Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/426

404 404 HISTORY OF THE tion and delivery, such as the light trochaic tetrameter so well suited to the dance, the lively iambic tetrameter, and the anapaestic te- trameter, Haunting along in comic pathos, which had been used by Aristoxenus of Selinus, an old Sicilian poet, who lived before Epi- charmus. In all these things comedy was just as inventive and refined as tra- gedy. Aristophanes had the skill to convey by his rhythms sometimes the tone of romping merriment, at others that of festal dignity ; and often in jest he would give to his verses and his words such a pomp of sound that we lament he is not in earnest. In reading his plays we are always impressed with the finest concord between form and meaning, between the tone of the speech and the character of the persons ; as, for example, the old, hot-headed Acharnians admirably express their rude vigour and boisterous impetuosity in the Cretic metres which prevail in the choral songs of the piece. But who could with a few words paint the peculiar instrument which comedy had formed for itself from the language of the day? It was based, on the whole, upon the common conversational language of the Athenians, — the Attic dialect, as it was current in their colloquial inter- course; comedy expresses this not only more purely than any other kind of poetry, but even more so than the old Attic prose :* but this every day colloquial language is an extraordinarily flexible and rich instrument, which not only contains in itself a fulness of the most ener- getic, vivid, pregnant and graceful forms of expression, but can even accommodate itself to the different species of language and style, the epic, the lyric, or the tragic; and, by this means, impart a special colouring to itself. f But, most of all, it gained a peculiar comic charm from its' parodies of tragedy ; here a word, a form slightly altered, or pronounced with the peculiar tragical accent, often sufficed to recal the recollection of a pathetic scene in some tragedy, and so to produce a ludicrous contrast. guish Attic Greek from its mother dialect the Tonic, tt for sit, and pp for e ;, occur every where in Aristophanes, and even in the fragments of Cratinus, hut are not found in Thueydides any more than in the tragedians ; although even Pericles is said to have used these un-Ionic forms on the hema. Eustathius on the Iliad, x. 385, p. 813. In other respects, too, the prose of Thueydides has far more epic and Ionic gravity and unction than the poetry of Aristophanes, — even in particular forms and expressions. f Plutarch very justly remarks, (Aristoph. ct Menandricomp. 1,) that the diction of Aristophanes contains all styles, from the tragic and pathetic (oyxo;) to the vul- garisms ot farce, {(rviofioKnyia ko.) <£Xvaoiu ;) hut he is wrong in maintaining that Aristophanes assigned these modes of speaking to his characters arbitrarily and at random.
 * We only remind the reader that the connexions of consonants which distin-