SCENERY  62>7

quake?  If  it  he  replied  that  the  reason  for  not  taking  tliis
passage  as  a  hteral  description  of  stage  effects  actually  produced
in  the  time  of  ^schylus,  is  that  they  were  then  impossible,
and  if  the  bounds  of  possibility  are  to  be  regarded  as  the  sole
limits  which  the  Three  recognised  in  staging  their  plays,  it  will
follow  that  the  opening  scene  of  the  Ajax  of  Sophocles  was  staged
with — real  sheep  !  They  were  plenty  in  Athens.  There  would
be  the  victims  offered  on  the  6v[M€Xrj ;  and,  if  further  proof
is  necessary,  we  may  refer  to  a  passage,  which  antiquaries  have
not  yet  utilised,  in  which  a  real  sheep  was  brought  on  the
Athenian  stage  by  Aristophanes  (Peace,  1020);

But  if  we  prefer  to  hold  that  the  Lenaeum  and  the  Lyceum
(London)  were  conducted  on  different  principles,  we  shall  be-
lieve that  the  dramatists  who  required  their  audience  to
imagine  that  it  was  the  dead  of  night,  when  it  was  really  broad
day,i  were  also  capable  of  describing  storms,^  destructions  of
cities,^  &c.,  which  they  left  to  the  imagination  of  the  audience,
and  not  to  the  apyj,riKT(Dv  of  the  theatre,  to  realise.  We  shall
believe  that  the  poet,  who  left  the  lightning  to  be  supplied  by
the  spectators,  left  also  the  thunder,  and  that  the  machine  for
producing  stage-thunder^  was  the  invention  of  a  later  age.  We
shall  take  it  as  a  general  rule  that  a  set  description  of  a  possible
(or  impossible)  stage  effect  was  intended  by  the  dramatist  as  a
deliberate  substitute  for  a  set  piece.  We  must,  consequently,
decline  to  admit  that,  in  the  Suppliant  Women  ^  of  Euripides,
Evadne  actually  threw  herself  from  a  rock,  or  even  had  any
stage-rock  to  throw  herself  from.  In  the  theatres  with  per-
manent stone  stages,  which  Pollux  and  Vitruvius  knew  in  later
times,  the  back  of  the  stage  was  doubtless  built  in  two  or  three
storeys,  and,  doubtless,  also,  in  post-classical  revivals  of  the
Agamemnon,  the  appearance  of  the  watchman  on  the  distegia  ^
was  an  unrivalled  attraction.'''    I3ut  in  the  time  of  ^schylus,  we

1  E.g.,  Eur.  El.  54  ;  Ar.  Nuh.  2.  "-^  Soph.  0.  C.  1502.
