But while the city has perished, the Hieron has, in a certain sense, come to life again. Here an area has been laid bare much larger than that excavated by the Germans at Olympia. The theatre, the best preserved of all Greek theatres, was never entirely covered up, and was early and easily cleared. The project of having a grand presentation of ancient dramas here has often been broached but never carried out, on account of the difficulty of transporting and feeding the spectators necessary to the success of the project, to say nothing of lodging them. The acoustic properties of this theatre are well known. One standing in front of the stage makes himself heard without effort by one sitting in the top row of seats. The finest building in the precinct was the so-called Tholos, a round building as highly ornamented as the Erechtheum at Athens, and boasting Polycleitus as its architect. The temple of Æsculapius was almost equally brilliant, but these two buildings do not exist except to the archæologist. We have inscriptions giving most elaborate accounts of the construction of each of them; but of each building nothing remains except their foundations and broken fragments of their brilliant adornment. Were it not for giving this description of a journey the appearance of a guide-book, I might speak of the Herculean labors of Mr. Kabbadias in excavating the Stadion, and the little pleasure that the sight of it affords the layman. [Illustration: THEATRE AT EPIDAUROS] The great interest of the excavation really centres in the inscriptions discovered. Mr. Kabbadias looked up from his arduous work, the hot afternoon of our arrival, upon a much-defaced inscription, and said with an enthusiasm which means much in a quiet man: "I tell you no man has a right to think that he understands Greek life if he has not read these inscriptions of Epidauros." These inscriptions, at any rate, kept him from sleeping during the afternoon hours of summer days when nearly all Greeks sleep, even if they do not sleep nights. Among this material there is, perhaps, nothing more interesting than two long inscriptions, each containing records of twenty or more cases of miraculous cures wrought on sick people who came here and went to sleep in a long porch, remains of which survive. The cures are mostly wrought in dreams. Here is a sample (I quote from the stone): "Case of a man with a cancer in his stomach. He went to sleep and had a vision. The god seemed to him to command his attendants to seize him and hold him that he might cut open his stomach. He himself seemed to be trying to run away; but the attendants caught him and bound him, while Æsculapius opened his stomach, cut out the cancer, sewed up the incision, and released him from his bonds. And after this he went away healed; and the floor of the apartment was covered with blood." The following case ascribes to the god the power to work cures upon an absent person: