Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/344

 522 HISTORY OF GREECE. level of humanity only in such measure as to present a strcnger claim to the hearer's admiration or pity. So powerful a body of poetical influence has probably never been brought to act upon the emotions of any other population ; and when we consider the extraordinary beauty of these immortal compositions, which first stamped tragedy as a separate department of poetry, and gave to it a dignity never since reached, we shall be satisfied that the tastes, the sentiments, and the intellectual standard, of the Athe- nian multitude, must have been sensibly improved and exalted by such lessons. The reception of such pleasures through the eye and the ear, as well as amidst a sympathizing crowd, was a fact of no small importance in the mental history of Athens. It contributed to exalt their imagination, like the grand edifices and ornaments added during the same period to their acropolis. Like them, too, and even more than they, tragedy was the monopoly of Athens ; for while tragic composers came thither from other parts of Greece Achaeus from Eretria, and Ion from Chios, at a time when the Athenian empire comprised both those places to exhibit their genius, nowhere else were original tragedies com- posed and acted, though hardly any considerable city was without a theatre. 1 The three great tragedians JEschylus, Sophokles, and Eurip- ides distinguished above all their competitors, as well by con- temporaries as by subsequent critics, are interesting to us, 'not merely from the positive beauties of each, but also from the differences between them in handling, style, and sentiment, and from the manner in which these differences illustrate the insen- sible modification of the Athenian mind. Though the subjects, persons, and events of tragedy always continued to be borrowed from the legendary world, and were thus kept above the level of contemporaneous life, 2 yet the dramatic manner of handling them is sensibly modified, even in Sophokles as compared with ./Eschy- lus ; and still more in Euripides, by the atmosphere of democracy, political and judicial contention, and philosophy, encompassing and acting upon the poet. 1 Sco Plato, Laches, c. 6, p. 183, B. ; and Wclcker, Gnech. Iragod. p J.-50.
 * Upon th:i point, compare Welcker, Gricch. Tragckl. vol. ii, p. 1102.