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297 On the Attic Dionysia. 297 grapes are kept hanging till December, frozen and often covered with snow, and are then accounted to yield a wine very superior to that nmade in the preceding months of the same year. Moreover had the festival been placed earlier in the year, it would in some years have happened before the end of the vintage. But the object of the festival in Anthesterion is entirely different. On the first day (YliOoiyLa) the casks are broached and tasted, on the second (Xoes^) the new wine is drunk. A similar operation is said to be performed in Hungary in the month of February. This therefore can not be the festival which derived its name from the winepress erected in the place called Lenason, at which the poets an- ciently received a prize of sweet must {Tpvyw^lav (paai^ md TO To7^ evcoKikovGLv ewl T(p A}]vaup yXeuKo^? ctooaOaL^ oirep eKoXovu Tpvya — the writer Trepl KWfjLwoia^ in Kuster Aristoph. p. xi.) But yet it will not follow that the occasion of the Lensea was precisely the same as that of the rural Dionysia. These were common to the whole country: the former were attached to a particular spot. It may easily be imagined, that, after the general vintage had ended, the fruit of some vines was still reserved to a later season, for the pur- pose of extracting from them a nectar, with which the erec- tion of the first winepress was commemorated, the successful poets rewarded, and the Lenaean god honoured, and from which the festival itself may have received the name of 'A/u/3jOoa/a, (above p. 279-) The partisans of Ruhnken^s hypothesis felt the difficulty of assigning a vintage festival to the month of February, and have attempted to meet it, by supposing that the Lenaea, originally a rural festival, had in course of time been trans- ferred to the city. Spalding (De Dionysiis p. 76) conceived that, after the concentration of the Attic state had been effected by Theseus, a festival was instituted to supply the place of the rural Dionysia, for those who had removed their habitations to the capital : but that the new festival, in order that it might not interfere with the old holidays, was fixed in Anthesterion. The third and latest of the Dionysia he supposes to have been instituted for the purpose of displaying the public magnificence to foreigners, and therefore annexed to Elaphebolion. He thinks that this view of the subject is confirmed by the re-