Such, then, were the general features of the tragedy which the Athenian public, and the married women, including many strangers, assembled to witness in broad daylight under the Attic sky. They were not sparing of their time. They ate a good breakfast before they came. They ate sweetmeats in the theatre when the acting was bad. Each play was short, and there was doubtless an interval of rest. But it is certain that each poet contended as a rule with four plays against his competitors; and as there were certainly three of them, there must have been twelve plays acted; this seems to exceed the endurance of any public, even allowing two days for the performance. We are not fully informed on these points. We do not even know how Sophocles, who contended with single plays, managed to compete against Euripides, who contended with sets of four. But we know that the judges were chosen by lot, and we strongly suspect, from the records of their decisions, that they often decided wrongly. We also know that the poets sought to please the audience by political and patriotic allusions, and to convey their dislike of opposed cities or parties by drawing their representatives in odious colors on the stage. Thus Euripides is never tired of traducing the Spartans in the character of Menelaus. Æschylus fights the battle of the Areopagus in his _Eumenides_. But besides all this, it seems that tragic poets were regarded as the proper teachers of morality, and that the stage among the Greeks occupied somewhat the place of the modern pulpit. This is the very attitude which Racine assumes in the Preface to his _Phèdre_. He suggests that it ought to be considered the best of his plays, because there is none in which he has so strictly rewarded virtue and punished vice.(48) He alters, in his _Iphigénie_, the Greek argument from which he copied, because as he tells us (again in the Preface) it would never do to have so virtuous a person as Iphigenia sacrificed. This, however, would not have been a stumbling-block to the Greek poet, whose capricious and spiteful gods, or whose deep conviction of the stain of an ancestral curse, would justify catastrophies which the Christian poet, with his trust in a benevolent Providence, could not admit. But, indeed, in most other points the so-called imitations of the Greek drama by Racine and his school are anything but imitations. The main characters and the general outline of the plot are no doubt borrowed. The elegance and power of the dialogue are more or less successfully copied. But the natural and familiar scenes, which would have been shocking to the court of Louis XIV.—“ces scenes entremêlées de bas comique, et ces fréquents exemples de mauvais ton et d’une familiarité choquante,” as Barthélémy says—such characters as the guard in the _Antigone_, the nurse in the _Choephorœ_, the Phrygian in the _Orestes_, were carefully expunged. Moreover, love affairs and court