novelists. In one marvellous sentence, too, he passes beyond mere prettiness to poetry, expressing with perfect mastery the truth that the sight of beauty is the surest incentive to chastity: κἀξεπεσφραγίζετο ὥρας γελώσης χωρὶς ἐλπίδων ἔρως:—

Love, his passion quelled by awe,

Printed his smiling soul on all he saw.

It is the idea which Meredith has voiced so magically in Love in the Valley:—

Love that so desires would fain keep her changeless,

Fain would fling the net, and fain have her free.

That Greek literature has progressed far towards the self-conscious Alexandrian search for charm can nevertheless be observed if we compare this passage from Chæremon with the analogous description in Euripides’ Bacchæ[93] (which no doubt suggested it). There the same general impression, and far more “atmosphere,” is given with no voluptuous details: θαῦμ’ ἰδεῖν εὐκοσμίας—“a marvel of grace for the eye to behold”—is his nearest approach to Chæremon’s elaboration. If, as has been well said,[94] one may compare the three Masters to Giotto, Raffaelle, and Correggio respectively, then Chæremon finds his parallel among the French painters; he reminds one not so much of the handsome sensuality of Boucher as of that more seductive simplesse in which Greuze excelled.

A curious figure in this history is Dionysius the Elder, tyrant of Syracuse from 405-367 B.C. Like Frederick the Great of Prussia, not satisfied with political and military glory, he aspired to literary triumphs. With a pathetic hero-worship he purchased and treasured the desk of Æschylus, and similar objects which had belonged to Euripides, hoping (says Lucian[95]) to gain inspiration from them. The prince frequently tried his fortune at the dramatic contests in Athens, but for long without success, and naturally became a butt of the Attic wits, who particularly relished his moral aphorisms (such as “tyranny is the mother of injustice”!); Eubulus devoted a whole comedy to his tragic confrère. In 367 B.C. he heard with joy that at last the first prize had fallen to him at the Lenæa for Hector’s Ransom; gossip said that his death in the same year was due to the paroxysms of gratified vanity. Little is known about the contents of his dramas, but we hear that one play was an attack upon the philosopher Plato. In other works, too, he appears to have discussed his personal interests. Lucian preserves the bald verse:—

Doris, Dionysius’ spouse, has passed away,

and the astonishing remark:—

Alas! alas! a useful wife I’ve lost.

But one may be misjudging him. Perhaps by “useful” (χρησίμην) he meant “good” (χρηστήν); Dionysius had a curious fad for using words, not in their accepted sense, but according to real or fancied etymology.[96]

Ancient critics set great store by Carcinus, the most distinguished of a family long connected with the theatre. One hundred and sixty plays are attributed to him, and eleven victories. He spent some time at the court of the younger Dionysius, the Syracusan tyrant, and his longest fragment deals with the Sicilian worship of Demeter and Persephone. We possess certain interesting facts about his plots. Aristotle[97] as an instance of the first type of Recognition—that by signs—mentions among those which are congenital “the stars introduced by Carcinus in his Thyestes” (evidently birthmarks). More striking is a later paragraph:[98] “In constructing the plot and working it out with the proper diction, the poet should place the scene, as far as possible, before his eyes.... The need of such a rule is shown by the fault found in Carcinus. Amphiaraus was on his way from the temple. This fact escaped the observation of one who did not see the situation. On the stage, however, the piece failed, the audience being offended at the oversight.” This shows incidentally how little assistance an ancient dramatist obtained from that now vital collaborator, the rehearsal. In the Medea[99] of Carcinus the heroine, unlike the Euripidean, did not slay her children but sent them away. Their disappearance caused the Corinthians to accuse her of their murder, and she defended herself by an ingenious piece of rhetorical logic: “Suppose that I had killed them. Then it would have been a blunder not to slay their father Jason also. This you know I have not done. Hence I have not murdered my children either.” Just as Carcinus there smoothed away what was felt to be too dreadful in Euripides, so in Œdipus he appears[100] to have dealt with the improbabilities which cling to Œdipus Tyrannus. He excelled, moreover, in the portrayal of passion: Cercyon, struggling with horrified grief in Carcinus’ Alope, is cited by Aristotle.[101] The Ærope too had sensational success. That bloodthirsty savage Alexander, tyrant of Pheræ, was so moved by the emotion wherewith the actor Theodorus performed his part, that he burst into tears.[102]

Two points in his actual fragments strike a modern reader. The first is a curious flatness of style noticeable in the one fairly long passage; every word seems to be a second-best. The opening lines will be sufficient:—

λέγουσι Δήμητρός ποτ’ ἄρρητον κόρην

Πλούτωνα κρυφίοις ἁρπάσαι βουλεύμασι,

δῦναί τε γαίας εἰς μελαμφαεῖς μυχούς.

πόθῳ δὲ μητέρ’ ἠφανισμένης κόρης

μαστῆρ’ ἐπελθεῖν πᾶσαν ἐν κύκλῳ χθόνα.

To turn from this dingy verbiage to his amazing brilliance in epigram is like passing from an auctioneer’s showroom into a lighthouse. (The difference, we note, is between narrative and “rhetoric”.) Such a sentence as οὐδεὶς ἔπαινον ἡδοναῖς ἐκτήσατο (“no man ever won praise by his pleasures”) positively bewilders by its glitter. It is perhaps not absolutely perfect: its miraculous ease might allow a careless reader to pass it by; but that is a defect which Carcinus shares with most masters of epigram, notably with Terence and Congreve. More substantial is the wit of this fragment:—

χαίρω σ’ ὁρῶν φθονοῦντα, τοῦτ’ εἰδώς, ὅτι

ἓν δρᾷ μόνον δίκαιον ὧν ποιεῖ φθόνος·

λυπεῖ γὰρ αὐτόχρημα τοὺς κεκτημένους.

“I rejoice to see that you harbour spite, for I know that of all its effects there is one that is just—it straightway stings those who cherish it.” One notices the exquisite skill which has inserted the second line, serving admirably to prepare for and throw into relief the vigorous third verse.

Theodectes of Phaselis enjoyed a brilliant career. During his forty-one years he was a pupil of Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle, obtained great distinction as an orator (Cicero[103] praises him), produced fifty plays, and obtained the first prize at eight of the thirteen contests in which he competed. Alexander the Great decked his statue with garlands in memory of the days when they had studied together under Aristotle. That philosopher quotes him several times, and in particular pays Theodectes the high honour of coupling him with Sophocles; the examples which he gives[104] of peripeteia are the Œdipus Tyrannus and the Lynceus of Theodectes. The same drama is used[105] to exemplify another vital point, the difference between Complication and Dénouement.

He was doubtless a brilliantly able man and a popular dramatist with a notable talent for concocting plots. But all that we can now see in his remains is a feeble copy of Euripides, though he was, to be sure, audacious enough to place Philoctetes’ wound in the hand instead of the foot—for the sake of gracefulness, one may imagine. For the rest, we possess a curious speech made by some one ignorant of letters, who describes[106] as a picture the name “Theseus”—this idea is taken bodily from Euripides—and sundry sententious remarks, one of which surely deserves immortality as reaching the limit of pompous common-place:—

Widely through Greece hath this tradition spread

O aged man, and ancient is the saw:

The hap of mortals is uncertain ever.

Mention should be made of Diogenes and Crates the philosophers, who wrote plays not for production, but for the study, as propagandist pamphlets. They may none the less have been excellent plays, like the Justice of Mr. Galsworthy. Very little remains on which an opinion can be founded. One vigorous line of Diogenes catches the attention: “I would rather have a drop of luck than a barrel of brains”.[107]

A more remarkable dramatist was Moschion, whose precise importance it is hard to estimate, though he is deeply interesting to the historian of tragedy. For on the one hand, he was probably not popular—nothing is known of his life,[108] and Stobæus is practically the only writer who quotes him. On the other hand, he is the one Greek poet known to have practised definitely the historical type of drama. Moschion is of course not alone in selecting actual events for his theme. Long before his day Phrynichus had produced his Phœnissæ and The Capture of Miletus, Æschylus his Persæ; and his contemporary Theodectes composed a tragedy Mausolus in glorification of the deceased king of Caria. But all four were pièces d’occasion. Moschion alone practised genuine historical drama: he went according to custom into the past for his material, but chose great events of real history, not legend.[109] His Themistocles dealt with the battle of Salamis; we possess one brief remnant thereof, in which (as it seems) a messenger compares the victory of the small Greek force to the devastation wrought by a small axe in a great pine-forest. The Men of Pheræ appears[110] to have depicted the brutality of Alexander, prince of Pheræ, who refused burial to Polyphron.

These “burial-passages” include Moschion’s most remarkable fragment, a fine description in thirty-three lines describing the rise of civilization. The versification is undesirably smooth—throughout there is not a single resolved foot. Like a circumspect rationalist, Moschion offers three alternative reasons, favouring none, for the progress made by man: some great teacher such as Prometheus, the Law of Nature (ἀνάγκη), the long slow experience (τριβή) of the whole race. His style here is vigorous but uneven; after dignified lines which somewhat recall Æschylus we find a sudden drop to bald prose: ὁ δ’ ἀσθενὴς ἦν τῶν ἀμεινόνων βορά:[111] “the weak were the food of the strong”.

It is convenient to mention here a remarkable satyric drama, produced about 324 B.C., the Agen,[112] of which seventeen consecutive lines survive. This play was produced during the Dionysiac festival in the camp of Alexander on the banks of the Hydaspes or Jhelum, in the Punjaub. Its subject was the escapades of Harpalus, who had revolted from Alexander and fled to Athens. The author is said[113] to have been either Python of Catana or Byzantium, or the Great Alexander himself. No doubt it was an elaborate “squib” full of racy topical allusions. Were it not that Athenæus calls it a “satyric playlet”[114] we might take the fragment as part of a comedy. But about this time satyric drama tended to become a form of personal attack—a dramatic “satire”. Thus one Mimnermus, whose date is unknown, wrote a play against doctors[115]; Lycophron and Sositheus, both members of the Alexandrian “Pleiad,” attacked individual philosophers, the former writing a Menedemus which satirized the gluttony and drunkenness of the amiable founder of the Eretrian school, the latter ridiculing the disciples whom the “folly of Cleanthes” drove like cattle—an insult which the audience resented and damned the play.[116]

The third century saw a great efflorescence of theatrical activity in Alexandria. Under Ptolemy II (285-247 B.C.), that city became the centre of world-culture as it already was of commerce. All artistic forms were protected and rewarded with imperial liberality. The great library became one of the wonders of the world, and the Dionysiac festivals were performed with sedulous magnificence. Among the many writers of tragedy seven were looked on as forming a class by themselves—the famous Pleiad (“The Constellation of Seven”). Only five names of these are certain—Philiscus, Homerus, Alexander, Lycophron, and Sositheus; for the other two “chairs” various names are found in our authorities: Sosiphanes, Dionysiades, Æantides, Euphronius. Nor can we be sure that all these men worked at Alexandria.[117] That the splendour of the city and Ptolemy’s magnificent patronage should have drawn the leading men of art, letters, and science to the world’s centre, is a natural assumption and indeed the fact: Theocritus the idyllist, Euclid the geometer, Callimachus the poet and scholar, certainly lived there. Of the Pleiad, only three are known to have worked in Alexandria: Lycophron, to whom Ptolemy entrusted that section of the royal library which embraced Comedy, Alexander, who superintended Tragedy, and Philiscus the priest of Dionysus. Homerus may have passed all his career in Byzantium, which later possessed a statue of him, and Sositheus was apparently active at Athens.

