DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.1031#0123
CHAP. XIII.] LOCAL ILLUSTRATION, &C. 99
excursion1? There his journey would be reduced to
a mere mechanical process of ropes and pullies, and
would be inexorably baffled by the resistance of the
roof. But in the Athenian Theatre the sky itself
was then visible, whither he was mounting, and in
which he was placed by the simple machinery of the
imagination of the spectators to which free play was
given by the natural properties of the theatre itself.
How again, if pent in by the limits of a modern
theatre could the birds be imagined to build their
aerial city2 ? How could the Clouds have come sailing
on the stage from the heights of a neighbouring
Parties? How in such a position could the future
Minister of Athens have surveyed from the stage, as
he did3, the natural map of his own future domains,
the Agora, the harbours and the Pnyx, and all the
tributary islands lying in a group around him ?
These conceptions, and such as these, are charac-
teristic of the genius of the Athenian drama: on a
modern stage they would be forced and inadmissible:
here, under an open sky, with the hills of Athens
around him, and a part of the city beneath him, they
would seem to the spectator to be in some sense
the creations of the place, no less than of the poet
himself.
1 Pac. 165. 2 Av. 785.
3 Eauites, 165. Steinbuchel Alterthumskunde p. 17. concludes some
good observations on this subject with the remark that "Der Grieche
waehlte vorzugsweise den Ort (for their Theatres^ welcher zugleich die
lohnendste Aussicht uber Stadt und Hafen und die naechste Umge-
bung both"......
G2
excursion1? There his journey would be reduced to
a mere mechanical process of ropes and pullies, and
would be inexorably baffled by the resistance of the
roof. But in the Athenian Theatre the sky itself
was then visible, whither he was mounting, and in
which he was placed by the simple machinery of the
imagination of the spectators to which free play was
given by the natural properties of the theatre itself.
How again, if pent in by the limits of a modern
theatre could the birds be imagined to build their
aerial city2 ? How could the Clouds have come sailing
on the stage from the heights of a neighbouring
Parties? How in such a position could the future
Minister of Athens have surveyed from the stage, as
he did3, the natural map of his own future domains,
the Agora, the harbours and the Pnyx, and all the
tributary islands lying in a group around him ?
These conceptions, and such as these, are charac-
teristic of the genius of the Athenian drama: on a
modern stage they would be forced and inadmissible:
here, under an open sky, with the hills of Athens
around him, and a part of the city beneath him, they
would seem to the spectator to be in some sense
the creations of the place, no less than of the poet
himself.
1 Pac. 165. 2 Av. 785.
3 Eauites, 165. Steinbuchel Alterthumskunde p. 17. concludes some
good observations on this subject with the remark that "Der Grieche
waehlte vorzugsweise den Ort (for their Theatres^ welcher zugleich die
lohnendste Aussicht uber Stadt und Hafen und die naechste Umge-
bung both"......
G2