It need not be said that the same difficulty of plausible motivation puzzled the comic as well as the tragic writers of antiquity, and they extricated themselves with no less ingenuity in their own way. For the further unfolding of the plot in Plautus’ _Pseudolus_ it became necessary that that crafty slave should explain to his accomplices certain developments which had already been represented on the scene. Actually to repeat the facts would have been tedious to the spectators, while to motive an exit for all the parties concerned until the information could be imparted and then to motive their re-entrance might have proved difficult and certainly would have caused an awkward pause in the action. The poet therefore chose the bolder course of dropping for the moment all dramatic illusion and at the same time of slyly poking fun at the conventions of his art: “This play is being performed for the sake of these spectators. They have been here, and are aware of developments. I’ll tell _you_ about them afterwards”(!) (vss. 720 f.). We have already referred to the fact that topographical conditions in Athens gave rise to a convention regarding the significance of the parodi (see p. 208, above). As the spectator sat on the south slope of the Acropolis at Athens, with the orchestra and scene-buildings before him, the harbor of the Piraeus and the market place lay toward his right and the open country on his left (Fig. 29). And since the theater was roofless and the performances given in daylight, these relationships were visible and must at all times have been present to the consciousness of the audience. The matter was, therefore, one of more consequence than in the modern theater, where many spectators, being unable to see points of orientation outside, would be puzzled to indicate the points of the compass. In the Athenian theater, on the contrary, if the scene were laid locally no poet or stage manager could have allowed a character from the Piraeus to enter by the left (east) parodus without committing a patent absurdity. In such a case there was, at the beginning, no convention; the plays simply reacted to actual local conditions. But the fifth-century plays were rarely laid in Athens, and in them comparatively little is said of harbor, market place, or countryside, whether at Athens or elsewhere. Apart from a rigid convention, there would be no point in staging Aeschylus’ _Suppliants_, the scene of which is laid just outside the city of Argos, or Aristophanes’ _Birds_, whose scene is supposed to be in the clouds, in such a way as to conform to Athenian topography. In fact, incidental allusions in the fifth-century plays, the comparative infrequency in them of references to harbor, country, and market place, and minor infelicities arising from any attempt to foist this convention upon them, would all seem to indicate that these plays had been written without much regard for local geography. But with increasing frequency