completed till the year B. c. 340) are not known. That it was built on a large scale as compared with modern playhouses, is beyond a doubt. It has been supposed to have been capable of holding thirty thousand persons: though this statement, founded chiefly on certain passages of Plato and Dicæarchus, has been called in question by Wordsworth, (Athens and Attica, chapter XIII.,) who alleges that the site of its ruins gives no idea of its magnitude. At all events it was large enough to accommodate a large proportion of the people of Athens. The drama was intended for the multitude, and it was in accordance with the spirit of the constitution, that every facility should be afforded for their enjoying the spectacle. In the time of the old wooden theatre the admission was free to all citizens; but the crushing for places led to confusion and danger; and after the building of the stone theatre it was resolved that a price should be charged for entrance. This was fixed at two obols, and was received by the lessee or manager of the theatre, (called Theatrones or Architecton,) who for that price undertook to keep it in repair and ready for use. Pericles afterwards passed a law, that the two obols should be given to the poorer citizens out of the treasury, and so the admission became again virtually free. Many who could afford to pay for themselves used to apply for the dole of two obols; but, as a general rule, the rich paid for their seats, and sometimes gave as much as a drachm for a seat of a better class. There were certain places reserved for official personages and others, as for the Members of the Council, Archons, Generals, Ambassadors. Any one who took a place belonging to another might, as we have learned from the Oration against Midias, be removed by the police. (See ante, p. 124.)

The plays began at an early hour in the morning, and lasted the whole of the day. Such was the general eagerness to be present, that many would come long before the time to secure a good place. Some indeed, to save their two obols, would take their chance of getting a seat at a later hour; for after a certain time no money was demanded for entrance. Those that wished to see the whole performance brought wine and provisions with them; especially the ladies; for they were permitted to see tragedies, but not comedies, while boys were allowed to be present at both. At the Lenæan festival, which was in the month Gamelion, (January,) the spectators were provided with cloaks; for, the theatre being roofless, they were exposed both to wind and rain. The more luxurious brought cushions to sit upon. Eschines reproaches Demosthenes, because, when he accompanied the Macedonian ambassadors to the play, he did not neglect this little addition to their comfort. The conduct of the spectators during the entertainment, their expressions of approbation and displeasure, by shouting, clapping, hissing, &c., were pretty much the same as in our own country, but partook somewhat more of democratic freedom. Eschines, if we may believe his rival, was pelted not unfrequently with figs and olives for his bad acting; though this seems to have

been by a provincial audience. (See volume II. p. 97; and, on the whole subject of theatre-going at Athens, see Becker's Charicles, Excursus to Scene X.)

While the performances of an Athenian drama had much that was in common with our own, there were peculiar causes which made it a scene of much stronger excitement such as the festive occasion, the national character of the exhibition, the constant appeal to the popular sentiment of religion and patriotism. The very fact of the people sitting under the open sky, while it exposed them to some inconvenience, was attended also with advantages; as Wordsworth has well pointed out in the chapter of his Athens and Attica last referred to.

"Whatever its capacity might have been, the Theatre of Athens did not mainly depend on its dimensions for the attractions which it possessed. Here on this gentle slope, with the Parthenon and the Acropolis immediately above them, with the valley of the Ilissus not far beneath, at the beginning of spring, in a transparent atmosphere beneath a clear sky, with a gentle breeze blowing on them from the sea, here the spectators sat to be charmed by the mixed enchantments of nature and art which the Athenian Theatre supplied, both in exquisite perfection.

The dramatic influence of this union, of this interweaving (as it were) of natural scenery with that of the theatre itself, deserves here a moment's consideration.

