(c) There are five phrases used by Aristophanes. Three times[156] an actor, on approaching other actors, is said to “come up”; twice[157] he is said to “go down”. Nothing in the context implies raised ground as needed by the drama, so that we seem forced to refer these expressions to the visible stage itself. Dörpfeld and others would translate these two verbs by “come here” and “go away”; but there is no evidence for these meanings.
(d) The existing plays throw incidental light on the problem:—
(i) Certain characters[158] complain of the steepness of their path as they first come before the audience. Do they not refer to an actual ascent from orchestra to stage?
(ii) Ghosts sometimes appear. How can they have ascended out of “the ground” unless action took place on a raised area? This argument is, however, not strong. In later theatres such spectres did rise from below. But in the fifth century they may well have walked in.
(iii) A more striking[159] argument is that on several occasions the chorus, though it has excellent reason to enter the back scene, remains inert. In the Agamemnon the elders talk of rushing to the king’s aid; a similar thing happens in the Medea; there are a number of such strange features. The inference is that there was a stage, to mount which would have appeared odd.
(iv) A stage was needed to make the actors visible, instead of being hidden by the chorus.[160] But, though there is no evidence that the chorus grouped themselves about the orchestra (as in the performances at Bradfield College), and they apparently stood in rows facing the actors, they could have been placed far forward enough to enable all to see the actors. Anyone who has visited a circus will appreciate this.
(v) Plato[161] remarks that Agathon and his actors appeared on an ὀκρίβας, a “platform”. But the word suggests a slight structure: Dörpfeld objects that this appearance was probably in the Odeum, or Music Hall, not the Theatre of Dionysus; if it was in the theatre, the passage rather tells against a stage, for a temporary platform would not have been used if there was a stage.
(vi) Horace[162] says that “Æschylus gave his modest stage a floor of beams” or “gave the stage a floor of moderate-sized beams”. Dörpfeld alleges (without evidence) that pulpitum (translated “stage” in the last sentence) may mean “booth,” and suggests that the poet assumes a stage as matter of course: he is marking the advance made by Æschylus upon Thespis, who (according to Horace himself), performed his plays upon a waggon. But the proper answer is surely that Horace is regularly unreliable when he deals with questions of Greek scholarship, and that he is no doubt arbitrarily combining his knowledge of contemporary Greek theatres with his knowledge that Æschylus advanced in theatrical matters beyond Thespis.
Such are the main arguments in favour of a stage in the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ.