The Easter feast is of great importance in Greece because the Lenten fast is so scrupulously observed. At all times the working people are temperate enough to have pleased Aristophanes, who liked to dwell on the simple living of a generation before his own, when from the country districts men trooped in to the assembly,— “Each with his own little Goatskin of wine, Each with three olives, two Onions, one loaf in his Wallet, to dine.”[13] But during parts of Lent even vegetables are forbidden, and a man who has guided you up Pentelicus will accept from your lunch-basket only a few olives and an orange to supplement his own piece of coarse bread. The markets are in the older and most picturesque part of the city, but only a modern Aristophanes could make them into scenes of rollicking farce shot through with political purpose. Provincial Megarians with pigs to sell, uncouth Bœotians bringing in vegetables and game, knavish Athenians offering garlic and salt and anchovies from Phaleron—probably the types are still here, dialects, morals and all, awaiting their sacred bard. Footnote 12: Euripides, _Electra_, 701, translated by Gilbert Murray. Footnote 13: _Ecclesiazusae_, 306, translated by Rogers. In the same district lies the bazaar known as Shoe Lane, where cobblers and tailors and carpenters work in the open, protected by awnings. Socrates, keen-eyed for handicraft and homely illustrations, often must have watched their forebears. Not far from the shoemakers, the coppersmiths, in the same district as of old, are suitably gathered in Hephæstus Street, whence the sound of ringing hammers echoes afar. The Homeric picture of Hephæstus in his forge on Olympus is duplicated in any little forge along the modern street, when a workman rises from his anvil and with a sponge wipes his face and hand and sturdy neck and shaggy breast. In more than one part of the city the “bankers’ tables,” at which also Socrates used to seek his crowd, are reproduced in the much frequented tables of the money changers. The open-air bakeries of his day also exist again and tempt with their bread and plain cakes the exhausted sight-seer, whatever his philosophy. But a Platonist is deterred at the threshold of a pastry-cook’s in the fashionable shopping district by the remembrance that in the ideal life there is no place for “those celebrated delicacies, the Athenian confectionery.”