The hap of mortals is uncertain ever.
Mention should be made of Diogenes and Crates the philosophers, who wrote plays not for production, but for the study, as propagandist pamphlets. They may none the less have been excellent plays, like the Justice of Mr. Galsworthy. Very little remains on which an opinion can be founded. One vigorous line of Diogenes catches the attention: “I would rather have a drop of luck than a barrel of brains”.[107]
A more remarkable dramatist was Moschion, whose precise importance it is hard to estimate, though he is deeply interesting to the historian of tragedy. For on the one hand, he was probably not popular—nothing is known of his life,[108] and Stobæus is practically the only writer who quotes him. On the other hand, he is the one Greek poet known to have practised definitely the historical type of drama. Moschion is of course not alone in selecting actual events for his theme. Long before his day Phrynichus had produced his Phœnissæ and The Capture of Miletus, Æschylus his Persæ; and his contemporary Theodectes composed a tragedy Mausolus in glorification of the deceased king of Caria. But all four were pièces d’occasion. Moschion alone practised genuine historical drama: he went according to custom into the past for his material, but chose great events of real history, not legend.[109] His Themistocles dealt with the battle of Salamis; we possess one brief remnant thereof, in which (as it seems) a messenger compares the victory of the small Greek force to the devastation wrought by a small axe in a great pine-forest. The Men of Pheræ appears[110] to have depicted the brutality of Alexander, prince of Pheræ, who refused burial to Polyphron.
These “burial-passages” include Moschion’s most remarkable fragment, a fine description in thirty-three lines describing the rise of civilization. The versification is undesirably smooth—throughout there is not a single resolved foot. Like a circumspect rationalist, Moschion offers three alternative reasons, favouring none, for the progress made by man: some great teacher such as Prometheus, the Law of Nature (ἀνάγκη), the long slow experience (τριβή) of the whole race. His style here is vigorous but uneven; after dignified lines which somewhat recall Æschylus we find a sudden drop to bald prose: ὁ δ’ ἀσθενὴς ἦν τῶν ἀμεινόνων βορά:[111] “the weak were the food of the strong”.
It is convenient to mention here a remarkable satyric drama, produced about 324 B.C., the Agen,[112] of which seventeen consecutive lines survive. This play was produced during the Dionysiac festival in the camp of Alexander on the banks of the Hydaspes or Jhelum, in the Punjaub. Its subject was the escapades of Harpalus, who had revolted from Alexander and fled to Athens. The author is said[113] to have been either Python of Catana or Byzantium, or the Great Alexander himself. No doubt it was an elaborate “squib” full of racy topical allusions. Were it not that Athenæus calls it a “satyric playlet”[114] we might take the fragment as part of a comedy. But about this time satyric drama tended to become a form of personal attack—a dramatic “satire”. Thus one Mimnermus, whose date is unknown, wrote a play against doctors[115]; Lycophron and Sositheus, both members of the Alexandrian “Pleiad,” attacked individual philosophers, the former writing a Menedemus which satirized the gluttony and drunkenness of the amiable founder of the Eretrian school, the latter ridiculing the disciples whom the “folly of Cleanthes” drove like cattle—an insult which the audience resented and damned the play.[116]
The third century saw a great efflorescence of theatrical activity in Alexandria. Under Ptolemy II (285-247 B.C.), that city became the centre of world-culture as it already was of commerce. All artistic forms were protected and rewarded with imperial liberality. The great library became one of the wonders of the world, and the Dionysiac festivals were performed with sedulous magnificence. Among the many writers of tragedy seven were looked on as forming a class by themselves—the famous Pleiad (“The Constellation of Seven”). Only five names of these are certain—Philiscus, Homerus, Alexander, Lycophron, and Sositheus; for the other two “chairs” various names are found in our authorities: Sosiphanes, Dionysiades, Æantides, Euphronius. Nor can we be sure that all these men worked at Alexandria.[117] That the splendour of the city and Ptolemy’s magnificent patronage should have drawn the leading men of art, letters, and science to the world’s centre, is a natural assumption and indeed the fact: Theocritus the idyllist, Euclid the geometer, Callimachus the poet and scholar, certainly lived there. Of the Pleiad, only three are known to have worked in Alexandria: Lycophron, to whom Ptolemy entrusted that section of the royal library which embraced Comedy, Alexander, who superintended Tragedy, and Philiscus the priest of Dionysus. Homerus may have passed all his career in Byzantium, which later possessed a statue of him, and Sositheus was apparently active at Athens.
Lycophron’s Menedemus has already been mentioned. His fame now rests upon the extant poem Alexandra, in high repute both in ancient and in modern times for its obscurity. But Sositheus is the most interesting of the galaxy. We may still read twenty-one lines from his satyric drama Daphnis or Lityerses, describing with grim vigour the ghoulish harvester Lityerses who made his visitors reap with him, finally beheading them and binding up the corpses in sheaves. Sositheus made his mark, indeed, less in tragedy than in satyric writing: he turned from the tendency of his day which made this genre a form of satire, and went back to the antique manner. Sosiphanes, finally, deserves mention for a remarkable fragment:—
ὦ δυστυχεῖς μὲν πολλά, παῦρα δ’ ὄλβιοι
βροτοί, τί σεμνύνεσθε ταῖς ἐξουσίαις,
ἃς ἕν τ’ ἔδωκε φέγγος ἕν τ’ ἀφείλετο;