Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/472

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chief actors, with a notice of the order in which the judges had placed the competitors. This record was preserved in the public archives. Towards the middle or latter part of the fifth century, it became usual to engrave such a record on a stone tablet, and to set it up in or near the Dionysiac theatre. Further, the choregus whose poet gained the prize received a tripod from the State, which he erected, with an inscription, in the same neighbourhood. In the fourth century, about sixty years after the deaths of Sophocles and Euripides, Aristotle compiled a work called Διδασκαλίαι, "Dramatic performances," being a list of the tragedies and comedies produced in each year. For this work his materials were the written or engraved records just mentioned. The book has perished, but its nature is known from citations of it which occur in the Greek Arguments to some plays, in scholia, and in late writers. There are altogether thirteen such citations; five of these say, "Aristotle in the Διδασκαλίαι": the other eight quote simply the Διδασκαλίαι, without the author's name. They are collected in the Berlin Aristotle, v. 1572. About 260 B.C. the Alexandrian poet Callimachus compiled another work of the same kind, Πίναξ καὶ ἀναγραφὴ τῶν κατὰ χρόνους ἀπ' ἀρχῆς γενομένων διδασκαλιῶν, "A Table and Record of Dramatic Performances in chronological order, from the earliest times." He made a careful use of Aristotle's Διδασκαλίαι, as appears from the scholium on Ar. Nub. 552. Works of a similar kind were written by Aristophanes of