by various authors

“ Even before the time of Aeschylus, it had been customary to contend for the prize of tragedy with three plays exhibited at the same time, but it was reserved for him to shew how each of three tragedies might be complete in itself, and independent of the rest, and nevertheless form a part of a harmonious and connected whole. The only example still extant of such a trilogy is the Oresteia, as it was called. A Satyrical play commonly followed each tragic trilogy, and it is recorded that Aeschylus was no less a master of the ludicrous than of the serious drama. ”

“ Independently of the gratification of his personal taste, which in this respect accorded with that of the people, his internal and external policy formed parts of one whole. While he raised Athens to that supremacy which in his judgment she deserved to possess, on account both of the natural capabilities of the people and the glorious sacrifices which they had made for the safety and freedom not of themselves only but of Greece, the magnificent aspect which the city assumed under his directions was designed to keep alive among the people a present consciousness of their great- ness and power. ”

“ As in an organic body life does not dwell in one single point, but requires a union of certain systems and members, so the internal connection of the Iliad rests on the union of certain parts ; and neither the interesting introduction describing the defeat of the Greeks up to the burning of the ship of Pro- tesilaus, nor the turn of affairs brought about by the death of Patroclus, nor the final pacification of the anger of Achilles, could be spared from the Iliad, when the fruitful seed of such a poem had once been sown in the soul of Homer, and had begun to develop its growth. ”

“ The continued popularity of Plautus, through so many centuries, was owing, in a great measure, to his being a national poet. For though his comedies belong to the Comoedia palliata, and were taken, for the most part, from the poets of the new Attic comedy, we should do great injustice to Plautus if we regarded him as a slavish imitator of the Greeks. Though he founds his plays upon Greek models, the characters in them act, speak, and joke like genuine Romans, and he thereby secured the sympathy of his audience more completely than Terence could ever have done. ”

“ People will judge of Seneca, as they do of most moral writers, by the measure of their own opinions. The less a man cares for the practical, the real, the less will he value Seneca. The more a man envelops himself in words and ideas without exact meaning, the less will he comprehend a writer who does not merely deal in words, but has ideas with something to correspond to them. ”

“ It may safely be affirmed that the loss of Sappho's poems is the greatest over which we have to mourn in the whole range of Greek literature, at least of the imaginative species. The fragments that survive, though some of them are exquisite, barely furnish a sample of the surpassing beauty of the whole. ”

“ It is quite true that the earliest and some of the mightiest efforts of genius are to a great extent (though never, we believe, entirely) unconscious; and even such productions are governed by laws, written in the human mind and instinctively followed by the poet, laws which it is the task and glory of aesthetic science to trace out in the works of those writers who followed them unconsciously ”

“ Cleon is the confidential steward of Demus, the impersonation of the Athenian people, who is represented as almost in his dotage, but at the same time cunning, suspicious, ungovernable, and tyrannical. His slaves, Nicias and Demosthenes, determine to rid themselves of the insolence of Cleon by raising up a rival in the person of a sausage-seller, by which the poet ridicules the mean occupation of the demagogues. This man completely triumphs over Cleon in his own arts of lying, stealing, fawning, and blustering. ”

“ The noblest image, and which was afterwards looked upon as the ideal of the goddess, was the statue by Polycletus. She was usually represented as a majestic woman at a mature age, with a beautiful forehead, large and widely opened eyes, and with a grave expression commanding reverence. Her hair was adorned with a crown or a diadem. A veil frequently hangs down the back of her head, to characterise her as the bride of Zeus, and, in fact, the diadem, veil, sceptre, and peacock are her ordinary attributes. A number of statues and heads of Hera still exist. ”

“ If we add to all this the differences that exist between the two poems in language and tone, we shall be obliged to admit, that the Odyssey is of considerably later date than the Iliad. Every one who admires the bard of the Iliad, with whom are connected all the associations of ideas which have been formed re- specting Homer, feels naturally inclined to give him credit for having composed the Odyssey also, and is unwilling to fancy another person to be the author who would be quite an imaginary and un- interesting personage. ”

“ No individual human being can imagine himself in the position of Prometheus, or derive a personal warning from the crimes and fate of Clytemnestra; but every one can, in feeling, share the self-devotion of Antigone in giving up her life at the call of fraternal piety, and the calmness which comes over the spirit of Oedipus when he is reconciled to the gods. In Aeschylus, the sufferers are the victims of an inexorable destiny ”

“ A practical philosopher, who has lived in the world, must often have done that which he would wish undone; and the contradiction which appears between a man's acts and his principles will appear in his writings. Ritter remarks that he has treated of the doctrines of Seneca at some length, because they show how little talent the Romans had for philosophy. Perhaps the historian of Philosophy may provoke a like remark by his criticisms. Seneca applied himself chiefly to Ethic, which in its wide sense is the art of living happily, without which philosophy has no value. ”

“ In Terence's age there were two strongly opposed parties in literature, as well as in politics,—the Latin party, of which Cato and the Fabii were the representatives, and the Greek, or movement-party, of which the Scipios were the leaders and Terence the favourite. Here was plentiful matter for libel. Whether the attacks of Lavinius drove him from Italy, or whether he went to Greece as to a university, is uncertain. Before his departure his detractors had affirmed that from his ignorance of Attic manners and idiom his versions of Menander and Apollodorus were caricatures. ”

