We know the Seasons, the fruit and food bringers, but Dike is strange.  We translate the word “Justice,” but Dike means, not Justice as between man and man, but the order of the world, the way of life.  It is through this way, this order, that the seasons go round.  As long as the seasons observe this order there is fruitfulness and peace.  If once that order were overstepped then would be disorder, strife, confusion, barrenness.  And next comes a mandate, strange to our modern ears: 

     “To us also leap for full jars, and leap for fleecy flocks, and
     leap for fields of fruit and for hives to bring increase.”

And yet not strange if we remember the Macedonian farmer (p. 32), who throws his spade into the air that the wheat may be tall, or the Russian peasant girls who leap high in the air crying, “Flax, grow.”  The leaping of the youths of the Cretan hymn is just the utterance of their tense desire.  They have grown up, and with them all live things must grow.  By their magic year by year the fruits of the earth come to their annual new birth.  And that there be no mistake they end: 

     “Leap for our cities, and leap for our sea-borne ships, and for
     our young citizens, and for goodly Themis.”

They are now young citizens of a fenced city instead of young tribesmen of the bush, but their magic is the same, and the strength that holds them together is the bond of social custom, social structure, “goodly Themis.”  No man liveth to himself.

* * * * *

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.)