Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/234

210 of the whole; in the Ion (414 ) it is nearly half, but the monodies and part-songs amount to half as much again as the choir-songs. In the Orestes (408 ) the solo parts are three times as long as the choral parts. One apparent exception to this rule really illustrates its meaning. The Bacchæ, 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 Bacchæ.

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 mumming 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