Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/465

 inference seems unwarranted; however, it is plain from scholia that, as well as , was a current term with the Alexandrian scholars; and in the second century A.D. Diogenes Laertius uses the phrase, (3. 56) in a way which shows that it had long been familiar. Welcker indeed, assumed that a poet of the Old Comedy, Nicomachus, had written a piece called —in ridicule of the tragic practice; but Meineke has cleared this up (Frag. Com. I. 496 ff.), by showing that, in the passage of Suidas on which Welcker relied, is not the name of a comedy, but refers to the names of three tragedies which follow it, indicating that they formed a trilogy. So we are left without any certain evidence for the words and  before 200 B.C. It is quite possible that, as Mr H. Richards has suggested, the earlier use of  was in reference to a group of four speeches (such as Antiphon's tetralogies), and that the Alexandrian scholars transferred it to groups of plays. In any case, it is certain that Aeschylus composed in these forms, whether he did or did not use these terms. Wagner, too, composed what we call a tetralogy, yet he did not call it so, but simply a Bühnenfestspiel.

Was Aeschylus the inventor of the trilogy? It is nowhere stated, and cannot be proved; but it