CHAPTER IX.
PROLOGUES, EPILOGUES, LESSER CHARACTERISTICS, &C.
96. The use of prologues was common among the earlier dramatists. The Eumenides of Æschylus and the Trachiniæ of Sophocles afford signal examples, and other plays of both, such as the Agamemnon and Electra, the Choephoræ and the Prometheus, have substantially the same kind of opening. But Euripides is so constant in its use that critics assume a mutilation in the few cases where it is absent, very unjustly, as I have already pointed out. It was, moreover, the supplement most easily added by subsequent arrangers when they produced the old master's play before a strange or ignorant audience, which required a special introduction to the subject of the piece. This, indeed, seems from the beginning the proper intention of the prologue, and of great use to an audience who had no printed arguments, and apparently no play-bills, and may often have required some refreshing of their legendary lore. But to us these prologues reach too far into the action, and anticipate, more than we desire, the interest of the plot I have above (p. 45) indicated that this arose from the traditional habit of the dramatists, of taking up well-known and national subjects, and depending rather upon effective treatment for their success than upon surprises or novelties of plot. Euripides followed no fixed rule as regards the characters to whom he assigned his prologue. In about an equal number of cases he has given it to the leading personage, to a secondary
