ABSTRACT
Aeschylus will do anything. It seems impossible to reduce his dramatic procedure to any kind of system. For example: some of his plots are full of action, like the second half of the Choephori and the whole of the Eumenides, yet for most of the time the Septem and the Supplices are quite static, the Prometheus has a chief actor who cannot move, and consists almost entirely of speeches, and the Persae is nearly all narrative. In the Eumenides he manages what are virtually five actors with-the greatest of ease; in the Supplices he cannot manage even two-a fact that is the more interesting now that we can no longer assume that Aeschylus wrote the play in his comparative youth, when he had not yet learned how to use the two actors.1 It is the same with his character-drawing: on the one hand we find vivid portraits or sketches, as of Clytemnestra or the Nurse; on the other, mere outlines, as of Pelasgus or Danaus or Xerxes.
