divinity came round, and so were invested with, a dignity which cannot attach to our modern theatres, open as these are every day in the year or in the season. And as a consequence of the rarity of the representations, each play was, as a rule, enacted only once.
All these facts—that the theatre was national, and religious, and rarely open—combined to make the audience on each occasion very numerous. It was a point of national pride, of religious duty, and of common prudence on the part of every citizen, not to miss the two great dramatic festivals of the year when their season came. Accordingly, we hear that thirty thousand people used to be present together; and we may infer from this, as well as from other indisputable evidence, the vast size of the theatre itself. The performance took place in the day-time, and lasted nearly all day, for several plays were presented in succession; and the theatre was open to the sky and to the fields, so that when a man looked away from the solemn half-mysterious representation of the legendary glories of his country, his eye would fall on the city itself, with its temples and its harbours, or on the rocky cliffs of Salamis and the sunny islands of the Ægean. Finally, the performance was musical, and so more like an opera than an ordinary play, though we shall see that even this resemblance is little more than superficial.
From these few facts it will probably be clear that we shall do best if we entirely discard our modern notions of a theatre, and start quite afresh in our attempt to understand what a Greek play was like.