Lycophron’s Menedemus has already been mentioned. His fame now rests upon the extant poem Alexandra, in high repute both in ancient and in modern times for its obscurity. But Sositheus is the most interesting of the galaxy. We may still read twenty-one lines from his satyric drama Daphnis or Lityerses, describing with grim vigour the ghoulish harvester Lityerses who made his visitors reap with him, finally beheading them and binding up the corpses in sheaves. Sositheus made his mark, indeed, less in tragedy than in satyric writing: he turned from the tendency of his day which made this genre a form of satire, and went back to the antique manner. Sosiphanes, finally, deserves mention for a remarkable fragment:—

ὦ δυστυχεῖς μὲν πολλά, παῦρα δ’ ὄλβιοι

βροτοί, τί σεμνύνεσθε ταῖς ἐξουσίαις,

ἃς ἕν τ’ ἔδωκε φέγγος ἕν τ’ ἀφείλετο;

ἢν δ’ εὐτυχῆτε, μηδὲν ὄντες εὐθέως

ἴσ’ οὐρανῷ φρονεῖτε, τὸν δὲ κύριον

Αἵδην παρεστῶτ’ οὐχ ὁρᾶτε πλησίον.

“O mortal men, whose misery is so manifold, whose joys so few, why plume yourselves on power which one day gives and one day destroys? If ye find prosperity, straightway, though ye are naught, your pride rises high as heaven, and ye see not your master death at your elbow”—a curiously close parallel with the celebrated outburst in Measure for Measure. We observe the Euripidean versification, though Sosiphanes “flourished” two centuries[118] after the master’s birth, and though between the two, in men like Moschion, Carcinus, and Chæremon, we find distinct flatness of versification. The fourth-century poets, however second-rate, were still working with originality of style: Sosiphanes belongs to an age which has begun not so much to respect as to worship the great models. He sets himself to copy Euripides, and his iambics are naturally “better” than Moschion’s, as are those written by numerous able scholars of our own day.

After the era of the Pleiad, Greek tragedy for us to all intents and purposes comes to an end. New dramas seem to have been produced down to the time of Hadrian, who died in A.D. 138, and theatrical entertainments were immensely popular throughout later antiquity, as vase-paintings show, besides countless allusions in literature. But our fragments are exceedingly meagre. One tragedy has been preserved by its subject—the famous Christus Patiens (Χριστὸς Πάσχων), which portrayed the Passion. It is the longest and the worst of all Greek plays, and consists largely of a repellent cento—snippets from Euripides pieced together and eked out by bad iambics of the author’s own. The result is traditionally, but wrongly, attributed to Gregory of Nazianzus (born probably in A.D. 330). Its only value is that it is often useful in determining the text of Euripides. It would be useless to enumerate all the poetasters of these later centuries whose names are recorded.

In this chapter we have constantly referred to the Poetic of Aristotle, and it will be well at this point to summarize his view of the nature, parts, and aim of tragedy. Before doing so, however, we must be clear upon two points: the standpoint of his criticism and the value of his evidence. It was long the habit to take this work as a kind of Bible of poetical criticism, to accept with blind devotion any statements made therein, or even alleged[119] to be made therein, as constituting rules for all playwrights for ever. Now, as to the former point, the nature of his criticism, it is simply to explain how good tragedies were as a fact written. He takes the work of contemporary and earlier playwrights, and in the light of this, together with his own strong common sense, æsthetic sensibility, and private temperament, tells how he himself (for example) would write a tragedy. On the one hand, could he have read Macbeth then, he would have condemned it; on the other, could he read it now as a modern man, he would approve it. As to the second point, the value of his evidence, we must distinguish carefully between the facts which he reports and his comment thereon. The latter we should study with the respect due to his vast merits; but he is not infallible. When, for instance, he writes that “even a woman may be good, and also a slave; though the woman may be said to be an inferior being, and the slave quite worthless,”[120] and blames Euripides because “Iphigenia the suppliant in no way resembles her later self,”[121] we shall regard him less as helping us than as dating himself. But as to the objective facts which he records he must be looked on as for us infallible.[122] He lived in or close to the periods of which he writes; he commanded a vast array of documents now lost to us; he was strongly desirous of ascertaining the facts; his temperament and method were keenly scientific, his industry prodigious. We may, and should, discuss his opinions; his facts we cannot dispute. The reader will be able to appreciate for himself the statement which follows.

Aristotle’s definition of tragedy runs thus: “Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions”.[123] Adequate discussion of this celebrated passage is here impossible; only two points can be made. Firstly, the definition plainly applies to Greek Tragedy alone and as understood by Aristotle: we observe the omission of what seems to us vital—the fact that tragedy depicts the collision of opposing principles as conveyed by the collision of personalities—and the insertion of Greek peculiarities since, as he goes on to explain, by “language embellished” he means language which includes song. Secondly, the famous dictum concerning “purgation” (catharsis) is now generally understood as meaning, not “purification” or “edification” of our pity and fear, but as a medical metaphor signifying that these emotions are purged out of our spirit.

Further light on the nature of tragedy he gives by comparing it with three other classes of literature. “Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.”[124] In another place he contrasts tragedy with history: “It is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen—what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose.... The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.”[125] Our imperfect text of the treatise ends with a more elaborate comparison between Tragedy and Epic, wherein Aristotle combats the contemporary view[126] that “epic poetry is addressed to a cultivated audience, who do not need gesture; Tragedy to an inferior public. Being then unrefined, it is evidently the lower of the two.” His own verdict is that, since tragedy has all the epic elements, adds to these music and scenic effects, shows vividness in reading as well as in representation, attains its end within narrower limits, and shows greater unity of effect, it is the higher art.[127]

In various portions of the Poetic he gives us the features of Tragedy, following three independent lines of analysis:—

§ I. On the æsthetic line he discusses the elements of a tragedy: plot, character, thought, diction, scenery, and song. Of the last three he has little to say. But on one of them he makes an interesting remark. “Third in order is Thought—that is, the faculty of saying what is possible and pertinent in given circumstances.... The older poets made their characters speak the language of civic life; the poets of our time, the language of the rhetoricians.”[128] This prophesies from afar of Seneca and his like. As for character, it must be good, appropriate, true to life, and consistent.

Concerning Plot, which he rightly calls “the soul of a tragedy,”[129] Aristotle is of course far more copious. The salient points alone can be set down here:—

(a) “The proper magnitude is comprised within such limits, that the sequence of events, according to the law of probability or necessity, will admit of a change from bad fortune to good, or from good fortune to bad.”[130]

(b) “The plot ... must imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts being such that if anyone of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed.”[131] A tragedy must be an organism. It therefore follows that “of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst ... in which the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence”.[132] He is recommending the “Unity of Action”.

(c) “Plots are either Simple or Complex.... An action ... I call Simple, when the change of fortune takes place without Reversal (or Recoil) of the Action and without Recognition. A Complex Action is one in which the change is accompanied by such Reversal, or by Recognition, or by both.”[133] Reversal we shall meet again. By Recognition Aristotle means not merely such Recognition-scenes as we find in the crisis of the Iphigenia in Tauris (though such are the best) but “a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune”.[134]

(d) “Two parts, then, of the plot—Reversal and Recognition—turn upon surprises. A third part is the Tragic Incident. The Tragic Incident is a distinctive or painful action, such as death on the stage, bodily agony, wounds, and the like.”[135] In the words “death on the stage”—or “before the audience” (the phrase[136] has no bearing on the stage-controversy), Aristotle casually but completely overthrows another critical convention, that in ancient Tragedy deaths take place only “behind the scenes”. In the extant plays, not only do Alcestis and Hippolytus “die on the stage” in their litters, but Ajax falls upon his sword.

(e) The best subject of Tragedy is the change from good fortune to bad in the life of some eminent man not conspicuously good and just, whose misfortune, however, is due not to wickedness but to some error or weakness.[137]

(f) The poet “may not indeed destroy the framework of the received legends—the fact, for instance, that Clytæmnestra was slain by Orestes and Eriphyle by Alcmæon—but he ought to show invention of his own, and skilfully handle the traditional material”.[138] This injunction was obeyed beforehand by all the three Athenian masters; it is especially important to remember it when studying Euripides.

(g) “The unravelling of the plot ... must arise out of the plot itself; it must not be brought about by the Deus ex Machina, as in the Medea.... The Deus ex Machina should be employed only for events external to the drama—for antecedent or subsequent events, which lie beyond the range of human knowledge.”[139] This vital criticism will be considered later, when we discuss the Philoctetes[140] of Sophocles and the Euripidean drama.[141]

(h) “Within the action there must be nothing irrational. If the irrational cannot be excluded, it should be outside the scope of the tragedy. Such is the irrational element in the Œdipus of Sophocles.”[142] Aristotle means certain strange data in the Œdipus Tyrannus—the fact that neither Œdipus nor Jocasta has learnt earlier about the past, and so forth.

§ II. On the purely literary line he tells us the parts:—[143]

(a) “The Prologos is that entire part of a tragedy which precedes the Parodos of the chorus” (see below for the Parodos). Thus a drama may have no “prologos” at all, for example the Persæ. The implications of our word “prologue” are derived from the practice of Euripides, who is fond of giving in his “prologos” an account of events which have led up to the action about to be displayed.

(b) “The Episode is that entire part of a tragedy which is between complete choric songs.” “Episodes” then are what we call “acts”: the name has already been explained.[144]

(c) “The Exodos is that entire part of a tragedy which has no choric song after it.” The few anapæsts which close most tragedies are not “choric songs”—they were performed in recitative. Thus the Exodos is simply the last act.

(d) “Of the choric part the Parodos is the first undivided utterance of the chorus: the Stasimon is a choric ode without anapæsts or trochees: the Commos is a joint lamentation of chorus and actors.” It will be seen later[145] that by excluding trochees he probably means the trochaic tetrameter as seen in dialogue; lyric trochees are very common.

§ III. On the strictly dramatic line he tells us the stages of structural development.

