the modern town was built, it arose from the ruins of the antient city. The first and principal ruin appears from the sea, before landing, to the west of the town. It is that of an immense theatre, whose enormous portals are yet standing. It seems one of the grandest and most perfect specimens the Antients have left of this kind of building. The situation selected for it, according to the common custom observed throughout Greece, is the side of a mountain sloping to the sea. Thus, by the plans of Grecian architects, the great operations of Nature were rendered subservient to works of art; for the mountains whereon they built their theatres possessed naturally a theatrical form; and towering behind them, like a continuation of the immense curvature containing seats for the spectators, gave a prodigious dignity to those edifices. Not only the mountains, but the sea itself, and all the vast perspective presented before the spectators who were assembled in those buildings, must have been considered, by their architects, as forming parts of one magnificent design. The removal of any object from the rest would materially have injured the grandeur of the whole. Savary, who saw this theatre at Telmessus, says it is much less than that of Patara, and we found its diameter not half so great as that of Alexandria Troas; yet the effect produced by it seemed greater. Some of the stones used in its construction are nine feet long, three feet wide, and two feet thick. Three immense portals, not unlike the appearances presented at Stonehenge, conducted to the arena. The

CHAP. VIII.

Theatre.

CHAP. VIII.

The stones which compose these gates are larger than those I have described. The centre gateway consists only of five, and the two others of three each, placed in the most simple style of architecture. Indeed every thing at Telmessus is colossal. A certain vastness of proportion, as in the walls of Tirynthus or Crotona, excites admiration mingled with awe; and this may be said to characterize the traces of the Dorian colonies over all the coast of Asia Minor. The grandeur of the people, as well as the sublime conceptions of their artists, were displayed, not only in the splendor of their buildings, but in the size of the materials wherewith their edifices were constructed. The kings and people of Caria and of Lycia have left behind them monuments defying the attacks of time or of barbarians. Amidst the convulsions of nature, and the earthquakes desolating the shores of the Carpathian Sea, these buildings have remained unshaken. The enormous masses constituting the doors of the Telmessensian theatre were placed together without cementation or grooving; they are simply laid one upon the other and some notion may be formed of the astonishing labour necessary in the completion of the edifice to which they belong, when it is further stated, that every stone in the exterior walls of the building appears sculptured in regular parallelograms, formed by bevelling the edges'.

There were, originally, five immense doors leading to

the

(1) In all description of this kind, the pencil of the artist is so much superior to the pen of the writer, that it is doubtful whether, after every endeavour to give an idea of this appearance, the account will be intelligible.