We thus pass from one problem to another: Why this disparity between the technique of tragedy and comedy? Must we suppose that the comic dramatists were more clever artists than their tragic confrères? By no means. Comedy was more mobile and reacted more quickly to the actual conditions of contemporaneous life; tragedy was more conventional, never could free itself entirely from the power of tradition, and could only slowly modify that tradition. The situation is clearly revealed in the field of meter. In the iambic trimeters written by Aeschylus a trisyllabic substitution (tribrach, anapaest, or dactyl) for the pure disyllabic iambus occurs only once in about twenty-five verses. In the earliest plays of Euripides such resolutions appear once in sixteen verses but gradually increase to a maximum of one in every alternate verse.[273] On the contrary, in the comedies of Aristophanes they are found in almost every line. Now we are not to suppose that Euripides required a lifetime in order to learn how to use resolutions with freedom or that he was never able to gain the facility of Aristophanes. Nor are we to suppose that Sophocles, whose iambics resemble those of Aeschylus, was never able to master this expedient. In both cases we see merely the power which convention and tradition exercised over tragedy. And the same influences made themselves felt in the comparatively archaic technique of tragic dialogue and tended to keep the tragic playwrights from making full use of their resources.