that competed with the amphitheatre — and bid us

construct an idea of the drama of Euripides out of

203



204 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

the ghastly farrago. It is one of the immediate duties
of archaeological research to set us right again where
architjological text-books have set us so miserably
wrong.

Still our undoubted literary tradition does contain
strong elements of conventionalism. The characters
are all saga-people ; ^ they all speak in verse ; they tend
to speak at equal length, and they almost never interrupt
except at the end of a line. Last and worst, there is
eternally present a chorus of twelve or fifteen homo-
geneous persons— maidens, matrons, elders, captives, or
the like — whose main duty is to minimise the inconve-
nience of their presence during the action, and to dance
and sing in a conventional Doric dialect during the inter-
vals. The explanation of this is, of course, historical.

We have seen above (p. 99) how the Silenus-choir
of the Centaur-like followers of Dionysus was merged
into the Satyr-choir of wild mountain-goats in the
suite of the Arcadian mountain-god Pan. 'Tragos' is
a goat; 'tragikos choros ' a goat-choir; and 'tragoidia'
a goat-song. The meaning of the word only changed
because the thing it denoted changed. Tragedy de-
veloped from the Dorian goat-choirs of the Northern
Peloponnese —those of Arion at Corinth, and of the
precursors of Pratinas at Phlius, and those w^hich the
tyrant Cleisthenes suppressed at Sikyon for " celebrating
the sufferings of Adrastus." ^



^J3"



1 The best known exception is the Flower* (or Antheus) of Agathon.
Agathon left Athens (about 407) at the age of forty, when he had already won
a position inferior only to that of Sophocles and Euripides, but before his in-
dividual originality and his Socratic or Platonic spirit had a permanent effect
on the drama. Aristophanes had assailed him vehemently in the Thesmo-
phoriazusa and Gerytades * — a testimony to his ' advanced ' spirit in art,

2 Hdt. V. 67.



ORIGINS OF TRAGEDY 205

Of course, other influences may also have helped.
There was a mimetic element in the earliest popular
poetry, and we hear of ^ droj/iena' (things performed)
— the word lies very near ' drama ' (performance) — in
many religious cults. The birth of Zeus was acted
in Crete ; his marriage with Hera, in Samos, Crete, and
Aigos. There were sacred puppets, ' Daidala,' at Plataea.
The * Crane-Dance ' of Delos showed Theseus saving the
children from the Labyrinth ; and even the mysteries
at Eleusis and elsewhere made their revelations more to
mortal eyes by spectacle than to mortal ears by definite
statement.

The first step in the transformation of the goat-choir
took place on Attic soil, when the scng poetry of the
Dorian met the speech poetry of Ionia. A wide-spread
tradition tells us that Thespis of the village Icaria was the
first poet who, " to rest his dancers and vary the enter-
tainment," came forward personally at intervals and
recited to the public a speech in trochaic tetrameters,
like those metrical haran^ aes which Solon had declaimed
in the market-place.^ His first victory was in 534 B.C.
His successors were Choirilus and a foreigner who
performed in Attica, Pratinas of Phlius.

The choir were still satyrs at this stage. What was the
poet? Probably he represented the hero of the play,
the legendary king or god. An old saying, not under-
stood afterw^ards, speaks of the time " when Choirilus was
a king among satyrs." But if the poet represented one
character, why should he not represent more ? If he

^ Aristotle does not mention Thespis ; and the pseudo-Platonic dialogue
Minos says expressly that tragedy did not start, "as people imagine," with
Thespis, nor yet with Phrynichus, but was much older. See Hilier in Kh.
Mus. xxxix. 321.

15



2o6 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

came on first, say, as the King Lycurgus, let jiim change
his dress during the next song and re-enter as the priest
whom Lycurgus has scorned; next time he may be a
messenger announcing the tyrant's death. All that is
needed is a place to dress in. A section of the round
dancing-floor ('orchestra') is cut off; a booth or 'skene'
is erected, and the front of it made presentable.
Normally it becomes a palace with three doors for the
actor-poet to go in and out of. Meantime the character
of the dancing is somewhat altered, because there is no
longer a ring to dance in ; the old ring-dance or * cyclic
chorus ' has turned into the * square ' chorus of tragedy.

