Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/333

311 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 311 which the progress of the action causes it to assume. As the chorus, generally, represented the ideal spectator, whose mode of viewing things was to guide and control the impressions of the assembled people, so it was the peculiar province of the stasimon, amidst the press and tumult of the action, to maintain that composure of mind which the Greeks deemed indispensable to the enjoyment of a work of art; and to divest the action of the accidental and personal, in order to place in a clearer light its inward signification and the thoughts which lay beneath the surface. Stasima, therefore, are only introduced in pauses, when the action has run a certain course ; the stage is often perfectly clear, or, if any persons have remained on it, others come on who were not in connexion with them before, in order that they may have time for the change of costume and masks. In this manner these songs of the assembled chorus divide the tragedy into certain parts, which may be compared to the acts of modern plays, and from which the Greeks called the part before the parodos the prologue, the parts between the parodos and the stasima, episodta, the part after the last stasimon, exodus. The chorus appears in this kind of songs in its appropriate character, and is true to its desti- nation, viz., to express the sentiments of a pious, well-ordered mind in beautiful and noble forms. Hence this part of ancient tragedy, both in matter and form, has the greatest resemblance to the choral lyrics of Stesichorus, Pindar, and Simonides. The metrical form consists of strophes and antistrophes, which are connected in simple series, without any artificial interweaving, as in the choral lyric poetry. Instead, how- ever, of the same scheme of strophes and antistrophes being preserved through a whole stasimon, it is changed with each pair. Nor are there epodes after every pair of strophes ; but only at the close of the ode.* This change of metre (which seems also to have been occasionally con- nected with an alteration of the musical mode) was used to express a change in the ideas and feelings ; and herein the dramatic lyric poetry differs essentially from the Pindaric. For whereas the latter rests on one fundamental thought and is essentially pervaded by one tone of feeling, the dramatic lyric, containing allusions to past and to coming events, and subject to the influence of various leanings to the several interests which are opposed on the stage, undergoes changes which often materially distinguish the beginning from the end. The rhythmical treatment of the several parts, too, is generally less that artificial combi- nation of various elements which we find in the works of the above- mentioned masters of choral lyric poetry, than a working out of one ./J^ch. A gam. 1-40 — o'J. Dindorf.) form the conclusion of the parodos. In the instance just adverted to, this consists of nine anapaBstic systems, and a strophe, ant .strophe, and epode in dactylic measures, and is immediately followed by the first stasimon, which contains five strophes and antistrophes in trochaic and lo^arcdic metres.
 * The epodes, which are apparently in the middle of, in