Both tragedy and comedy,[865] properly so called, took their rise in Attica, and there only, in the ancient world, flourished and grew up to perfection. The theatre, in fact, formed at length a part of the constitution, and, probably, the worst part, its tendency being to foster personal enmities, to stir the sources of malice, and, while pretending to purge off the dross of the passions by the channels of sorrow and mirth, to induce habits of idleness and political apathy, by affording in the brilliant recesses of a mock world a facile refuge from the toils and duties of the real one. Nevertheless, it may be curious to open up a view into that universe of shadows wherein the vast creations of Æschylus, of Sophocles, of Euripides, of Aristophanes, and Menander displayed themselves before the eyes of the Athenians, with a costly grandeur and magnificence never equalled save in imperial Rome. ----- Footnote 865: See Bentley, Dissert. on Phal. i. 251. ----- It has been already remarked, that to the Dionysiac theatre of Athens the architectural speculations of Vitruvius on dramatic edifices apply, this building having constituted the model on which similar structures were afterwards erected.[866] By carefully studying its details, therefore, we shall be enabled to form a tolerably just conception of all the theatres once found in Greece, though each, perhaps, may have been slightly modified in plan, general arrangement, and decorations, by the peculiarities of the site, and the science or taste of its architect. ----- Footnote 866: On the form and construction of ancient theatres, see Chandler, Travels, &c., who describes the ruins of the theatre of Teos. i. 110; of Ephesos, 138; of Miletos, (457 feet in length,) 168; of Myos, 191; of Stratonica, 222; of Nysa, built with a blue-veined marble, 245; of Laodicea, 262; of Ægina, ii. 16; of Athens, 113; of Eleusis, 215; on the theatre of Syracuse, see Antiq. of Athens, &c. Supplementary to Stuart, by Cockerel, Donaldson, &c. p. 38.—See a plan of the theatre in the grove of Asclepios at Epidauros, pl. 1. p. 53, and another of that of Dramysos, near Joannina, pl. 3.—(Compare on the Dionysiac Theatre, Leake, Topog. of Athens, p. 53, sqq.) ----- The great theatre of Bacchos, partly scooped out of the rock on the face of the hill at the south-eastern angle of the Acropolis, stretched forth, on solid piers of masonry, a considerable distance into the plain, and was capable of containing upwards of thirty thousand people. The diameter, accordingly, if it did not exceed, could have fallen little short of five hundred feet.[867] For we are not to suppose that, while Sparta,[868] and Argos, and Megalopolis, cities comparatively insignificant, possessed theatres of such dimensions, Athens, incomparably the largest and most beautiful of Hellenic capitals, would have been content with one of inferior magnitude.[869] ----- Footnote 867: