The profession of acting in ancient times required a great variety of accomplishments. The words of a play were partly spoken and partly sung, and it was necessary that the actor should have a knowledge of music, and a carefully cultivated voice. He had to combine the qualities of a modern actor with those of an operatic singer. In fact the Greek drama was not unlike a modern comic opera in this particular respect, that it consisted of a mixture of speaking and of singing. The question as to the mode in which the different portions of the dialogue were delivered, and the proportion which speech bore to song in the parts of the actors, is a matter of very great interest. In the first place there can be little doubt that, with few exceptions, all that portion of the dialogue which was written in the ordinary iambic trimeter was merely spoken or declaimed, with no musical accompaniment whatsoever. This of course constituted by far the larger part of the dialogue. Some remarks of Aristotle in the Poetics may be cited in proof of the above statement. Aristotle expressly says that in certain portions of the drama there was no music at all. In another place he remarks that when dialogue was introduced into tragedy, the iambic trimeter was naturally adopted as the most suitable metre, since it is ‘better adapted for being spoken’ than any other.[785] A second argument is to be found in the practice of the Roman stage. In two of the manuscripts of Plautus there are marks in the margin to discriminate between the portions of the play which were spoken, and the portions which were sung. The result is to show that, while the rest of the play was sung, the iambic trimeters were always spoken.[786] As Roman comedy was a close and faithful imitation of the Greek, it follows almost as a matter of certainty that the iambic trimeters were spoken in the Greek drama also. It is true that in one place Lucian contemptuously remarks about the tragic actor, that he ‘occasionally even sings the iambic lines’.[787] But this statement, at the very most, cannot be held to prove more than that in Lucian’s time iambic passages were sometimes sung or chanted. It is no proof that such a practice ever existed in the classical period. It is quite possible that in the second century A.D., when the chorus had either disappeared from tragedy, or been very much curtailed, some of the more emotional portions of the iambic dialogue were sung or chanted as a sort of equivalent. But Lucian himself speaks of the practice with disapproval, as a sign of bad taste and degeneracy. In the best period of the drama there can be little doubt that the ordinary iambics were spoken. The only exception was in cases where iambic lines occurred in close connexion with lyrical metres. For instance, iambics are sometimes inserted in the midst of a lyrical passage. At other times speeches in iambics alternate with speeches in a lyrical metre, and the pairs of speeches are bound