e tales of the favourite champions soon
passed into dialogue. On the Greek stage the chorus was always before the
audience; the curtain was never dropped, as we should say; and change of
place being therefore, in general, impossible, the absurd notion of
condemning it merely as improbable in itself was never entertained by any
one. If we can believe ourselves at Thebes in one act, we may believe
ourselves at Athens in the next.

If a story lasts twenty-four hours or twenty-four years, it is equally
improbable. There seems to be no just boundary but what the feelings
prescribe. But on the Greek stage, where the same persons were perpetually
before the audience, great judgment was necessary in venturing on any such
change. The poets never, therefore, attempted to impose on the senses by
bringing places to men, but they did bring men to places, as in the
well-known instance in the _Eumenides_, where, during an evident
retirement of the chorus from the orchestra, the scene is changed to
Athens, and Orestes is first introduced in the temple of Minerva, and the
chorus of Furies come in afterwards in pursuit of him.

In the Greek drama there were no formal divisions into scenes and acts;
there were no means, therefore, of allowing for the necessary lapse of
time between one part of the dialogue and another, and unity of time in a
strict sense was, of course, impossible. To overcome that difficulty of
accounting for time, which is effected on the modern stage by dropping a
curtain, the judgment and great genius of the ancients supplied music and
measured motion, and with the lyric ode filled up the vacuity. In the
story of the _Agamemnon_ of AEschylus, the capture of Troy is supposed to
be announced by a fire lighted on the Asiatic shore, and the transmission
of the signal by successive beacons to Mycenae. The signal is first seen at
the 21st line, and the herald from Troy itself enters at the 486th, and
Agamemnon himself at the 783rd line. But the practical absurdity of this
was not felt by the audience, who, in imagination stretched minutes into
hours, while they listened to the lofty narrative odes of the chorus which
almost entirely filled up the interspace. Another fact deserves attention
here, namely, that regularly on the Greek stage a drama, or acted story,
consisted in reality of three dramas, called together a trilogy, and
performed consecutively in the course of one day. Now you may conceive a
tragedy of Shakespeare'