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.

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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 Phaedra 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.