If it were desired to disclose to the audience the corpse of someone who has just been done to death behind the scenes, perhaps with the murderers still gloating over their crime, or to set any similar interior view before the faithful eyes of the spectators, the simplest device was to fling open the appropriate door of the scene-building and thus to display the desired objects or persons close behind the opening. Whatever may be said for such a method under other conditions, in the Greek theater it ran afoul of certain practical considerations. For example, the wings of the auditorium extended around so far (Fig. 22) that spectators seated there could have obtained no satisfactory view through the opened doors of the scene-building. Nevertheless, during the last quarter-century not a few scholars have maintained that this was the sole means which the Greek playwrights employed for such a purpose. But the ancient commentators often speak of a contrivance which was used to bring a supposedly interior scene out of the opened doors and more fully into the view of the audience. This device is sometimes described as “turning” or “revolving” (στρέφειν)[355] and sometimes as being “rolled out” (ἐκ, “out” + κυκλεῖν, to “wheel”). And though eccyclema (ἐκκύκλημα) was used as the generic term I am persuaded that there were in fact two types of machine corresponding to different conditions in the Athenian theater. When the first scene-building was erected, about 465 B.C., it must have been simple and unpretentious, having neither parascenia nor proscenium. Probably it consisted also of but a single story, though in Fig. 74[356] I have given it a low clerestory with small windows for the admission of light into the scene-building. The roof would thus have been better suited for the occasional appearance of actors upon the housetop, as in Aeschylus’ _Agamemnon_ (458 B.C.). In addition to the usual doors in the front of the scene-building (_A_, _C_, and _E_ in Fig. 74), I believe that a butterfly valve, to the base of which a semicircular platform was attached, was used to close one or more other openings. In Fig. 74 one of these is shown closed and not in use at _B_ and another open and in action at _D_. The size of the semicircular platform would be limited only by the depth of the scene-building and the space between the front doors, and there would be ample room for several persons upon the eccyclema at a time. Therefore when a deed of violence had been committed indoors it was possible, by revolving one of the valves after a tableau had been posed upon its platform, to place a quasi-interior scene before the spectators. This is Mr. Exon’s theory of the eccyclema, and it admirably fits the conditions in the Athenian theater at an early date. [Illustration: FIG. 74.—The Athenian Theater of About 460 B.C., Showing the Earlier Type of Eccyclema. See p. 285, n. 2]