sense of entering into higher places, filled with a larger
and a purer air--a sense of beauty born clean out of conflict and
disaster.

A suspicion dawns upon the spectator that, great though the tragedies in
themselves are, they owe their peculiar, their incommunicable beauty
largely to this element of the chorus which seemed at first so strange.

Now by examining this chorus and understanding its function--nay, more,
by considering the actual _orchestra_, the space on which the chorus
danced, and the relation of that space to the rest of the theatre, to
the stage and the place where the spectators sat--we shall get light at
last on our main central problem: How did art arise out of ritual, and
what is the relation of both to that actual life from which both art and
ritual sprang?

* * * * *

The dramas of AEschylus certainly, and perhaps also those of Sophocles
and Euripides, were played not upon the stage, and not in the _theatre_,
but, strange though it sounds to us, in the _orchestra_. The _theatre_
to the Greeks was simply "the place of seeing," the place where the
spectators sat; what they called the sk{-e}n{-e} or _scene_, was the
tent or hut in which the actors dressed. But the kernel and centre of
the whole was the _orchestra_, the circular _dancing-place_ of the
chorus; and, as the orchestra was the kernel and centre of the theatre,
so the chorus, the band of dancing and singing men--this chorus that
seems to us so odd and even superfluous--was the centre and kernel and
starting-point of the drama. The chorus danced and sang that Dithyramb
we know so well, and from the leaders of that Dithyramb we remember
tragedy arose, and the chorus were at first, as an ancient writer tells
us, just men and boys, tillers of the earth, who danced when they rested
from sowing and ploughing.

Now it is in the relation between the _orchestra_ or dancing-place of
the chorus, and the _theatre_ or place of the spectators, a relation
that shifted as time went on, that we see mirrored the whole development
from ritual to art--from _dromenon_ to drama.

* * * * *

The orchestra on which the Dithyramb was danced was just a circular
dancing-place beaten flat for the convenience of the dancers, and
sometimes edged by a stone basement to mark the circle. This circular
orchestra is very well seen in the theatre of Epidaurus, of which a
sketch is given in Fig. 1. The or