* * * * * Crete is not Athens, but at Athens in the theatre of Dionysos, if the priest of Dionysos, seated at the great Spring Festival in his beautiful carved central seat, looked across the orchestra, he would see facing him a stone frieze on which was sculptured the Cretan ritual, the armed dancing youths and the child to be year by year reborn. We have seen what the Dithyramb, from which sprang the Drama, was. A Spring song, a song of Bull-driving, a song and dance of Second Birth; but all this seems, perhaps, not to bring us nearer to Greek drama, rather to put us farther away. What have the Spring and the Bull and the Birth Rite to do with the stately tragedies we know--with Agamemnon and Iphigenia and Orestes and Hippolytos? That is the question before us, and the answer will lead us to the very heart of our subject. So far we have seen that ritual arose from the presentation and emphasis of emotion--emotion felt mainly about food. We have further seen that ritual develops out of and by means of periodic festivals. One of the chief periodic festivals at Athens was the Spring Festival of the Dithyramb. Out of this Dithyramb arose, Aristotle says, tragedy--that is, out of Ritual arose Art. How and Why? That is the question before us. FOOTNOTES: [19] _Poetics_, IV, 12. [20] See my _Themis_, p. 419. (1912.) [21] I, 43. 2. [22] _Quaest. Græc._ XII. [23] _Op. cit._ [24] _Quæst. Symp._, 693 f. [25] The words "in Spring-time" depend on an emendation to me convincing. See my _Themis_, p. 205, note 1. [26] IX. [27] See my _Themis_, p. 151. [28] See my _Prolegomena_, p. 439. [29] _Prolegomena_, p. 402. [30] Frazer, _Totemism and Exogamy_, Vol. I, p. 228. [31] _The Golden Bough_,^2 III, 424. [32] _The Golden Bough_,^2 III, 442. [33] _The Golden Bough_,^2 III, p. 438. [34] See my _Themis_, p. 503. CHAPTER V TRANSITION FROM RITUAL TO ART: THE DROMENON ("THING DONE") AND THE DRAMA Probably most people when they go to a Greek play for the first time think it a strange performance. According, perhaps, more to their temperament than to their training, they are either very much excited or very much bored. In many minds there will be left a feeling that, whether they have enjoyed the play or not, they are puzzled: there are odd effects, conventions, suggestions.