“ If, from the personal history of Hippocrates, we turn to the collection of writings that go under his name, the parallel with Homer will be still more exact and striking. In both cases we find a number of works, the most ancient, and, in some respects, the most excellent of their kind, which, though they have for centuries borne the same name, are discovered, on the most cursory examination, to belong in reality to several different persons. ”

“ The alterations made by Aeschylus in the composition and dramatic representation of Tragedy were so great, that he was considered by the Athenians as the father of it, just as Homer was of Epic poetry and Herodotus of History. (Philostr. Vit. Apoll. vi. 11.) As the ancients themselves remarked, it was a greater advance from the elementary productions of Thespis, Choerilus, and Phrynichus, to the stately tragedy of Aeschylus, than from the latter to the perfect and refined forms of Sophocles. It was the advance from infancy if not to maturity, at least to a youthful and vigorous manhood. ”

“ Their dwelling in the same locality not only kept alive the re- membrance of the deeds of their fathers, but gave a new impulse to their poetry, just as in the middle ages in Germany the foundation of the kingdom of the Hungarians in the East, and their destructive invasions, together with the origin of a new empire of the Burgundians in the West, awakened the old songs of the Niebelungen, after a slumber of centuries. ”

“ Which is the wiser, Seneca or his critic, let every man judge for himself. There is enough in Ethic, or the practical application of knowledge to life, to employ us all. Those who have no taste for Ethic, as thus understood, may indulge, if they have money and leisure, in the "intemperantia litterarum," of which kind of intemperance a large part of all literature is an example. ”

“ The gods are introduced in the most ludicrous positions, and it is certainly incomprehensible how a writer who represents them in such a light, could feel so great indignation against those who were suspected of a design to shake the popular faith in them. To say that his plays are defiled by coarseness and indecency, is only to state that they were comedies, and written by a Greek who was not superior to the universal feeling of his age.
The first edition of Aristophanes was that of Aldus, Venice, 1498, which was published without the Lysistrata and Thesmophoriazusae. ”

“ It was here that the old Thracian bards had effected that unity of mythology which, spreading all over Greece, had gradually absorbed and obliterated the discrepancies of the old local myths, and sub- stituted, one general mythology for the whole nation, with Zeus as the supreme ruler, dwelling on the snowy heights of Olympus. Impregnated with this European mythology, the heroic lays were brought to Asia Minor by the Greek colonies, which left the mother-country about three ages after the Trojan war. ”

“ From Theophrastus, on the other hand, he must have derived much of that skill in the discrimination of character which we so much admire in the Χαρακτῆρες of the philosopher, and which formed the great charm of the comedies of Menander. His master's attention to external elegance and comfort he not only imitated, but, as was natural in a man of an elegant person, a joyous spirit, and a serene and easy temper, he carried it to the extreme of luxury and effeminacy. ”

“ These Roman tragedies are, in fact, little more than dramas in name and in form: the form, indeed, is precisely Greek, but there is no substance under the form. The Octavia, which some critics violently condemn, is perhaps the best of them, viewed as a drama. There is something to move the affections: there is a tragical situation of an unhappy woman suffering from a brutal husband and a rival favourite, and a catastrophe in the wretched fate of Octavia. The study of the tragedies of Seneca has had some influence on the French drama. ”

“ It was the task of men, who, like Aristarchus, could judge of poetry without being able to write any themselves, to preserve carefully that which was extant, to clear it from all stains and corruptions, and to ex- plain what was no longer rooted in and connected with the institutions of a free political life, and therefore was become unintelligible to all but the learned. ”

“ We have instances of modern poets, who have composed long poems without writing down a single syllable, and have preserved them faithfully in their memory, before committing them to writing. And how much more easily could this have been done in the time anterior to the use of writing, when all those faculties of the mind, which had to dispense with this artificial assistance, were powerfully developed, trained, and exercised. We must not look upon the old bards as amateurs, who amused themselves in leisure hours with poetical compositions, as is the fashion now-a-days. ”

“ Nearly all the stories about the childhood and youth of Heracles, down to the time when he entered the service of Eurystheus, seem to be inventions of a later age: at least in the Homeric poems and in Hesiod we only find the general remarks that he grew strong in body and mind, that in the confidence in his own power he defied even the immortal gods, and wounded Hera and Ares, and that under the protection of Zeus and Athena he escaped the dangers which Hera prepared for him. ”

“ The design of his policy was that Athens should be thoroughly prepared for war, while it contained within itself every thing that could render the citizens satisfied with peace ; to make them conscious of their great- ness, and inspire them with that self-reliance and elastic vigour, which was a surer safeguard than all the jealous measures resorted to by the Spartans (c. 36 — 39) . ”

“ Another matter of great interest is concerning the relations of Sappho to those of her own sex. She appears to have been the centre of a female literary society, most of the members of which were her pupils in the technical portion of her art. For the Greeks were never guilty of the enormous error of confounding genius with its instruments, or of supposing that, because they cannot of themselves produce its fruit, therefore it can perform its work equally well without them. ”

“ That Terence was indebted to him for all his ideas and very many of his lines, is true enough; but that from any one play of Terence we can form a fair notion of the corresponding play of Menander, is disproved by the confession of Terence himself (Prolog, in Andr.) that he compressed two of Menander's plays into one; while the coolness with which he defends and even boasts of the exploit, shows how little we can trust him as our guide to the poetical genius of Menander. The one merit of Terence was felicity of expression ”