among the ancient Greek actors. Such being the requirements of the Greek stage, it was necessary that the actors should receive a musical education as elaborate as that of a professional singer in modern times. Cicero informs us that the Greek tragic actors spent many years in the training of their voices, and used to test them, before each performance, by running over all their notes from the highest to the lowest.[810] They had to be careful and abstemious in their diet, as excess in eating and drinking was found to be inconsistent with the possession of a good voice.[811] The importance attached to this particular quality in the actor’s art was not always beneficial in its results. Actors were sometimes inclined to violate good taste by intruding into their performances mere exhibitions of skill in the manipulation of the voice. They were ready to catch the applause of the populace by startling effects, such as imitations of the rushing of streams, the roaring of seas, and the cries of animals.[812] Moreover, it was a common fault among the ancient actors that, as a result of excessive training, their voices sounded artificial and unnatural. There was a special term to denote the forced tone of voice which was caused by too much exercise. Aristotle remarks that one of the principal excellences of the tragic actor Theodorus was the thoroughly natural character of his delivery. Unlike other actors, he seemed to speak with his own voice.[813] § 9. _Style of Greek Acting._ Both in tragic and comic acting a loud and exceedingly distinct utterance must have been a matter of necessity. But in comedy the tone of voice adopted appears, as was only natural, to have been much less sonorous than that of the tragic actors, and to have approached far more closely to the style of ordinary conversation.[814] In tragedy, on the other hand, it was the conventional practice to declaim the verses with a loud and ringing intonation, and to fill the theatre with a deep volume of sound. Ancient authors often refer to the sonorous utterances of the tragic stage.[815] With bad actors the practice would easily degenerate into mere bombast. Pollux mentions a series of epithets, such as ‘booming’ and ‘bellowing’, which were applied to actors guilty of such exaggeration. Socrates and Simylus, the tragic actors with whom Aeschines went on tour in the country districts of Attica, derived their nickname of ‘the Ranters’ from a fault of this kind.[816]