Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/234

 Centaur seems to have been "a compound of epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry," and who is called by Aristotle "a poet to be read," we may trace the gradual extinction of Attic tragedy. The glorious odes of the tragic chorus seem to have died away into descriptive and rhetorical writing intended rather for the scholar's eye than the public ear; and this stage-oratory belongs rather to the development of Attic prose than to that of Attic verse. The rapid decline of tragedy is, in fact, due to the decay of those moral characteristics of the Athenian audience which had primarily given to tragedy its vital force. Even dramatic studies of personal character gradually lost their interest when divorced from social sympathy and great moral problems; and soon little remained but a spectacular medley enlivened by descriptions of female beauty, or natural scenery, or by rhetorical declamation of a thoroughly metallic ring. The majestic spirit of tragedy departed at the touch of an individualism which could only laugh at its own littleness.

Both the processes we have already observed in the development of the tragic drama—the subordination of the chorus and the reduction of abstract and heroic to human and individual character—are repeated in the progress of Attic comedy; to this progress we shall accordingly now turn. The comedy like the tragedy of Athens had originated in the choral worship of Bacchus; but the development of the comic chorus seems to have been checked by the tyranny of Peisistratus. We know little or nothing of the earliest Attic comedians. Susarion, who probably flourished in Solon's time, before Thespis; and Chionides, who is reckoned by Aristotle the first of Attic comedians; even Cratinus, who died so late as 423, and Eupolis, who began to bring out