The Athenian Stage Tr by R B Paul, and Ed by T K Arnold

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: him fifty dramas, of which thirty-two were satyr-plays. (23) Among the ancients they ranked next to the compositions A of .flischylus as the most distinguished of their kind. Of his son Aristias, to whom the Phliasians erected a 24 statue in the market-place of their city, we are told that he was no less...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: him fifty dramas, of which thirty-two were satyr-plays. (23) Among the ancients they ranked next to the compositions A of .flischylus as the most distinguished of their kind. Of his son Aristias, to whom the Phliasians erected a 24 statue in the market-place of their city, we are told that he was no less celebrated than his father as a writer of satyric dramas. He flourished contemporaneously with Choerilus, JEschylus, Sophocles, and even with Euripides. We may, therefore, conclude, that he followed the example of those illustrious writers in gradually circumscribing the lyric and orchestral parts of the chorus, which seem to have obtained an undue ascendancy in the dramas of his father. 3. jSschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.?Trilogies and tetralogies.?Character of the satyric drama, or 'satyr-play. In the first year of the 70th Olympiad, JEscniLvs, 25 then in his twenty-fifth year, appeared on the Athenian B stage as the rival of Pratinas. On this occasion the old hustings, which had hitherto answered the purpose of a theatre, broke down, we are told, under the weight of the performers, an accident which occasioned the erection of a stone theatre. To a lively imagination, these two events might seem to typify the fate of tragedy before and after the time of jEsehylus. For as the ricketty and incon- c venient wooden fabric fell to the ground as soon as its boards were trodden by the feet of Eschylus, and a stately and commodious edifice of stone supplied its place; so was the ancient tragedy, with all its poverty and meanness, dashed in pieces by his magic wand, and the ground on which it stood, occupied by the majestic fabric of his own noble poetry. To carry out the simile, we may add, that as the talents of other artists were required for the full embellishment ...