If you follow the course of this paved road as it approaches the Palace, you will see a small open space, forty feet by thirty, enclosed on two sides by rising tiers of steps with a raised platform in the corner between them. This was the theatre. Some scholars identify it with the dancing-place (choros) which, so tradition tells us, “Dædalus wrought in broad Knossos for fair-haired Ariadne” (Homer, “Iliad,” xviii. 590); although Sir Arthur Evans thinks the choros was in a Palace Court. It would hold about 500 spectators, who made part or all of the “great throng that surrounded the lovely dancing-place, full of glee” (to quote the same tradition). No doubt the boxing contests and other forms of sport were held there. The Cretans, to judge by the pictures which have been discovered, were given to strenuous and exciting, possibly cruel, forms of sport. A painted panel depicts a bull-fighting scene. In it are two girls and a boy, the girls distinguished from the boy by their white skin, although all three wear the same sort of “cowboy” dress. A bull, head down, is charging one of the girls, who grips its horns in the attempt, apparently, to turn a somersault over its back, a feat which the boy is represented as in the process of accomplishing. He is half-way over, and the second girl stands ready to catch him. (See _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, xxiii, p. 381. There is a copy of the fresco in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.) Fifty yards to the east of the theatre is the northern entrance of the palace, which leads directly into the central court. Round this court are grouped the various rooms of the palace. Chapter 5: _Prehistoric Engineering and Architecture_ The plan of the palace of Knossos is at first sight rather confusing, especially when one reflects that it represents only the ground floor of the original building and that one has to imagine, in some places two, and in others perhaps three storeys of rooms above it. If this is the old labyrinth of legend, no wonder, you think, that Theseus needed his Ariadne to show him a way out of it; and that Dædalus, who built it, could himself find no other means of escape but by flying straight up into the air! But it is the nature of legend to exaggerate; and one can easily understand how, years after the destruction of the palace, the deserted ruins with their ghostly corridors and chambers would create the impression of an “inextricable maze” which was crystallized by tradition and became the setting for so many of the Cretan stories. As it stood in the days of Minos, the palace would not, of course, be anything so fantastic. The arrangement of the rooms and corridors, though on a great and elaborate scale, was based on a simple plan. The mass of buildings in the west wing of the palace is divided into two halves by a long corridor running north and south, those in the east wing by one running east and west, and the four divisions thus made fall into a regular scheme.