SOURCE: R. C. Jebb, "The Attic Drama," in The Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry, Macmillan and Co., 1893, pp. 217-251.

[In the essay that follows, Jebb explores the political context within which Euripides wrote and the social commentary and philosophical views expressed in his plays.]

The victory at Salamis, in which Aeschylus took part as a soldier, and which Sophocles, as leader of the boy-chorus, helped to celebrate, marks the birth-year of Euripides. Like Aeschylus, he competed for the tragic prize at the age of twenty-five, but had to wait many years before he gained it. His first success was in 441, when he was thirty-nine; and in a career of nearly half a century that success was only four times repeated. To the end of his days he was the butt of Attic Comedy, which, besides ridiculing his plays, propagated all manner of stories concerning his private life. He was a lonely man, a student and a thinker, who lived in seclusion,—a strong contrast, here, to Aeschylus the soldier and Sophocles the man of affairs. It was an old tradition that he had fitted up a place of study in a cave on the shore of Salamis, where he used to work, looking out upon the sea; and much of his imagery is taken, not indeed from the sea itself, but from the life of seafarers. He was a friend of Anaxagoras, to whom he has paid a beautiful tribute (fr. 910, …). His management of controversy bears the impress of Protagoras. No tradition associates him with the circle of Pericles; nor does any trace in his work show the influence of Socrates.

The relation of Euripides to the Athens of his time has two distinct aspects, both of which are illustrated by his plays. On the intellectual side, he was in general sympathy with the tendencies which prevailed during the second half of his career. The rhetorical dialectic of the new teachers, with its sophistical subtleties, is conspicuous in his writings. He alludes here and there to particular opinions of various thinkers—Heracleitus, Xenophanes, Anaxagoras—in a manner which indicates his speculative bent; but he is not a declared adherent of any school; nor yet has he a definite philosophy of his own. The central point of his ethical doctrine is the importance of the individual's nature, φύσις his intellectual and moral endowment. He has not broken, meanwhile, with the popular religion; he claims to criticise it freely in the light of morality and reason.

Thus far he was fairly in accord with the tone of his age; but on the social and political side it was otherwise. Nothing in his work shows the intellectual stamp of the Periclean age—as the work of Sophocles, for instance, shows it by the desire to reconcile consecrated tradition with a higher range of thought. Euripides is not, like Sophocles, a true child of that age. His aspirations were rather those, in modern phrase, of philosophical radicalism; he longed for a form of democracy in which the reign of reason should be still less fettered by prescription. The death of Pericles, in 429, removed a great moderating power; but Euripides had the pain of seeing the democracy, when freed from that strong hand, degrade liberty into license, and drown the voice of sober counsel in the strife of demagogues. He shrank from this debased democracy. His best word is for the small farmer, who seldom comes to town, and who does not soil his rustic honesty by contact with the crowd of the market-place. For a while, indeed, Euripides had one bright hope: it was the young and dazzling Alcibiades, for whose victory in the Olympian chariot-race (420 B.C.) he composed the last recorded example of the epinikion. Might not Alcibiades become a second Pericles, only with more advanced aims? That hope was cruelly disappointed. About 409 B.C. Euripides left Athens: and he was not destined to return. He went to King Archelaus in Macedonia. In the rough military world of that half-barbarian court Euripides, now just seventy, would have met a younger Athenian dramatist, Agathon. The wild scenery of the northern land is reflected in the Bacchae. He died there in the winter of 407-406 B.C.

The dramatic work of Euripides interests alike by its success and by its failure. It is the most instructive of comments on the nature of Attic Tragedy, and on the limits which that nature imposed. It is also fraught with the germs of a new drama; it is the source of influences which proved fruitful in the later literature of antiquity; it is even a link between the ancient and the modern theatre. But few literary questions are more difficult to estimate fairly than the relation of Euripides to a form of art which he enriched with some of its noblest ornaments, but on which he also impressed tendencies that could lead only to decay and extinction.

Tragedy came to Euripides with its general conditions fixed in a manner which he could not attempt to alter. Three actors, a chorus, subject-matter to be taken from the heroic legends,—these were the essentials. Aeschylus and Sophocles, unlike in so much, were alike in this, that to the external traditions of their drama they had added an unwritten law as to its spirit, which they both observed with unwavering constancy: it was that the treatment should be ideal. Agamemnon, for example, was not to be taken out of the heroic atmosphere with which the myth surrounded him. He was, indeed, to be made living; but the life was to be that of a Greek hero,—in other words, of a man belonging to the far-off age when gods mingled in the warfare on the plain of Troy; a man, moreover, directly descended from Zeus himself. The divine light which played around that age was compatible with the full humanity of the heroes, as it is in the Iliad, only the humanity must be noble. That nobleness is independent of rank or circumstance. The Homeric swineherd Eumaeus has it as well as Achilles. The necessary minimum of such nobleness might be defined negatively. Persons whose life is placed in the heroic age must not so act or speak as to resemble ordinary men or women of the contemporary world. If they do so, they may be interesting, but they lose their ideal character. By ceasing to be ideal they also become, as heroic persons, less real. Agamemnon, arguing like an astute lawyer or an ingenious demagogue, may be a more familiar type of person, but the illusion that we are listening to the king of Mycenae is ruined.

Now Euripides was a poet fertile in ideas, full of views on all the questions of his day,—religious, moral, political, social. If he was to write Tragedy, he could only use the heroic myths. Tragedy was an act of worship. He could not be allowed to write a tragedy about Miltiades or Themistocles; but when he had chosen his heroic dramatis personae, the impulse was irresistible to make these persons the exponents of his teeming thoughts on contemporary life. 'It was easy enough for Aeschylus,' we can imagine him saying, 'to exclude modern thought; there were no pressing problems then; the era of reason had scarcely dawned; besides his poetical vision, Aeschylus had only his half-mystic theology, which suited it. It is easy, too, for worthy Sophocles, a pious soul who lives for art, not for philosophy; but if I am to give the people of my best,—if I am to teach and improve them through my poetry at the Dionysia,—how can I keep within those old limits of conventional utterance?'

So Euripides went to work in his own new way. The extent to which he modernized the heroes must not be exaggerated. He observed measure. Still, he introduced a most vital change; he brought the diction and thought of the heroic persons far nearer to that of everyday life; he added small traits of character, which, in contrast to the finer touches of Sophocles, did not (as a rule) deepen the significance of those persons, but merely made them appear more commonplace. And, pervading his plays, there was what must be called the Sophistical strain, most prominent in the Protagorean rhetoric of the debates, where λᾳγος is pitted against λᾳγγoς, but seen also in the remarks on the gods, or on moral questions. Here the light of common day was let in upon the heroic age, with disastrous results for dramatic effect. A new treatment of the Chorus was an inevitable consequence. In this respect the difference between Aeschylus and Sophocles had been less important than the agreement: both had maintained the organic bond between Chorus and dialogue. This was possible, because the animating spirit of their dialogue was one which could be continued in lyric utterance; it was noble; it belonged to the age of the heroes. But after a dialogue in which two disputants had displayed the latest novelties of rhetorical casuistry, how could a choral ode be in accord with it? And besides this difficulty, there was a positive motive for a change—the wish for variety. Thus the choral odes of Euripides came to be either wholly irrelevant to the dramatic context, or connected with it only slightly and occasionally.

The instinct which told Euripides that the day of Attic Tragedy, as the elder masters had understood it, could not be much prolonged, was a true one; the signs were around him. But it is a different question, and one not easily answered, how far he actually felt, in his last twenty or thirty years, the pressure of a public demand, which his innovations were designed to meet. It is a significant fact that, in 409 B.C., when the career of Euripides was nearing its close, the Philoctetes of Sophocles gained the first prize. The old style of Tragedy could still hold its own, then, with the public—at least in the hands of Sophocles. But the veteran poet may have been a favoured exception. Certainly there are several features in the work of Euripides which look like concessions to a new popular taste. Foremost among these is his adoption in his lyrics of the musical novelties associated with the new dithyrambic school, and especially with Timotheus. The general tendency of these was to substitute a florid style, with profuse ornament, for the simpler and purer music of the older Tragedy. A step in the same direction was the monody,—a solo sung by an actor, who accompanied it with an expressive dance. Such monodies—called 'Cretan' by Aristophanes, since the dance was of Cretan origin—were elements of operatic ballet thrust into Greek Tragedy. Outside of the lyric province, an appeal to popular taste may be surmised in the love of Euripides for startling effects in the management of the plot. The use of the deus ex machina was often, doubtless, merely to cut a knot; but we may conjecture that it was also popular in itself, as a ghost is always popular on the modern stage. The Euripidean prologue, introducing the spectators to the subject of the play, was again a boon to ignorance or mental indolence.

