A Manual of Classical Literature Author:Charles Morris Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: DEVELOPMENT OF THE GREEK DRAMA. The sudden decline in lyric poetry had its cause in the intense devotion which the pleasure-loving Athenians displayed for the... more » drama, which, at the epoch of these brilliant lyric poets, had reached its highest stage in the writings of /Ksrii v In-: and his successors. This growth of the dramatic art evidenced a new advance in the progress of literature, so rapidly developing in the hands of the alert and active-minded Greeks. The epic, in which the poet stands at a distance, calmly observing and quietly narrating the deeds of former heroes, is a more primitive literary form than the drama, in which the artist throws himself into the midst of his characters, and makes them live, act and talk in his very presence, and in that of his hearers. It is a severer art than the epic. It has no background of narration, none of that aerial perspective which draws on the imagination of the spectator to eke out any insufficiency in the story. Suppressing these aids, it must depend for effect on its unity and simplicity, on its power of awakening the sympathy of an audience, of unfolding the depths of human nature, and of making visible to the eye and palpable to the touch what the epic poet displays wrapped in the glowing veil of imagination. In Greek drama, too, the lyric art is almost as fully cultivated as the dramatic, in the songs of the chorus, which forms such an essential feature of the classic stage. In this, and in other respects, the ancient drama differs essentiallyfrom the modern; its peculiar features arising from the character of its origin, and from the marked differences in mental requirement between the Greeks and the moderns. Our tendency to the romantic and imaginative was in them replaced by a severely artistic spirit, whose deman...« less