VOLUME VIII SLICE VI Dodwell to Drama (continued 11)

Thus, clothing itself in a diction always ornate and tropical, in which (as Rückert has happily expressed it) the prose is the warp and the verse the weft, where (as Goethe says) words become allusions, allusions similes, and similes Diction. metaphors, the Indian drama essentially depended upon its literary qualities, and upon the familiar sanctity of its favourite themes for such effects as it was able to produce. Of scenic apparatus it knew but little. The plays were usually performed in the hall of a palace; the simple devices by which exits and entrances were facilitated it is unnecessary to describe, Scenery and costume. and on the contrivances employed for securing such “properties” as were required (above all, the cars of the gods and of their emissaries),19 it is useless to speculate. Propriety of costume, on the other hand, seems always to have been observed, agreeably both to the peculiarities of the Indian drama and to the habits of the Indian people.

The ministers of an art practised under such conditions could not but be regarded with respect, and spared the contempt or worse, which, except among one other great civilized people, the Greeks, has everywhere, at one period or Actors. another, been the actor’s lot. Companies of actors seem to have been common in India at an early date, and the inductions show the players to have been regarded as respectable members of society. In later, if not in earlier, times individual actors enjoyed a widespread reputation—“all the world” is acquainted with the talents of Kalaha-Kandala.20 The managers or directors, as already stated, were usually gifted and highly-cultured Brahmans. Female parts were in general, though not invariably, represented by females. One would like to know whether such was the case in a piece21 where—after the fashion of more than one Western play—a crafty minister passes off his daughter as a boy, on which assumption she is all but married to a person of her own sex.

The Indian drama would, if only for purposes of comparison, be invaluable to the student of this branch of literature. But from the point of view of purely literary excellence it holds its own against all except the very foremost dramas of the Summary. world. It is, indeed, a mere phrase to call Kālidāsa the Indian Shakespeare—a title which, moreover, if intended as anything more than a synonym for poetic pre-eminence, might fairly be disputed in favour of Babhavūti; while it would be absolutely misleading to place a dramatic literature, which, like the Indian, is the mere quintessence of the culture of a caste, by the side of one which represents the fullest development of the artistic consciousness of such a people as the Hellenes. The Indian drama cannot be described as national in the broadest and highest sense of the word; it is, in short, the drama of a literary class, though as such it exhibits many of the noblest and most refined, as well as of the most characteristic, features of Hindu religion and civilization. The ethics of the Indian drama are of a lofty character, but they are those of a scholastic system of religious philosophy, self-conscious of its completeness. To the power of Fate is occasionally ascribed a supremacy, to which gods as well as mortals must bow;22 but, if man’s present life is merely a phase in the cycle of his destinies, the highest of moral efforts at the same time points to the summit of possibilities, and self-sacrifice is the supreme condition both of individual perfection and of the progress of the world. Such conceptions as these seem at once to enfold and to overshadow the moral life of the Indian drama. The affections and passions forming part of self it delineates with a fidelity to nature which no art can afford to neglect; on the other hand, the freedom of the picture is restricted by conditions which to us are unfamiliar and at times seem intolerable, but which it was impossible for the Indian poet’s imagination to ignore. The sheer self-absorption of ambition or love appears inconceivable by the minds of any of these poets; and their social philosophy is always based on the system of caste. On the other hand, they are masters of many of the truest forms of pathos, above all of that which blends with resignation. In humour of a delicate kind they are by no means deficient; to its lower forms they are generally strangers, even in productions of a professedly comic intention. Of wit, Indian dramatic literature—though a play on words is as the breath of its nostrils—furnishes hardly any examples intelligible to Western minds.

The distinctive excellence of the Indian drama is to be sought in the poetic robe which envelops it as flowers overspread the bosom of the earth in the season of spring. In its nobler productions, at least, it is never untrue to its Poetry of the Indian drama. half religious, half rural origin; it weaves the wreaths of idyllic fancies in an unbroken chain, adding to its favourite and familiar blossoms ever fresh beauties from an inexhaustible garden. Nor is it unequal to depicting the grander aspects of nature in her mighty forests and on the shores of the ocean. A close familiarity with its native literature can here alone follow its diction through a ceaseless flow of phrase and figure, listen with understanding to the hum of the bee as it hangs over the lotus, and contemplate with Sākuntalā’s pious sympathy the creeper as it winds round the mango tree. But the poetic beauty of the Indian drama reveals itself in the mysterious charm of its outline, if not in its full glow, even to the untrained; nor should the study of it—for which the materials seem continually on the increase—be left aside by any lover of literature.

3. Chinese Drama

Like the Indian drama, the Chinese arose from the union of the arts of dance and song. To the ballets and pantomimes out of which it developed itself, and which have continued to flourish by the side of its more advanced forms, the Chinese ascribe a primitive antiquity of origin; many of them originally had a symbolical reference to such subjects as the harvest, and war and peace. A very ancient pantomime is said to have symbolized the conquest of China by Wu-Wang; others were of a humbler, and often of a very obscure, character. To their music the Chinese likewise attribute a great antiquity of origin.

There are traditions which carry back the characters of the Chinese drama to the 18th century before the Christian era. Others declare the Emperor Wan-Te (fl. about a.d. 580) to have invented the drama; but this honour is more usually given to the emperor Yuen-Tsung (a.d. 720), who is likewise remembered as a radical musical reformer. Pantomimes henceforth fell into disrepute; and the history of the Chinese drama from this date is divided, with an accuracy we cannot profess to control, into four distinct periods. Each of these periods, we are told, has a style, and each style a name of its own; but these names, such as “Diversions of the Woods in Flower,” have little or no meaning for us; and it would therefore be useless to cite them.

The first period is that of the dramas composed under the T’ang dynasty, from a.d. 720 to 907. These pieces, called Tchhouen-Khi, were limited to the representation of extraordinary events, and were therefore, in design at least, a species of heroic drama. The ensuing times of civil war interrupted the “pleasures of peace and prosperity” (a Chinese phrase for dramatic performances)—which, however, revived.

The second period is that of the Tsung Dynasty, from 960 to 1119. The plays of this period are called Hi-Khio, and presented what became a standing peculiarity of the Chinese Classical age. drama, viz. that in them figures a principal personage who sings.

The third and best-known age of the Chinese drama was under the Kin and Yuen dynasties, from 1125 to 1367. The plays of this period are called Yuen-Pen and Tsa-Ki; the latter seem to have resembled the Hi-Khio, and to have treated very various subjects. The Yuen-Pen are the plays from which our literary knowledge of the Chinese drama is mainly derived; the short pieces called Yen-Kia were in the same style, but briefer. The list of dramatic authors under the Yuen dynasty, the most important period in Chinese literary annals, which covered the years 1260 to 1368, is tolerably extensive, comprising 85, among whom four are designated as courtesans; the number of plays composed by these and by anonymous authors is reckoned at not less than 564. In 1735 the Jesuit missionary Joseph Henry Prémare first revealed to Europe the existence of the tragedy Tchao-Chi-Cu-Eul (The Little Orphan of the House of Tchao), which was founded upon an earlier piece treating of the fortunes of an heir to the imperial throne, who was preserved in a mysterious box like another Cypselus or Moses. Voltaire seized the theme of the earlier play for a rhetorical tragedy, L’Orphelin de la Chine, in which he coolly professes it was his intention “to paint the manners of the Chinese and the Tartars.” The later play, which is something less elevated in the rank of its characters, and very decidedly less refined in treatment, was afterwards retranslated by Stanislas Julien; and to the labours of this scholar, of Sir J. F. Davis (1795-1890) and of Antoine Bazin (1799-1863), we owe a series of translated Chinese dramas, among which there can be no hesitation whatever in designating the master-piece.

The justly famous Pi-Pa-Ki (The Story of the Lute) belongs to a period rather later than that of the Yuen plays, having been composed towards the close of the 14th century by Kao-Tong-Kia, and reproduced in 1404, under the Ming Pi-Pa-Ki. dynasty, with the alterations of Mao-Tseu, a commentator of learning and taste. Pi-Pa-Ki, which as a domestic drama of sentiment possesses very high merit, long enjoyed a quite exceptional popularity in China; it was repeatedly republished with laudatory prefaces, and so late as the 18th century was regarded as a monument of morality, and as the master-piece of the Chinese theatre. It would seem to have remained without any worthy competitors; for, although it had been originally designed to produce a reaction against the immorality of the drama then in fashion, especially of Wang-Chi-Fou’s celebrated Si-Siang-Ki (The Story of the Western Pavilion), yet the fourth period of the Chinese drama, under the Ming dynasty, from 1368 to 1644, exhibited no improvement. “What” Decline and decay. (says the preface to the 1704 edition of Pi-Pa-Ki) “do you find there? Farcical dialogue, a mass of scenes in which one fancies one hears the hubbub of the streets or the ignoble language of the highways, the extravagances of demons and spirits, in addition to love-intrigues repugnant to delicacy of manners.” Nor would it appear that the Chinese theatre has ever recovered from its decay.

In theory, no drama could be more consistently elevated in purpose and in tone than the Chinese. Every play, we learn, should have both a moral and a meaning. A virtuous aim is imposed upon Chinese dramatists by an article Theoretical aims. of the penal code of the empire; and those who write immoral plays are to expect after death a purgatory which will last so long as these plays continue to be performed. In practice, however, the Chinese drama falls far short of its ideal; indeed, according to the native critic already cited, among ten thousand playwrights not one is to be found intent upon perfecting the education of mankind by means of precepts and examples.

