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Ith. But if you may not upset the old you may without irreverence add
the new. Peisistratos probably cared little for, and believed less in,
magical ceremonies for the renewal of fruits, incantations of the dead.
We can scarcely picture him chewing buckthorn on the day of the "Cups,"
or anointing his front door with pitch to keep out the ghosts. Very
wisely he left the Anthesteria and the kindred festival "in the fields"
where and as they were. But for his own purposes he wanted to do honour
to Dionysos, and also above all things to enlarge and improve the rites
done in the god's honour, so, leaving the old sanctuary to its fate, he
built a new temple on the south side of the Acropolis where the present
theatre now stands, and consecrated to the god a new and more splendid
precinct. He did not build the present theatre, we must always remember
that. The rows of stone seats, the chief priest's splendid marble chair,
were not erected till two centuries later. What Peisistratos did was to
build a small stone temple (see Fig. 2), and a great round orchestra of
stone close beside it. Small fragments of the circular foundation can
still be seen. The spectators sat on the hill-side or on wooden seats;
there was as yet no permanent _the{-a}t