Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/331

LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 309 seen a lonely forest with a distant view of the sea ; here Ajax enters when he is about to destroy himself; so that he is visible to the au- dience, but cannot for a long' time be seen by the Chorus, which is in the side space of the orchestra. § 10. On the other hand, ancient tragedy was required to fulfil another condition, which could only co-exist with such a conception of the locality as has been just described. It is this : the proscenium or stage represents a space in the open air: what passes here is in public ; even in confidential discourse the presence of witnesses is always to be feared. But it was occasionally necessary to place before the spectator a scene which was confined to the interior of the house ; for example, when the plan and the idea of the piece required what is called a tragic situation, that is, a living picture, in which a whole series of affecting images are crowded together. Scenes of this tre- mendous power are: that in which Clyttemnestra with the bloody sword stands over the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra, holding the gar- ment in which she has entangled her unfortunate husband ; and, in the succeeding tragedy of the same trilogy, that in which Orestes is seen on precisely the same spot, where the same bathing robe now covers the bodies of iEgisthus and Clytsemnestra. Or, in the tragedy of Sophocles, Ajax, standing among the animals which he has slaughtered in his frenzy, taking them for the princes of the Greek host, and now, sunk in the deepest melancholy, contemplates the effects of his madness. Jt is easy to perceive that it is not the acts themselves in the moment of execution; but the circumstances, arising out of those acts when accomplished, which occupied the reflections and the feelings of the chorus and of the audience. To bring on the stage groups like these, (in the choice and disposition of which we recognize the plastic genius of the age that produced a Phidias,) and to bring to view the interior of dwellings hidden behind the scenes, machines were used, called Eccyclcma and Exostra (the one being rolled, the other pushed forward). It were presumptuous to attempt to describe the construction of these machines from the slight indications we could gather from the grammarians ; but their working may be clearly per- ceived in the tragedians themselves. The side doors of a palace or tent are thrown open, and in the same moment an inner chamber with its appropriate decorations is distinctly seen on the stage, where it remains as a central point of the dramatic action, till the progress of the drama requires its disappearance in the same manner. We may fairly presume that these local representations were far from rude or tasteless; that they were worthy of the feeling for beauty, and the fancy of the age and nation which produced them; especially in the latter years of iEschylus, and during the whole career of Sophocles, when the mathematicians, Anaxagoras and Democritus, had begun to study