Cephisophon) by whom the play was performed,—altogether it may be assumed that even at the festival most people, if intellectually qualified to understand or care for his meaning, were not left in doubt of it. But for those who were, there was still abundant opportunity. The effect produced by a play at the state-performance (and in the case of Euripides more especially) was neither the whole nor the chief part of what the author might hope to achieve. As was said before, we know that Euripides at least was widely read, and this at a time when habitual reading was a new force. And what was even more important in a society so constituted as Athens, we know by direct testimony, and it is manifest from the nature of Athenians, that plays which received what we have ventured to call the 'advertisement' of the Dionysia, were copiously talked about. Here again we are perhaps liable not perfectly to realize a condition of things so different from our own. For a play of these days, the stage-effect is not only the first thing but almost the last. Our reading body is so scattered, so disparate, so distracted, and it has so many ways of obtaining imaginative amusement without the intervention of the theatre, that even with the help of printed criticism a dramatist would not be well-advised in counting upon any sustained and harmonious impression from the interchange of ideas among the members of his fluctuating audiences. But the audience of Euripides was always assembled. All the year round the few thousand men and few score women—'one among many, not alien from the muse'[1]—who made Euripides' world, were going in and out of the same narrow streets and markets, gardens and colonnades, courts and quays, sitting-rooms and supper-rooms, crossing and conversing incessantly. And whenever the group in contact for the instant had a mind to talk literature, which, it is plain, they often did, no topic was so obvious, so surely dominant as the plays of the Dionysia, positively the only writings, except the school Homer, with which this people of talkers were generally familiar. It is this state of things, this unique opportunity of mutual comment and elucidation, which alone, to my mind, makes intelligible the existence of such works as those of the Attic tragedians. Speaking for myself, I cannot imagine a man, much less a
- ↑ Medea, 1084.
