and especially of its first day. The _festa_ of some popular saint in Southern Europe, who demands the veneration of his people and yet is broad-minded enough to enter into the spirit of the occasion and is not offended even by being made the subject of rollicking jests, would afford a far better parallel, and even this falls short. Drunkenness combined with the darkness at the close of the day’s proceedings to intensify the license natural on such an occasion. Children born as the result of chance meetings at these annually recurring processions are frequently mentioned in New Comedy and often motivate the action.[229] Nevertheless, the religious character of these festivals and of the dramatic exhibitions connected with them was a very real thing to the Greeks, and everyone in attendance would fully realize that he was present at no secular proceeding. To a mediaeval spectator of miracle plays and mysteries this feeling would seem perfectly natural, but it would be another occasion of surprise to a modern visitor. Already in Elizabethan times Shakespeare could assure his audience: “Our true intent is all for your delight.” So exclusively is this now the motive of theatrical performances that we seldom think of the theater as a place for the inculcation of religious truths or for teaching the facts of religious history. It follows that the subject-matter of Greek drama was drawn from their mythology as inevitably and uniformly as the text of a modern sermon is drawn from the Bible. In fact, freedom of choice was originally still more restricted. Whether tragedy was derived from satyric drama and satyric drama from the dithyramb or whether, as I believe, both tragedy and satyric drama were independent offshoots of the dithyramb (see pp. 2-4), this remains true—the early dithyramb was exclusively devoted to the exaltation of Dionysus, and in consequence the themes of tragedy and of satyric drama were likewise, at the beginning, entirely Dionysiac. By the time of Thespis or soon thereafter (see pp. 20 f., above) tragedy broadened out so as to treat any mythological theme. Of the thirty-two extant Greek tragedies Dionysus appears in only one, Euripides’ _Bacchanals_, and even in that he is disguised during most of the play. But the playwrights were not content to stop at this point. Phrynichus, who was a pupil of Thespis and won his first victory in 511 B.C., introduced the innovation of dramatizing contemporaneous history. In 494 B.C. the Persians captured and destroyed the Ionic city of Miletus. Shortly thereafter Phrynichus treated this subject in a tragedy. Though it moved the Athenians to tears, they were so indignant at being reminded of the misfortunes of their kinsmen that they fined the poet one thousand drachmae. Undeterred by this rebuff, however, in 476 B.C. Phrynichus brought out his _Phoenician Women_, dealing with the Persian invasion of Greece in 480-479 B.C. This play served as a