a thing to be looked at.  The history of the Greek stage is one long story of the encroachment of the stage on the orchestra.  At first a rude platform or table is set up, then scenery is added; the movable tent is translated into a stone house or a temple front.  This stands at first outside the orchestra; then bit by bit the scene encroaches till the sacred circle of the dancing-place is cut clean across.  As the drama and the stage wax, the dromenon and the orchestra wane.

This shift in the relation of dancing-place and stage is very clearly seen in Fig. 2, a plan of the Dionysiac theatre at Athens (p. 144).  The old circular orchestra shows the dominance of ritual; the new curtailed orchestra of Roman times and semicircular shape shows the dominance of the spectacle.

[Illustration:  Fig. 2.  Dionysiac Theatre at Athens.]

Greek tragedy arose, Aristotle has told us, from the leaders of the Dithyramb, the leaders of the Spring Dance.  The Spring Dance, the mime of Summer and Winter, had, as we have seen, only one actor, one actor with two parts—­Death and Life.  With only one play to be played, and that a one-actor play, there was not much need for a stage.  A scene, that is a tent, was needed, as we saw, because all the dancers had to put on their ritual gear, but scarcely a stage.  From a rude platform the prologue might be spoken, and on that platform the Epiphany or Appearance of the New Year might take place; but the play played, the life-history of the life-spirit, was all too familiar; there was no need to look, the thing was to dance.  You need a stage—­not necessarily a raised stage, but a place apart from the dancers—­when you have new material for your players, something you need to look at, to attend to.  In the sixth century B.C., at Athens, came the great innovation.  Instead of the old plot, the life-history of the life-spirit, with its deadly monotony, new plots were introduced, not of life-spirits but of human individual heroes.  In a word, Homer came to Athens, and out of Homeric stories playwrights began to make their plots.  This innovation was the death of ritual monotony and the dromenon.  It is not so much the old that dies as the new that kills.

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AEschylus himself is reported to have said that his tragedies were “slices from the great banquet of Homer.”  The metaphor is not a very pleasing one, but it expresses a truth.  By Homer, AEschylus meant not only our Iliad and Odyssey, but the whole body of Epic or Heroic poetry which centred round not only the Siege of Troy but the great expedition of the Seven Against Thebes, and which, moreover, contained the stories of the heroes before the siege began, and their adventures after it was ended.  It was from these heroic sagas for the most part, though not wholly, that the myths or plots of not only AEschylus but also Sophocles