The religious horrors of inherited guilt are supplanted by subtle analyses of personal character, and the rhetoric of the contemporary law-court and assembly are now much more effective than the moral preaching of early tragedy. On the stage of Euripides everything of real interest is individual, nothing impersonal; the chorus has here survived into conditions of action and thought in which it is out of place, and the stereotyped practice of taking the dramatis personæ from the old mythical heroes of Hellas is now a lumbering impediment to a tragedian who had little in common with old Greek morality or heroism. The chorus of Æschylus, says Euripides, in the Frogs, "used to hurl four series of songs one after another without ceasing, while the few characters he used were silent." The "son of the market-place," the "gossip-gleaner," prays to his "own peculiar gods"—"O Air and thou well-hung tongue and sagacity and sharp-smelling nostrils, may I rightly refute whatever arguments I assail!"—but Æschylus claims to have fulfilled the true poetic function ("to make the people in the cities better") by composing a drama "full of martial spirit" (the Seven against Thebes)—"every man that saw it would long to be a warrior"—while Euripides had been teaching men "to practise loquacity and wordiness." Such had been the progress of the Athenian drama—from the moral and religious spectacle, with its central group of worshippers, to an aesthetic exhibition of personal character; and now the conservative comedian was revolting from the new drama of art to the old drama of moral teaching—an Athenian victory for the Chinese ideal of the theatre.
§ 56. But, in truth, Aristophanes' dramas reflect the individualism of contemporary Athens, the characteristics of the men and women who subjected the old traditional
