Such was the arrangement of the main body of the house.  Let us now descend to the orchestra, which, in the Greek theatres, was set apart for the dancing of the choirs, but in the Roman theatres, was reserved for the great dignitaries, and at Rome itself for the prince, the vestals, and the senators.  I have somewhere read that, in the great city, the foreign ambassadors were excluded from these places of honor because among them could be found the sons of freedmen.

Would you like to go up on the stage?  Raised about five feet above the orchestra, it was broader than ours, but not so deep.  The personages of the antique repertory did not swell to such numbers as in our fairy spectacles.  Far from it.  The stage extended between a proscenium or front, stretching out upon the orchestra by means of a wooden platform, which has disappeared, and the postscenium or side scenes.  There was, also, a hyposcenium or subterranean part of the theatre, for the scene-shifters and machinists.  The curtain or siparium (a Roman invention) did not rise to the ceiling as with us, but, on the contrary, descended so as to disclose the stage, and rolled together underground, by means of ingenious processes which Mazois has explained to us.  Thus, the curtain fell at the beginning and rose at the end of the piece.

You are aware that in ancient drama the question of scenery was greatly simplified by the rule of the unity of place.  The stage arrangement, for instance, represented the palace of a prince.  Therefore, there was no canvas painted at the back of the stage; it was built up.  This decoration, styled the scena stabilis, rose as high as the loftiest tier in the theatre, and was of stone and marble in the Pompeian edifice.  It represented a magnificent wall pierced for three doors; in the centre was the royal door, where princes entered; on the right, the entrance of the household and females; at the left, the entrance for guests and strangers.  These were matters to be fixed in the mind of the spectator.  Between these doors were rounded and square niches for statues.  In the side-scenes, was the moveable decoration (scena ductilis), which was slid in front of the back-piece in case of a change of scene, as, for instance, when playing the Ajax of Sophocles, where the place of action is transferred from the Greek camp to the shores of the Hellespont.  Then, there were other side-scenes not of much account, owing to lack of room, and on each wing a turning piece with three broad flats representing three different subjects.  There were square niches in the walls of the proscenium either for statues or for policemen to keep an eye on the spectators.  Such, stated in a few lines and in libretto style, was the stage in ancient times.

[Illustration:  The Smaller Theatre at Pompeii.]