We cannot doubt that the effect of these compositions upon the public sympathies, as well as upon the public judgment and intelligence, must have been beneficial and moralizing in a high degree. Though the subjects and persons are legendary, the relations between them are all human and simple, exalted above the level of humanity only in such measure as to present a stronger claim to the hearer’s admiration or pity. So powerful a body of poetical influence has probably never been brought to act upon the emotions of any other population; and when we consider the extraordinary beauty of these immortal compositions, which first stamped tragedy as a separate department of poetry, and gave to it a dignity never since reached, we shall be satisfied that the tastes, the sentiments, and the intellectual standard, of the Athenian multitude, must have been sensibly improved and exalted by such lessons. The reception of such pleasures through the eye and the ear, as well as amidst a sympathizing crowd, was a fact of no small importance in the mental history of Athens. It contributed to exalt their imagination, like the grand edifices and ornaments added during the same period to their acropolis. Like them, too, and even more than they, tragedy was the monopoly of Athens; for while tragic composers came thither from other parts of Greece—Achæus from Eretria, and Ion from Chios, at a time when the Athenian empire comprised both those places—to exhibit their genius, nowhere else were original tragedies composed and acted, though hardly any considerable city was without a theatre.[512]
The three great tragedians—Æschylus, Sophoklês, and Euripidês—distinguished above all their competitors, as well by contemporaries as by subsequent critics, are interesting to us, not merely from the positive beauties of each, but also from the differences between them in handling, style, and sentiment, and from the manner in which these differences illustrate the insensible modification of the Athenian mind. Though the subjects, persons, and events of tragedy always continued to be borrowed from the legendary world, and were thus kept above the level of contemporaneous life,[513] yet the dramatic manner of handling them is sensibly modified, even in Sophoklês as compared with Æschylus; and still more in Euripidês, by the atmosphere of democracy, political and judicial contention, and philosophy, encompassing and acting upon the poet.
In Æschylus, the ideality belongs to the handling not less than to the subjects: the passions appealed to are the masculine and violent, to the exclusion of Aphroditê and her inspirations:[514] the figures are vast and majestic, but exhibited only in half-light and in shadowy outline: the speech is replete with bold metaphor and abrupt transition, “grandiloquent even to a fault,” as Quintilian remarks, and often approaching nearer to Oriental vagueness than to Grecian perspicuity. In Sophoklês, there is evidently a closer approach to reality and common life: the range of emotions is more varied, the figures are more distinctly seen, and the action more fully and conspicuously worked out. Not only we have a more elaborate dramatic structure, but a more expanded dialogue, and a comparative simplicity of speech like that of living Greeks: and we find too a certain admixture of rhetorical declamation, amidst the greatest poetical beauty which the Grecian drama ever attained. But when we advance to Euripidês, this rhetorical element becomes still more prominent and developed. The ultra-natural sublimity of the legendary characters disappears: love and compassion are invoked to a degree which Æschylus would have deemed inconsistent with the dignity of the heroic person: moreover, there are appeals to the reason, and argumentative controversies, which that grandiloquent poet would have despised as petty and forensic cavils. And—what was worse still, judging from the Æschylean point of view—there was a certain novelty of speculation, an intimation of doubt on reigning opinions, and an air of scientific refinement, often spoiling the poetical effect.
Such differences between these three great poets are doubtless referable to the working of Athenian politics and Athenian philosophy on the minds of the two later. In Sophoklês, we may trace the companion of Herodotus;[515] in Euripidês, the hearer of Anaxagoras, Sokratês, and Prodikus;[516] in both, the familiarity with that wide-spread popularity of speech, and real, serious debate of politicians and competitors before the dikastery, which both had ever before their eyes, but which the genius of Sophoklês knew how to keep in due subordination to his grand poetical purpose.
The transformation of the tragic muse from Æschylus to Euripidês is the more deserving of notice, as it shows us how Attic tragedy served as the natural prelude and encouragement to the rhetorical and dialectical age which was approaching. But the democracy, which thus insensibly modified the tragic drama, imparted a new life and ampler proportions to the comic; both the one and the other being stimulated by the increasing prosperity and power of Athens during the half century following 480 B.C. Not only was the affluence of strangers and visitors to Athens continually augmenting, but wealthy men were easily found to incur the expense of training the chorus and actors. There was no manner of employing wealth which seemed so appropriate to procure influence and popularity to its possessors, as that of contributing to enhance the magnificence of the national and religious festivals.[517] This was the general sentiment both among rich and among poor; nor is there any criticism more unfounded than that which represents such an obligation as hard and oppressive upon rich men. Most of them spent more than they were legally compelled to spend in this way, from the desire of exalting their popularity. The only real sufferers were the people, considered as interested in a just administration of law; since it was a practice which enabled many rich men to acquire importance who had no personal qualities to deserve it, and which provided them with a stock of factitious merits to be pleaded before the dikastery, as a set-off against substantive accusations.
