A history of classical Greek literature.

  • Mahaffy, J. P. (John Pentland), 1839-1919.
Date:
1903-1908
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A history of classical Greek literature. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Euripides, had he been able to break wholly with tradition and choose his subjects from actual life, misses the mark as a description of Attic tragedy.1 In fact, the definition omits essential and includes unessential points. For ^Eschylus, the great creator of this splendid national poetry, in which the people through their chorus took part ; in which the service of the god was satisfied; in which the poet, as a teacher of wisdom, could speak his word through a transparent disguise —^Eschylus not only determined that the Ionic recitation of iambics should be fused with the Doric choral song—a fusion never so complete as to efface the distinctness of each of the components—but also, like Homer, like Stesichorus, imported into his new creation the national legends, and determined once for all that no subject but the lives and acts of the heroes, as known in epic mythology, should attain the dignity of the Attic stage. Phrynichus, as we shall see, in the youth of tragedy’s first development, tried an advance into recent history. His attempt was condemned by the Athenian public. To define, therefore, Attic tragedy without mention of the definite subject-matter to which it was bound, is to omit its 1 essential difference.’ To assert, moreover, with Aristotle, that the ‘purification of terror and pity ’ was the invariable object, errs in two directions. In the first place, the poets were probably not conscious of this aesthetic subtlety, and seem to have openly accepted the simpler role of moral teachers. Such, at least, is the opinion of Aristophanes, as expressed in his Frogs. In the second place, there are other emotions than mere pity and terror— pious awe, fervent patriotism—which are certainly the pro- minent emotions in our most famous plays. But to Aristotle, a sceptic and an alien, neither piety nor patriotism were likely to appear in their proper force. Yet so intimately were these three factors, faith in the heroic legends, piety to- wards the gods, devotion to the state, in the life-blood of Attic tragedy, that with them it sank into decay, and passed through Euripides into Menander, whose comedies were the successors, not of Aristophanes’, but of Euripides’ plays. Here, then, is the proper definition : ‘An Attic tragedy is a story from the