The Chinese are, like the Hindus, unacquainted with the distinction between tragedy and comedy; they classify their plays according to subjects in twelve categories. It may be doubted whether what seems the highest of these is Religious drama. actually such; for the religious element in the Chinese drama is often sheer buffoonery. Moreover, Chinese religious life, as reflected in the drama, seems one in which creed elbows creed, and superstitions are welcome whatever their origin. Of all religious traditions and doctrines, however, those of Buddhism (which had reached China long before the known beginnings of its drama) are the most prominent; thus, the theme of absolute self-sacrifice is treated in one play,23 that of entire absorption in the religious life in another.24 The historical Historical. drama is not unknown to the Chinese; and although a law prohibits the bringing on the stage of “emperors, empresses, and the famous princes, ministers, and generals of former ages,” no such restriction is observed in practice. In Han-Kong-Tseu (The Sorrows of Han), for instance, which treats a national historic legend strangely recalling in parts the story of Esther and the myth of the daughter of Erechtheus, the Domestic. emperor Yuen-Ti (the representative, to be sure, of a fallen dynasty) plays a part, and a sufficiently sorry one. By far the greater number, however, of the Chinese plays accessible in translations belong to the domestic species, and to that subspecies which may be called the criminal drama. Their favourite virtue is piety, of a formal25 or a practical26 kind to parents or parents-in-law; their favourite interest lies in the discovery of long-hidden guilt, and in the vindication of persecuted innocence.27 In the choice and elaboration of such subjects they leave little to be desired by the most ardent devotees of the literature of agony. Besides this description of plays, we have at least one love-comedy pure and simple—a piece of a nature not “tolerably mild,” but ineffably harmless.28

Free in its choice of themes, the Chinese drama is likewise remarkably unrestricted in its range of characters. Chinese society, it is well known, is not based, like Indian, upon the principle of caste; rank is in China determined Range of Characters. by office, and this again depends on the results of examination. These familiar facts are constantly brought home to the reader of Chinese plays. The Tchoang-Yuen, or senior classman on the list of licentiates, is the flower of Chinese society, and the hero of many a drama;29 and it is a proud boast that for years “one’s ancestors have held high posts, which they owed to their literary successes.”30 On the other hand, a person who has failed in his military examination, becomes, as if by a natural transition, a man-eating monster.31 But of mere class the Chinese drama is no respecter, painting with noteworthy freedom the virtues and the vices of nearly every phase of society. The same liberty is taken with regard to the female sex; it is clear that in earlier times there were few vexatious restrictions in Chinese life upon the social intercourse between men and women. The variety of female characters in the Chinese drama is great, ranging from the heroine who sacrifices herself for the sake of an empire32 to the well-brought-up young lady who avers that “woman came into the world to be obedient, to unravel skeins of silk, and to work with her needle”33—from the chambermaid who contrives the most gently sentimental of rendezvous,34 to the reckless courtesan who, like another Millwood, upbraids the partner of her guilt on his suing for mercy, and bids him die with her in hopes of a reunion after death.35 In marriage the first or legitimate wife is distinguished from the second, who is at times a ci-devant courtesan, and towards whom the feelings of the former vary between bitter jealousy36 and sisterly kindness.37

The conduct of the plays exhibits much ingenuity, and an aversion from restrictions of time and place; in fact, the nature of the plot constantly covers a long series of years, and spans wide intervals of local distance. The plays are divided into acts and scenes—the former being usually four in number, at times with an induction or narrative prologue spoken by some of the characters (Sie-Tsen). Favourite plays were, however, allowed Construction and conduct of plots. to extend to great length; the Pi-Pa-Ki is divided into 24 sections, and in another recension apparently comprised 42. “I do not wish,” says the manager in the prologue, “that this performance should last too long; finish it to-day, but cut out nothing”—whence it appears that the performance of some plays occupied more than a single day. The rule was always observed that a separate act should be given up to the dénouement; while, according to a theory of which it is not always easy to trace the operation, the perfection of construction was sought in the dualism or contrast of scene and scene, just as the perfection of diction was placed in the parallelism or antithesis of phrase and phrase. Being subject to no restrictions as to what might, or might not, be represented on the stage, the conduct of the plots allowed of the introduction of almost every variety of incidents. Death takes place, in sight of the audience, by starvation,38 by drowning,39 by poison,40 by execution;41 flogging and torture are inflicted on the stage;42 wonders are wrought;43 and magic is brought into play;44 the ghost of an innocently-executed daughter calls upon her father to revenge her foul murder, and assists in person at the subsequent judicial enquiry.45 Certain peculiarities in the conduct of the business are due to the usages of society rather than to dramaturgic laws. Marriages are generally managed—at least in the higher spheres of society—by ladies professionally employed as matrimonial agents.46 The happy resolution of the nodus of the action is usually brought about by the direct interposition of superior official authority47—a tribute to the paternal system of government, which is the characteristic Chinese variety of the deus ex machina. This naturally tends to the favourite close of a glorification of the emperor,48 resembling that of Louis XIV. at the end of Tartufe, or in spirit, at all events, those of the virgin queen in more than one Elizabethan play. It should be added that the characters save the necessity for a bill of the play by persistently announcing and re-announcing their names and genealogies, and the necessity for a book by frequently recapitulating the previous course of the plot.

One peculiarity of the Chinese drama remains to be noticed. The chief character of a play represents the author as well as the personage; he or she is hero or heroine and chorus in one. This is brought about by the hero’s (or heroine’s) The principal personage who sings. singing the poetical passages, or those containing maxims of wisdom and morality, or reminiscences and examples drawn from legend or history. Arising out of the dialogue, these passages at the same time diversify it, and give to it such elevation and brilliancy as it can boast. The singing character must be the principal personage in the action, but may be taken from any class of society. If this personage dies in the course of the play, another sings in his place. From the Poetic diction. mention of this distinctive feature of the Chinese drama it will be obvious how unfair it would be to judge of any of its productions, without a due appreciation of the lyric passages, which do not appear to be altogether restricted to the singing of the principal personage, for other characters frequently “recite verses.” In these lyrical or didactic passages are to be sought those flowers of diction which, as Julien has shown, consist partly in the use of a metaphorical phraseology of infinite nicety in its variations—such as a long series of phrases compounded with the word signifying jet and expressing severally the ideas of rarity, distinction, beauty, &c., or as others derived from the names of colours, birds, beasts, precious metals, elements, constellations, &c., or alluding to favourite legends or anecdotes. These features constitute the literary element par excellence of Chinese dramatic composition. At the same time, though it is impossible for the untrained reader to be alive to the charms of so unfamiliar a phraseology, it may be questioned whether even in its diction the Chinese drama can claim to be regarded as really poetic. It may abound in poetic ornament; it is not, like the Indian, bathed in poetry.

On the other hand, the merits of this dramatic literature are by no means restricted to ingenuity of construction and variety of character—merits, in themselves important, which no candid criticism will deny to it. Its master-piece Merits of the Chinese drama. is not only truly pathetic in the conception and the main situations of its action, but includes scenes of singular grace and delicacy of treatment—such as that where the remarried husband of the deserted heroine in vain essays in the presence of his second wife to sing to his new lute, now that he has cast aside the old.49 In the last act of a tragedy appealing at once to patriotism and to pity, there is true imaginative power in the picture of the emperor, when aware of the departure, but not of the death, of his beloved, sitting in solitude broken only by the ominous shriek of the wild-fowl.50 Nor is the Chinese drama devoid of humour. The lively abigail who has to persuade her mistress into confessing herself in love by arguing (almost like Beatrice) that “humanity bids us love men”;51 the corrupt judge (a common type in the Chinese plays) who falls on his knees before the prosecuting parties to a suit as before “the father and mother who give him sustenance,”52 may serve as examples; and in Pi-Pa-Ki there is a scene of admirable burlesque on the still more characteristic theme of the humours of a competitive examination.53 If such illustrations could not easily be multiplied, they are at least worth citing in order to deprecate a perfunctory criticism on the qualities of a dramatic literature as to which our materials for judgment are still scanty.

While in the north of China houses are temporarily set apart for dramatic performances, in the south these are usually confined to theatres erected in the streets (Hi-Thaï). Scenery and costume. Thus scenic decorations of any importance must always have been out of question in the Chinese theatre. The costumes, on the other hand, are described as magnificent; they are traditionally those worn before the 17th century, in accordance with the historical colouring of most of the plays. Actors. The actor’s profession is not a respectable one in China, the managers being in the habit of buying children of slaves and bringing them up as slaves of their own. Women may not appear on the stage, since the emperor K’ien-Lung admitted an actress among his concubines; female parts are therefore played by lads, occasionally by eunuchs.

4. Japanese Drama

The Japanese drama, as all evidence seems to agree in showing, still remains what in substance it has always been—an amusement passionately loved by the lower orders, but hardly dignified by literature deserving the name. Apart from its native elements of music, dance and song, and legendary or historical narrative and pantomime, it is clearly to be regarded as a Chinese importation; nor has it in its more advanced forms apparently even attempted to emancipate itself from the reproduction of the conventional Chinese types. As early as the close of the 6th century Hada Kawatsu, a man of Chinese extraction, but born in Japan, is said to have been ordered to arrange entertainments for the benefit of the country, and to have written as many as thirty-three plays. The Japanese, however, ascribe the origin of their drama to the introduction of the dance called Sambāso as a charm against a volcanic depression of the earth which occurred in 805; and this dance appears still to be used as a prelude to theatrical exhibitions. In 1108 lived a woman called Iso no Zenji, who is looked upon as “the mother of the Japanese drama.” But her performances seem to have been confined to dancing or posturing in male attire (otokomai); and the introduction of the drama proper is universally attributed to Sarnwaka Kanzaburō, who in 1624 opened the first theatre (sibaïa) at Yeddo. Not long afterwards (1651) the playhouses were removed to their present site in the capital; and both here and in the provincial towns, especially of the north, the drama has since continued to flourish. Persons of rank were formerly never seen at these theatres; but actors were occasionally engaged to play in private at the houses of the nobles, who appear themselves to have taken part in performances of a species of opera affected by them, always treating patriotic legends and called nō. The mikado has a court theatre.

