Personages so fixed do, indeed, tend to preclude both novelty and subtlety of characterization. In this regard Euripides, especially in his Medea, is sometimes exceptional. Generally the characterization of Greek tragedy is broad and simple. The _personæ_ are taken full-blown, at some revealing crisis. But modern experience with plays and with novels confirms the impression that broad characterization is generally more effective before an audience; subtle, minute, or cumulative, with an individual reader. In this application, too, we may take Aristotle’s saying that plot is more important in drama, character in epic. But lest we separate character from plot unduly, we must remember that the movement of Greek tragedy is not merely of events, but of human will. Will is the exhibition of character in action. It is the mainspring of every tragic crisis. At once the simplest and the strongest expression of character, it animates Greek tragedy because it animates almost all tragedy.[11] Æschylus in _Prometheus Bound_ promises the victory of heroic fortitude. Sophocles in _King Œdipus_ conveys the agony of assertive individuality at finding the struggle for self-fulfillment vain, and brings even innocent willfulness to wreck. Euripides sees the tragic conflict of the traditional bloodwite with reverence to a mother as leading to madness. Within the compass of the few dramas left to us from the Greek stage the tragedies of human will in a few typical personages are seen to be as various as they are convincing. Even the rich variety of the great Elizabethan period does not make them seem meager. Rather they exhibit the dramatic richness of the typical. By the very fact of being embodied in flesh and blood any “illustrious person” begins to be real. Even the allegorical figure of Everyman in the mediæval morality—and the Greek _dramatis personæ_ were never allegorical—has held modern audiences because each spectator recognized himself with his secret foes and friends. That the persons of the Greek stage were few and familiar, then, was not of itself a disadvantage. The tragedies of a few famous families can strike pity and fear into all families who know the bitterness of hate. Moreover, the restriction to familiar themes, the exclusion of novelty from plot, focused attention upon conception and movement. Playwright and audience alike looked for originality not in subject, but in art. Comparison of play with play was readier and more specific; and the competition of the stage was almost purely artistic. (5). _Plot_