therefore, produced in these cases not one play, but a series of four, and several competitors followed one another throughout the day. Wearisome, dry, unimpassioned, all this may seem to us; but we must remember that to the Greek it meant religious service, literary culture, and the celebration of the national greatness. As he sat in the theatre, the gods of his country looked down approvingly from the Acropolis above, and his fellow-citizens, whom he loved with intense patriotism, were all about him. He might say of the assembly, what an old poet had said of the Ionians gathered for festival at Delos, that you would think them blessed with endless youth, so glorious they were and so blooming; and as the rocks under which he sat re-echoed to the applause of that great assembly, he must indeed have felt the thrill of sympathetic enthusiasm which Plato describes as produced by such occasions.
One word about the mental condition of a people whose masses could take pleasure in such an entertainment. That their culture must in some degree have exceeded our own is evident from a comparison of the plays in which we and they respectively delight. The majority of Englishmen, even among the so-called educated, do not care to see Shakespeare's tragedies; the effort of attention is too great, the beauties too subtle, the plot too simple. Now Shakespeare's plays stand to the Greek drama much as a picture does to a statue. And a picture most men can enjoy, but very few can really appreciate a statue. Shakespeare, then, is too severe for us, and Æschylus is much more
