Carrying out
of Winter, the Bringing in of Spring, is doomed to an inherent and
deadly monotony. It is only when its magical efficacy is intensely
believed that it can go on. The life-history of a holy bull is always
the same; its magical essence is that it should be the same. Even when
the life-daemon is human his career is unchequered. He is born,
initiated, or born again; he is married, grows old, dies, is buried; and
the old, old story is told again next year. There are no fresh personal
incidents, peculiar to one particular daemon. If the drama rose from the
Spring Song only, beautiful it might be, but with a beauty that was
monotonous, a beauty doomed to sterility.

We seem to have come to a sort of _impasse_, the spirit of the
_dromenon_ is dead or dying, the spectators will not stay long to watch
a doing doomed to monotony. The ancient moulds are there, the old
bottles, but where is the new wine? The pool is stagnant; what angel
will step down to trouble the waters?

* * * * *

Fortunately we are not left to conjecture what _might_ have happened. In
the case of Greece we know, though not as clearly as we wish, what did
happen. We can see in part why, though the _dromena_ of Adonis and
Osiris, emotional as they were and intensely picturesque, remained mere
ritual; the _dromenon_ of Dionysos, his Dithyramb, blossomed into drama.

Let us look at the facts, and first at some structural facts in the
building of the theatre.

We have seen that the orchestra, with its dancing chorus, stands for
ritual, for the stage in which all were worshippers, all joined in a
rite of practical intent. We further saw that the _theatre_, the place
for the spectators, stood for art. In the orchestra all is life and
dancing; the marble _seats_ are the very symbol of rest, aloofness from
action, contemplation. The seats for the spectators grow and grow in
importance till at last they absorb, as it were, the whole spirit, and
give their name _theatre_ to the whole structure; action is swallowed up
in contemplation. But contemplation of what? At first, of course, of the
ritual dance, but not for long. That, we have seen, was doomed to a
deadly monotony. In a Greek theatre there was not only orchestra and a
spectator-place, there was also a _scene_ or _stage_.

The Greek word for stage is, as we said, _skene_, our scene. The _scene_
was not a stage in our sense, _i.e._ a platform raised so that the
pla