The second compensation for the absence of a playbill was provided within the plays themselves. First, with reference to the imaginary scene of action. The mythological stories which uniformly supplied the tragic playwrights with their themes were always definitely localized, and the tragic poets seemed to feel the necessity of indicating the place of action. This was commonly done by having an actor refer to “this land of so-and-so,” or even address it or some conspicuous object. At the beginning of Sophocles’ _Electra_ the aged servant says to Orestes, “This is ancient Argos for which you longed” (vs. 4); in the _Bacchanals_, Dionysus in a typical Euripidean prologue states, “I come to this land of the Thebans” (vs. 1); Apollo begins Euripides’ _Alcestis_ with the words, “O house of Admetus!” (vs. 1); and Eteocles in Aeschylus’ _Seven against Thebes_ addresses the spectators, “O citizens of Cadmus” (vs. 1). When the scene is changed within a play each locality is clearly identified. Thus at the beginning of Aeschylus’ _Eumenides_, Delphi is indicated as the scene in the usual way; a little later Apollo bids Orestes “go to the city of Pallas” (vs. 79), and still later, when the shift is supposed to have taken place, Orestes enters and says, “O Queen Athena, I come at the bidding of Loxias” (vs. 235). Euripides was most punctilious about this matter: he usually identified his scene within the first five lines and always within the first fifty. Aeschylus and Sophocles were not always so particular: in the _Antigone_, Thebes is not mentioned until vs. 101; and in the _Persians_, though it early becomes apparent that the action is laid in Persia, Susa is not actually shown to be the place of action before vs. 761. On the other hand, Euripides sometimes plays a little joke upon his audience; for example, the _Andromache_ begins, “O pride of Asia, city of Thebe, whence I came to Priam’s princely halls as Hector’s bride,” as if the scene were laid in Asia Minor; but in vs. 16 we learn that the scene is really placed in Phthia!