II. The Classical Period of Attic Tragedy—that of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and their contemporaries (499-405). To this belong all the really important phases in the progress of Greek tragedy, which severally connect themselves with the names of its three great masters. They may be regarded as the representatives of successive generations of Attic history and life, though of course in these, as in the progress of their art itself, there is an unbroken continuity.

Aeschylus (525-456) had not only fought both at Marathon and at Salamis against those Persians whose rout he celebrated with patriotic price,[56] but he had been trained in the Eleusinian mysteries, and strenuously asserted the Aeschylus. value of the institution most intimately associated with the primitive political traditions of the past—the Areopagus.[57] He had been born in the generation after Solon, to whose maxims he fondly clung; and it was the Dorian development of Hellenic life and the philosophical system based upon it with which his religious and moral convictions were imbued. Thus even upon the generation which succeeded him, and to which the powerful simplicity of his dramatic and poetic diction seemed strange, the ethical loftiness of his conceptions and the sublimity of his dramatic imagination fell like the note of a mightier age. To us nothing is more striking than the conciliatory tendencies of his conservative mind, and the progressive nature of what may have seemed to his later contemporaries antiquated ideals.

Sophocles (495-405) was the associate of Pericles, and an upholder of his authority, rather than a consistent pupil of his political principles; but his manhood, and perhaps the maturity of his genius, coincided with the great Sophocles. days when he could stand, like his mighty friend and the community they both so gloriously represented, on the sunny heights of achievement. Serenely pious as well as nobly patriotic, he nevertheless treats the myths of the national religion in the spirit of a conscious artist, contrasting with lofty irony the struggles of humanity with the irresistible march of its destinies. Perhaps he, too, was one of the initiated; and the note of personal responsibility which is the mystic’s inner religion is recognizable in his view of life.[58] The art of Sophocles may in its perfection be said to typify the greatest epoch in the life of Athens—an epoch conscious of unequalled achievements, but neither wholly unconscious of the brief endurance which was its destiny.

Euripides (480-406), as is the fate of genius of a more complex kind, has been more variously and antithetically judged than either of his great fellow-tragedians. His art has been described as devoid of the idealism of theirs, Euripides. his genius as rhetorical rather than poetical, his morality as that of a sophistical wit. On the other hand, he has been recognized not only as the most tragic of the Attic tragedians and the most pathetic of ancient poets, but also as the most humane in his social philosophy and the most various in his psychological insight. At least, though far removed from the more naïf age of the national life, he is, both in patriotic spirit and in his choice of themes, genuinely Attic; and if he was “haunted on the stage by the daemon of Socrates,” he was, like Socrates himself, the representative of an age which was a seed-time as well as a season of decay. His technical innovations corresponded to his literary characteristics; but neither in the treatment of the chorus, nor in his management of the beginning and the ending of a tragedy, did he introduce any radical change. To Euripides the general progress of dramatic literature nevertheless owes more than to any other ancient poet. Tragedy followed in his footsteps in Greece and at Rome. Comedy owed him something in the later phases of the very Aristophanes who mocked him, and more in the human philosophy expressed in the sentiments of Menander; and, when the modern drama came to engraft the ancient upon its own crude growth, his was directly or indirectly the most powerful influence in the establishment of a living connexion between them.

The incontestable pre-eminence of the three great tragic poets was in course of time acknowledged at Athens by the usage allowing no tragedies but theirs to be performed more than once, and by the prescription that one The great tragic masters and their contemporaries. play of theirs should be performed at each Dionysia, as well as by the law of Lycurgus (c. 330) which obliged the actors to use, in the case of works of the great masters, authentic copies preserved in the public archives. Yet it is possible that the exclusiveness of these tributes is not entirely justifiable; and not all the tragic poets contemporary with the great writers were among the myriad of younglings derided by Aristophanes. Of those who attained to celebrity Ion of Chios (d. before 419) seems to have followed earlier traditions of style than Euripides; Agathon, who survived the latter, on the other hand, introduced certain innovations of a transnormal kind both into the substance and the form of dramatic composition.[59]

III. Of the third period of Greek tragedy the concluding limit cannot be precisely fixed. Down to the days of Alexander the Great, Athens had remained the chief home of tragedy. Though tragedies must have begun to be The successors of the great masters at Athens. acted at the Syracusan and Macedonian courts, since Aeschylus, Euripides and Agathon had sojourned there—though the practice of producing plays at the Dionysia before the allies of Athens must have led to their holding similar exhibitions at home—yet before the death of Alexander we meet with no instance of a tragic poet writing or of a tragedy written outside Athens. An exception should indeed be made in favour of the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse, who (like Critias in his earlier days at Athens) was “addicted to” tragic composition. Not all the tragedians of this period, however, were Athenians born; though the names of Euphorion, the son of Aeschylus, Iophon, the son of Sophocles, and Euripides and Sophocles, the nephew and the grandson respectively of their great namesakes, illustrate the descent of the tragic art as an hereditary family possession. Chaeremon (fl. 380) already exhibits tragedy on the road to certain decay, for we learn that his plays were written for reading.