(a) “Every tragedy falls into two parts—Complication and Unravelling (or Dénouement).... By the Complication I mean all that comes between the beginning of the action and the part which marks the turning-point to good or bad fortune. The Unravelling is that which comes between the beginning of the change and the end.”[146]

(b) “Reversal (or Recoil, Peripeteia) is a change by which a train of action produces the opposite of the effect intended, subject always to our rule of probability or necessity. Thus in the Œdipus, the messenger comes to cheer Œdipus and free him from his alarms about his mother, but, by revealing who he is, he produces the opposite effect.”[147]

Much might be written on this analysis of dramatic structure. One remark at least must be made. It is not plain how much importance Aristotle allots to the Recoil or Peripeteia. We have seen that he did not regard it as indispensable. At the most he seems to think it a striking way of starting the dénouement. It is better to look upon it, and the action which leads up to it, as a separate part of the drama—and it may be argued that every tragedy, if not every comedy, has a Peripeteia—to form, in fact, that middle stage which elsewhere[148] in the Poetic he mentions as necessary.

CHAPTER II
THE GREEK THEATRE AND THE PRODUCTION OF PLAYS

I. The Occasions of Performance

Greek drama was looked upon not only as a form of entertainment and culture, but as an act of worship offered to the god Dionysus. It was, in consequence, restricted to his festivals; performances of a quite secular character are unknown. Three Attic festivals are connected with the tragic drama: the City Dionysia, the Lenæa, the Rural Dionysia. The City or Great Dionysia were the most splendid of the three, held in the precinct of Dionysus Eleuthereus on the south-eastern slope of the Acropolis, where the ruined theatre still lies. Tragedies, comedies, and dithyrambs were performed, but of these tragedy was the most important. The time was the month of Elaphebolion (March to April). The Lenæa or “Wine-Press Festival” which occurred in Gamelion (January to February) was the great occasion for comedy, though tragedies were also to be seen. It was held at first in the Lenæon, a sacred enclosure, the site of which is still uncertain, later in the same theatre as tragedy. The Rural Dionysia fell in Poseideon (December to January), and were celebrated by the various Attic townships, especially the Peiræus; most of the dramas performed were probably such as had been successful in Athens itself; companies of actors travelled about the country for this purpose.

Of these three celebrations the City Dionysia were the most important for tragedy. The tyrant Pisistratus greatly increased the splendour of this festival and instituted the tragic contest. Each year during the fifth century three tragedians submitted each a tetralogy, and five comedians one play apiece. Tragedies were given in the mornings, comedies in the afternoon, and the celebration continued for at least five days.

II. The Buildings

Since the performance was a state-function, the whole nation was theoretically expected to be present, and in point of fact enormous audiences attended: the great theatre accommodated perhaps 30,000[149] spectators. This fact governs the nature of the whole presentation. The theatre could not be roofed, and the acting therefore differed greatly from that customary in modern buildings.

A Greek theatre consisted of three parts—the auditorium, the orchestra, and the “stage-buildings”. The heart of the whole is the orchestra or “dancing-ground” (ὀρχήστρα) upon which the chorus, throughout the action, were stationed—a circular area of beaten earth, later paved with marble. Beside the altar in this orchestra stood, in the earliest days of the theatre, the sacrificial table upon which the single actor mounted. This table in the fixed theatre is the descendant of the waggon from which the peripatetic actor of Thespis delivered his lines. In addition to the celebrants the passive worshippers were needed—the audience. Therefore the orchestra was placed at the bottom of a slope; and the spectators stood or sat on the higher ground. On the farther side rose the “stage-buildings,” whatever from time to time they were. The general plan, then, of any Greek theatre was this:—

A is the circular orchestra, B the altar (θυμέλη) of Dionysus which invariably stood in the middle of it. C represents the “stage-buildings”; D, E, F, are the doors which led from the building to the open air. The building usually projected into side-wings (G, G), called παρασκήνια. H, H, are the passage-ways (πάροδοι), by which the chorus generally entered the orchestra, and by which the audience always made its way to the seats. J, J, J, is the auditorium, a vast horseshoe-shaped space rising up a hillside from the orchestra, and filled with benches. This space was intersected by gangways,[150] K, K, L, L, etc., called, perhaps, κλίμακες; the areas M, M, N, N, etc., so formed, had the name “pegs” (κερκίδες). In most theatres a longitudinal gallery O, O, O, was made for further convenience in getting to the seats. In the strictly Greek type the front line of “stage-buildings” never encroached on the circle of the orchestra. But these theatres were used in Roman times also, and altered to suit certain needs. The front of C was thrown forward so that it cut into the orchestra and obliterated the passages H, H. To replace these, entrances were tunnelled through the auditorium. Thus at Athens the orchestra is now only little more than a semicircle, though amid the ruins of the “stage-buildings” can still be seen a few feet of the kerbstone which surrounded the original dancing floor—the only surviving remnants of the Æschylean theatre; this masonry shows that the diameter of the whole was about 90 feet.

The “stage-buildings,” as we have called them for convenience, require a longer discussion. Originally there stood in that place only a tent, called scēnē (σκηνή), which took no part in the theatrical illusion, but was used by the one actor simply as a dressing-room. Soon, no doubt, came the important advance of employing it as “scenery”—the tent of Agamemnon before Troy, for example. Later a wooden booth was erected, and Sophocles’ invention of scene-painting—that is, of concealing this booth with canvas to represent whatever place or building was needed—added enormously to the playwright’s resources. This booth was afterwards built of stone and became more and more elaborate; Roman “stage-buildings” survive which are admirable pieces of dignified architecture. The building of course contained dressing-rooms and property-rooms. There were doors at the narrow ends. The front of the building was pierced by three, later by five, doors.

Upon what did these doors open? Was there a stage in the Greek theatre? This problem has aroused more discussion than any other in Greek scholarship save the “Homeric Question”. That all theatres possessed a stage (λογεῖον) in Roman times is certain; the Athenian building—which in its present condition dates from the alterations made by Phædrus in the third century after Christ—shows quite obviously the front wall of a stage about 4½ feet high. But did the dramatists of the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ write for a theatre with a stage or not? There is a good deal of prima-facie evidence for a stage, and a good deal to show that the actors moved to and fro on that segment of the orchestra nearest to the booth. That is, the question lies between acting on top of the proscenium (or decorated wall joining the faces of the parascenia G, G) and acting in front of it. A brief résumé[151] of the evidence is all that can be attempted here. It is confined to the consideration of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., to which belongs practically all the extant work. For the period after 300 B.C. the use of a stage seems indisputable.

A. Arguments For a Stage

§ 1. A High Stage.—Vitruvius, the Roman architect, who wrote at the end of the first century B.C., in his directions for building a Greek theatre says: “Among the Greeks the orchestra is wider, the back scene is farther from the audience, and the stage is narrower.[152] This latter they call logeion (speaking-place), because the actors of tragedy and comedy perform there close to the back scene, while the other artistes play in the ambit of the orchestra, wherefore the two classes of performer are called scænici and thymelici respectively.” [Literally, “those connected with the booth” and “those connected with the central altar”.] “This logeion should be not less than 10, and not more than 12, feet in height.”[153] This, says Dörpfeld, applies to the Greek theatre of Vitruvius’ own time, but has been extended by modern writers to the fifth century. Supposing, however, that Vitruvius was thinking of the fifth century, then:—

(a) The stage is too narrow for performances, viz. 2·50 to 3 mètres, from which 1 mètre must be subtracted for the background. The remaining space is not enough for actors and mutes, not to mention any combined action of players and chorus.

(b) It is also too high. Many passages in the plays show that chorus and actors are on the same level; in all these cases the chorus would have to mount steps, or the actors descend. This is absurdly awkward; nor is there evidence for steps. An attempt has been made[154] to meet the difficulties by the assumption of another platform about half the height of the stage, erected on the orchestra for the chorus. But the various objections to such a subsidiary platform are so strong that it is no longer believed in. With it, however disappears the only way by which plays with a chorus could be performed on the high stage of Vitruvius.

§ 2. A Low Stage.—Many scholars, abandoning Vitruvius as evidence for the fifth century, postulate a low stage. Their arguments are:—[155]

(a) Aristotle in the fourth century calls the songs of the actors τὰ ἀπὸ τῆς σκηνῆς, and says that the actor performed ἐπὶ τῆς σκηνῆς, phrases which seem to mean “from the stage” and “on the stage” respectively. And though Dörpfeld would take σκηνή as “background” (not “stage”) translating Aristotle’s phrases by “from the background” and “at the background,” there remains the difficulty that Aristotle plainly thinks of actors and chorus as occupying quite distinct stations, which scarcely suggests that they move on contiguous portions of the same ground.

(b) The side-wings or parascenia must have been meant to enclose a stage. What else could have been their use?

(c) There are five phrases used by Aristophanes. Three times[156] an actor, on approaching other actors, is said to “come up”; twice[157] he is said to “go down”. Nothing in the context implies raised ground as needed by the drama, so that we seem forced to refer these expressions to the visible stage itself. Dörpfeld and others would translate these two verbs by “come here” and “go away”; but there is no evidence for these meanings.

(d) The existing plays throw incidental light on the problem:—

(i) Certain characters[158] complain of the steepness of their path as they first come before the audience. Do they not refer to an actual ascent from orchestra to stage?

(ii) Ghosts sometimes appear. How can they have ascended out of “the ground” unless action took place on a raised area? This argument is, however, not strong. In later theatres such spectres did rise from below. But in the fifth century they may well have walked in.

(iii) A more striking[159] argument is that on several occasions the chorus, though it has excellent reason to enter the back scene, remains inert. In the Agamemnon the elders talk of rushing to the king’s aid; a similar thing happens in the Medea; there are a number of such strange features. The inference is that there was a stage, to mount which would have appeared odd.

(iv) A stage was needed to make the actors visible, instead of being hidden by the chorus.[160] But, though there is no evidence that the chorus grouped themselves about the orchestra (as in the performances at Bradfield College), and they apparently stood in rows facing the actors, they could have been placed far forward enough to enable all to see the actors. Anyone who has visited a circus will appreciate this.

(v) Plato[161] remarks that Agathon and his actors appeared on an ὀκρίβας, a “platform”. But the word suggests a slight structure: Dörpfeld objects that this appearance was probably in the Odeum, or Music Hall, not the Theatre of Dionysus; if it was in the theatre, the passage rather tells against a stage, for a temporary platform would not have been used if there was a stage.

(vi) Horace[162] says that “Æschylus gave his modest stage a floor of beams” or “gave the stage a floor of moderate-sized beams”. Dörpfeld alleges (without evidence) that pulpitum (translated “stage” in the last sentence) may mean “booth,” and suggests that the poet assumes a stage as matter of course: he is marking the advance made by Æschylus upon Thespis, who (according to Horace himself), performed his plays upon a waggon. But the proper answer is surely that Horace is regularly unreliable when he deals with questions of Greek scholarship, and that he is no doubt arbitrarily combining his knowledge of contemporary Greek theatres with his knowledge that Æschylus advanced in theatrical matters beyond Thespis.

