a close and Athens was taken by the Spartans; the short-lived Spartan political ascendancy which followed the latter event; the succeeding Theban rule; and finally the meteoric career of Philip of Macedon and of his son Alexander the Great (ending with the death of the latter in 323 B.C.), constituting one of the wonders of military history. Greek civilization now dominated all western Asia and southern Europe.

The Persian wars and the Greek civil wars kept Greece in a turmoil during a large part of the Attic Age, though they brought out the heroic traits in the character of the race. Simonides sang of the men of Tegea, "Their choice was to leave their children a city flourishing in freedom, and to lay down their own lives in the front of the battle."1

Under Pericles Athens became the teacher and leader of the Greek world. It probably had not more than thirty thousand free inhabitants, but its contribution during a single generation to the thought and culture of the human race was an unparalleled one. Important new conceptions of the State, and the rapid development of architecture and sculpture, of the drama and other branches of literature, and of philosophical thought, are associated inevitably with the age of Pericles.

The Greek mind, to be sure, was still partly undeveloped. We find constant traces of rudeness and harshness; a lack of consideration for old age or human weakness; dishonesty and selfishness, even treachery, in public and private life. If there was a highminded Socrates, there was also an Alcibiades-licentious, reckless, and unfeeling. Aristophanes, in his castigations of the life of the times, reveals many flaws in the Greek character. The other side of the picture, however, is more pleasing. Even if we judge the age by the average individual, the standard seems to have been high. The stories of Herodotus exhibit kindly and tender feeling. Some of the most glorious types of womanhood conceived in the literature of Greece were produced during this period-witness Antigone and Alcestis. We have glimpses of home life among the lower classes which make a strong appeal to us. The Greeks were pleas1 Translation by Jebb.

ant and conversational, but this does not mean that they were superficial. Their intellectual acuteness is proved by their attraction to the great themes of the Attic tragedians. Ethical and religious ideas were much more profound than during the preceding period.

Apart from mere matters of material progress, the Periclean times seem strangely like our own; the intervening centuries offer no obstacle to our understanding of the ancient Greek. If he could walk the streets of our cities, the vitality and urge and the openmindedness and catholic tastes of our generation would please him mightily. We could teach him something, but it may be doubted whether our contribution to him would be nearly as significant as his contribution to us.

The Greek drama. On the side of literature the chief glory of the Attic Age was its development of the drama. The epic deals with the past, the lyric with the present, the drama with the past in the present. At the basis of the Greek drama is the religious festival. The great Greek god was Zeus; his interpreter was Apollo, at whose shrine the Hellenic games took place. The popular god Dionysus (Bacchus)-the god of wine, or in a larger sense the god of enthusiasm or the spirit of life-was associated with a religious exercise accompanied by music and dance. In its early form this was perhaps no more than an impromptu song of revelry, a chorus of men in fantastic costume dancing at some local shrine in honor of Dionysus. Then the song became more deliberate, the exercise more formal, and a leader for the chorus was assigned, with perhaps an occasional colloquy between the leader and the chorus. The poet who wrote the lyrics would naturally be the leader, and the next development would be the impersonation of a few parts by the leader, giving opportunity for some little dramatic action. Thespis has the honor of evolving this important new idea. At the spring festival in 534 B.C. he won the first tragic contest instituted by the Athenian state. By the time that the earliest tragedy of Æschylus, the first Greek tragedian, was produced, the art had developed wonderfully; but there was still the lyric basis, the choral song or ode, and this constituted the main part of the play.

Great interest naturally attaches to the open theater in Athens where were first given the plays of the Attic tragedians. Contestants were invited to exhibit their tragedies here for a state prize during the spring Dionysian festival. Visitors came from all parts of Greece and sat all day to listen. It was a true gathering of the people, for the semicircular seats on the hillside leading up toward the Acropolis would accommodate seventeen thousand people. The theater was open to the sky, and at its base was a circular dancing-floor, the orchestra. Originally the stage for the actors was not separate from the orchestra used by the chorus. There was no embellishment, beyond something to represent the tomb of the hero or the altar to the god, which might aid the imagination in the setting of the scene. A building for the actors' dressing-room gave way later to a more elaborate building with doors and colonnades which served as a background for the play. The actors' parts were all taken by men. Masks were worn, a disadvantage from our point of view; but it must be remembered that the distances were so great that the change of facial expression could not well be seen, and that masks were helpful in a rapid change of parts, there being only a few actors in any play. Æschylus' plays were nearly all handled by only two actors. Sophocles was the first to introduce a third.

As to the themes, these were taken mostly from the old hero stories dear to the Greek race. Thus the audience, though without program or text and without scenery to help the imagination, could anticipate in general the development of the plot and give themselves up to the play as a work of art. It was left, in other words, to the genius of the tragic poet to handle a well-worn theme in such a new and effective way as to win the prize. The words of the actors would commonly explain the place of the action. Night scenes, scenes within doors, city scenes, country scenes, were all represented in one open place under the bright Athenian sky, and with no change of scenery. The chorus of a Greek play was appropriate to the action and shared to some extent the development of the plot. Nothing definite is known of the nature of the dances and the character of the singing and the accompaniment.

Æschylus. The first of the great tragic poets was born in 525 B.C. He fought at Marathon and at three other battles during the Persian wars. One may well believe that he was a mighty fighter, for there is something of titanic energy and unrestrained power in all his tragedies. His conceptions are bold. His sense of sin and of the weight of the moral law reminds us of the prophets of Israel. When Clayton Hamilton said that Greek tragedy represented a conflict between man and fate, he perhaps had Eschylus particularly in view. Eschylus held that even when a man had offended involuntarily, the evil consequences were certain. His plays are rough-hewn, presenting types rather than detailed studies of character. We have the titles of seventy-two plays produced by him, but only seven of these plays have come down to us. "The Persians" was presented eight years after the battle of Salamis. It is the only historical Greek tragedy extant. The scene is laid in Susa, and the chorus consists of Persian elders. The tragic moment is the announcement of the Persian defeat at Salamis, and the theme is the jealousy of the gods because of the arrogance of men. Another play, "The Suppliants," apparently a very early work, exhibits Zeus as the avenger of sacrilegious violence. "The Seven against Thebes" is concerned with an episode in an old myth, the story of Edipus. The family curse is represented as descending from father to son, but the sin of the individual is also clearly shown. "Prometheus" likewise is based on an ancient story. The conception is extremely bold. Zeus himself learns wisdom from experience.

Following custom Eschylus presented four plays in succession on a single theme, three forming a trilogy and the fourth being a satyr play as a sort of light epilogue. We have fortunately preserved to us his complete trilogy on the story of Orestes—"Agamemnon,' "Choephori" (or the "Libation-Bearers"), and "The Eumenides." In its original form it is a horrible tale of murder and revenge. Æschylus works it over into great tragedy. In the first play Agamemnon returns from Troy in triumph, only to be treacherously slain by his wife Clytemnestra; in the second, Orestes, his son, avenges the murder by killing Clytemnestra; while in the third, Orestes, pursued by the Furies for his act of blood, is saved only