During the fourth century many tragedians wrote not for public performance but for readers. Of these ἀναγνωστικοί[89] the most celebrated was Chæremon, of whom sufficient fragments and notices survive to give a distinct literary portrait. Comic poets ridiculed his preciosity: he called water “river’s body,” ivy “the year’s child,” and loved word-play: πρὶν γὰρ φρονεῖν εὖ καταφρονεῖν ἐπίστασαι.[90] But though a sophisticated attention to style led him into such frigid mannerisms, he can express ideas with a brief Euripidean cogency: perhaps nothing outside the work of the great masters was more often quoted in antiquity than his dictum “Human life is luck, not discretion”—τύχη τὰ θνητῶν πράγματ’, οὐκ εὐβουλία.
The only technical peculiarity attributed to him is the play Centaur, if play it was. Athenæus calls it a “drama in many metres,”[91] while Aristotle[92] uses the word “rhapsody,” implying epic quality. It may be that the epic or narrative manner was used side by side with the dramatic in the manner of Bunyan. Here is another proof that by the time of Euripides tragedy had really attained its full development. Attempts at new departures in technique are all abortive after his day.
A delightful point which emerges again and again is Chæremon’s passion for flowers. From Thyestes come two phrases—“the sheen of roses mingled with silver lilies,” and “strewing around the children of flowering spring”—which indicate, as do many others, Chæremon’s love of colour and sensuous loveliness. It was his desire to express all the details of what pleased his eye that led him into preciosity—a laboured embroidery which recalls Keats’ less happy efforts. But he can go beyond mere mannerism. A splendid fragment of his Œneus shows Chæremon at his best: it describes the half-nude beauty of girls sleeping in the moonlight. One can hardly believe that Chæremon belonged to the fourth century and was studied by Aristotle. In this passage, despite its voluptuous dilettantism, there is a sense of physical beauty, above all of colour and sensuous detail, which was unknown since Pindar, and is not to be found again, even in Theocritus, till we come to the Greek novelists. In one marvellous sentence, too, he passes beyond mere prettiness to poetry, expressing with perfect mastery the truth that the sight of beauty is the surest incentive to chastity: κἀξεπεσφραγίζετο ὥρας γελώσης χωρὶς ἐλπίδων ἔρως:—
Love, his passion quelled by awe,
Printed his smiling soul on all he saw.
It is the idea which Meredith has voiced so magically in Love in the Valley:—
Love that so desires would fain keep her changeless,
Fain would fling the net, and fain have her free.
That Greek literature has progressed far towards the self-conscious Alexandrian search for charm can nevertheless be observed if we compare this passage from Chæremon with the analogous description in Euripides’ Bacchæ[93] (which no doubt suggested it). There the same general impression, and far more “atmosphere,” is given with no voluptuous details: θαῦμ’ ἰδεῖν εὐκοσμίας—“a marvel of grace for the eye to behold”—is his nearest approach to Chæremon’s elaboration. If, as has been well said,[94] one may compare the three Masters to Giotto, Raffaelle, and Correggio respectively, then Chæremon finds his parallel among the French painters; he reminds one not so much of the handsome sensuality of Boucher as of that more seductive simplesse in which Greuze excelled.
A curious figure in this history is Dionysius the Elder, tyrant of Syracuse from 405-367 B.C. Like Frederick the Great of Prussia, not satisfied with political and military glory, he aspired to literary triumphs. With a pathetic hero-worship he purchased and treasured the desk of Æschylus, and similar objects which had belonged to Euripides, hoping (says Lucian[95]) to gain inspiration from them. The prince frequently tried his fortune at the dramatic contests in Athens, but for long without success, and naturally became a butt of the Attic wits, who particularly relished his moral aphorisms (such as “tyranny is the mother of injustice”!); Eubulus devoted a whole comedy to his tragic confrère. In 367 B.C. he heard with joy that at last the first prize had fallen to him at the Lenæa for Hector’s Ransom; gossip said that his death in the same year was due to the paroxysms of gratified vanity. Little is known about the contents of his dramas, but we hear that one play was an attack upon the philosopher Plato. In other works, too, he appears to have discussed his personal interests. Lucian preserves the bald verse:—