Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/94

 76 CLASSIFICATION OF GREEK PLAYS. quite unheard of. There is, it must be admitted, some difficulty in this, and principally in regard to the last question. The Helots, with their dresses of goatskin or sheepskin, and their indecent dances in honour of Bacchus, were very fit substitutes for the satyrs, and it is quite possible to conceive that a Dionysian myth might be represented in a play, the chorus of which consisted of Helots. From the statement, however, that Eupolis was the author, and from the purely comic and criticizing tone of one of the frag- ments we are disposed to conclude that Herodian is mistaken in calling it a satyrical drama, and that he has been misled by the resemblance between the guise of the Helots, and that of the satyrs; whereas the play was a regular Comedy with a political reference, perhaps not unlike the Aafcehalixove^ of the same author. The Comedy of the Greeks first attained to a distinct literary and political importance in the country which witnessed its final development in a form corresponding to that of its modern repre- sentatives. Whatever may have been the value of the writings of Epicharmus, they have not reached our time except in fragments. For us, Greek Comedy, both in itself, and in its Koman transcrip- tions, is the Comedy of Athens. So far as we are acquainted with its literary history, it owes its first development and completion to the political and social condition of that great democratic metro- polis; and it is so intimately connected with all that is characteristic of Attic life, that the greatest scholars of Alexandria, Lycophron and Eratosthenes, wrote formal and elaborate treatises on the sub- ject. Considered, then, as peculiarly Athenian, the Comedy of the Greeks admits of subdivision into three species, or rather three suc- cessive variations in form, which are generally distinguished as the Old, the Middle, and the New Comedy. These three subdivi- sions must be considered separately, and with a brief review of their distinctive characteristics. The Old Comedy was, as we have already seen, the result of a successful attempt to give to the waggon-jests of the country comus a particular and a political bias. Its outward form was burlesque in its most wanton extravagance. Its essence, or to use the words of Yico^, its eterna jpropieta^ was personal vilification. Not merely the satire of description, the abuse of words; but the satire of repre- 1 In Athen. xiv. p. 638. 2 Scienza Nuova, in. p. 638: *'La satira serbb quest' etei'na pi'opieta, con la qual ella nacquC; di dir villanie ed ingiurie."