Peirithous, 598.
Young, but in spirit not untrained by trouble.
Dictys, 332.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE FRAGMENTS OF THE LOST TRAGIC POETS.
Apparent Accident in the Preservation of Greek Poetry.—Criticism among the Ancients.—Formation of Canons.—Libraries.—The Political Vicissitudes of Alexandria, Rome, Constantinople.—Byzantine Scholarship in the Ninth Century.—The Lost MS. of Menander.—Tragic Fragments preserved by the Comic Poets and their Scholiasts; by Athenæus, by Stobæus.—Aristotle.—Tragedy before Æschylus.—Fragments of Aristarchus.—The Medea of Neophron.—Ion.—The Games of Achæus.—Agathon; his Character for Luxurious Living.—The Flower.—Aristotle's Partiality for Agathon.—The Family of Æschylus.—Meletus and Plato among the Tragic Playwrights.—The School of Sophocles.—Influence of Euripides.—Family of Karkinos.—Tragedians ridiculed by Aristophanes.—The Sisyphus of Critias.—Cleophon.—Cynical Tragedies ascribed to Diogenes.—Extraordinary Fertility of the Attic Drama.—The Repetition of Old Plots.—Mamercus and Dionysius.—Professional Rhetoricians appear as Playwrights.—The School of Isocrates.—The Centaur of Chæremon.—His Style.—The Themistocles of Moschion.—The Alexandrian Pleiad.—The Adonis of Ptolemy Philopator.
Among the losses in Greek literature few are so tantalizing as the almost absolute extinction of the tragic poets who preceded and followed the supreme Athenian triumvirate. It would have been exceedingly interesting to trace the history of the drama from its rude origins up to the point at which the creative genius of Æschylus gave it an inalienable character, and again to note the deviation of the tragic muse from heroic themes to fables of pure fiction under the influence of Agathon. This pleasant task of analytical criticism, concordant with the spirit of our age, which is not satisfied with admiring masterpieces unless it can also understand the law of their growth and mark the several stages in the process of historical development, will fall to the lot of no student now, unless, indeed, Pompeii render up a treasure-house of MSS. as yet undreamed of, and Signor Fiorelli save the priceless leaflets of charred tinder from destruction.
Why is it that out of the seventy plays of Æschylus only seven are extant; of the Sophoclean one hundred and thirteen (allowing seventeen others which bore his name to have been spurious) only seven; while eighteen—or, if we admit the Rhesus, nineteen—are the meagre salvage from the wreck of at least seventy-five dramas by Euripides? Why is it that of their lost tragedies we possess but inconsiderable fragments—just enough to prove that the compilers of commonplace books like Stobæus might, if they had pleased, have gratified our curiosity beyond the dreams of a Renaissance scholar's covetousness? Why, again, is it that of Agathon, whose dramatic romance, the Flower, was thought worthy of citation by Aristotle, whom Aristophanes named as Ἀγάθων ὁ κλεινός, ἀγαθὸς ποιητὴς καὶ ποθεινὸς τοῖς φίλοις,[70] whose thanksgiving banquet supplied a frame for Plato's dialogue on Love, and whose style, if faithfully depicted by the philosopher, was a very "rivulet of olive-oil noiselessly running"—why is it that of this Agathon we know nothing but what may be inferred from the caricature of the Thesmophoriazusæ, the portrait of the Symposium, and a few critical strictures in the Poetics? Why is it that Ion, who enjoyed a great renown (περιβόητος ἐγένετο) and ranked as fifth in the muster-roll of Athenian tragic poets, is now but a mere empty name? To these questions, which might be rhetorically multiplied ad infinitum on a hundred tones of querulous and sad expostulation with the past, there is no satisfactory answer. Not, as Bacon asserted, has time borne down upon his flood the froth and trash of things; far rather may we thank fate that the flotsam and the jetsam that have reached our shore include the best works of antiquity. Yet, notwithstanding this, "the iniquity of oblivion," in the words of Sir Thomas Browne, "blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity."