Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/54

26 fifth century after Christ there is a chain of writers of philosophy or on the history of philosophy and philosophers. The early philosophers, who mostly engaged in speculations as to the physical universe, lived in various parts of Greece—Ionia, Magna Graecia, and Sicily—but in the fifth century we find that all teachers have a tendency to drift to Athens, and when about B.C. 300 and onward literature found a centre rather in Alexandria, Athens still maintained its prestige as the home of philosophy. It was there that the four great schools—Academics, Peripatetics, Stoics, and Epicureans—through all their later developments had their headquarters, and attracted the best intellects of Greece and Rome.

But the most characteristic literature in Greece is the dramatic. The exhibition of plays may have begun, as some think, in village festivals of harvest or vintage, and the story of Thespis, the first exhibitor of them in Athens, travelling round the country with his theatrical properties in a cart, may be true. But their literary shape seems certainly a development from the Comus, or revel-song, and especially from that part of it called a dithyramb, or hymn in honour of Bacchus. It was chiefly in use among Dorian peoples, and accordingly the employment of the Dorian dialect in the choric songs of later days became traditional. To this song was added a dialogue between the leader of the chorus and an "answerer", and as the plot or fable became more important and intricate a second and third actor was added to carry on the dialogues. But whatever their origin these exhibitions rapidly