all with dignity and elevation of feeling.” In connection with the foregoing arises another point: when the line between tragedy and comedy was drawn so sharply, we should hardly expect to find the writer of tragedies and the writer of comedies united in one and the same person. As a matter of fact not a single case is known in all Greek drama. “The sock and buskin were not worn by the same poet”;[299] the Greek theater knew no Shakespeare. This very versatility of the Elizabethan poet helps to explain why his tragedies contain much that is humorous and his comedies much that is painful, a characteristic which has been so offensive to his French critics. Very similar is the situation among the actors. At the City Dionysia, beginning with 449 B.C., a prize was awarded to the best actor in the tragedies brought out each year, and about 325 B.C. a contest was established for comic actors. At the Lenaea, prizes were offered for comic and for tragic actors from about 442 B.C. and about 433 B.C., respectively. These arrangements would tend still further to keep each actor within his specialty. No performer in both tragic and comic rôles is indubitably known until Praxiteles, who performed at Delphi in 106 B.C. as a comedian and nine years later as a tragedian. Two other instances occurred a little later. In the second century B.C. Thymoteles seems to have been both a tragic poet and a comic actor. These examples exhaust the list in pre-Christian times. In the preceding discussion some changes in the festival program have already been mentioned, for the program was not, like Athena, fully grown at birth. For example, the requirement that each tragic poet should present three tragedies and a satyric drama in a group did not go back to the introduction of tragedy by Thespis in 534 B.C. and cannot be established for any poet before Aeschylus. It is likely that this regulation, together with the main outlines of the program as known at a later period, dates from about 501 B.C., when the festival seems to have been reorganized (see p. 319, below). This is the period with which the official records began, when also the κῶμοι, that is, the volunteer performances from which formal comedy was derived, were first added to the festival. In addition to the changes that have already been noticed we may now mention the following: It was not customary for plays to be performed more than once at Athens. It is true that the more successful plays in the city might be repeated at the Rural Dionysia, which were held in the various demes (townships) during the month Posideon (December), and that some of these provincial festivals, notably that at the Piraeus, were almost as splendid as those at Athens itself; yet the fact remains that at Athens the repetition of a play was an exceptional thing. Thus, when Aeschylus died in 456 B.C., honor was shown him by the provision that his plays might be brought out in rivalry with the