In the third place, perhaps it is unnecessary to point out that acceleration of time is possible in all drama quite apart from an empty stage or choral songs. Instances can be cited even from dramatists who owned no allegiance to the unities—note, for example, the striking of the half-hour every twenty or twenty-five lines at the close of Marlowe’s _Doctor Faustus_. In Aristophanes’ _Plutus_ the blind god is escorted from the stage for a night’s treatment in the temple of Asclepius (vs. 626), the chorus remaining in its place but apparently not singing.[321] At the very next verse one of the escort returns to announce that Plutus has recovered his sight and to relate the events of the night! But here again, despite the transition from one day to another, the action does not exceed twenty-four hours. In the same writer’s _Acharnians_, Amphitheus goes from Athens to Sparta and returns again during the dialogue contained between vss. 133 and 174. There is no hint, however, that his reappearance is premature or that his trip would occupy more than the apparent space allotted it. But neither the ordinary acceleration of time in drama nor the use of stasima nor yet the stage left empty by the retirement of chorus and actors tells the whole story of Greek practice. Nowadays the playbill clearly informs us how much time has elapsed between acts, and the piece is constructed accordingly. If a character in the third act has occasion to refer to something which occurred in the first act ten years or so ago he must not speak of it as if it happened yesterday. Not so in ancient drama. The Greek audiences had no playbills, and even the introductions to Greek plays prepared by Alexandrian scholars contained no such information as this. I fancy that the Greek dramatist never laid his finger upon a given line and said: “Here we must assume a lapse of several days, or months, or years.” The events of a drama, regardless of actualities, were conventionally treated as occupying no more than twenty-four hours. A like convention was customary in the Greek epic: when once a Homeric character was given a definite age or form he maintained each unchanged throughout.[322] For example, Telemachus is introduced in the first book of the _Odyssey_ as a young man just reaching his majority, ready and anxious to assume the duties of manhood; but nine years before, when he could not have been more than twelve years of age, he is spoken of as just as old and as already a man among men (cf. Book xi, vss. 185 f. and 449). Again, in the third book of the _Iliad_, Helen is pictured in the prime of youth and beauty; ten years later and thirty years after her elopement with Paris she is likened to the same goddess as is the Maiden Nausicaa (cf. _Odyssey_ iv. 121 f. and vi. 102 ff.). In Greek drama time relations are similarly ignored. At the opening of Aeschylus’ _Agamemnon_ the watchman sights the signal fire which announces the capture of Troy, and within a few hundred lines