the stage, and on it were seen the corpses of the murdered persons, the murderers standing beside them with the bloody weapons in their hands. It might be rolled through any of the three doors at the back of the stage. The contrivance was of course a purely conventional one, due to the necessities of the Greek theatre. All pretence of realism and illusion was abandoned. But this was a point on which the Greeks did not lay very much stress. In such matters custom is everything. To a modern spectator, used to elaborate stage effects, the device would appear intolerable. But the Greeks, living at a time when stage decoration was in its infancy, were less exacting in their demands. And when they had once accepted the ekkyklema as a conventional contrivance for exhibiting interiors their plastic genius would enable them to use it to the best advantage. The sudden spectacle of the murderer standing beside his victim’s body, with the instrument of death in his hands, might easily be formed into a most impressive tableau. The ekkyklema was probably invented towards the middle of the fifth century, about the time when the actor’s booth was first converted into a regular back-scene. It is used twice in the Oresteia. In the Agamemnon, after the murder has been committed, the platform rolls out, and reveals the person of Clytaemnestra, standing over the dead bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra. In the Choephori there is a parallel scene. Orestes is brought into view standing beside the bodies of Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra, and pointing to the net in which his father had been entangled and slaughtered many years ago. He is seized with frenzy, descends from the ekkyklema, and hastens away to the temple of Apollo at Delphi. The platform is then withdrawn into the palace.[622] During the rest of the century there are many instances of the use of the ekkyklema in tragedy. In the Ajax the interior of the tent is exposed to view by this contrivance; and at the end of the Antigone the body of Eurydice is exhibited, lying beside the altar at which she has stabbed herself. In the Hippolytus, after the suicide of Phaedra, her dead body is displayed upon the ekkyklema, and Theseus takes from it the letter in which she makes her charge against Hippolytus. In the Electra of Sophocles the door is thrown open at the command of Aegisthus, and the platform rolls out and exhibits Orestes and Pylades standing beside the corpse of Clytaemnestra, which is covered with a cloth. Aegisthus himself removes the cloth, and then Orestes and Pylades descend to the stage, and the platform is drawn back again. In the Hecuba the sons of Polymestor, who have been slaughtered inside the tent, are made visible to the spectators by means of the ekkyklema. In the Hercules Furens Hercules is exhibited lying prostrate between the bodies of his wife and children, with his face covered up, and his limbs chained to the broken column which he had thrown down in his frenzy.