“Yes,” says Peripatetica, who has just been consulting the guide-book. “It must have been rather like the barbecues the American politicians used to give to their constituents half a century ago, for only the choicest bits were burnt before the gods, sprinkled with oil and wine and sweet-smelling spices, and the populace, I suppose, carried home the rest. No doubt Hiero found it a paying investment.” The theatre, when reached, is found, of course, to have a beautiful situation. All Greek theatres have. 167They were a people who liked to open all the doors of enjoyment at once, and when they filled this enormous semicircle (24,000 could sit there) cut from the living rock upon the hillside, they could not only listen to the rolling, organ-like Greek of the great poets, and have their souls shaken with the “pity and terror” of tragedy, or laugh at the gay mockery of comedy, but by merely lifting their eyes they could look out upon the blue Ionian sea, the smiling flowered land, and in the distance the purple hills dappled with flying shadows. In their time all the surrounding eminences were crowned with great temples, and behind them—this was a contrast very Greek—lay the Street of Tombs. For they had not a shuddering horror of death, hastening their departed into remote isolation from their own daily life. They liked to pass to their occupations and amusements among the beautiful receptacles made for the ashes of those they had loved. In this theatre Syracuse saw not only the great dramas, but the great dramatists and poets. Æschylus, sitting beside Hiero I., saw all his plays produced here; “The Ætnaiai” and “The Persians” were written for this stage. Pindar was often here; so were Bacchylides and Simonides, and a host of lesser playwrights. Indeed, no theatre has ever known such famous auditors. Theocritus, Pythagoras, Sappho, Empedocles, Archimedes, Plato, Cicero, have all sat here. Plato was long in Syracuse; called by Dionysius to train his son Dion, he labours with such poor success that Dion is driven from the power inherited from his father, by the citizens outraged at the grossness of his vices. Before this fall Plato has left him in disgust, Dion remarking with careless insolence: 168“I fear you will not speak kindly of me in Athens.” To which the philosopher, with still more insolent sarcasm, replies: “We are little likely to be so in want of a topic in Athens as to speak of you at all.” Yet it would seem as if no good effort was ever wholly lost, for when Dion, earning his bread in exile as an obscure schoolmaster, is sneeringly asked what he ever learned from Plato, his dignified answer is, “He taught me to bear misfortune with resignation.”