retired into the porticoes behind
the seats of the theatre.

The fondness of the Athenians for representations of this kind cannot be
expressed. Their eyes, their ears, their imagination, their understanding,
all shared in the satisfaction. Nothing gave them so sensible a pleasure
in dramatic performances, either tragic or comic, as the strokes which
were aimed at the affairs of the public; whether pure chance occasioned
the application, or the address of the poets, who knew how to reconcile
the most remote subjects with the transactions of the republic. They
entered by that means into the interests of the people, took occasion to
soothe their passions, authorize their pretensions, justify, and sometimes
condemn, their conduct, entertain them with agreeable hopes, instruct them
in their duty in certain nice conjunctures; in consequence of which they
often not only acquired the applauses of the spectators, but credit and
influence in the public affairs and counsels: hence the theatre became so
grateful and so interesting to the people. It was in this manner,
according to some authors, that Euripides artfully adapted his tragedy of
_Palamedes_(211) to the sentence passed against Socrates; and pointed out,
by an illustrious example of antiquity, the innocence of a philosopher,
oppressed by malignity supported by power and faction.

Accident was often the occasion of sudden and unforeseen applications,
which from their appositeness were very agreeable to the people. Upon this
verse of AEschylus, in praise of Amphiaraus,

---- 'Tis his desire
Not to appear, but be the great and good,

the whole audience rose up, and unanimously applied it to Aristides.(212)
The same thing happened to Philopoemen at the Nemaean games. At the instant
he entered the theatre, these verses were singing upon the stage:

---- He comes, to whom we owe
Our liberty, the noblest good below.

All the Greeks cast their eyes upon Philopoemen,(213) and with clapping of
hands and acclamations of joy expressed their veneration for the hero.

In the same manner at Rome, during the banishment of Cicero,(214) when
some verses of Accius,(215) which reproached the Greeks with their
ingratitude in suffering the banishment of Telamon, were repeated by AEsop,
the best actor of his time, they drew tears from the eyes of the whole
assembly.

Upon another, though very different, occasion, the Roman people applied to
Pom