In later antiquity it was universally held that Aeschylus was the most given, of the three fifth century Athenian tragic poets, to lavish spectacular display. This view rested on three foundations: first, consistent misinterpretation of the many jokes which Aristophanes makes in The Frogs about the archaic grandeur of Aeschylean drama — jokes which on close examination revolve almost entirely around the style of Aeschylus' language; second, the practice of importing scenes of spectacle and crowds of extras into Hellenistic and Roman productions of classical Greek tragedy; and, third, the ascription to this author of the play, Prometheus Bound, which undoubtedly calls for elaborate scenic requirements. The authenticity of Prometheus Bound has been increasingly called in question during the twentieth century: and no scholar who is prepared to accept the arguments and comparisons to be found in Mark Griffith's recent study would now care to place the composition of Prometheus Bound less than twenty years after the death of Aeschylus.

If Prometheus Bound is not to be ascribed to Aeschylus, six of his plays survive. They are distinguished by their extreme theatrical economy; no device is used in them unless it bears close relevance to the playwright's purpose and theme. In his pioneering study, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus, Oliver Taplin has drawn attention to a number of ways in which this feature is to be observed in the surviving plays; and his penetrating observations are by no means confined to the main subject of the book, which is the dramatic use made in Greek tragedy of the entrances and exits of the characters and of the chorus. But much remains to be done, before we can seriously claim to understand the genius of Aeschylus and his successors as theatre craftsmen. I want now to introduce and open up an area of debate which I find to have been seriously neglected in the work on Aeschylus which I have read.

In the Metamorphoses, Ovid suppresses certain elements of the myth of Medea and supplements others. The focus of his alterations, it seems, is on language itself, and particularly on the relation of language to metamorphosis. He returns again and again to Medea's use of incantation. Whether in the story of Jason and the golden fleece or of Aeson's rejuvenation, Ovid emphasizes the efficacy of language. He suggests the relationship of words to transformation through Medea's exercise of magic, indeed literalizes the connection between ritual language and transformed phenomena in the metamorphoses that follow her magic rites. But magic functions also as a metaphor for imaginative power, since it possesses the capacity shared by poet and magician to transform. In the several depictions of Medea's magic art — and one can perceive the episodes of the myth structured around their connections with magic — Ovid develops an image for imagination itself. Jason's labors, for example, are affected by Medea's expertise in magic; they are also a vehicle for a self-conscious display of poetic power. Ovid asserts his imaginative superiority more clearly in the case of Medea, whose relation even to her own power is ambiguous. But let us first consider the portrayal of Medea as a teller of her own tale and the poet's nod in the direction of his predecessors.

After Athena announces his acquittal in the trial of the Eumenides, Orestes offers thanks to the three gods who have driven him from the house into the city to restore him once again to his house — Pallas, Loxias, and the Third Savior who accomplishes all things, Zeus Sōtēr (757-760). In the plot of the Oresteia, this triad has made Orestes the third savior for whom the Chorus of the Choephoroi pray (1073); he comes in the third generation, after Atreus and Agamemnon, to save his line from the extinction threatened by the atē working its way through the generational cycles of the House of Atreus. His trial, which establishes in the polis the precedent of Ixion (cf. 441, 717-718), brings it an unbeatable grip of salvation and victory against its opponents (776-777). The evolution he thus effects in the human ethical order is an unwitting imitation, with Orestes as a human counterpart to Zeus, of the evolution in the divine ethical order effected by the young Olympian gods in the Prometheia, for only in the third generation, after Ouranos and Kronos, does Zeus halt the lawless cycle of divine usurpation. Zeus proves triaktēr, victor in the third bout, in the struggle for control of the kosmos (cf. Ag. 168-172); likewise, Orestes overcomes the atē which Elektra describes as atriaktos (Cho. 339), and, having offered Aegisthus as a third libation (Cho. 577-578), he proves triaktēr in his agōn against the Erinyes, although they claim to have tripped him in the first of three bouts (Eum. 589). Human history is an imitation of divine history, accomplished under Zeus' command by the Olympian gods, who seek to bring man's ethical order into line with the new order of the kosmos; only by thus reconciling the Chthonic gods to the new order can the Olympians establish the harmonia necessary if Zeus' regime is to stop permanently the cycle of crime and counter-crime.

This epigram of Callimachus is one of the best known poems in Classical literature, but it suffers more than most from the misfortune of having to live permanently in the shadow of its own translation. It may no longer be the case that every schoolboy knows ‘They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead’, but it is certainly true that Cory's English version is much more widely known, and much more widely quoted, than Callimachus's Greek original. One result of this has been that a good deal of attention has often been given to comparing the two poems, but little time has been spent on examining the Callimachus as a poem in itself in an effort to see what its virtues are. One may occasionally find a few remarks on the restraint or simplicity of the Greek, as opposed to the English, or a note suggesting that Heraclitus of Halicarnassus, the poet to whom the verses are addressed, wrote a volume of verse the title of which was actually Aēdones (‘Nightingales’) — hence the ‘nightingales’ of the second last line. Occasionally a commentator will go a little further. K. J. Mckay for instance remarks: ‘The high respect in which this epigram is held is fully justified. The way in which the thoughts spill over their barriers in the first four lines, the magic of katedusamen (suggestive of a communion of uncommon power), the skilful location of key thoughts (teon moron, katedusamen, aēdones), the pathos of an unknown grave and an abiding grief cannot but move us. Above all, the suggestion of unfathomable sorrow.’

Unusual things are to happen to Lucius in Hypata. Since he finds himself lodged at the home of the town's foremost miser, he tactfully refuses hospitality and sets off to procure his own food for dinner. After a little bargaining, he manages to purchase some fish at a reasonable price – but life is not going to be that easy. He is spotted by an acquaintance from Athens who has confirmed the ‘Peter Principle’ by rising to the position of public overseer of the market. Pythias is wonderfully officious: when he learns how much the fish have cost his friend, he is outraged and immediately drags Lucius back to the fish-seller, scolds the miscreant merchant, and as a curious climax to his absurd performance: