| T. Allom. | S. Fisher. |
THE RUINS OF HIERAPOLIS, FROM THE THEATRE.
ASIA MINOR.
Nothing marks so strongly the genius and propensities of the ancient Greeks, as their theatres. As these edifices were the most interesting and most attractive, so they seemed to have engaged their greatest attention, and to have called forth all their skill, to render them the most permanent and beautiful of the buildings they erected. We have already remarked, that every town, inhabited by Greeks, or the descendants of Greeks, seems to have had one, as essential to its well-being; and they were not erected with the fragile and perishable materials with which the modern edifices of the same kind were constructed. Their seats were not wooden benches enclosed with slight walls and covered with slender roofs, or their decorations flimsy painted paper and canvass; they were built with solid blocks of marble, roofed with the canopy of heaven, adorned with statuary and sculptured ornaments of imperishable materials; and their remains, at the present day, are as durable as the rock on which they were generally erected. When every other vestige of an ancient city is obliterated, its theatre is the only building that remains, to determine its site; and when ruins had concealed it, or the lapse of time had covered it with soil, accident or design has detected it under the mass, as perfect in some of its parts as when it was frequented by a crowded audience. The beautiful theatre in the small and comparatively obscure Island of Milo had disappeared for ages, till unexpectedly discovered by agricultural labourers, in a solitary spot, where no other evidence existed but itself, of the city to which it had belonged. Its materials were solid blocks of beautifully sculptured marble; the angular mouldings seemed as sharp, and the workmanship as recent, as when the chisel had first struck them; and though probably not less than 2,000 years erected, looked as fresh, said a traveller, “as if the masons had just gone home to their dinner, and you expected them to return every moment, and put the last hand to their work.”
As these characteristic structures form so prominent a feature in ancient Greek cities, and at this day are generally the most striking objects emerging from their ruins, a brief notice of their structure will be the best accompaniment to our illustration. The inventor of dramatic entertainments was Thespis, who lived about 550 years before the Christian era. His theatre was as simple as his exhibition was rude; it was an ambulatory machine, moving from place to place, like the booth of an English fair. On the cart, a stage was erected; the dramatic representation was confined to two performers, whose faces were smeared with lees of wine, and who entertained the audience with a dialogue of coarse and rustic humour. This movable edifice was improved by being fixed, and the spectators accommodated with wooden benches, raised one above the other; but the fondness of the Greeks for such exhibitions was so great, and the throng so pressing, that frequent accidents occurred from the breaking down of these frail structures, and the loss of life was so serious, that it was necessary to accommodate the people with more durable edifices. The name of Æschylus is immortalized as well by his mechanical as his literary genius; he not only fixed the drama by the composition of forty regular plays, in which the characters were dressed in suitable costume, but he gave his representations in a regular and permanent edifice, the arrangement of which was the model on which all others were afterwards built.
The building was a semicircle whose extremities were limited by a right line; this was divided into three parts, each having its own appropriation. The theatre, properly so called, from whence the spectators “saw” the exhibition, filled the semicircle, where the people were accommodated with benches rising one above the other. The upper were allocated to females. The seats were confined to a particular number in each row, in all theatres they were eighteen inches high and three feet broad, so that the people sat at their ease, the feet of those above never incommoding those below. Behind each row were galleries, formed in the walls, by which the spectators entered from without, and, from the crowds that issued from them, they were called “vomitories;” from them were passages through the seats in a right line tending to a common centre, and, from the shape of the enclosed spaces, broad above and narrow below, the portions into which the benches were divided, were called “wedges.” As the actor’s voice would be insufficient to fill the vast space enclosed by some theatres, which contained 40,000 people, the sound was augmented, and rendered distinct, by hollow vessels of copper, dispersed under the seats in such a way as to reverberate the words distinctly to the ear of every individual.
The right line, in front, was occupied by the orchestra, so called because it was originally intended for the exhibition of “mimes and dancers;” it afterwards admitted other exhibitions. In one of its compartments, the chorus acted, which from its square form was called thymele, or “the altar;” another received a band of music, and, from its position at the bottom of the theatre, was named “hyposcene;” behind this was the stage, divided also into three parts; the largest, properly called the “scene,” extended across the theatre. Here was suspended the large curtain, which fell, not rose, when the exhibition commenced; the next was the proscene, or “pulpit,” where the performance was carried on; and the last the parascene, or green room, the place “behind the stage,” where the performers retired to dress, and the machines were kept and prepared.
The bland and beautiful climate of the country inhabited by the Greeks, require for the greater part of the year no shelter. The theatre, therefore, had no roof, and all the exhibitions were in the open air; when a passing shower required it, there were porticoes to which the audience retired in winter; in summer, the rays of the sun were to be guarded against in a warm climate, and machinery was provided, by which canvass awnings were drawn across over the theatre. The degree of sultriness which this caused among a crowd in confined air, was mitigated by an artificial rain. Reservoirs of scented water were formed above the porticoes, from whence it descended to the statues and other sculptured ornaments, and was suffered to exude through certain pores in the marble, and filled the covered space not only with grateful coolness but fragrant exhalation.
The fondness of the Greeks in general, and of the Athenians in particular, for such dramatic exhibitions, is not to be expressed; it was not only the medium through which the music of their poetry, the refinement of their sentiments, the display of their taste, and their moral impressions, were conveyed, but it was the great channel of their political opinions. Every sense and faculty was engaged in these exhibitions: the eye, the ear, the imagination, the understanding, were appealed to, and gratified; but what rendered it so deeply interesting was, that it became the arena upon which the public affairs were exhibited, the channel through which public sentiments were conveyed; and the great interests and transactions of the republic, in which every man felt a personal interest, were discussed in mimic representations. When an event or character was introduced in the drama, its parallel was immediately found, and its application was made to some passing circumstance or person. When a passage in Æschylus was uttered, that Amphiaraus “had rather be great and good, than seem so,” it was instantly and simultaneously applied by the audience to Aristides, and they rose up spontaneously to salute him. It was thus, that not only in Athens, their vast theatre, capable of holding 30,000 people, was constantly crowded, but in every city inhabited by the Greeks, either in the islands or on the continents of Asia and Europe, theatres were erected among their first public edifices; and there is scarcely a town, however obscure or little noticed, where one is not found at this day among the most perfect part of the ruins.
The theatre of Hieropolis, given in our illustration, is the least dilapidated among its existing remains; it is an extensive and sumptuous structure, even in its present ruinous state; it retains perfectly its semicircular form, and part of the proscene is still standing in good preservation; the wedge-form rows of benches still afford seats to the traveller; and the arched vomitories, opening upon the passages to admit spectators, are still perfect; but the centre is filled up with heaps of broken cornices, fragments of fluted shafts, and almost perfect capitals of pillars, tumbled from their elevation, and indicating, by their number and the excellency of their workmanship, the skill and labour bestowed upon the theatre of this provincial town. On a low semicircular screen, dividing the seats, is still legible an inscription in which “Apollo the Archegetes,” or manager of the theatre, is entreated to be “propitious to the performers;” and on another is a panegyric on the city of Hieropolis, in which it is called “the city of gold.” The perspective in the background exhibits the remains of stadia, baths, and other edifices before mentioned.