The Greek drama embraced a very limited number of stories and events, and they were all thoroughly known to every audience in the country. The incidents and tragic occurrences so wonderfully illustrated by the genius of their tragic poets, are almost all to be found sketched out in the _Odyssey_ of Homer, or in the successive disasters of the fated race of Oedipus. The sacrifice of Iphigenia to procure fair gales when setting out for Troy, the foundation of the exquisite tragedy by Euripides of _Iphigenia in Aulis_; the subsequent meeting of her with her brothers, the basis of _Iphigenia in Tauris_, by the same poet; the murder of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra and her adulterous lover; the revenge of Electra and Orestes, who put their mother and her lover to death; the subsequent remorse and woful fate of the avenging brother and sister--form so many tragedies, which for centuries entranced the Athenian audience. The sorrows of Andromache, when torn from her home after the death of Hector and sack of Troy, and subjected to the jealousy of the daughter of Menelaus; the deep woes of Hecuba, who saw in one day her daughter sacrificed on the tomb of Achilles, and the corpse of her son washed ashore, after having been perfidiously murdered by his Thracian host, as they appeared in the thrilling verses of Euripides--were all previously well known to the Grecian audience. If to these we add the multiplied disasters of the line of Oedipus; the despair of that unhappy man at his incestuous marriage with Jocasta; his subsequent sorrow when an exile, poor and bowed down by misfortune; the dreadful fate which befell his sons when they fell by each others' hands before the walls of Thebes; and the heroic self-sacrifice of Antigone to procure the rites of sepulture for her beloved and innocent brother--we shall find we have embraced nearly the whole dramas which exercised the genius of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.