simplifies all outlines and heals with tender touch the wounds of
ages, it is easy enough to dream ourselves into the belief that the
ghosts of dead actors may once more glide across the stage.
Fiery-hearted Medea, statuesque Antigone, Prometheus silent beneath
the hammer-strokes of Force and Strength, Orestes hounded by his
mother's Furies, Cassandra aghast before the palace of Mycenae,
pure-souled Hippolytus, ruthful Alcestis, the divine youth of Helen,
and Clytemnestra in her queenliness, emerge like faint grey films
against the bluish background of Hymettus. The night air seems vocal
with echoes of old Greek, more felt than heard, like voices wafted
to our sense in sleep, the sound whereof we do not seize, though the
burden lingers in our memory.

[1] It is true, however, that these sculptures belong to a
comparatively late period, and that the theatre underwent
some alterations in Roman days, so that the stage is now
probably a few yards farther from the seats than in the
time of Sophocles.

[2] It is not a little surprising to come upon this relic
of the worship of the young Bithynian at Athens in the
theatre still consecrated by the memories of AEschylus and
Sophocles.

In like manner, when moonlight, falling aslant upon the Propylaea,
restores the marble masonry to its original whiteness, and the
shattered heaps of ruined colonnades are veiled in shadow, and every
form seems larger, grander, and more perfect than by day, it is well
to sit upon the lowest steps, and looking upwards, to remember what
processions passed along this way bearing the sacred peplus to
Athene. The Panathenaic pomp, which Pheidias and his pupils carved
upon the friezes of the Parthenon, took place once in five years, on
one of the last days of July.[1] All the citizens joined in the
honour paid to their patroness. Old men bearing olive-branches,
young men clothed in bronze, chapleted youths singing the praise of
Pallas in prosodial hymns, maidens carrying holy vessels, aliens
bending beneath the weight of urns, servants of the temple leading
oxen crowned with fillets, troops of horsemen reining in impetuous
steeds: all these pass before us in the frieze of Pheidias. But to
our imagination must be left what he has refrained from sculpturing,
the chariot formed like a ship, in which the most illustrious nobles
of Athens sat, splendidly arrayed, beneath the crocus-coloured
curtain or peplus outspread