Having once selected his chorus, the necessity rested upon the poet of composing choral odes appropriate to the character chosen. In this they were not always successful. In Euripides’ _Electra_ the chorus consists of virgins from the Argive countryside. At vss. 434-78 they give an elaborate description of Achilles’ armor. Such women would have had no opportunity of seeing Achilles at Troy themselves, and hearsay would scarcely have been so circumstantial. Again, in Euripides’ _Phoenician Maids_, vss. 638-75, 801-27, and 1019-67, the Tyrian girls unroll the scroll of Theban history like antiquarians. Their knowledge is not justified by the fact that Thebes had been founded, some five generations before, by a Phoenician prince. Again, in Euripides’ _Hippolytus_, vss. 1102-19, women of Troezen, the intimates of a local washerwoman (!), discourse upon the conflict between faith and reality! Still again, in Euripides’ _Iphigenia at Aulis_, vss. 794-800, a band of unassuming women from Chalcis throw doubt upon the mythological tradition that Zeus had appeared unto Leda in the form of a swan. The first two examples are somewhat different from the last two. The former arise simply from failure to find a satisfactory solution for the problem under consideration. But the latter reveal the poet dropping his mask and using the chorus as a mouthpiece for his own philosophizing and skepticism. Lest anyone suppose that I exaggerate the difficulty or attribute to Greek playwrights a perplexity which they did not experience, let me point out the confessed failure of a modern poet. Concerning the close of Act III in the second part of _Faust_, Goethe said: “You have observed the character of the chorus is quite destroyed by the mourning song: until this time it has remained thoroughly antique, or has never belied its girlish nature; but here of a sudden it becomes nobly reflecting, and says things such as it has never thought or could think.” And to this Eckermann, uncontradicted, replied: “These little inconsistencies are of no consequence, if by their means a higher degree of beauty is obtained. The song had to be sung, somehow or other; and as there was no other chorus present, the girls were forced to sing it.”[247] That Euripides was equally conscious of what he was doing is proven by the fact that in some cases he makes only too patent an attempt to gloss over the difficulty. Thus, he makes the chorus in the _Electra_ explain that they had heard of Achilles’ shield in the nearby harbor of Nauplia “from one who had fared from Troy” (vss. 452-55); and the Tyrian maidens justify their knowledge of Theban history by saying that they “had received an account at home in an alien tongue” (_Phoenician Maids_, vs. 819). A curious self-consciousness seems to obsess dramatic poets and force them to call to the hearer’s attention the very difficulty that they are striving to avoid. Like some scientists who think they have explained a