early societies; hence it was only when individualised conduct and sentiment became the groundwork of average Athenian character that the subtleties of Euripides showed their hostility not only to the old prominence of the chorus, but also to those mythical personages of the sacred spectacle who were too abstract to suit an age of small personalities. Three striking features of the Æschylean drama are therefore to be explained by the early social life of Athens—the predominance of the chorus in the plays of Æschylus, his leaning to abstract or impersonal dramatis personæ, and his ethical machinery of inherited guilt. The chorus is the central point in the spiritual as well as in the formal elements of the old Attic drama; but the reason for this is not to be found in the chorus itself as the production of conscious dramatic art—for the rude drama of early Attica had as little to do with art as an Indian Buffalo-dance—but in the dême life of early Attica, in the small social groups which here, as everywhere else in the world, once subordinated all personal action and thought to their own collective being. It was one great work of city life at Athens to cut down this collective being into individual units, each with his separate personal character and destiny, and the progress of this work is reflected very closely in the progress of the Attic drama.
In the seven extant plays of Æschylus there are only about seventeen individual personages, the rest of the forty-five dramatis personæ being either groups, as the chorus itself, or general and abstract personages such as the herald and the messenger, Might and Force. In the Suppliants personal character has hardly any place at all; for neither Danaus nor the king of the Argives (who with the chorus and a herald make up all the dramatis personaæ) can be called a study of character. In
