We have just seen what the theatre was in the time of Shakespeare and Molière. Shall we see what it was at the time of Æschylus? Let us go to that spectacle. It is no longer the cart of Thespis; it is no longer the scaffold of Susarion; it is no longer the wooden circus of Chœrilus. Athens, foreboding, perceiving the coming of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, has built theatres of stone. No roof, the sky for a ceiling, the day for lighting, a long platform of stone pierced with doors and staircases, and secured to a wall, the actors and the chorus going and coming on this platform, which is the logeum, and performing the play; in the centre, where in our days is the hole of the prompter, a small altar to Bacchus, the thymele; in front of the platform a vast hemicycle of stone steps, five or six thousand men sitting pell-mell,--such is the laboratory. There it is that the swarming crowd of the Piræus come to turn Athenians; there it is that the multitude become the public, until such day when the public will become the people. The multitude is in reality there,--all the multitude, including the women, the children, and the slaves, and Plato, who knits his brows. If it is a fête-day, if we are at the Panathenæa, at the Lenæa, or at the great Dionysia, the magistrates form part of the audience; the proedri, the epistati, and the prytani sit in their place of honour. If the trilogy is to be a tetralogy, if the representation is to conclude by a piece with satyrs; if the fauns, the ægipans, the menades, the goat-footed, and the evantes, are to come at the end to perform their pranks; if among the comedians, almost priests, and called "the men of Bacchus," is to appear the favourite actor who excels in the two modes of declamation, in paralogy as well as in paracatology; if the poet is sufficiently liked by his rivals to let the public expect to see some celebrated men, Eupolis, Cratinus, or even Aristophanes figure in the chorus,--"Eupolis atque Cratinus, Aristophanesque poetæ," as Horace will one day say; if a play with women is performed, even the old "Alcestis" of Thespis, the whole place is full; there is a crowd. The crowd is already to Æschylus what, later on, as the prologue of the "Bacchides" remarks, it will be to Plautus,--a swarm of men on seats, coughing, spitting, sneezing, making grimaces and noises with the mouth and "ore concrepario" and talking of their affairs; what a crowd is to-day. Students scrawl with charcoal on the wall, now in token of admiration, now in irony, some well-known verses,--for instance, the singular iambic a Phrynichus in a single word:-- "Archaiomelesidonophrunicherata." [1] Of which the famous Alexandrine, in two words, of one of our tragic poets of the sixteenth century was but a poor imitation:-- "Métamorphoserait Nabuchodonosor."