The full splendor of the comic muse was considerably later than that of the tragic. Even down to 460 B.C. (about the time when Periklês and Ephialtês introduced their constitutional reforms), there was not a single comic poet of eminence at Athens; nor was there apparently a single undisputed Athenian comedy before that date, which survived to the times of the Alexandrine critics. Magnês, Kratês, and Kratinus—probably also Chionidês and Ekphantidês[518]—all belong to the period beginning about (Olympiad 80 or) 460 B.C.; that is, the generation preceding Aristophanês, whose first composition dates in 427 B.C. The condition and growth of Attic comedy before this period seems to have been unknown even to Aristotle, who intimates that the archon did not begin to grant a chorus for comedy, or to number it among the authoritative solemnities of the festival, until long after the practice had been established for tragedy. Thus the comic chorus in that early time consisted of volunteers, without any chorêgus publicly assigned to bear the expense of teaching them or getting up the piece; so that there was little motive for authors to bestow care or genius in the preparation of their song, dance, and scurrilous monody, or dialogue. The exuberant revelry of the phallic festival and procession, with full license of scoffing at any one present, which the god Dionysus was supposed to enjoy, and with the most plain-spoken grossness as well in language as in ideas, formed the primitive germ, which under Athenian genius ripened into the old comedy.[519] It resembled in many respects the satyric drama of the tragedians, but was distinguished from it by dealing not merely with the ancient mythical stories and persons, but chiefly with contemporary men and subjects of common life; dealing with them often, too, under their real names, and with ridicule the most direct, poignant, and scornful. We see clearly how fair a field Athens would offer for this species of composition, at a time when the bitterness of political contention ran high,—when the city had become a centre for novelties from every part of Greece,—when tragedians, rhetors, and philosophers, were acquiring celebrity and incurring odium,—and when the democratical constitution laid open all the details of political and judicial business, as well as all the first men of the state, not merely to universal criticism, but also to unmeasured libel.
Out of all the once abundant compositions of Attic comedy, nothing has reached us except eleven plays of Aristophanês. That poet himself singles out Magnês, Kratês, and Kratinus, among predecessors whom he describes as numerous, for honorable mention; as having been frequently, though not uniformly, successful. Kratinus appears to have been not only the most copious, but also the most distinguished, among all those who preceded Aristophanês, a list comprising Hermippus, Telekleidês, and the other bitter assailants of Periklês. It was Kratinus who first extended and systematized the license of the phallic festival, and the “careless laughter of the festive crowd,”[520] into a drama of regular structure, with actors three in number, according to the analogy of tragedy. Standing forward, against particular persons exhibited or denounced by their names, with a malignity of personal slander not inferior to the iambist Archilochus, and with an abrupt and dithyrambic style somewhat resembling Æschylus, Kratinus made an epoch in comedy as the latter had made in tragedy; but was surpassed by Aristophanês, as much as Æschylus had been surpassed by Sophoklês. We are told that his compositions were not only more rudely bitter and extensively libellous than those of Aristophanês,[521] but also destitute of that richness of illustration and felicity of expression which pervades all the wit of the latter, whether good-natured or malignant. In Kratinus, too, comedy first made herself felt as a substantive agent and partisan in the political warfare of Athens. He espoused the cause of Kimon against Periklês;[522] eulogizing the former, while he bitterly derided and vituperated the latter Hermippus, Telekleidês, and most of the contemporary comic writers followed the same political line in assailing that great man, together with those personally connected with him, Aspasia and Anaxagoras: indeed, Hermippus was the person who indicted Aspasia for impiety before the dikastery. But the testimony of Aristophanês[523] shows that no comic writer, of the time of Periklês, equalled Kratinus, either in vehemence of libel or in popularity.
It is remarkable that, in 440 B.C., a law was passed forbidding comic authors to ridicule any citizen by name in their compositions; which prohibition, however, was rescinded after two years, an interval marked by the rare phenomenon of a lenient comedy from Kratinus.[524] Such enactment denotes a struggle in the Athenian mind, even at that time, against the mischief of making the Dionysiac festival an occasion for unmeasured libel against citizens publicly named and probably themselves present. And there was another style of comedy taken up by Kratês, distinct from the iambic or Archilochian vein worked by Kratinus, in which comic incident was attached to fictitious characters and woven into a story, without recourse to real individual names or direct personality. This species of comedy, analogous to that which Epicharmus had before exhibited at Syracuse, was continued by Pherekratês as the successor of Kratês. Though for a long time less popular and successful than the poignant food served up by Kratinus and others, it became finally predominant after the close of the Peloponnesian war, by the gradual transition of what is called the Old Comedy into the Middle and New Comedy.
But it is in Aristophanês that the genius of the old libellous comedy appears in its culminating perfection. At least we have before us enough of his works to enable us to appreciate his merits; though perhaps Eupolis, Ameipsias, Phrynichus, Plato (Comicus), and others, who contended against him at the festivals with alternate victory and defeat, would be found to deserve similar praise, if we possessed their compositions. Never probably will the full and unshackled force of comedy be so exhibited again. Without having Aristophanês actually before us, it would have been impossible to imagine the unmeasured and unsparing license of attack assumed by the old comedy upon the gods, the institutions, the politicians, philosophers, poets, private citizens specially named, and even the women, whose life was entirely domestic, of Athens. With this universal liberty in respect of subject, there is combined a poignancy of derision and satire, a fecundity of imagination and variety of turns, and a richness of poetical expression, such as cannot be surpassed, and such as fully explains the admiration expressed for him by the philosopher Plato, who in other respects must have regarded him with unquestionable disapprobation. His comedies are popular in the largest sense of the word, addressed to the entire body of male citizens on a day consecrated to festivity, and providing for them amusement or derision with a sort of drunken abundance, out of all persons or things standing in any way prominent before the public eye. The earliest comedy of Aristophanês was exhibited in 427 B.C., and his muse continued for a long time prolific, since two of the dramas now remaining belong to an epoch eleven years after the Thirty and the renovation of the democracy, about 392 B.C. After that renovation, however, as I have before remarked, the unmeasured sweep and libellous personality of the old comedy was gradually discontinued: the comic chorus was first cut down, and afterwards suppressed, so as to usher in what is commonly termed the Middle Comedy, without any chorus at all. The “Plutus” of Aristophanês indicates some approach to this new phase; but his earlier and more numerous comedies, from the “Acharneis,” in 425 B.C. to the “Frogs,” in 405 B.C., only a few months before the fatal battle of Ægospotami, exhibit the continuous, unexhausted, untempered flow of the stream first opened by Kratinus.
Such abundance both of tragic and comic poetry, each of first-rate excellence, formed one of the marked features of Athenian life, and became a powerful instrument in popularizing new combinations of thought with variety and elegance of expression. While the tragic muse presented the still higher advantage of inspiring elevated and benevolent sympathies, more was probably lost than gained by the lessons of the comic muse; not only bringing out keenly all that was really ludicrous or contemptible in the phenomena of the day, but manufacturing scornful laughter, quite as often, out of that which was innocent or even meritorious, as well as out of boundless private slander. The “Knights” and the “Wasps” of Aristophanês, however, not to mention other plays, are a standing evidence of one good point in the Athenian character; that they bore with good-natured indulgence the full outpouring of ridicule and even of calumny interwoven with it, upon those democratical institutions to which they were sincerely attached. The democracy was strong enough to tolerate unfriendly tongues either in earnest or in jest: the reputations of men who stood conspicuously forward in politics, on whatever side, might also be considered as a fair mark for attacks; inasmuch as that measure of aggressive criticism which is tutelary and indispensable, cannot be permitted without the accompanying evil, comparatively much smaller, of excess and injustice;[525] though even here we may remark that excess of bitter personality is among the most conspicuous sins of Athenian literature generally. But the warfare of comedy, in the persons of Aristophanês and other composers, against philosophy, literature, and eloquence, in the name of those good old times of ignorance, “when an Athenian seaman knew nothing more than how to call for his barley-cake, and cry, Yo-ho;”[526] and the retrograde spirit which induces them to exhibit moral turpitude as the natural consequence of the intellectual progress of the age, are circumstances going far to prove an unfavorable and degrading influence of comedy on the Athenian mind.