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IX.] pain, or still more, with their unconscious silence, enlist the spectator's profoundest sympathy for the helpless sorrows of a helpless age. Such are Eumelus the child of Alcestis, the children of the fallen Thebans in the Supplices, the children of Medea, and, above all, the little Orestes in the Iphigenia, who is brought in a mute and unwitting suppliant for the life of his sister.

100. In the other minor features, the plays even of Euripides seem very simple to modern critics. Complicated scenes were against the tradition of the Greek stage, and could not indeed be effective on the large scale in which open-air performances were held for enormous audiences. It is indeed ridiculous to assert, upon the authority of a general statement in Plato, that thirty thousand Athenians could attend a single performance. The unearthed theatre of Dionysus at once proves to any observer that such a thing was impossible. But, the greatest theatres elsewhere, as at Megalopolis and Syracuse, were so happily constructed that even now ordinary speaking on the site of the stage, though the scenes are gone, can he perfectly heard in the furthest and highest back seats, as I can assert from personal experiments. Still the audiences were immense, and included the common people, who were not so learned, even in Periclean Athens, as the historians would have us believe. Hence the great body of the plays are made up of soliloquy, dialogue (strictly so called), and lyrical odes. Even when more than two characters occupy the stage, or when the chorus is drawn into the action, two of them usually monopolise the attention, and the chorus either speaks as a single person in the mouth of the coryphæus (a rare case, as in the Heracles, v. 352), or listens as an arbiter, who, when one party has pleaded, asks what is to be said on the other side.

101. Indeed this perpetual arguing of disputes upon the stage, with all the arts of rhetoric, is one of the most Athenian, but to us disagreeable, features in the old