Divine Euripides, this tomb we see
So fair is not a monument for thee,
So much as thou for it; since all will own
That thy immortal fame adorns the stone.
We have now observed the transitions through which Grecian tragedy passed in the hands of its three great masters, Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. As GROTE says, "The differences between these three poets are doubtless referable to the working of Athenian politics and Athenian philosophy on the minds of the two latter. In Sophocles we may trace the companion of Herodotus; in Euripides the hearer of Anaxag'oras, Socrates, and Prod'icus; 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 Sophocles knew how to keep in subordination to his grand poetical purpose." To properly estimate the influence which the tragedies exerted upon the Athenians, we must remember that a large number of them was presented on the stage every year; that it was rare to repeat anyone of them; that the theatre of Bacchus, in which they were represented, accommodated thirty thousand persons; that, as religious observances, they formed part of the civil establishment; and that admission to them was virtually free to every Athenian citizen. Taking these things into consideration, GROTE adds: "If we conceive of the entire population of a large city listening almost daily to those immortal compositions whose beauty first stamped tragedy as a separate department of poetry, we shall be satisfied that such powerful poetic influences were never brought to act upon any other people; and that the tastes, the sentiments, and the intellectual standard of the Athenians must have been sensibly improved and exalted by such lessons." [Footnote: "History of Greece," Chap, lxvii.]
2. COMEDY.
Another marked feature of Athenian life, and one but little less influential than tragedy in its effects upon the Athenian character, was comedy. It had its origin, as we have seen, in the vintage festivals of Bacchus, where the wild songs of the participants were frequently interspersed with coarse witticisms against the spectators. Like tragedy, it was a Dorian invention, and Sicily seems to have early become the seat of the comic writers. Epichar'mus, a Dorian poet and philosopher, was the first of these to put the Bacchic songs and dances into dramatic form. The place of his nativity is uncertain, but he passed the greater part of his life at Syracuse, in the society of the greatest literary men of the age, and there he is supposed to have written his comedies some years prior to the Persian war. It seems, however, that comedy was introduced into Attica by Susa'rion, a native of Meg'ara, long before the time of Epichar'mus (578 B.C.). But the former's plays were so largely made up of rude and abusive personalities that they were not tolerated by the Pisistrati'dæ, and for over a century we bear nothing farther of comedy in Attica—not until it was revived by Chion'ides, about 488 B.C., or, according to some authorities, twenty years later.
Under the contemporaries or successors of Chionides comedy became an important agent in the political warfare of Athens, although it was frequently the subject of prohibitory or restrictive legal enactments. "Only a nation," says a recent writer, "in the plenitude of self-contentment, conscious of vigor, and satisfied with its own energy, could have tolerated the kind of censorship the comic poets dared to exercise."
Characterization of the Old Comedy.
In the preliminary discourse to his translation of the Comedies of Aristophanes, MR. THOMAS MITCHELL, an English critic of note, makes these observations upon the character of the Old Comedy: "The Old Comedy, as it is called, in contradistinction to what was afterward named the Middle and the New, stood in the extreme relation of contrariety and parody to the tragedy of the Greeks —it was directed chiefly to the lower orders of society at Athens; it served in some measure the purposes of the modern journal, in which public measures and the topics of the day might be fully discussed; and in consequence the dramatis personæ were generally the poet's own contemporaries, speaking in their own names and acting in masks, which, as they bore only a caricature resemblance of their own faces, showed that the poet, in his observations, did not mean to be taken literally. Like tragedy, comedy constituted part of a religious ceremony; and the character of the deity to whom it was more particularly dedicated was stamped at times pretty visibly upon the work which was composed in his honor. The Dionysian festivals were the great carnivals of antiquity—they celebrated the returns of vernal festivity or the joyous vintage, and were in consequence the great holidays of Athens—the seasons of universal relaxation.
"The comic poet was the high-priest of the festival; and if the orgies of his divinity (the god of wine) sometimes demanded a style of poetry which a Father of our Church probably had in his eye when he called all poetry the devil's wine, the organ of their utterance (however strange it may seem to us) no doubt considered himself as perfectly absolved from the censure which we should bestow on such productions: in his compositions he was discharging the same pious office as the painter, whose duty it was to fill the temples of the same deity with pictures which our imaginations would consider equally ill-suited to the habitations of divinity. What religion therefore forbids among us, the religion of the Greeks did not merely tolerate but enjoin. Nor was the extreme and even profane gayety of the comedy without its excuse. To unite extravagant mirth with a solemn seriousness was enjoined by law, even in the sacred festival of Ceres.
"While the philosophers, therefore, querulously maintained that man was the joke and plaything of the gods, the comic poet reversed the picture, and made the gods the playthings of men; in his hands, indeed, everything was upon the broad grin: the gods laughed, men laughed, and animals laughed. Nature was considered as a sort of fantastic being, with a turn for the humorous; and the world was treated as a sort of extended jest-book, where the poet pointed out the bon-mots [Footnote: French; pronounced bong-mos.] and acted in some degree as corrector of the Press. If he discharged this office sometimes in the sarcastic spirit of a Mephistopheles, this, too, was considered as part of his functions. He was the Ter'roe Fil'ius [Footnote: Terroe Filius, son of the earth; that is, a human being.] of the day; and lenity would have been considered, not as an act of discretion, but as a cowardly dereliction of duty."
It was in the time of Pericles that the comedy just described first dealt with men and subjects under their real names; and in one of the plays of Crati'nus—under whom comedy received its full development—Cimon is highly eulogized, and his rival, Pericles, is bitterly derided. With unmeasured and unsparing license comedy attacked, under the veil of satire, not only all that was really ludicrous or base, but often cast scorn and derision on that which was innocent, or even meritorious. For the reason that the comic writers were so indiscriminate in their attacks, frequently making transcendent genius and noble personality, as well as demagogism and personal vice, the butt of comic scorn; their writings have but little historical value except in the few instances in which they are corroborated by higher authority.