Of the choral dance we have heard much, of the procession but little, yet its ritual importance was great.  In religion to-day the dance is dead save for the dance of the choristers before the altar at Seville.  But the procession lives on, has even taken to itself new life.  It is a means of bringing masses of people together, of ordering them and co-ordinating them.  It is a means for the magical spread of supposed good influence, of “grace.”  Witness the “Beating of the Bounds” and the frequent processions of the Blessed Sacrament in Roman Catholic lands.  The Queen of the May and the Jack-in-the-Green still go from house to house.  Now-a-days it is to collect pence; once it was to diffuse “grace” and increase.  We remember the procession of the holy Bull at Magnesia and the holy Bear at Saghalien (pp. 92-100).

[Illustration:  Fig. 4.  Panathenaic Procession.]

What, then, was the object of the Panathenaic procession?  It was first, as its name indicates, a procession that brought all Athens together.  Its object was social and political, to express the unity of Athens.  Ritual in primitive times is always social, collective.

The arrangement of the procession is shown in Figs. 3 and 4 (pp. 174, 175).  In Fig. 3 we see the procession as it were in real life, just as it is about to enter the temple and the presence of the Twelve Gods.  These gods are shaded black because in reality invisible.  Fig. 4 is a diagram showing the position of the various parts of the procession in the sculptural frieze.  At the west end of the temple the procession begins to form:  the youths of Athens are mounting their horses.  It divides, as it needs must, into two halves, one sculptured on the north, one on the south side of the cella.  After the throng of the cavalry getting denser and denser we come to the chariots, next the sacrificial animals, sheep and restive cows, then the instruments of sacrifice, flutes and lyres and baskets and trays for offerings; men who carry blossoming olive-boughs; maidens with water-vessels and drinking-cups.  The whole tumult of the gathering is marshalled and at last met and, as it were, held in check, by a band of magistrates who face the procession just as it enters the presence of the twelve seated gods, at the east end.  The whole body politic of the gods has come down to feast with the whole body politic of Athens and her allies, of whom these gods are but the projection and reflection.  The gods are there together because man is collectively assembled.

The great procession culminates in a sacrifice and a communal feast, a sacramental feast like that on the flesh of the holy Bull at Magnesia.  The Panathenaia was a high festival including rites and ceremonies of diverse dates, an armed dance of immemorial antiquity that may have dated from the days when Athens was subject to Crete, and a recitation ordered by Peisistratos of the poems of Homer.

* * * * *