I am sure I was not the only student who, when he first made his way stumblingly through the opening lines of the Persae, called to mind the raising of the curtain on the first act of The Mikado. But Aeschylus tells us a good deal more in his opening lines than the identity of the chorus of elders. They are the men left behind when the Persian host went to Greece, and they have been appointed by King Xerxes, son of Darius, to guard the wealth and splendour of the royal palace and oversee the land.
What I want to show in this paper is that what seems so natural in the Persae is achieved throughout tragedy and old comedy through a conscious adherence, as far as the identity of characters is concerned, to a convention. It is a convention which arises from the nature of Greek drama as a literary form primarily designed for performance.