The Theban people, represented by the chorus supplicating their savior king, rehearses his great achievements for their deliverance. Œdipus in the strong confidence of his power and his mission stands before his palace like a god. At the end of the play he is led slowly from that palace a broken man. But the composition of the play is not mere reversal for contrast. Between the first scene and the last, action moves without haste, but without delay or interruption. The vigorous and self-reliant king chafes at the cryptic response brought from the oracle by Creon; he is indignant, then furious, at the tragic silence of the seer Tiresias. His quick intelligence scents a plot between the two. Breaking through the interposition of Jocasta, he wins from her false hopes while he gives her no less unwittingly the premonition of doom. Once suspecting, however darkly, he must know, he will know, he knows a dreadful part, he knows more, he knows all. So this great play, though it is focused on a single day, though it excludes all the past history and the development of character, is never static. It is never for a moment tableau. Because of its compression it moves not less, but more. For that is why Aristotle insists that the dramatic action should be self-consistent, limited in scope. The object of dramatic unity is not bareness, but fulness and continuity. It is to give time for full and intense realization of what actual life merely hints interruptedly. It is to give us human life undisturbed and uninterrupted, so that we may see it clearly and whole. We are to have the illusion of actual experience, yes, but of larger and deeper experience than we can get from the mere reproduction of facts or from the cross-currents of life itself. Like every other art, drama is a simplification of life because it is an interpretation. The dramatic simplification is seen by Aristotle to consist essentially in moving from revealing crisis to revealing crisis up to a final revelation. It excludes all the accidental and the irrelevant that embarrass our actual movements; it tells what has happened through what is happening; it cuts to the quick. It takes those moments only in which a man is himself, suppressing those in which he is indistinguishable from other men. But it does not leap or halt between; it brings out our real sequences. It reveals life to us by showing the emotional connection of its great moments.