Behind this technic is an ideal of singleness. The sacrifice to continuity springs from that _ascesis_ which has been remarked in other fields of Greek art. It has aroused—it will always arouse—the protest of the romantics. An art of singleness, lucidity, cogency, seems to them, as perhaps it seemed already to Euripides, too far removed from life. And not the romanticists only, but after them the realists, have demanded a drama more like life itself, freer, more various, less composed. Perhaps there is no ultimate reconciliation, or perhaps the two conceptions are complementary; but the Greek tragedians seem to answer from their plays: art is not life; it is idealization. B. SENECAN TRAGEDY[18] How far the Latin tragedy of the actual stage followed the great Greeks we can only speculate from a few fragments and from the references of critics. That the lost _Medea_ of Ovid was Greek in more than name the habit of composition seen in the _Heroides_ leaves much doubt. Certainly the tragedies of Seneca, while they revive the great names of Agamemnon, Hippolytus, and Medea, never enter the great art of Athens. Indeed, their relevance at this juncture is for contrast. A Senecan prologue is not only a separable prefix; it may be a summary of the whole plot, as the prologue of Latin comedy. Separable the Senecan chorus is always in providing lyric interludes. It would thereby interrupt the action if the tragedy had the Greek onward course; but instead Seneca’s violent scenes are themselves separable, and his dialogue is sometimes a collection of speeches. Seneca wrote tragic scenes and spaced them with lyric pauses;[19] he did not gather momentum for a total impression. He made his _personæ_ utter their feelings; he did not make them interact. The familiar names, the familiar stories, only heighten the contrast. Senecan tragedy is like Greek tragedy only in non-essentials. The essentials of Greek dramatic composition are not here.