rose out of a ritual dance. An _agon_, or
contest, or wrangling, there will probably be, because Summer contends
with Winter, Life with Death, the New Year with the Old. A tragedy must
be tragic, must have its _pathos_, because the Winter, the Old Year,
must die. There must needs be a swift transition, a clash and change
from sorrow to joy, what the Greeks called a _peripeteia_, a
_quick-turn-round_, because, though you carry out Winter, you bring in
Summer. At the end we shall have an Appearance, an Epiphany of a god,
because the whole gist of the ancient ritual was to summon the spirit of
life. All these ritual forms haunt and shadow the play, whatever its
plot, like ancient traditional ghosts; they underlie and sway the
movement and the speeches like some compelling rhythm.

Now this ritual mould, this underlying rhythm, is a fine thing in
itself; and, moreover, it was once shaped and cast by a living spirit:
the intense immediate desire for food and life, and for the return of
the seasons which bring that food and life. But we have seen that, once
the faith in man's power magically to bring back these seasons waned,
once he began to doubt whether he could really carry out Winter and
bring in Summer, his emotion towards these rites would cool. Further, we
have seen that these rites repeated year by year ended, among an
imaginative people, in the mental creation of some sort of daemon or god.
This daemon, or god, was more and more held responsible on his own
account for the food-supply and the order of the Horae, or Seasons; so we
get the notion that this daemon or god himself led in the Seasons; Hermes
dances at the head of the Charites, or an Eiresione is carried to Helios
and the Horae. The thought then arises that this man-like daemon who rose
from a real King of the May, must himself be approached and dealt with
as a man, bargained with, sacrificed to. In a word, in place of
_dromena_, things done, we get gods worshipped; in place of sacraments,
holy bulls killed and eaten in common, we get sacrifices in the modern
sense, holy bulls offered to yet holier gods. The relation of these
figures of gods to art we shall consider when we come to sculpture.

So the _dromenon_, the thing done, wanes, the prayer, the praise, the
sacrifice waxes. Religion moves away from drama towards theology, but
the ritual mould of the _dromenon_ is left ready for a new content.

Again, there is another point. The magical _dromenon_, the