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}tron or spectator-place, still less a stone stage; the dromena were done on the dancing-place.  But for spectator-place they had the south slope of the Acropolis.  What kind of wooden stage they had unhappily we cannot tell.  It may be that only a portion of the orchestra was marked off.

* * * * *

Why did Peisistratos, if he cared little for magic and ancestral ghosts, take such trouble to foster and amplify the worship of this maypole-spirit, Dionysos?  Why did he add to the Anthesteria, the festival of the family ghosts and the peasant festival “in the fields,” a new and splendid festival, a little later in the spring, the Great Dionysia, or Dionysia of the City?  One reason among others was this—­Peisistratos was a “tyrant.”

Now a Greek “tyrant” was not in our sense “tyrannical.”  He took his own way, it is true, but that way was to help and serve the common people.  The tyrant was usually raised to his position by the people, and he stood for democracy, for trade and industry, as against an idle aristocracy.  It was but a rudimentary democracy, a democratic tyranny, the power vested in one man, but it stood for the rights of the many as against the few.  Moreover, Dionysos was always of the people, of the “working classes,” just as the King and Queen of the May are now.  The upper classes worshipped then, as now, not the Spirit of Spring but their own ancestors.  But—­and this was what Peisistratos with great insight saw—­Dionysos must be transplanted from the fields to the city.  The country is always conservative, the natural stronghold of a landed aristocracy, with fixed traditions; the city with its closer contacts and consequent swifter changes, and, above all, with its acquired, not inherited, wealth, tends towards democracy.  Peisistratos left the Dionysia “in the fields,” but he added the Great Dionysia “in the city.”

Peisistratos was not the only tyrant who concerned himself with the dromena of Dionysos.  Herodotos[40] tells the story of another tyrant, a story which is like a window opening suddenly on a dark room.  At Sicyon, a town near Corinth, there was in the agora a heroon, a hero-tomb, of an Argive hero, Adrastos.