ABOUT HALF OF SHAKESPEARE' TRAGEDIES TAKE THEIR SUBjects from Graeco-Roman antiquity and this is not merely a question of sources or of the characters' names. It used to be said by critics that Shakespeare had transformed all his Romans and Greeks into Elizabethans, but such a general statement ignores important elements shared by these plays as well as the weight of common ideas about Roman virtues and the nature of the Greeks. To be sure, there is a great deal of intentional or unintentional anachronism and the plots have been adapted to Elizabethan dramatic conventions and native rhetoric. But for Shakespeare and the better read of his contemporaries the world of Rome and, chiefly filtered through it, the world of the Greeks, constituted a very precisely located historical epoch, remote in time, yet quite well known and more familiar than any other foreign history of the past. It was made more accessible even than early English history, at least more impressively so, by the Roman historians and it seemed particularly suitable as a model of political stability and the dangers to which it is exposed. Roman virtues and Roman patriotism suggested ideas that stimulated critical description and poetic exploration.