scarcely to have received the attention which it deserves; viz., the nature of the task imposed on the ten judges, who, after the performance of the tragedies, had to arrange the three contending poets in order of merit. In the case of a trilogy like the Oresteia, where the three plays formed an artistic unit, the task of judging would be comparatively easy; the poet came before the judges with what was essentially a single work. But it would be otherwise when a poet offered four plays, unrelated in subject, appealing to different ranges of thought or sentiment, marked by incommensurable beauties and dissimilar faults. If this poet's two competitors also offered four unconnected plays each, the judges would have before them three groups of independent compositions. We may assume that, at the Great Dionysia, the aspirants to the Tragic prize would, as a rule, be fairly well matched against each other in respect of general dramatic calibre; such an inference is made reasonable by the fact that those great dramatists, from whom a few plays have come down to us, were occasionally defeated—even when exhibiting works which in our eyes are supreme masterpieces—by other dramatists whose works have perished. It is not permissible, then, to suppose that the task of the judges would often be simplified by a clear pre-eminence in one poet. And, given a well-matched trio, the kind of difficulty which would confront the judges may best be imagined, perhaps, by taking an illustration from English literature. Let us suppose a contest
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