Wagner produces on some persons as compared with that of Beethoven or Mozart.

Fate, the power of Zeus, Nemesis, the claims. of the Erinyes and of the powers below, the prescience of Apollo, the wisdom of Athena, these are factors of the tragic art, with which the poet works, and disposes them differently according to the thoughts that dominate him and the requirements of his audience. This last condition is never to be forgotten, whether in speaking of the superficial or the deeper nature of tragedy.

race.

The Greek of that age delighted in listening to life-histories, and he believed implicitly in the real presence of dead heroes, the patrons of his Both features of the time are manifest in the pages of Herodotus, who also exemplifies the taste for gnomic sayings and for interspersing narrative with dialogue. The Athenian was in all these respects a child of the time, and was ready at the Dionysiac festival to brim over with sympathetic emotion. But he further demanded from the tragic poet that "emotion should be touched with thought." For in the Athens of the fifth century, more than ever elsewhere, human consciousness was struggling towards independent existence.

Vivid national experiences had freshly

1 It was only when smarting under disappointment that the Thebans sent back the Aeacidae to Aegina and asked for living men. -Herod. v. 81.

awakened various obstinate questionings about the meaning of life, the essential characteristics of human nature, and the purposes of the gods. Before philosophy had prepared her answer, the drama gave an imaginative embodiment to the successive contemporary phases of the mental struggle. The attainment of free citizenship and the successful repulse of Persia had the combined effect of intensifying the general interest in all things human. Hence at the annual festival of Dionysus, when the poet, according to religious wont, idealised for them some aspect of human sorrow (side by side with the exuberance of animal gladness), the people entered with new zest into the spirit of the representation, and realised with extreme vividness all the deep reflections and far-reaching thoughts which it evoked. it is a mistake to assume any immediate connection between particular events of Greek history and the subjects chosen. The attempts which have been made in this direction by Mr. W. W. Lloyd and others have not been successful. The results are too thin and shadowy to produce conviction. The poet's choice had for the most part an artistic, not a political motive. The Persae and Eumenides of Aeschylus are no doubt inspired with Athenian patriotism; but this was always ready to be called forth, and needed not any occasional motive for its expression. Such motives, even if they existed,

But

as we may imagine them to have done in the case, for instance, of the Oedipus Coloneus, as they undoubtedly do in that of the Supplices and Heraclidae of Euripides, are but slightly connected with the artistic result, which depends on independent laws of poetic and dramatic creation.1

Nor is the effort justifiable, though often made, to deduce the evolution of a tragic poem from some "ground-idea." There can be little doubt, for example, on which side the sympathies of Sophocles and his audience were in the struggle represented in the Antigone. But much of what has been said on the subject rests on the barren supposition that the poet starts with a clear-cut preference for the claims either of the state or of family-life, or else on the merely abstract notion that from the clashing of two principles equally divine, he is endeavouring to strike a harmony. Even in Aeschylus, who is more actively possessed with moral notions, the central or heart-thought of each drama comes out rather as a last result than as the primary motive.

1 But for the facts of chronology, the line in the Seven, 1044, "Be warned; a people rescued knows not ruth," might have seemed to reflect the experience of the restored democracy.

CHAPTER VII

CONVERSATIONAL AND LYRIC ELEMENTS:

I. THE DIALOGUE; II. THE CHORUS1

IN Chapters IV. and VI. we have considered the substance of Greek tragedy-the fable and the thoughts. We now return to the consideration of the form; and before dealing with this synthetically, i.e. before looking at the structure of a drama, considered as a whole, we have to study the parts of which it is composed, in the arrangement and distribution of which the art of the dramatist largely consists.

I. THE DIALOGUE.

The student of a Greek play is at once encountered with the diversity of two main elements the choric passages and the dialogue. It has been already shown that the choral part

1 Books to consult: Müller's History of Greek Literature; Schiller's Preface to the Bride of Messina; Schlegel's Lectures on the Drama; Munk's Greek Tragedy, ed. Verrall.

was originally supreme, and we shall have occasion presently to observe that in the typical period of Greek tragedy the Chorus had a recognised place amongst the persons of the drama. But it is convenient for us to treat first of the dialogue as the more obvious and familiar part, and we are justified in doing so by the saying of Aristotle, that Aeschylus had already given to the dialogue the principal role (τὸν λόγον πρωταγωνιστὴν κατεσκεύασεν). The natural order in this case differs from the historical.

By dialogue, for the purpose of this chapter, I understand that part of the business of a Greek play which either takes place wholly between the actors, or is carried on between the leader of the Chorus, or the choreutae severally, and persons on the stage. We may therefore consider separately, under the present heading narrative, 2) dramatic speeches, (3) antiphonal interchange, 4) stage lyrics.

It may be premised that the language of tragic dialogue is for the most part intermediate between poetry and prose; it was noticed by the Greeks themselves that the rhythm of the senarius was not far removed from the natural movement of ordinary Athenian speech. The dialect is Attic, with a strong tinge of archaism, borrowed either from the earlier speech of Attica, or from epic poetry, or from contemporary Ionic. In