Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/277

 GREEK PLAYS IN GENERAL. 251 preserved, tliougli of course the colours were strongly pronounced and exaggerated. It is obvious, as Miiller says^, that the masks were sometimes changed between the acts, and that a difference of complexion was introduced to mark the change in the condi- tion of the character, as when CEdipus or Polymnestor returns to the stage after the loss of his eyes^. The masks of female cha- racters were furnished with the 07/^09, as in the figure of the Tragic Muse (fig. 7), in the parody of the Antigone (fig. 17), and in the Pompeian picture already cited^, but the features were less exag- gerated, and they had sometimes caps of a peculiar colour, with hanging ribands kept down by a knob or tassel of gilded metal called potaico^, i.e. " a little pomegranate^." There was a different kind of mask for almost every character. Julius Pollux divides the tragic masks alone into twenty-six classes®; and while he informs us that the comic masks were much more numerous®, he specifies only four kinds of satyric masks, two portraying satyrs with grey hair or a long beard, and two repre- senting Sileni, as youthful or aged respectively^. The last of these is depicted in the Pio-Clementine Mosaic, as a bald-headed, grey- bearded mask, crowned with ivy (PL v. No. Vii.), and the last group on that Mosaic (PL xxviil.) represents the Silenus in full costume, bald-headed and crowned with ivy, though dressed in the tragic 1 Hist, of Gr. Lit. i. p. 395. 2 These were called ^KaKcva irpbawira. Pollux, IV. § 14 1. 3 Gell, Pompeii, Vol. 11. PI. LXXV,, of which the following is a copy, as far as con- cerns the female head in question : 5 IV. § 133 sqq. '•' Jul. Poll. IV. §§ 143—154. 7 Id. § I4CJ.
 * Milliu, Mosaique, PI. v. No. Viii. ; Monum. Antiq. ined. ii. 249.