Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/293

 GREEK PLAYS IN GENERAL. 267 long anapaestic march, as in the case of the SuppUces and Agamem- non. Sometimes this anapasstic march was followed by a system of the cognate^ Ionics a minore. This we find in the Persce, In some Tragedies there was no parodus, but the opening of the play found the chorus already assembled on the Thymele, and prepared to sing the first stasimon. Such is the case in the (Edipus Tyrannus. It seems probable that they then entered by the passage under the seats {rhh). The stasima were always sung by the chorus when it was either stationary or moving on the same limited surface around the altar of Bacchus, and with its front to the stage. The places of the choreut£e were marked by lines on the stage (Scaypafji/jiaTa). The two circles round the altar, indicated in the plan, give the maximum and minimum range of their evolutions. When those evolutions amounted to a dance 2, it was of the nature of the emme- leia, which, as we have seen, was a staid and solemn form of the gymnopcediG gesticulations. The satyric chorus danced the rapid pyrrhic, or some form derived from it, and we may infer that it involved a great deal of tramping backwards and forwards, with high steps and lively movements of the hands, like the morris- dance in England, or the tarantella in Italy. Although the cordax, derived from the hyjoorcheme, was the original form of dance adopted by the phallic comus, it was so grossly indecent, that Aristophanes claims credit for its omission in The Clouds^. The comic chorus sang its ^arodus and its stasima in the same manner as the tragic; but they were, as pieces of poetry, much less elabo- rate, and generally much shorter. The main performance of the chorus in Comedy was the parahasis. It was an address to the audience in the middle of the play, and was the most immediate representative of the old trochaic or anapaestic address by the leader of the phallic song, for which the personal lampoons of Archilochus furnished the model, and to which the Old Comedy of Athens was mainly indebted for its origin. This parahasis^ or "counter- march," was so called, because the chorus, which had previously stood facing the stage, and on the other side of the central altar, wheeled about, and made a movement towards the spectators, who were then addressed by the coryphgeus in a short system of ana- paests or trochees, called the Ko/jufjudTcov, and this was followed by a 1 Donaldson's Gr. Gr. art. 650, p. 620. ^ Bockh, Antigone, pp. 280 sqq. ^ See vv. 537 sqq.