Such are the main arguments in favour of a stage in the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ.

B. Arguments Against a Stage

(i) The evidence of the extant dramas. This, already adduced by many to prove that a stage was used, is taken by Dörpfeld[163] as “showing unmistakably that no separation existed between chorus and actors, that on the contrary both played on the same area”. He refers to action where people pass between house and orchestra with no apparent difficulty or hesitation. The chorus enter from the “palace” in the Choephorœ, the Eumenides, and Euripides’ Phaethon; the chorus of huntsmen enter it in the Hippolytus. There are other probable or possible instances. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that in Helena the chorus in the midst of the play enter the building, and later reappear from it.

(ii) The tradition in later writers. It is true, says Dörpfeld, that we have no express assertion that there was no stage—it never occurred to the older writers to say so, for they knew of no such thing. The later writers imply that there was none. Timæus,[164] commenting on ὀκρίβας, says: “for there was not yet a thymele”. Thymele there means “stage”. Several late writers tell us that the Roman logeion (“speaking-place” or “stage”) was once called “orchestra”: this supports the view that the stage is part of the old orchestra, higher than the other portion (see below). The scholiast on Prometheus Vinctus, 128, remarks: “They (the chorus) say this as they hover in the air on the machine; for it would be absurd for them to converse from below [i.e. from the orchestra] to one aloft”. Now, the pro-stage theory makes all choruses do this. The scholiast on Aristophanes’ Wasps, 1342, writes: “The old man stands on a certain height (ἐπί τινος μετεώρου) as he summons the girl”. The word “certain” (τινός) implies that he knew nothing of a regular stage. Finally, if there was a definite and regular difference of position between actors and chorus, is it not astonishing (a) that there is in Greek literature no certain allusion to the fact, (b) that the older literature contains no word for the stage, the place where the acting was performed being referred to merely by reference to the booth (ἐπὶ σκηνῆς and ἀπὸ σκηνῆς)?

(iii) The architectural remains. Dörpfeld sums up his celebrated architectural researches thus. No theatre survives from the fifth century, but the theatre of Lycurgus (fourth century) belongs to a period when the plays of that century were still acted in the old manner. Also we possess numerous buildings which represent the rather later form of the theatre (the building with fixed proscenium), and which belong to that period to which the remarks of Vitruvius apply. From the Lycurgean theatre we learn that there was no stage high or low. A platform for actor or orator is only necessary when the audience are all on a flat area. If they sit on a slope, a stage is more inconvenient than if the speaker stands on the ground.[165] And so, in the earliest times, when there was no sloping auditorium, Thespis, for example, performed upon a cart. In Italy the slope came into use only late, and the stage had been widely adopted before that time—for there was no chorus to provide for. When the Greek theatre was introduced into Italy, the Roman form was invented. They did not abandon their own stage, but divided the Greek orchestra into two parts of different height. The farther half, now superfluous (the chorus having vanished) could be used for spectators or gladiators. This portion was (in earlier theatres of the true Greek type) excavated and filled with fresh seats. The stage was, of course, not made higher than the lowest eyes.

The nature of the proscenium in Greek theatres was not suitable for the supporting wall of a stage. It would be absurd to see a temple in the air above a colonnade.[166] Again, it was impossible to act on top of the proscenium. The fear of falling, when the actor wore a mask and was forced to approach the edge in order to be well seen by the lowest spectators, would spoil his acting. Finally, why was the proscenium-front not a tangent of the orchestra circle? It should have been brought as far forward as possible if they acted on top of it.

To sum up. The orchestra in the earliest period was the place of the chorus and the actors. It kept that function when the scēnē was erected beside it as a background. The chorus used the whole circle, the actors only part of it and the ground which lay in front of the scēnē. No change in this arrangement was made later. The actors in Roman times, of course, stood above the level of the excavated semicircle. But they remained throughout at the same distance from the spectators[167] and at the same level—that of the old orchestra.

How then are we to deal with Vitruvius’ statement about the height of the stage? Dörpfeld suggested[168] that Vitruvius used plans and descriptions made by a Greek; Vitruvius, in absence of any warning, taking it (as a Roman) for granted there was a stage, saw it in the proscenium; or he may have misunderstood the phrase ἐπὶ σκηνῆς in his Greek authority. But such a fundamental error made by a professional architect, who even if he had never been in Greece, must have known many persons familiar with Greek acting, is extremely hard to assume.[169] Yet the mistake is credible as regards the Greek theatre of the fourth and fifth centuries.

Amidst the mass of evidence and argument, only an outline of which is here presented, it is difficult to decide. The majority of inquirers will probably be swayed as regards the theatre of Sophocles and Astydamas by two considerations: the acting exigencies of the plays we now read or know of, and their own feeling as to how the performance would look with a stage and without. It seems, perhaps, most likely that Dörpfeld is right: that there was no stage, though when the façade represented a palace or temple a few steps might naturally appear.

III. Supervision of Dramatic Displays

The authority superintending dramatic performances was the Athenian State, acting through the archon basileus for the Lenæa, the archon eponymus for the City Dionysia. The archon allotted the task of producing the three annual series of dramas to three persons for each series: the poet, the choregus, the protagonist. We will consider these persons in turn.

Playwrights submitted their work to the archon, who himself selected three: to each he was said to “give a chorus”. The applications were many, and distinguished poets sometimes failed to “receive a chorus”. The poet’s business was not only to write the play and the music, (but in early times) to train actors and chorus. Near the end of the fifth century B.C. it became the practice to employ an expert trainer. Occasionally the poet caused some other person to “produce” the play. This was frequently done by Aristophanes, and we hear that Iophon competed with tragedies written by his father Sophocles.

The name “choregus” means “chorus-leader,” but the choregus actually had quite other functions. He was a rich citizen who as a “liturgy” or public service bore all the special cost of the performance. To each choregus a flute-player was allotted, and it seems likely that the poet too was regarded as assigned to the choregus rather than the latter to the poet. The mounting of plays, which depended on the choregus, greatly influenced the audience, and their expressed opinion cannot but have had weight with the ten judges.[170] The wealthy Nicias, for example, obtained success for every tetralogy which he mounted.[171]

The third person with whom the archon concerned himself was the “protagonist” (the chief actor)—after the middle of the fifth century; before then it appears that poets chose their protagonists. In the middle of the fifth century a protagonist was selected by the archon and one assigned to each tragic poet by lot. (The chief actor provided his subordinates himself.) This change came at about the time when three actors were regularly employed in each tragedy and when the contests in acting were instituted; a prize for acting was awarded, and the successful actor had the right to perform the following year. As the importance of the actor increased—Aristotle tells us that in his time the success of a play depended more upon the actor than upon the poet[172]—it was considered unfair that one poet should have the best performer for all his plays. In the middle of the fourth century the arrangement was introduced that each protagonist should play in one tragedy only of each poet.

Each dramatist competed with a tetralogy[173] (that is, “four works”) consisting of three tragedies and a satyric play, and the claims of these three tetralogies were decided by five[174] judges. Some days before the competition began, the Council of the State and the choregi selected a number of names from each of the ten tribes. These names were sealed up in urns, which were produced at the opening of the festival. The archon drew one name from each urn, and the ten citizens so selected were sworn as judges and given special seats. After the conclusion of the performances each of the ten gave his verdict on a tablet, and five of these were drawn by the archon at random; these five judgments gave the award. In this method the principle of democratic equality and the necessity to rely on expert opinion were well combined. When the votes had been collected, a herald proclaimed the name of the successful poet and of his choregus, who were crowned with ivy (a plant always associated with Dionysus). There is no evidence that a dramatic choregus was given any further reward: the prize of a tripod was only for dithyramb. The poet received, tradition said, a goat[175] in early times; after the State-supervision began, a sum of money from public funds was paid to each of the competitors. Records of the results were inscribed upon tablets and set up both by the victorious choregi and by the State. It is from these, directly or indirectly, that our knowledge of the facts is obtained; directly, because such inscriptions have been discovered in Athens, indirectly, because they were the basis of written works on the subject. Aristotle wrote a book called Didascaliæ (διδασκαλίαι), that is, “Dramatic Productions”; though it is lost, later works were based upon it, and it is from these that the Greek “Arguments” to the existing plays are derived.

IV. The Mounting of a Tragedy

Scenery was painted on canvas or boards and attached to the front of the buildings. In satyric drama it appears to have varied little—a wild district with trees, rocks, and a cave. Tragedy generally employed a temple or palace-front, though even in the extant thirty-two there are exceptions—the rock of Prometheus, the tent of Ajax, the cave of Philoctetes, and so forth. In a façade there were three doors, corresponding to the three permanent doors in the buildings; when a cave or tent was depicted, its opening was in front of the central door. Statues were placed before the temple or palace—those of the deities, for instance, in the Agamemnon to whom the Herald utters his magnificent address. Individuality would be given to a temple by the statue of a particular god. Scene-painting was probably not very artistic or scrupulous of details. We never read any praise of splendid theatrical scenery such as is familiar to-day; and clever lighting effects were of course out of the question when all was performed in the daylight. Here and there the persons allude to the landscape, as in Sophocles’ Electra, where the aged attendant of Orestes points out to the prince striking features of the Argolid plain. Such things were mostly left to the imagination of the audience, like the forest of Arden and the squares of Verona or Venice in Shakespeare. Undoubtedly, a Greek tragedy provided a beautiful spectacle, but this resulted from the costumes, poses, and grouping of actors and chorus.

Change of scene was rarely needed in tragedy; the peculiar arrangements of comedy do not concern us. Only two extant tragedies need it. In the Eumenides of Æschylus the change from the temple of Apollo at Delphi to Athena’s temple in Athens is vital to the plot but need not have caused much trouble; probably convention was satisfied by changing the statue. In Ajax the scene shifts from that hero’s tent to a deserted part of the sea-shore; no doubt the tent was simply removed. One reason against change of scene was the continuous presence of the chorus; when the playwright found he must shift his locality the chorus were compelled to retire and reappear. We read[176] of a permanent appliance by which scenery could be altered; there is, however, no evidence that it was known in the great age of Athenian drama. This consisted of the periacti (περίακτοι). At each end of the scene stood wooden triangular prisms standing on their ends and revolving in sockets, so arranged that one of the narrow oblong sides continued the picture. A different subject was painted on each side. A twist given to either marked a change of place; the alteration of one periactus meant a change of locality within the same region, while the alteration of both meant a complete change of district. Thus, had this contrivance been used in the fifth century, one periactus would have been moved in the Ajax, both in the Eumenides. Another and stranger use of this contrivance is mentioned by Pollux: “it introduces sea-gods and everything which is too heavy for the machine”. We shall return to this when we come to the “eccyclema” and the “machine”. No curtain is known for the classical age.

