ychological insight. At
least, though far removed from the more naif age of the national life,
he is, both in patriotic spirit and in his choice of themes, genuinely
Attic; and if he was "haunted on the stage by the daemon of Socrates,"
he was, like Socrates himself, the representative of an age which was a
seed-time as well as a season of decay. His technical innovations
corresponded to his literary characteristics; but neither in the
treatment of the chorus, nor in his management of the beginning and the
ending of a tragedy, did he introduce any radical change. To Euripides
the general progress of dramatic literature nevertheless owes more than
to any other ancient poet. Tragedy followed in his footsteps in Greece
and at Rome. Comedy owed him something in the later phases of the very
Aristophanes who mocked him, and more in the human philosophy expressed
in the sentiments of Menander; and, when the modern drama came to
engraft the ancient upon its own crude growth, his was directly or
indirectly the most powerful influence in the establishment of a living
connexion between them.

The great tragic masters and their contemporaries.

The incontestable pre-eminence of the three great tragic poets was in
course of time acknowledged at Athens by the usage allowing no tragedies
but theirs to be performed more than once, and by the prescription that
one play of theirs should be performed at each Dionysia, as well as by
the law of Lycurgus (c. 330) which obliged the actors to use, in the
case of works of the great masters, authentic copies preserved in the
public archives. Yet it is possible that the exclusiveness of these
tributes is not entirely justifiable; and not all the tragic poets
contemporary with the great writers were among the myriad of younglings
derided by Aristophanes. Of those who attained to celebrity Ion of Chios
(d. before 419) seems to have followed earlier traditions of style than
Euripides; Agathon, who survived the latter, on the other hand,
introduced certain innovations of a transnormal kind both into the
substance and the form of dramatic composition.[59]

The successors of the great masters at Athens.

III. Of the third period of Greek tragedy the concluding limit cannot be
precisely fixed. Down to the days of Alexander the Great, Athens had
remained the chief home of tragedy. Though tragedies must have begun to
be acted at the Syracusan and Macedonian courts, since Aeschylus,
Euripides a