Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1894) v1.djvu/21

Rh in the dialogue, and that a secondary function of the choral odes was to carry the audience over the interval supposed to elapse between the acts, and which might vary from a few minutes, as in the Alcestis (568–605), to several days, or even weeks, as in the Suppliants (598–633). The convention was understood, and the illusion was no more impaired by the continued presence of the same chorus in the orchestra, than it is in a modern theatre by our consciousness that the same actors are waiting behind the scenes; and certainly men's minds were not jarred by a sense of discord, and brought down from heaven to earth, as with us, when the descent of the curtain on a scene which has thrilled the house with high-wrought emotion is followed by a babble of gossip and by the shrill importunities of waiters.

Certain obvious lacunæ in the text (e.g., Alcestis, 468, Suppliants, 263 and 764), I have supplied, either adopting the conjecture of some editor, or by inserting a relevant connection of my own devising.

The spelling of Greek proper names is still in the transition stage, and I have therefore taken the questionable benefit of the license yet allowed. Old forms, familiar and firmly rooted, like Hecuba, I have not disturbed; new forms well established, like Odysseus, I have adopted; in well-known names, like Kassandra, in which the pronunciation is unaffected by the change of a letter, I have preferred the nearer approach to the Greek; for unfamiliar names, transliteration seemed advisable. I have retained, however, the Latin termination -us, because of the apparently invincible tendency of the English reader to place a secondary accent on -os, the resulting -oss producing a rhythmical discord; and I regard u and y respectively as closer equivalents than ou and u for the sound of and.

In the numbering of the lines, and in the arrangement of the choruses (the reader who refers to the Greek text will