THE HISTORY OF OLD ROME

III. From the Union of Italy to the Subjugation of Carthage and the Greek States

From: The History of Rome, by Theodor Mommsen
Translated with the sanction of the author by William Purdie Dickson

Chapter XIV - Literature and Art

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Page 61

He was able to destroy the ancient tragedy, but not to create the modern. Everywhere he halted half-way. Masks, through which the expression of the life of the soul is, as it were, translated from the particular into the general, were as necessary for the typical tragedy of antiquity as they are incompatible with the tragedy of character; but Euripides retained them. With remarkably delicate tact the older tragedy had never presented the dramatic element, to which it was unable to allow free scope, unmixed, but had constantly fettered it in some measure by epic subjects from the superhuman world of gods and heroes and by the lyrical choruses.

One feels that Euripides was impatient under these fetters: with his subjects he came down at least to semi-historic times, and his choral chants were of so subordinate importance, that they were frequently omitted in subsequent performance and hardly to the injury of the pieces; but yet he has neither placed his figures wholly on the ground of reality, nor entirely thrown aside the chorus. Throughout and on all sides he is the full exponent of an age in which, on the one hand, the grandest historical and philosophical movement was going forward, but in which, on the other hand, the primitive fountain of all poetry--a pure and homely national life--had become turbid.

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