[21] I, 43. 2.

[22] Quaest.  Graec. XII.

[23] Op. cit.

[24] Quaest.  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.

For example, the main deed of the Tragedy, the slaying of hero or heroine, is not done on the stage.  That disappoints some modern minds unconsciously avid of realism to the point of horror.  Instead of a fine thrilling murder or suicide before his very eyes, the spectator is put off with an account of the murder done off the stage.  This account is regularly given, and usually at considerable length, in a “messenger’s speech.”  The messenger’s speech is a regular item in a Greek play, and though actually it gives scope not only for fine elocution, but for real dramatic effect, in theory we feel it undramatic, and a modern actor has sometimes much ado to make it acceptable.  The spectator is told that all these, to him, odd conventions are due to Greek restraint, moderation, good taste, and yet for all their supposed restraint and reserve, he finds when he reads his Homer that Greek heroes frequently burst into floods of tears when a self-respecting Englishman would have suffered in silence.

Then again, specially if the play be by Euripides, it ends not with a “curtain,” not with a great decisive moment, but with the appearance of a god who says a few lines of either exhortation or consolation or reconciliation, which, after the strain and stress of the action itself, strikes some people as rather stilted and formal, or as rather flat and somehow unsatisfying.  Worse still, there are in many of the scenes long dialogues, in which the actors wrangle with each other, and in which the action does not advance so quickly as we wish.  Or again, instead of beginning with the action, and having our curiosity excited bit by bit about the plot, at the outset some one comes in and tells us the whole thing in the prologue.  Prologues we feel, are out of date, and the Greeks ought to have known better.  Or again, of course we admit that tragedy must be tragic, and we are prepared for a decent amount of lamentation, but when an antiphonal lament goes on for pages, we weary and wish that the chorus would stop lamenting and do something.