Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/280

 254 ON THE EEPRESENTATION OF is probably a representation of Victory, who is about to place a crown on the head of the successful actor ^ On the other side is a boy playing the einvUiov, and probably the same as the performer who accompanied him on the stage. The curtain in the background seems to indicate that the actor is receiving this public recognition as he sits enthroned on the proscenium. As the general costume of the tragic performers was thus fixed by the conventions of the Bacchic festival, the discrimination of the character represented depended on the expression of the mask, on certain adjuncts, and partly on the colour of the dress. It was only Euripides who ventured to allow his tragic heroes to appear in rags, and he incurred, by this departure from Bacchic magni- ficence, the keenest ridicule of his comic contemporaries. The other dramatists contrived that every character should be consistent with the dignity and splendour of the festal occasion, with which the exhibition was connected. The adjuncts, which marked the different characters, were very simple, and might be recognized at once. Of the attributes of Hercules we have already spoken. He has both the club and the bow in the Pio-Clementine Mosaic (PL VI. Wieseler, vii. 2), but the club alone in the same Mosaic (PI. VIII. Wieseler, No. 3), in the Cyrenaic picture, and in the following illustration from a bas-relief in the Villa Albani. Mercury has simply a caduceus in the Pio-Clementine Mosaic (PL X.) and in the Cyrenaic picture. The figure in the act of shooting with a bow and arrow at a man bearing an unsheathed poignard (Millin, PL ix. Wieseler, vii. 4) probably represents i Miiller, Handh. d. Arch. § 4^5^ 2.