ple, as we have noticed above, true Tragedy had always taken its
material from the sacred myths, or heroic sagas, which to the classical
Greek constituted history. But the New Comedy was in the habit of
inventing its plots. Consequently Aristotle falls into using the word
_mythos_ practically in the sense of 'plot', and writing otherwise in a
way that is unsuited to the tragedy of the fifth century. He says that
tragedy adheres to 'the historical names' for an aesthetic reason,
because what has happened is obviously possible and therefore
convincing. The real reason was that the drama and the myth were simply
two different expressions of the same religious kernel (p. 44). Again,
he says of the Chorus (p. 65) that it should be an integral part of the
play, which is true; but he also says that it' should be regarded as one
of the actors', which shows to what an extent the Chorus in his day
was dead and its technique forgotten. He had lost the sense of what the
Chorus was in the hands of the great masters, say in the Bacchae or the
Eumenides. He mistakes, again, the use of that epiphany of a God which
is frequent at the end of the single plays of Euripides, and which seems
to have been equally so at the end of the trilogies of Aeschylus. Having
lost the living tradition, he sees neither the ritual origin nor the
dramatic value of these divine epiphanies. He thinks of the convenient
gods and abstractions who sometimes spoke the prologues of the New
Comedy, and imagines that the God appears in order to unravel the plot.
As a matter of fact, in one play which he often quotes, the _Iphigenia
Taurica_, the plot is actually distorted at the very end in order to
give an opportunity for the epiphany.(1)

(1) See my _Euripides and his Age_, pp. 221-45.

One can see the effect of the tradition also in his treatment of the
terms Anagnorisis and Peripeteia, which Professor Bywater translates
as 'Discovery and Peripety' and Professor Butcher as 'Recognition and
Reversal of Fortune'. Aristotle assumes that these two elements are
normally present in any tragedy, except those which he calls 'simple';
we may say, roughly, in any tragedy that really has a plot. This strikes
a modern reader as a very arbitrary assumption. Reversals of Fortune
of some sort are perhaps usual in any varied plot, but surely not
Recognitions? The clue to the puzzle lies, it can scarcely be doubted,
in the historical origin of tragedy. Tragedy, according to Greek