II.—Excavations at Sparta. 1906

The narratives of the travellers, who have visited the theatre at: Sparta, are for the most part too short and too vague to prove of much real service to the excavator. Leroy, who visited Sparta in 1770, mentions the seats of greyish-white marble and the retaining-walls of fine rusticated stone, and shows in his illustration the Byzantine fortress-wall, which runs southwards from the theatre, with two columns standing outside it. The plans and drawings of the French Expedition sixty years later show the same wall and columns without any trace of the stage-buildings mentioned by Leake (1805) and Dodwell (1819) among previous visitors, and by Curtius in 1852. Neither Clark, nor Wyse, nor Bursian saw remains of a proscenium , so that it appears likely that Curtius at any rate, if not his predecessors, mistook the Byzantine remains in front of the theatre for Roman stage-buildings. It was principally on the evidence of these remains that Leake, Dodwell, and Bory de St. Vincent based their supposition that the theatre was of Roman date

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