Peace."

We know the Seasons, the fruit and food bringers, but Dike is strange.
We translate the word "Justice," but Dike means, not Justice as between
man and man, but the order of the world, the _way_ of life. It is
through this way, this order, that the seasons go round. As long as the
seasons observe this order there is fruitfulness and peace. If once that
order were overstepped then would be disorder, strife, confusion,
barrenness. And next comes a mandate, strange to our modern ears:

"To us also leap for full jars, and leap for fleecy flocks, and
leap for fields of fruit and for hives to bring increase."

And yet not strange if we remember the Macedonian farmer (p. 32), who
throws his spade into the air that the wheat may be tall, or the Russian
peasant girls who leap high in the air crying, "Flax, grow." The
leaping of the youths of the Cretan hymn is just the utterance of their
tense desire. They have grown up, and with them all live things must
grow. By their magic year by year the fruits of the earth come to their
annual new birth. And that there be no mistake they end:

"Leap for our cities, and leap for our sea-borne ships, _and for
our young citizens_, and for goodly Themis."

They are now young citizens of a fenced city instead of young tribesmen
of the bush, but their magic is the same, and the strength that holds
them together is the bond of social custom, social structure, "goodly
Themis." No man liveth to himself.

* * * * *

Crete is not Athens, but at Athens in the theatre of Dionysos, if the
priest of Dionysos, seated at the great Spring Festival in his beautiful
carved central seat, looked across the orchestra, he would see facing
him a stone frieze on which was sculptured the Cretan ritual, the armed
dancing youths and the child to be year by year reborn.

We have seen what the Dithyramb, from which sprang the Drama, was. A
Spring song, a song of Bull-driving, a song and dance of Second Birth;
but all this seems, perhaps, not to bring us nearer to Greek drama,
rather to put us farther away. What have the Spring and the Bull and the
Birth Rite to do with the stately tragedies we know--with Agamemnon and
Iphigenia and Orestes and Hippolytos? That is the question before us,
and the answer will lead us to the very heart of our subject. So far we
have seen that ritual arose from the presentation and emphasis of
emotion--emotion felt mainly ab