Freya Stark:

A spring was splashing into a sarcophagus by a shed of scattered tables, and drivers to the plateau stopped for a glass of tea.  From here a shepherd boy led us for two hours along a path that slants through woods, to where the town is slung like a hammock between sharp ridges.... Out of Pisidian roughness and tribal foundations easily Hellenized, Termessus emerged and flourished with many temples.  Their doors and pediments and tumbled columns survive in the descending basins of the valley; the pedestals of stoas show Greek inscriptions, where lichens and spring shadows blur the forgotten names.  A great wall, six feet wide or more, still stands across the inner valley, with the disc carvbed upon it which seems to be the sign of Termessus, so frequent is it on all the tombs that scatter the crests of the enclosing hills.  Beyond it,the street led to temples, a grass grown market, a gymnasium shaddowed by budding plane trees like an Oxford quad in spring; and at last, on the tip of the defile, to the most beautifully sited of all Pamphylian theatres, whose shallow stone seats and endfolding crags look three thousand feet down a straight ravine to the sea.

 Aspendos: Freya Stark:
The theatre stands on flat ground, like a box from which the lid has been lifted. Proud, limited and magnificent, there is a prison air about it - a difference as of death and life that one feels between the Roman and the Greek. No landscape stretches here beyond a low and unobtrusive stage, for the easy coming and going of the gods. Human experience, that moved with freedom and mystery, is here walled-in with balconies and columns; its pure transparency, the far horizon window, is lost.

In the Greek theatre, with its simple three-doored stage and chorus undertone of sorrow, the drama of life could penetrate, without any barrier between them, the surround vastness of the dark. I have listened to theHippolytus of Euripides in Epidaurus where the words of Artemis and Aphrodite with the mountain pines and the sunset behind them, become a limpid fear - a play no longer, but nature and all that ever has been, anguish and waste of days, speaking to men.