"It is evident that it furnished the scenic poet with a greater range of subjects and with greater freedom in treating them. To one of these poets it gave free scope to his bold conceptions, and supplied objects for his imagination to deal with. It will be found, that most of the metaphorical expressions of schylus are derived from objects which were visible to the audience, while they listened to the recital of those expressions in the theatre. Seas and storms, building of ships and their navigation, feeding of flocks on the hills, hunting in the woods, fishing in the sea, walls and fortifications, the Stadium and its course; these are the usual, the simple and natural sources from which Eschylus derived his copious streams of figurative diction. They were all either in the immediate field of view, or in near connexion with that theatre where the language they enriched was uttered. They were almost the natural elements of which the poetical atmosphere of that theatre was com posed: the dramatic poet breathed them as his native air.

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Similarly Sophocles speaks with a local truth when in the Theatre at Athens he says of the island of Salamis,1

(1)

O noble Salamis, thou indeed

Buoyed on the wave dost happy dwell
Conspicuous ever in the eyes of men.

"The peaked hills of Salamis stood in the western horizon, like a picture drawn to illustrate the poem with their visible beauty.

"To Euripides again this combination afforded the most favourable field for expressing the tenets of his own peculiar philosophy. While Eschylus exulted in the rich variety of natural objects before him, Euripides laboured to blend them into one: but unless the sky had been open, and the air free about him, he could never have here pronounced with the same energy as he did,1

Seest thou the abyss of sky that hangs above thee,

And clasps the earth around in moist embrace?

This to be Jove believe, this serve as God.

His creed would have remained a dry theme of abstract speculation, and never become instinct with the life of poetic sensation.

"To the dramatic poets of Athens not as inventors merely, but as addressing an audience for great moral and social purposes, the position of the theatre gave great advantages. To select one: Being placed immediately under the Acropolis, being seated (if we may so say) on the very steps of that great natural temple, for such to Athenians their Acropolis was, the audience were thus immediately connected with what was most sacred and beautiful in the Athenian city. They were themselves almost consecrated by such a union. Just above them was the Temple of Minerva and the Statue of the Jupiter of the Citadel. They were sitting thus, as the poet expressed it, under the wings of Gods.3

"To apply the same observation to another department of dramatic literature: It is evident that to the peculiar advantages arising from its position and character, which the Theatre of Athens possessed, is to be ascribed in a great degree the successful daring of the Aristophanic plays. To cite instances: How in the confinement of a modern theatre could we imagine a Trygæus soaring above the sea in an aerial excursion? There his journey would be reduced to a mere mechanical process of ropes and pullies, and would be inexorably baffled by the resistance of the roof. But in the Athenian Theatre the sky itself was then visible, whither he was mounting, and in which he was placed by the simple machinery of the imagination of the spectators, to which free play was given by the natural properties of the theatre itself. How again, if pent in by the limits of a modern theatre, could the birds be imagined to build their aerial city? How ὁρᾶς τὸν ὑψοῦ τόνδ' ἄπειρον αιθέρα καὶ γῆν περὶξ ἔχονθ' ὑγραῖς ἐν ἀγκάλαις ; τοῦτον νόμιζε Ζήνα, τόνδ' ἡγοῦ θεόν.

(1)

Eurip. Fragment.

could the clouds have come sailing on the stage from the heights of a neighbouring Parnes? How in such a position could the future minister of Athens have surveyed from the stage, as he did, the natural map of his own future domains, the Agora, the harbours, the Pnyx, and all the tributary islands lying in a group around him? These conceptions and such as these are characteristic of the genius of the Athenian drama: on a modern stage they would be forced and inadmissible here, under an open sky, with the hills of Athens around him, and a part of the city beneath him, they would seem to the spectator to be in some sense the creations of the place, no less than of the poet himself."

APPENDIX VIII.

CRIMINAL PROCEDURE.