The subjects of the serious popular plays are mainly mythological—the acts of the great spirit Day-Sin, the incarnation of Brahma, and similar themes—or historical, treating of the doings of the early dynasties. In these the Subjects of the plays. names of the personages are changed. An example of the latter class is to be found in the jōruri, or musical romance, in which the universally popular tale of Chiushingura (The Loyal League) has been amplified and adapted for theatrical representation. This famous narrative of the feudal fidelity of the forty-seven ronins, who about the year 1699 revenged their chief’s judicial suicide upon the arrogant official to whom it was due, is stirring rather than touching in its incidents, and contains much bloodshed, together with a tea-house scene which suffices as a specimen of the Japanese comedy of manners. One of the books of this dramatic romance consists of a metrical description, mainly in dialogue, of a journey which (after the fashion of Indian plays) has to be carried out on the stage. The performance of one of these quasi-historical dramas sometimes lasts over several days; they are produced with much pomp of costume; but the acting is very realistic, and hari-kari is performed, almost “to the life.” Besides these tragic plays (in which, however, comic intermezzos are often inserted) the Japanese have middle-class domestic dramas of a very realistic kind. The language of these, unlike that of Chinese comedy, is often gross and scurrilous, but intrigues against married women are rigidly excluded. Fairy and demon operas and ballets, and farces and intermezzos, form an easy transition to the interludes of tumblers and jugglers. As a specimen of nearly every class of play is required to make up a Japanese theatrical entertainment, which lasts from sunrise to sunset, and as the lower houses appropriate and mutilate the plays of the higher, it is clear that the status of the Japanese theatre cannot be regarded as at all high. In respect, however, of its movable scenery and properties, it is in advance of its Chinese prototype. The performers are, except in the ballet, males only; and the comic acting is said to be excellent of its kind. Though the leading actors enjoy great popularity and very respectable salaries, the class is held in contempt, and the companies were formerly recruited from the lowest sources. The disabilities under which they lay have, however, been removed; a Dramatic Reform Association has been organized by a number of noblemen and scholars, and a theatre on European lines built (see Japan).

5. Persian and other Asiatic, Polynesian and Peruvian Drama

Such dramatic examples of the drama as may be discoverable in Siam will probably have to be regarded as belonging to a branch of the Indian drama. The drama of the Malay Siam. populations of Java and the neighbouring island of Sumatra also resembles the Indian, to which it may have owed what development it has reached. The Javanese, as we learn, distinguish among the lyrics sung on occasions of Java, Sumatra, &c. popular significance the panton, a short simile or fable, and the tcharita, a more advanced species, taking the form of dialogue and sung or recited by actors proper. From the tcharita the Javanese drama, which in its higher forms treats the stories of gods and kings, appears to have been derived. As in the Indian drama, the functions of the director or manager are of great importance; as in the Greek, the performers wear masks, here made of wood. The comic drama is often represented in both Java and Sumatra by parties of strollers consisting of two men and a woman—a troop sufficient for a wide variety of plot.

Among other more highly civilized Asiatic peoples, the traces of the dramatic art are either few or late. The originally Aryan Persians exhibit no trace of the drama in their ample Persian. earlier literature. But in its later national development the two species, widely different from one another, of the religious drama or mystery and of the popular comedy or farce have made their appearance—the former in a growth of singular interest.

Of the Persian téaziés (lamentations or complaints) the subjects are invariably derived from religious history, and more or less directly connected with the “martyrdoms” of the house of Ali. The performance of these episodes or The téaziés. scenes takes place during the first ten days of the month of Muharram, when the adherents of the great Shi’ite sect all over Persia and Mahommedan India commemorate the deaths of the Prophet and his daughter Fatima, the mother of Ali, the martyrdoms of Ali himself, shamefully murdered in the sanctuary, and of his unoffending son Hasan, done to death by his miserable guilty Deianira of a wife, and lastly the never-to-be-forgotten sacrifice of Hasan’s brother, the heroic Hosain, on the bloody field of Kerbela (a.d. 680). With the establishment in Persia, early in the 16th century, of the Safawid (Sufi) dynasty by the Shi’ites, the cult of the martyrs Hasan and Hosain secured the official sanction which it has since retained. Thus the performance of these téaziés, and the defraying of the equipment of them, are regarded as religious, and in a theological sense meritorious, acts; and the plays are frequently provided by the court or by other wealthy persons, by way of pleasing the people or securing divine favour. The plays are performed, usually by natives of Isfahan, in courtyards of mosques, palaces, inns, &c., and in the country in temporary structures erected for the purpose.

It would seem that, no farther back than the beginning of the 19th century, the téaziés were still only songs or elegies in honour of the martyrs, occasionally chanted by persons actually representing them. Just, however, as Greek tragedy was formed by a gradual detachment of the dialogue from the choric song of which it was originally only a secondary outgrowth, and by its gradually becoming the substance of the drama, so the Miracle Play of Hasan and Hosain, as we may call it, has now come to be a continuous succession of dramatic scenes. Of these fifty-two have, thanks to the labours of Alexander Chodzko and Sir Lewis Pelly, been actually taken down in writing, and thirty-seven published in translations; and it is clear that there is no limit to the extension of the treatment, as is shown by such a téazié as the Marriage of Kassem, dealing with the unfortunate Hosain’s unfortunate son.54 The performance is usually opened by a prologue delivered by the rouzékhán, a personage of semi-priestly character claiming descent from the Prophet, who edifies and excites the audience by a pathetic recitation of legends and vehement admonitions in prose or verse concerning the subject of the action. But the custom seems to have arisen of specially prefacing the drama proper by a kind of induction which illustrates the cause or effect of the sacred story—as for instance that of Amir Timur (Tamerlane), who appears as lamenting and avenging the death of Hosain; or the episode of Joseph’s betrayal by his brethren, as prefiguring the cruelty shown to Ali and his sons. At the climax of the action proper Hosain prays to be granted at the day of judgment the key of the treasure of intercession; and the final scene shows the fulfilment of his prayer, which opens paradise to those who have helped the holy martyr, or who have so much as shed a single tear for him. It will thus be seen that not only is this complex and elaborate production unapproached in its length and in its patient development of a long sequence of momentous events by any chronicle history or religious drama, but that it embodies together with the passionately cherished traditions of a great religious community the expression of a long-lived resentment of foreign invasion—and is thus a kind of Oberammergau play and complaint of the Nibelungs in one.

The other kind of Persian drama is the témacha (= spectacle), a kind of comedy or farce, sometimes called teglid (disguising), performed by wandering minstrels or joculatores called loutys, who travel about accompanied by their bayadères, The témachas. and amuse such spectators as they find by their improvised entertainments, which seem to be on much the same level as English “interludes.” A favourite and ancient variety of the species is the karaguez or puppet-play, of which the protagonist is called kétchel péhlévan (the bald hero).

The modern Persian drama seems to have admitted Western influences, as in the case of such comedies as The Pleaders of the Court, and, avowedly, Monsieur Jourdan and Musla’li Shah, of whom the former steals away the wits of young Persia by his pictures of the delights of Paris.

There is no necessity for any reference here to the civilization or to the literature of the Hebrews, or to those of other Semitic peoples, with whom the drama is either entirely Hebrew literature. wanting, or only appears as a quite occasional and exotic growth. Dramatic elements are apparent in two of the books of the Hebrew scripture—the Book of Ruth and the Book of Job, of which latter the author of Everyman, and Goethe in his Faust, made so impressive a use.

From Polynesia and aboriginal America we also have isolated traces of drama. Among these are the performances, accompanied by dancing and intermixed with recitation and singing, of the South Sea Islanders, first described by South Seas; Peru. Captain Cook, and reintroduced to the notice of students of comparative mythology by W. Wyatt Gill. Of the so-called Inca drama of the Peruvians, the unique relic, Apu Ollantay, said to have been written down in the Quichua tongue from native dictation by Spanish priests shortly after the conquest of Peru, has been partly translated by Sir Clements Markham, and has been rendered into German verse. It appears to be an historic play of the heroic type, combining stirring incidents with a pathos finding expression in at least one lyric of some sweetness—the lament of the lost Collyar. With it may be contrasted the ferocious Aztek dramatic ballet, Rabinal-Achi (translated by Brasseur de Bourbourg), of which the text seems rather a succession of warlike harangues than an attempt at dramatic treatment of character. But these are mere isolated curiosities.

6. Dramatic Elements in Egyptian Culture

The civilization and religious ideas of the Egyptians so vitally influenced the people of whose drama we are about to speak that a reference to them cannot be altogether omitted. The influence of Egyptian upon Greek civilization has probably been overestimated by Herodotus; but while it will never be clearly known how much the Greeks owed to the Egyptians in divers branches of knowledge, it is certain that the former confessed themselves the scholars of Egypt in the cardinal doctrine of its natural theology. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul there found its most solemn expression in mysterious recitations connected with the rites of sepulture, and treating of the migration of the soul from its earthly to its eternal abode. These solemnities, whose transition into the Hellenic mysteries has usually been attributed to the agency of the Thracian worship of Dionysus, undoubtedly contained a dramatic element, upon the extent of which it is, however, useless to speculate. The ideas to which they sought to give utterance centred in that of Osiris, the vivifying power or universal soul of nature, whom Herodotus simply identifies with the Dionysus of the Greeks. The same deity was likewise honoured by processions among the rural Egyptian population, which, according to the same authority, in nearly all respects except the absence of choruses resembled the Greek phallic processions in honour of the wine-god.

That the Egyptians looked upon music as an important science seems fully established; it was diligently studied by their priests, though not, as among the Greeks, forming a part of general education, and in the sacred rites of their gods they as a rule permitted the use of flute and harp, as well as of vocal music. Dancing was as an art confined to professional persons; but though the higher orders abstained from its practice, the lower indulged in it on festive occasions, when a tendency to pantomime naturally asserted itself, and licence and wanton buffoonery prevailed, as in the early rustic festivals of the Greek and Italian peoples. Of a dance of armed men, on the other hand, there seems no satisfactory trace in the representations of the Egyptian monuments.