Stage-properties were few and for the most part simple. Much the most important was the tomb of some great person; that of Darius in the Persæ, and of Agamemnon in the Choephorœ, are fundamental to the plot, and there are many other examples.[177] Statues have already been mentioned. The spaciousness of the orchestra made it easy to introduce chariots and horses, as in Agamemnon, Euripides’ Electra and Iphigenia at Aulis.

Various contrivances were employed to permit the appearance of actors in circumstances where they could not simply enter the orchestra or logeion. We need not dwell upon certain quaint machinery which it is fairly certain was not used in the great age—“Charon’s steps,” by which ghosts ascended, the “anapiesma” which brought up river-gods and Furies, the “stropheion” which showed heroes in heaven and violent deaths, the “hemicyclion” by which the spectators were given a view of remote cities or of men swimming, the “bronteion,” or thunder machine, consisting of a sheet of metal and sacks of stones to throw thereon, the “ceraunoscopeion” or lightning machine, a black plank with a flash painted upon it, which was shot across the stage. In the fifth century the theatrical contrivances amounted to four—the distegia, the theologeion, the “machine,” and the eccyclema.

The distegia was employed when human beings showed themselves above the level of the “stage,” for example on a roof or cliff. Such appearances are not common—the watchman (Agamemnon), Antigone and her nurse (Phœnissæ), Orestes and Pylades (Orestes), Evadne (Euripidean Supplices), are all the occasions in existing tragedy; comedy supplies a few more. Probably it was “a projecting balcony or upper story, which might be introduced when required”;[178] the word appears to mean “second story”. The arrangement would then correspond closely to the gallery used at the back of the Elizabethan stage.

Similar to this was the “theologeion” (“speaking-place for gods”), on which gods or deified heroes appeared when they were not to be shown descending through the air. The arrangement seems to have been a platform in the upper part of the scenery. Whether it was fixed there and the actors entered through an opening to take their place, or whether it was used like the eccyclema (see below), is not clear.

We hear much more of the “machine” (μηχανή) by which actors descended as from Heaven or ascended. It was a crane from which cords were attached to the actor’s body; a stage-hand hauled the actor up or down by a winch. There are a good many instances of its use. The apparition of Thetis at the close of Andromache exemplifies the most customary happening. But sometimes the machine had to carry a greater burden; both the Dioscuri appear in Euripides’ Electra, both Iris and Frenzy in Hercules Furens. Æschylus no doubt sent Oceanus on his four-legged bird by this route; possibly Medea, and the chariot containing her sons’ bodies, were also suspended by it; and it has even been thought that the chorus of Prometheus Vinctus and their “winged chariot” enter in this way. But the last suggestion is very questionable. The weight would be excessive, and probably the car is supposed to be left outside, or may have been painted on a periactus. Aristophanes gets excellent fooling out of the machine. The celebrated basket in which Socrates “walks the air and contemplates the sun”[179] is attached to it; and in the Peace there is a delightful parody of Bellerophon’s ascent to Heaven.

Far more puzzling is the eccyclema. This celebrated device was employed to reveal to the spectators events which had just taken place “within”. After the murders in the Agamemnon the palace doors are opened and Clytæmnestra is shown standing axe in hand over the corpses of Cassandra and the king. There are a good many instances of precisely the same type: the scene exhibited is a small tableau. But there are dissimilar examples which shall be discussed later. The construction of this machine is usually described thus. Inside the middle[180] door was a small oblong platform on wheels, upon which the tableau was arranged; then the platform was thrust out upon the stage and in a few minutes drawn back again. Two quite different objections have been raised to this account.

First, it seems ridiculous to reveal what is supposed to be inside a building—not to come out, be it observed, but to stay inside—by thrusting forth one or two people on a species of dray. But we must remember the enormous and rightful influence of convention. If Greek audiences wished to see such tableaux and were convinced that by no other means could they be shown, then it was their business to accept the eccyclema; that in such circumstances they would accept and soon fail even to notice it, is proved by the whole history of art. We see nothing ludicrous in the spectacle of a man telling his deepest secrets in a study one wall of which is replaced by a vast assembly of eavesdroppers. The Elizabethan theatre accepted precisely this contrivance of the eccyclema. In our texts of Henry VI (Pt. II, Act III, Sc. ii.) we read this stage-direction: “The folding-doors of an inner chamber are thrown open, and Gloucester is discovered dead in his bed: Warwick and others standing by it”. Instead of all this, the old direction merely says: “Bed put forth”. In another early drama we find the amusing instruction: “Enter So-and-So in bed”. The æsthetic objection to the eccyclema has no force whatever.

The other objection rests on the fact that a more elaborate tableau is sometimes indicated than could be accommodated on so narrow a platform. The most serious example is provided by the Eumenides, where we are to imagine upon the eccyclema an altar, Orestes kneeling by it, Apollo and Hermes standing beside him, and the whole chorus of Furies sleeping around them. In Aristophanes’ Clouds the interior of Socrates’ school is exhibited, with pupils at work amid lecture-room appliances. A brilliant scene of the same poet’s Acharnians depicts Dicæopolis’ interview with Euripides, who is too busy to come downstairs from his study-attic, but consents to be “wheeled out”. Thus the eccyclema shows him outside and also aloft: how could this be represented on the dray? Perhaps by elevating poet and furniture upon posts? Even this is not inconceivable.[181] Nor is it impossible that the Furies of the Eumenides were arranged on two eccyclemata of their own, thrust out of the side doors, while Orestes and the gods were upon the central platform. For Pollux does say that there were three.

Other views of this machine have been offered, which explain the “wheeling” of which we read as the working of wheeled mechanism, such as a winch. Some would have it that the scenery opens, whether doors are flung wide, or the canvas is rolled back like curtains. In this way a considerable area behind the scenes could be revealed. This is, of course, infinitely more in accordance with modern ideas. But it will not fit all the available evidence, which talks of “wheeling in” and “wheeling out,” “Roll this unhappy man within”[182] and the like. Moreover, in such a simple operation there would be nothing for Aristophanes to parody. A third explanation is that a considerable part of the back scene was cut out and replaced so as to swing on a perpendicular axis. Projecting from this at the back was a small platform, upon which the tableau was grouped; this oblong portion was twisted round so that the platform pointed towards the spectators. It resembled, in fact, that contrivance in the modern Japanese theatre by which one scene is prepared while the preceding action takes place, and is swung into position when needed. A grave objection to this is that some of the groups—those in Eumenides and Acharnians—would be too large for such a contrivance. The best view seems to be the traditional, to which the evidence strongly points. As for the large scenes so displayed, various tolerable explanations may be found. Only one or two Furies and Socratic novices may have appeared on the platform, and the others may have simply walked in through the right and left doors, or even been shown on subsidiary platforms at those entrances.

All other appurtenances of a performance were provided by the choregus—such things as chariots and animals, and, far the most important, costumes of chorus and actors. All dramatic performers, both actors and chorus in tragedy, comedy, and satyric drama alike, wore disguise throughout the whole history of the ancient theatre. The reason in the first place was that masks or some kind of facial disguise—in Thespis’ time the face was anointed with lees of wine—was a feature of Dionysiac worship. The dressing of a tragic chorus was generally a simple matter. It often represented a company of people from the district with no special characteristics. The dress was therefore the usual dress of Greek men or women, with a special shoe, the crēpis (κρηπίς), said to have been introduced by Sophocles. There were also obvious indications of circumstances; old men wore beards and carried staves; suppliants bore olive-branches twined with wool. The occasional choruses of peculiar character were of course equipped specially. In Euripides’ Bacchæ they were dressed in fawn-skins and carried timbrels. When Æschylus brought out his Eumenides he designed the Furies’ costume himself; their terrible masks and the snakes entwined in their hair are said to have terrified the spectators and produced most untoward effects on the more susceptible. The equipment of satyric choristers was very different. They were always dressed as satyrs or goat-men. A tight garment, representing the naked flesh, covered their bodies. Their masks were surmounted by horns, their feet were shod in hoof-shaped shoes, and round their middle they wore a woollen girdle like goatskin to which were attached the phallus and a tail, which, however, after about 400 B.C., resembled the tail of a horse, not a goat, the satyr-type being superseded by the Silenus-type. Satyric actors seem to have worn much the same costume as the tragic, save that the dress of Silenus represented the hides of animals.

The dress of tragic actors was mostly the invention of Æschylus and showed little change throughout ancient times. Everything was done to make the actor’s appearance as stately as possible. His robes were heavy, sweeping, and of brilliant colours. His size was increased by various devices. The boot, the famous cothurnus (κόθορνος) or buskin, had an immensely thick sole; the limbs were padded and the height was further increased by an oncus (ὄγκος) or projection of the mask above the forehead. The mask itself was modelled and painted to correspond with the character: a tyrant’s mask wore a frown, that of a suppliant a distorted look of misery, and so forth. Increased power was given to the voice by a large orifice at the mouth. Identity was indicated wherever possible by some obvious mark: Apollo was known by his bow, Heracles by his lion’s skin and club, kings by crowns and sceptres. It was a joke against Euripides that his heroes so often entered in the rags of beggary.

Such a cumbersome equipment would be fatal to acting as we understand it. The mask at once destroys all chance of that facial play which we deem essential; the padded limbs, heavy garments, and gigantic boots made all life-like motion and élan impossible. This is no doubt one great reason why the playwrights rarely exhibit exciting physical action. Even so, the ludicrous sometimes occurred. Æschines when acting Œnomaus fell and had to be helped up by the chorus-trainer.[183] A natural supposition is that these impedimenta date not from Æschylus but from the period of vulgar elaboration. Certainly, it is not easy to imagine how such scenes as the delirium of Orestes, or the departure of Pentheus in the Bacchæ, could have been reasonably carried out—so to say—on stilts; indeed the whole spirit of such plays as Orestes, Ion, and Iphigenia at Aulis seems utterly alien to such equipment. But it is hard to set aside the voice of all the evidence. The best way would be to surmise that Euripides sometimes dispensed with buskins and the rest—though we should surely expect some allusion to so remarkable a change—for noble as is the work of his predecessors, it could be so performed without too absurd an effect. If Garrick’s audience did not object to his playing Macbeth in a periwig and knee-breeches, it is likely enough that Athens was content with such a Clytæmnestra as Pollux would have us imagine.

V. The Performers and Their Work

A tragic performance was carried out by actors, extra performers, flute-player, and chorus. All these were men.

Extra performers, though they take up very little space in our text, were important to the spectacle. Mutes were often needed. Not only did these figure as attendants, crowds, and the like; they are sometimes important to the plot though they do not happen to speak. The jury of Areopagites in Eumenides is vital; children such as Eurysaces in Ajax, and the sons[184] of Medea, are important. Other extra performers were those who had very small speaking or singing parts, such as Eumelus in Alcestis. This would seem to mean a fourth actor, but, so slight was the part always[185] allotted, that it is not an unreasonable statement that there were never more than three actors. Thirdly, an extra chorus was occasionally needed for a short scene, as the Propompi in Eumenides and the Huntsmen in Hippolytus. Any such extra performer was called a parachoregema (παραχορήγημα, “extra supply”) and was paid by the choregus, as the name shows. (The regular chorus was paid by the State.) At times a chorus sang behind the scenes and was then called a “parascenion”; this function would, if possible, be performed by members of the regular chorus.

