INTRODUCTION
The audience who assembled in the Theatre of Dionysos under a spring sky—behind them the Akropolis, and before them the amethyst hill of Hymettos and the sea—to listen to the plays of the Athenian tragedians, when they were first given to the world, expected, unlike a modern audience, to watch the unfolding of a story already familiar to them. Effects were calculated on this supposition. The allusions, the "tragic irony," of which the plays were full, would otherwise have missed aim. And it is, I suppose, the business of a translator to reproduce in the mind of a reader, so far as that is possible, the impressions, which came to those for whose eyes and ears the plays were originally designed. But if so, it would seem an essential part of his business to give some preliminary account of the story and the persons of the drama,
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