CHAPTER VIII.
HIS LYRIC POETRY—CHORAL ODES, MONODIES.
88. I have hitherto designedly kept out of sight an important feature in all Greek tragedy—the chorus, which was its origin, and which stamped upon it a peculiar character. As is well known, the first actor was originally severed from the chorus, to represent the adventures of Dionysus, and recite them to his sympathetic companions. Hence, when actor after actor was added, the chorus still held an important place in the plot, and was always there—an audience within the audience, a play within the play, like the scene in Hamlet.[1] We see its earliest form in the Supplices of Æschylus, where the fugitive daughters of Danaus are themselves the chief personages in the play. So, also, in the awful Eumenides of the same poet, the Furies are the leading figures, and their claims the centrepoint of the piece. When we come to the more developed character plays of Sophocles the chorus necessarily becomes a spectator, but a deeply interested and sympathetic spectator, singing, moreover, those hymns to the gods—dirges, or pæans, which come within the action of the piece, and require
- ↑ The device of a chorus within the chorus was very rare, and applied by Euripides in the Hippolytus, where the hero's followers are such a παραχορήγημα, as the Greeks call it. The same may be said of the companions of Odysseus, in the Cyclops, but they are silent actors; and we hear that the poet also had such a second chorus (of shepherds) in his lost Alexander (Paris), and in the Antiope.