Instrumental music was supplied by a single flute-player, paid by the choregus. He was stationed in the orchestra, very likely upon the step of the thymele, and accompanied all songs. At times a harpist was added to the flute-player; Sophocles had great success with that instrument in his own Thamyris. At the end of a play the flute-player led the chorus out of the orchestra. The music itself is a subject complicated and obscure. Practically none of it has survived, and the details are naturally difficult to determine; but some main facts are clear. Though there was much singing and dancing the music composed by the tragedians was vastly more simple than that of a modern opera. All choral singing was in unison, and as a rule the words dominated the music.[186] The result was that an audience followed the language of an ode with ease, nor is it likely that such lyrics as those of the Agamemnon or the Colonus-song, not to mention many others, which are masterpieces of literature, would have been written were they fated to be drowned by elaborate music. Nevertheless a distinct change took place even in the fifth century, owing chiefly to the eminent composer Timotheus, whose innovations were of course looked upon by conservative taste as corrupt; the comic playwright Pherecrates grumbles about the way in which his notes scurry hither and thither like ants in a nest,[187] a charge repeated almost in the same words by Aristophanes against Agathon. Euripides followed the new manner, and his novelties are brilliantly caricatured in the Frogs: the elaborate but thin libretto and the trills.[188] The increasing use of monodies, or solos by an actor, which we find in Euripides—the exotic but effective performance of the Phrygian slave in Orestes is a conspicuous instance—also points to the growing importance of musical virtuosity. Greek music was composed in certain modes (νόμοι), the precise difference between which is not clear, though the ethical distinctions are known. The Dorian mode was austere and majestic, the Lydian and Mixolydian plaintive, the Phrygian passionate.

We come now to the actors. These three performers were able to present more than three persons, since they could change mask and costume behind the scenes. One of them far outshone the others in importance—the “protagonist” (πρωταγωνιστής, “first competitor”). He alone was allotted to the poet by the archon; the “deuteragonist” and “tritagonist,” he selected himself; he alone could be a competitor for the acting prize. The most important rôle was of course performed by him. In many dramas this was a vast responsibility; Hamlet himself—the proverbial instance—is not more vital to his play than Prometheus, Œdipus, or Medea to theirs. The other two divided the minor parts among them; it was the custom to give a tritagonist the rôle of a king when only spectacularly important—the Doge in The Merchant of Venice would have been just the part. In earlier dramas it is plain which rôle would be given to the protagonist; there is no mistaking the pre-eminence of Clytæmnestra in Agamemnon or of Philoctetes. But in some later works it is not clear who is the outstanding character. In the Bacchæ Dionysus and Pentheus, in the Orestes Electra and her brother, have parts of fairly equal importance. In such cases the protagonist would take an important rôle and a minor rôle. Change of costume took little time, as examination of structure sometimes shows.[189]

This restriction of the “company” to three actors had important influence upon both plot and presentation. As for plot, however many persons a dramatist used, he clearly could not bring more than three of them forward together. But the power to do even this was frugally used: there are but few instances of a genuine three-cornered conversation; one of the three in turn is generally silent. In the Recognition-scene of the Tauric Iphigenia, Orestes, Pylades, and Iphigenia are all present, but though the éclaircissement fills about two hundred lines, the only part of it in which all three share is but twenty lines in length. This frugality indicates that the simplicity of Greek tragedy is a result not only of external conditions, but of the poets’ deliberate choice. As for presentation, the restriction to three actors would result in excellent playing of minor parts: a thoroughly competent performer would discharge such short but important rôles as that of the Butler in Alcestis and the Herald in Agamemnon. Anyone who has been depressed by wooden Macduffs and Bassanios will realize the value of this method.

A Greek actor combined the functions of a modern actor and of an operatic performer. Lyrics performed by actor and chorus together were called “commi” (κομμοί): the most elaborate instance is the great and lengthy invocation of Agamemnon’s shade in the Choephorœ. A solo by an actor was known as a “monody”; Euripides is particularly fond of these; Ion’s song is perhaps the most attractive. Finally, two or three actors might sing alternately to each other without the chorus; no name for this has been preserved. Certain other passages were neither sung nor spoken, but delivered in recitative: in tragedy these were the dialogue-trochaics and anapæsts. Iambics were spoken (or “declaimed”). Obviously the voice is of great importance to an actor’s proficiency, above all in a vast open-air theatre, but Greek writers lay even more stress upon it than we should have expected. Both volume and subtlety were demanded. This is illustrated by a famous story.[190] An actor named Hegelochus ruined the sick-bed scene in Orestes by a slip in pronunciation. Orestes, on recovering from delirium, says (v. 279):—

ἐκ κυμάτων γὰρ αὖθις αὖ γαλήν’ ὁρῶ

“after the billows once more I see a calm”. The unlucky player instead of saying γαλήν’ said γαλῆν, “once more do I see a weasel coming out of the waves”. The theatre burst into laughter, for correct pronunciation was far more insisted upon than in the English theatre of to-day.[191] The status of the acting profession rose steadily as time went on. At first the poet acted as protagonist, but this practice was dropped by Sophocles, owing to the weakness of his voice. From that time acting was free to develop as a separate profession. In the middle of the fifth century a prize for acting was instituted, and the actor’s name began to be added in the official records of victories. In the fourth century the importance of the player increased still more. We have seen that he was so vital to the success of a playwright that for fairness’ sake the three protagonists each acted in a single tragedy of each poet. We often hear of brilliant acting successes. In the fourth century an Actors’ Guild was formed at Athens and continued in existence for centuries. Its object was to protect the remarkable privileges held by the “artists of Dionysus”. They were looked upon as great servants of religion, and were not only in high social esteem but possessed definite privileges, especially the right of safe-conduct through hostile states and exemption from military service. About the beginning of the third century before Christ the Amphictyonic Council, at the instance of the Guild itself, renewed a decree, the terms of which have fortunately been preserved,[192] affirming the immunity of person and property granted to the Athenian actors.

The chorus, we have seen, was originally the only celebrant of the Dionysiac festival. As the importance of the actors increased it became less and less vital to the performance. Its numbers, its connexion with the plot, and the length and relevance of its songs, all steadily diminished.

Originally there were fifty choristers, but we learn that early in the fifth century there were only twelve, and it is suggested that this change was due to the introduction of tetralogies—the fifty choreutæ being divided as equally as possible between the four dramas. Sophocles, it is said, raised the number to fifteen. This account is doubtful. It is not in the nature of things likely that Æschylus (if it was he) caused or approved such an immense drop in numbers, from fifty to twelve: for the notion that the original chorus was split up into four is frivolous. Is it not obvious that a poet would employ the same choristers for each play of his tetralogy? Again, that Sophocles should chafe at Æschylus’ twelve singers and alter the number, and that by a mere trifle of three, is quite unlikely. There is, moreover, strong evidence that the elder poet used fifty choreutæ, at any rate in his earlier time. The Supplices has for chorus the daughters of Danaus, and their exact number, fifty, was a familiar datum of the legend. The natural view is that Æschylus began with fifty, that Sophocles ended with fifteen, and that between these two points the number gradually sank. Whether the choreutæ after the fifth century became still fewer is not clearly known; there is some evidence that at times they were only seven.

Next, the dramatic value of the chorus steadily went down. In our earliest tragedy, the Æschylean Supplices, the chorus of Danaids is absolutely vital; they are the chief, almost the sole, interest. In other works of the same poet their importance is certainly less, but still very great; everywhere they are deeply interested in the fate of the chief persons—Xerxes, Eteocles, Prometheus, Agamemnon, Orestes; the chorus of the Eumenides is even more closely attached to the plot. In Sophocles a certain change is to be felt. The connexion between chorus and plot is of much the same quality as in the five plays just mentioned, but the emotional tie and (still more) the tie of self-interest are weaker. The chorus of Greek seamen in Philoctetes are (in the abstract) as deeply concerned in the issue as the Oceanids in Prometheus, but most readers would probably agree that they show it less; we can “think away” the chorus more easily from the Philoctetes. In all the other six Sophoclean dramas the interest of the chorus in the action is about the same as in the Philoctetes—strong but scarcely vital. Euripides’ work shows more variety. Alcestis, Heracleidæ, Hecuba, Ion, Troades, Iphigenia in Tauris, Helen, and Rhesus all possess choruses which are prima-facie Sophoclean in this regard, though their language tends to show less personal concern. In other dramas, Medea, Hippolytus, Andromache, Electra, Phœnissæ, Orestes, Iphigenia at Aulis, the chorus is simply a company of spectators. Thirdly, in two plays, Supplices and Bacchæ, the importance of the chorus is thoroughly Æschylean. In Euripides, then, there is found on the whole a weakening in the dramatic value of the chorus: in some instances the singers are little more than random visitors. In the fourth century Aristotle protests against this: “the chorus too should be regarded as one of the actors; it should be an integral part of the whole, and share in the action, in the manner not of Euripides but of Sophocles”.[193]

A precisely similar change operated in the length of the ode. The lyrics of Æschylus’ Supplices form more than half the work, those of Orestes only one-ninth. Even at the end of Æschylus’ career we find in the Agamemnon odes magnificent, elaborate, and lengthy. Sophocles composed shorter songs which were still closely germane to the plot. But in Euripides there frequently occur lyrics whose connexion with the plot is slight, sometimes difficult to make out. Agathon carried this still further: his odes are mere interludes, quite outside the plot.[194]

The fifteen choristers usually entered through the parodos, marching like soldiers.[195] Drawn up in ranks upon the orchestra, they followed the action with their backs to the audience but faced about when they sang. Their work fell into two parts, the odes sung between the episodes, and participation in the episodes. The entrance-song was called the parodos or “entrance,” and was written in anapæstic rhythm, suitable for marching. If so, it was chanted in recitative; lyrics were sung. Songs between episodes were called stasima. This means “stationary songs,” not because the singers stood still but because they had taken up their station in the orchestra. As they left at the end they sang an exodos or “exit” in anapæsts. Besides these, there were occasional hyporchemes (ὑπορχήματα, “dances”), short, lively songs expressing sudden joy. All lyrics were rendered by both song and dance. Singing was generally executed by all the choreutæ, but some passages were divided between them. The most frequent division was into two semi-choruses (ἡμιχόρια), but now and then individuals sang a few words. Incidental iambic lines were spoken by one person, and the short anapæstic system which at the end of the lyric often announces the approach of an actor was no doubt assigned to the coryphæus, or chorus-leader alone. Dancing was also an essential feature, but both Greeks and Romans meant more by dancing than do we, or than we did before the rise of “Salome” performances. It was in fact a mimetic display, giving by the rhythmic manipulation of all the limbs an imitation of the emotions expressed, or the events described, by the song. The whole company, moreover, went through certain evolutions over the surface of the orchestra. When they sang the strophe[196] they moved in one direction, back again for the antistrophe,[196] and perhaps stood still when there was an epode.[196] But nothing is known as to details here. The centre of all the dancing was the coryphæus (κορυφαῖος, “top man”), the leader of the chorus; when two semi-choruses acted separately each had its leader. As was natural, choric dancing flourished mightily in the early days, and went down with lyrical performance in general. Thus Phrynichus congratulated himself on having devised “as many figures of the dance as are the billows on the sea under a dread night of storm”. Æschylus too was a brilliant ballet-master. But Plato, the comic playwright, at the end of the same century grumbles[197] amusingly:—

There was something to watch when the dancing was good,

But now there’s no acting to mention—

Just a paralysed row of inflexible singers,

Who howl as they stand at attention.

