Page:The Outline of History Vol 1.djvu/379

 in religious dances. But running through the rural life of Greece was the tradition of a dressing-up and a dancing and chanting associated with the worship of another god, who is killed and lives again as a part of the ceremonies, the god Dionysus. After the coming of the Aryans into Greece, the vocal element became stronger in these proceedings, and thrust into the dance came a recitation. There was first one reciter, then two, and then three, and the rest of the company became the chorus to the declamations of these principal actors. Out of the public performance at festivals and anniversaries of these choir songs or dithyrambs with one actor grew the great art of tragedy with three and more. Side by side with tragedy, comedy developed from another and merrier series of dressings-up and singing. Here we can but name those who were supreme in these arts who flourished in the days of Pericles, Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the masters of tragedy, and Aristophanes, the writer of comedies. We can say nothing of the splendour and beauty of the former, nor of the fantastic invention and wit of the latter. Æschylus won his first prize for tragedy in the year that Herodotus was born (484 B.C.); Sophocles came some eighteen years later; Euripides was four years old when Æschylus was beginning his career. The mockery of Aristophanes broke out (427 B.C.) only when the days of great tragedy and sculpture and building were drawing to a close.

§ 5

The influence of Socrates also began to bear fruit after the days of Pericles and Aspasia. This old questioner, at whose touch faith, speculation, and illusion shrivelled together, was the centre of a group of young men who lived through and after the years of the Peloponnesian War. Of all these young men, one stands out as the greatest of them all, Plato. He was born 427 B.C., the year of the first performance of the work of Aristophanes, and he lived for eighty years.

In mental temperament Plato was of an altogether different type from the older man. He was a most artistic and delicate