Of course, the choir can change costume too :
Pratinas once had a choir representing Dymanian
dancing girls. But that was a more serious business,
and seems to have required a rather curious intermediate
stage. There are titles of plays, such as The Huntsmen-
Satyrs,* Herald- Satyrs,* Wrestler- Satyj's.* Does not
this imply ^ something like the Maccus a Soldier,
Maccus an Innkeeper, of the Italian 'Atellanae,' like
The Devil a Monk in English ? The actor does not
represent a soldier simply ; he represents the old stage
buffoon Maccus pretending to be a soldier. The choir
are not heralds ; they are satyrs masquerading as such.
It is the natural end of this kind of entertainment to
have the disguise torn off, and the satyrs, or Maccus,
or the Devil, revealed in their true characters. In
practice the tragic choirs were allowed three changes
of costume before they appeared as satyrs confessed.
That is, to use the language of a later time, each per-
formance was a 'tetralogy' — three 'tragedies' ('little
myths,' Aristotle calls them by comparison with the

I W. M. Herakks, i. p. 88.



THE STAGE AND THE ACTORS 207

longer plays of his own day), followed by a satyric
drama. The practice did not die till the middle period
of Euripides. His Cyclops is the one satyr-play extant,
while his Alkcstis is a real drama acted as a concluding
piece to three tragedies.

The Greek word for actor, 'hypocrites/ means 'an-
swerer.' The poet was really the actor ; but if he
wanted to develop his solitary declamation into dia-
logue, he needed some one to answer him. The chorus
was normally divided into two parts, as the system of
strophe and antistrophe testifies. The poet perhaps took
for answerers the leaders of these two parts. At any
rate, ' three actors ' are regularly found in the fully-
developed tragedy. The old round choir consisted
of fifty dancers and a poet : the full tragic company
of forty-eight dancers, two ' answerers,' and a poet.
That was all that the so-called ' choregiis' — the rich
citizen who undertook the expenses of the perform-
ance — was ever bound to supply; and munificent as
this functionary often was in other respects, his ' para-
ckoregemata,' or gifts of supererogation, never took the
form of a fourth actor in the proper sense. Nor did
he provide four changes of costume for the whole forty-
eight dancers; they appeared twelve at a time in the
four plays of the tetralogy. The tradition says loosely
that Thespis had one actor, .^schylus two, and Sophocles
three, though sometimes it is .^schylus who introduced
the third. As a matter of fact, it was the state, not the
poet, which gave fixed prizes to the actors, and settled
the general conduct of the Dionysus Feast. Accordingly,
when we find an ancient critic attributing particular
scenic changes to particular poets, this as a rule only
means that the changes appeared to him to occur for



208 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

the first time in their works. A mutilated inscription i
seems to give us the date of some important altera-
tion or ratification of stage arrangements. It admitted
Comedy to the great Dionysia ; it perhaps established
the ' three actors/ perhaps raised the tragic chorus from
twelve to fifteen, and perhaps made the palace-front
scene a permanency. The poets tended naturally to
retire from acting, ^schylus ceased in his later life.
Sophocles is said to have found his voice too weak.
The profession of actor must have been established
before 456 B.C., when we first find the victorious
actors mentioned officially along with the poet and the
'choregus.'

The chorus was the main substance of the tragedy.
Two main processes were needed to make a complete
performance : the ' choregus ' ' provided a chorus,' the
poet 'taught the chorus '—those were the difficult things.
The mere composition was a matter of detail, which any
good poet was ready to do for you. All the technical
terms are formed with reference to the chorus. The
* prologue ' is all that comes before their entrance ; an
'episodion' is the 'entry to' the chorus of any fresh
character ; the close of the play is an ' exodus,' because
they then depart. But the chorus was doomed to
dwindle as tragedy grew. Dialogue is the essence of
drama ; and the dialogue soon became, in Aristotle's
phrase, 'the protagonist.' We can see it developing
even in our scanty remains. It moves from declaimed
poetry to dramatic speech ; it grows less grand and
stiff, more rapid and conversational. It also increases
in extent. In the Supplimits of ^schylus (before
470 B.C.; the chorus are really the heroines of the

^ C. I. A. ii. 971.



MUSIC IN TRAGEDY 209

play. They are singing for two-thirds of it. They are
present from the first line to the last. In the Philoctetes
of Sophocles (409 B.C.) they are personally unimportant,
they do not appear till the play is well in train, and
their songs fill about one-sixth of the whole. This is
one reason why the later plays are so much longer than
the earlier : they were quicker to act.

