To this stage of his town-life, that Dionysus of "enthusiasm" already belonged; it was to the Athenians of the town, to urbane young men, sitting together at the banquet, that those expressions of a sudden eloquence came, of the loosened utterance and finer speech, its colour and imagery. Dionysus, then, has entered Athens, to become urbane like them; to walk along the marble streets in frequent procession, in the persons of noble youths, like those who at the Oschophoria bore the branches of the vine from his temple, to the temple of Athene of the Parasol, or of beautiful slaves; to contribute through the arts to the adornment of life, yet perhaps also in part to weaken it, relaxing ancient austerity. Gradually, his rough country feasts will be outdone by the feasts of the town; and as comedy arose out of those, so these will give rise to tragedy. For his entrance upon this new stage of his career, his coming into the town, is from the [40] first tinged with melancholy, as if in entering the town he had put off his country peace. The other Olympians are above sorrow. Dionysus, like a strenuous mortal hero, like Hercules or Perseus, has his alternations of joy and sorrow, of struggle and hard-won triumph. It is out of the sorrows of Dionysus, then,--of Dionysus in winter--that all Greek tragedy grows; out of the song of the sorrows of Dionysus, sung at his winter feast by the chorus of satyrs, singers clad in goat-skins, in memory of his rural life, one and another of whom, from time to time, steps out of the company to emphasise and develope this or that circumstance of the story; and so the song becomes dramatic. He will soon forget that early country life, or remember it but as the dreamy background of his later existence. He will become, as always in later art and poetry, of dazzling whiteness; no longer dark with the air and sun, but like one eskiatrofêkôs+--brought up under the shade of Eastern porticoes or pavilions, or in the light that has only reached him softened through the texture of green leaves; honey-pale, like the delicate people of the city, like the flesh of women, as those old vase-painters conceive of it, who leave their hands and faces untouched with the pencil on the white clay. The ruddy god of the vineyard, stained with wine-lees, or coarser colour, will hardly recognise his double, in the white, graceful, mournful figure, weeping, chastened, lifting up his arms in yearning+ [41] affection towards his late-found mother, as we see him on a famous Etruscan mirror. Only, in thinking of this early tragedy, of these town- feasts, and of the entrance of Dionysus into Athens, you must suppose, not the later Athens which is oftenest in our thoughts, the Athens of Pericles and Pheidias; but that little earlier Athens of Peisistratus, which the Persians destroyed, which some of us perhaps would rather have seen, in its early simplicity, than the greater