east slope of the Acropolis.

Above are the new marble buildings of the Parthenon, rich with the
statues and bas-reliefs of Phidias and his scholars, gleaming white
against the blue sky, with the huge bronze statue of Athene
Promachos, fifty feet in height, towering up among the temples and
colonnades. In front, and far below, gleams the blue sea, and
Salamis beyond.

And there are gathered the people of Athens--fifty thousand of them,
possibly, when the theatre was complete and full. If it be fine,
they all wear garlands on their heads. If the sun be too hot, they
wear wide-brimmed straw hats. And if a storm comes on, they will
take refuge in the porticoes beneath; not without wine and cakes, for
what they have come to see will last for many an hour, and they
intend to feast their eyes and ears from sunrise to sunset. On the
highest seats are slaves and freedmen, below them the free citizens;
and on the lowest seats of all are the dignitaries of the republic--
the priests, the magistrates, and the other [Greek]--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, pug-
nosed 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, humorist, 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 religions 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 the 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 s