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ANCIENT GREECE,[CHAP. xv.and all that concerns the drama began to be developed inThe contests of the poets,which were introducedthat city.there at the festivals of Bacchus, and which, though theycost the state only a crown, rewarded the poet more thangold could have done, contributed much to excite emulation. It was about this time that Athens began to be theseat of literature, and in the scale of political importance thefirst state in Greece. Hence we can explain the remarkable fact, that the dramatic art seemed in that city as athome, Athens directed the taste of the other cities ;andwithout being the capital in the same degree as Paris andLondon, her great superiorityin intellectual culture securedto her that supremacy, which was the more glorious,as itrested not on violence, but on the voluntary concession ofher pre-eminence.I am acquaintedwith no investigationof the question,inwhat manner, after the erection of ^a stage at Athens, theatrical amusements were extended* throughoutthe otherGrecian cities. The ruins which remain in them leave itstill uncertain when they were built ;and where can wefind dates to settle this point? But so many vestiges makeitthat the drama was introduced into thehighly probable,other cities before the Macedonian age.Neither tragic norcomic poets were at home in Athens exclusively but start;ed up in the most various 1regionsof the Grecian world.Athenian poets were invited to resort to the courts of foreignprinces.A 2 king of Syracuse was himself a tragic poet. 3 Inthe same city,Athenian captives regainedtheir liberty byThe inhabitants offragments from the tragedies of Euripides,Abdera, when their fellow-citizen Archelaus played the partof Andromeda, were seized with a theatric passion borderingon madness. 4 Other proofs, if necessary, might be foundof thebe saiclItmay seem doubtful, whether the same maycomic drama; which in Athens was of so local a character,that it could hardly have been understood in the other cities ;or at least much of its wit must have been lost. But in itAbundant proof may he found in Fabricii Bibl. Gr. T. i in the Catalog*1Tragicorum et Comicorum deperditorum,2Euripides was invited to repair to the court of Archelaus, king of Macedonia.aDionysius the elder. A fragment of his has heen preservedin Stub.i. iv. 19.Eclog. 4Lucian. de conscrib, his tor. Op. iv, p. 159, 13ip.