Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/415

393 LITERATURE OP ANCIENT GREECE. o'93 ideas and the warmth of noble feelings were still united with the sa- gacious, refined, and penetrating observation of human life, for which the Athenians were invariably distinguished among the other Greeks, Attic genius here found the form in which it could not merely point out the depraved and the foolish as they appeared in individuals, but even grasp and subdue them when gathered together in masses, and follow them into the secret places where the perverted tendencies of the age were fabricated. It was the worship of Bacchus again which rendered the construction of these great forms possible. It was by means of it that the imagina- tion derived that bolder energy to which we have already ascribed the origin of the drama in general. The nearer the Attic comedy stands to its origin, the more it has of that peculiar inebriety of mind which the Greeks showed in everything relating to Bacchus; in their dances, their songs, their mimicry, and their sculpture. The unrestrained enjoyments of the Bacchic festivals imparted to all the motions of comedy a sort of grotesque boldness and mock dignity which raised to the region of poetry even what was vulgar and common in the representation : at the same time, this festal jollity of comedy at once broke through the restraints of decent behaviour and morality which, on other occasions, were strictly attended to in those days. " Let him stand out of the way of our choruses," cries Aristophanes,* "who has not been initiated into the Bacchic mysteries of the steer-eating Cratinus." The great come- dian gives this epithet to his predecessor in order to compare him with Bacchus himself. A later writer regards comedy as altogether a product of the drunkenness, stupefaction, and wantonness of the nocturnal Dionysia;f and though this does not take into account the bitter and serious earnestness which so often forms a back-ground to its bold and unbridled fun, it nevertheless explains how comedy could throw aside the restraints usually imposed by the conventions of society. The whole was regarded as the wild drollery of an ancient carnival. When the period of universal inebriety and licensed frolic had passed away, all recollection of what had been seen and done was dismissed, save where the deeper earnestness of the comic poet had left a sting in the hearts of the more intelligent among the audience. §2. The side of the multifarious worship of Bacchus to which comedy attached itself, was naturally not the same as that to which the origin of tragedy was due. Tragedy, as we have seen, proceeded from the Lensea, the winter feast of Bacchus, which awakened and fostered an f Eunapius, Vita Sophist, p. 32, cd. Boissonade, -who explains from this the representation of Socrates in the Clouds. During the comic contest the people kept eating and tippling ; the choruses hud wine given to them as they went on nnd came off the stage. Philochorus in Athenaeua, xi. p. 464 F. The troQiii, -who are opposed to the yikavri;. Aristoph. Ecclcsiaz. 1155.
 * Fror/a, v. 356.