The fondness of the Athenians for representations of this kind cannot be expressed. Their eyes, their ears, their imagination, their understanding, all shared in the satisfaction. Nothing gave them so sensible a pleasure in dramatic performances, either tragic or comic, as the strokes which were aimed at the affairs of the public; whether pure chance occasioned the application, or the address of the poets, who knew how to reconcile the most remote subjects with the transactions of the republic. They entered by that means into the interests of the people, took occasion to soothe their passions, authorize their pretensions, justify, and sometimes condemn, their conduct, entertain them with agreeable hopes, instruct them in their duty in certain nice conjunctures; in consequence of which they often not only acquired the applauses of the spectators, but credit and influence in the public affairs and counsels: hence the theatre became so grateful and so interesting to the people. It was in this manner, according to some authors, that Euripides artfully adapted his tragedy of _Palamedes_(211) to the sentence passed against Socrates; and pointed out, by an illustrious example of antiquity, the innocence of a philosopher, oppressed by malignity supported by power and faction. Accident was often the occasion of sudden and unforeseen applications, which from their appositeness were very agreeable to the people. Upon this verse of Æschylus, in praise of Amphiaraus, —— ’Tis his desire Not to appear, but be the great and good, the whole audience rose up, and unanimously applied it to Aristides.(212) The same thing happened to Philopœmen at the Nemæan games. At the instant he entered the theatre, these verses were singing upon the stage: —— He comes, to whom we owe Our liberty, the noblest good below. All the Greeks cast their eyes upon Philopœmen,(213) and with clapping of hands and acclamations of joy expressed their veneration for the hero. In the same manner at Rome, during the banishment of Cicero,(214) when some verses of Accius,(215) which reproached the Greeks with their ingratitude in suffering the banishment of Telamon, were repeated by Æsop, the best actor of his time, they drew tears from the eyes of the whole assembly. Upon another, though very different, occasion, the Roman people applied to Pompey the Great some verses to this effect: ’Tis our unhappiness has made thee great;(216) and then addressing the people; The time shall come when you shall late deplore So great a power confided to such hands; the spectators obliged the actor to repeat these verses several times. Fondness for Theatrical Representations one of the principal Causes of the Decline, Degeneracy, and Corruption of the Athenian State.