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.

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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 dramatic poet Phrynichus for choosing as the plot of one of his tragedies the Taking of Miletus.  Probably the fine was inflicted for political party reasons, and had nothing whatever to do with the question of whether the subject was “artistic” or not.  But the story may stand, and indeed was later understood to be, a sort of allegory as to the attitude of art towards life.  To understand and still more to contemplate life you must come out from the choral dance of life and stand apart.  In the case of one’s own sorrows, be they national or personal, this is all but impossible.  We can ritualize our sorrows, but not turn them into tragedies.  We cannot stand back far enough to see the picture; we want to be doing, or at least lamenting.  In the case of the sorrows of others this standing back is all too easy.  We not only bear their pain with easy stoicism, but we picture it dispassionately at a safe distance; we feel about rather than with it.  The trouble is that we do not feel enough.  Such was the attitude of the Athenian towards the doings and sufferings of Homeric heroes.  They stood towards them as spectators.  These heroes had not the intimate sanctity of home-grown things, but they had sufficient traditional sanctity to make them acceptable as the material of drama.