ot quickened except it die."

The dead, then, as well as the living--this is for us the important
point--had their share in the _dromena_ of the "more ancient Dionysia."
These agricultural spring _dromena_ were celebrated just outside the
ancient city gates, in the _agora_, or place of assembly, on a circular
dancing-place, near to a very primitive sanctuary of Dionysos which was
opened only once in the year, at the Feast of Cups. Just outside the
gates was celebrated yet another festival of Dionysos equally primitive,
called the "Dionysia in the Fields." It had the form though not the date
of our May Day festival. Plutarch[39] thus laments over the "good old
times": "In ancient days," he says, "our fathers used to keep the feast
of Dionysos in homely, jovial fashion. There was a procession, a jar of
wine and a _branch_; then some one dragged in a goat, another followed
bringing a wicker basket of figs, and, to crown all, the phallos." It
was just a festival of the fruits of the whole earth: wine and the
basket of figs and the branch for vegetation, the goat for animal life,
the phallos for man. No thought here of the dead, it is all for the
living and his food.

* * * * *

Such sanctities even a great tyrant might not tamper with. But if you
may not upset the old you may without irreverence add the new.
Peisistratos probably cared little for, and believed less in, magical
ceremonies for the renewal of fruits, incantations of the dead. We can
scarcely picture him chewing buckthorn on the day of the "Cups," or
anointing his front door with pitch to keep out the ghosts. Very wisely
he left the Anthesteria and the kindred festival "in the fields" where
and as they were. But for his own purposes he wanted to do honour to
Dionysos, and also above all things to enlarge and improve the rites
done in the god's honour, so, leaving the old sanctuary to its fate, he
built a new temple on the south side of the Acropolis where the present
theatre now stands, and consecrated to the god a new and more splendid
precinct.

He did not build the present theatre, we must always remember that. The
rows of stone seats, the chief priest's splendid marble chair, were not
erected till two centuries later. What Peisistratos did was to build a
small stone temple (see Fig. 2), and a great round orchestra of stone
close beside it. Small fragments of the circular foundation can still be
seen. The spectators sat on