7. Greek Drama

Whatever elements the Greek drama may, in the sources from which it sprang, have owed to Egyptian, or Phrygian, or other Asiatic influences, its development was independent and self-sustained. Not only in its beginnings, but Religious origin. so long as the stage existed in Greece, the drama was in intimate connexion with the national religion. This is the most signal feature of its history, and one which cannot in the same degree or to the same extent be ascribed to the drama of any other people, ancient or modern. Not only did both the great branches of the Greek drama alike originate in the usages of religious worship, but they never lost their formal union with it, though one of them (comedy) in its later growth abandoned all direct reference to its origin. Hellenic polytheism was at once so active and so fluid or flexible in its anthropomorphic formations, that no other religious system has ever with the same conquering force assimilated to itself foreign elements, or with equal vivacity and variety developed its own. Thus, the worship of Dionysus, introduced into Greece by the Phoenicians as that of the tauriform sun-god whom his worshippers adored with loud cries (whence Bacchus or Iacchus), and the god of generation (whence his phallic emblem) and production, was brought into connexion with the Dorian religion of the sun-god Apollo. Apollo and his sister, again, corresponded to the Pelasgian and Achaean divinities of sun and moon, whom the Phoenician Dionysus and Demeter superseded, or with whose worship theirs was blended. Dionysus, whose rites were specifically conducted with reference to his attributes as the wine-god, was attended by deified representations of his original worshippers, who wore the skin of the goat sacrificed to him. These were the satyrs. Out of the connected worships of Dionysus, Bacchus, Apollo and Demeter sprang the beginnings of the Greek drama.

“Both tragedy and comedy,” says Aristotle, “originated in a rude and unpremeditated manner—the first from the leaders of the dithyramb, and the second from those who led off the phallic songs.” This diversity of origin, and the distinction jealously maintained down to the latest times between the two branches of the dramatic art, even where they might seem to come into actual contact with one another, necessitate a separate statement as to the origin and history of either.

The custom of offering thanks to the gods by hymns and dances in the places of public resort was first practised by the Greeks in the Dorian states, whose whole system of life was organized on a military basis. Hence the Origin of tragedy. dances of the Dorians originally taught or imitated the movements of soldiers, and their hymns were warlike chants. Such were the beginnings of the chorus, and of its songs (called paeans, from an epithet of Apollo), accompanied first by the phorminx and then by the flute. A step in advance was taken when the poet with his trained singers and dancers, like the Indian sŭtra-dhāra, performed these religious functions as the representative of the population. From the Doric paean at a very early period several styles of choral dancing formed themselves, to which the three styles of dance in scenic productions—the tragic, the comic and the satyric—are stated afterwards to have corresponded. But none of these could have led to a literary growth. This was due to the introduction among the Dorians The dithyramb. of the dithyramb (from δῖος, descended from Zeus, and θρίαμβος, the Latin triumphus), originally a song of revellers, probably led by a flute-player and accompanied by the music of other Eastern instruments, in which it was customary in Crete to celebrate the birth of Bacchus (the doubly-born) and possibly also his later adventures. The leader of the band (coryphaeus) may be supposed to have at times assumed the character of the wine-god, whose worshippers bore aloft the vineclad thyrsus. The dithyramb was reduced to a definite form by the Lesbian Arion (fl. 610), who composed regular poems, turned the moving band of worshippers into a standing or “cyclic” chorus of attendants on Dionysus—a chorus of satyrs, a tragic or goat chorus—invented a style of music adapted to the character of the chorus, and called these songs “tragedies” or “goat-songs.” Arion, whose goat-chorus may perhaps have some connexion with an early Arcadian worship of Pan, associated it permanently with Dionysus, and thus became the inventor of “lyrical tragedy”—a transition Lyrical tragedy. stage between the dithyramb and the regular drama. His invention, or the chorus with which it dealt, was established according to fixed rules by his contemporary Stesichorus. About the time when Arion introduced these improvements into the Dorian city of Corinth, the (likewise Dorian) families at Sicyon honoured the hero-king Adrastus by tragic choruses. Hence the invention of tragedy was ascribed by the Sicyonians to their poet Epigenes; but this step, significant for the future history of the Greek drama, of employing the Bacchic chorus for the celebration of other than Bacchic themes, was soon annulled by the tyrant Cleisthenes.

The element which transformed lyrical tragedy into the tragic drama was added by the Ionians. The custom of the recitation of poetry by wandering minstrels, called rhapsodes (from ῥάβδος, staff, or from ῤάπτειν, to piece The rhapsodes. together), first sprang up in the Ionia beyond the sea; to such minstrels was due the spread of the Homeric poems and of subsequent epic cycles. These recitations, with or without musical accompaniment, soon included gnomic or didactic, as well as epic, verse; if Homer was a rhapsode, so was the sententious or “moral” Hesiod. The popular effect of these recitations was enormously increased by the metrical innovations of Archilochus (from 708), who invented the trochee and the iambus, the latter the arrowy metre which is the native form of satirical invective—the species of composition in which Archilochus excelled—though it was soon used for other purposes also. The recitation of these iambics may already have nearly approached to theatrical declamation. The rhapsodes were welcome guests at popular festivals, where they exercised their art in mutual emulation, or ultimately recited parts, perhaps the whole, of longer poems. The recitation of a long epic may thus have resembled theatrical dialogue; even more so must the alternation of iambic poems, the form being frequently an address in the second person. The rhapsode was in some sense an actor; and when these recitations reached Attica, they thus brought with them the germs of theatrical dialogue.

The rhapsodes were actually introduced into Attica at a very early period; the Iliad, we know, was chanted at the Brauronia, a rural festival of Bacchus, whose worship had early entered Attica, and was cherished among its rustic Invention of the tragic drama. population. Meanwhile the cyclic chorus of the Dorians had found its way into Attica and Athens, ever since the Athenians had recognized the authority of the great centre of the Apolline religion at Delphi. From the second half of the 6th century onwards the chorus of satyrs formed a leading feature of the great festival of Dionysus at Athens. It therefore only remained for the rhapsodic and the cyclic—in other words, for the epic and the choral—elements to coalesce; and this must have been brought about by a union of the two accompaniments of religious worship in the festive rites of Bacchus, and by the domestication of these rites in the ruling city. This occurred in the time of Peisistratus, perhaps after his restoration in 554. To Thespis (534), said to have been a contemporary of the tyrant and a native of an Attic deme (Icaria), the invention of tragedy is accordingly ascribed. Whether his name be that of an actual person or not, his claim to be regarded as the inventor of tragedy is founded on the statement that he introduced an actor (ὑποκριτής, originally, “answerer”), doubtless, at first, generally the poet himself, who, instead of merely alternating his recitations with the songs of the chorus, addressed his speech to its leader—the coryphaeus—with whom he thus carried on a species of “dialogue.” Or, in other words, the leader of the chorus (coryphaeus), instead of addressing himself to the chorus, held converse with the actor. The chorus stood round its leader in front of the Bacchic altar (thymelē); the actor stood with the coryphaeus, who had occupied a more elevated position in order to be visible above his fellows, on a rude table, or possibly on a cart, though the wagon of Thespis may be a fiction, due to a confusion between his table and the wagon of Susarion. In any case, we have here, with the beginnings of dialogue, the beginning of the stage. It is a significant minor invention ascribed to Thespis, that he disguised the actor’s face first by means of a pigment, afterwards by a mask. In the dialogue was treated some myth relating to Bacchus, or to some other deity or hero. Whether or not Thespis actually wrote tragedies (and there seems no reason to doubt it), Phrynichus and one or two other poets are mentioned as having carried on choral tragedy as set on foot by him, and as having introduced improvements into its still predominating lyrical element. The step which made dramatic action possible, and with which the Greek drama thus really began, was, as is distinctly stated by Aristotle, taken by Aeschylus. He added a second actor; and, by reducing the functions of the chorus, he further established the dialogue as the principal part of tragedy. Sophocles afterwards added a third actor, by which change the preponderance of the dialogue was made complete.

If the origin of Greek comedy is simpler in its nature than that of Greek tragedy, the beginnings of its progress are involved in more obscurity. Its association with religious worship was not initial; its foundations lay in popular Origin of comedy. mirth, though religious festivals, and those of the vintage god in particular, must from the first have been the most obvious occasions for its exhibition. It is said to have been “invented” by Susarion, a native of Doric Megaris, whose inhabitants were famed for their coarse humour, which they communicated to their own and other Dorian colonies in Sicily, to this day the home of vivacious mimic dialogue. In the rural Bacchic vintage festivals bands of jolly companions (κῶμος, properly a revel continued after supper) went about in carts or afoot, carrying the phallic emblem, and indulging in the ribald licence of wanton mirth. From the song sung in these processions or at the Bacchic feasts, which combined the praise of the god with gross personal ridicule, and was called comus in a secondary sense, the Bacchic reveller taking part in it was called a comus-singer or comoedus. These phallic processions, which were afterwards held in most Greek cities, and in Athens seem to have early included a “topical” speech as well as a choral song, determined the character of Old Attic comedy, whose most prominent feature was an absolute licence of personal vilification.

Thus independent of one another in their origin, Greek tragedy and comedy never actually coalesced. The “satyr-drama,” though in some sense it partook of the nature of both, was in its origin as in its history connected with The satyr-drama. tragedy alone, whose origin it directly recalled. Pratinas of Philus, a contemporary of Aeschylus in his earlier days, is said to have restored the tragic chorus to the satyrs; i.e. he first produced dramas in which, though they were the same in form and theme as the tragedies, the choric dances were different and entirely carried on by satyrs. The tragic poets, while never writing comedies, henceforth also composed satyr-dramas; but neither tragedies nor satyr-dramas were ever written by the comic poets, and it was in conjunction with tragedies only that the satyr-dramas were performed. The theory of the Platonic Socrates, that the same man ought to be the best tragic and the best comic poet, was among the Greeks Tragi-comedy. never exemplified in practice. The so-called “hilaro-tragedy” or “tragi-comedy” of later writers, perhaps in some of its features in a measure anticipated by Euripides,55 in form nowise differed from tragedy; it merely contained a comic element in its characters, and invariably had a happy ending. It is an instructive fact that the serious and sentimental element in the comedy of Menander and his contemporaries did far more to destroy the essential difference between the two great branches of the Greek dramatic art.

