As regards the style of the ancient scene-painting, and the degree of perfection to which it was eventually brought, it is difficult to speak with any certainty. But in the fifth century, at any rate, there can be little doubt that the scenery was of the simplest description. Landscape-painting was still in its infancy, and altogether subordinated to the painting of the human figure. When landscapes were introduced into a picture, they were suggested rather than worked out in detail.[576] A city was represented by a few houses, a forest by a few trees, and so on. The paintings for the stage were probably of the same general type. The scenes most in use were front views of temples, palaces, and dwelling-houses. In such cases a rough indication of the different buildings would be considered sufficient. That they were depicted with any completeness and realism is far from likely, though the newly discovered art of perspective was undoubtedly applied to architecture and the painting of architectural scenes much earlier than to landscape.[577] It is true that the personages in the extant dramas often use words which seem to imply an elaborate architectural background. They speak of columns, triglyphs, cornices, and pediments.[578] In the Ion they even admire in detail the bas-reliefs with which the temple front was decorated.[579] But it is not certain that the objects mentioned were all of them actually represented upon the stage. Many of them may have been left to the imagination. As for natural scenery, there was probably very little of this in the early theatre. If the action was laid in a country region, as in the Philoctetes and the Oedipus Coloneus, and in the generality of satyric plays, the necessary effect might be produced by a few rocks, and trees, and other similar objects. In later times it was customary, when the background represented a palace or temple, to insert a landscape on either side.[580] Even in the plays of the fifth century there are occasional references to such landscapes. Helen, standing before the palace of the Egyptian king, points to the ‘streams of the Nile’ as flowing close by. The old man in the Electra, when he reaches the palace of the Atreidae, shows Orestes the country round about, with Argos and Mycenae in the distance. The Trojan captives descry, from the Greek encampment, the smoke and flames of burning Troy.[581] But here again we may doubt whether, on the contemporary stage, these places were really visible to the spectators. At any rate, if they were delineated at all, it was probably in a slight and symbolical fashion. As time went on the art of scenic decoration was much improved and elaborated. In the Hellenistic period it seems to have reached a fairly high degree of development. Natural phenomena were now depicted with more realism. Seas and rivers, earth and sky, are mentioned among the objects delineated. Even regions in Hades and Tartarus were represented upon the stage.[582]