The important thing to observe is what Mr. F. M. Cornford has explained in his _Thucydides Mythistoricus_ (pp. 144 ff.), that a Greek tragedy normally proceeds in two planes or two worlds. When the actors are on the stage we are following the deeds and fates of so many particular individuals, lovers, plotters, enemies, or whatever they are, at a particular point of time and space. When the stage is empty and the Choral Odes begin, we have no longer the particular acts and places and persons but something universal and eternal. The body, as it were, is gone and the essence remains. We have the greatness of love, the vanity of revenge, the law of eternal retribution, or perhaps the eternal doubt whether in any sense the world is governed by righteousness. Thus the talk about improbability with which we started falls into its proper insignificance. The Chorus in Euripides is frequently blamed by modern scholars on the ground that "it does not further the action," that its presence is "improbable," or its odes "irrelevant." The answer is that none of these things constitute the business of the Chorus; its business is something considerably higher and more important. Of action and relevancy we will speak later. They are both closely connected with the question of verisimilitude. And as for verisimilitude, we simply do not think of it. We are not imitating the outside of life. We are expressing its soul, not depicting its body. And if we did attempt verisimilitude we should find that in a Chorus it is simply unattainable. In Nelson's case a Chorus of Sailors would be every bit as improbable as a Chorus of Mermaids or Angels, and on the whole rather more strikingly so. If we try to think of the most effective Choruses in modern tragedies, I do not think we shall hit on any bands of Strolling Players or Flower Girls or Church Choirs or other Choruses that aim at "naturalness"; we shall probably go straight to the Choruses of Spirits in _Prometheus Unbound_ or those of The Ages and The Pities in Mr. Hardy's _Dynasts_. The Chorus belongs not to the plane of ordinary experience, where people are real and act and make apposite remarks, but to that higher world where in Mr. Cornford's words "metaphor, as we call it, is the very stuff of life." With very few exceptions, Greek Choruses are composed of beings who are naturally the denizens or near neighbours of such a world. Sometimes they are frankly supernatural, as in the _Eumenides_, or half supernatural, as in the _Bacchae_; sometimes they are human beings seen through the mist of a great emotion, like the weeping Rachels of the _Suppliant Women_; the captives of the _Trojan Women_ or the _Iphigenîa_; the old men who dream dreams in the _Heracles_. Even if they start as common men or women, sooner or later they become transformed.