Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/395

 ON THE LANGUAGE, METRES AND PROSODY GREEK DRAMATISTS. I. LANGUAGE. ATTENTION lias been already directed to the fact that the different -^^ origin of the dialogue and chorus in a Greek play is indicated by a corresponding difference of dialect, and that, while the dialogues repre- sent the spoken language of the poet's age and country, with some few traditions derived from the Ionic of the rhapsodes, the choruses are more or less tinged with the conventional Doric of lyric poetry. The basis, however, of the whole dramatic style of the Greeks was the Attic dialect of the period during which the great dramatists flourished ; and while we have the older Attic in ^schylus, we find in Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes all the characteristics of the middle Attic of Thucydides, and in the fragments of Menander and the other poets of the New Comedy we have the language of Athens as it was spoken by Demos- thenes or written by Aristotle. In briefly noticing the successive changes of the tragic style, we shall begin with those Epic, ^olic, and Doric pecidiarities which are found in the dramatists, and then examine the standard of theii' Atticism. I. Eiyic Forms in the Dramatists. Besides the common forms ^eVo9, ixovoq, yovara, K6po<;, Sopt, ©paKc?, ^a)>7, the di'amatists wrote ^etvos, [xovvo<;, yovvara, Kovpo<;, Sovpt, &pfJK€<;, ^orf. We also find ovvofxa (Soph. Fhil. 251), ctAto-crw, eivcKa (New Cratylus, § 277), cimXios (Eurip. Plicen. 6), Katco, /cXatw, cA-ata (see Person, Prcef. Hec. p. 4, Hermann, Prcef. Ajac. p. 18), atero?, atet or aliv (Pors. Pra^J. Hec. p. 4, and Herm. Prcef. Hec. p. 21), ecro-o/xat, fxeaa-o^, ttoWos, by the side of the Attic ovofxa, eXio-ao}, cvcKa, ivaXtos, kolo), kA-ciw, eXaa, aero?, aet, ecrofxai, j-U(To<s, 7roA.v5. The dative plural in -crt or -(tlv is used whenever the D.T.G. 24