permitted the use of flute and harp,
as well as of vocal music. Dancing was as an art confined to
professional persons; but though the higher orders abstained from its
practice, the lower indulged in it on festive occasions, when a
tendency to pantomime naturally asserted itself, and licence and wanton
buffoonery prevailed, as in the early rustic festivals of the Greek and
Italian peoples. Of a dance of armed men, on the other hand, there seems
no satisfactory trace in the representations of the Egyptian monuments.

7. GREEK DRAMA

Religious origin.

Whatever elements the Greek drama may, in the sources from which it
sprang, have owed to Egyptian, or Phrygian, or other Asiatic influences,
its development was independent and self-sustained. Not only in its
beginnings, but so long as the stage existed in Greece, the drama was in
intimate connexion with the national religion. This is the most signal
feature of its history, and one which cannot in the same degree or to
the same extent be ascribed to the drama of any other people, ancient or
modern. Not only did both the great branches of the Greek drama alike
originate in the usages of religious worship, but they never lost their
formal union with it, though one of them (comedy) in its later growth
abandoned all direct reference to its origin. Hellenic polytheism was at
once so active and so fluid or flexible in its anthropomorphic
formations, that no other religious system has ever with the same
conquering force assimilated to itself foreign elements, or with equal
vivacity and variety developed its own. Thus, the worship of Dionysus,
introduced into Greece by the Phoenicians as that of the tauriform
sun-god whom his worshippers adored with loud cries (whence _Bacchus_ or
_Iacchus_), and the god of generation (whence his _phallic_ emblem) and
production, was brought into connexion with the Dorian religion of the
sun-god Apollo. Apollo and his sister, again, corresponded to the
Pelasgian and Achaean divinities of sun and moon, whom the Phoenician
Dionysus and Demeter superseded, or with whose worship theirs was
blended. Dionysus, whose rites were specifically conducted with
reference to his attributes as the wine-god, was attended by deified
representations of his original worshippers, who wore the skin of the
goat sacrificed to him. These were the _satyrs_. Out of the connected
worships of Dionysus, Bacchus, Apollo and Demeter sprang the beginnings
of the Greek dram