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CHAP. IX.] personage, and to a god who does not reappear in the play at all.

97. But in two of the last cases he has even expanded the prologue into a dialogue among gods, which is very peculiar. In the first (Alcestis), Apollo, as he is leaving the house of Admetus, after his prologue, meets Death on the way to seize his prey, and in a short dialogue expresses his adverse will, but his powerlessness to do more than effect an exchange of victims; while Death, by his stern and gloomy harshness, increases our wonder at the extraordinary nature of the subsequent conflict and victory of Heracles. This result is, however, plainly indicated in the parting words of Apollo, evidently spoken aside. In the second case (Troades), the prologue of Poseidon, leaving his favourite haunt, the ruined Troy, passes into a dialogue, in which Athene expresses her anger at the insulting desecration of her temple by the Greeks, and asks the god to aid her in punishing the returning host, to which he willingly accedes. This dialogue actually reaches beyond the argument, and as it were an anticipated epilogue, reconciles us to the harrowing scenes which follow, by the consciousness that the Greeks will suffer condign punishment, though it is beyond the scope of the play. It need not be objected that possibly the divine vengeance was exhibited in a later play of the same group, as might be imagined, for we know that the Troades was the last of the three tragedies brought out together at the representation in Ol.91.1.

Thus there is great variety and no little importance in these prologues. The gods who speak them, not being characters in the play, are not drawn as such, and seem as purely stage machinery as the mechanical contrivance in which they were sometimes shown aloft. The best and most suitable speakers of such introductions are undoubtedly, like the nurse in the Medea, secondary characters, who are the most natural exponents of the external circumstances of the action,