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A THOUGH Aeschylus' and Euripides' tragedies of Philoctetes are no longer extant, enough of them, especially of the latter, 1--X-is known from fragments and from two essays by Dio of Prusa' to afford a comparison and contrast with Sophocles' Philoctetes. Such a comparison brings to view two opposed conceptions of arete and ranges the poets on opposite sides of the enduring question of human conduct. It shows the greater depth of understanding possessed by Sophocles and with what sort of premises he exercises that dramatic art by which he is recognized to be one of the poets most surely touched with universality. Sophocles' play is the latest of the three2 and in externals owes something to each of his predecessors and particularly to Euripides. The fact that we can estimate this debt and draw comparisons we owe to our ability to interpret the fragments of the lost plays in the light of Dio's essays. But Dio's information is incomplete; he assumed in his reader a knowledge of the text of the plays. How could he have dreamed that his modest essays would outlive two of the three classics he was criticizing? The details of plot that he mentions are incidental to his main interest in character and style. Thus mere information about the plays is deficient; what is worse, it is uneven, at least in the case of Aeschylus and Euripides-where it matters most. We are told much more about their beginnings than about their endings and are left groping as to how they turn out. And, finally, Dio has confused two methods of procedure. Though he treats the plays in chronological order, he tries also to contrast their virtues and defects by anticipating the discussion of Euripides' play in his discussion of Aeschylus'. In this way he sometimes obscures the sequence of events followed by either author.