In such particulars, the course adopted by Euripides may have been prescribed, or favoured, by his audiences. But the essence of his reform, at any rate, had little to do with popular taste. He was not driven to it; he imposed it. The wit of Aristophanes often packs a great deal of sound criticism into a few words. His Euripides says that, when he received Tragedy from Aeschylus, it was plethoric, swollen, and heavy. He treated it for this malady, giving it decoctions which reduced it to a leaner but more healthy state. Then he proceeded to feed it up again, with such a stimulating diet as monodies. There is a biting truth in this mockery. Euripides had to apply the principle of compensation. The heroic had to be replaced by the sensational.

In attempting to estimate the work of Euripides, we must indeed guard against allowing too much weight to the verdict of Attic Comedy; but neither can we ignore it. It is necessary to apprehend the point of view from which this contemporary satire assailed him, and the grounds on which it based its unfavourable judgment. If we then proceed to modify that judgment in the light of a larger survey, we shall do so with less fear of erring through modern misconception.

The hostility of Aristophanes to Euripides was certainly bitter; nor can it surprise us, if he believed Euripides to have done all the mischief with which he charges him. But Aristophanes was not the only comic poet who attacked Euripides. There was a deeper reason for this than any individual or personal sentiment. Attic Comedy had a natural quarrel with the innovator in Tragedy, and the ground of this lay in its own history.

Sicily is one of two regions in which the origin of Comedy is to be sought; the other is Athens. The Dorians, both in Sicily and in Greece Proper, early showed a bent towards farcical humour; in the case of the Siceliots, there may have been some Italic influences at work, since it has always been an Italic gift to seize those traits of life and character which suit farce and burlesque. At the courts of the Sicilian princes such entertainments were welcome. The Dorian Epicharmus, from the Sicilian Megara, was the first who developed the ruder farce into a species of dramatic poetry. This was done at Syracuse, where the tragic poets Phrynichus and Aeschylus had been the guests of Hieron; and Attic Tragedy may have suggested the general idea of the form which Epicharmus adopted, though he does not seem to have used a Chorus. Athens, during the same period—the first half of the fifth century B.C.—developed a comic drama from a different source. At the Dionysia, when the people. were assembled to worship the god and to see tragedy, the merry procession called a comus had become a recognised feature of the festival. It was at first a voluntary and unofficial affair. One or more troops of men dressed themselves up in mummers' costume, and marched into the sacred precinct to the music of the flute. They then sang a song in honour of Dionysus; and one of their number addressed the audience in a humorous speech, turning on civic interests and on the topics of the day. The festal procession then withdrew again. The name Comedy, κωμωδίὰ, originally denoted this 'Song of the Comus,' and was doubtless coined at Athens, on the analogy of tragoedia. About 465 B.C. the comus was adopted into the official programme of the festival: instead of being the voluntary work of private persons, it was now organised with aid from the State. The steps by which a dramatic performance was built up around the comus-song and speech can no longer be traced. But some five-and-thirty years later, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, Attic Comedy, as we know it, was mature. Tragedy naturally furnished the general model on which the new kind of drama was constructed. This is apparent in the limit placed on the number of actors; no extant play of Aristophanes requires more than three regular actors, allowance being made for small parts being taken by supernumeraries who were not required to be absolutely mute. But Comedy was connected with Tragedy by much more than this kinship of form. Comedy expressed the frolicsome side of that Dionysiac worship from which Tragedy took its birth. Religion, the religion of Dionysus, was the breath of life to Comedy, not less—perhaps even more—than to her grave sister. It was religion that authorised the riot of fancy which turns the world topsy-turvy, the jest upon all things Olympian or human, the unsparing personal satire. Let that popular religion once lose its hold, and then, though Tragedy might survive, Comedy, such as Aristophanes wrote, must lose its sacred privileges, and, with them, its reason for existing. By the first law of its being, the Old Comedy was the sworn foe of all things which could undermine the sway of Dionysus, the god who not only inspires the poet, but protects his liberties. And the nearer Tragedy stood to the original form which the Dionysiac cult had given to it, the closer was the kinship which Comedy felt with it. For this reason Aeschylus represents, even better than Sophocles, the form of Tragedy with which the muse of Aristophanes was in spiritual accord; and Euripides represents everything which that muse abhors. Euripides, who dwarfs the heroic stature, and profanes heroic lips with the rhetoric of the ecclesia or the law-court; Euripides, with his rationalism, his sophistry, his proclivity to new-fangled notions of every kind—here Comedy, with sure instinct, saw a dramatist who was using the Dionysia against the very faith to which that festival was devoted, and whose poetry was the subtle solvent by which Comedy and Tragedy alike were destined to perish.

It was a happy fortune that, before its short life came to an end, the essence of Attic Comedy was so perfectly expressed by the great satirist who was also a great poet. The genius of Aristophanes indeed transcends the form in which he worked; but it exhibits all the varied capabilities of that form. He can denounce a corrupt demagogue on an unworthy policy with a stinging scorn and a force of righteous indignation which make the poet almost forgotten in the patriot. He can use mockery with the lightest touch. But it is not in denunciation or in banter that his most exquisite faculty is revealed. It is rather in those lyric passages where he soars above everything that can move laughter or tears, and pours forth a strain of such free, sweet music and such ethereal fancy as it would be hard to match save in Shakespeare. A poet who united such gifts brought keen insight and fine taste to the task of the critic.

In reading the Frogs, we do not forget that it is a comedy, not a critical essay. And we allow for the bias against Euripides. But no careful student of the play can fail to admire how Aristophanes seizes the essential points in the controversy between the two schools of Tragedy. When Aeschylus has said that a poet ought to edify, Euripides rejoins (in effect), 'Are you edifying when you indulge in dark grandiloquence, instead of explaining yourself in the language of ordinary humanity?' Now observe the rejoinder of Aeschylus. He replies, 'Great sentiments and great thoughts are suitably clothed in stately words. Besides, it is natural that the demigods (τον̀י ήιθέoνי) should have grandeur of words; for their clothes are much grander than ours. I exhibited all this properly—and you have utterly spoiled it.' Here Aristophanes has put the true issue in a simple form. Aeschylus is right in vindicating his own style, and condemning his rival's, by an appeal to the nature of his subject-matter. Heroes and demigods ought not to speak like ordinary men. He is right, too, when he enforces his point by referring to the stately costume which he had devised for Tragedy. This was a visible symbol of the limit set to realism.

When Aristophanes passes from the ground of art to that of ethics, the justice of his criticism may be less evident to moderns, but here also he is substantially right from the Athenian point of view. His Aeschylus complains that Euripides had sapped the springs of civic manliness, of patriotism, and even of morality. It is true that Euripides, as a dramatic poet, had contributed to tendencies setting in that direction. Homer had been regarded by the Greeks as their greatest teacher, because the heroes were the noblest ideals of human life which they possessed. Aeschylus and Sophocles, in their different ways, had preserved the Homeric spirit. If the heroes once ceased to be ideals of human life, the ordinary Greek of the fifth century had no others. To depose the heroes from their elevation above commonplace humanity was also to destroy an indispensable link between god and man in the popular religion. But that religion was at the root of the Greek citizen's loyalty to the city.

In the smaller details of his polemic against Euripides, the comic poet is sometimes acute and just, sometimes excessively unfair. We are not here concerned with such details. The broad facts which claim our attention are simply these. Attic Comedy, as such, was the natural foe of a tragic poet like Euripides. Aristophanes clearly understood the artistic limits proper to Attic Tragedy. He clearly saw where and how Euripides had transgressed them; he also saw that this error of Euripides in art was, for the Athens of his day, inseparable from a bad moral influence. And Aristophanes can sum up his judgment by saying that Euripides, in pursuing new refinements, had abandoned the greatest things (τὰ μέγιστα̂) of the Tragic Art—as Athens had known it.

The very qualities by which Euripides incurred this censure endeared him to later antiquity, both Greek and Roman. As Attic Tragedy perished with Euripides, so the old life of Athens, and of Hellas itself, perished only seventy years later. Hellas gave place to Hellenism, a civilization in which Hellenic and foreign elements were mingled. This later Greek age recognized Euripides as its prophet. He had been before his own time, and therefore he was in harmony with theirs. In touching the deep problems of human destiny, he had given utterance to their scepticism, perplexity, melancholy. In drawing human character, he had used a thousand subtle touches which every day they could recognize as true, and which they found in no other poet of old Hellas. He delighted them by the bold ingenuity of his plots and by the brilliant beauty of his descriptions. He was with them, too, in their sorrows; if any one of them had been visited by a cruel reverse of fortune, or by a heart-breaking bereavement, he could find no poet whose sympathy was so human as that of Euripides, or who could so gently unseal the fountain of tears. And therefore Euripides became indeed their idol. He was the inspiration, and in much the pattern, of the New Attic Comedy. One of its poets, Philemon, exclaims, 'If the dead retain their senses, as some say, I would hang myself to see Euripides.'

