Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/254

 232 ON THE REPRESENTATION OF the city or the harbour in the immediate neighbourhood of the locality represented, or from a distance. The student will remem- ber that these five entrances led to the stage, and belonged to the actors only* And the distinction between the two elements in the ancient drama, on which we have so often insisted, must be borne in mind here* For in addition to these five etaoBoc for the entrances of the actors, there were two irdpoSoi, one on each side, for the chorus. These irdpohoi did not lead to the stage, but either opened at once from the wings into the orchestra, as we see in the theatre at Aspendus, or, to favour the idea that the side-entrances of the chorus and actors corresponded, the chorus passed under the stage, and came out by doors (^, t) on a line with the periacti {m, m), which are often mentioned in connexion with the parodi. If any one, who so entered the orchestra, had afterwards to mount the stage, as Agamemnon in the play of that name, he was obliged to ascend by a flight of steps ^ Now we are told that while, with regard to the side-doors on the stage, the right door indicated that the actor so entering came from a distance, but the left that he came from the city or the harbour, and that if the rz^A^-hand irepi- a/cTo? was turned, it indicated that the road leading to the distant object was difi'erent, but that if both ireplaKToi were turned, with of course a change in the decorations of the scene itself, the place of action was different, or there was a total change of scene. But, on the other hand, it is said that, with regard to the irdpohoi or en- trances of the chorus, that on the right was supposed to lead from the market-place (if we read dyoprjQev for dypoOev) or from the har- bour or from the city, but that those who came on foot (i. e. not floating in the air like the chorus of Oceanides in the Prometheus) from any other q,uarter entered by the left 7rdpoSo<;^. As it is quite ^ It is clear that the doors on the stage were always used for the entrances and exits of the actors, except in the few cases in which they made their first appearance on horseback or in a chariot, like Ismene in the (Edipus Coloneus, and Agamemnon and Cassandra in the first play of the Orestea. See Schonborn, Scene der Hellenen, pp. 1 7 sqq. ; Kolster, Sophokleisehe Studien, Pref. p, xii. ^ This is Schonborn's explanation of the difficulty {Scene der Hellenen, pp. 72 sqq.). Kolster, on the contrary {SophoTcleische Sludien, pp. 24 sqq.), understands the words of Pollux (iv. 126) of the actors, and reads them as follows: tQv fievroi wapSduv ij fxev de^LCL ayphdev rj eK Xifx^vos 7} e/c TroXews ayei, oi 5' dWaxo^^f ir^^oi d(pLKvov[x€voL Kara ttjv erepav eialacnv eiaeXdovres de [^0' lttttov rj e0' d/xa^Qvl eis ttjv 6px'f}(yTpav iirl rrju (XK7)vy]v dia hXifxaKcov ava^alvovai. He supposes that, as the theatre at Athens was on the south slope of the Acropolis, the city and the harbour would lie on the right and the country of Attica on the left ; consequently, the spectators would imagine that the right-hand door, by which they had entered the theatre along with their foreign visitors, led to distant parts, and that the left-hand door, by which the countrymen