Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/301

 CHAPTER II. ON THE REPEESENTATION OF CERTAIN TRAGEDIES AND COMEDIES IN PARTICULAR. Veteres ineunt proscenia ludi. Vergilius. HAVING fully considered all the circumstances connected with the representation of a Greek play in general, we must now apply the results of this inquiry to an investigation of the manner in which these arrangements were practically applied in particular cases. And as our space will not allow us to examine with sufficient mi- nuteness the details which probably attended the exhibition of every extant Tragedy and Comedy, it will be desirable to select those dramas which furnish the most decisive and distinctive ex- amples of the scenic ingenuity of the Greeks. The most prominent peculiarity is undoubtedly the complete or partial change of the indications of locality. And this is of very rare occurrence. In the seven plays of JEschylus there is a complete change of scene only in the second and third plays of the extant Trilogy ; and the left periactos, which, as we have seen, indicates the direction of the foreign or distant regions from which the visitant is supposed to enter the stage, is not turned once in all the remains of the oldest dramatist. Sophocles has only one example of a complete change of scene, that in the Ajax ; and only one of the turning of the left periacfos, that in the (Edipus Tyrannus^ when the road to Corinth is substituted for that to Delphi, with, perhaps, a distant view of Parnassus. In the numerous plays of Euripides we have no ex- ample of a complete change of place, but several of his plays require a change of the left periactos. The scene is completely changed in five of the eleven plays of Aristophanes; but the left 18—2