As these characteristic structures form so prominent a feature in ancient Greek cities, and at this day are generally the most striking objects emerging from their ruins, a brief notice of their structure will be the best accompaniment to our illustration. The inventor of dramatic entertainments was Thespis, who lived about 550 years before the Christian era. His theatre was as simple as his exhibition was rude; it was an ambulatory machine, moving from place to place, like the booth of an English fair. On the cart, a stage was erected; the dramatic representation was confined to two performers, whose faces were smeared with lees of wine, and who entertained the audience with a dialogue of coarse and rustic humour. This movable edifice was improved by being fixed, and the spectators accommodated with wooden benches, raised one above the other; but the fondness of the Greeks for such exhibitions was so great, and the throng so pressing, that frequent accidents occurred from the breaking down of these frail structures, and the loss of life was so serious, that it was necessary to accommodate the people with more durable edifices. The name of Æschylus is immortalized as well by his mechanical as his literary genius; he not only fixed the drama by the composition of forty regular plays, in which the characters were dressed in suitable costume, but he gave his representations in a regular and permanent edifice, the arrangement of which was the model on which all others were afterwards built. The building was a semicircle whose extremities were limited by a right line; this was divided into three parts, each having its own appropriation. The theatre, properly so called, from whence the spectators “saw” the exhibition, filled the semicircle, where the people were accommodated with benches rising one above the other. The upper were allocated to females. The seats were confined to a particular number in each row, in all theatres they were eighteen inches high and three feet broad, so that the people sat at their ease, the feet of those above never incommoding those below. Behind each row were galleries, formed in the walls, by which the spectators entered from without, and, from the crowds that issued from them, they were called “vomitories;” from them were passages through the seats in a right line tending to a common centre, and, from the shape of the enclosed spaces, broad above and narrow below, the portions into which the benches were divided, were called “wedges.” As the actor’s voice would be insufficient to fill the vast space enclosed by some theatres, which contained 40,000 people, the sound was augmented, and rendered distinct, by hollow vessels of copper, dispersed under the seats in such a way as to reverberate the words distinctly to the ear of every individual.