Periods of Greek Tragedy.—The history of Greek—which to all intents and purposes remained Attic—tragedy divides itself into three periods.

I. The Period before Aeschylus (535-499).—From this we have but a few names of authors and plays—those of the former being (besides Thespis) Choerilus, Phrynichus and Pratinas, all of whom lived to contend with Aeschylus for the tragic prize. To each of them certain innovations are ascribed—for instance the introduction of female characters to Phrynichus. He is best remembered by the overpowering effect said to have been created by his Capture of Miletus, in which the chorus consisted of the wives of the Phoenician sailors in the service of the Great King.

II. The Classical Period of Attic Tragedy—that of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and their contemporaries (499-405). To this belong all the really important phases in the progress of Greek tragedy, which severally connect themselves with the names of its three great masters. They may be regarded as the representatives of successive generations of Attic history and life, though of course in these, as in the progress of their art itself, there is an unbroken continuity.

Aeschylus (525-456) had not only fought both at Marathon and at Salamis against those Persians whose rout he celebrated with patriotic price,56 but he had been trained in the Eleusinian mysteries, and strenuously asserted the Aeschylus. value of the institution most intimately associated with the primitive political traditions of the past—the Areopagus.57 He had been born in the generation after Solon, to whose maxims he fondly clung; and it was the Dorian development of Hellenic life and the philosophical system based upon it with which his religious and moral convictions were imbued. Thus even upon the generation which succeeded him, and to which the powerful simplicity of his dramatic and poetic diction seemed strange, the ethical loftiness of his conceptions and the sublimity of his dramatic imagination fell like the note of a mightier age. To us nothing is more striking than the conciliatory tendencies of his conservative mind, and the progressive nature of what may have seemed to his later contemporaries antiquated ideals.

Sophocles (495-405) was the associate of Pericles, and an upholder of his authority, rather than a consistent pupil of his political principles; but his manhood, and perhaps the maturity of his genius, coincided with the great Sophocles. days when he could stand, like his mighty friend and the community they both so gloriously represented, on the sunny heights of achievement. Serenely pious as well as nobly patriotic, he nevertheless treats the myths of the national religion in the spirit of a conscious artist, contrasting with lofty irony the struggles of humanity with the irresistible march of its destinies. Perhaps he, too, was one of the initiated; and the note of personal responsibility which is the mystic’s inner religion is recognizable in his view of life.58 The art of Sophocles may in its perfection be said to typify the greatest epoch in the life of Athens—an epoch conscious of unequalled achievements, but neither wholly unconscious of the brief endurance which was its destiny.

Euripides (480-406), as is the fate of genius of a more complex kind, has been more variously and antithetically judged than either of his great fellow-tragedians. His art has been described as devoid of the idealism of theirs, Euripides. his genius as rhetorical rather than poetical, his morality as that of a sophistical wit. On the other hand, he has been recognized not only as the most tragic of the Attic tragedians and the most pathetic of ancient poets, but also as the most humane in his social philosophy and the most various in his psychological insight. At least, though far removed from the more naïf age of the national life, he is, both in patriotic spirit and in his choice of themes, genuinely Attic; and if he was “haunted on the stage by the daemon of Socrates,” he was, like Socrates himself, the representative of an age which was a seed-time as well as a season of decay. His technical innovations corresponded to his literary characteristics; but neither in the treatment of the chorus, nor in his management of the beginning and the ending of a tragedy, did he introduce any radical change. To Euripides the general progress of dramatic literature nevertheless owes more than to any other ancient poet. Tragedy followed in his footsteps in Greece and at Rome. Comedy owed him something in the later phases of the very Aristophanes who mocked him, and more in the human philosophy expressed in the sentiments of Menander; and, when the modern drama came to engraft the ancient upon its own crude growth, his was directly or indirectly the most powerful influence in the establishment of a living connexion between them.

The incontestable pre-eminence of the three great tragic poets was in course of time acknowledged at Athens by the usage allowing no tragedies but theirs to be performed more than once, and by the prescription that one The great tragic masters and their contemporaries. play of theirs should be performed at each Dionysia, as well as by the law of Lycurgus (c. 330) which obliged the actors to use, in the case of works of the great masters, authentic copies preserved in the public archives. Yet it is possible that the exclusiveness of these tributes is not entirely justifiable; and not all the tragic poets contemporary with the great writers were among the myriad of younglings derided by Aristophanes. Of those who attained to celebrity Ion of Chios (d. before 419) seems to have followed earlier traditions of style than Euripides; Agathon, who survived the latter, on the other hand, introduced certain innovations of a transnormal kind both into the substance and the form of dramatic composition.59

III. Of the third period of Greek tragedy the concluding limit cannot be precisely fixed. Down to the days of Alexander the Great, Athens had remained the chief home of tragedy. Though tragedies must have begun to be The successors of the great masters at Athens. acted at the Syracusan and Macedonian courts, since Aeschylus, Euripides and Agathon had sojourned there—though the practice of producing plays at the Dionysia before the allies of Athens must have led to their holding similar exhibitions at home—yet before the death of Alexander we meet with no instance of a tragic poet writing or of a tragedy written outside Athens. An exception should indeed be made in favour of the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse, who (like Critias in his earlier days at Athens) was “addicted to” tragic composition. Not all the tragedians of this period, however, were Athenians born; though the names of Euphorion, the son of Aeschylus, Iophon, the son of Sophocles, and Euripides and Sophocles, the nephew and the grandson respectively of their great namesakes, illustrate the descent of the tragic art as an hereditary family possession. Chaeremon (fl. 380) already exhibits tragedy on the road to certain decay, for we learn that his plays were written for reading.

Soon after the death of Alexander theatres are found spread over the whole Hellenic world of Europe and Asia—a result to which the practice of the conqueror and his father of celebrating their victories by scenic performances The Alexandrians. had doubtless contributed. Alexandria having now become a literary centre with which even Athens was in some respects unable to compete, while the latter still remained the home of comedy, the tragic poets flocked to the capital of the Ptolemies; and here, in the canon of Greek poets drawn up by command of Ptolemy Philadelphus (283-247), Alexander the Aetolian undertook the list of tragedies, while Lycophron was charged with the comedies. But Lycophron himself was included in all the versions of the list of the seven tragic poets famed as the “Pleias” who still wrote in the style of the Attic masters and followed the rules observed by them. Tragedy and the dramatic art continued to be favoured by the later Ptolemies; and about 100 b.c. we meet with the curious phenomenon of a Jewish poet, Ezechiel, composing Greek tragedies, of one of which (the Exodus from Egypt) fragments have come down to us. Tragedy, with the satyr-drama and comedy, survived in Alexandria beyond the days of Cicero and Varro; nor was their doom finally sealed till the emperor Caracalla abolished theatrical performances in the Egyptian capital in a.d. 217.

Thus Greek tragedy is virtually only another name for Attic; nor was any departure from the lines laid down The tragedy of the great masters. by its three great masters made in most respects by the Roman imitators of these poets and of their successors.

Tragedy was defined by Plato as an imitation of the noblest life. Its proper themes—the deeds and sufferings of heroes—were familiar to audiences intimately acquainted with the mythology of the national religion. To such Subjects of Greek tragedy. themes Greek tragedy almost wholly confined itself; and in later days there were numerous books which discussed these myths of the tragedians. They only very exceptionally treated historic themes, though one great national calamity,60 and a yet greater national victory,61 and in later times a few other historical subjects,62 were brought upon the stage. Such veiled historical allusions as critical ingenuity has sought not only in passages but in the entire themes of other Attic tragedies63 cannot, of course, even if accepted as such, stamp the plays in which they occur as historic dramas. No doubt Attic tragedy, though after a different and more decorous fashion, shared the tendency of her comic sister to introduce allusions to contemporary events and persons; and the indulgence of this tendency was facilitated by the revision (διασκυή) to which the works of the great poets were subjected by them, or by those who produced their works after them.64 So far as we know, the subjects of the tragedies before Aeschylus were derived from the epos; and it was a famous saying of this poet that his dramas were “but dry scraps from the great banquets of Homer”—an expression which may be understood as including the poems which belong to the so-called Homeric cycles. Sophocles, Euripides and their successors likewise resorted to the Trojan, and also to the Heraclean and the Thesean myths, and to Attic legend in general, as well as to Theban, to which already Aeschylus had had recourse, and to the side or subsidiary myths connected with these several groups. These substantially remained to the last the themes of Greek tragedy, the Trojan myths always retaining so prominent a place that Lucian could jest on the universality of their dominion. Purely invented subjects were occasionally treated by the later tragedians; of this innovation Agathon was the originator.65

