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222 galaxy of gods, and that, with some exceptions, his gods walked the floor of earth with the other actors. (The evidence for this is given in Miss Harrison's Themis, pp. 347 ff.) Sophocles, moving towards a more "natural" and less ritual tragedy, used the divine epiphany comparatively little. Euripides, somewhat curiously for one so hostile to the current mythology, intensified this ritual element in drama as he did all the others. And he used it more and more as he grew older. He evidently liked it for its own sake.

There is one view about the Deus ex Mâchinâ which needs a word of correction. It is widely entertained and comes chiefly from Horace's Ars Poetica. It takes the Deus as a device—and a very unskilful one—for somehow finishing a story that has got into a hopeless tangle. The poet is supposed to have piled up ingenious complications and troubles until he cannot see any way out and has to cut the knot by the intervention of something miraculous—in this case, of a machine-made god. Now devices of this sort—the sudden appearance of rich uncles, the discovery of new wills, or of infants changed at birth and the like—are more or less common weaknesses in romantic literature. Hence