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Updated: June 22, 2025
The comic poet, therefore, must divest his characters of all such qualities; he must place himself without the sphere of them; nay, even deny altogether their existence, and form an ideal of human nature the direct opposite of that of the tragedians, namely, as the odious and base.
As it is, I feel that there are two Greeces: one of statues and temples, which is academic and somewhat cold; the other of philosophers and tragedians, who convey to my mind more of an impression of life and humanity. Apart from the Greek, which I know but fragmentarily, I have no great admiration for ancient literatures. The Old Testament never aroused any devotion in me.
I suppose you know all about the stage and stage people. You've been touched with and by actors, and you read the newspaper criticisms and the jokes in the weeklies about the Rialto and the chorus girls and the long-haired tragedians. Chorus girls are inseparable from peroxide, Panhards and Pittsburg. All shows walk back to New York on tan oxford and railroad ties.
He would fain spend his life in these romantic dreams, and devoured Racine, the Greek tragedians, Corneille, Shakespeare, Voltaire's verses on the death of Adrienne Lecouvreur, and whatever in modern literature appealed to him as elegant or fraught with passion. But in all these creations it was one image, and one only, that he saw.
In The Clouds, where the main attack is directed against modern free-thought, Euripides, to be sure, is sneered at as being the fashionable poet of the corrupted youth, but he is not drawn into the charge of impiety. Even when Plato wrote his Republic, Euripides was generally considered the “wisest of all tragedians.” This would have been impossible if he had been considered an atheist.
About the house lingers a sense of unrest, of expectation, of transientness, even of anxiety and apprehension. The halls are a labyrinth. Without a guide, you wander like a lost soul in a Sam Loyd puzzle. Turning any corner, a dressing-sack or a cul-de-sac may bring you up short. You meet alarming tragedians stalking in bath-robes in search of rumored bathrooms.
Marcus Pacuvius, the nephew of Ennius, wrote plays for the thirty years after his uncle's death, which had an even greater vogue; he is placed by Cicero at the head of Roman tragedians.
"Quanta pernis pestis veniet, quanta labes larido, Quanta sumini absumedo, quanta callo calamitas Quanta lanies lassitudo." Compare our verse: "Right round the rugged rock the ragged rascal ran." Ennius and the tragedians make it express the stronger emotions, as violence: "Priamo vi vitam evitari." A hard letter expresses difficulty or effort, e.g. manibus magnos divellere montis.
Thebes now falls, and Thereander, the son of Polynices, is made king. The legends of Thebes have furnished the great tragedians Sophocles and Euripides, with their finest subjects. In the fable of the Sphinx we trace a connection between Thebes and ancient Egypt. But all the legends of ancient Greece yield in interest to that of Troy, which Homer chose as the subject of his immortal epic.
Cases of suicide, so common in the tragedians, are almost unknown. In one respect, and that too a point of the very highest importance, the Greeks of this age were far in advance of those who came after them, and not behind the most polished nations of modern Europe. We refer to the beauty, the tenderness, and the purity of their domestic relations.
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