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 tradition, is originally the ritual play of Dionysus, performed
at his festival, and representing, as Herodotus tells us, the
'sufferings' or 'passion' of that God. We are never directly told what