prize. His success occasioned the veteran's retreat to Sicily, where he died, commanding that his epitaph should make mention of his share in the victory of Marathon, but should contain no allusion to his dramatic excellencies. His more fortunate rival judiciously avoided the dizzy and terrific path which Eschylus had trod with so firm and daring a step. It was the object of Sophocles to move sorrow and compassion rather than to excite indignation and terror. He studied the progress of action with more attention than Eschylus, and excelled in that modulation of the story by which interest is excited at the beginning of a drama, maintained in its progress, and gratified at its conclusion. His subjects are also of a nature more melancholy and less sublime than those of his predecessors. He loved to paint heroes rather in their forlorn than in their triumphant fortunes, aware that the contrast offered new sources of the pathetic to the author. Sophocles was the most fortunate of the Greek tragedians. He attained the age of ninety-one years; and in his eightieth, to vindicate himself from a charge of mental imbecility, he read to the judges his Edipus Coloneus, the most beautiful, at least the most perfect, of his tragedies. He survived Euripides, his formidable rival, of whom, also, we must speak a few words. It is observed by Schlegel that the tone of the tragedies of Euripides approaches more nearly to modern taste than to the stern simplicity of his predecessors. The passion of love predominates in his pieces, and he is the first tragedian who paid tribute to that sentiment which has been too exclusively made the moving cause of interest on the modern stage, the first who sacrificed to "Cupid, king of gods and men." The dramatic use of this passion has been purified in modern times, by the introduction of that tone of feeling, which, since the age of Chivalry, has been a principal ingredient in heroic affection. This was unknown to the ancients, in whose society females, generally speaking, held a low and degrading place, from which few individuals emerged, unless those who aspired to the talents and virtues proper to the masculine sex. Women were not forbidden to become competitors for the laurel or oaken crown offered to genius and to patriotism; but antiquity held out no myrtle wreath, as a prize for the domestic virtues peculiar to the female character. Love, therefore, in Euripides, does not always breathe purity of sentiment, but is stained with the mixture of violent and degrading passions. This, however, was the fault of the age, rather than of the poet, although he is generally represented as an enemy of the female sex; and his death was ascribed to a judgment of Venus. "When blood-hounds met him by the way, And monsters made the bard their prey." This great dramatist was less happy than Sophocles in the construction of his plots; and, instead of the happy expedients by which his predecessor introduces us to the business of the drama, he had too often recourse to the mediation of a prologue, who came forth to explain, in detail, the previous history necessary to understand the piece. Euripides is also accused of having degraded the character of his personages by admitting more. alloy of human weakness, folly and vice than was consistent with the high qualities of the heroic age. Eschylus, it was said, transported his audience into a new and more sublime race of beings; Sophocles painted mankind as they ought to be, and Euripides as they actually are. Yet the variety of character introduced by the latter tragedian, and the interest of his tragedies, must always attract the modern reader, colored as they are by a tone of sentiment, and by his knowledge of the business, rules and habits of actual life, to which his predecessors, living as they did, in an imaginary and heroical world of their own, appear to have been strangers. And although the judgment of the ancients assigned the preeminence in tragedy to Æschylus or Sophocles, yet Euripides has been found more popular with posterity than either of his two great predecessors. EURIPIDES. THE OLD COMEDY. The division between tragedy and comedy-for both sprang from the same common origin-the feasts, namely, in honor of Bacchus, and the dis guise adopted by his worshipers, seems to have taken place gradually, until the jests and frolics, which made a principal part of these revels, were found misplaced when introduced with graver matter, and were made by Susarion, perhaps, the subject of a separate province of the Drama. The Grecian comedy was divided into the ancient, the middle, and the modern style of composition. The ancient and original comedy was of a kind which may, at first sight, appear to derogate from the religious purposes which we have pointed out as the foundations of the Drama. They frequently turn upon parodies, in which the persons and adventures of those gods and heroes who were the sublime subjects of the tragic Drama, are introduced for the purpose of buffoon sport and ridicule, as in Carey's modern farces of Midas and the Golden Pippin. Hercules appears in one of those pieces astonishing his host by an extravagant appetite, which the cook in vain attempts to satiate by placing before him, in succession, all the various dishes which the ancient kitchen afforded. In another comedy, Bacchus (in whose honor the solemnity was instituted) is brought in only to ridicule his extreme cowardice. At other times, allowing a grotesque fancy its widest range, the early comic authors introduced upon the stage animals, and even inanimate things, as part of their dramatis persona, and embodied forth on the stage the fantastic imaginations of Lucian in his True History. The golden age was represented in the same ridiculous and bizarre mode of description as the Pays de la Cocaigne of the French minstrels, or the popular ideas of Lubberland in England; and the poets furnished kingdoms of birds and worlds in the moon. Had the only charm of these entertainments consisted in the fantastic display with which the eyes of the spectators were regaled at the expense of the over-excited imagination of the poet, they would soon have fallen into disuse; for the Athenians were too acute and judicious critics to have been long gratified with mere extravagance. But these grotesque scenes were made the medium for throwing the most bold and daring ridicule upon the measures of the stage, upon the opinions of individuals, and upon the religion of the country. This propensity to turn into ridicule that which is most serious and sacred had probably its origin in the rude gambols of the sylvan deities who accom panied Bacchus, and to whose petulant and