Only a few plays survive out of the many which these great geniuses wrote; there were many other writers of plays who were held to be scarcely inferior to these three, and who sometimes even carried off the prize from them, whose plays are lost for ever. But from the little that is left to us we can still judge that never did the mind of man reach to greater heights than in these dramas which the Athenians loved to listen to and to criticize. We think ourselves, of course, far superior to these slow old folks of so many centuries ago; but I wonder in what city to-day you would get tens of thousands to gather together, and sit for days listening to the greatest and deepest thoughts of the noblest thinkers, comparing them with each other, and judging carefully between their merits. The Athenians did that regularly—not a handful of the educated among them, but vast crowds of the common people. On a great festival-day at Athens you would see a crowd almost as big as a football cup crowd pouring into the Theatre of Dionysos, not to watch professionals kicking a football, but to listen by the hour to great poetry, and seriously to make up their minds which poet they preferred. But, of course, the Athenians are hopelessly out of date now.

In fact, the Greek theatre was as different from our theatre as it is possible for two things with the same name to be from one another. To us the theatre is a place where we go to be amused; to the Athenian it was a place where a great religious ceremony was performed to the glory of the gods, and for the education and improvement of men. Consequently, the Athenian got plays that will live for ever because they are the noble expression of noble thought, and we get—exactly what we deserve and desire.

But, indeed, the Greek theatre is so totally different from ours—in intention, in form, in everything, that it is no use trying to tell you all the differences. The best way is to take you to the theatre at Athens, and let you see what the place was like, how the plays were staged, what kind of an audience they had, and how the spectators behaved. We have to jump over a good many years, for the great Theatre of Dionysos, to which we are going, was not completed till long after the time of Pericles, though dramatic performances were given on the slope of the hill where it stands quite a hundred years earlier.

First of all, we must go to the booking office, and get our ivory tickets, stamped with our names and the numbers of our seats. For your ticket, unless you want to sit among the big folks in the reserved seats, you will pay two obols—say threepence, though, as threepence went farther in those days, the real value might be about ninepence. If you haven't got two obols to spend, you can go to the state office and ask for them, and they will be handed over to you; for the state believes that poor folks may need a good entertainment just as much as the rich, and may get as much benefit from it. There are mean folk in Athens, just as there are mean folk everywhere, who take advantage of the public generosity, and get their two obols though they have no need of them, and certainly don't go to the theatre with them.

Now we are safely seated in the theatre, and can look round us while the crowd is gathering. By the way, I hope you have remembered to bring a cushion, for the stone seats are rather hard and uncomfortable. One thing I am sure of—you never saw a theatre like this in your life before; nor, I am sure, one half so beautiful as this. Here is no stuffy, badly ventilated, tawdry building, with tinsel and electric light everywhere to make your eyes ache; but a huge, semicircular hollow, scooped out of the flank of the Acropolis Hill, and lined with tier upon tier of seats, divided into sections by passages. They say that it holds 30,000 when it is packed—anyway, it can take in quite a big slice of the population of Athens. Of course, there is no roof, except the cloudless blue sky overhead. The theatre faces south, and as we sit we look out across the city and the plain to Phalerum, and the dark waters of the Saronic Gulf, beginning to sparkle now under the rays of the rising sun. Play-going in Athens is not an after-dinner business, you will understand; it begins at daybreak, and goes on all day long, and I hope you have brought figs and bread with you to keep you going.

In the midst of the semicircle of seats lies a broad, flat, circular space, with an altar in the centre. This is the orchestra; quite a different thing from ours; and here the chorus of the play will be ranged, with its flute-player, and will sing and dance. Beyond the orchestra is a kind of platform, where the main actors will play their parts. There are two ways up to it, and if the actor comes in by the western one, you know that he is supposed to be coming from the city or the harbour; if he comes in by the eastern, he is coming from the country. Behind the platform is a simple background. The Greeks do not trouble themselves much about scenery or any of the tricks that are used in modern theatres. It is the play they are interested in, and they put up with the simplest arrangements, so long as they are pleased with the poet or the actors. When a god has to appear from the sky, as sometimes happens in a play, they swing him in quite openly by a crane, which they call "the machine," on to the higher platform called "the god-stage." And so, by and by, we begin to talk about "the god from the machine," when any wonderful intervention happens in affairs.

Our whole morning will be taken up with the hearing of one set of tragedies. In the afternoon, when lunch is over, we shall have a change, and hear comedy instead. Next day there will be a fresh set of tragedies in the forenoon, and of comedies in the afternoon, and the same order will hold on the third day, which will be the last day of the festival, when the plays will be judged, and prizes given to the authors of the best tragedy and the best comedy, to the best actor in each, and to the wealthy citizen who has provided the best chorus. For the plays are not presented by a theatre-manager, who hires his company and runs his show for profit. When a playwright has been selected to take part in the competition, his star actor is picked for him by lot, and the star then chooses two other actors to help him; for no matter how many characters there may be in a play, they are so arranged that three actors can perform all the parts, except, of course, the work that falls to the chorus. These three actors are paid by the State. There are no women among them: women's parts are all played by men, as in our own theatre in Shakespeare's time.

Of course, all this preparation has been going on for months before the plays are to be presented; and while the chief actors have been preparing for their task, the chorus has been in training also. Its work is provided for in a very curious way. The public official who looks after the affairs of the theatre keeps a list of wealthy citizens who can afford to spend money on the drama. To each playwright he assigns a man from this list, and this citizen has to hire, dress, and train at his own expense a body of singers and dancers suitable for the play. If it is a tragedy, he will hire fifteen men; if a comedy, twenty-four. So you can imagine that the honour of staging a play for Euripides or Aristophanes is rather a costly one, especially if you are anxious to carry off the prize for the best-trained chorus from your neighbour in the next street.