tragedies. The nation were awaking to the delights of legal argument, and the sophists and rhetoricians were discovering and perfecting the weapons which would assure a victory in the courts or before the assembly. Euripides shows a mastery of the art earlier than the exercises of Antiphon, and far clearer than the contorted subtleties of Thucydides. Thus a feature disagreeable to us may probably have had a peculiar zest for an Attic audience; nor did Sophocles disdain to adopt it in his later plays. It was even a rule that attack and reply should occupy the same number of lines, not only in the quick retort of the stichomuthia (one line each), but in longer speeches, where a slight difference might be inappreciable to the audience. And so strict is here the rule, that critics have detected mutilation and interpolation by its absence. When the chorus is to be employed in the action, the poet sometimes divides it into semi-choruses, which speak in dialogue like two actors. Of this there are instances in the older poets also. Euripides has employed it with great effect in the opening of the Ion, of the Alcestis, and in the Cyclops. But it is, I think, unique that Iphigenia should address the chorus of fellow-exiles one by one (Iphigenia in Tauris, 1068–1074) in beseeching them to aid her in her flight. The chorus being the recognised spectators of the action, asides of the actors not intended for their ears do not, I think, occur in any Greek play. Indeed, asides of any kind, beyond anxious exclamations, like those of Agamemnon in the Aulid Iphigenia, are rare, and could hardly have been effective in very large theatres, and with actors stuffed and padded out into a conventional and unwieldy majesty. I have noticed one in Ion (above, p. 48), and there are two others, which are a sort of double asides, in the Alcestis and the Hecuba. In the former, as Apollo and Death leave each other, one departing from, and the other entering the palace, each speaks a parting soliloquy not intended to be heard by the other. In the Hecuba, when Agamemnon comes in to hurry the
