The modern study of folklore, by recovering some lost echoes in Greek tragedy, has enhanced its significance. Folk superstitions, though they retire from public gaze before more sophisticated conventions, are slow to die. Those which have become mere curious lore are of course dead dramatically; but those which express persistent human yearnings may be all the more vital dramatically because they are primitive. Such, for instance, is the folk-tale of the fairy mistress, the woman of unearthly beauty who has the magic to enrich the man she loves with joy and power. Widespread over western Europe in the middle ages, it has roots in remote antiquity. Euripides made it, not as the medieval writers the story of the delusion of the man, but the tragedy of the woman. In varying forms it has recurred again and again. In Walter Map’s amazing tale of Gerbert[10] it concludes upon penance and renunciation. In Fouqué’s _Undine_ its native force is dissipated in sentiment. A dead superstition, on the other hand, has no dramatic appeal. Though we admire the steadfast piety that agonizes over the unburied body of a brother, we can no longer appreciate the situation of Antigone as fully tragic; for we have lost irrevocably the ancient superstition from which it springs. But Medea with her power to bless and ban her lover, and with her unearthly capacity for suffering, who will venture to say that she is dead? That she is primitive gives her only the more power to walk the stage to-morrow. Mythical idealizing is readily symbolic. But in Greek tragedy direct symbolism, except in the chorus, is not common. Rather than as symbolical, the legendary figures appear as typical. It is as typical that the “illustrious persons” are recommended by Aristotle and represented by the dramatists that he expounds. Prometheus, Heracles, Agamemnon, Medea, are chosen as eminent not in rank, as some French dramatists are accused of thinking, but in typically human traits. They show grandly and conspicuously what obscurely is suffered by us all. “There you and I and all of us fell down.” They are race heroes; we communally feel in them the race ghost. And the more mythical they are, the more we can feel the struggle of all human kind. For the very limitations on themes sets Greek tragedy in sharper relief against modern as exhibiting the dramatic vitality of legend.