t the
actors repeated between the songs of the chorus was called an episode,
or additional part, consisting often of different adventures, which had
no connexion with each other. Thus Pantomime, the song, and the dance,
which were at first the only performances, became gradually and
insensibly a necessary and ornamental part of the drama.

From this time, the actor, or reciter, was more attended to than the
chorus; however, his part was executed, and it had the powerful charms
of novelty to recommend it, and quickly obscured the lustre of the
chorus, whose songs were now of a different nature, insomuch that the
original subject of them, the praise of Bacchus, was by degrees either
slightly mentioned, or totally passed over and forgotten; the priests,
who we may suppose for a long time presided over the whole, were alarmed
at so open a contempt of the deity, and unanimously exclaimed, that this
was nothing to Bacchus; the contempt grew into a kind of proverbial
saying, and as such is handed down to us.

From the origin of Tragedy and Comedy, and to the days of Thespis, and
from this time to that of Aeschylus, all is doubt, conjecture, and
obscurity; neither Aristotle, nor any other ancient writer, gives us the
least insight into the state and progress of the Greek Drama; the names
of a few, and but a few, tragedians, during this dark period, are handed
down to us; such were Epigenes, the Sicyonion, and Pratinas, who wrote
fifty-two plays, thirty-two of which are said to be satirical. After
Thespis, came his scholar Phrynicus, who wrote nine tragedies; for one
of which, we are told, he was fined fifty drachmas, because he had made
it (an odd reason) too deep, and too affecting; there was another, also
named Phrynicus, author of two tragedies: to these must be added
Alcaeus, Phormus, and Choeritas, together with Cephisodorus, an
Athenian, who wrote the "Amazon," and Apollophanes, supposed to have
been the author of a tragedy named "Daulis," though Suidas is of another
opinion. Tragedy had, during the lives of these writers, probably made
but a slow progress, and received but very little culture and
improvement; when at length the great Aeschylus arose, who, from this
rude and undigested chaos, created as it were a new world in the system
of letters.

Poets, and perhaps epic poets, there might have been before Homer (the
latter, who, in all probability, lived within fifty years of the Fall of
Troy--1250 B.C.). Dramatic w