The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 03

by Unknown

With the restoration of peace all civic festivals took a higher flight, the various constituents fell apart, tragedy rejected the baser elements of Bacchic festivity and assumed greater dignity, it was cast into definite artistic forms by Pratinas and Chœrilus, and became freer and freer in its choice of subject. The old element was not abandoned for all that, the rustic youth would not be deprived of their accustomed masquerade, and the people were left their satyr choruses. But the two forms, which could not be combined without mutual detriment, were separated, and thus the satyr drama grows up side by side with tragedy. Pratinas, who migrated to Athens from Phlius, gave these plays their typical form, and they retained their original character of Bacchic jollity, their rustic and homely features, and the merry rout of the satyrs with their wild dances and rude jests. Thus these elements were preserved to literature and yet prevented from molesting or hampering the further development of tragedy.

The period in which Athens took her place as a great power and sent her triremes across the sea to support the Ionian revolt, likewise constituted an epoch in the history of Attic tragedy. About that time the wooden scaffoldings from which the audience had looked on at the plays of Pratinas, Chœrilus, Phrynichus, and the youthful Æschylus, gave way; and the drama had already attained such consequence in Athens that the building of a magnificent theatre was taken in hand. A permanent stage of stone was built within the precincts sacred to Dionysus on the southern declivity of the citadel, and seats for spectators, rising one above the other in semi-circular rows, were built into the rock of the Acropolis in such wise that the audience commanded a view of Hymettus and the Ilissus on the left and of the harbour on the right.

Greek Poet

Meanwhile the artistic structure of tragedy was steadily advancing towards perfection. The subject-matter grew more varied, music and the dance were used in a greater variety of forms, female characters were added. Nevertheless the lyric element remained predominant down to the time of the Persian wars; and Phrynichus, the greatest predecessor of Æschylus, was most admired for his charming choral songs. It was with the great drama of the War of Liberation that the theatrical drama began to unfold its full powers, and nowhere do we perceive more clearly the manifestation of the newly-acquired energy which pervaded every department of Attic life.

The man destined to give utterance in tragic art to the spirit of the great age was Æschylus, the son of Euphorion of Eleusis, a scion of an ancient family, through which he claimed association with one of the most venerable sanctuaries of the land. This is why he calls himself the pupil of Demeter, thus testifying that the solemn services of the temple at Eleusis had not failed to exercise a lasting influence upon his mind. As a boy he witnessed the fall of the tyrants: when come to man’s estate he fought at Marathon, being then thirty-five years old, and he himself declared, in the inscription on his tombstone, that he took pride, not in his tragedies, but in his share in that great day, though there he had been but a citizen among citizens, while as a poet he was without peer among his contemporaries. For it was he whose creative genius laid the foundations of Attic tragedy, making all previous achievements look like imperfect attempts.

He introduced a second actor on the stage, and thus made the play a real drama, by which means lively colloquy first became possible. Dialogue, for which the Athenians were singularly well qualified by their love of talking, readiness and acute reasoning faculty, was thus transferred to the stage, and this gave it a wholly novel interest. The language of the dialogue was in the main that of ordinary life, while older phonetic principles prevailed in the chorus, which was thus less familiar to the ear and produced an impression of solemnity and dignity which suited well with its character of the oldest element of tragedy and the religious centre about which it had crystallised. The choruses were shortened to allow the action to proceed more vigorously, the characters of the dramatis personæ were more sharply defined, a distinction was made between leading and secondary parts, and the parts of secondary characters of lower station bore the stamp of the common people, as distinguished from the heroic figures of the play. The stage itself was brought to a higher pitch of perfection. It was effectively fitted up as an ideal scene by Agatharchus, the son of Eudemus, an artist from Samos, who cultivated scene painting scientifically as a branch of art, and mechanism was pressed into the service to raise shades from the depths of the earth or cause gods to hover in the air by artificial means. The spectacle as a whole gained in solemn dignity no less than in spiritual import and moral significance.

The principal aim of the earlier poets had been to express and induce emotional moods; but the object of the drama was to present the legends of olden times completely in their general connection, and for this purpose Attic drama was so arranged that three tragedies were joined to form a single whole, in order to display upon a harmonious plan the successive developments of the mythical story, and these three tragedies, which were so many acts of one great drama, were followed by a Satyr-drama as afterpiece. This led back from the affecting solemnity of the tragedies to the popular sphere of the Dionysian festival, where the diverting adventures witnessed and enacted by the satyrs restored the minds of the spectators to innocent mirth. It was a healthy trait of popular sentiment which thus mingled jest and earnest, and one of which we see other evidences in vase painting and the sculptures of the temples.

Such was the tetralogy of Attic drama, which, if not invented by Æschylus yet received its artistic consummation at his hands. The dithyrambic chorus was divided into groups, each consisting of twelve (and later of fifteen) persons, so that there was a special chorus for each part of the tetralogy, to follow sympathetically the action of the dramatis personæ and fill up the pauses with dance and song. The orchestra, where the chorus was placed, lay between the stage and the spectators, just as the chorus itself symbolically occupied an intermediate position between the audience and the heroes of the drama.