tion, and those of one far more advanced. It is just in such widening spheres of social development—clan, city, nation—and this impossibility of representing certain species of human character save as contrasts to our own, that the relativity of literature peculiarly discloses itself.
Social circumstances, it may be added, possibly produced the local limitations of the Athenian tragedy quite as much as the chorus or the architecture of the theatre. We have seen how differences of custom and language give rise to a conflict between what can and what cannot be dramatically represented through the medium of the spectators' speech, and thoughts, and feelings; and in the practice (not the merely critical rules) of the unities, especially that of place, it is possible that we have an unconscious feeling of such a conflict. But, it will be asked, how could Greeks, so slow to compare "barbarian" manners and customs with their own, so disdainful of everything beyond their own Greek associations, acquire any sense of social contrasts as affecting dramatic art? By the striking social and political contrasts of their little city commonwealths, contrasts to which the intellectual energy of Greece was so largely due. Here were opportunities for the recognition of relativity in miniature. What was true of individualised life at Athens was by no means true in the corporate organisation and sentiments of Sparta; the men and women of the Asiatic Ionians differed in many respects from those of Thessaly or Bœotia; and differences of dialect helped to emphasise those of social and political life. When we remember how largely these contrasts contributed to create the comparative thinking of the Sophists, and (by force of repulsion) the universal ethic of Socrates and the universal metaphysic of Plato, we cannot help believing
