Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/82

 64 THE TRAGIC DIALOGUE. — THESPIS. distinct exhibition ^ Nay, the Homeric rhapsody was recited by itself on the proper occasion ; that is to say, generally at the great Panathen^ea^: nor would the Homeric hexameter have been so well suited to a dramatic dialogue as the trochaic tetrameter and senarius, which the vigorous and sententious poetry of Archilochus and the elder Simonides had made well known and popular in Attica and in the -^gean. Whether anticipated or not by Su- sarion, in the employment of the Iambic metre in dramatic speeches, Thespis may claim the merit of having been the first to combine with the Bacchic chorus, which he received from Arion, a truly epic element, and he was clearly the first who made the rhapsode appear as an actor sustaining different characters, and addressing the audience from a fixed and elevated stage. At first he may have been contented, like the exarchi of the improved Dithyramb, with personating Bacchus, and surrounding himself with a chorus of Satyrs; but there is every reason to believe that he soon ex- tended his sphere of myths, and that his plots were as various as those of his successors. Bentley was interested in the establishment of his proposition that Thespis did not write his plays, and naturally manifested the eagerness of a pleader rather than the impartiality of a judge ^. There is no antecedent improbability in the statement of Donatus that Thespis wrote tragedies. Solon, and, much earlier, Archilo- chus and Simonides committed their poems to writing ; and in the days of Pisistratus it is not likely that a favourite rhapsode would leave his compositions unpublished. The destruction of Athens, in B.C. 480, made the older specimens of Attic literature very scarce, but there must have been some remains of his writings in the time of Sophocles, otherwise that poet would hardly have published strictures on him and Choerilus^, which, as we may infer from his criticisms on ^schylus^, in all probability referred to the harshness of their style. Aristophanes speaks of him precisely in the same terms as he does of Phrynichus, predicating an antiquated stiffness of both these old Tragedians^. We may grant that the lines attri- 1 Lys. u. s. ; Schol. Aristojoh. Nub. 988. 2 Lycurg. c. Leocr. p. 161 ; Plat. Hipparch. p. 228 b; ^lian, V. H. viii. 2. 3 Dissertation on Phalaris, pp. 237 sqq. ^ Suid. s. V. So^o/cXtjs : irepl tov xopov Trpbs Q^ainv /cat XoipiXop dyoovi^op.ei'os. 5 See Miiller, Hist. Lit. Gr. Vol. i. p. 340, and our note on the translation. '^ Comp. Ve.'ip. 220: dpxo-LOfieXi.a-tdwuocppuvLxVP^^'''^ f^^^V> " antiquated honey-sweet