was no originator in the external appliances, or even in the general internal plan, of the Greek drama. His great predecessors had introduced him to the muse of tragedy, as it were, dwelling in a splendid temple, and honoured with an established worship.
The great stone theatre of Dionysus had long replaced the old wooden seats, and if the marble chairs, and sculptured front of the stage, which we can now admire at Athens, were not added till the days of the orator Lycurgus, we may yet he sure that the theatre of Sophocles, in which Pericles sat, was not wanting in splendour. Even the illusion of scenes in perspective was attempted by the genius of the painter Agatharchus about the time when Euripides began his poetical career. Thus, though the absence of actresses and the stiff conventional costume of the puffed and padded-out actors must have been a serious hindrance to the subtler graces of acting, the dramatic poets were provided with scenery and accompaniments quite adequate to stimulate their imagination, and yet not so perfect as to provide them with splendid stage effects as a cloak for dramatic feebleness. In all probability, they were more adequate to their purpose than the theatres for which Shakspere composed his plays.
The alterations Euripides attempted were indeed very serious, but not such as would strike the observation of the vulgar. The outer dress, the stage arrangements, the chorus of Greek tragedy, he left as he found them.[1] But the deeper student who penetrated beneath the surface found that the whole edifice was renewed within, as in the so-called restorations of our day, though the outer shell is ingeniously propped up and appears undisturbed.
20. It was not otherwise with his treatment of religion. A deep study of the Orphic books and of the Mysteries, a close friendship with Anaxagoras, the
- ↑ For the external appliances of the Greek stage and the form of Greek plays, I must refer the reader to the Primer of Greek Literature.
