Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/325

LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 303 never changed. Each of these entrances to the stage had its established and permanent signification, and this enabled the spectator to apprehend many things ai, the first glance, which he must have otherwise gradually made out in the course of the piece ; since contrivances similar to our play-bills were unknown to the ancients. On the other hand, the audience came furnished with certain preliminary information concerning what they were about to witness, by means of which the plot was far more clear to them than it can now be by mere reading-. Of this kind was the distinct meaning attached to the right and the left side. The theatre at Athens was built on the south side of the Acropolis, in such a manner that a person standing on the stage saw the greater part of the city and the harbour on his left, and the country of Attica on his right. Hence, a man who entered on the right by the parascenia, was invariably understood to come from the country, or from afar; on the left, from the city, or the neighbourhood. The two side-walls always bore the same relation to each other in the arrangements, as to exterior or interior. Of course, the lower side entrance which led into the orchestra, stood in the same relation ; but of these, the right one was little used, because the chorus generally consisted of inhabitants of the place, or of the immediate neighbourhood. The main wall, however, or the scene, properly so called, had three doors ; the middle, which was called the royal door, represented the principal entrance to the palace, the abode of the prince himself; that on the right was held to be a passage leading without, especially to the apartments of the guests, which in Greek houses were often in a detached building appropriated to that purpose; that on the left, more towards the interior, leading to a part of the house not obvious to the first approach ; such as a shrine, a prison, the apartments of the women, &c. § 7. But the Greeks carried still further this association of certain localities with certain incidents or appearances. The moment an actor entered, they could decide upon his part and his relation to the whole drama. And here we come to the point in which the Greek drama seems the most fettered by inflexible rules, and forced into forms which appear, to our feelings, stiff and unnatural. Grecian art, however, as we have often had occasion to remark, in all its manifestations, loves distinct and unvarying forms, which take possession of the mind with all the force of habit, and immediately put it into a certain frame and temper. If, on the one hand, these forms appear to cramp the creative genius, to check the free course of the fancy; on the other, works of art, which have a given measure, a prescribed form, to fill out, acquire, when this form is animated by a corresponding spirit, a peculiar stability which seems to raise them above the capricious and ephemeral productions of the human mind, and to assimilate them to the eternal