Initiation into Literature | Page 6

Hippolytus and Iphigenia.
After Euripides tragedy was exhausted and only produced very second-rate works.
COMEDY.--Comedy enjoyed a longer existence. Very obscure in origin, no doubt proceeding from the opprobrious jests exchanged by the lower classes in mirthful hours, it was at first freely fantastical, composed in dialogue, oratorical, lyrical, satirical, even epical at times. Like tragedy, it possessed a chorus for which the lyrical part was specially reserved. It was personal--that is, it directly attacked known contemporaries, often by name and often by bringing them on the stage. The celebrated authors of this "ancient comedy" were Eupolis, Cratinos, of whom we have only fragments, and Aristophanes, whose work has come down to us.
ARISTOPHANES.--Aristophanes was a great poet, with incisive humour and also incomparable lyrical power, with voluntary vulgarity which is often shocking and an elevation of ideas and language which frequently raise him to the heights of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Here was one of the grandest poetic minds that the world has produced. His most considerable achievements are The Frogs, the earliest known work of literary criticism, in dramatic form too, wherein he sets up a parallel between Aeschylus and Euripides and cruelly jeers at the latter; The Clouds, in which he mocks the sophists; The Wasps, wherein he ridicules the Athenian mania for judging, and magnificently praises the old Athenians of the time of Marathon.
MENANDER.--To this "ancient comedy," immediately succeeded the "middle comedy," in which it was forbidden to introduce personalities and of which Aristophanes gave an example and a model in his Plutus. Later, in the fourth century before Christ, with the refined, witty, and discreet Menander, the "new comedy" was analogous to that of Plautus, of Terence, and that of our own of the seventeenth century.
THUCYDIDES.--To return to the time of Pericles; Attic prose developed in the hands of historians, sages, and philosophers. Thucydides founded true history, scientific, drawn from the sources, supported and strengthened by all the information and corroboration that the skilled historian can gather, examine, and control. As a writer, Thucydides was terse, bare, limpid, and possessed an agreeable sober elegance. He introduced into his history imaginary discourses between great historical personages which allowed him to show the general state of Greece or of particular portions of Greece at certain important times. It is not known why these discourses were written in a style differing from that of the rest of the work, wise, even beautiful, but so extremely concise and elliptic as, in consequence, to be extremely difficult to understand.
HIPPOCRATES.--Hippocrates created scientific medicine, the medicine of observation, denying prodigies, seeking natural causes for diseases, and already setting up rational therapeutics. There are seventy-two works called "Hippocratical," which belong to his school; some may be by himself.
SOPHISTS AND ORATORS.--The language grew flexible in the hands of the learned, subtle, and ingenious sophists (Gorgias, Protagoras) who attacked Socrates by borrowing his weapons, as it were, and making them perfect.
A new type of literature was created: the oratorical. Antiphon was the earliest in date alike of the Athenian orators and of the professors of eloquence. In a crowd after him came Isocrates, Andocides, Lysias, Aeschines, Hyperides, and the master of them all, that astonishing logician, that impassioned and terrible orator, Demosthenes.
THE PHILOSOPHERS: PLATO.--Contemporaneously the philosophers, quite as much as the sophists, even confining the matter to the literary aspect, cast immortal glory on Attica. Imbued with the spirit of Socrates, even when more or less unfaithful to him, Plato, psychologist, moralist, metaphysician, sociologist, marvellous poet in prose, seductive and fascinating mythologist, really created philosophy in such fashion that even the most modern systems, if not judged by how much they agree or differ from him, at least invariably recall him, whether they seem a distant echo of him or whether they challenge and combat him.
ARISTOTLE; XENOPHON; THEOPHRASTUS.--Aristotle, pre-eminently learned, admirably cultivated naturalist, acquainted also with everything known in his day, more prudent metaphysician than Plato but without his depth, a precise and sure logician and the founder of scientific logic, a clear and dexterous moralist, an ingenious and pure literary theorist; Xenophon, who commanded the retreat of the ten thousand, moralist and Intelligent pedagogue displaying much attractiveness in his Cyropoedia, the sensible, refined, and delightful master of familiar and practical life in his _Economics_; Theophrastus, botanist, very witty satirical moralist, highly caustic and realistic--these three established Greek wisdom for centuries, and probably for ever, erecting a solid and elegant temple wherein humanity has almost continuously sought salutary truths, and where some at least of our descendants, and those not the least illustrious, will always perform their devotions.
The chief works of Plato are the Socratic Dialogues, the Gorgias, the Timoeus, the Phaedo (immortality of the soul), the Republic, and the Laws. The principal books of Aristotle are his Natural History, Metaphysics, Logic, Rhetoric, Poetica. The most notable volumes of