CHORUS. Not so. Stable spears they carry, massy armature of shields. ATOSSA. Who is shepherd of this people? lord (ἐπιδεσπόζει) of the Athenian host? CHORUS. Slaves are they to no man living, subject to no earthly name. ATOSSA. How can such repel the onset of a strong united host? CHORUS. _How_ Darius knew in Hellas, when he lost vast armies there. [Blackie’s translation] From a dramatic standpoint these questions are out of place, since Atossa’s ignorance is improbable and is shown to be feigned by vss. 348 and 474 f. The first question is especially artificial. Nevertheless, point by point Atossa has drawn out all the distinctive points of pride in her son’s enemies: their commanding influence, their numbers, their resources, their national weapon, their freedom, and their previous exploits. Aeschylus valued dramatic verisimilitude less highly than the fervent response that each of these couplets would evoke in every Athenian breast. So we see that the tragic playwrights, more subtly than their comic confrères but fully as effectively, knew how to commend themselves to the good graces of the populace by incidents and sentiments no less palatable than the nuts and figs of comedy. If such conduct seem to some to be beneath the dignity of transcendent geniuses like Aeschylus and Euripides, a corrective may be found in the words of Schlegel:[307] “The dramatic poet is, more than any other, obliged to court external form and loud applause. But of course it is only in appearance that he thus lowers himself to his hearers; while, in reality, he is elevating them to himself.” For to set up the Grecian method amongst us with success, it is absolutely necessary to restore, not only their religion and their polity, but to transport us to the same climate in which Sophocles and Euripides writ; or else, by reason of those different circumstances, several things which were graceful and decent with them must seem ridiculous and absurd to us, as several things which would have appeared highly extravagant to them must look proper and becoming with us.—JOHN DENNIS. CHAPTER V THE INFLUENCE OF PHYSICAL CONDITIONS[308]