Long before curtain time on the evening of May 14, 1886, carriages blocked the intersection of Broad and Locust Streets near the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. Nearly 3,000 people streamed toward the gaslit Academy that spring evening, including President Daniel Coit Gilman and Professor Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve of the Johns Hopkins University, Professors Charles Eliot Norton, William Watson Goodwin, John Williams White, and Louis Dyer of Harvard,' and scores of other distinguished academicians and their students from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Cornell Universities and from Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges. A large crowd of students from the University of Pennsylvania mingled easily with the social elite of Philadelphia. Although the curtain had been scheduled to rise at eight o'clock, the performance could not begin until half an hour later, after the eager throng had finally taken its seats. Everybody is here of any note, one usher observed.2 This glittering, learned audience had gathered to see and hear Aristophanes' Acharnians performed in its original Greek by students from the University of Pennsylvania. They had chosen to attend this first performance of an ancient Greek comedy in North America rather than see Othello at the Arch Street Opera Company, Mrs. John Drew in Gilbert's comedy, Engaged, at the Arch Street Theatre, Arizona Joe in The Black Hawks at the Central Theatre, or any of the other competing entertainments in Philadelphia.3 The Acharnians ended its run of two performances in Philadelphia with matinee at the Academy of Music the next afternoon. On November 19, 1886, it was reprised in New York City at the Academy of Music on Irving Place, where it drew, headline proclaimed, a Greater House than Patti.4 The proceeds of the New York performance were dedicated to the new building of The American School