a number of entrances and exits from a palace door. Whether this was a temporary or permanent wooden structure or simply a tent remains unclear since there is no physical evidence for a skene building until the Periclean phase. However, the hypothesis of a skene is not contradicted by the known archaeology of the site. The Oresteia also refers to a roof from which a watchman looks out, a step to the palace and an altar. It is sometimes argued that an ekkyklema, a wheeled trolly, was used for the revelation of the bodies by Clytemnestra at line 1372 in Agamemnon amongst other passages. If so it was an innovation of Aeschylus' stagecraft. However, Oliver Taplin questions the seemingly inconsistent use of the device for the dramatic passages claimed for it, and doubts whether the mechanism existed in Aeschylus' lifetime. Periclean theatre The substantial changes to the theatre in the late fifth century BC is conventionally called Periclean since they coincide with the completion of the Odeon of Pericles immediately adjacent and the wider Periclean building programme. However, there is no strong evidence to say the theatre’s reconstruction was of the same group as the other works or from Pericles’ lifetime. The new plan of the theatre consisted of a slight displacement of the performance area northward, a banking up of the auditorium, the addition of retaining walls to the west, east and north, a long hall south of the skene and abutting the Older Temple and a New Temple which was said to have contained a chryselephantine sculpture of Dionysus by Alkamenes. The seating during this phase was probably still in the form of ikria but it may be the case that some stone seating had been installed. Inscribed blocks, displaced but preserved in the retaining walls, with fifth-century BC epigraphy on them might indicate dedicated or numbered stone seats. The use of breccia in the foundations of the west wall and the long hall gives a terminus ante quem of the early fifth century BC, and a likely date of the last half of that century when its use was becoming common. Also the last recorded statue of Alkamenes was 404 BC, again placing the works in the late 400s. Pickard-Cambridge argues that the reconstruction was piecemeal over the last half of the century into the period of Kleophon. From the evidence of the plays there is a