* A notable exception is Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast.

* Music continued to play a central role in the culture of the classic period (480-323). The great name among the fifth-century composers was Timotheus of Miletus; he wrote nomes in which the music dominated the poetry, and represented a story and an action. His extension of the Greek lyre to eleven strings, and his experiments in complex and elaborate styles, provoked the conservatives of Athens to such denunciation that Timotheus, we are told, was about to take his own life when Euripides comforted him, collaborated with him, and correctly prophesied that all Greece would soon be at his feet.²⁵

* There were a few dramas about later history; of these the only extant example is Aeschylus’ Persian Women. About 493 Phrynichus presented The Fall of Miletus; but the Athenians were so moved to grief by contemplating the capture of their daughter city by the Persians that they fined Phrynichus a thousand drachmas for his innovation, and forbade any repetition of the play.³⁹ There are some indications that Themistocles had secretly arranged for the performance as a means of stirring up the Athenians to active war against Persia.⁴⁰

* Though in Aeschylus the actors were only two, the roles they played in a drama were limited only in the sense that no more than two characters could be on the stage at once. The leader of the chorus was sometimes individualized into a third actor. Minor charactersattendants, soldiers, etc.—were not counted as actors.

* The Suppliant Women is of the primitive type, in which the chorus predominates; The Persians is also mostly choral, and vividly describes the battle of Salamis; the Seven against Thebes was the third play in a trilogy that told the story of King Laius and his queen Jocasta, the patricide and incest of their son Oedipus, and the conflict between the sons of Oedipus for the Theban throne.

* Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone were produced separately.

* Theseus.

* The major plays appeared in approximately the following order: Alcestis, 438; Medea, 431; Hippolytus, 428; Andromache, 427; Hecuba, ca. 425; Electra, ca. 416; The Trojan Women, 415; Iphigenia in Tauris, ca. 413; Orestes, 408; Iphigenia in Aulis, 406; The Bacchae, 406.

* It was presented in 438 as the fourth play in a group by Euripides; perhaps it was intended as a half-serious satyr play rather than as a half-comic tragedy. In Balaustion’s Adventure Browning, with generous simplicity, has taken the play at its face value.

* There had already been royal or state libraries in Greece, as we have seen; and such collections in Egypt can be traced back to the Fourth Dynasty. A Greek library consisted of scrolls arranged in pigeonholes in a chest. Publication meant that an author had allowed his manuscript to be copied, and the copies to be circulated; thereafter further copies could be made without permission or “copyright.” Copies of popular works were numerous, and not costly; Plato tells us in the Apology that Anaxagoras’ treatise On Nature could be bought for a drachma ($1). Athens, in the age of Euripides, became the chief center of the book trade in Greece.

* Possibly a reference to the repetition of Aeschylus’ plays.

* Some of the gods, he tells us, keep brothels in heaven.¹³⁵

* Cf. the imaginative but excellent discussion of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, in iii, 80-2.

* E.g., the speech of Alcibiades at Sparta, vi, 20.89.