THE piece, on the perusal of which the reader is now about to enter, stands unique among the extant remains of the ancient drama, as drawing its materials from the historical, not the mythological, age of the Greek people. We are not, from this fact, to conclude that the Greeks, or the ancients generally, drew a more strict boundary line between the provinces of history and poetry, than the moderns. Such an inference were the very reverse of the fact, as the whole style of ancient history on the one hand, and the examples of Ennius and Lucan in poetry, sufficiently show. Not even within the special domain of the Greek stage is our one extant example the only historical drama of which the records of Hellenic literature have preserved the memory; on the contrary, one of the old arguments of the present play expressly testifies that Phrynichus, a contemporary of Æschylus, had written a play on the same subject; and we know, from other sources, that the same dramatist had exhibited on the stage, with the most powerful effect, the capture of the city of Miletus, which took place only a few years before the battle of Marathon.[f1] There was a plain reason, however, why, with all this, historical subjects should, in the general case, have been excluded from the range of the Greek dramatic poetry; and that reason was, the religious character which, as we have previously shown, belonged so essentially to the tragic exhibitions of the Hellenes. That religious character necessarily directed the eye of the tragic poet to those ages in the history of his country, when the gods held more familiar and open converse with men, and to those exploits which were performed by Jove-descended heroes in olden time, under the express sanction, and with the special inspiration, of Heaven. Had a characteristically Christian drama arisen, at an early period, out of the festal celebrations of the Church, the sacred poets of such a drama would, in the same way, have confined themselves to strictly scriptural themes, or to themes belonging to the earlier and more venerable traditions of the Church. {298}