Architectural embellishments of stone, representing a palace, with three entrances, the centre one appropriated to royalty, the others to subordinate rank, usually served for the scene.

But at times, when the plot demanded a different locality, scenes painted with the utmost art and cost were easily substituted; nor were wanting the modern contrivances of artificial lightning and thunder--the clouds for the gods--a variety of inventions for the sudden apparition of demon agents, whether from above or below--and all the adventitious and effective aid which mechanism lends to genius.
VII.

Thus summoning before us the external character of the Athenian drama, the vast audience, the unroofed and enormous theatre, the actors themselves enlarged by art above the ordinary proportions of men, the solemn and sacred subjects from which its form and spirit were derived, we turn to Aeschylus, and behold at once the fitting creator of its grand and ideal personifications.

I have said that Homer was his original; but a more intellectual age than that of the Grecian epic had arrived, and with Aeschylus, philosophy passed into poetry.

The dark doctrine of fatality imparted its stern and awful interest to the narration of events--men were delineated, not as mere self-acting and self-willed mortals, but as the agents of a destiny inevitable and unseen--the gods themselves are no longer the gods of Homer, entering into the sphere of human action for petty motives and for individual purposes--drawing their grandeur, not from the part they perform, but from the descriptions of the poet;--they appear now as the oracles or the agents of fate--they are visiters from another world, terrible and ominous from the warnings which they convey.
Homer is the creator of the material poetry, Aeschylus of the intellectual.