Thespis is said to have introduced the use of a “prologue” and a “rhesis” (speech)—the former being probably the opening speech recited by the coryphaeus, the latter the dialogue between him and the actor. It was a natural result Construction. of the introduction of the second actor that a second rhesis should likewise be added; and this tripartite division would be the earliest form of the trilogy,—three sections of the same myth forming the beginning, middle and end of a single The Aeschylean trilogy. drama, marked off from one another by the choral songs. From this Aeschylus proceeded to the treatment of these several portions of a myth in three separate plays, connected together by their subject and by being performed in sequence on a single occasion. This is the Aeschylean trilogy, of which we have only one extant example, the Oresteia—as to which critics may differ whether Aeschylus adhered in it to his principle that the strength should lie in the middle—in other words, that the interest should centre in the second play. In any case, the symmetry of the trilogy The tetralogy. was destroyed by the practice of performing after it a satyr-drama, probably as a rule, if not always, connected in subject with the trilogy, which thus became a tetralogy, though this term, unlike the other, seems to be a purely technical expression invented by the learned.66 Sophocles, a more conscious and probably a more self-critical artist than Aeschylus, may be assumed from the first to have elaborated his tragedies with greater care; and to this, as well as to his innovation of the third actor, which materially added to the fulness of the action, we may attribute his introduction of the custom of contending for the prize with single plays. It does not follow that he never produced connected trilogies, though we have no example of such by him or any later author; on the other hand, there is no proof that either he or any of his successors ever departed from the Aeschylean rule of producing three tragedies, followed by a satyr-drama, on the same day. This remained the third and last stage in the history of the construction Complicated actions. of Attic tragedy. The tendency of its action towards complication was a natural progress, and is emphatically approved by Aristotle. This complication, in which Euripides excelled, led to his use of prologues, in which one of the characters opens the play by an exposition of the circumstances under which its action begins. This practice, though ridiculed by Aristophanes, was too convenient not to be adopted by the successors of Euripides, and Menander transferred it to comedy. As the dialogue increased in importance, so the dramatic significance of the chorus diminished. While in Aeschylus it mostly, and in Sophocles occasionally, takes part in the action, its songs could not but more and more approach the character of lyrical intermezzos; and this they openly assumed when Agathon began the practice of inserting choral songs (embolima) which had nothing to do with the action of the play. In the general contrivance of their actions it was only natural that, as compared with Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides should exhibit an advance in both freedom and ingenuity; but the palm, due to a treatment at once piously adhering to the substance of the ancient legends and original in an effective dramatic treatment of them, must be given to Sophocles. Euripides was, moreover, less skilful in untying complicated actions than in weaving them; hence his frequent resort67 to the expedient of the deus ex machina, which Sophocles employs only in his latest play.68

The other distinctions to be drawn between the dramatic qualities of the three great tragic masters must be mainly based upon a critical estimate of the individual genius of each. In the characters of their tragedies, Aeschylus Characters. and Sophocles avoided those lapses of dignity with which from one point of view Euripides has been charged by Aristophanes and other critics, but which, from another, connect themselves with his humanity. If his men and women are less heroic and statuesque, they are more like men and women. Aristotle objected to the later tragedians that, compared with the great masters, they were deficient in the drawing of character—by which he meant the lofty drawing of lofty character. In Diction. diction, the transition is even more manifest from the “helmeted phrases” of Aeschylus, who had Milton’s love of long words and sonorous proper names, to the play of Euripides’ “smooth and diligent tongue”; but to a sustained style even he remained essentially true, and it was reserved for his successors to introduce into tragedy the “low speech”—i.e. the conversational language—of comedy. Upon the whole, however, the Euripidean diction seems to have remained the standard of later tragedy, the flowery style of speech introduced by Agathon finding no permanent favour.

Finally, Aeschylus is said to have made certain reforms in tragic costume of which the object is self-evident—to have improved the mask, and to have invented the cothurnus Improvements in costume, &c. or buskin, upon which the actor was raised to loftier stature. Euripides was not afraid of rags and tatters; but the sarcasms of Aristophanes on this head seem feeble to those who are aware that they would apply to King Lear as well as to Telephus.

Periods of Greek Comedy.—The history of Greek comedy is likewise that of an essentially Attic growth, although Sicilian comedy was earlier in date than her Attic sister or descendant. The former is represented by Epicharmus (fl. 500), and by the names of one or two other poets. It probably had a chorus, and, dealing as it did in a mixture of philosophical discourse, antithetical rhetoric and wild buffoonery, necessarily varied in style. His comedies were the earliest examples of the class distinguished as motoriae from the statariae and the mixtae by their greater freedom and turbulence of movement. Though in some respects Sicilian comedy seems to have resembled the Middle rather than the Old Attic comedy, its subjects sometimes, like those of the latter, coincided with the myths of tragedy, of which they were doubtless parodies. The so-called “mimes” of Sophron (fl. 430) were dramatic scenes from Sicilian everyday life, intended, not for the stage, but for recitation, and classed as “male” and “female” according to the sex of the characters.

Attic comedy is usually divided into three periods or species.

I. Old comedy, which dated from the complete establishment of democracy by Pericles, though a comedy directed against Themistocles is mentioned. The Megarean farcical entertainments had long spread in the rural districts The Old comedy. of Attica, and were now introduced into the city, where from about 460 onwards the “comus” became a matter of public concern. Cratinus (c. 450-422) and Crates (c. 449-425) first moulded these beginnings into the forms of Attic art. The final victory of Pericles and the democratic party may be reckoned from the ostracism of Thucydides (444); and so eagerly was the season of freedom employed by the comic poets that already four years afterwards a law—which, however, remained only a short time in force—limited their licence. Cratinus,69 an exceedingly bold and broad satirist, apparently of conservative tendencies, was followed by Eupolis (446-after 415), every one of whose plays appears to have attacked some individual,70 by Phrynichus, Plato and others; but the representative of old comedy in its fullest development is Aristophanes (c. 444-c. 380), a comic poet of unique and unsurpassed genius. Dignified by the acquisition of a chorus (more numerous—twenty-four to twelve or afterwards fifteen—though of a less costly kind than Aristophanes. the tragic) of masked actors, and of scenery and machinery, as well as by a corresponding literary elaboration and elegance of style, Old Attic comedy nevertheless remained true both to its origin and to the purposes of its introduction into the free imperial city. Its special season was at the festival of the Lenaea, when the Athenians could enjoy the fun against one another without espying strangers; but it was also performed at the Great Dionysia. It borrowed much from tragedy, but it retained the phallic abandonment of the old rural festivals, the licence of word and gesture, and the audacious directness of personal invective. These characteristics are not features peculiar to Aristophanes. He was twitted by some of the older comic poets with having degenerated from the full freedom of the art by a tendency to refinement, and he took credit to himself for having superseded the time-honoured cancan and the stale practical joking of his predecessors by a nobler kind of mirth. But in daring, as he likewise boasted, he had no peer; and the shafts of his wit, though dipped in wine-lees and at times feathered from very obscene fowl, flew at high game.71 He has been accused of seeking to degrade what he ought to have recognized as good72; and it has been shown with complete success that he is not to be taken as an impartial or accurate authority on Athenian history. But partisan as he was, he was also a genuine patriot; and his very political sympathies—which were conservative, like those of the comic poets in general, not only because it was the old families upon whom the expense of the choregia in the main devolved—were such as have often stimulated the most effective political satire. Of the conservative quality of reverence he was, however, altogether devoid; and his love for Athens was that of the most free-spoken of sons. Flexible even in his religious notions, he was, in this as in other respects, ready to be educated by his times; and, like a true comic poet, he could be witty at the expense even of his friends, and, it might almost be said, of himself. In wealth of fancy73 and in beauty of lyric melody, he has few peers among the great poets of all times.

The distinctive feature of Old, as compared with Middle comedy, is the parabasis, the speech in which the chorus, moving towards and facing the audience, addressed it in the name of the poet, often abandoning all reference to the The parabasis. action of the play. The loss of the parabasis was involved in the loss of the chorus, of which comedy was deprived in consequence of the general reduction of expenditure upon the comic drama, culminating in the law of the personally aggrieved dithyrambic poet Cinesias (396).74 But with the downfall of the independence of Athenian public life, the ground had been cut from under the feet of its most characteristic representative. Already in 414, in the anxious time after the sailing of the Sicilian expedition, the law of Syracosius had prohibited the comic poets from making direct reference to current events; but the Birds had taken their flight above the range of all regulations. The catastrophe of the city (405) was preceded by the temporary overthrow of the democracy (411), and was followed by the establishment of an oligarchical “tyranny” under Spartan protection; and, when liberty was restored (404), the citizens for a time addressed themselves to their new life in a soberer spirit, and continued (or passed) the law prohibiting the introduction by name of any individual as one of the personages of a play. The change to which comedy had to accommodate itself was one which cannot be defined by precise dates, yet it was not the less inevitable in its progress and results. Comedy, in her struggle for existence, now chiefly devoted herself to literary and social themes, such as the criticism of tragic poets,75 and the literary craze of women’s rights,76 and the transition to Middle comedy accomplished itself. Of the later plays of Aristophanes, three77 are without a parabasis, and in the last of those preserved to us which properly belongs to Middle comedy78 the chorus is quite insignificant.

II. Middle comedy, whose period extends over the remaining years of Athenian freedom (from about 400 to 338), thus differed in substance as well as in form from its predecessor. It is represented by the names of thirty-seven writers The Middle Comedy. (more than double the number of poets attributed to Old comedy), among whom Eubulus, Antiphanes and Alexis are stated to have been pre-eminently fertile and successful. It was a comedy of manners as well as character, although its ridicule of particular classes of men tended to the creation of standing types, such as soldiers, parasites, courtesans, revellers, and—a favourite figure already drawn by Aristophanes79—the self-conceited cook. In style it necessarily inclined to become more easy and conversational and to substitute insinuation for invective; while in that branch which was devoted to the parodying of tragic myths its purpose may have been to criticize, but its effect must have been to degrade. This species of the comic art had found favour at Athens already before the close of the great civil war; its inventor was the Thasian Hegemon, whose Gigantomachia was amusing the Athenians on the day when the news arrived of the Sicilian disaster.

III. New comedy, which is dated from the establishment of the Macedonian supremacy (338), is merely a further development of Middle, from which indeed it was not distinguished till the time of Hadrian. If its favourite types were The New Comedy. more numerous, including the captain (of mercenaries)—the original of a long line of comic favourites—the cunning slave, &c., they were probably also more conventional. New comedy appears to have first constituted love intrigues the main subject of dramatic actions. The most famous of the sixty-four writers said to have belonged to this period of comedy were Philemon (fl. from 330), Menander (342-329) and his contemporary Philemon and Menander. Diphilus. Of these authors we know something from fragments, but more from their Latin adapters Plautus and Terence. As comedians of character, they were limited by a range of types which left little room for originality of treatment; in the construction of their plots they were skillful rather than varied. In style, as well as to some extent in construction, Menander seems to have taken Euripides as his model, infusing into his comedy an element of moral and sentimental reflection, which refined if it did not enliven it.

