The Deikelistæ, however, were not confined to Laconia, but, under various names were known in most other parts of Greece. Thus, at Sicyon, they obtained the appellation of Phallophori, elsewhere they were called Autocabdali, or Improvisator; while in Italy, (that is, among the Greek colonists,^[934]) they were known by the name of Phlyakes.^[935] By the common people they were called the wise men (σοφίσται), upon the same principle that actors in France are known by the name of artistes. The Thebans, renowned for the havoc they made in the language of Greece, denominated them the Voluntaries, alluding proleptically perhaps to the “voluntary principle.” Semos, the Delian, draws an amusing picture of these Improvisatori. Those performers, he says, who are called Autocabdali made their appearance on the stage, crowned with ivy, and poured forth their verse extempore. The name of Iambi was afterwards bestowed, both on them and their poems. Another class who were called Ithyphalli,^[936] wore those masks, which on the stage were appropriated to drunkards, with crowns of ivy and flowered gloves upon their hands. Their chitons were striped with white, and over these, bound by a girdle at the loins, they wore a Tarentine pelisse descending to the ankle. They entered upon the stage by the great door appropriated to royal personages, and, advancing in silence across the stage, turned towards the audience and exclaimed,—

The Phallophori made their appearance unmasked, shading their face with a drooping garland of wild thyme, intermingled with acanthus-leaves, and surmounted by an ample crown of ivy, with violets appearing between its glossy dark foliage. Their costume was the caunacè. Of these actors, some entered through the side-passages, others through the central door, advancing with measured tread, and saying,—

After which, skipping forward, they made a halt and showered their sarcasms indiscriminately on whomsoever they pleased, while the leader of the troop moved slowly about, his face bedaubed with soot.^[937]

The superior classes of performers, whether actors or musicians, seem to have been held in much estimation, and to have been still more extravagantly paid than in our own day. Thus Amœbæos, the Citharœdos, who lived near the Odeion at Athens, received, but at what period of the republic is not known, an Attic talent a day, as often as he played in public.^[938] Music, however, was always in high estimation in Greece, where the greatest men, though they did not seek to rival regular professors in skill, yet learned to amuse their leisure with it. Thus the Homeric Achilles plays on the lyre, the sounds of which could not only cure diseases of the mind but of the body. A similar belief existed among the Israelites, as we learn from the example of Saul.

Though talent must have been always respected in an actor, it appears to me that anciently they made comparatively little figure, while there were great poets to excite admiration. But, afterwards, when dramatic literature had sunk very low, the actor usurped the consideration due to the poet, as has long been the case in this country. They then contended for the prize in the tragic contests,^[939] and began to entertain a high opinion of their own merits. In fact, the ignorant being better calculated to feel than to judge, the actors often obtained the first prizes in the games, and were held in higher estimation than the poets themselves.^[940]

Thus persuaded of their own importance, they gradually exercised over the poor devils who composed plays for them, much the same tyranny as that in our own age complained of by the poetical servants of the theatre. That is, they despotically interfered with the framing of the plot, with the succession of the scenes, and procured episodes to be introduced, in order that they might show off their peculiar abilities. This is evident from a passage in Aristotle’s Politics,^[941] where he observes that the celebrated actor Theodoros would allow no inferior performer to appear before him on the stage, knowing the force of first impressions; from which it is evident that the author was compelled to yield to his caprice.

Antiquity has preserved the names of many celebrated actors, of whom several played a conspicuous though sometimes a dishonourable part in the great theatre of the world. Thus Aristodemos, who performed the first character alternately with Theodoros, became afterwards a traitor and betrayed the state to Philip. Such too was the case with Philocrates and Æschines, both actors,^[942] and both rogues. Satyros, a comedian of the same period, appears to have been a man of high character and honour, who in consequence obtained the friendship of Demosthenes.Demosthenes. But the Garrick of that age seems to have been Theocrines,^[943] who by many, however, is supposed to have afterwards degenerated into a sycophant. Callipedes is chiefly known to us from the anecdote which describes the check his vanity received from Agesilaos. Having acquired great reputation as a tragic actor, he appears to have considered himself as equal at least to any king, and therefore, meeting one day with Agesilaos, he ostentatiously put himself forward, mingled with the courtiers and took much pains to attract his notice. Finding all these efforts useless, his pride was wounded, and going up directly to the Spartan, he said,

“Dost thou not know me, king?”

