before the introduction of the Greek Drama. But in Greece this was so, not only in the beginning, but as long as the stage existed; and the circumstance, which gave to the Attic drama its chief strength and its highest charms, was its continued connexion with the state-worship of Bacchus, in which both Tragedy and Comedy took their rise. We must not allow ourselves to be misled by our knowledge of the fact that the Drama of modern Europe, though derived from that of ancient Greece, exhibits no trace of its religious origin. The element which originally constituted its whole essence has been overwhelmed and superseded by the more powerful ingredients which have been introduced into it by the continually diverging tastes of succeeding generations, till it has at length become nothing but a walking novel or a speaking jest-book. The plays of Shakspeare and Calderon (with the exception, of course, of the Autos Sacramentales of the latter) are Dramatic reproductions of the prose romances of the day, with the omission of the religious element which they owed to the monks', just as the tragedies of Eschylus and Sophocles would have been mere Epic Dramas, had they broken the bonds which connected them with the elementary worship of Attica. But this disruption never took place. In ancient Greece the Drama retained to the last the character which it originally possessed. The theatrical representations at Athens, even in the days of Sophocles and Aristophanes, were constituent parts of a religious festival; the theatre in which they were performed was sacred to Bacchus, and the worship of the god was always as much regarded as the amusement of the sovran people. This is a fact which cannot be too strongly impressed upon the student: if he does not keep this continually in view, he will be likely to confound the Athenian stage with that of his own time and country, and will misunderstand and wonder at many things which under this point of view are neither remarkable nor unintelligible. How apt we all are to look at the manners of ancient times through the false medium of our every-day associations! how difficult we find it to strip our thoughts of their modern garb, and to escape from the thick atmosphere of prejudice in which 1 Malone's Shakspeare, vol. iii. p. 8, sqq. Lessing, Geschichte der Engl. Schaubühne. (Werke, xv. 209.) custom and habit have enveloped us! and yet, unless we take a comprehensive and extended view of the objects of archæological speculation, unless we can look upon ancient customs with the eyes of the ancients, unless we can transport ourselves in the spirit to other lands and other times, and sun ourselves in the clear light of bygone days, all our conceptions of what was done by the men who have long ceased to be, must be dim, uncertain, and unsatisfactory, and all our reproductions as soulless and uninstructive as the scattered fragments of a broken statue'. These remarks are particularly applicable to the Greek stage. For in proportion to the perfection of the extant specimens of ancient art in any department, are our misconceptions of the difference between their and our use of these excellent works. We feel the beauty of the remaining Greek Dramas, and are unwilling to believe that productions as exquisite as the most elaborate compositions of our own playwrights should not have been, as ours were, exhibited for their own sake. But this was far from being the case. The susceptible Athenian,—whose land was the dwellingplace of gods and ancestral heroes',-to whom the clear blue sky, the swift-winged breezes, the river fountains, the Ægean gay with its countless smiles, and the teeming earth from which he believed his ancestors were immediately created, were alike instinct with an all-pervading spirit of divinity;-the Athenian, who loved the beautiful, but loved it because it was divine, who looked upon all that genius could invent, or art execute, as but the less unworthy offering to his pantheism; and considered all his festivals and all his amusements as only a means of withdrawing the soul from the world's business, and turning it to the love and worship of God', how could he keep back from the object of his adoration the fairest and best of his works? 4 We shall make the permanent religious reference of the Greek Drama more clear, by showing with some minuteness how it gradually evolved itself from religious rites universally prevalent, and by pointing out by what routes its different elements 2 See some good remarks on this subject in Niebuhr's Kleine Schriften, vol. i. p. 92, and in his letter to Count Adam Moltke. (Lebensn. vol. ii. p. 91.) Hegesias ap. Strab. ix. p. 396. 4 Esch. Prom. v. 87-90. 