There was, however, another influence affecting the
musical side of tragedy in a very different manner. The
singing gradually ceased to be entirely in the hands of
the chorus. The historical fact is that with the rise
of the Athenian Democracy the chorus ceased to be
professional. It consisted of free burghers who under-
took the performance of the public religious dances as
one of their privileges or duties.^ The consequence
was that the dancing became less elaborate. The metres
and the singing had to be within the capabilities of the
average musical man. But meanwhile the general in-
terest in music w^as growing deeper, and the public
taste more exacting in its demands. The average choir-
song lost its hold on the cultivated Athenian of the war
time. If he w^as to have mu-ic, let him have something
more subtle and moving than that, something more like
the living music of the dithyramb, w^hich was now
increasingly elaborate and professional. So while be-
tween ^schylus and the later plays of Sophocles the
musical side of the drama is steadily falling back,
between the earlier and later plays of Euripides it is
growing again. But it is no longer the music of the
chorus. Euripides used ' answerers ' who were also
trained singers ; he abounds in ' monodies ' or solos.
In the Medea (431 B.C.) the lyrical part is about a fifth

^ Resp. Ath. i. 13.



2 10 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

of the whole ; in the Ion (414 B.C.) it is nearly half, bat
the monodies and part-songs amount to half as much
again as the choir-songs. In the Orestes (408 B.C.) the
solo parts are three times as long as the choral parts.
One apparent exception to this rule really illustrates
its meaning. The Bacchce, one of the very latest plays,
has a large choral element and no monodies. Why ?
Because when Euripides wrote it he had migrated to
Macedonia, and apparently had not taken his operatic
actors with him. Macedonia had no drama ; but it had
a living dithyramb with professional performers, and it
was they who sang in the Bacchc^.

This upward movement of the satyr-song was due to
various causes — to the spiritual crises that ennobled the
Athenian people ; to the need for some new form of art
to replace the dying epos as a vehicle for the heroic
saga ; to the demand made by Dionysus-worship for
that intensity of emotion which is almost of necessity
tragic. The expropriated satyrs were consigned, with
their quaint old-world buffoonery, to a private corner at
the end of the three tragedies, and the comic element
was left to develop itself in a separate form of art.

To us in our reflective moods comedy and tragedy
seem only two sides of the same thing, the division
between them scarcely tangible ; and so thought the
Athens of Menander. But historically they are of
different pedigree. Tragedy springs from the artistic
and professional choir-song ; comedy, from the mum-
ming of rustics at vintage and harvest feasts. " Tragedy
arose from the dithyramb," says Aristotle ; " comedy,
from the phallic performances." These were celebrated
in honour of the spirits of fructification and increase
in man, beast, or herb, which were worshipped under



ORIGINS OF COMEDY 211

various names in different parts of Greece. It was
Dionysus at Acharnas, in Rhodes, and in Delos. It
was the sisters Damia and Auxesia in ^gina ; Demeter
in some parts of Attica ; Pan in the Northern Pelopon-
nese. It is always a shock to the modern imagination
to come upon the pubHc estabhshment of such mon-
strously indecent performances among a people so far
more simple and less self-indulgent than ourselves.
But, apart from possible elements of unconscious
hypocrisy on our own part, there are many things
to be borne in mind. In dealing with those elements
in human nature which are more permanent than re-
spectable, the characteristic Greek method was frank
recognition and regulation. A pent-up force becomes
dangerous ; let all natural impulses be given free play in
such ways and on such occasions as will do least damage.
There were the strictest laws against the abuse of these
festivals, against violence, against the undue participation
of the young ; but there was, roughly speaking, no shame
and no secrecy. We have, unfortunately, lost Aristotle's
philosophy of comedy. It was in the missing part of the
Poetics. But when he explains the moral basis of tragedy
as being " to purge our minds of their vague impulses of
pity and terror" by a strong bout of these emotions;
when he justifies ' tumultuous ' music as affording a
* purgation ' of the wild emotional element in our
nature which might else break out in what he calls
' enthousiasmos' ; it is easy to see that the licences in
comedy might be supposed to effect a more obvious
and necessary purgation.^ Besides this, we must not

' The definition in frag. 3, Vahlen, says this directly: "â– ^Soi't; and â– yi\wi
are to be so purged by comedy." But is the whole passage a genuine quota-
tion, or is it rather a deduction of Aristotle's views ?