“Why,” replied Agesilaos, “art thou not Callipedes, the stage-buffoon?”^[944]

The account transmitted to us of Æsopos is somewhat puzzling; he is described as one of the actors^[945] who performed in the tragedies of Æschylus, but is said to have been at the same time a fellow of infinite merriment who turned everything into a jest, a sort I suppose of comic Macbeth. Œagros obtained celebrity in the part of Niobe,^[946] in the tragedy of Æschylus or Sophocles; and Aristophanes enumerates among the pleasures of Dicasts the power, should such an actor appear before them in a court of justice, of requiring him by way of pleading his own cause, to give them a few choice speeches of his favourite tragic queen.

Among the most celebrated actors of antiquity was Polos, a native of Ægina, who studied the art of stage-declamation under Archias, known in his own age by the infamous surname of Phugadotheras, or the “Exile Hunter.”Hunter.”^[947] This miscreant it was, who, under the orders of Antipater, pursued Demosthenes to the temple of Poseidon in Calauria, where, to escape the cruelty of the Macedonians, the orator put a period to his own life.

Polos appears to have risen speedily to that eminence which he maintained to the last. A striking anecdote is related of the means by which he worked upon his own feelings, in order the more vehemently to stir those of his audience. On one occasion,^[948] having to perform the part of Electra, he took along with him to the theatre an urn containing the ashes of a beloved son, whom he had recently lost, and thus, instead of shedding, under the mask of the heroic princess, feigned tears over the supposed remains of Orestes, he sprinkled the urn which he bore upon the stage with the dews of genuine and deep sorrow. He eclipsed in reputation all the actors of his time, and was in tragedy what Theocrines, in the preceding age, had been in comedy. His salary, accordingly, was very great, amounting at one time to half a talent per day, out of which, to be sure, he was required to pay the third actor.

He must have led, moreover, a life of much temperance, otherwise he would scarcely have been able to accomplish what is related of him by Philochoros, who says, that, at seventy years of age, a little before his death, he performed the principal parts of eight tragedies in four days. His devotion to his art did not, however, carry him so far as that of the comic poets, Philemon and Alexis, who breathed their last upon the stage at the moment that the crown of victory was placed upon their heads, and so were literally dismissed for the last time from the scene amidst the shouts and acclamations of the admiring multitude.^[949] But the passion of the Greeks for the arts of imitation did not confine itself to the enacting of human character and human feelings. Every species of mimicry found its patrons among them. There were, for example, persons who, by whistling, could imitate the notes of the nightingale; and Agesilaos, being once invited to witness the performances of one of these artists, replied somewhat contemptuously, “I have heard the nightingale herself.”^[950] Others, as Parmenion, could counterfeit to perfection the grunt of a pig,^[951] though it is probable, that actors of smaller dimensions were called upon to perform in the comedy of Aristophanes, where the Megarean^[952] brings on the stage his daughters in a sack, and disposes of them as porkers, having first carefully instructed them in the proper style of squeaking. Other actors obtained celebrity^[953] through their power of imitating by their voice the grating or rumbling of wheels, the creaking of axletrees, the whistling of winds, the blasts of trumpets, the modulations of flutes, or pipes, or the sounds of other instruments. It was customary, too, among this class of performers, to mimic, doubtless, in pastoral scenes, the bleating of sheep, and the bark of the shepherd’s dog, the neighing of horses, and the deep bellowing of bulls. They could imitate, moreover, but by what means is uncertain, the pattering of hail-storms, the dash and breaking of water in rivers or seas, with other natural phenomena. It was customary, likewise, as in modern times, to introduce boats and galleys rowed along the mimic waters of the stage, an example of which occurs on an Etruscan Chalcidone, where we behold a little vessel of extraordinary form, with a mariner at bow and stern, paddled along a bank adorned with flowers, while on a platform, occupying the boat’s waist, two naked dancers are exhibiting their saltatorial powers.^[954]

