c--the priests, the magistrates, and
the other [Greek text]--the fair and good men--as the citizens of the
highest rank were called, and with them foreign ambassadors and
distinguished strangers. What an audience--the rapidest, subtlest,
wittiest, down to the very cobblers and tinkers, the world has ever seen.
And what noble figures on those front seats; Pericles, with Aspasia
beside him, and all his friends--Anaxagoras the sage, Phidias the
sculptor, and many another immortal artist; and somewhere among the free
citizens, perhaps beside his father Sophroniscus the sculptor, a short,
square, pugnosed boy of ten years old, looking at it all with strange
eyes--'who will be one day,' so said the Pythoness at Delphi, 'the wisest
man in Greece'--sage, metaphysician, humourist, warrior, patriot,
martyr--for his name is _Socrates_.

All are in their dresses of office; for this is not merely a day of
amusement, but of religious ceremony; sacred to Dionysos--Bacchus, the
inspiring god, who raises men above themselves, for good--or for evil.

The evil, or at least the mere animal aspect of that inspiration, was to
be seen in forms grotesque and sensuous enough in those very festivals,
when the gayer and coarser part of the population, in town and country,
broke out into frantic masquerade, of which that silly carnival of Rome
is perhaps the last paltry and unmeaning relic. 'When,' as the learned
O. Muller says, 'the desire of escaping from self into something new and
strange, of living in an imaginary world, broke forth in a thousand ways;
not merely in revelry and solemn, though fantastic songs, but in a
hundred disguises, imitating the subordinate beings--satyrs, pans, and
nymphs, by whom the god was surrounded, and through whom life seemed to
pass from him into vegetation, and branch off into a variety of beautiful
or grotesque forms--beings who were ever present to the fancy of the
Greeks, as a convenient step by which they could approach more nearly to
the presence of the Divinity.' But even out of that seemingly bare
chaos, Athenian genius was learning how to construct, under Eupolis,
Cratinus and Aristophanes, that elder school of comedy, which remains not
only unsurpassed, but unapproachable, save by Rabelais alone, as the
ideal cloudland of masquerading wisdom, in which the whole universe goes
mad--but with a subtle method in its madness.

Yes, so it has been, under some form or other, in every race and
clime--ever