Photius, while explaining the ‘scaffolding,’ gives us incidentally a priceless piece of information. This early theatre was _in the agora_. But then, to raise a time-honoured question, to which we shall later (p. 132) return, where is the agora? This question for the present we must not pursue. But the ancient theatre consisted of more than ‘scaffolding’ for seats. It had what was the central, initial, cardinal feature of every Greek theatre, its dancing place, its _orchestra_; and we know approximately where this orchestra was. A lexicographer[203], explaining the word _orchestra_, says, ‘a conspicuous place for a public festival, where are the statues of Harmodios and Aristogeiton.’ The agora, conducted by successive theorists, has made the complete tour of the Acropolis, but the statues of the Tyrant-Slayers cannot break loose from the Areopagus,—beneath which ‘not far’ from the temple of Ares, Pausanias[204] saw them. The statues, according to Timaeus, were at the site of the ancient orchestra[205], from the scaffolding of which ‘in the agora’ the more ancient festival (the Lenaia) was witnessed. Here then, somewhere near the Areopagus, we must seek the sanctuary of Dionysos-in-the-Marshes. The Lenaia, though more ancient than the ‘city Dionysia’ was no obscure festival. Plato[206], in the _Protagoras_, mentions a comedy which Pherecrates had brought out at the Lenaia, and it can never be forgotten that for the Lenaia, in 405 B.C., Aristophanes wrote the _Frogs_[207]. The chorus of Frogs[208] assuredly remember that their home is in the Limnae. There they were wont to croak and chant at the Anthesteria, on the third day of which festival, the Chytroi or Pots, came the ‘Pot Contests,’ probably the earliest dramatic performances that Athens saw. ‘O brood of the mere, the spring, Gather together and sing From the depths of your throat By the side of the boat Co-äx, as we move in a ring; As in Limnae we sang the divine Nyseïan Giver of Wine, When the people in lots With their sanctified Pots Came reeling around my shrine.’ The excavations which have brought to light the ancient sanctuary of the Limnae were not undertaken solely, or even chiefly, with that object. Rather the intention was to settle, if possible, other and wider topographical questions: where lay the ancient road to the Acropolis, where the ancient agora, and where the city well, Kallirrhoë. Yet, to some, who awaited with an almost breathless impatience the result of these excavations, their great hope was that the precinct of the Limnae might be found; that they might know where in imagination to picture the ancient rites of the Anthesteria and the marriage of the Queen and those earliest dramatic contests from which sprang tragedy and comedy. The wider results of the excavations will be noted in connection with the Enneakrounos; for the moment it is the narrower, intenser issue of the _Limnae_ that alone concerns us.