Soon after the death of Alexander theatres are found spread over the whole Hellenic world of Europe and Asia—a result to which the practice of the conqueror and his father of celebrating their victories by scenic performances The Alexandrians. had doubtless contributed. Alexandria having now become a literary centre with which even Athens was in some respects unable to compete, while the latter still remained the home of comedy, the tragic poets flocked to the capital of the Ptolemies; and here, in the canon of Greek poets drawn up by command of Ptolemy Philadelphus (283-247), Alexander the Aetolian undertook the list of tragedies, while Lycophron was charged with the comedies. But Lycophron himself was included in all the versions of the list of the seven tragic poets famed as the “Pleias” who still wrote in the style of the Attic masters and followed the rules observed by them. Tragedy and the dramatic art continued to be favoured by the later Ptolemies; and about 100 b.c. we meet with the curious phenomenon of a Jewish poet, Ezechiel, composing Greek tragedies, of one of which (the Exodus from Egypt) fragments have come down to us. Tragedy, with the satyr-drama and comedy, survived in Alexandria beyond the days of Cicero and Varro; nor was their doom finally sealed till the emperor Caracalla abolished theatrical performances in the Egyptian capital in a.d. 217.

Thus Greek tragedy is virtually only another name for Attic; nor was any departure from the lines laid down The tragedy of the great masters. by its three great masters made in most respects by the Roman imitators of these poets and of their successors.

Tragedy was defined by Plato as an imitation of the noblest life. Its proper themes—the deeds and sufferings of heroes—were familiar to audiences intimately acquainted with the mythology of the national religion. To such Subjects of Greek tragedy. themes Greek tragedy almost wholly confined itself; and in later days there were numerous books which discussed these myths of the tragedians. They only very exceptionally treated historic themes, though one great national calamity,[60] and a yet greater national victory,[61] and in later times a few other historical subjects,[62] were brought upon the stage. Such veiled historical allusions as critical ingenuity has sought not only in passages but in the entire themes of other Attic tragedies[63] cannot, of course, even if accepted as such, stamp the plays in which they occur as historic dramas. No doubt Attic tragedy, though after a different and more decorous fashion, shared the tendency of her comic sister to introduce allusions to contemporary events and persons; and the indulgence of this tendency was facilitated by the revision (διασκυή) to which the works of the great poets were subjected by them, or by those who produced their works after them.[64] So far as we know, the subjects of the tragedies before Aeschylus were derived from the epos; and it was a famous saying of this poet that his dramas were “but dry scraps from the great banquets of Homer”—an expression which may be understood as including the poems which belong to the so-called Homeric cycles. Sophocles, Euripides and their successors likewise resorted to the Trojan, and also to the Heraclean and the Thesean myths, and to Attic legend in general, as well as to Theban, to which already Aeschylus had had recourse, and to the side or subsidiary myths connected with these several groups. These substantially remained to the last the themes of Greek tragedy, the Trojan myths always retaining so prominent a place that Lucian could jest on the universality of their dominion. Purely invented subjects were occasionally treated by the later tragedians; of this innovation Agathon was the originator.[65]

Thespis is said to have introduced the use of a “prologue” and a “rhesis” (speech)—the former being probably the opening speech recited by the coryphaeus, the latter the dialogue between him and the actor. It was a natural result Construction. of the introduction of the second actor that a second rhesis should likewise be added; and this tripartite division would be the earliest form of the trilogy,—three sections of the same myth forming the beginning, middle and end of a single The Aeschylean trilogy. drama, marked off from one another by the choral songs. From this Aeschylus proceeded to the treatment of these several portions of a myth in three separate plays, connected together by their subject and by being performed in sequence on a single occasion. This is the Aeschylean trilogy, of which we have only one extant example, the Oresteia—as to which critics may differ whether Aeschylus adhered in it to his principle that the strength should lie in the middle—in other words, that the interest should centre in the second play. In any case, the symmetry of the trilogy The tetralogy. was destroyed by the practice of performing after it a satyr-drama, probably as a rule, if not always, connected in subject with the trilogy, which thus became a tetralogy, though this term, unlike the other, seems to be a purely technical expression invented by the learned.[66] Sophocles, a more conscious and probably a more self-critical artist than Aeschylus, may be assumed from the first to have elaborated his tragedies with greater care; and to this, as well as to his innovation of the third actor, which materially added to the fulness of the action, we may attribute his introduction of the custom of contending for the prize with single plays. It does not follow that he never produced connected trilogies, though we have no example of such by him or any later author; on the other hand, there is no proof that either he or any of his successors ever departed from the Aeschylean rule of producing three tragedies, followed by a satyr-drama, on the same day. This remained the third and last stage in the history of the construction Complicated actions. of Attic tragedy. The tendency of its action towards complication was a natural progress, and is emphatically approved by Aristotle. This complication, in which Euripides excelled, led to his use of prologues, in which one of the characters opens the play by an exposition of the circumstances under which its action begins. This practice, though ridiculed by Aristophanes, was too convenient not to be adopted by the successors of Euripides, and Menander transferred it to comedy. As the dialogue increased in importance, so the dramatic significance of the chorus diminished. While in Aeschylus it mostly, and in Sophocles occasionally, takes part in the action, its songs could not but more and more approach the character of lyrical intermezzos; and this they openly assumed when Agathon began the practice of inserting choral songs (embolima) which had nothing to do with the action of the play. In the general contrivance of their actions it was only natural that, as compared with Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides should exhibit an advance in both freedom and ingenuity; but the palm, due to a treatment at once piously adhering to the substance of the ancient legends and original in an effective dramatic treatment of them, must be given to Sophocles. Euripides was, moreover, less skilful in untying complicated actions than in weaving them; hence his frequent resort[67] to the expedient of the deus ex machina, which Sophocles employs only in his latest play.[68]