IV.
His deeds, his social love (so will the nine,
Proud to spread wide the praise
Of friendship and of friendly Jove) shall shine
With ever-living rays.
This moralizing humour, so prevalent in those times, is, I dare be confident, the true source of the sententious cast of the Greek dramatic writers, as well as of that sober air of moral, which, to the no small disgust of modern writers, is spread over all their poets. Not but there would be some difference in those poets themselves, and in proportion as they had been more or less conversant in the Academy, would be their relish of this moral mode; as is clearly seen in the case of Euripides, that philosopher of the stage, as the Athenians called him, and who is characterized by Quinctilian, as sententiis densus, et in iis, quæ a sapientibus tradita sunt, pæne ipsis par. [L. x. c. 1.] Yet still the fashion was so general, that no commerce of the world could avoid, or wholly get clear of it; and therefore Sophocles, though his engagements in the state kept him at a greater distance from the schools, had yet his share of this philosophical humour. Now this apology for the practice of the Greek poets doth by no means extend to the Roman; Philosophy having been very late, and never generally, the taste of Rome.
Cicero says, Philosophia quidem tantum abest ut proinde, ac de hominum est vitâ merita, laudetur, ut a plerisque neglecta, a multis etiam vituperetur. In another place he tells us, that in his time Aristotle was not much known, or read, even by the philosophers themselves. [Cic. Top. sub init.]
And, though in the age of Seneca, Sentences, we know, were much in use, yet the cast and turn of them evidently shew them to have been the affectation of the lettered few, and not the general mode and practice of the time. For the quaintness, in which Seneca’s aphorisms are dressed, manifestly speaks the labour and artifice of the closet, and is just the reverse of that easy, simple expression, which cloaths them in the Greek poets, thus demonstrating their familiar currency in common life. Under any other circumstances than these, the practice, as was observed, must be unquestionably faulty; except only in the chorus, where for the reason before given, it may always, with good advantage, be employed.
220. Carmine qui tragico, &c.] The connexion with v. 201, from whence the poet had digressed, is worth observing. The digression had been taken up in describing the improved state of dramatic music; the application of which to the case of tragedy, brings him round again to his subject, the tragic chorus; to which alone, as hath been observed, the two last lines refer. This too is the finest preparation of what follows. For to have passed on directly from the tibia to the satyrs, had been abrupt and inartificial; but from tragedy, the transition is easy, the satyrs being a species of the tragic drama. That it was so accounted may be seen from the following passage in Ovid,
Est et in obscænos deflexa tragædia risus,
Multaque præteriti verba pudoris habet.
Trist. l. ii. v. 409.
For the tragedy, here referred to, cannot be the regular Roman tragedy. That he had distinctly considered before, and, besides, it in no age admitted, much less in this, of which we are speaking, so intolerable a mixture. As little can it be understood of the proper Atellane fable, for besides that Ovid is here considering the Greek drama only, the Atellane was ever regarded as a species, not of tragedy, but comedy: The authority of Donatus is very express; “Comædiarum formæ sunt tres: Palliatæ, Togatæ, Atellanæ, salibus et jocis compositæ, quæ in se non habent nisi vetustam elegantiam.” [Prol. in Terent.] And Athenæus [l. vi.] speaking of some pieces of this sort, which L. Sylla had composed, calls them σατυρικὰς κωμῳδίας, satyric comedies; comedies, because, ss Donatus says, “salibus et jocis compositæ:” and satyric, not that satyrs were introduced in them, but, according to Diomedes, from their being “argumentis dictisque similes satyricis fabulis Græcis.” Of what then can Ovid be understood to speak, but the true satyric piece, which was always esteemed, and, as appears from the Cyclops, in fact is, what Demetrius [περὶ ἑρμηνείας] elegantly calls it, τραγῳδία παιζούση, a lighter kind of tragedy; the very name, which Horace, as well as Ovid in this place, gives to it? But this is further clear from the instance quoted by Ovid, of this loose tragedy; for he proceeds:
Nec nocet autori, mollem qui fecit Achillem,
Infregisse suis fortia facta modis.
which well agrees to the idea of a satyric piece, and, as Vossius takes notice, seems to be the very same subject, which Athenæus and others tell us, Sophocles had work’d into a satyric tragedy, under the title of Ἀχιλλέως ἐρασταί.