Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/466

 is very probable; Phrynichus seems less likely, and no third name has been suggested. We may next ask, what was the motive which first prompted such a grouping of three tragedies? Welcker finds it in a custom (which he supposes) that the single actor of the earlier period should speak thrice between the choral parts; each such deliverance being a, and the whole a. This is to assume a good deal; besides, if, as Welcker holds, the primitive answered to the single  of later days, then three  ought to have been called an. The true motive of trilogy—so far as Aeschylus, at least, is concerned—is certainly deeper than any mere accident of tradition; it is rather to be sought in the nature of the epic material which he used, and in his relation, as a dramatist, to that material;—a relation which no one has appreciated better than Welcker himself. As Homer was the chief authority for the heroic legends, so epic narrative was the form of poetry which was chiefly associated with them. In the rudimentary drama—if it may be so called—of the days before Aeschylus, the single actor's parts probably bore some resemblance to the messenger's speeches in matured tragedy—in this respect, at least, that they were mainly occupied with narration. Thus when Aeschylus first came forward, all the influences of past and present favoured the tendency to combine a dramatic form with an epic spirit. Whether Aeschylus really said that his tragedies were only "morsels from the great feasts