Excerpt from Sketches of the Greek Dramatic Poets for English ReadersAeschylus, who is our author t'o-day, does not, like Homer, simply tell a straightforward tale. He brings his characters directly before us and makes them speak and act for themselves upon the stage. That stage differed materially from the stage we are accustomed to: and I would ask you to try to realise not only the appearance the theatre presented to the eyes of the Athenians, but also the associations with which, to their minds, it was surrounded.Aeschylus is reported to have said that his tragedies were morsels from the banquet of Homer. This is true of the subject-matter of his plays, not of their form. The tales with which he deals belong mostly to the same mythical cycle of the Heroic Age as the Homeric poems, but the form of his plays differs from the Iliad and Odyssey not only in dialect and metre but in all that is implied by the distinction between epic and dramatic poetry.Attic tragedy for the most part avoided contempo rary history and sought its subjects in heroic legends.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.