5 Strabo, x. p. 467. Η τε γὰρ ἄνεσις τὸν νοῦν ἀπάγει ἀπὸ τῶν ἀνθρωπίνων ἀσχολημάτων, τὸν δὲ ὄντως νοῦν τρέπει πρὸς τὸ θεῖον. converged, till they became united in one harmonious whole of "stateliest and most regal argument "." The dramatic element in the religion of ancient Greece manifested itself most prominently in the connected worship of Apollo, Demeter, and Dionysus. Thus at Delphi, the main seat of the Dorian worship of Apollo, the combat with the serpent, and the flight and expiation of the victorious son of Latona, were made the subject of a representation almost theatrical'. And Clemens Alexandrinus tells us that Eleusis represented by torch-light the rape of Proserpine, and the wanderings and grief of her mother Demeter, in a sort of mystic drama. Dionysus, who was worshipped both at Eleusis and at Delphi', was personated by the handsomest young men who could be found, in a mimic ceremony at the Athenian Anthesteria, which represented his betrothal to the wife of the King Archon; and there were other occasions, quite unconnected with theatrical exhibitions, in which the Bacchic mythology was made the subject of direct imitation. But it was not in these forms of worship that the Attic Drama immediately originated, however much it may have been connected with them in spirit. The almost antagonistic materials of Dorian and oriental mythology had to seek their common ground, and the lyric chorus of the Dorians had to combine itself with the epos of the Ionian rhapsode, before such a phenomenon as the full-grown tragedy of Eschylus could become possible. We see these ingredients standing side by side, like oil and vinegar, and not perfectly fused', in the first Attic tragedy which we open. It is the business of the following pages to point out how they came together. In order to do this in a satisfactory manner, we must constantly bear in mind the important statement of Aristotle', that 6 Milton's Prose Works, p. 101. 7 Plutarch. Quæst. Gr. ii. p. 202, Wyttenb. De Defect. Orac. ii. p. 710. 723, Wyttenb. 8 Cohort. ad Gentes, p. 12, Potter. Plut. de EI Delphico, p. 591, Wyttenb. ròv Aióvvoov, & twv Aeλøwv ovdèv ἧττον ἢ τῷ ̓Απόλλωνι μέτεστιν. 1 Demosth. in Near. p. 1369, 70. Plutarch, Nic. c. 3. 2 Plutarch. Quæst. Gr. ii. p. 228, Wyttenb. 3 Eschyl. Agam. 322. Οξος τ' ἄλειφά τ ̓ ἐγχέας ταὐτῷ κύτει, Poet. c. iv. below, Part II. p. 7. "both Tragedy and Comedy originated in a rude and unpremeditated manner; the first from the leaders of the Dithyrambs, and the second from those who led off the Phallic songs." To reconcile all our scattered information on the subject with this distinct and categorical account of the beginning of the Greek Drama, we must in the first place confine ourselves to Tragedy. We must see how the solemn choral poetry of the Dorians admitted of a union with the boisterous Dithyramb, which belonged to the orgiastic worship of an exotic divinity. And, we must inquire how the leaders of this lyrical and Dorized Dithyramb became the vehicles of the dramatic dialogues in which the Tragedy of Athens carried on the development of its Epic plots. We shall then be able without much difficulty to consider the case of Comedy, which exhibited in its older form the unmitigated ingredients of the noisy Phallic Comus. CHAPTER II. THE TRAGIC CHORUS.-ARION. Doch hurtig in dem Kreise ging's, GÖTHE. In the earliest times of Greece, it was customary for the whole population of a city to meet on stated occasions and offer up thanksgivings to the gods for any great blessings, by singing hymns, and performing corresponding dances in the public places'. This custom was first practised in the Doric states. The maintenance of military discipline was the principal object of the Dorian legislators; all their civil and religious organization was subservient to this; and war or the rehearsal of war was the sole business of their lives'.) Under these circumstances, it was not long before the importance of music and dancing, as parts of public education, was properly appreciated: for what could be better adapted than a musical accompaniment to enable large bodies of men to keep time and act in concert? (What could be more suitable than the war-dance, to familiarize the young citizen with the various postures of attack and defence, and with the evolutions of an army? Music and dancing, therefore, were cultivated at a very early period by the Cretans, the 1 This is the reason why, according to Pausan. iii. 11, 9, the ȧyopà at Sparta was called yopóg. We are rather inclined to believe that the Chorus of Dancers got its name from the place ; χορὸς is only another form of χῶρος-χώρα : and hence the epithet supúxopoc which is applied to Athens (Dem. Mid. p. 531) as well as to Sparta (Athen. p. 131, c. in some anapests of Anaxandrides). Welcker's derivation of xoods from xeip (Rhein. Mus. for 1834, p. 485) is altogether inadmissible. See further New Cratylus, p. 301. Antigone, Introduction, p. xxix. 2 arparonidov yàp (says an Athenian to a Cretan, Plato, Legg. ii. p. 666) πολιτείαν ἔχετε ἀλλ ̓ οὐκ ἐν ἄστεσι κατῳκηκότων. All the Dorian governments were aristocracies, and therefore necessarily warlike, as Vico has satisfactorily shown, whatever we may think of his derivation of wóλeμoç from Tóλig. (Scienz. Nuov. vol. ii. p. 160.) |