New comedy, and with it Greek comedy proper, is regarded as having come to an end with Posidippus (fl. c. 280). Other comic writers of a later date are, however, mentioned, among them Rhinthon of Tarentum (fl. c. 300), whose Decay of comedy. mixed compositions have been called by various names, among them by that of “phlyacographies” (from phlyax, idle chatter). He was succeeded by Sopater, Sotades and others; but the dramatic element in these often obscene, but not perhaps altogether frivolous, travesties is not always clearly ascertainable. It is certain that Greek comedy gradually ceased to be productive; and though even in its original form it long continued to be acted in imperial Rome, these are phases of its history which may here be passed by.

The religious origin of the Attic drama impresses itself upon all its most peculiar features. Theatrical performances were held at Athens only at fixed seasons in the early part of the year—at the Bacchic festivals of the country Results of religious origin of Attic drama. Dionysia (vintage), the Lenaea (wine-press), probably at the Anthesteria, and above all, at the Great Dionysia, or the Dionysia par excellence, at the end of March and beginning of April, when in her most glorious age Athens was crowded with visitors from the islands and cities of her federal empire. As a part of religious worship, the performances took place in a sacred locality—the Lenaeum on the south-eastern declivity of the Acropolis, where the first wine-press (lenos) was said to have been set up, and where now an altar of Bacchus (thymele) formed the centre of the theatre. For the same reason the exhibitions claimed the attendance of the whole population, and room was therefore provided on a grand scale—according to the Platonic Socrates, for “more than 30,000” spectators (see Theatre). The performances lasted all day, or were at least, in accordance with their festive character, extended to as great a length as possible. To their religious origin is likewise to be attributed the fact that they were treated as a matter of state concern. The expenses of the chorus, which in theory represented the people at large, were defrayed on behalf of the state by the liturgies (public services) of wealthy citizens, chosen in turn by the tribes to be choragi (leaders, i.e. providers of the chorus), the duty of training being, of course, deputed by them to professional persons (chorodidascali). Publicly appointed and sworn judges decided between the merits of the dramas produced in competition with one another; the successful poet, performers and choragus were crowned with ivy, and the last-named was allowed at his own expense to consecrate a tripod in memory of his victory in the neighbourhood of the sacred Bacchic enclosure. Such a monument—one of the most graceful relics of ancient Athens—still stands in the place where it was erected, and recalls to posterity the victory of Lysicrates, achieved in the same year as that of Alexander on the Granicus. The dramatic exhibitions being a matter of religion and state, the entrance money (theoricum), which had been introduced to prevent overcrowding, was from the time of Pericles provided out of the public treasury. The whole population had a right to its Bacchic holiday; neither women, nor boys, nor slaves were excluded from theatrical spectacles at Athens.

The religious character of dramatic performances at Athens, and the circumstances under which they accordingly took place, likewise determined their externals of costume and scenery. The actor’s dress was originally the festive Costume and scenery. Dionysian attire, of which it always retained the gay and variegated hues. The use of the mask, surmounted, high over the forehead, by an ample wig, was due to the actor’s appearing in the open air and at a distance from most of the spectators; the several species of mask were elaborated with great care, and adapted to the different types of theatrical character. The cothurnus, or thick-soled boot, which further raised the height of the tragic actor (while the comedian wore a thin-soled boot), was likewise a relic of Bacchic costume. The scenery was, in the simplicity of its original conception, suited to open-air performances; but in course of time the art of scene-painting came to be highly cultivated, and movable scenes were contrived, together with machinery of the ambitious kind required by the Attic drama, whether for bringing gods down from heaven, or for raising mortals aloft.

On a stage and among surroundings thus conventional, it might seem as if little scope could have been left for the actor’s art. But, though the demands made upon the Attic actor differed in kind even from those made upon his Actors. Roman successor, and still more from those which the histrionic art has to meet in modern times, they were not the less rigorous. Mask and buskin might increase his stature, and the former might at once lend the appropriate expression to his appearance and the necessary resonance to his voice. But in declamation, dialogue and lyric passage, in gesticulation and movement, he had to avoid the least violation of the general harmony of the performance. Yet it is clear that the refinements of by-play must, from the nature of the case, have been impossible on the Attic stage; the gesticulation must have been broad and massive; the movement slow, and the grouping hard, in tragedy; and the weighty sameness of the recitation must have had an effect even more solemn and less varied than the half-chant which still lingers on the modern stage. Not more than three actors, as has been seen, appeared in any Attic tragedy. The actors were provided by the poet; perhaps the performer of the first parts (protagonist) was paid by the state. It was again a result of the religious origin of Attic dramatic performances and of the public importance attached to them, that the actor’s profession was held in high esteem. These artists were as a matter of course free Athenian citizens, often the dramatists themselves, and at times were employed in other branches of the public service. In later days, when tragedy had migrated to Alexandria, and when theatrical entertainments had spread over all the Hellenic world, the art of acting seems to have reached an unprecedented height, and to have taken an extraordinary hold of the public mind. Synods, or companies, of Dionysian artists abounded, who were in possession of various privileges, and in one instance at least (at Pergamum) of rich endowments. The most important of these was the Ionic company, established first in Teos, and afterwards in Lebedos, near Colophon, which is said to have lasted longer than many a famous state. We likewise hear of strolling companies performing in partibus. Thus it came to pass that the vitality of some of the masterpieces of the Greek drama is without a parallel in theatrical history; while Greek actors were undoubtedly among the principal and most effective agents of the spread of literary culture through a great part of the known world.

The theory and technical system of the drama exercised the critical powers both of dramatists, such as Sophocles, and of the greatest among Greek philosophers. If Plato touched the subject incidentally, Aristotle has in his Poetics Writers on the theory of the drama. (after 334) included an exposition of it, which, mutilated as it is, has formed the basis of all later systematic inquiries. The specialities of Greek tragic dramaturgy refer above all to the chorus; its general laws are those of the regular drama of all times. The theories of Aristotle and other earlier writers were elaborated by the Alexandrians, many of whom doubtless combined example with precept; they also devoted themselves to commentaries on the old masters, such as those in which Didymus (c. 30 b.c.) abundantly excelled, and collected a vast amount of learning on dramatic composition in general, which was doomed to perish, with so many other treasures, in the flames kindled by religious fanaticism.

8. Roman Drama

In its most productive age, as well as in the times of its decline and decay, the Roman drama exhibits the continued coexistence of native forms by the side of those imported from Greece—either kind being necessarily often subject to the influence of the other. Italy (with Sicily) has ever been the native land of acting and of scenic representation; and, though Roman dramatic literature at its height is but a faint reflex of Greek examples, there is perhaps no branch of Roman literary art more congenial than this to the soil whence it sprang.

Quick observation and apt improvisation have always been distinctive features in the Italian character. Thus in the rural festivities of Italy there developed from a very early period in lively intermixture the elements of the Origin of its native forms. dance, of jocular and abusive succession of song, speech and dialogue, and of an assumption of character such as may be witnessed in any ordinary dialogue carried on by southern Italians at the present day. Not less indigenous was the invariable accompaniment of the music of the flute (tibia). The occasions of these half obligatory, half impromptu festivities were religious celebrations, public or private—among the latter more especially weddings, which have in all ages been provocative of demonstrative mirth. The so-called Fescennine verses (from Fescennium in southern Etruria, and very possibly connected with fascinum = phallos), which were afterwards confined to weddings, and ultimately suggested an elaborate species of artistic poetry, never merged into actual dramatic performances. Saturae. In the saturae, on the other hand—a name originally suggested by the goatskins of the shepherds, but from primitive times connected with the “fulness” of both performers and performance—there seems from the first to have been a dramatic element; they were probably comic songs or stories recited with gesticulation and the invariable flute accompaniment. Introduced into the city, these entertainments received a new impulse from the performances of the Etruscan players (ludiones) who had been brought into Rome when scenic games (ludi scenici) were introduced there in 364 b.c. for purposes Istriones. of religious propitiation. These (h)istriones, as they were called at Rome (istri had been their native name), who have had the privilege of transmitting their appellation to the entire histrionic art and its professors, were at first only dancers and pantomimists in a city where their speech was exotic. But their performances encouraged and developed those of other players and mountebanks, so that after the establishment of the regular drama at Rome on the Greek model, the saturae came to be performed as farcical after-pieces (exodia), until they gave way to other species. Among these the mimi were at Rome Mimi. probably coeval in their beginnings with the stage itself, where those who performed them were afterwards known under the same name, possibly in the place of an older appellation (planipedes, bare-footed, representatives of slaves and humble folk). These loose farces, after being probably at first performed independently, were then played as after-pieces, till in the imperial period, when they reasserted their predominance, they were again produced independently. At the close of the republican period the mimus found its way into literature, through D. Laberius, C. Matius and Publilius Syrus, and was assimilated in both form and subjects to other varieties of the comic drama—preserving, however, as its distinctive feature, a preponderance of the mimic or gesticulatory element. Together with the pantomimus (see below) the mimus continued to prevail in the days of the Empire, having transferred its original grossness to its treatment of mythological subjects, with which it dealt in accordance with the demands of a “lubrique and adulterate age.” As a matter of course, the mimus freely borrowed from other species, among which, so far as they were Atellanae. of native Italian origin, the Atellane fables (from Atella in Campania) call for special mention. Very probably of Oscan origin, they began with delineations of the life of small towns, in which dramatic and other satire has never ceased to find a favourite subject. The principal personages in these living sketches gradually assumed a fixed and conventional character, which they retained even when, after the final overthrow of Campanian independence (210), the Atellanae had been transplanted to Rome. Here the heavy father or husband (pappus), the ass-eared glutton (maccus), the full-cheeked, voracious chatterbox (bucco), and the wily sharper (dorsenus) became accepted comic types, and, with others of a similar kind, were handed down, to reappear in the modern Italian drama. In these characters lay the essence of the Atellanae: their plots were extremely simple; the dialogue (perhaps interspersed with songs in the Saturnian metre) was left to the performers to improvise. In course of time these plays assumed a literary form, being elaborated as after-pieces by Lucius Pomponius of Bononia, Novius and other authors; but under the Empire they were gradually absorbed in the pantomimes.

