Ancient Art and Ritual | Page 2

a place "cut off" from the
common land and dedicated to a god. He will pass to the left (Fig. 2, p.
144) two temples standing near to each other, one of earlier, the other
of later date, for a temple, once built, was so sacred that it would only
be reluctantly destroyed. As he enters the actual theatre he will pay
nothing for his seat; his attendance is an act of worship, and from the
social point of view obligatory; the entrance fee is therefore paid for
him by the State.
The theatre is open to all Athenian citizens, but the ordinary man will
not venture to seat himself in the front row. In the front row, and that
only, the seats have backs, and the central seat of this row is an
armchair; the whole of the front row is permanently reserved, not for
individual rich men who can afford to hire "boxes," but for certain State
officials, and these officials are all priests. On each seat the name of the
owner is inscribed; the central seat is "of the priest of Dionysos
Eleuthereus," the god of the precinct. Near him is the seat "of the priest
of Apollo the Laurel-Bearer," and again "of the priest of Asklepios,"
and "of the priest of Olympian Zeus," and so on round the whole front
semicircle. 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 theatre at Athens is not open night by night, nor even day by day.
Dramatic performances take place only at certain high festivals of
Dionysos in winter and spring. It is, again, as though the modern
theatre was open only at the festivals of the Epiphany and of Easter.
Our modern, at least our Protestant, custom is in direct contrast. We
tend on great religious festivals rather to close than to open our theatres.
Another point of contrast is in the time allotted to the performance. We
give to the theatre our after-dinner hours, when work is done, or at best
a couple of hours in the afternoon. The theatre is for us a recreation.
The Greek theatre opened at sunrise, and the whole day was
consecrated to high and strenuous religious attention. During the five or
six days of the great Dionysia, the whole city was in a state of
unwonted sanctity, under a taboo. To distrain a debtor was illegal; any
personal assault, however trifling, was sacrilege.

Most impressive and convincing of all is the ceremony that took place
on the eve of the performance. By torchlight, accompanied by a great
procession, the image of the god Dionysos himself was brought to the
theatre and placed in the orchestra. Moreover, he came not only in
human but in animal form. Chosen young men of the Athenians in the
flower of their youth--_epheboi_--escorted to the precinct a splendid
bull. It was expressly ordained that the bull should be "worthy of the
god"; he was, in fact, as we shall presently see, the primitive
incarnation of the god. It is, again, as though in our modern theatre
there stood, "sanctifying all things to our use and us to His service," the
human figure of the Saviour, and beside him the Paschal Lamb.
* * * * *
But now we come to a strange thing. A god presides over the theatre, to
go to the theatre is an act of worship to the god Dionysos, and yet,
when the play begins, three times out of four of Dionysos we hear
nothing. We see, it may be, Agamemnon returning from Troy,
Clytemnestra waiting to slay him, the vengeance of Orestes, the love of
Phædra for Hippolytos, the hate of Medea and the slaying of her
children: stories beautiful, tragic, morally instructive it may be, but
scarcely, we feel, religious. The orthodox Greeks themselves
sometimes complained that in the plays enacted before them there was
"nothing to do with Dionysos."
If drama be at the outset divine, with its roots in ritual, why does it
issue in an art profoundly solemn, tragic, yet purely human? The actors
wear ritual vestments like those of the celebrants at the Eleusinian
mysteries. Why, then, do we find them, not executing a religious
service or even a drama of gods and goddesses, but rather
impersonating mere Homeric heroes and heroines? Greek drama, which
seemed at first to give us our clue, to show us a real link between ritual
and art, breaks down, betrays us, it would seem, just at the crucial
moment, and leaves us with our problem on our hands.
Had we only Greek ritual and art we might well despair. The Greeks
are a people of such swift