At Rome, from the latter part of the third century onwards, he was equally welcome. Ennius translated the Medea; Pacuvius and Attius took him for their chief model. The Parthian Orodes was seeing a performance of the Bacchae, when the actor who was playing Agave produced the gory head of Crassus. Dante, who does not name Aeschylus or Sophocles, numbers Euripides among the great poets of Greece. In the period of the Renaissance Euripides was more popular than either of the elder dramatists. Racine was his disciple; and his influence predominates in Milton's Samson Agonistes. It has been his crowning good fortune in modern times that, when a reaction against him came towards the end of the last century, the reaction was intemperate. Such excessive disparagement as Schlegel's elicited a protest from Goethe; who says that it is absurd to deny sublimity to Euripides; and that 'if a modern man must pick out faults in so great an ancient, he ought to do it upon his knees.' This is one of those generous outbursts which are sure of applause; and yet the defence is not relevant. No intelligent criticism would deny that Euripides is sometimes sublime; he is so, incontestably, in the Bacchae. Nevertheless modern criticism has a right to speak, though it should be reverent. Euripides has qualities which place him among the world's great poets and fully justify all the admiration which he has won from posterity. But these qualities must also be estimated relatively to the form and to the age in which he worked. The conflict of modern judgments upon him has arisen in large measure from failing to keep the two points of view distinct.

Some of his best plays charm the modern reader, not merely by particular beauties, but also by unity of effect. Such are the Medea, the Hippolytus, the Ion, the Bacchae. But it is distinctive of Euripides, as compared with Aeschylus and Sophocles, that the interest of particular passages is usually felt more strongly than the harmony of the whole. There are powerful scenes, which can often be detached. There are ideas, maxims, sentiments, of which it is easy to make an anthology. In an age of intellectual and moral unsettlement, a cultivated man who gives a voice to each doubt or emotion as it arises is certain to have the ear of posterity. It is not only in action that history repeats itself. At one point or another, in this phase or that of his reflections, Euripides has a kinship with the troubled spirits of every race and century. Not less universal in its appeal to the modern mind is that gleam of romance which he makes to play, with so strange a beauty, around the shapes of classical mythology. We see it in the story of Phaedra, pining with secret love; in the story of Ion, the young ministrant of the Delphian temple, who comes to learn the secret of his parentage; in both the plays concerning the fortunes of Iphigeneia. This tinge of romance is given chiefly by two things,—analysis of the individual's feeling, aided by minute portraiture of circumstance, and sudden surprises in the plot,—sometimes through supernatural agency. But a romantic colouring is not the only quality of Euripides in which he might be regarded as a precursor of modern drama. In one play at least, the Bacchae, he shows a sense of natural beauty, lit up by fancy, which no other Greek poet, perhaps, has manifested with equal splendour. The same play is also distinguished from all the other works of its author by profound sympathy with the spirit of the Dionysiac worship. It was written in Macedonia shortly before his death; and might almost have propitiated Aristophanes himself, who very likely had not seen it when he wrote the Frogs.

Euripides was sometimes reproached with the tearful scenes in his plays. His critics called him maudlin and effeminate. He has made a good answer, and it is curiously modern. The disguised Orestes is deeply moved by the plight in which he finds his sister Electra. As he is supposed to be a stranger, he feels it necessary to make some excuse for his emotion, lest it should surprise her. 'Pity,' he says, 'nowhere dwells with ignorance, but with the wise among men; for indeed the wise have to pay a price for their advantage in wisdom.' 'Wise,' 'wisdom,' here refer to mental cultivation. He means that sensibility to the sight of suffering is the proof, and the penalty, of mental refinement.

