But Pindar is not, we now know, merely being “poetical,” which amounts, according to some scholars, to meaning anything or nothing.  He is describing, alluding to, an actual rite or dromenon in which a Bull is summoned and driven to come in spring.  About that we must be clear.  Plutarch, the first anthropologist, wrote a little treatise called Greek Questions, in which he tells us all the strange out-of-the-way rites and customs he saw in Greece, and then asks himself what they meant.  In his 36th Question he asks:  “Why do the women of Elis summon Dionysos in their hymns to be present with them with his bull-foot?” And then, by a piece of luck that almost makes one’s heart stand still, he gives us the very words of the little ritual hymn the women sang, our earliest “Bull-driving” Spring Song: 

    “In Spring-time,[25] O Dionysos,
      To thy holy temple come;
    To Elis with thy Graces,
      Rushing with thy bull-foot, come,
          Noble Bull, Noble Bull.”

It is a strange primitive picture—­the holy women standing in springtime in front of the temple, summoning the Bull; and the Bull, garlanded and filleted, rushing towards them, driven by the Graces, probably three real women, three Queens of the May, wreathed and flower-bedecked.  But what does it mean?

Plutarch tries to answer his own question, and half, in a dim, confused fashion, succeeds.  “Is it,” he suggests, “that some entitle the god as ‘Born of a Bull’ and as a ‘Bull’ himself? ... or is it that many hold the god is the beginner of sowing and ploughing?” We have seen how a kind of daimon, or spirit, of Winter or Summer arose from an actual tree or maid or man disguised year by year as a tree.  Did the god Dionysos take his rise in like fashion from the driving and summoning year by year of some holy Bull?

First, we must notice that it was not only at Elis that a holy Bull appears at the Spring Festival.  Plutarch asks another instructive Question:[26] “Who among the Delphians is the Sanctifier?” And we find to our amazement that the sanctifier is a Bull.  A Bull who not only is holy himself, but is so holy that he has power to make others holy, he is the Sanctifier; and, most important for us, he sanctifies by his death in the month Bysios, the month that fell, Plutarch tells us, “at the beginning of spring, the time of the blossoming of many plants.”

We do not hear that the “Sanctifier” at Delphi was “driven,” but in all probability he was led from house to house, that every one might partake in the sanctity that simply exuded from him.  At Magnesia,[27] a city of Asia Minor, we have more particulars.  There, at the annual fair year by year the stewards of the city bought a Bull, “the finest that could be got,” and at the new moon of the month at the beginning of seedtime they dedicated it, for the city’s welfare.  The Bull’s sanctified life began with the opening of the agricultural