The bird I am going to write about is the owl. The owl cannot see at all in the daytime, and at night it is as blind as a bat. I do not know much about the owl, so I will go on to the beast I am going to choose. It is the cow. The cow is a marnai, and it is tame. It has six sides, right, left, fore, back and upper and below. At the back it has a tail, on which hangs a brush. With this it sends the flies away, so that they do not fall into the milk. The head is for the purpose of growing horns, and so that the mouth can be somewhere. The horns are to butt with. The mouth is to moo with. Under the cow hangs the milk. It is arranged for milking. When people niilk, the milk comes, and there is never any end to the supply. How the cow does it I have not yet realized, but it makes more and more. The man cow is called an ox, but what it eats it eats twice, so that it gets enough. When it is hungry it moos, and when it says nothing, it is because its inside is full up of grass.

The volume of scholarly literature on Aeschylus is already so large that an attempt to make even the minutest addition to it may well appear rash. But the standard literature has most often dealt with the dramatic technique of Aeschylus and with the moral or social issues raised by him. This is true even of Kitto's work, Form and Meaning in Drama. Thus, in his preface, he states, ‘The presumption with Aeschylus, Sophocles and Shakespeare, when he wrote Hamlet, is that the dramatist was competent. If the dramatist had something to say and if he was a competent artist, the presumption is that he has said it and that we, by looking at the form which he has created, can find out what it is’; that is to say, he was thinking of dramatic form. This article is concerned with an aspect of form which does not appear to have received sufficient attention. I would call it the ‘poetic’ aspect of form. ‘Poetry’ is not easy to define, but one of the ‘tentative formulas’ given by Lattimore expresses what I mean. ‘What is directed’, he said, ‘neither to the emotion nor the intellect but to the imagination is the poetry of the plays.’ Aeschylus is a poet even more than he is a dramatic artist. One would naturally, therefore, expect to find in his plays much of the stuff that is directed towards the imagination. This ‘poetic’ element is to a large extent communicated through the form, which will enhance his meaning or will even be an image of his thought. It is from this point of view that I propose, in this note, to examine the Oresteia, in the hope that it may throw some light on many of the peculiarities of construction that are so prominent a feature of the trilogy.

In laying out the plot of the Aeneid there were certain features to which Virgil was committed. They were connected with plot, treatment, and theme. As to plot: the outlines of Aeneas' wanderings from Troy to Tiber were so well known that Virgil was bound to follow them fairly closely. They were to Virgil what Holinshed's Chronicles were to Shakespeare. As to treatment: by current literary etiquette, a writer of epic was obliged to follow established models, especially those of Homer, both in the larger design and in the shaping of notable incidents. As to theme: the essential purpose of the Aeneid was to show that Aeneas was a man of destiny, called by the gods to lead a chosen people to an appointed home in Italy.