Very singular figures were also introduced upon the stage, as wasps, frogs, and birds, of sufficiently large dimensions to be enacted by men; and still stranger personages occasionally made their appearance, as where, in a kind of practical parody of the story of Andromeda,^[955] a whale emerges on the sea beach to snap off an old woman. In another drama the transformation of Argos was represented, after which this luckless male duenna strutted like a peacock before the audience. Io, moreover, was changed into a cow, and Euippe, in Euripides, into a mare. What there was peculiar in the appearance of Amymone it is not easy to conjecture; but she was, possibly, represented in the act of withdrawing the trident of Poseidon from the rock, from which gushed forth three fountains. The rivers, and mountains, and cities introduced^[956] were, doubtless, personifications, such as we still find in many works of art. The giants were simply, in all probability, huge figures of men, made to stalk about the stage, like elephants, with an actor in each leg; and the Indians, Tritons, Gorgons, Centaurs, with other personages of terrible or fantastic aspect, owed their existence, perhaps, to masks, if we may so speak, representing the whole figures.

In what form the Seasons, the Pleiades,^[957] or the nymphs of Mithakos, made their appearance on the stage, we are, I believe, nowhere told, though we possess some information respecting the costume and figure of those other strange persons of the drama, the Clouds,^[958] which came floating in through the Parodoi, enveloped, some in masses of white fleecy gauze, like vapour, others in azure, or many-tinted robes, or in drapery like piled-up flocks of wool, to represent the various aspects of the skies; while a hazy atmosphere was probably diffused around them, as around the other gods, by the smoke of styrax or frankincense, burnt in profusion on the altars of the theatre. Here and there, through these piles of drapery, a mask with ruddy pendant nose, like the tail of a lobster, peered forth, and a human voice was heard chanting in richest cadence and modulation the lively anapæsts of the chorus.

In the tragedy of Alcestis, the grim, spectral figure of Death was beheld gliding to and fro through the darkness, in front of the palace of Admetos, while personifications still, if possible, more strange and wild, made their appearance in other dramas,—as Justice, Madness, Frenzy, Strength, Violence, Deceit, Drunkenness, Laziness, Envy.^[959]

Plato, who entertained peculiar notions^[960] respecting the dignity of human nature, banished the theatre from his Republic, because he thought it unbecoming a brave man, who had political rights to watch over and defend, to demean himself by low stage impersonations; and, from his account of what he would not have his citizens do, we learn what by others was done. Sometimes, he observes, the actor was required to imitate a woman, (though this task often devolved upon eunuchs,) whether young or old, reviling her husband, railing at and expressing contempt for the gods, either puffed up by the supposed stableness of her felicity, or stung to desperation by the severity of her misfortunes and sorrows. Other female characters were to be represented, toiling, or in love, or in the pangs of labour; which shows that there was scarcely an act or passage in human life not occasionally imitated on the stage.

Slaves of course performed an important part in the mimic world of the theatre; and with these, Plato, by some unaccountable association of ideas, classes smiths, and madmen, and vagabonds, and low artificers of every kind, and the rowers of galleys, and rogues, and cowards, below which his imagination could discover nothing in human nature.

But it was these very characters, with their low wit, buffoonery, and appropriate actions, that constituted the most effective materials of the comic poet, whose creed was, that

They accordingly hesitated at no degree of grotesque buffoonery and extravagance, introducing not only low sausage-sellers with their trays of black-puddings and chitterlings suspended on their paunches,^[961] and drunkards lisping, hiccuping, and reeling about the stage,^[962] but even libertines and profligates carrying on their intrigues in the view of the spectators. An example of this kind of scene occurs on an Etruscan bronze seal dug up near Cortona, which represents an adulterer in conference with his mistress, together with the Leno who brought them together.^[963]