The announcement of a new character’s coming was usually a pretty artificial device, but it is plausibly employed a little farther on (vss. 210 ff.) in this same play, when Cadmus says: Since thou, Tiresias, seest not this light, I will for thee be spokesman of thy words. Lo to these halls comes Pentheus hastily. [Way’s translation] Again, at the beginning of Sophocles’ _Oedipus at Colonus_, Oedipus inquires: “To what place have we come, Antigone? Who will receive the wandering Oedipus?” In a blind man these questions are especially natural, and the use of the proper names identifies the actors’ rôles. Soon a stranger approaches, and to him Oedipus repeats his first question (vs. 38). His replies reveal the location and significance of the scenic setting. The directness of the play’s first line finds a parallel in Shakespeare’s _Twelfth Night_, Act I, scene 2: VIOLA. What country, friends, is this? CAPTAIN. This is Illyria, lady. [Illustration: FIG. 68.—Mask of a Slave in New Comedy. See p. 213, n. 1] [Illustration: FIG. 69.—Terra Cotta Mask in Berlin Representing a Courtesan in New Comedy. See p. 213, n. 1] The third compensation for the lack of a playbill was afforded by the use of masks (see pp. 221 ff., below). In Old Comedy contemporaneous personages were often introduced, and we are told that their masks were true enough to life for their identity to be recognizable before the actors had uttered a word. According to a late anecdote, at the presentation of Aristophanes’ _Clouds_, Socrates rose from his place and remained standing during the whole performance so that strangers in attendance might recognize the original of his double on the stage. In the _Knights_ (vss. 230 ff.), Aristophanes explains the absence of a portrait-mask for Cleon on the ground that the mask-makers were too apprehensive of that demagogue’s vengeance to reproduce his features. But the playbill value of masks was seen more fully in the case of more or less conventionalized characters, especially in New Comedy (Figs. 68 f.).[303] Pollux, a writer of the second century A.D., describes twenty-eight such masks for tragedy and forty-four for New Comedy. The hair, of varying amount, color, coiffure, and quality, seems to have been the chief criterion, but dress, complexion, facial features, etc., were also taken into account. The make-up of every stock character was fixed with some definiteness and must have been well known to all intelligent spectators. Thus the first glimpse of approaching actors enabled an ancient audience to identify the red-headed barbarian slave, the pale lovelorn youth, the boastful soldier, the voracious parasite, the scolding wife, the flatterer, the “French” cook, the maiden betrayed or in distress, the stern father, the designing courtesan, etc., much more easily than a playbill of the modern type would have done.