The steps leading from the orchestra upon the stage (Fig. 65) can be explained only on the supposition that even in the Roman period, to which the steps in their present form belong, actors who took the part of persons arriving from distant places came upon the stage through the orchestra. In the niches in front of the stage, as we learn from a wall painting, sat those charged with the maintenance of order in the Theatre, two perhaps in the rectangular niches, or one in the semicircular niche in the middle. The stage is long and narrow, measuring 120 by 24 Oscan feet; the floor is a little more than three feet above the level of the orchestra. The rear wall, as in ancient theatres generally, was built to represent the front of a palace, entered by three doors, and adorned with columns and niches for statues. In each of the short sections of wall at the ends of the stage is a broad doorway, extending across almost the entire space. The long narrow room behind the stage, used as a dressing room (_postscaenium_), was entered by a door at the rear, which was reached by an inclined approach. No trace of the roof of the stage remains, but from the better preserved theatres at Orange, in the south of France, and at Aspendus, in Asia Minor, we infer that it sloped back toward the rear wall. The floor was of wood. The room underneath the stage was divided into several parts. Between the front wall and that just back of it (seen in Fig. 65) was the place for the curtain, which, as in Roman theatres, was let down at the beginning of the play, and raised at the end. The space between the parallel walls must have been covered, leaving only a narrow slit for the curtain; otherwise it would not have been easy to go upon the stage from the steps in the orchestra. Underneath the place for the curtain is a low passage, in the vaulted roof of which are two rows of holes, a little more than a foot square, cut in blocks of basalt, and evidently designed to hold upright timbers. This passage has in recent years been entirely cleared. In the floor, directly under the openings in the vaulted roof and corresponding with them, were square holes. In those nearer the front of the stage were remains of timbers and of square pieces of iron fitted to the ends of these, a larger and a smaller piece for each hole. It seems likely that, as Mazois suggested, hollow upright beams were set in the holes, and in them smaller hollow beams were placed, in which were still smaller poles or iron rods; by the sliding of these up and down, the long horizontal pole on which the curtain was hung could be raised or lowered. The use of the inner row of holes has not been satisfactorily explained.