By this time, however, the reader will probably be of opinion, that we have lingered long enough about the dinner-table and its attendant pastimes. We shall therefore hasten the departure of the guests, who after burning the tongues of the animals that had been sacrificed, to intimate that whatever had been uttered was to be kept secret, offered libations to Zeus, Hermes, and other gods, and took their leave, in ancient times before sunset; but afterwards, as luxury and extravagance increased, the morning sun often enabled them to dispense with link-boys. Examples, indeed, of similar perversions of the night occur in Homer and Virgil, but always among the reckless or effeminate in the palaces of princes, whence, in all ages, the stream of immorality has flowed downward upon society to disturb and pollute it. The company assembled at Agathon’s, also, sit up all night in Plato; and Aristophanes represents drunken men reeling home through the agora by daylight. CHAPTER VII. THE THEATRE. It is far from being my purpose to repeat the information which may be obtained from a hundred authors on the rise and progress of scenic representation in Greece. I shall, on the contrary, confine myself chiefly to those parts of the subject which others have either altogether neglected, or treated in a concise and unsatisfactory manner. It would, nevertheless, be beside my purpose to attempt the clearing up of all such difficulties as occur in the accounts transmitted to us of the Hellenic drama; and, in fact, notwithstanding the laborious investigations into which I have been compelled to enter, I feel that there are many points upon which I can throw no new light, and which appear likely for ever to baffle the ingenuity of architects and scholars. Dionysos, being a deity connected with agriculture, his worship naturally took its rise, and for a long time prevailed chiefly, in the country. His festivals were celebrated with merriment; and, the power of mimicry being natural to man, the rustics, when congregated to set forth the praise of their tutelar god, easily glided into the enactment of a farcical show. And dramatic exhibitions at the outset were little superior to the feats of Punch, though, so great was their suitableness to the national character, that, in the course of time, every town of note had its own theatre, as it had of old its own dithyrambic bard;[864] and dramatic writers were multiplied incomparably beyond what they have been in any other country. ----- Footnote 864: Schol. Aristoph. Av. 1404. -----