More and more a moralist as his life advanced, turning from rhetor into preacher, Dio nevertheless maintains a variety reminding us that this form of oratory had great range. The prelude of his _Euboica_, extensively descriptive of simple frontier life, is almost a short story. Quite different from the conventional expatiation, which Dio elsewhere does not despise, it shows him expert not only in the theory of narrative, but also in its practise. Some of his discourses are less speeches than what we should call essays. The one on Practise in Speaking[25] is in topics, plan, and style quite conventional. The remarkable one on Greek drama is as it stands an essay in literary criticism. By the insertion of recited passages it could easily and effectively have been expanded into a lecture; but even without these it is both sustained and suggestive. DIO CHRYSOSTOM, ORATIO LII ÆSCHYLUS, SOPHOCLES, AND EURIPIDES, OR THE BOW OF PHILOCTETES 1. [I rose early, walked, meditated, prayed, exercised, bathed, breakfasted.] 2. I chanced upon certain tragedies of the masters, Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, all upon the same theme. It is that of the theft of the bow and arrows of Philoctetes—perhaps one should say the seizure. At any rate, Philoctetes was deprived of his arms by Odysseus, and himself brought to Troy, largely of his own free will, partly also by the persuasion of necessity, since he was bereft of the arms which provided at once his living on the island, his courage in such disease, and his glory. 3. Well, I feasted on the spectacle, and I reflected that even if I had been at Athens in their time, I could not have seen all three great men in competition. Some, indeed, did see the competition of the young Sophocles with the old Æschylus, and of the older Sophocles with the younger Euripides; but Euripides was quite outside of the generation of Æschylus, and competed with him seldom, if ever, in the same drama. My having all three to read together seemed a revel, and a fresh consolation for my inability [to see them]. 4. Well, I imagined myself putting the plays on quite splendidly, and tried to fix my attention as a judge of the first tragic choruses. But though I had taken my oath, I could not have given a decision; nor, for all me, would any of those masters have been held inferior. The greatness of mind in Æschylus and his sense of tradition, as well as his austerity of thought and expression, seemed appropriate to tragedy and to the ancient heroic ethics—nothing contrived or glib or low. 5. Even Odysseus he introduced as shrewd and crafty in the way of that time, [a way] so far removed from the baseness of to-day that what is really traditional [in Æschylus] seems beyond those who now try to be simple and high-minded.