INIVERSITY STUDIES 
VoL. XIII OCTOBER 1913 No. 4 
I—THE THEORY OF GREEK TRAGEDY 
BY. PP. Ee PRYE 
It is not infrequently objected to the practice of generalizing 
on literary topics that it tends to transform what is properly a 
creature of flesh and blood into a lifeless, if symmetrical, figure of 
abstraction. In some respects the charge is just. To suppose 
that Sophocles wrote the Antigone in conscious illustration of a 
dramatic formula, would be totally to mistake the process of lit- 
erary creation. He wrote it because he liked the subject and 
found it suggestive: as we say nowadays, he saw something in it. 
But even in this case it is perfectly legitimate to analyze and de- 
fine the kind of thing that appealed to him and the kind of thing 
that he succeeded in making out of it as far as his impressions and 
methods are uniform. In other words, it is possible to determine 
the character of his work as a whole even at the risk of neglecting 
the specific play of feature and circumstance which lends every 
individual performance its own peculiar vivacity. And the same 
sort of treatment is equally feasible with the body of Greek trag- 
edy—or for that matter, with tragedy considered as a universal 
genre. 
And further, even though the Greeks, like other tragedians, 
worked freely, according to their own genius, in the stuff that 
pleased them, without reference to rule or prescription, even so it 
is none the less certain that they proceeded in accordance with cer- 
tain general ideas and habits of thought. And in any case in 
order to understand what they have done, we should naturally 
have to take it up in some general expression, which at most would 
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