The Historians' History of the World 03 [Greece to the Peloponnesian War]

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.

The Greeks were accustomed to look upon the poets as their teachers, and no man could gain recognition as a poet among them who had only talent, imagination, and artistic skill to show as proofs of his poetic vocation; this required a thorough education of heart and mind and clear insight into things human and divine. Hence the calling of a poet laid claim to the whole man and the man’s whole life, and none conceived of it more nobly than Æschylus. Like Pindar he takes his hearers into the very heart of the myth, drawing out its moral earnestness and illuminating it with the light of historical experience. Humanity, as represented by Æschylus in the Titan Prometheus, with its constancy through struggles and misery, its proud self-respect, its indefatigable inventive genius, with its tendency, too, to rashness and arrogant boasting, is the generation of his own contemporaries, with their reckless aspirations; but no wisdom avails man save that which comes from Zeus, no skill and intelligence save that which is based on devout morality. Thus, without petty premeditation the poet becomes a true teacher of the people; in an age of incipient scepticism he endeavours to uphold the religion of his forefathers, to purify popular conceptions and to draw forth the kernel of wholesome truth from the many-hued tinsel of popular fables. It was the mission of the poet to maintain harmony between popular tradition and advancing knowledge.

But the poets lived in the midstream of civic life, and it is not to be supposed that, in a city like Athens, men who at public festivals set forth the creations of their genius in the public eye, could remain indifferent to the questions of their own day. They were obliged of necessity to belong to one party or another, and if they were sincere and candid, their views as to what was for the good of the commonwealth could not but appear in their works. Their choice of subject was still limited in the main to mythology; man’s strength of will, his deeds and sufferings, the contradiction between laws human and divine, were still set forth by preference in the characters of the Homeric age of which the tradition survived in the epos. These were the prototypes of the human race, their sufferings were the sufferings and entanglements incident to the whole human race; in contemplating them the spectators were to be freed from what was personal in their sorrows and cares, the narrow bounds of their self-consciousness were to be widened, and they were to receive from the performance not only the highest artistic pleasure, but a cheering and healing purification of their hearts. These heroes of olden times were in harmony with the ideal character which the dramatists were bent on giving to the whole world of the stage; but the impression was none the less striking because the audience was transported into a dim and legendary past. We feel the spirit of the warrior of Marathon in the warlike plays of Æschylus, and the spectator of his Seven against Thebes glowed with eagerness to strike a blow for his country.

Meanwhile Phrynichus had ventured to put modern events on the stage, and his Fall of Miletus and Phœnissæ were no doubt fraught with political intention. Æschylus followed the example of his predecessor in a far grander style when, four years after the production of the Phœnissæ of Phrynichus, he produced his drama of the Persæ. He depicted the fall of the Great King. But with fine artistic instinct he chose Persia, not Attica, for the scene of his tragedy. He brings before our eyes the consequences of the battle, its reaction upon the hostile empire, in its own capital. Darius is conjured from the grave that in the person of the pious and prudent ruler may be set forth the glory of the inviolate Persian empire, while his successor returns from Hellas shorn of all dignity, a warning example of the ruin which foolish arrogance brings upon all sovereign power. The whole composition is pervaded by the idea of retribution, which had been awakened in the Greek mind by the Persian wars.