There were companies of players who strolled about the country, just as the English actors of Shakespeare's time were wont to do. While the better class of actors were highly honored, ordinary players were held in very low esteem. The tragic actor increased his height and size by wearing thick-soled buskins, an enormous mask, and padded garments. The actor in comedy wore thin-soled slippers, or socks. The _sock_ being thus a characteristic part of the make-up of the ancient comic actor, and the _buskin_ that of the tragic actor, these foot coverings have come to be used as the symbols respectively of comedy and tragedy, as in the familiar lines of Dryden:-- "Great Fletcher never treads in buskins here, Nor greater Jonson dares in socks appear." The theatre exerted a great influence upon Greek life. It performed for ancient Greek society somewhat the same service as that rendered to modern society by the pulpit and the press. During the best days of Hellas the frequent rehearsal upon the stage of the chief incidents in the lives of the gods and the heroes served to deepen and strengthen the religious faith of the people; and later, in the Macedonian period, the theatre was one of the chief agents in the diffusion of Greek literary culture over the world. BANQUETS AND SYMPOSIA.--Banquets and drinking-parties among the Greeks possessed some features which set them apart from similar entertainments among other peoples. The banquet proper was partaken, in later times, by the guest in a reclining position, upon couches or divans, arranged about the table in the Oriental manner. After the usual courses, a libation was poured out and a hymn sung in honor of the gods, and then followed that characteristic part of the entertainment known as the _symposium_. The symposium was "the intellectual side of the feast." It consisted of general conversation, riddles, and convivial songs rendered to the accompaniment of the lyre passed from hand to hand. Generally, professional singers and musicians, dancing-girls, jugglers, and jesters were called in to contribute to the merrymaking. All the while the wine- bowl circulated freely, the rule being that a man might drink "as much as he could carry home without a guide,--unless he were far gone in years." Here also the Greeks applied their maxim, "Never too much." The banqueters usually consumed the night in merry-making, sometimes being broken in upon from the street by other bands of revellers, who made themselves self-invited guests. OCCUPATION.--The enormous body of slaves in ancient Greece relieved the free population from most of those forms of labor classed as drudgery. The æsthetic Greek regarded as degrading any kind of manual labor that marred the symmetry or beauty of the body.