THE invention of the science of jurisprudence has been attributed (not without some reason) to the Athenians. Considering the antiquity of their laws, we are astonished at their variety and their excellence. Besides a code of statutes remarkable for the care and foresight with which they were drawn up, whether that be due to Solon alone, or to Solon jointly with succeeding legislators, we find established in the flourishing period of their republic a complex judicial system, with prescribed forms of action and rules of pleading and practice, so nice and artificial as to remind one of that which our Norman ancestors, full of forensic subtlety, handed down to us. Meier, Schömann, Platner, and other German authors have written copious treatises on the process of the Athenian courts. Out of the scanty materials furnished by a few ancient books, they have done for Attic law what Blackstone, Tidd, and Archbold have for the English. And to such works I am in great measure indebted for the brief outline which I present to the reader.

It will be found convenient to take separately the two great divisions to which we are accustomed in our own country, of civil law and criminal. The line of demarcation between them was not indeed quite the same at Athens as in England: for there were some offences which, though they are treated as purely criminal with us, might at Athens be made the subject of civil proceedings, as theft and perjury: again there were some things punishable as crimes at Athens and not so in England; and vice versa; as might be expected. There was

(1) To Athens, says Ælian, mankind were indebted for the olive, the fig, and the administration of justice; likewise for athletics and chariot-driving. Aikas doūvai καὶ λαβεῖν εὗρον 'Αθηναῖοι πρῶτοι. Var. Hist. iii. 38.

1

also much in the judicial system of the Athenians that was common both to civil and criminal charges; and with them, as with us, it frequently happened that the aggrieved party had the option of proceeding either civilly or criminally against the offender. Still the main distinctions between crime and civil injury, which are founded on the principles of human society, were observed both in the statutory code and the judicial practice of the Athenians.1

We will begin with the criminal law; noticing the different classes of offences, the punishments with which they were respectively visited, the various tribunals before which they were brought, and the different methods of proceeding.

As a general rule it may be laid down, that every criminal charge was tried before a jury taken from the body of the people, and presided over by a particular magistrate having cognizance of the offence. The case of homicide furnishes an exception; in this the ancient tribunals, which were anterior to the establishment of the jury system, maintained their jurisdiction. And to this our attention will first be directed.

MURDER, HOMICIDE, ETC.

This whole department of crime was anciently under the jurisdiction of the Areopagus. The court, composed of men taken from the best families of Attica, was always famous for the justice of its decisions so at least the Athenians boasted;-but, when it passed sentence of condemnation on the criminal, it had no option but to punish him with death. Draco2 first mitigated the rigour of this law, somewhere about the year B. C. 621, by establishing a board of fiftyone judges, taken from families of high birth, and called Ephetæ, with power to try cases of accidental or justifiable homicide, and deal with them on equitable principles.3 Solon, who repealed other ordi

(1) See the reasoning of Demosthenes in the Oration against Midias, ante, pp. 65, 71, 75, 77, 80, 81, 108, 124.

(2) "Draco did not meddle with the political constitution, and in his ordinances Aristotle finds little worthy of remark, except the extreme severity of the punishments awarded: petty thefts or even proved idleness of life being visited with death or disfranchisement. But we are not to construe this remark as demonstrating any special inhumanity in the character of Draco, who was not invested with the large power which Solon afterwards enjoyed, and cannot be imagined to have imposed upon the community severe laws of his own invention. Himself of course an Eupatrid, he set forth in writing such ordinances as the Eupatrid archons had before been accustomed to enforce without writing in the particular cases which came before them; and the general spirit of penal legislation had become so much milder during the two centuries which followed, that these old ordinances appeared to Aristotle intolerably rigorous. Probably neither Draco nor the Locrian Zaleucus, who somewhat preceded him in date, were more rigorous than the sentiment of the age indeed the few fragments of the Draconian tables which have reached us, far from exhibiting indiscriminate cruelty, introduce for the first time into the Athenian law mitigating distinctions in respect to homicide, founded on the variety of concomitant circumstances." Grote's History of Greece, iii. 101. See Ælian's Various History, v. 15; viii. 10.

(3) Some have supposed they derived their title from the word peois, appeal, because there was an appeal to their more equitable jurisdiction from the rigour of the