Frequently the opening soliloquy of the prologue was spoken by a divinity, and in Euripides’ _Hecabe_ it is spoken by a ghost! Their prophetic powers enabled such personages to predict the course of the action. Thus in Euripides’ _Hippolytus_ (vss. 42 ff.), Aphrodite declares that Phaedra’s love for her stepson will be made known to his father, whose curses will bring Hippolytus to destruction, and that Phaedra herself will die, though with name untarnished; and these things actually come to pass in the play. Indeed, an outstanding difference between ancient and modern tragedy, doubtless arising from the fact that the former dealt with traditional material whose outlines were fairly well known to at least some and could be modified only within certain limits, consists in this, that the Greek tragedians usually made little or no attempt to keep their audiences in the dark as to the outcome. It is true that there are occasional exceptions. For example, in Euripides’ _Ion_, Hermes explains in the prologue that Apollo is Ion’s father by a secret union, but expressly states that the Delphian deity will bring the youth into his just deserts without letting his own misdeed become known. Consequently when Ion’s very life seems to depend upon his parentage transpiring, the hearts of the spectators are harried with fear for his safety until Athena appears in her brother’s stead as deus ex machina and unexpectedly reveals his secret after all. Euripides’ _Orestes_ provides another instance of an attempt to baffle the spectators. The contrast of a few such cases, however, serve only to call attention to the more usual procedure. Here again the Greek practice has not lacked defenders. Lessing wrote:[367] “I am far removed from believing with the majority of those who have written on the dramatic art that the dénouement should be hid from the spectator. I rather think it would not exceed my powers to rouse the very strongest interest in the spectator even if I resolved to make a work where the dénouement was revealed in the first scene. Everything must be clear for the spectator, he is the confidant of each person, he knows everything that occurs, everything that has occurred, and there are hundreds of instances when we cannot do better than to tell him straight out what is going to occur.” A somewhat different point of view is presented by Professor Murray:[368] “But why does the prologue let out the secret of what is coming? Why does it spoil the excitement beforehand? Because, we must answer, there is no secret, and the poet does not aim at that sort of excitement. A certain amount of plot-interest there certainly is: we are never told exactly what will happen but only what sort of thing; or we are told what will happen but not how it will happen. But the enjoyment which the poet aims at is not the enjoyment of reading a detective story for the first time; it is that of reading _Hamlet_ or _Paradise Lost_ for the second or fifth or tenth.”