This new form was the tragedy. The powerful dramatic impulse which now leaped into being was born of the increased intensity of the spiritual struggle with the problems of actual life. But this life projected its reality into the world of ancient legend, just as at an earlier stage Homer’s era had projected itself into the epic. For the generation of Aeschylus and Sophocles this world of ancient legend became the ideal mirror of their own concept of man, the gods, and the world. Thus legend, dramatized in tragedy, experienced a radiant rebirth and proved its indestructible power to survive. The vase painting and choral songs of the sixth century were the first symptoms of the people’s new and increased interest in the old myths which formed the content of the epic. The manner in which the writers of Attic tragedy used these myths gave the characters of legend their final form. What constituted the tragic in tragedy? The passionate awareness of destiny, the sense of how freedom and limitation are mixed in life, and the way in which man reaches heroic stature under the impact of his appointed fate. The great masters of Greek tragedy found the outlines of this basically “tragic” attitude toward life clearly limned in the myths of their people. And so the tragedians gave the old vocation of the singer as a carrier of the tradition a new and deeper significance. Homer himself presented the poet as far more than a man who glorifies the deeds of heroes. To him he was an interpreter of human destiny, and this idea he embodied in his treatment of Achilles and Odysseus. Plato was, therefore, quite right in calling Homer the father of tragedy. This aspect of legend was brought to the peak of perfection only by the tragic poetry of the Greeks of the fifth century.

This development from legend to tragedy brings to light still another force latent in Greek myth, the inimitable plastic vigor of the characters of legend, which were shaped into living and acting persons by the tragedians. For the dramatist the characters of legend were a most fruitful subject. The heroes in Greek legends are not majestic but insubstantial apparitions, such as we sometimes find in the legends of other peoples. They are amazingly real, individual, and convincing. That was why, in his famous epistle on poetry, Horace advised the younger generation of poets in Rome to give up the ambition of inventing their own dramatic characters, for these so often lacked all individual life and were nothing but shadows. It would be better, he said, for them to utilize the characters in Greek legend, who were indestructibly actual. And no one can fail to agree with this Roman critic, at least in his evaluation of the myth as potential poetry, for even after so many centuries the heroes and heroines of Greek legend are still as clear, as three-dimensional to us, as though we had met them in the flesh: Achilles and Patroclus, Odysseus and Penelope, Oedipus and Antigone, Prometheus, Agamemnon, Clytaemnestra, Orestes, Iphigenia, Electra, Ajax, Medea. Jason, and many more. It is true, of course, that these figures are, in part, the creations of great poets; for us it is hardly possible to distinguish between their share in the formation of these characters and that of the mythical tradition. Still, though the myths do not give the fully developed features of these characters, they contain the seeds which flower later in tragedy.

The myth also contained another important trait of the characters of Greek tragedy: their universality. For not one of them is merely individual. They are convincing because they represent the coincidence of individuality and type. The Greek mind had the capacity of detecting the basic law, not only in all human beings, but in all things. They called this “idea” inherent in every thing and every human creature the “form of its being.” Aeschylus saw Prometheus as a creative genius, inspired by warm love for suffering humanity, always ready to help the weak but defiant toward the higher powers and egregiously self-confident. Antigone is the idealist who readily sacrifices herself to the claims of divine law. Full of tender love for her dead brother to whom his fellow-citizens deny the rites of burial because they regard him as a traitor, she is fanatically inflexible in her opposition to the laws of worldly power which claim her as their victim. Achilles, a character of heroic greatness, is essentially noble, and just because of this, he loves honor and is given to sudden anger against everyone who offends this sense of honor.