This process of decay was natural enough and was only to be expected, given the changes in Rome’s society and with them the decline of Roman ideals. But it is still somewhat of a riddle why at Rome as well as at Athens good playwrights ceased to write a hundred years before tragedy ceased to attract respectable audiences. It would seem as if the art of writing plays lost its stimulus even before the plays themselves ceased to please. The reason for this may well be that tragedy kept too long to its convention of interpreting sacred myths. The themes were outworn, and each myth had had every human interest exploited by the time that several writers had given it their several interpretations.
Today it would seem quite the obvious thing to have dramatized fictitious experience, even as comedy had long ago learned to do. But a moment’s reflection will show that to assume that this might have been done involves an anachronism. Greece did not take this step after Euripides, for Agathon’s experiment was not followed, nor France for some time after the classical period, nor England after the Elizabethan successes, and conditions at Rome in the days of Accius were in many respects analogous to those in the countries named. Though the dramatic instinct seems always to be presumable, the drama depends upon social conditions and must draw its life from that which society provides. Its evolution has accordingly been a fairly consistent story. Early tragedy assumes the rôle of interpreting the most sacred and time-honored of a nation’s stories. The sufferings, thoughts, emotions of the great—heroes, demigods, and kings—are worthy of presentation, and these alone. At first the tale must not be altered, it must be told as nearly as possible in the way that tradition has hallowed. As time goes on, however, and men have changed, the tale thus told will seem inconsonant with human nature; then the dramatist may re-tell it, suppressing what has grown obsolete, emphasizing the elements that still seem true to experience. A very daring realist will venture to present Telephus in tatters, but the critics will be upon his heels immediately. For the hero will remind you of a beggar, and it would be desecration to set mere man upon the stage made for the demigods. Common man belongs in comedy; you may laugh at him and with him, but life’s great lessons are illustrated only in the characters of the great. And that is where Euripides stopped—was doubtless compelled to stop. And it is nearly where Shakespeare found the outward boundary of his tragedies. His tragic plots derive from old Chronicles or from Ancient Rome, or from foreign lands sufficiently removed from his audience by mists of unknown space to make them suitably heroic. His tragic characters never represent the men of contemporary England. They are as real and human as the man of the street, to be sure; but that is after all not the same thing. Try to imagine the heroines of Ibsen or Pinero or O’Neill upon the stage of the Globe Theatre in Shakespeare’s day! The Elizabethan conception of the function of tragedy makes such heroines unthinkable except in comic rôles.
Realistic tragedy is of course a thing of slow growth, or perhaps we should say that a nation fits itself slowly for the reception of it. Comedy paves the way somewhat. When the great may not be laughed at, it is well that comedy should present the foibles and deformities of the common man, if it be merely for ridicule. Slaves served the purpose of comedy for Menander and Plautus, though they were careful not to compromise the dignity of their art by giving title rôles to such humble fellows. Yet as a matter of fact the study of mean subjects contributed directly and very largely to the understanding of the ordinary character as material for tragedy. Shakespeare’s portraiture of Shylock, for example, carried him so far that modern critics do not know where comedy ends and tragedy begins. In the Andria, the Hecyra, and the Heauton of Terence the emotion shifts more than once from laughter to deep sympathy. But something more was needed than the dramatist’s study of the man of the street. Human society must itself change. It is not an accident that genuine realistic tragedy failed to find its fully accepted place upon the stage till the nineteenth century, in a word not till thoroughgoing democracy, by preaching the equality of men, had persuaded us of the dignity of the mere human being, and through the prose novel taught the man on the street to concern himself with his fellows as worthy themes of art. That was a stage of democratic realism which Rome did not reach while the literary art was still creative. And therein probably lies the final explanation of the slow failure of Roman tragedy.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Am. Jour. Phil., 1927, 105.
[2] Livius and Naevius were both very fond of the septenarii; the iambic tetrameter appears in the tragic fragments of Naevius once; cretics are found in the Equos Trojanus, and bacchiacs apparently in Naevius’ Danae and in his Lycurgus. Fraenkel, Hermes (1927), 357 ff., has shown that the trochaic septenarius (quadratus) was an old Latin meter. We need not, however, assume with him that it was derived from the Greek. As a marching rhythm it is too natural to require explanation. The assumption of an Indo-European Urvers needs to be exiled from our books. Song and dance are very old.
[3] See Cambridge Ancient History, VII, 644.
[4] See Duckett, Studies in Ennius, 56, who revises the views of Leo, De Tragoedia Romana (Göttingen, 1910).