And not only the relative coherence of mythological plot, but the absence of a chorus from the plays of Epicharmus, so far as the fragments negatively attest, provide the requisite background for both the chorusless Hellenistic type and for an intermediate form in which a chorus, relatively inactive, perhaps appeared with an entrance song, but denied itself parabasis and regularly recurring chorika mele, as Platonius seems to assert and as the present text of the Plutus may serve to illustrate.