Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/273

 GREEK PLAYS IN GENERAL. 247 feet, but resemble the marionettes which are worked from below. On a closer examination, however, we observe that the feet of the actors are covered by their long robes, and that we only see the high soles on which they are elevated. For in one of the figures (Xo. xviii. see the accompanying plate, Xo. 3), where a woman in a state of great agitation is nishing in to announce some dread- ful intelligence, one of her feet is lifted from the stage, so that we see the bottom of the sole : and in two others (also given in the accompanying plate), the toe of the buskin projects be- yond the bottom of the robe. In the Cyrenaic picture the three figures of the actors are raised on little pedestals, if Pacho's copy is correctly drawn, and Miiller has supposed^ that the picture repre- sents statues of actors and not the actors themselves, a supposi- tion which is set aside by the whole composition. There can be little doubt that these basements merely depict the soles of their buskins, the square space in the middle being perhaps intended to indicate the division between the two soles in each case^. In a painting on a wall at Pompeii^, the peculiar shape of the soles conveyed to Sir W. Gell the idea that the figm-es were Scythian Hippopodae 1 but a more exact copy, which has subsequently been made by Wieseler*, shows that the figm-es merely wear a sort of sabot or wooden shoe. That these soles of the cothurnus, which seem to have been called i/ju^drai or efi^ara^, were made of wood, probably of some very light wood, if not occasionally of cork, is distinctly stated by the Scholiast on Lucian^ ; and the Pio-Clemen- tine Mosaic shows us that they were generally painted so as to harmonize with the robe of the actor. On account, both of its connexion with the Dionysiac attire and of its special use in giving height and dignit}' to the tragic actor, the cothurnus was an emblem of Tragedy, as the soccus was of Comedy^; the Tragic Muse is ^ Handh. d. Arch. § 425, 2. 2 This is Wieseler's opinion, TJieaterrjeh. p. 100. 3 Gell, Pompeii, Vol. ii. PI. lxxv. ^ See Yalckenaer, Ammon. p. 49. ^ Ad Jov. Trag. p. 15: iji^Sdras fJ.ev to. ^va a ^dWovc-iv virb tovs wodas oi -rpa- yu}5oi, tva (pavQai fj-aKporepoi. ~ Horace, A rs Poet tea, 80 : Hunc socci cepere pedem grantlesque cothurni.
 * Wieseler, Theatergeh. p. 51, and Taf. a, No. 23,