In her more recent work Miss Harrison reverts to this theme, and subsequently carries us one step further.  She maintains that the original conception of the Greek drama was in no way spectacular.  The Athenians went to the theatre as we go to church.  They did not attend to see players act, but to take part in certain ritualistic things done (dromena).  The priests of Dionysos Eleuthereus, of Apollo Daphnephoros, and of other deities attended in solemn state to assist in the performance of the rites.  With that keen sense of humour which enlivens all her pages, and which made her speak in her Themis of the august father of gods and men as “an automatically explosive thunderstorm,” Miss Harrison says, “It is as though at His Majesty’s the front row of stalls was occupied by the whole bench of bishops, with the Archbishop of Canterbury enthroned in the central stall.”  The actual dromenon performed was of the same nature as that which in more modern times has induced villagers to make Jacks-in-the-Green and to dance round maypoles.  It was always connected with the recurrence of the seasons and with the death and resurrection of vegetation.  In fact, the whole ritual clustered round the idea represented at a later period in the well-known and very beautiful lines of Moschus in the Lament for Bion, which may be freely translated thus: 

    Ah me!  The mallows, anise, and each flower
      That withers at the blast of winter’s breath
    Await the vernal, renovating hour
      And joyously awake from feigned death.

The idea which impelled these ancient Greeks to perform ritualistic dromena on their orchestras, which took the place of what we should call the stage, is not yet dead.  Miss Harrison quotes from Mr. Lawson’s work on modern Greek folklore, which is a perfect mine of knowledge on the subject of the survival of ancient religious customs in modern Greece, the story of an old woman in Euboea who was asked on Easter Eve why village society was in a state of gloom and despondency, and who replied:  “Of course, I am anxious; for if Christ does not rise to-morrow, we shall have no corn this year.”

It was during the fifth century that the dromenon and the Dionysiac Dithyramb passed to some extent away and were merged into the drama.  “Homer came to Athens, and out of Homeric stories playwrights began to make their plots.”  The chief agent in effecting this important change was the so-called “tyrant” Pisistratus, who was probably a free-thinker and “cared little for magic and ancestral ghosts,” but who for political reasons wished to transport the Dionysia from the country to the town.  “Now,” Miss Harrison says, “to bring Homer to Athens was like opening the eyes of the blind.”  Independently of the inevitable growth of scepticism which was the natural result of increased knowledge and more acute powers of observation, it is no very hazardous conjecture to assume that the quick-witted and pleasure-loving Athenians welcomed the relief afforded to the dreary monotony of the ancient dromena by the introduction of the more lively episodes drawn from the heroic sagas.  “Without destroying the old, Pisistratus contrived to introduce the new, to add to the old plot of Summer and Winter the life-stories of heroes, and thereby arose the drama.”