Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/357

 RHETORIC IN THE DRAMA. 335 false character, and by its effusion of sentiments not genuine or sincere to corrupt the integrity of human dealings ; 1 a charge of corruption, not unlike that which Aristophanes worked up, a century afterwards, in his " Clouds," against physics, rhetoric, and dialectics, in the person of Sokrates. But the properties of the graft had overpowered and subordinated those of the original stem ; so that dramatic poetry was now a distinct form, subject to laws of its own, and shining with splendor equal, if not superior, to the elegiac, choric, lyric, and epic poetry which constituted the previous stock of the Grecian world. Such transformations in the poetry, or, to speak more justly, in the literature for before the year 500 B.C. the two expressions were equivalent of Greece, Avere at once products, marks, and auxiliaries, in the expansion of the national mind. Our minds have now become familiar with dramatic combinations, which have ceased to be peculiar to any special form or conditions of political society. But if we compare the fifth century B.C. with that which preceded it, the recently born drama will be seen to have been a most important and impressive novelty : and so assuredly it would have been regarded by Solon, the largest mind of his own age, if he could have risen again, a century and a quarter after his death, to witness the Antigone of Sophokles, the Medea of Euripides, or the Acharneis of Aristophanes. Its novelty does not consist merely in the high order of imagi- nation and judgment required for the construction of a drama at once regular and effective. This, indeed, is no small addition to Grecian poetical celebrity as it stood in the days of Solon, Alkasus, Sappho, and Stesichorus : but we must remember that the epical structure of the Odyssey, so ancient and long acquired to the Hellenic world, implies a reach of architectonic talent quite equal to that exhibited in the most symmetrical drama of Sophokles. The great innovation of the dramatists consisted in the rhetorical, the dialectical, and the ethical spirit which they breathed into their poetry. Of all this, the undeveloped germ doubtless existed in the previous epic, lyric, and gnomic compo- sition ; but the drama stood distinguished from all three by 1 Plutarch, Solon, c. 29. See the previous volumes of this History, ch zzi, vol. ii, p. 145 ; ch. xxix, vol. ir, pp. 83, 84.