matic 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.

Adequately sacred though they were, they were yet free and flexible. It
is impiety to alter the myth of your local hero, it is impossible to
recast the myth of your local daemon--that is fixed forever--his
conflict, his _agon_, his death, his _pathos_, his Resurrection and its
heralding, his Epiphany. But the stories of Agamemnon and Achilles,
though at home these heroes were local _daimones_, have already been
variously told in their wanderings from place to place, and you can
mould them more or less to your will. Moreover, these figures are
already personal and individual, not representative puppets, mere
functionaries like the May Queen and Winter; they have life-histories of
their own, never quite to be repeated. It is in this blend of the
individual and the general, the personal and the universal, that one
element at least of all really great art will be found to lie; and just
here at Athens we get a glimpse of the moment of fusion; we see a
definite historical reason why and how the universal in _dromena_ came
to include the particular in drama. We see, moreover, how in place of
the old monotonous plots, intimately connected with actual practical
needs