The Keraunoskopeion[[902]] was a lofty triangular column, which appears to have been hollow, and furnished with narrow fissures, extending in right lines from top to bottom. Within seem to have been a number of lamps, on stationary bases, from which, as the periactos whirled round, sheets of mimic lightning flashed upon the stage from behind the scenes.
The construction of the Bronteion,[[903]] or thunder magazine, I imagine to have been nearly as follows:—a number of brazen plates, arranged one below another, like stairs, descended through a steep, vaulted passage behind the scene, into the bottom of a tower, terminating in a vast brazen caldron. From the edge of this, a series of metallic apertures,[[904]] probably spiral, pierced the tower wall, and opened without in funnels, like the mouths of trumpets.
When some deity was required to descend to earth in the midst of lightning and sudden thunder, the Keraunoskopeion was instantaneously put in motion, and showers of pebbles from the sea-shore were hurled down the mouth of the Bronteion, and, rolling over the brazen receptacles, produced a terrific crash, which, with innumerable reverberations, was poured forth by the Echeia upon the theatre.[[905]]
In a lofty gallery called the Theologeion, extending over the marble skreen at the back of the stage, appeared the gods, when the drama required their presence; and hence, I imagine, the Hebrew colony which makes its appearance nightly near the roof of our own theatres have obtained the name of gods. Here Zeus, and the other deities of Olympos, were assembled in that very extraordinary drama of Æschylus, the Psychostasia, or weighing in the balance the souls of Achilles and Hector.
They employed in the theatre the machine called a Crane,[[906]] the point of which being lowered, snatched up whatever it was designed to bear aloft into the air. By means of this contrivance, Eos, goddess of the dawn, descended and bore away the body of Memnon, slain by Achilles before Troy. At other times strong cords, so disposed as to resemble swings, were let down from the roof, to support the gods or heroes who seemed to be borne through the air.
Though by turning the Periactoi three changes of scene could be produced, many more were sometimes required, and, when this was the case, new landscapes were dropped, like hangings, or slided in frames in front of those painted columns. These usually represented views of the sea, or mountain scenery, or the course of some river winding along through solitary vales, or other prospects of similar character, according to the spirit of the drama.
The position of the Hemicycle is more difficult to comprehend. It appears to have been a retreating semicircular scene, placed facing the orchestra, and masking the marble buildings at the back of the stage, when a view was to be opened up into some distant part of the city, or shipwrecked mariners were to be exhibited buffeting with the waves. Not very dissimilar was the Stropheion,[[907]] which brought to view heroes translated to Olympos, or on the ocean, or in battle slain, where change of position with respect to the spectator was produced by the rotatory motion of the machine.
The position of the Charonian staircase,[[908]] by which spectres and apparitions ascended from the nether world, is exceedingly difficult to be determined; but that it was somewhere on the stage appears to me certain, notwithstanding the seeming testimony of Pollux to the contrary. The hypothesis which makes the ghosts issue from a door immediately beneath the seats of the spectators, and rush along the whole depth of the orchestra, among the chorus and musicians, is, at any rate, absurd. It must have been somewhere towards the back of the stage, near the altar of Loxios, the table of shew-bread and those sacred and antique images which in certain dramas were there exhibited. Here, likewise, was the trap-door, through which river-gods issued from the earth, while the other trap-door, appropriated to the Furies, seems to have been situated in the boards of the Logeion, near one of the flights of steps leading down into the orchestra.
The above synopsis of the machinery and decorations employed by the Greeks in their theatrical shows may, possibly, from its imperfection, suggest the idea of a rude and clumsy apparatus. But, as the arts of poetry, sculpture, painting, and architecture reached in Greece the highest perfection, and, as this perfection was coëtaneous with the flourishing state of the drama, it is impossible to escape the conviction, that the art of scene-painting and the manufacturing of stage machinery, likewise, underwent all the improvements of which by their nature they are susceptible. For, in the first place, it is not easy to suppose, that a people, so fastidious as were the Athenians, would have tolerated in the theatre displays of ignorance and want of skill which everywhere else they are known to have overwhelmed with contempt and derision; more especially as, in the first place, the landscapes and objects represented were usually those with which they were most familiar, though the fancy of the poet sometimes ventured to transport them to the most elevated and inaccessible recesses of Mount Caucasus, to the summit of the celestial Olympos, to the palaces and harems of Persia, to the wilds of the Tauric Chersonese,[[909]] or even to the dim and dreary regions of the dead. The names, nevertheless, of few scene-painters, besides Agatharchos,[[910]] have come down to us, though it is known, that, in their own day, they sometimes divided with the poet the admiration of the audience, and, on other occasions, enabled poets of inferior merit to bear away the prize from their betters.
The character, however, of stage-scenery differed very widely in tragedy, comedy, and satyric pieces,[[911]] usually consisting, in the first, of façades of palaces, with colonnades, architraves, cornices, niches, statues, &c.; in comedy, of the fronts or courts of ordinary houses, with windows, balconies, porticoes, &c.; while, in the satyric drama, the fancy of the painter and decorator was allowed to develope before the audience scenes of rural beauty remote from cities, as the hollows of mountains shaded with forests, winding valleys, plains, rivers, caverns, and sacred groves.