Early in the second century AD, during the reign of Hadrian, the proposed structural and functional conversion of the Theatre of Dionysus to stage gladiatorial combats within it led to rioting. The orator Musonius had earlier urged the Athenians to use peaceful persuasion to have the gladiatorial games banned from the sacred precinct of Dionysus. Subsequently the cynic philosopher Demonax went further, opposing gladiatorial games altogether and asserting that if the Athenians introduced them they should tear down the Altar of Mercy. The theatre had then been in use for some seven centuries. Clearly the citizens of Athens conceived both the site itself and its associated functions as in some very fundamental and vital sense 'permanent'. During its long existence it had undergone numerous modifications, few of which, despite the determined and persistent efforts of generations of archaeologists and scholars, can now be identified or traced with much accuracy or confidence. At some point in late antiquity the theatre ceased to be used even for secular entertainments, and the site itself fell into ruin, was overgrown and all but forgotten. In fact, until the nineteenth century, its location was erroneously thought to be the more extensively preserved adjacent site of the late second-century AD Odeon of Herodes Atticus; an irony of history since the impulse to construct this second theatre arose in part from the wish to replace the desecrated venue. Although the location and general lineaments of the Theatre of Dionysus, the most significant of all ancient theatres, are identified and demarcated today, the whole site seems on the verge either of being submerged into the encroaching urban landscape, or alternatively, absorbed back into the living rock of the slopes of the Acropolis, out of which it had originally been fashioned.