hens, in her sheltered peninsula, lay somewhat outside the tide of
migrations and heroic exploits. Her population and that of all Attica
remained comparatively unchanged; her kings are kings of the stationary,
law-abiding, state-reforming type; Cecrops, Erechtheus, Theseus, are not
splendid, flashing, all-conquering figures like Achilles and Agamemnon.
Athens might, it would seem, but for the coming of Homer, have lain
stagnant in a backwater of conservatism, content to go on chanting her
traditional Spring Songs year by year. It is a wonderful thing that this
city of Athens, beloved of the gods, should have been saved from the
storm and stress, sheltered from what might have broken, even shattered
her, spared the actual horrors of a heroic _age_, yet given heroic
_poetry_, given the clear wine-cup poured when the ferment was over. She
drank of it deep and was glad and rose up like a giant refreshed.

* * * * *

We have seen that to make up a heroic age there must be two factors, the
new and the old; the young, vigorous, warlike people must seize on,
appropriate, in part assimilate, an old and wealthy civilization. It
almost seems as if we might go a step farther, and say that for every
great movement in art or literature we must have the same conditions, a
contact of new and old, of a new spirit seizing or appropriated by an
old established order. Anyhow for Athens the historical fact stands
certain. The amazing development of the fifth-century drama is just
this, the old vessel of the ritual Dithyramb filled to the full with the
new wine of the heroic _saga_; and it would seem that it was by the hand
of Peisistratos, the great democratic tyrant, that the new wine was
outpoured.

* * * * *

Such were roughly the outside conditions under which the drama of art
grew out of the _dromena_ of ritual. The racial secret of the individual
genius of AEschylus and the forgotten men who preceded him we cannot hope
to touch. We can only try to see the conditions in which they worked and
mark the splendid new material that lay to their hands. Above all things
we can see that this material, these Homeric _saga_, were just fitted
to give the needed impulse to art. The Homeric _saga_ had for an
Athenian poet just that remoteness from immediate action which, as we
have seen, is the essence of art as contrasted with ritual.

Tradition says that the Athenians fined the dra