There remains for discussion a passage in Plutarch. It concerns an episode in the career of Demetrius Poliorcetes (337-283 B.C.) and has been thought to refer to the theater of his day. But a study has been made of Plutarch’s practice in such matters and it has been found that many times he deliberately sought vividness of presentation by modernizing his accounts and picturing his scenes amid the familiar surroundings of contemporaneous life; in other words, the references to the theater in connection with his anecdotes never presuppose any other type of building than the stage-equipped buildings of his own day, and in several instances this method resulted in patent anachronisms. One example will suffice.[204] Plutarch declares that Lycurgus, the Spartan lawgiver of about the ninth century B.C., believed that the minds of assemblymen were distracted by “statues and paintings or the proscenia of theaters or the extravagantly wrought roofs of council chambers,” and so caused the Spartans to hold their assemblies in an open space. The author has here modernized his account in two particulars: he speaks as if Lycurgus were familiar with a fully developed theater building and as if it had already come to be used, elsewhere in Greece, as a place of meeting for the popular assembly. Of course, Lycurgus antedated the Greek drama and all but the crudest forms of choral performances by centuries, and this fact was as well known to Plutarch as it is to us. [Illustration: FIG. 46.—Plan of the Theater at Epidaurus in Argolis See p. 104, n. 1]