There is yet another trait in the poetry of Euripides which often gives it a peculiar charm for moderns. Though he was called a misogynist, no one has shown a finer appreciation of feminine tenderness or feminine strength. Nor has any ancient poet given more beautiful expression to the family affections. Take, for instance, this fragment of the Erechtheus: 'Love your mother, children, for there is no love that it is sweeter to cherish.' In another fragment (No. 909) a devoted wife is very beautifully described. She holds her husband's affection by her goodness more surely than by beauty; she looks always on the bright side of his deeds and words; his troubles and joys are reflected in her countenance; she helps to bear his burdens, and without feeling it to be a pain. It is significant that these verses have been preserved by a Christian writer, Clement of Alexandria.

Such are the qualities by which Euripides became the first prophet of a cosmopolitan humanity. His influence on the history of the world has been wider than that of either Aeschylus or Sophocles, for the interests and feelings to which he appeals are common to all men. He demands no peculiar sympathy with the Hellenic spirit; he makes no severe demand on the historical imagination. No sane criticism would now dispute his claim to a place among the world's great poets.

Yet the serious student of Greek literature must not shrink from a difficult and almost painful duty; he must not shut his eyes to the truth that Aristophanes was right in the main, both artistically and morally. This great and fascinating poet, Euripides, the author of a dazzling compromise, the precursor of the romantic drama, was not a sound Hellenic artist; he was a herald of death to the art around which he threw those novel splendours. In modern phrase, we may say that Tragedy as he found it was ideal, and that his tendency was towards realism; only, in using those words, we must remember that the Greek mind, when it was at its best,—as it was in the middle of the fifth century B.C.,—knew no such antithesis between idealism and realism in art as our use of those terms is apt to suggest. Achilles, for instance, was what we should call an ideal to the Greeks; he was so, however, not as transcending humanity, not as a semi-abstract person seen through a divine mist, but because he was so lucidly and brilliantly human,—human in the most splendid and pathetic shape that Greek fancy could give to a young hero. Odysseus was an ideal as being a man, vividly drawn, of superlative fortitude, ability, and resource. When Euripides made such persons speak in the strain of contemporary rhetoric or casuistry, he was not making them, from a Greek point of view, more real; he was making them, considered as heroes, less so, because he was reducing them from a higher to a lower sphere of reality. Menander did not feel this, any more than the ordinary modern reader does, because in Menander's day the old Hellenic life was broken up, and the old faith was dead; but Aristophanes felt it, and Sophocles would have felt it too. Sophocles, in his later years, experienced the influence of Euripides on the technical side,—in some details of composition and versification,—though not to the extent that has sometimes been assumed; but no one can say that in the essence of his conception—in 'the greatest things' of the tragic art, as Aristophanes calls them—Sophocles ever made the smallest approach to the younger poet's manner. The lines of an English poetess are well known:—

'Our Euripides the human
 With his droppings of warm tears,
And his touching of things common
 Till they rise to meet the spheres.'

The last two lines may often be as true for us as the first two; but they do not truly describe what Euripides did for those of his Athenian contemporaries who were in sympathy with the traditional Hellenic faith. In their view, he so touched things heroic as to make them,—not rise to meet the spheres,—but descend nearer to the level of common ground. Cicero, in an eloquent passage', has pleaded for aesthetic tolerance on the ground of the wide differences of individual type between artists who excel in the same field. Sculpture is a single art, he says; and yet how unlike each other are Myron, Polycleitus, and Lysippus! Painting is a single art; and yet there is little resemblance between Zeuxis, Aglaophon, and Apelles. It is so also, he proceeds, in poetry. Roman literature presents us with the contrasts of Ennius, Pacuvius, and Attius; Greek literature, with those of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. This is an excellent instance of a plausible criticism which moderns would be apt to accept as almost a truism, and which, nevertheless, so far as Greek art and poetry are concerned, misses the vital point. The difference between Myron and Polycleitus in Greek sculpture is utterly different, not merely in degree but in kind, from that which both present in relation to Lysippus. Aeschylus and Sophocles are dissimilar; but the difference is not the same in kind as that which divides both of them from Euripides.

In the highest Greek genius, symmetry and harmony were essential elements; the Hellene had established a concord of spirit and body which he impressed upon the creations of his mind, and in which resides the peculiar secret of their beauty; therefore the truly classical poetry of Greece, such as that of Homer, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, cannot be understood,—indeed, is not conceivable,—apart from the phase of Hellenic society and Hellenic thought in which each kind had its birth; to each of them this society and this thought were necessary conditions.

