Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/425

405 GKEEIt.] I. The period before ^Eschylus (535-499). From this we have but a few names of authors and plays those of the former being (besides Thespis) Choerilus, Phrynichus, and Pra*tinas, all of whom lived to contend with ^Eschylus for the tragic prize. To each of them certain innovations are ascribed among the rest the introduction of female characters to Phrynichus. II. The classical period of Attic tragedy that of TEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and their con temporaries (499-405). To this belong all the really im portant phases in the progress of Greek tragedy, which severally connect themselves with the names of its three great masters. They may be regarded as the representa tives of different generations of Attic history and life, though of course in these, as in the progress of their art itself, there is an unbroken continuity. ^Eschylus (525-456) had not only fought both at Marathon and at Salamis against those Persians whose rout he celebrated with patriotic pride, 1 but he had been trained in the Eleusinian mysteries, and was a passionate upholder of the institution most intimately associated with the primitive political traditions of the past the Areopagus. 2 He had been born in the generation after Solon, to whose maxims he fondly clung ; he must have belonged to that anti- democratical party which favoured the Spartan alliance, and it was the Dorian development of Hellenic life and the philosophical system based upon it with which his religious and moral convictions were imbued. Thus even upon the generation which succeeded him the chivalrous spirit and diction of his poetry, and the unapproached sublimity of his dramatic imagination, fell, as it falls upon later posterity, like the note of a mightier age. Sophocles (495-405) was the associate of Pericles, and an upholder of his authority rather than a consistent pupil of his political ideas ; but his manhood and perhaps the maturity of his genius coincided with the great days when he could stand, like his mighty friend and the community they both so gloriously repre sented, on the sunny heights of achievement. Serenely pious, he yet treats the myths of the national religion in the spirit of a conscious artist, contrasting with lofty irony the struggles of humanity with the irresistible march of its destinies. His art (which he described as having passed through three successive stages) may in its perfection be said to typify the watchful and creative calm of his city s im perial epoch. Euripides (480-406), as is the fate of genius of a more complex kind, has been more variously and anti thetically judged than either of his great fellow-tragedians. His art has been called thinner and tamer than theirs, his genius rhetorical rather than poetical, his morality that of a sophistical wit. On the other hand, he has been recognized not only as the most tragic of the Attic tragedians and the most pathetic of ancient poets, but also as the most humane in his social philosophy and the most various in his psychological insight. At least though far removed from the naiver age of the national life, he is, both in patriotic spirit and in his choice of themes, genuinely Attic ; and if he was &quot; haunted on the stage by the dgemon of Socrates,&quot; he was, like Socrates himself, the representative of an age which was a seed-time as well as a season of decay. To Euripides the general progress of dramatic literature owes more than to any other ancient poet. Tragedy followed in his footsteps in Greece and at Rome ; comedy owed him something in the style of the very Aristophanes who mocked him, and more in the sentiments of Menander; and when the modern drama came to engraft the ancient upon its own crude growth, his was directly or indirectly the most powerful influence in the establishment of a living connection between them. 1 I crscK. Eumenides. The incontestable pre-eminence of the three great tragic The gn poets was acknowledged at Athens by the usage allowing tra oic O J O ftifLs^ei ^ no tragedies but theirs to be more than once performed, tll eir c( and by the law of Lycurgtis (c. 330) which obliged the actors tempor to use, in the case of works of the great masters, authentic ries. copies preserved in the public archives. It is thus not impossible that the value of later Attic tragedy, of which the fertility continued considerable, has been under-rated. In all the names of 1400 tragedies and satyr-dramas are preserved ; and tragic poets are mentioned of whose plays no names are known. Among the more celebrated Attic tragedians contemporary with the great writers, Ion of Chios (d. before 419) seems to have followed earlier tradi tions of style than Euripides ; Agathon, who survived the latter, on the other hand, introduced certain innovations of a transnormal kind into the art of tragic composition. III. Of the third 2^erlod of Greek tragedy the concluding Last limit cannot be precisely fixed. Down to the days of F el iod - Alexander the Great, Athens remained the chief home of tragedy. Though tragedies must have begun to be acted The sn at the Syracusan and Macedonian courts, since .^Eschylus, sors of Euripides, and Agathon had sojourned there, though the j^ ter practice of producing plays at the Dionysia before the allies Athens of Athens must have led to their holding similar exhibi tions at home, yet before the death of Alexander we meet with no instance of a tragic poet writing or a tragedy written outside Athens. An exception should indeed be made in favour of the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse, who (like Critias in his earlier days at Athens) was &quot; addicted to &quot; tragic composition. Not all the tragedians of this period, however, were Athenians born ; though the names of Euphorion, the son of vEschylus, lophon, the son of Sophocles, and Euripides and Sophocles, the nephew and the grandson respectively of their great namesakes, illustrate the descent of the tragic art as an hereditary family posses sion. Chaeremon (fl. 380) already exhibits tragedy on the road to certain decay, for we learn that his plays were written for reading. Soon after the death of Alexander theatres are found spread over the whole Hellenic world of Europe and Asia a result to which the practice of the conqueror and his father of celebrating their victories by scenic performances had doubtless contributed. Alexandria having now The A become a literary centre with which even Athens was in an(iriai some respects unable to compete, while the latter still remained the home of comedy, the tragic poets flocked to the capital of the Ptolemies ; and here, in the reign of Ptolemy Pliiladelphus (283-247) flourished the seven tragic poets famed as the &quot;Pleias,&quot; who still wrote in the style and. followed the rules observed by the Attic masters. Tragedy and the dramatic art continued to be favoured by the later Ptolemies ; and about 100 B.C. we meet with the curious phenomenon of a Jewish poet, Ezechiel, composing Greek tragedies, of one of which (the Exodus from Egypt) frag ments have come down to us. Tragedy, with the satyr- drama and comedy, survived in Alexandria beyond the days of Cicero and Varro, nor was their doom finally sealed till the Emperor Caracalla abolished theatrical performances in the Egyptian capital in 217 A.D. During the whole of its productive age Greek tragedy The tr seems to have adhered to the lines laid down by its great Attic masters ; nor were these in most respects departed from by the Homan imitators of these poets and of their successors. Tragedy was defined by Plato as an imitation of the Subjec noblest life. Its proper themes the deeds and sufferings of heroes were familiar to audiences intimately acquainted with the mythology of the national religion. To such themes Greek tragedy almost wholly confined itself ; and in later days there were numerous books which discussed these