Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/478

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tribe was not appointed every year; but the ten tribes in rotation nominated choregi, from among whom the archon chose as many as were required for the festival; i.e., at the Great Dionysia in the fifth century, usually three for Tragedy and three for Comedy. The evidence on these points will be found in Albert Müller's recent work on Greek Scenic Antiquities, pp. 320 f. and 331, 1886. (2) The second objection to Mr Goodrick's hypothesis is that the three unacted plays of each tetralogy would not have been recorded in the Didascaliae, which, as their name denotes, were lists, not of plays written merely, but of plays performed. Thus the scholium on Eur. Andromache 446 says that the date of that play is not on record, because it was never acted at Athens. The same limit to the contents of the Didascaliae is expressly stated by the scholium on Ar. Nub. 552 ( = 553 Dindorf).

(4) C. F. Hermann (Greek Ant. ii. § 59, n. 23) approaches the problem from a different side. He grants that Sophocles continued to exhibit tetralogies, but supposes that he altered the mode of procedure. Hitherto the four plays of each tetralogy had been acted one after another. But Sophocles, says C. F. Hermann, arranged that the first play of the first tetralogy should be immediately followed by the first play of the second tetralogy, this by the first play of the third, and so on; so that each of the three poets appeared four several times. Here the first objection is that such a