At the end of the fifth century before Christ the intellectual progress of Hellas had produced a discord between the inward and the outward life which nothing could have resolved, short of some new religion which should succeed to the place of the old. And, as this discord became ever more conscious and more complex, the framework of the outward life itself was dissolved; there came a divorce between society and the State; the citizen no longer lived for the city. It is no accident that the creative period of the Greek mind closed with the end of the old social and political order in Hellas. Studious leisure might remain; learning might increase; new regions of knowledge might be opened; but the highest inspiration of literature and of art had disappeared.

It may be urged on behalf of Euripides that without some such changes as he introduced Tragedy could no longer hope to please. The altered circumstances of the time demanded the concession. This may be granted, at least for the time immediately after his: but it is only another way of saying that Attic Tragedy had reached the term of its existence, as Ionian epos had done at an earlier time. A great poet in whom the artistic sense was more purely Hellenic than it was in Euripides would have refrained from attempting a compromise. He would have felt that the result, however effective, could not be harmonious; that not merely would the form of Attic Tragedy be modified, but its very soul would be extinguished.

The historical proof of this is given by the actual development of Greek drama after Euripides. Tragedy languished in a feeble imitative way, and soon ceased altogether. It was in the line of Comedy that the work begun by the last of the tragic masters was continued and completed. The portraiture of ordinary character, the realistic description of ordinary life, to which Euripides had made the first approach, reached its full development in the New Comedy. Menander was as far from the lofty lyric strain of Aristophanes as from his wild fantasy and his personal satire. Menander's prevailing tone was that of polite conversation; not without passages of tender sentiment, grave thought, or almost tragic pathos. Thus his style was nearly on the level to which Euripides had reduced that of Tragedy: the resemblance was often so great that their fragments have sometimes been confused.

Euripides would have found a freer scope for his peculiar gifts, and would have worked with more complete success, if he could have broken away from the trammels of tradition; if he could have multiplied the actors at will, chosen his subject-matter where he would, altered the style of the costumes, and abolished the Chorus. Beautiful as his lyrics often are, they would charm still more as independent odes. But he could not thus emancipate himself, because Tragedy was a part of the Dionysiac worship, and the tradition which prescribed its type was also the sanction of its existence. It was needful that Tragedy should die before it could live again, the old name with a new form and a new spirit.

In the Roman adaptation of the Greek New Comedy a novel feature was introduced, fraught with consequences more important than itself. The division into scenes and acts, following on the abolition of the Chorus' was not, in Roman practice, accompanied with free change of scene, or with liberty for the dramatist to suppose as long an interval of time between scenes as he might desire. But it prepared the way for such deliverance from the thraldom of the 'unities,' a freedom which confers such an advantage on the modern theatre.

After the Roman reproductions of Greek Comedy, a long period, fruitful in new influences, elapsed before the advent of Romantic Drama, of which Shakespeare is the greatest representative. In the dark ages, the classical plays still found readers among the learned,—chiefly in monasteries; but there was no theatre as a place of amusement. The popular entertainers were not actors but story-tellers—minstrels, troubadours, and the like. The very words 'Tragedy' and 'Comedy' ceased to have dramatic associations. Such stories as those in the Mirror of Magistrates were called tragedies; Dante could call his grave epic the Divine Comedy. Stories in prose and verse,—sacred, taken from Scripture, or concerning the Saints—secular, concerning deeds of chivalry or marvellous adventure—were the delight of the middle age. The entire range of such stories falls under the word 'Romance,' which merely expresses the group of languages, all sprung from that of Rome, in which such stories were current. The first meeting of Romance with its almost forgotten predecessor, Drama, was in the Mysteries and Miracle Plays, from the twelfth century onwards,—which had for their first object to place sacred stories before the eyes of a laity unable to read Latin. The Miracle Play dealt with some portion of Scripture history, or with the life of a Saint: The Mystery, with some part of New Testament History which concerned a mysterious subject, such as the Incarnation or the Atonement. The 'Morality' was another step towards drama;—a play in which the characters were personified virtues and vices, or such allegorical agents as Wealth or Death. Yet one step more was taken when the abstract virtues and vices were replaced by men typical of them; as Aristeides might represent justice. And then the circle of characters came to be enlarged so as to include human life generally, as in John Heywood's Interludes in Henry VIII.'s reign.

