Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/417

395 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 395 It belonged especially to the ceremonies of this Bacchic feast that, after singing the song in honour of the god who was the leader of the frolic, the merry revellers found an object for their unrestrained petu- lance in whatever came first in their way, and overwhelmed the innocent spectators with a flood of witticisms, the boldness of which was justified by the festival itself. When the phallophori at Sicyon had come into the theatre with their motley garb, and had saluted Bacchus with a song, they turned to the spectators and jeered and flouted whomsoever they pleased. How intimately these jests were connected with the Bacchic song, and how essentially they belonged to it, may be seen very clearly from the chorus in the Frogs of Aristophanes. This chorus is supposed to consist of persons initiated at Eleusis, who celebrate the mystic Dionysus Iacchus as the author of festal delights and the guide to a life of bliss in the other world. But this Iacchus is also, as Dionysus, the god of comedy, and the jokes which were suitable to these initiated persons, as an expression of their freedom from all the troubles of this life, also belonged to the country Dionysia, and attained to their highest and boldest exercise in comedy : this justifies the poet in treating the chorus of the My st re as merely a mask for the comic chorus, and in making it speak and sing much that was suitable to the comic chorus alone, which it resembled in all the features of its appearance.* And thus it is quite in the spirit of the old original comedy that the chorus, after having in beautiful strains repeatedly celebrated Demeter and Iacchus, the god who has vouchsafed to them to dance and joke with impunity, directly after, and without any more immediate inducement, attacks an individual arbitrarily selected : — " Will ye, that we join in quizzing xlrchedemus ?" &c. t § 3. This old lyric comedy, which did not differ much either in origin or form from the Iambics of Archilochus, may have been sung in various districts of Greece, just as it maintained its ground in many pkces even after the development of the dramatic comedy. % By what gradations, f When Aristotle says {Poet. 4) that comedy originated kiro ran sgaa^oVrw./ rh tpaXXixd, he alludes to these unpremeditated jokes, which the leader of the Phallus song might have produced. % The existence of a lyrical tragedy and comedy, by the side of the dramatic, been lately established chiefly by the aid of Boeotian inscriptions, {Corpus Inscript. Grrecar. No. 1584,) though it has been violently controverted by others. But, though we should set aside the interpretation of these Boeotian monuments, it appears even from Aristotle, Poet. 4, (ra qaXktxu. u tn xa) mv h ToXXat; rZv ■riktuv liu/xivu voftityp'va,) that the songs, from which the dramatic comedy arose, still maintained their ground, as the 10v$uoi also were danced in the orchestra at Athens in the time of the orators, lljpcrides apud Harpoemt. v. 'UvQaKkoi. It is clear that the comedies of Antheus the Lindian were also of this kind, according to the expressions of Athenoeus, (x. p. 445 ; i " be composed comedies and many other things in the form of poems, which he sang as leader to his fellow-revellers who bore the phallus with him."
 * See below, chap. XXVIII. § 10.