Conventional as this is in making the usual contrast between Æschylus and Euripides, with Sophocles as a golden mean, it defines these distinctions afresh with suggestive precision. Moreover, the essay is free from the usual preoccupation with diction. What is said on that point, though not original, is tersely subordinated. If the manuscript is complete, therefore, the close upon the quotation from Aristophanes gives a false emphasis; for the criticism as a whole is quite different from the usual comparison of style with style. Plot, indeed, is not developed extensively as a separate item; but it is clearly implied in the treatment of characterization. The constant theme is motivation, the bringing out of character through the movement of the plot, the dramatic management of persons through interaction. Thus Dio has made his criticism singularly consistent. Instead of merely appreciating one dramatist after the other, he has made his comparison progressive. The oral criticism uttered by Greek and Roman rhetors of the Empire, we may guess from what has survived in manuscript, was not often either so sustained or so free from the bias of rhetoric. Perhaps Dio’s unusual grasp came from his missionary sense of the tradition of Hellenism. D. PLUTARCH’S _HOW YOUTH SHOULD READ POETRY_[26] Literary criticism has often taken direction from philosophy. In ancient criticism such a slant was habitual. Most ancient critics show definite preoccupation with some school of philosophy.[27] For example, there was a Stoic theory of style; and “the æsthetic theories of Panætius are reproduced in the first book of Cicero’s _De officiis_.”[28] Such cases are typical even to the involving of æsthetics with ethics; for ancient literary criticism, more generally and avowedly than modern, is ethical. Aristotle is almost alone in proposing for poetic principles frankly æsthetic. The general tendency of ancient criticism is to give poetic a moral color. This ethical direction of critical thought confirmed the tendency to conceive poetic in terms of rhetoric. Not only are the implications of rhetoric inevitably moral, but the theories of rhetoric associated with ancient theories of morals were often extended to include even poetic expression. Ancient poetic was thus rhetoricated partly by being moralized.