Æschylus. He may call them by what names he pleases, but they are the personages of ordinary life. His drunken Hercules, in his beautiful drama (tragedy it can hardly be called) 'Alcestis,' is as really comic as any character in Menander's plays. His unsparing satirist Aristophanes, in his 'Frogs,' when he introduces Æschylus and Euripides pleading before Bacchus their respective claims to the chair of tragedy, makes it one of the charges against the latter that he had lowered the whole tone of tragedy: that whereas Æschylus had left the ideal men of the drama "grand figures, four cubits high," his rival had reduced them to the petty level of everyday life—poor mean gossips of the market-place.[1] He allows Euripides indeed to plead in his defence that while the elder tragedian had given the audience nothing but high-flown sentiment and pompous language which was quite above their comprehension, he had brought before them subjects of common household interest which all could understand and sympathise with. Both accusation and defence were true. Euripides had violated the severe simplicity of classic tragedy: but he had founded the domestic drama.
The oligarchy of Rome would scarcely have permitted to the writers for the stage the licence of personal satire which the Athenian democracy not only bore with, but encouraged and delighted in. The risk which Aristophanes ran from the political partisans of Cleon would have been as nothing, compared with the perils of the comic dramatist who should have presumed to
- ↑ Frogs, 953, 910.
