say; and change of place being therefore, in general, impossible, the
absurd notion of condemning it merely as improbable in itself was never
entertained by any one. If we can believe ourselves at Thebes in one
act, we may believe ourselves at Athens in the next. If a story lasts
twenty-four hours or twenty-four years, it is equally improbable. There
seems to be no just boundary but what the feelings prescribe. But on the
Greek stage where the same persons were perpetually before the audience,
great judgment was necessary in venturing on any such change. The poets
never, therefore, attempted to impose on the senses by bringing places
to men, but they did bring men to places, as in the well known instance
in the 'Eumenides', where during an evident retirement of the chorus
from the orchestra, the scene is changed to Athens, and Orestes is first
introduced in the temple of Minerva, and the chorus of Furies come in
afterwards in pursuit of him. [2]

In the Greek drama there were no formal divisions into scenes and acts;
there were no means, therefore, of allowing for the necessary lapse of
time between one part of the dialogue and another, and unity of time in
a strict sense was, of course, impossible. To overcome that difficulty
of accounting for time, which is effected on the modern stage by
dropping a curtain, the judgment and great genius of the ancients
supplied music and measured motion, and with the lyric ode filled up the
vacuity. In the story of the Agamemnon of AEschylus, the capture of Troy
is supposed to be announced by a fire lighted on the Asiatic shore, and
the transmission of the signal by successive beacons to Mycene. The
signal is first seen at the 2lst line, and the herald from Troy itself
enters at the 486th, and Agamemnon himself at the 783rd line. But the
practical absurdity of this was not felt by the audience, who, in
imagination stretched minutes into hours, while they listened to the
lofty narrative odes of the chorus which almost entirely fill up the