Pompeii, Its Life and Art

by August Mau

Near the front of the orchestra at the right and the left were small rectangular platforms; one is shown in [Fig. 65]. They were supported by the vaults over the entrances (7, 7), and were reached by small stairways near the ends of the stage. They were called tribunals, and here, as in Rome, were no doubt reserved for the seats of those to whom special honor was paid. One was set aside for the use of the magistrate who gave the play; in Rome the vestal virgins, in accordance with a decree of Augustus, occupied the other, and in Pompeii their place was very likely taken by the city priestesses.

Fig. 65.—View of the Large Theatre.

The shape of the orchestra is that of a semicircle enlarged in the direction of tangents at right angles with the diameter; a complete circle could be inscribed in the space. It was probably never used for a chorus, but was occupied by the seats of prominent spectators, particularly the city officials and their friends. It was entered by means of the vaulted passages under the tribunals.

The steps leading from the orchestra upon the stage ([Fig. 65]) can be explained only on the supposition that even in the Roman period, to which the steps in their present form belong, actors who took the part of persons arriving from distant places came upon the stage through the orchestra. In the niches in front of the stage, as we learn from a wall painting, sat those charged with the maintenance of order in the Theatre, two perhaps in the rectangular niches, or one in the semicircular niche in the middle.

The stage is long and narrow, measuring 120 by 24 Oscan feet; the floor is a little more than three feet above the level of the orchestra. The rear wall, as in ancient theatres generally, was built to represent the front of a palace, entered by three doors, and adorned with columns and niches for statues. In each of the short sections of wall at the ends of the stage is a broad doorway, extending across almost the entire space. The long narrow room behind the stage, used as a dressing room (postscaenium), was entered by a door at the rear, which was reached by an inclined approach. No trace of the roof of the stage remains, but from the better preserved theatres at Orange, in the south of France, and at Aspendus, in Asia Minor, we infer that it sloped back toward the rear wall. The floor was of wood.

The room underneath the stage was divided into several parts. Between the front wall and that just back of it (seen in [Fig. 65]) was the place for the curtain, which, as in Roman theatres, was let down at the beginning of the play, and raised at the end. The space between the parallel walls must have been covered, leaving only a narrow slit for the curtain; otherwise it would not have been easy to go upon the stage from the steps in the orchestra.

Underneath the place for the curtain is a low passage, in the vaulted roof of which are two rows of holes, a little more than a foot square, cut in blocks of basalt, and evidently designed to hold upright timbers. This passage has in recent years been entirely cleared. In the floor, directly under the openings in the vaulted roof and corresponding with them, were square holes. In those nearer the front of the stage were remains of timbers and of square pieces of iron fitted to the ends of these, a larger and a smaller piece for each hole. It seems likely that, as Mazois suggested, hollow upright beams were set in the holes, and in them smaller hollow beams were placed, in which were still smaller poles or iron rods; by the sliding of these up and down, the long horizontal pole on which the curtain was hung could be raised or lowered. The use of the inner row of holes has not been satisfactorily explained.

The room under the right of the stage is so low, about three feet, that it could not have been available for any purpose, but that at the left is higher, and was used for theatrical machinery, the scanty remains of which arouse our curiosity without satisfying it. In the floor are set two oblong blocks of limestone, about four feet in length. Each has in its upper surface a round hole, between two and three inches deep, with an iron socket, in which there are still remains of an iron cap once fitted to the lower end of a vertical wooden shaft that turned in it; the upper end of the shaft—assuming that the blocks are in their original position—must have revolved in a socket fixed in one of the joists of the stage floor. There is besides on the upper surface of each block a rectangular depression, and on either side a shallow incision; the purpose is altogether obscure. A third stone, similar to these two, is set in the north wall of the same room, and opposite it was fitted another; here, then, a horizontal shaft turned; there was a similar pair of stones at the left end of the place for the curtain. These arrangements suggest the crane-like machine by which floating figures were brought upon the stage, as Medea in the play of Euripides riding in a chariot drawn by dragons, and the familiar deus ex machina; such machinery, according to Pollux (Onomast. IV. 128), was placed on the left side of the stage.