longer plays of his own day), followed by a satyric drama. The practice did not die till the middle period of Euripides. His Cyclops is the one satyr-play extant, while his Alkêstis is a real drama acted as a concluding piece to three tragedies.
The Greek word for actor, 'hypocritês' means 'answerer.' The poet was really the actor; but if he wanted to develop his solitary declamation into dialogue, he needed some one to answer him. The chorus was normally divided into two parts, as the system of strophe and antistrophe testifies. The poet perhaps took for answerers the leaders of these two parts. At any rate, 'three actors' are regularly found in the fully-developed tragedy. The old round choir consisted of fifty dancers and a poet: the full tragic company of forty-eight dancers, two 'answerers,' and a poet. That was all that the so-called 'chorêgus'—the rich citizen who undertook the expenses of the performance—was ever bound to supply; and munificent as this functionary often was in other respects, his 'parachorêgêmata,' or gifts of supererogation, never took the form of a fourth actor in the proper sense. Nor did he provide four changes of costume for the whole forty-eight dancers; they appeared twelve at a time in the four plays of the tetralogy. The tradition says loosely that Thespis had one actor, Æschylus two, and Sophocles three, though sometimes it is Æschylus who introduced the third. As a matter of fact, it was the state, not the poet, which gave fixed prizes to the actors, and settled the general conduct of the Dionysus Feast. Accordingly, when we find an ancient critic attributing particular scenic changes to particular poets, this as a rule only means that the changes appeared to him to occur for
