play. They are singing for two-thirds of it. They are present from the first line to the last. In the Philoctêtês of Sophocles (409 B.C.) they are personally unimportant, they do not appear till the play is well in train, and their songs fill about one-sixth of the whole. This is one reason why the later plays are so much longer than the earlier: they were quicker to act.
There was, however, another influence affecting the musical side of tragedy in a very different manner. The singing gradually ceased to be entirely in the hands of the chorus. The historical fact is that with the rise of the Athenian Democracy the chorus ceased to be professional. It consisted of free burghers who undertook the performance of the public religious dances as one of their privileges or duties.[1] The consequence was that the dancing became less elaborate. The metres and the singing had to be within the capabilities of the average musical man. But meanwhile the general interest in music was growing deeper, and the public taste more exacting in its demands. The average choir-song lost its hold on the cultivated Athenian of the war time. If he was to have music, let him have something more subtle and moving than that, something more like the living music of the dithyramb, which was now increasingly elaborate and professional. So while between Æschylus and the later plays of Sophocles the musical side of the drama is steadily falling back, between the earlier and later plays of Euripides it is growing again. But it is no longer the music of the chorus. Euripides used 'answerers' who were also trained singers; he abounds in 'monodies' or solos. In the Medea (431 B.C.) the lyrical part is about a fifth
- ↑ Resp. Ath. i. 13.
