Except that the debate is here so extended, the same device occurs again and again. In Euripides’ _Hecabe_, Polymestor has been enticed within the tents, and cries out that he has been blinded and his children slain but that his enemies will not escape (vss. 1034-40). The chorus of Trojan captive women ask whether they ought not to rush in to help thwart this counter-stroke (vss. 1042 f.), but at once Hecabe appears and obviates the need of their entering (vs. 1044). Similarly, in Euripides’ _Andromache_, vss. 815-19, Hermione’s nurse declares that her strength has given out in trying to prevent her mistress’ suicide, and beseeches the chorus to enter the palace and lend their aid. The slaves acknowledge that they hear the cries of servants from within, which confirm the nurse’s story; but at this moment Hermione herself slips from the restraining clutches of her attendants and darts upon the stage. Less successful is the scene in Euripides’ _Hippolytus_. At vss. 776 ff. a handmaid raises the cry that Phaedra has hanged herself, and begs someone to cut her down. One semi-chorus inquires whether they should not render this service, but the other rejoins that there are attendants nearer at hand to do so and that officious meddlers often endanger their own lives! Immediately thereafter a further cry announces that the queen is dead past recovery (vss. 786 f.). One more illustration will suffice. The failure of the chorus to rescue Medea’s children is doubly motived: first, by the Colchian’s threat to anyone that might interfere (Euripides’ _Medea_, vss. 1053 f.), and secondly, by the fact that the palace doors are barred, so that Jason’s servants have to break them down (vss. 1312 ff.). It has also been conjectured that the chorus’ description of Medea as iron-hearted and like a rock (vss. 1279 ff.) is intended to suggest that they felt unable to cope with so masterful and relentless a creature. This explanation finds some support in the undoubted fact that the necessity of comparative inactivity on the part of the chorus had much to do with the Greek tragedians’ fondness for choruses of women and old men. In speaking of the elders in Aeschylus’ _Agamemnon_ Cornford[270] says that they “cannot enter the palace; not because the door is locked, nor yet because they are feeble old men. Rather they are old men because an impassible barrier of convention is forming between chorus and actors, _and their age gives colour to their powerlessness_.” In concluding this paragraph I wish to point out that the chorus’s inability to enter the background during the play existed quite independently of the threat of murder. In Euripides’ _Ion_ Creusa’s maidservants, by the express permission of their mistress, examine and admire the sculpture on the outer walls of Apollo’s temple at Delphi (vss. 183-218). In real life it would be inevitable that a crowd bent on sight-seeing should soon wish to pass inside and view the omphalus and