Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/421

399 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 399 vours, with as little sacrifice of nature as it may, so to arrange all the conversations and events that they may take place in the street and at the house-doors. The generally political subjects of the old comedy rendered this much less difficult ; and where it was absolutely necessary to represent an inner chamber of a house, they availed themselves of t he resource of the Eccyclema. Another point, common to tragedy and comedy, was the limited number of the actors, by whom all the parts were to be performed. According to an authority,* (on which, however, we cannot place perfect reliance,) Cratinus raised the number to three, and the scenes in most of the comedies of Aristophanes, as also in the plays of Sophocles and Euri- pides, can be performed by three actors only. The number of subor- dinate persons in comedy has made the change of parts more frequent and more varied. Thus, in the Acharnians, while the first player acted the part of Dicseopolis, the second and third actors had to undertake now the Herald and Amphitheus, then again the ambassador and Pseudartabas ; subsequently the wife and daughter of Dicaeopolis, Euripides, and Cephisophon; then the Megarian and the Sycophant, and the Boeotian and Nicarchus.f In other pieces, however, Aris- tophanes seems to have introduced a fourth actor (as Sophocles has done in the (Edipus at Colonvs); the Wasps, for example, could hardly have been performed without four actors 4 The use of masks and of a gay and striking costume was also common to tragedy and comedy ; but the forms of the one and the other were totally different. To conclude from the hints furnished by Aristophanes, (for we have a great w T ant of special information on the subject,) his comic actors must have been still more unlike the hisiriones of the new comedy, of Plautus and Terence ; of whom we know, from some very valuable and instructive paintings in ancient manuscripts, that they adopted, on the whole, the costume of every day life, and that the form and mode of their tunics and palliums were the same as those of the actual personages whom they represented. The costume of Aris- tophanes' players must, on the other hand, have resembled rather the garb of the farcical actors whom we often see depicted on vases from Magna Grpecia, namely, close-fitting jackets and trowsers striped with divers colours, which remind us of the modern Harlequin ; to which were added great bellies and other disfigurations and appendages pur- posely extravagant and indecorous, the grotesque form being, at the most, but partially covered by a little mantle : then there were masks, the • * Anonym, da Comedia, p. xwii. Comp. Aristot. l'ori. 5. + The little daughters, who are sold as pigs, were perhaps puppets ; their ko'i, ko'i, and the other sounds they utter, were probably spoken behind the scenes as a garascenion. I In the Wasps, Philoeleoii, Bdehelcon, and the two slavi s Xunlhias and Su-ias, are frequently on the stage at the same time as speaking persons.