2 12 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

forget that there was always present in Greece an
active protest against these performances ; that even
absolute asceticism was never without its apostles ;
and, lastly, that where religion gives sanctity to a bad
custom it palsies the powers of the saner intellect.
Without a doubt many a modest and homely priestess
of Dionysus must have believed in the beneficial effects
both here and hereafter of these ancient and symbolical
processions.

One of the characteristics of the processions was
'parrkesia ' (' free speech ') ; and it remained the proud
privilege of comedy. You mocked and insulted freely
on the day of special licence any of those persons to
whom fear or good manners kept you silent in ordinary
life. In some of the processions this privilege was speci-
ally granted to women. As soon as comedy began to be
seriously treated, the central point of it lay in a song,
written and learned, in which the choir, acting merely
as the mouthpiece of the poet, addressed the public on
'topical' subjects. This became the 'parabasis' of the
full-grown comedy. For the rest, the germ of comedy is
a troop of mummers at the feast of Dionysus or some
similar god, who march with flute and pipe, sing a
phallic song, and amuse the onlookers with improvised
buffoonery. They are unpaid, unauthorised. It was not
till about 465 B.C. that public recognition was given to
the ' komoi,' or revel-bands, and ^ komoidia' allowed to
stand by the side of ^ tragoidia! It came first at the
Lenaea, afterwards at other Dionysiac festivals. But it
was not till the beginning of the Peloponnesian War that
two gifted young writers, Eupolis and Aristophanes,
eventually gave the Old Comedy an artistic form, wove
the isolated bits of farce into a plot, and more or less



DEVELOPMENT OF COMEDY 213

abolished or justified the phallic element.^ After that
comedy develops even more rapidly than tragedy. The
chorus takes a more real and lifelike part in the action ;
its inherent absurdity does much less harm, and it dis-
appears more rapidly. The last work of Aristophanes
is almost without chorus, and marks the intermediate
development known as the Middle Comedy, tamer than
the Old, not so perfect as the New. Then comes, in
weaker hands, alas ! and brains less ' daemonic,' the
realisation of the strivings of Euripides, the triumph of
the dramatic principle, the art that is neither tragic nor
comic but both at once, which aims self-consciously at
being " the imitation of life, the mirror of human inter-
course, the expression of reality." ^ This form of art
once established lasted for centuries. It began shortly
after 400 B.C., when public poverty joined with artistic
feeling in securing the abolition of the costly chorus,
and when the free libel of public persons had, after
long struggles and reactions, become finally recognised
as offensive. It reached its zenith with Menander and
Philemon about 300 B.C. ; while inscriptions of various
dates about 160 have recently taught us that even at
that time five original comedies a year were still ex-
pected at the great Dionysia, besides the reproduc-
tion of old ones. It is a curious irony of fortune
that has utterly obliterated, save for a large store
of 'fragments' and a few coarse Latin adaptations,
the whole of this exceptionally rich department of
ancient literature.

* Abolished in the Clouds, justified in the Lysist^'ata.
'â– ' Cic. de Repub. iv. 11, quoting a Peripatetic (?).



214 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

Phrynichus, son op^ Polyphradmon (/. 494 b.c.)

The least shadowy among the pre-^schylean drama-
tists is Phrynichus. Tradition gives us the names of
nine of his plays, and tells us that he used the trochaic
tetrameter in his dialogue, and introduced women's
parts. We hear that he made a play on the Capture
of Miletus ; * that a fine was put on him for doing so,
and notice issued that the subject must not be treated
again. The fall of Miletus was a national grief, and
perhaps a disgrace ; at any rate, it involved party politics
of too extreme a sort. Phrynichus had better fortune
with his other play from contemporary history, the
Phceniss(E; * its chorus representing the wives of Xerxes'
Phoenician sailors, and its opening scene the king's
council-chamber, with the elders waiting for news of
the great war. He won the prize that time, and probably
had for 'choregus' Themistocles himself, the real, though
of course unmentioned, hero of the piece. It is the
lyrics that we most regret to have lost, the quaint
obsolete songs still hummed in the days of the Pelo-
ponnesian War by the tough old survivors of Marathon,
who went about at unearthly hours of the morning —

" Lights in their hands, old music on their lips,
Wild honey a?id the East and loveliness^'' ^

A certain grace and tenderness suggested by our remains
of Phrynichus enable us to realise how much -^^schylus's
grand style is due to his own character rather than to the
conditions of the art in his time ; though it remains true
that the Persian W^ar did for tragedy what the Migrations
seem to have done for Homer, and that Phrynichus and
.(Eschylus are both of them ' men of Marathon.'