During the best period of the chorus its mimetic dancing must have been a wonderful spectacle. We hear of highly-skilled performers who could reproduce action so that the audience followed every detail. They seem to have “accompanied” some portions of the episodes in this manner; and that fact may account for a rather curious feature in the Ion. The messenger gives a remarkably detailed description of the designs upon the embroideries wherewith Ion roofed his great banqueting-marquee—the constellations and “Dawn pursuing the stars” are all described. Possibly this was written for the sake of an unusually brilliant mimetic evolution by groups of choreutæ.

The chorus had other duties during the episodes. As a body they normally showed themselves interested spectators; thus the chorus of Orestes enter in order to inquire of Electra concerning her sick brother. Not infrequently they do more, taking an actual share in events. At the close of Agamemnon the Argive elders are at point to do battle with Ægisthus and his henchmen; in Alcestis they join the funeral procession; at other times they aid the persons of the play, not only by misleading enemies (Choephorœ) or directing friends (Œdipus Tyrannus) but by keeping watch (Orestes). Further, the coryphæus almost always delivers two or three lines at the end of every long speech, save when it ends a scene. These little interpolations are invariably obvious and feeble. After Hermione’s tirade against women the coryphæus comments thus: “Too freely hast thou indulged thy tongue against thy sex. It is pardonable in thee, but still women should gloss over the weaknesses of women.” Anyone who has listened to the delivery of some splendid passage in Shakespeare, an outburst of Lear or Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech, will remember how the applause which follows it drowns the next speaker’s opening lines. Some pause is needed. This is provided in Greek tragedy by the insertion of a line or two which will not be missed if inaudible.

The satyric chorus diverged little from the tragic in the points discussed under this section. It had, however, a special type of dance called the “Sikinnis”. “One of the postures used ... was called the owl, and is variously explained by the old grammarians as having consisted in shading the eyes with the hands, or in turning the head to and fro like an owl.”[198]

VI. The Audience

The time of the Dionysiac festivals, especially the great Dionysia, was a holiday for all Athens, and the centre of enjoyment was the show of tragedies and comedies. At sunrise the theatre was filled with a huge throng prepared to sit packed together for hours facing the sun with no interval for a meal or for exercise. It is important to remember that in Athens that incalculable play-goer, “the average man,” did really enjoy and appreciate first-class dramatic work.

There were a few rows of special seats for officials and persons otherwise honoured by the State. All the rest of the space, save for the separation of men and women, and the possibility that each cercis was allotted to a distinct tribe, was open to all without distinction of rank or means. The official seats were in the front rows, and the first row of all consisted of sixty-seven marble thrones, most of which are still preserved in situ. Of these sixty-seven, fifty belonged—as the inscriptions show—to ecclesiastics, and the famous middle throne—the best and most conspicuous[199] place in the theatre—was occupied by the priest of Dionysus of Eleutheræ. Besides priests, the archons, the generals, and the ten judges had special places, also benefactors of the State or their descendants, and the sons of men who had fallen in battle. Ambassadors from abroad, too, received this compliment of προεδρία (“foremost seat”).

Behind the dignified front circle of thrones rose tier after tier of stone benches, all alike and not marked off into separate seats, so that the audience must usually have been crowded. They were also cramped, for the height of each seat was but fifteen inches.[200] Spectators brought with them any cushions they needed. Admission to the theatre was allowed in the first instance to any Athenian citizen. In spite of the indecency which was a normal[201] feature of the Old Comedy, there is no doubt that women and boys were present at the shows both of tragedy and comedy. Slaves and foreigners also were admitted, obtaining admission, like the boys and women, through citizens. Foreigners, except the distinguished persons to whom proedria was granted, seem to have been confined to the extreme right and left cercides, next to the parodoi. All the seating which has been described dates from the time of the orator Lycurgus[202] in the fourth century; during the fifth Athens was content with wooden benches, called icria (ἴκρια, “planks”).

Admission was at first free, but the drama was so popular that the rush for seats caused much confusion; it is said that the more sedulous would secure places the night before. In the fifth century the custom arose of charging for admission, and making every one book in advance, save those dignitaries whose places were reserved. The price for one day was two obols (about threepence in weight, but of much greater purchasing power). At the end of that century this sum was paid by the State to any citizen who claimed it. The money allotted for this purpose was called the “theoric” fund (τὸ θεωρικόν, “money for the shows”), of which we hear so much in the speeches of Demosthenes. By his time the system had grown to a serious danger. Payments were made, not only for the original purpose, but for all the numerous festivals, and a law was actually passed that anyone who proposed to apply the fund in any other way should be put to death. Demosthenes represents the theoric fund and the Athenian affection for it as preventing Athens from supplying sufficient forces to check the growing menace from Philip of Macedonia. On paying in his two obols the spectator received a ticket of lead. The sums taken were appropriated by the lessee or architecton who in consideration thereof kept the theatre in repair.

As the auditorium was filled with many thousands of lively Southerners, who had to sit crammed together from sunrise till late in the day with no intermission, the question of good order might seem to have been a hopeless difficulty. It was not so. For, first, the occasion was religious, and to use blows in the theatre was a capital crime. Next, stewards (ῥαβδοφόροι, “rod-bearers”) were at hand to keep order among the choristers, who were numerous, seeing that each dithyrambic chorus consisted of fifty men. Finally, a good deal of exuberant behaviour was allowed. Serious disturbance occasionally happened: the high-spirited Alcibiades once had a bout at fisticuffs with a rival choregus, and the occasion of Demosthenes’ speech against Meidias was the blow which Meidias dealt the orator when the latter was choregus.

Though an Athenian audience had no objection, when comedy was played, to scenes which we should have supposed likely to strike them as blasphemous, they bitterly objected to any breach of orthodoxy in tragic drama. Æschylus once narrowly escaped death because it was thought that a passage in his play constituted a revelation of the mysteries. Euripides,[203] too, incurred great trouble owing to the opening lines of Melanippe the Wise. Approval and dislike were freely expressed. If the spectators admired a passage, shouts and clapping showed it: at times they would “encore” a speech or song with the exclamation αὖθις (“again”). Still more often do we hear of their proneness to “damn” a bad play. Hissing[204] was common, and there was a special custom at Athens of kicking with the heels upon the benches to express disapproval—a method which must have been effective in the time of wooden seats. Playwrights were known to take vigorous means to win favour. That distinguished writer of New Comedy, Philemon, is said to have defeated Menander himself by securing a large attendance of supporters to applaud his work, and it is certain that writers of the Old Comedy frequently directed their actors to throw nuts and similar offerings among the audience. In the Peace of Aristophanes barley was thus distributed. The spectators sometimes replied in kind. Bad performers were pelted with fruit, at any rate in the country, and even stones were used in extreme cases. The celebrated Æschines, during his career as a strolling tritagonist, was nearly stoned to death by his public.[205] But the fruit was generally used in the city itself for another purpose. Aristotle illustrates a detail of psychology by pointing to the fact that “in the theatre people who eat dessert do so with most abandon when the performers are bad”.[206]

CHAPTER III
THE WORKS OF ÆSCHYLUS

The place of Æschylus in dramatic history has been discussed in the first chapter. We have still to give some account of his seven extant plays and of the fragments.

The Supplices[207] (Ἱκετίδες, “Suppliant Women”) is no doubt the earliest of these. The scene is laid near the sea-coast, not far from Argos. The chorus, consisting of the fifty daughters of Danaus, enter, and in their opening song tell how they have fled from Egypt to escape marriage with their cousins, the fifty sons of Ægyptus. These suitors have pursued them overseas, but they call upon Zeus, who through Io is their ancestor, to defend them. Danaus, their father, urges them to take refuge upon the steps of the altar.[208] This they do, becoming suppliants of the State-deities and acquiring a claim upon the citizens. The King of Argos enters; to him the women make their appeal. He replies that he must consult the national assembly before facing the possibility of war with the Egyptians; meanwhile he sends Danaus into the city to engage the compassion of the Argives. After another song by the chorus, in which they relate the wanderings of Io and her final peace, Danaus returns with the news that the Argive assembly is unanimous in championing the Suppliants; the women burst forth into lyrical blessings upon the land. Danaus, who has been upon the watch, announces the approach of the hostile ships; he comforts his shrinking daughters, goes to fetch help, and does not return until the danger is over.[209] After a terrified lyric, the Egyptian herald appears, accompanied no doubt by warriors; he harshly bids them go to the ship and submit to their masters. They refuse. He is on the point of dragging them away when the King enters, rebukes the herald, and defies the power of Egypt. The intruder departs with threats of war. Danaus returns, and with his daughters is given lodging within the city-walls. The chorus end the drama with an ode voicing their fear of war and oppression.