The regular, as distinct from the popular, Roman drama, on the other hand, was of foreign (i.e. Greek) origin; and its early history, at all events, attaches itself to more or less fixed dates. It begins with the year 240 b.c., Origin of the regular Roman drama. when at the ludi Romani, held with unusual splendour after the first Punic War, its victorious conclusion was, in accordance with Macedonian precedent, celebrated by the first production of a tragedy and a comedy on the Roman stage. The author of both, who appeared in person as an actor, was Livius Andronicus (b. 278 or earlier), a native of the Greek city of Tarentum, where the Dionysiac festivals enjoyed high popularity. His models were, in tragedy, the later Greek tragedians and their revisions of the three great Attic masters; in comedy, we may feel sure, Menander and his school. Greek examples continued to dominate the regular Roman drama during the whole of its course, even when it resorted to native themes.

The main features of Roman tragedy admit of no doubt, although our conclusions respecting its earlier progress are only derived from analogy, from scattered notices, especially of the titles of plays, and from such fragments—mostly History of Roman tragedy. very brief—as have come down to us. Of the known titles of the tragedies of Livius Andronicus, six belong to the Trojan cycle, and this preference consistently maintained itself among the tragedians of the “Trojugenae”; next in popularity seem to have been the myths of the house of Tantalus, of the Pelopidae and of the Argonauts. The distinctions drawn by later Roman writers between the styles of the tragic poets of the republican period must in general be taken on trust. The Campanian Cn. Naevius (fl. from 236) wrote comedies as well as tragedies, so that the rigorous separation observed among the Greeks in the cultivation of the two dramatic species was at first neglected at Rome. His realistic tendency, displayed in that fondness for political allusions which brought upon him the vengeance of a noble family (the Metelli) incapable of understanding a joke of this description, might perhaps under more favourable circumstances have led him more fully to develop a Praetexta. new tragic species invented by him. But the fabula praetexta or praetextata (from the purple-bordered robe worn by higher magistrates) was not destined to become the means of emancipating the Roman serious drama from the control of Greek examples. In design, it was national tragedy on historic subjects of patriotic interest—which the Greeks had treated only in isolated instances; and one might at first sight marvel why, after Naevius and his successors had produced skilful examples of the species, it should have failed to overshadow and outlast in popularity a tragedy telling the oft-told foreign tales of Thebes and Mycenae, or even the pseudo-ancestral story of Troy. But it should not be forgotten to how great an extent so-called early Roman history consisted of the traditions of the gentes, and how little the party-life of later republican Rome lent itself to a dramatic treatment likely to be acceptable both to the nobility and to the multitude. As for the emperors, the last licence they would have permitted to the theatre was a free popular treatment of the national history; if Augustus prohibited the publication of a tragedy by his adoptive father on the subject of Oedipus, it was improbable that he or his successors should have sanctioned the performance of plays dealing with the earthly fortunes of Divus Julius himself, or with the story of Marius, or that of the Gracchi, or any of the other tragic themes of later republican or imperial history. The historic drama at Rome thus had no opportunity for a vigorous life, even could tragedy have severed its main course from the Greek literature of which it has been well called a “free-hand copy.” The praetextae of which we know chiefly treat—possibly here and there helped to form80—legends of a hoary antiquity, or celebrate battles chronicled in family or public records81; and in the end the species died a natural death.82

Q. Ennius (239-168), the favourite poet of the great families, was qualified by his Tarentine education, which taught the Oscan youth the Greek as well as the Latin tongue (so that he boasted “three souls”), to become the literary Ennius and his successors. exponent of the Hellenizing tendencies of his age of Roman society. Nearly half of the extant names of his tragedies belong to the Trojan cycle; and Euripides was clearly his favourite source and model. M. Pacuvius (b. c. 229), like Ennius subject from his youth up to the influences of Greek civilization, and the first Roman dramatist who devoted himself exclusively to the tragic drama, was the least fertile of the chief Roman tragedians, but was regarded by the ancients as indisputably superior to Ennius. He again was generally (though not uniformly) held to have been surpassed by L. Accius (b. 170), a learned scholar and prolific dramatist, of whose plays 50 titles and a very large number of fragments have been preserved. The plays of the last-named three poets maintained themselves on the stage till the close of the republic; and Accius was quoted by the emperor Tiberius.83 Of the other tragic writers of the republic several were dilettanti—such as the great orator and eminent politician C. Julius Strabo; the cultivated officer Q. Tullius Cicero, who made an attempt, disapproved by his illustrious brother, to introduce the satyr-drama into the Roman theatre; L. Cornelius Balbus, a Caesarean partisan; and finally C. Julius Caesar himself.

Tragedy continued to be cultivated under the earlier emperors; and one author, the famous and ill-fated L. Annaeus Seneca (4 b.c.-a.d. 65), left behind him a series of works which were to exercise a paramount influence upon the Seneca. beginnings of modern tragedy. In accordance with the character of their author’s prose-work, they exhibit a strong predominance of the rhetorical element, and an artificiality of style far removed from that of the poets Sophocles and Euripides, from whom Seneca derived his themes. Yet he is interesting, not only by these devices and by a “sensational” choice of themes, but also by a quickness of treatment which we may call “modern,” a quality not easily resisted in a dramatist. The metrification of his plays is very strict, and they were doubtless intended for recitation, whether or not also designed for the stage. A few tragic poets are mentioned after Seneca, till about the reign of Domitian (81-96) the list comes to an end. The close of Roman tragic literature is obscurer than its beginning; and, while there are traces of tragic performances at Rome as late as even the 6th century, we are ignorant how long the works of the old masters of Roman tragedy maintained themselves on the stage.

It would obviously be an error to draw from the plays of Seneca conclusions as to the method and style of the earlier writers. In general, however, no important changes seem to have occurred in the progress of Roman tragic Characteristics of Roman tragedy. composition. The later Greek plays remained, so far as can be gathered, the models in treatment; and, inasmuch as at Rome the several plays were performed singly, there was every inducement to make their action as full and complicated as possible. The dialogue-scenes (diverbia) appear to have been largely interspersed with musical passages (cantica); but the effect of the latter must have suffered from the barbarous custom of having the songs sung by a boy, placed in front of the flute-player (cantor), while the actor accompanied them with gesticulations. The chorus (unlike the Greek) stood on the stage itself and seems occasionally at least to have taken part in the action. But the whole of the musical element can hardly have attained to so full a development as among the Greeks. The divisions of the action appear at first to have been three; from the addition of prologue and epilogue may have arisen the invention (probably due in tragedy to Varro) of the fixed number of five acts. In style, such influence as the genius of Roman literature could exercise must have been in the direction of the rhetorical and the pathetic; a superfluity of energy on the one hand, and a defect of poetic richness on the other, can hardly have failed to characterize these, as they did all the other productions of early Roman poetry.

In Roman comedy two different kinds—respectively called palliata and togata from well-known names of dress—were distinguished,—the former treating Greek subjects and imitating Greek originals, the latter professing a native History of Roman comedy. character. The palliata sought its originals especially in New Attic comedy; and its authors, as they advanced in refinement of style, became more and more dependent upon their models, and unwilling to gratify the coarser Palliata. tastes of the public by local allusions or gross seasonings. But that kind of comedy which shrinks from the rude breath of popular applause usually has in the end to give way to less squeamish rivals; and thus, after the species had been cultivated for about a century (c. 250-150 b.c.), palliatae ceased to be composed except for the amusement of select circles, though the works of the most successful authors, Plautus and Terence, kept the stage even after the establishment of the empire. Among the earlier writers of palliatae were the tragic poets Andronicus, Naevius and Ennius, but they were alike Plautus. surpassed by T. Maccius Plautus (254-184), nearly all of whose comedies esteemed genuine by Varro—not less than 20 in number—have been preserved, though twelve of them were not known to the modern world before 1429. He was exclusively a comic poet, and, though he borrowed his plots from the Greeks—from Diphilus and Philemon apparently in preference to the more refined Menander—there was in him a genuinely national as well as a genuinely popular element. Of the extent of his originality it is impossible to judge; probably it lies in his elaboration of types of character and the comic turns of his dialogue rather than in his plots. Modern comedy is indebted to him in all these points; and, in consequence of this fact, as well as of the attention his text has for linguistic reasons received from scholarship both ancient and modern, his merits have met with quite their full share of recognition. Caecilius Statius (an Insubrian brought to Rome as a captive c. 200) stands midway between Plautus and Terence, but no Terence. plays of his remain. P. Terentius Afer (c. 185-159) was, as his cognomen implies, a native of Carthage, of whose conqueror he enjoyed the patronage. His six extant comedies seem to be tolerably close renderings of their Greek originals, nearly all of which were plays of Menander. It was the good fortune of the works of Terence to be preserved in an exceptionally large number of MSS. in the monastic libraries of the middle ages, and thus (as will be seen) to become a main link between the ancient and the Christian drama. As a dramatist he is distinguished by correctness of style rather than by variety in his plots or vivacity in his characters; his chief merit—and at the same time the quality which has rendered him so suitable for modern imitation—is to be sought in the polite ease of his dialogue. In general, the main features of the palliatae, which were divided into five acts, are those of the New Comedy of Athens, like which they had no chorus; for purposes of explanation from author to audience the prologue sufficed; the Roman versions were probably terser than their originals, which they often altered by the process called contamination.