The regular drama was now at hand. The first English Comedy, Ralph Roister Doister, was written by Nicholas Udall, before 1551. The first English Tragedy, Gorboduc, by Sackville and Norton, was acted in 1562, two years before Shakespeare's birth. This new drama is called the Romantic, in contradistinction to the Classical, because Romance furnished it with most of its material. But the ancient drama, revealed anew by the Renaissance, gave the outlines of its form, and strongly influenced its construction. There was indeed a school of criticism, not extinct, though defeated, in Shakespeare's time, which contended for the strict observance of the ancient unities in respect to time and place. Ben Jonson combated it by arguing that the ancient drama itself had been gradually developed, and that moderns were entitled to carry the development further, 'instead,' as he says, 'of being tied to those strict and regular forms which the niceness of a few, who are nothing but form, would thrust upon us.'

In recalling, however briefly, this course of progress from ancient to modern drama, we are already warned against making an exaggerated claim for that unique and splendid phase of dramatic poetry—the earliest—which is known as Attic Tragedy. It is not the absolute measure, for all times and peoples, of what Tragedy should or can be. It does not furnish a norm by which Shakespeare or Goethe or Victor Hugo can be adequately tried. But in its own kind Attic Tragedy is supreme. It is the final outcome of the Greek genius in poetry; it has absorbed into itself elements of all that was best in the forms which went before it. It is also a perfect expression of the Athenian mind in the best age of Athens; that is, of the greatest national genius for literary art which history can show, seen at the moment of its highest excellence.

The whole history of classical Greek poetry was that of a natural growth. Epos expresses one stage of the Hellenic development, Lyric poetry a second, Attic Drama a third. Each, in its own time and in its own way, represents an order of beliefs and feelings to which the poet gave, indeed, a clearer and more beautiful embodiment, but which was already pervading the Hellenic world of his age. Each, too, is addressed to hearers more directly than to readers; its interpreter is the living voice of the reciter, of the lyric singer, or of the actor. In the literature of Rome, and of the modern world, it is only the ruder phases of poetry, those of folk-song or ballad, which exhibit such a relation to national life. But Greek poetry preserved this relation so long as creative force remained to it.

The classification, Epic, Lyric, Dramatic, is itself a proof. The general rules governing each of these forms were gradually shaped by poets in response to the needs of Hellenic audiences. The laws of Epos were evolved by the conditions of a minstrel's recitation at a banquet, or on some public occasion. The laws of the Lyric were shaped by the requirements of choral worship at Dorian festivals, or by the usages of Aeolian society. The principal laws of Drama were determined by the Attic ritual of Dionysus. And when these general laws had been thus shaped, they were binding on the poet; his original genius was to be shown in his handling of the instrument prescribed to him, not in devising new instruments of his own; he could introduce new details, but the great outlines were fixed. His subject-matter decided the form which he was to employ. The series of great poets in any modern literature would illustrate this by contrast. Take, for example, English poetry from Spenser to Wordsworth; the literary development can be traced, no doubt, to the causes which connect it with the general intellectual progress of the nation, and with the social or political influences of different periods; but it is not, in the direct Greek sense, a spontaneous and continuous expression of national life; and therefore it does not follow, in the Greek sense, the course of a natural growth.

Hence there is no poetry of which it is so true as of the Greek that it ought to be studied in the historical order of its development. Homer is the best preparation for Pindar; Homer is again the best aid, and Pindar no small aid, to the comprehension of the Attic drama. In the classical age the whole bent of the Greek mind was retrospective. Descending the stream of Greek poetry from its source, we gradually learn to appreciate the feeling with which successive Greek poets looked back upon the spiritual past of their race. It would be a further aid to such appreciation, if it were possible to restrict our field of view as it was restricted for the Greeks themselves. But no modern can strictly confine his thoughts within the mental boundaries of ancient Greece; despite all his efforts, disturbing cross-lights from later ages will steal in, and colour or obscure his vision of that far-off world. The Attic drama, with its definite framework, its clear outlines, and its strong concentration, is the form of Greek poetry least liable to these effects; it is that which we can hope to see most nearly from the Hellenic point of view. In Tragedy, this is made possible for us by Aeschylus and Sophocles; in Comedy, by Aristophanes. the spectacle offered by Euripides is, in itself, less purely Hellenic; but, if we only remember that, then we can enjoy without reserve the peculiar gift which his genius has bequeathed to the modern world,—a blending of Hellenic light, though that light is declining, with the incipient promise of Romance.

Notes

¹De Oratore, 3. 7. § 26.