ἐγίγνετο, ἀλλ' οὐχὶ τετραλογίας—the contest (i.e. the tussle for the prize) now came to be one of play against play, not of tetralogy against tetralogy. Meeting with such a statement, Suidas might easily have taken ὁ ἀγών to mean, not the issue between the competitors, but the dramatic exhibition. I put this case merely to show how possible it is that his paraphrase is verbally faithful to an authority which he did not accurately comprehend, and that this may be the reason why it remains susceptible of the right sense, as well as of that wrong sense which he may have intended.
In concluding this endeavour to assist in the elucidation of a much-discussed passage, I would only add that the question with which it is concerned may be said to have a somewhat larger scope than that of a mere detail in the history of an ancient festival. Pindar stands between epos and drama, when he gives us such pictures—worthy of the man accustomed to see beautiful forms in vivid action—as the coming of Jason to Pelias, the meeting of Apollo and Cheiron, the episode of Castor and Polydeuces, the entertainment of Heracles by Telamon: Aeschylus is the great dramatist whose framework is still epic: but it is only when the single tragedy has become the measure of dramatic art, that drama reigns in its own right. We turn to Aristotle's Treatise on Poetry, and we are amazed to find that the author of the Didascaliae, the first annalist of trilogy and tetralogy, drops not one hint—in the text as we have it, at least—that tragedies had ever been
