at the expense of fairness towards one class of admissible compositions. I cannot, therefore, think that C. F. Hermann's theory is a probable one.
(5) Welcker's interpretation is simpler. He, we remember, holds that, in the tetralogies of Aeschylus, the three tragedies were always linked by story or by idea, and that Sophocles was the first to dispense with such a link. He understands the statement of Suidas as referring merely to this change. When Suidas says that Sophocles "began the practice of play contending against play, and not tetralogy against tetralogy," he means that a Sophoclean group of four plays was not a tetralogy in the same sense as an Aeschylean group; i.e., it had no inner unity[1]. Here, then, the issue is narrowed to a question of language. Welcker supposes that Suidas limited the use of the word τετραλογία to the case in which the plays were linked. The critic has been led to this supposition by his own view as to the proper use of the word τριλογία. That word, he thinks, should be restricted to the Aeschylean linked trilogy; in the case of Sophocles, he recognises no 'trilogy,' but only a group of three tragedies. Now, even if we granted, for the sake of argument, that Welcker was right about the word trilogy, the construction which he puts on Suidas would still be untenable. For Welcker allows that, in the Aeschylean tetralogy no
- ↑ So Haigh, p. 21, n. 1.