lively demeanor rude jest was a natural accompaniment. The audience-at least the more ignorant part of them-saw these parodies with pleasure, which equaled the awe they felt at the performance of the tragedies, whose most solemn subjects were thus burlesqued; nor do they appear to have been checked by any sense that their mirth was profane. In fact, when the religion of a nation comes to consist chiefly in the practice of a few unmeaning ceremonies, it is often found that the populace, with whatever inconsistency, assumes the liberty of profaning them by grotesque parodies, without losing their reverence for the superstitions which they thus villify. Customs of a like tendency were common in the middle ages. The Festival of the Ass in France, of the Boy-Bishop in England, of the Abbot of Unreason in Scotland and many other popular practices of the same kind, exhibited daring parodies of the most sacred services and ceremonies of the Church. And as these were practiced openly, and under authority, without being supposed to shake the people's attachment to the rites which they thus ridiculed, we cannot wonder that similar profanities were well received among the pagans, whose religion sat very loosely upon them, and who professed no fixed or necessary articles of faith. It is probable that, had the old Grecian comedy continued to direct its shafts of ridicule only against the inhabitants of Olympus, it would not have attracted the coercion of the magistracy. But its kingdom was far more extensive; and the poets, claiming the privilege of laying their opinions on public affairs before the people in this shape, Cratinus, Eupolis, and particularly Aristophanes, a daring, powerful and apparently unprincipled writer, converted comedy into an engine for assailing the credit and character of private individuals, as well as the persons and political measures of those who administered the state. The doctrines of philosophy, the power of the magistrate, the genius of the poet, the rites proper to the Deity, were alternately made the subject of the most uncompromising and severe satire. It was soon discovered that the more directly personal the assault could be made, and the more revered or exalted the personage, the greater was the malignant satisfaction of the audience, who loved to see wisdom, authority, and religious reverence brought down to their own level, and made subjects of ridi cule by the powers of the merciless satirist. The use of the mask enabled Aristophanes to render his satire still more pointedly personal; for, by forming it so as to imitate, probably with some absurd exaggeration, the features of the object of his ridicule, and by imitating the dress and manner of the original, the player stepped upon the stage a walking and speaking caricature of the hero of the night, and was usually placed in some ludicrous position, amid the fanciful and whimsical chimeras with which the scene was peopled. In this manner, Aristophanes ridiculed with equal freedom Socrates, the wisest of the Athenians, and Cleon, the demagogue, when at the hight of his power. As no one durst perform the latter part, for fear of giving offense to one so powerful, the author acted Cleon himself, with his face smeared with the lees of wine. Like the satire of Rabelais, the political and personal invective of Aristophanes was mingled with a plentiful allowance of scurrile and indecent jests, which were calculated to insure a favorable reception from the bulk of the people. He resembles Rabelais, also, in the wild and fanciful fictions which he assumes as the vehicle of his satire; and his comedy of "The Birds" may even have given hints to Swift, when, in order to contrast the order of existing institutions with those of a Utopian and fantastic fairy land, he carries Gulliver among giants and pigmies. But though his indecency, and the offensive and the indiscriminate scurrility of his satire, deserve censure; though he merits the blame of the wise for his attack upon Socrates, and of the learned for his repeated and envenomed assaults upon Euripides, Aristophanes has nevertheless added one immortal name to the immortal period in which he flourished; and, from the richness of his fancy, and gayety of his tone, has deserved the title of the Father of Comedy. When the style of his sarcasm possessed the rareness of novelty, it was considered of so much importance to the State, that a crown of olive was voted to the poet, as one who had taught Athens the defects of her public men. ARISTOPHANES. But, unless angels were to write satires, ridicule cannot be considered as the test of truth. The temptation to be witty is just so much the more resistless, that the author knows he will get no thanks for suppressing the jest which rises to his pen. As the public becomes used to this new and piquant fare, fresh characters must be sacrificed for its gratification. Recrimination adds commonly to the contest; and those who were at first ridiculed, out of mere wantonness of wit, are soon persecuted for resenting the ill usage, until literature resembles an actual personal conflict, where the victory is borne away by the strongest and most savage, who deals the most desperate wounds with the least sympathy for the feelings of his adversary. The ancient comedy was of a character too licentious to be long tolerated. Two or three decrees having been in vain passed, in order to protect the citizens against libels of this poignant description, the ancient comedy was finally proscribed by that oligarchy which assumed the sway over Athens, upon the downfall of the popular government toward the end of the Peloponnesian war. By orders of these rulers, Anaxander, an actor, was punished capitally for parodying a line of Euripides so as to infer a slight of the government. He was starved to death, to which, as an appropriate punishment, the public has since his time often indirectly condemned both actors and dramatists. Aristophanes, who was still alive, bowed to the storm, and relinquished the critical and satirical scourge, which he had hitherto exercised in the combined capacity of satirist, reformer, and reviewer; and the use of the Chorus was prohibited to comic authors, as it seems to have been in their stanzas chiefly that the offensive satire was invested. To this edict Horace alludes in the well-known lines: The ancient comedy next play'd its part, In the middle comedy, Thalia and her votaries seemed to have retraced their steps, and, avoiding personal satire, resorted once more to general subjects of burlesque railery. We learn from history, real or fabulous, or from the works of the elder poets, that these plays had the fanciful wildness |