That tragedy should have a full close, carrying the action through to a καταστροφή, or state of rest, must have been with the Greeks a principle; for it was an almost invariable habit. Though the tragedies of other and later nations do not always end so, they too have the full close often enough to suggest that audiences generally desire it.[17] Whether or not this is true of audiences, it seems true of playwrights in proportion as they work, as the Greeks worked, for singleness. In Greek tragedy the end crowns the work in the sense that the close completes the interpretation. The close of the action is the issue of the characterization. Characterization in Greek tragedy, more consistently than in any other, is motivation. In some Greek plays it offers hardly anything else. The characters are drawn for the play, not for themselves. The “part” is subordinated to the theme. When we see that this is true even for Medea, a “part” to be coveted by any modern actress, we realize that the significance of the whole play was habitually in the Greek conception the main object. This explains the full close as the goal of a steady movement, and as the final stage of the idealization which habitually shaped both characters and plot. And where a modern playwright has worked with the same intention, we find again and again, as in _Othello_, the same full close. The ultimate technical question, then, is What is continuity worth? Euripides composed sometimes as if it were worth less than salience. He has even been called romantic; and the influence of Greek tragedy, since it was overwhelmingly his among the Romans and in the middle ages, may seem after all to be hardly the influence of Sophoclean movement. But the great influence of Euripides is largely of his poetry apart from his dramaturgy. It reigns through a time when tragedy was waning, and through a later time when there was hardly any drama at all. He is still the most interesting of Greek dramatists to read. On the other hand, those of his plays which are now most effective as stage performances have the typical Greek continuity; nor does he often depart from the type very far. That the type has a controlling idea of continuity is evident. To the Greek dramatists generally continuity seemed to be worth much technical labor and even much sacrifice. The crown of their technical skill was to carry the theme, to develop it, to fulfill it at the last.