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Oil the Attic Dionysia. 285 morate stood, though once part of a rural district, might in the course of time have been inclosed within the city walls, and then the festival solemnized there could no longer be called a rural one. Before however this inclosure took place, this dis- trict, the deme Lenaeon or liCnaeus mentioned in the above- quoted article of Steph. Byzant., was undoubtedly a rural one, and the spectacles exhibited there would be properly described as a'yojv Aioiw(Tov ev aypoi^. Whether Apollodorus, in the passage to which Stephanus referred, had really made a learned remark to this effect, and whether the passage of the Scholiast of Aristophanes may have been grounded on a perversion of this piece of antiquarian erudition, is a question which must be left to conjecture. One thing however is clear, that Lena?a was the name of a particular festival, referred by local tra- dition to a particular spot, which already in very early times formed part of the city. To get rid of this difficulty, Hermann has adopted a pecu- liar hypothesis on the subject of the rural Dionysia. He sup- poses that though they were celebrated all over Attica, yet the dramatic exhibitions which accompanied them were con- fined to one place : that this was the district Lenseon^^ which lay originally, though near to the city, without the walls : hence the rural Dionysia, from being celebrated there by such spectacles, were called Lenaea. He further conjectures that the theatre built for the same exhibitions in the room of the wooden stage was that of Piraeus or Munychia, which he takes to be one and the same, and he holds the Aiovvcria ev lieLpaiei to be no other than the rural Dionysia celebrated at Piraeus. The festival, even after this transfer to a new scene, might still, he thinks, have retained the name it derived from its ancient locality: or the rural Dionysia may, as Kanngiesser imagines, have lasted three days, distinguished by different names, of which the two first may have been Qeoivia and AaKcoXia^ the third Ai^vaia. The objections which Boeckh opposes to this conjecture apply partly to the general view it suggests of the mode of celebrating the rural Dionysia, and partly to the peculiar hypothesis regarding the theatre of Piraeus. Dramatic enter- tainments are mentioned as exhibited in other rural districts of Attica. Those of Collytus are celebrated by the orators :