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We have seen how a forest people, dependent on fruit trees and berries for their food, will carry a maypole and imagine a tree-spirit.  But a people of agriculturists will feel and do and think quite otherwise; they will look, not to the forest but to the earth for their returning life and food; they will sow seeds and wait for their sprouting, as in the gardens of Adonis.  Adonis seems to have passed through the two stages of Tree-Spirit and Seed-Spirit; his effigy was sometimes a tree cut down, sometimes his planted “Gardens.”  Now seeds are many, innumerable, and they are planted in the earth, and a people who bury their dead know, or rather feel, that the earth is dead man’s land.  So, when they prepare a pot of seeds on their All Souls’ Day, it is not really or merely as a “supper for the souls,” though it may be that kindly notion enters.  The ghosts have other work to do than to eat their supper and go.  They take that supper “of all seeds,” that panspermia, with them down to the world below, that they may tend it and foster it and bring it back in autumn as a pot of all fruits, a pankarpia.

     “Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die.”

The dead, then, as well as the living—­this is for us the important point—­had their share in the dromena of the “more ancient Dionysia.”  These agricultural spring dromena were celebrated just outside the ancient city gates, in the agora, or place of assembly, on a circular dancing-place, near to a very primitive sanctuary of Dionysos which was opened only once in the year, at the Feast of Cups.  Just outside the gates was celebrated yet another festival of Dionysos equally primitive, called the “Dionysia in the Fields.”  It had the form though not the date of our May Day festival.  Plutarch[39] thus laments over the “good old times”:  “In ancient days,” he says, “our fathers used to keep the feast of Dionysos in homely, jovial fashion.  There was a procession, a jar of wine and a branch; then some one dragged in a goat, another followed bringing a wicker basket of figs, and, to crown all, the phallos.”  It was just a festival of the fruits of the whole earth:  wine and the basket of figs and the branch for vegetation, the goat for animal life, the phallos for man.  No thought here of the dead, it is all for the living and his food.

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Such sanctities even a great tyrant might not tamper with.  But if you may not upset the old you may without irreverence add the new.  Peisistratos probably cared little for, and believed less in, magical ceremonies for the renewal of fruits, incantations of the dead.  We can scarcely picture him chewing buckthorn on the day of the “Cups,” or anointing his front door with pitch to keep out the ghosts.  Very wisely he left the Anthesteria and the kindred festival “in the fields” where and as they were.  But for his own purposes he wanted to do honour to Dionysos, and also above all things to enlarge and improve the rites done in the god’s honour, so, leaving the old sanctuary to its fate, he built a new temple on the south side of the Acropolis where the present theatre now stands, and consecrated to the god a new and more splendid precinct.