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289 On the Attic Dionysia. 289 evyyjpvi^ e^av aoiodv^ Koa^ koo^^ rjv UjuCpl ^uatfiov Atoy /^Lovvaov ev AL/uvaiatv Iw^rjcraiuev^ r]VLy^ o KpanraXoKcofjiO^ toi^^ lepoiai Avrpoiai ywpei kcit e^ov Te^xevo^ Aacvi^ o^Ao?. This last argument rests on a misunderstanding which spoils the humour of the passage. The croaking choir de- scribes the time when they raised their voices in their beloved haunts, ev AiiivaKjLv^ by the season when the human revellers flocked to the same scene to keep the holiday of the Chytri. For this, Anthesterion, was the time when marsh and pool resounded with such strains. But they were ready to enter- tain Bacchus with their music a month earlier than usual, if the Lenaea be supposed to fall in Gamelion. The passage of the Acharnians in which the chorus complains of having been dismissed by a choragus supperless, evidently refers to a former year. We have therefore only to consider the other allusions in that play, which relate to a time really or imagi- narily present. It ought not to be doubted that the Acharnians was really exhibited at the Lenaea, as is recorded in the didascalia, which has all the marks that can be desired of an ancient, trustworthy document. Kanngiesser and Hermann indeed have questioned its genuineness, the latter suspecting that it was fabricated according to an erroneous interpretation of the line, cwtoI yap eajuev^ ovttl Arjvauo t dycjov. But the author at least cannot have drawn all the information he communicates from the play. He writes: eoiod'^^Or] eirl RvOv/jlcvov^ upyovro^ ei/ ArjvaioL^ ^id KaWiaTpdrov kol Trpvoros rjv' oevTepo^ KpaTivo^ Xet/ia^o/xe/'ot9' ov aco^eTat' TpiTo^ Et'TroXt? l^ovfxrjviai^. It seems capricious to charge a person who relates so many facts which he could only have learnt from express authority, with inserting among them a conjecture of his own, on a point which he was likely to find similarly ascertained in the same works^ But the mode in which Hermann attempts to get rid of the ^ The reader wHl probably be glad to hear Boeckh's general opinion on this sub- ject. He says: '^I venture to assert, that next to the coins and inscriptions and the works of the first historians, the SLOarTKaXiai are the purest and most trustworthy sources of information, contemporary original documents on the pieces actually exhibited, collected by writers, who had access to a world of monuments that has long perished, by Aristotle, Dica^archus, Callimachus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, Apollodorus, Eratosthenes and others, who compiled them, not out of their own heads, nor by guesswork, but from accounts into which no error could find its way,