The foundations of the temple came to light in the South corner of the precinct. It is of small size (3·96 by 3·40 m.), and consists of a quadrangular cella and a narrow pronaos. From its small size it seems unlikely that the pronaos had any columns. The masonry is very ancient. The walls are polygonal, and the blocks of calcareous stone of which they are made are on the South-West side unusually large. In the foundations of the side-walls a few _poros_ blocks occur. There are no steps serving as foundation to either cella or pronaos. From this Professor Dörpfeld concludes that in all probability this temple is earlier than the temple of Dionysos Eleuthereus, close to the _skenè_ of the theatre. The temple of Eleuthereus belonged to the time of Peisistratos; it is more carefully built than the one newly discovered, and it has one step. Early though the newly discovered building undoubtedly is, it was preceded by a yet earlier structure, the walls of which, marked on the plan, lie beneath its foundations. Quite exceptional is the relation of the temple to the precinct. It does not lie in the middle, and is, moreover, separated from the inner part of the precinct by a wall and a door that could be closed. This separating wall is however apparently later than the temple, which possibly at one time stood free within the precinct. The separating wall is only explicable on ritual grounds. It made it possible for the temple to be accessible all the year round, whereas the precinct, save for one day in the year, was closed. * * * * * Are we to give to the ancient sanctuary the name _Lenaion_? To the sanctuary itself probably not. The meaning of _Lenaion_, it would seem, is not ‘sanctuary of the god Lenaios,’ but rather ‘place of the wine-press.’ It is noticeable that writers who could themselves have seen the sanctuary never call it _Lenaion_. Thucydides[217], the writer of the oration _against Neaera_[218], be he Demosthenes or Apollodorus, and again Phanodemus[219], as quoted by Athenaeus, all speak of it as the sanctuary of _Dionysos-in-the-Marshes_. Isaeus[220] calls it the Dionysion-in-the-Marshes. On the other hand, when contemporary authors speak of the dramatic contest which was held not in honour of Dionysos Eleuthereus but at the older Dionysia, they speak of the contest as _at_ or _on_ the Lenaion, never as _in-the-Marshes_. The natural conclusion is that the name _Lenaion_ is applicable to the place where the contests actually took place, namely to the ancient Orchestra and perhaps its immediate neighbourhood. The district of the wine-presses naturally had its dancing place, and that dancing place was called the Lenaion. To this day the peasants of Greece use for their festival-dances the village threshing-floor. * * * * *