Again, there is another point.  The magical dromenon, the Carrying out of Winter, the Bringing in of Spring, is doomed to an inherent and deadly monotony.  It is only when its magical efficacy is intensely believed that it can go on.  The life-history of a holy bull is always the same; its magical essence is that it should be the same.  Even when the life-daemon is human his career is unchequered.  He is born, initiated, or born again; he is married, grows old, dies, is buried; and the old, old story is told again next year.  There are no fresh personal incidents, peculiar to one particular daemon.  If the drama rose from the Spring Song only, beautiful it might be, but with a beauty that was monotonous, a beauty doomed to sterility.

We seem to have come to a sort of impasse, the spirit of the dromenon is dead or dying, the spectators will not stay long to watch a doing doomed to monotony.  The ancient moulds are there, the old bottles, but where is the new wine?  The pool is stagnant; what angel will step down to trouble the waters?

* * * * *

Fortunately we are not left to conjecture what might have happened.  In the case of Greece we know, though not as clearly as we wish, what did happen.  We can see in part why, though the dromena of Adonis and Osiris, emotional as they were and intensely picturesque, remained mere ritual; the dromenon of Dionysos, his Dithyramb, blossomed into drama.

Let us look at the facts, and first at some structural facts in the building of the theatre.

We have seen that the orchestra, with its dancing chorus, stands for ritual, for the stage in which all were worshippers, all joined in a rite of practical intent.  We further saw that the theatre, the place for the spectators, stood for art.  In the orchestra all is life and dancing; the marble seats are the very symbol of rest, aloofness from action, contemplation.  The seats for the spectators grow and grow in importance till at last they absorb, as it were, the whole spirit, and give their name theatre to the whole structure; action is swallowed up in contemplation.  But contemplation of what?  At first, of course, of the ritual dance, but not for long.  That, we have seen, was doomed to a deadly monotony.  In a Greek theatre there was not only orchestra and a spectator-place, there was also a scene or stage.

The Greek word for stage is, as we said, skene, our scene.  The scene was not a stage in our sense, i.e. a platform raised so that the players might be better viewed.  It was simply a tent, or rude hut, in which the players, or rather dancers, could put on their ritual dresses.  The fact that the Greek theatre had, to begin with, no permanent stage in our sense, shows very clearly how little it was regarded as a spectacle.  The ritual dance was a dromenon, a thing to be done, not