d to send them back. But I
do think that the museum on the Acropolis should be provided with a
better set of casts of the figures than those which are now to be seen
there. They look very wretched, and carelessly prepared....

THE THEATER OF DIONYSUS[48]

BY J. P. MAHAFFY

Some ten or twelve years ago, a very extensive and splendidly successful
excavation was made when a party of German archeologists laid bare the
Theater of Dionysus--the great theater in which AEschylus, Sophocles,
and Euripides brought out their immortal plays before an immortal
audience. There is nothing more delightful than to descend from the
Acropolis, and rest awhile in the comfortable marble arm-chairs with
which the front row of the circuit is occupied. They are of the pattern
usual in the sitting portrait statues of the Greeks--very deep, and with
a curved back, which exceeds both in comfort and in grace any chairs
made by modern workmen.[49] Each chair has the name of a priest
inscribed on it, showing how the theater among the Greeks corresponded
to our cathedral, and this front row to the stalls of canons and
prebendaries.

But unfortunately all this sacerdotal prominence is probably the work of
the later restorers of the theater. For after having been first
beautified and adorned with statues by Lycurgus (in Demosthenes' time),
it was again restored and embellished by Herodes Atticus, or about his
time, so that the theater, as we now have it, can only be called the
building of the second or third century after Christ. The front wall of
the stage, which is raised some feet above the level of the empty pit,
is adorned with a row of very elegant sculptures, among which one--a
shaggy old man, in a stooping posture, represented as coming out from
within, and holding up the stone above him--is particularly striking.
Some Greek is said to have knocked off, by way of amusement, the heads
of most of these figures since they were discovered, but this I do not
know upon any better authority than ordinary report. The pit or center
of the theater is empty, and was never in Greek days occupied by seats,
but a wooden structure was set up adjoining the stage, and on this the
chorus performed their dances, and sang their odes. But now there is a
circuit of upright slabs of stone close to the front seat, which can
hardly have been an arrangement of the old Greek theater. They are
generally supposed to have been added when the building was used fo