Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/129

Rh ,—Hermes, Herakles, the houses of Theseus, Atreus, Jason,—all are types of humankind, repeating the Hebraic argument of transmitted tendency, virtue, and crime, and the results of crime especially, from generation to generation. The public delight in the Athenian stage was due to its strenuous dramatic action at an epoch when the nation was in extreme activity. Its religious cast was the quintessence of morals derived from history, from the ethics of the gnomic and didactic bards, from the psychological conditions following great wars and crises such as those which terminated at Salamis and Platæa. Æschylus and Sophocles were inspired by their times. They soared in contemplation of the life of gods and men: no meaner flight contented them. The apparent subjectivity of Euripides is due to his relative modernness. No literature was ever so swift to run its course as the Attic drama, from the Cyclopean architecture of the "Prometheus" to the composite order of "Alcestis" and "Ion." Euripides, freed somewhat from the tyranny of the colossal myths, Euripides. was almost Shakespearian in his reduction of them to every-day life with its vicissitudes and social results. His characters are often unheroic, modern, very real and emotional men and women. Aristophanes, still more various, and at times Aristophanes. equal to the greatest of the dramatists, as a satirist necessarily enables us to judge of his own taste and temper; but in his travesties of the immediate life