^ Aristoph. Vesp. 220.



X

^SCHYLUS

^SCHYLUS, SON OF EUPHORION, FROM ELEUSIS

(525-456 B.C.)

^SCHYLUS was by birth an Eupatrid, of the old
nobihty. He came from Eleusis, the seat not only of
the Demeter Mysteries, but also of a special worship
of Dionysus-Zagreus, and close to Thespis's own deme
Icaria. We hear that he began writing young ; but he
was called away from his plays, in 490, to fight at
Marathon, where his brother Kynegeirus met a heroic
death, and he won his first victory in the middle of the
nine years of peace which followed (484). Four years
later he joined in the general exodus to the ships and
Salamis, leaving the stones of Athens for the barbarians
to do their will upon. These were years in which
tragedies and big thoughts might shape themselves in
men's minds. They were not years for much actual
writing and play-acting. In 476 ^schylus seems to
have been at the wars in Thrace ; we have echoes of
them in the Lyairgus* Trilogy and in the Persce (esp.
866). Soon after that again he was in Syracuse, perhaps
on a diplomatic mission, and wrote his Women of Etna*
in honour of the town of that name which Hiero had
just founded (476-475) on the slopes of the mountain.
From 484 onwards he was probably the chief figure



215



2i6 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

in Attic letters ; though his old rivals Pratinas and
Phrynichiis, and their respective sons Aristias and
Polyphradmon, among others, doubtless won prizes
over his head from time to time, and, for all we know,
deserved them. The earliest play we possess is the
Suppliant -Women ; the earliest of known date is the
PerscZy which won the first prize in 472.

In 470 he was again in Syracuse, and again the
reason is not stated, though we hear that he repro-
duced the PerscE there. In 468 he was beaten for the
first time by the young Sophocles. The next year he
was again victor with the Seven against Thebes. We
do not know the year of his great Prometheus Trilogy,
but it and the Lykurgeia * seem to have come after this.
His last victory of all was the Oresteia {Agamemnon^
Choephoroi, and Eumenides) in 458. He was again in
Sicily after this — the little men of the Decadence sug-
gest that he was jealous of Sophocles's victory of ten
years back! — and died suddenly at Gela in 456. His
plays went in and out of fashion at Athens, and a
certain party liked to use him chiefly as a stick for
beating Euripides ; but a special law was passed after
his death for the reproduction of his tragedies, and he
had settled into his definite place as a classic before the
time of Plato. The celebrated bronze statue of him was
made for the stone theatre built by Lycurgus about 330.

The epitaph he is said to have written for his tomb
at Gela is characteristic : no word of his poetry ; only
two lines, after the necessary details of name and birth-
place, telling how the ''grove of Marathon can bear witness
to his good soldierhood, and the long-haired Mede who felt
it." It is very possible that the actual facing of death
on that first great day remained with him as the supreme



LIFE OF ^SCHYLUS: EARLY PLAYS 217

moment of his life, and that his poetry had failed to
satisfy him. It often leaves th2it impression, even at
its most splendid heights.

Of the ninety plays ^schylus wrote, we possess seven.
The earliest, on internal grounds, is the Suppliant- Women
— a most quaint and beautiful work, like one of those
archaic statues which stand with limbs stiff and coun-
tenance smiling and stony. The subject, too, is of
the primitive type, more suited for a cantata than for
a play. The suppliants are the fifty daughters of
Danaus, who have fled to Argos to avoid marrying
their cousins, the fifty sons of ^gyptus. Their horror
is evidence of a time when the marriage of first cousins
was counted incestuous. They appeal for protection
to Pelasgus, king of Argos, who refers the question
to the Demos. The Demos accepts the suppliants,
and the proud Egyptian herald is defied. The other
plays of the trilogy had more action. In the Makers
of the Bride-Bed* the sons of ^gyptus follow the
Danaids, conquer Danaus in battle, and msist on the
marriage. Danaus, preferring murder to incest, com-
mands his daughters to stab their husbands on their
bridal night ; all do so except Hypermestra, who is
put on trial in the Danaides * for marriage with a
cousin and for filial disobedience, and is acquitted
by the help of Aphrodite. Our play seems to have
been acted on the old round dancing-floor, with a
platform in the middle, and images round it. There
is no palace front ; and the permanent number of fifty
in the chorus throughout the trilogy suggests the idea
that the old round choir may have been still undivided.

The PerscB (472) was the second piece of a trilogy.