This new freedom, which thus came first to divine prologists, was soon extended also to mortals. Thus the heroine in Euripides’ Andromache exclaims (vss. 1 ff.):
O town of Thebes, beauty of Asian land,
Whence, decked with gold of costly bride-array,
To Priam’s royal hearth long since I came, ...
Here on the marshes ’twixt Pharsalia’s town
And Phthia’s plains I dwell.
[Way’s translation]
The artificiality of Euripides’ opening soliloquies strikingly appears in his Orestes. Referring to Clytemnestra’s murder of her husband, Electra says (vss. 26 f.):
Wherefore she slew,—a shame for maid to speak!—