who read Shakespeare and then turn to Athenian tragedies are puzzled. They do not understand those Attic creations. They think them rather cold, with somewhat slender plot, containing few surprises. Italians and Frenchmen can understand them; the average Englishman cannot. The poetry is often admirable, but the action appears strangely simple, and for the most part over obvious. The very name “tragedy” seems sometimes misapplied. But by “tragedy” the Greeks did not necessarily mean a play which ends in death and disaster. Such an end was, indeed, usual, and hence the modern meaning of the term. But the _Eumenides_ of Aeschylus ends happily, as do the _Alcestis_ of Euripides and the _Philoctêtes_ of Sophocles. The Greeks meant rather the working out of some great and powerful situation affording occasion for sensations of pity and fear. Here was “the luxury of grief.” The spectators knew that there would be some climax in the drama; but whether it would issue in good or evil depended on the poet; they only knew that their feelings would be powerfully worked upon by great poetry greatly delivered. For the rest, they required no startling ingenuity of plot or variety of incident. The three great dramatists in artistic sequence are Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. These were all alive together, but Aeschylus was old when Euripides was young. The appearance of all these in one epoch is exactly paralleled by the cluster of superlative dramatists in the Elizabethan age or in the France of Louis XIV. Of Sophocles it has been said that he represented men as they ought to be, and of Euripides that he represented them as they were. The dictum is hardly true, and, if it were, it must be noted that, whereas to “hold the mirror up to nature” is as much the function of Greek tragedy as of English, it is no function of Greek drama to be a literal copy of literal everyday human experience. In Aeschylus all is in the grand style of an awe-inspiring simplicity. Take his _Prometheus Bound_. We have a majestic Titan figure bound to a desolate rock, there to remain in punishment for an offence against the law of Zeus. He had bestowed fire and other boons on mortal men. Therefore Zeus pinioned him on Caucasus for tens of thousands of years. In one way, and one only, could he gain his freedom—by disclosing to Zeus a certain secret of fate. But Prometheus would not repent of having exercised his benevolent freewill against the decree of Heaven. He gloried in his action; he refused to deliver up the secret. Now during the whole play the figure of Prometheus does not move: he is fixed fast. There is no action on his part, nothing but speech. Different gods, demigods, and a mortal visit him, condole with him, advise him, or threaten him. He remains firm to the end, the spectacle of an utterly resolute heart rebelling against fate.