From these considerations it follows that the attendance upon the dramatic performances was enormous, and that the use of temples to accommodate the spectators was entirely out of the question. Therefore it became necessary to provide a separate structure, which in fourth-century Athens could seat as many as seventeen thousand. From this fact arose the further necessity for an annual procession, in order to escort the statue of Dionysus from his temple to his theater. Since the two buildings were situated in the same precinct on the south slope of the Acropolis and within a few feet of each other (Figs. 29 and 32), there was no need of the processional ceremony being other than a very simple one. As a matter of fact, from the spectacular standpoint this was one of the most splendid features of the festival and consumed the whole first day. It has been claimed that several Attic vases, dating from the close of the sixth century B.C. and depicting the “wagon-ship” of Dionysus, give a hint as to the character of this part of the City Dionysia (Fig. 65).[228] The car is drawn by two men representing attendant sprites of Dionysus. The tip of the long equine tail of one of them is clearly indicated. In the car are two other sprites, whether sileni or satyrs, playing on flutes, and the god himself is seated between them. Alongside of the sacrificial bull are two citizens standing. Farther forward are two youths with branches (θαλλοφόροι), then a youth with a censer, another with a basket (κανηφόρος), and finally, at the head of the procession, a boy who is perhaps to be regarded as a trumpeter. Whatever relationship may subsist between such vase paintings and contemporaneous drama (see p. 20, above) the entire free population, from the chief magistrate of the city (the archon eponymus) down, participated in the procession at the City Dionysia and took the god’s statue by stages from his temple to a point near the Academy on the road to Eleutherae (Fig. 2). This direction was chosen because, as the Athenian god’s cognomen of Eleuthereus shows, this image and its cult were supposed to have been introduced from this town on Attica’s northern border (see p. 21 and n. 3, above) and because the return of the processional was intended to imitate the final portion of the original entry. After the remainder of the day had been spent in rites and festivities the procession escorted the sacred relic back to its precinct by torchlight and placed it near the orchestra in the theater, where it remained during the rest of the festival. Thus the god was supposed to have witnessed every play presented at the City Dionysia from 534 B.C. on, and it is as a connoisseur and critic of wide experience that he is appointed to judge between the rival claims of Aeschylus and Euripides in Aristophanes’ _Frogs_, vss. 810 f. Our English and Protestant ideas concerning the nature of a religious ceremony are only too likely to give us a misleading conception of the whole festival