A certain dulness in the audience is suggested by the fact that Terence was reproached for combining two Greek plots in one Latin play. He protests, naturally, that this is his right; and the _Phormio_ shows his ability to weave an intrigue clearly and attractively. The dramatic lack mistakenly ascribed to his stories is rather of salience, especially of visibly significant action before our eyes. That this can vivify even conventional characters in a conventional plot is the chief dramatic message of Plautus. He trusts the intelligence of his audience so little as to make his prologue an oral program, a _catalogue raisonné_, explicit to the last degree.[30] With Terence he resorts to the aside, the soliloquy, and the convention of people on the stage together who do not see each other—all these when they could be obviated by a little dramatic ingenuity. Where Plautus spends his ingenuity is on lively realism of detail, on abundance of stage “business.” He holds a scene, turning and returning a situation, until he has used its whole value. Though this is sometimes tiresome for reading, it shows good theatrical sense of the actual audience. He may have learned it from acting. Nothing is more instructive to playwrights than this filling of a simple outline. The habit is almost the opposite of the compression of Greek tragedy, and the New Comedy is doubtless inferior to tragedy in every point of plot; but none the less it vindicates clearly the value and the Plautine method of imaginative amplification. FOOT-NOTES: [1] All the larger histories of Greek literature appraise Greek tragedy, trace its history, and cite monographs for special study. The study of Greek tragedy as drama should begin with the plays themselves. These should be read—and with happily increasing frequency they may even be seen—before reading further about them; for they are now available not only in many editions, but also in many translations. Translation, though it must fall short or go wide of the original diction, conveys the larger dramatic movement, the characteristic dramaturgy; and Sir Gilbert Murray’s translation of Aristotle’s main example, _Œdipus Rex_, seeks especially the dramatic values. Very instructive comparisons may be made by reading all eight tragedies presenting the story of Orestes and his house, the “Oresteia”: the _Agamemnon_, _Choephoræ_, and _Eumenides_ of Æschylus, the only extant trilogy; the _Electra_ of Sophocles; and the _Orestes_, _Electra_, _Iphigenia in Aulis_, and _Iphigenia in Tauris_ of Euripides. Beside the _Œdipus Rex_ of Sophocles most critics would place his _Antigone_; and beside the _Medea_, the most popular play of Euripides, his _Alcestis_ and his _Trojan Women_. But it is no great task to read all extant Greek tragedies.