Thespis—­The Progress of Tragedy and Comedy—­Aeschylus—­The Epopee—­Homer—­Sophocles—­Euripides—­Grecian Mimes—­The First Athenian Theatre—­Scenery and Effects.

When Thespis first pointed out the tragic path, and when (as Horace tells us in his Odes) that “The inventor of the Art carried his vagrant players on a cart,” by his introduction of a new personage, who relieved the chorus, or troop of singers, by reciting some part of a well-known history, or fable, which gave time for the chorus to rest.  All that 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.