contributed in a manner to be hereafter discussed. But let us pause to note certain evidences of the same weakness in the early drama of Athens.
The weakness of character-drawing in the early Athenian drama cannot escape the most superficial student of Athenian literature. Thus in the Prometheus of Æschylus we have Violence (Βίa) and Force (Κράτος) executing the will of Zeus against Forethought (Προμηθεύς); and, as Æschylean critics have often observed, the chorus, and not the individual characters, may be seen to predominate in the dramas of Æschylus. Far from the Athenians of the Æschylean age being, in Sir Walter Scott's phrase, "of an individual soldier than in the grand events of a general action," the Suppliants (the earliest Greek play extant) turns entirely on the action and character of its chorus—the fifty daughters of Danaus; the Persians derives its name from the chorus of twelve Persian elders, and is far less individual than social in its interest; and the Eumenides centres in the action and character of the Furies who form its chorus, supply its name, and make the allegorical personifications of the inherited curse—a conception of impersonal ethics with difficulty harmonised in the later Athenian drama with freedom of more interested in the fate personal character. Moreover, when we follow the developments of the ancient and modern dramas, we find a striking similarity in their progressive treatment of character. By degrees the divine, saintly, or allegorical personages of our medieval stage give way to human character in its contemporary individualities, and the tragedy or comedy of real life is reached. So, also, in the Athenian drama. The chorus, dominant, as noticed, in Æschylus, is by Sophocles subordinated to individual character, and by Euripides is finally converted
