But at the same time that the chorus conferred this liberty it restricted it. The presence of such a body of performers at all the scenes of a play could seldom be entirely natural. Yet that the same persons should be found standing about, in the same place, at various intervals during the day is conceivable, though it does not often happen. But that they should be found there at every moment chosen for representation during weeks or months or years is inconceivable and ridiculous. Only by shortening the supposed action of the piece and the supposed lacunae in the plot could the convention be tolerated at all. However, Professor Verrall was lacking in historical imagination when he maintained that “the point at which the discrepancy between the facts presented and the natural facts began to be flagrant and intolerable was when the audience were told to pass in imagination _from day to day_. Night is the great natural interrupter of actions and changer of situations” (_op. cit._, p. 1). To the spoiled theatergoer of today this would seem to be true. But the ancient drama knew no lighting effects (see p. 224, above). On the stage day and night looked the same to them. Scenes at midday, in the darkness of night, in the gloom of Hades, were alike enacted in the glare of the sun. Ostensibly the entire action of the anonymous _Rhesus_ and much of that in Euripides’ _Cyclops_ fell within the hours of night, and characters frequently addressed the heavenly constellations in (actual) daylight. So far were the playwrights from avoiding the discrepancy involved in passing from one day to another that in Terence’s translation of Menander’s _Self-Tormentor_, when a night is supposed to elapse between Acts II and III, attention is deliberately called to it by Chremes’ words, “It is beginning to grow light here now” (vs. 410). In my opinion this play extends over about as much time as the conditions which obtained in ancient drama would normally allow; and it should be noted that it does not exceed the twenty-four hours permitted by the unity of time.