Such a close evidently implies that the story was continued in another work, and it has been conjectured that the Egyptians and the Danaides (“Daughters of Danaus”) formed the second and third parts of the trilogy. Scarcely anything of these two plays has been preserved, but there is good reason to suppose that the Egyptians were victorious, that the daughters of Danaus were compelled to marry their ferocious suitors, and that on the command of their father each slew her husband on the wedding-night. Hypermnestra alone spared her lover, by name Lynceus. It seems that she was put on her trial for this disobedience and was saved by the advocacy of Aphrodite, who thus foreshadows the Apollo of the Eumenides. The satyric play was perhaps the Amymone; this was the name of one of the Danaides, who was delivered from a satyr by Poseidon. Viewed not historically, but æsthetically, especially by a reader already familiar with the Oresteia, the play must be confessed bald and monotonous. Many of Æschylus’ most splendid attributes, it is true, are to be discerned, but their fire too often sinks into smouldering grimness. The only really fine passages are those portions of the lyrics which bear the impress of the poet’s masculine and profound theology. Such strictures, however, are merely one way of saying that the Supplices is an early work. It would be fairer (were it only possible) to compare it with the drama of Phrynichus rather than with the Agamemnon. Here, perhaps for the first time, we have a genuinely dramatic situation—the collision between the king and the herald. There is little characterization. The chorus are simply distressed damsels (save for their vivid and strong religious faith), the king is simply a magnanimous and wary monarch, the herald simply a “myrmidon”. Danaus, however, shows some interesting traits. He is extremely sententious and rejoices in the fact: “Inscribe this on your hearts beside the many other precepts of your father written there”.[210] His exhortation[211] to chaste behaviour, though long and (as his daughters assure him) unnecessary, is, albeit corrupt textually, one of the most striking passages in the play. But one feels that characterization is perhaps less needed in a work which, literally from the first word, is filled with the name of God, Zeus,[212] the ancestor of the Danaids, the lord of the universe, the guardian of right. “And whensoever it is decreed by nod of Zeus that a thing be brought to fullness, it falls not prostrate, but on its feet. Yea, through thicket and shadow stretch the paths of his decrees, that no thoughts can spy them out.”[213] Equally majestic is the language concerning that other Zeus[214] who judges the sins of men in Hades. Finally, though the thought and diction are in the main stark if dignified, a change comes over the play before the end: we get a little “atmosphere”. Danaus already fears personal enemies (v. 1008), and the arrangements for lodging the suppliants show a tinge of domesticity.

The Persæ[215] (Πέρσαι, “Men of Persia”), though perhaps twenty years later, comes next among the surviving plays. The action takes place before the palace of Xerxes. It opens with a song from the chorus, who represent aged councillors of the Persian Empire. They describe the departure of the host which is to conquer Greece, and their own anxiety for news. Atossa, widow of Darius and mother of Xerxes, enters, distressed by an ill-omened dream. The councillors discuss this portent and the prospects of victory. A messenger arrives who announces the complete overthrow of the “barbarians”. The queen speedily rallies from her grief, learns that her son himself is safe, and hears the narrative of Salamis and the flight of the Persians back to Asia. She determines to offer supplications to Heaven and retires to fetch the materials of sacrifice; the chorus pour forth a lyric lament and deplore the loss of Darius the conqueror. Atossa returns bearing the libation which she offers to the shade of Darius, while the chorus invoke the dead king, praying him to appear and give counsel. In answer, the ghost of Darius rises from his tomb. He learns the evil tidings, laments the impious folly of his son, and foretells the coming disaster of Platæa. After the shade has sunk back into the tomb, and Atossa has gone to meet Xerxes,[216] the elders sing of Persia’s greatness under Darius. Finally, Xerxes appears, plunged in despair. Amid the antiphonal wailings of the king and his councillors the tragedy ends.

The scholiast says that “Æschylus won the prize in the archonship of Menon, with Phineus, Persæ, Glaucus of Potniæ and Prometheus”.[217] This tetralogy seems (to judge from the titles and the fragments) to have been a collection of plays which had no relation of subject-matter. Interesting to the historian as the only extant tragedy dealing with a contemporary subject, the Persæ also wins the highest admiration as a piece of literature not unworthy of its theme. The muscular and majestic diction of the speeches, the noble sweep of the lyrics, the colossal dignity of the characters, the picturesqueness and vigour which make the story of Salamis one of the greatest passages even in Æschylus—these are characteristics of the poet which the Supplices presents only in germ. But the noblest feature of the whole is the manner in which Æschylus has faced his chief obstacle. To dramatize the heroic spirit and overwhelming success of Athens in the presence of Athenians—was this an easy task? Nothing could be more cloying at the moment, more thin and unsatisfying to the after-reflection. Æschylus rises clear above all this. First, he places the scene not in Athens, but before the gates of the palace at Susa; that dignity which elsewhere in Greek tragedy is secured by remoteness in time, is here obtained by remoteness in space.[218] The whole incident is held at arm’s length that it may be viewed with soberness, and as a whole in perspective. Next, it has often been observed that on the one hand he chronicles a host of Asiatic nobles while on the other not a single Greek—not even Themistocles—is named. Both these facts spring from the same source. Æschylus, it cannot be repeated too often, was a deeply religious man. When he takes it in hand to dramatize an event of recent history his instinct impels him, just as infallibly as if he were writing of Heracles or Prometheus, to describe occurrences not in the language of politics or of tactics, but of theology. Athens has been but the instrument of Heaven; Persia has fallen, not through the brawn of oarsmen or the skill of captains, but through the blasphemous infatuation of her prince and the wrath of God following thereupon.

O God, thy arm was here;

And not to us, but to thy arm alone,

Ascribe we all! When, without stratagem,

But in plain shock and even play of battle,

Was ever known so great and little loss

On one part and on th’ other? Take it, God,

For it is none but thine![219]

He is little concerned with that play of human psychology on the Greek side, which forms so brilliant a page of Herodotus. Even when he narrates that trick by which the conflict was precipitated, the false message from Themistocles to Xerxes, nothing is said of the reasons for sending it. Though the antecedent “facts” are known, yet he chooses to tell what he does indeed regard as the truth, that the whole error of the king came from “a fiend or evil spirit,” and that he fell into the trap because “he perceived not the guile of the Greek nor the spite of Heaven”.[220] On the Greek side, then, “the creatures of a day” are lost in the vision of eternal righteousness. But the poet has no such reason to obliterate the mighty names of Persia. Almost the whole effect of them is for us lost; but to an Athenian ear these barbaric polysyllables must have sounded with all the pomp of an ancient chivalry, the waves of the boundless and terrible Orient descending in deluge upon the tiny states of Hellas. But the billows at their highest had been stayed and had sunk; the appalling roll of warlike titles was changed into a proclamation of glory—but not the glory of Greece. No Greek name is immortalized in this play, which resounds at every moment with the name of God.

The Seven Against Thebes[221] (Οἱ Ἑπτὰ ἐπὶ Θήβας) was produced in 467 B.C. and deals with the fratricidal quarrel of the sons of Œdipus. Eteocles, the elder, had become King of Thebes and expelled his brother Polynices. The latter with six comrades-in-arms and an host led by Adrastus, King of Argos, attacked the city. The seven invading champions were met at the seven gates by as many Theban warriors. The scene is laid in an open space in the town. A messenger brings to Eteocles the news that the enemy are on the point of assaulting the walls. The chorus, consisting of Theban maidens, enter, and in a vivid lyric express their frantic terror. Eteocles attempts to calm them, urging that their outcries will demoralize the citizens; but soon they burst forth again into wild forebodings. Then follows a long scene in which the messenger describes the seven heroes who are to attack at the seven gates. As each is described Eteocles allots one of his comrades for defence. The seventh enemy is Polynices, the king’s own brother; Eteocles, spurred on by the curse of his house, declares that he will himself confront Polynices. He rushes away and the maidens lament the frightful story of Œdipus’ curse. The messenger returns with the news that the invaders have been routed and that the brothers have fallen by each other’s hand. After the chorus have lamented this crime, the corpses are brought forward, accompanied by Antigone and Ismene, sisters of the dead, who utter an antiphonal dirge. They are interrupted by a herald who proclaims the decree of the “people’s councillors”. Eteocles is to be honourably buried; his brother is to be left to the dogs and birds of prey. Antigone defies the decree and declares that she will bury Polynices. The chorus divide into two parties, one supporting Antigone, the other giving obedience to the State.

This tragedy won the prize. The trilogy consisted of Laius, Œdipus, the Seven, with the Sphinx as satyric play. Aristeas and Polyphradmon, the sons of Pratinas and Phrynichus respectively, were second and third. Very little is known about the companion plays. The Laius contained a reference to the exposure of the infant Œdipus; the Œdipus described the death of Laius.

The Seven is a magnificently vigorous and graphic presentment of war in one of its aspects. As such it is eulogized by Aristophanes, who puts into the mouth of Æschylus the boast that he “composed a drama full of the War-God—my Seven against Thebes”.[222] The chief excellences are the first chorus and the celebrated Choosing of the Champions. This latter contained the best-known passage in the play, where the messenger says of Amphiaraus:—[223]

σῆμα δ’ οὐκ ἐπῆν κύκλῳ

οὐ γὰρ δοκεῖν ἄριστος, ἀλλ’ εἶναι θέλει,

βαθεῖαν ἄλοκα διὰ φρενὸς καρπούμενος,

ἐξ ἧς τὰ κεδνὰ βλαστάνει βουλεύματα.

His buckler bore no blazon; for he seeks

Not to seem great, but to be great indeed,

Reaping the deep-ploughed furrow of his soul

Wherefrom the harvest of good counsel springs.

As these lines were declaimed in the theatre, Plutarch[224] tells us, every one turned and gazed at Aristides the Just. The first half of the play is in strictness not dramatic[225] at all—a merely static presentment of the situation: a city in a state of siege, panic among the women, resolution in the mind of the general. The later portion gives us decisive action. The King rushes to his fratricidal duel, spurred on by the invisible curse; but even here there is no dramatic conflict of personalities like the altercation between the brothers in the Phœnissæ of Euripides. Such a collision is, however, provided at the very end, where Antigone defies the State.

As regards the Prometheus Vinctus (Προμηθεὺς δεσμώτης, “Prometheus Bound”) we are in doubt as to the date, the arrangement of the cast, and the other parts of the trilogy.

Concerning the date, we know that the play was written after 475 B.C., the year in which occurred that eruption of Etna described by Prometheus (vv. 363-72). Further, it is usually regarded as later than the Seven owing to the increased preponderance of dialogue over lyrics. Also, the supposition that three actors are required has led some scholars to believe that the Prometheus belongs to the period when Sophocles had introduced a third actor, and so to place it in the last part of the poet’s life.[226] The static nature of the drama might seem to forbid such a view, but possibly it formed the centre of the trilogy, the most likely place for an equilibrium of the tragic forces. And the theological basis of the whole series is so profound, that an approximation in date to the Oresteia is not unreasonable. On the whole, then, the Prometheus may be conjecturally assigned to about the year 465 B.C.

As for the division of the parts among the actors, we find in the opening scene three[227] persons engaged, Prometheus, Hephæstus, and Cratos (“Strength”). Prometheus, however, does not utter a word until his tormentors have retired, and it has been held that only two actors are needed here (as in the rest of the work). On this view, Prometheus would be represented by a lay-figure, either Hephæstus or Cratos would return unseen, delivering the later speeches of Prometheus from behind the figure, through a mouth-piece in the head. But as there was no curtain in the theatre, it would be necessary for the executioners to carry the lay-figure forth in view of the audience before the action began. The true objection to this is not its absurdity; an audience will tolerate much awkwardness in stage-management, if only it is accustomed to such conventions. But it would scarcely have harmed the play if the poet had dispensed with Cratos; the actor thus disengaged could have impersonated Prometheus from the beginning. That Æschylus saw this possibility cannot be doubted; therefore he did not feel bound to use a lay-figure; therefore he did not, and we must assume that he employed three actors.