* * * * *

Greece and the Greek drama remind me that I should like to offer my
thanks to Professor Gilbert Murray, for help and criticism which has far
outrun the limits of editorial duty.

J.E.H.

_Newnham College,
Cambridge, June 1913._

* * * * *

NOTE TO THE FIFTH IMPRESSION

The original text has been reprinted without change except for the
correction of misprints. A few additions (enclosed in square brackets)
have been made to the Bibliography.

1947

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I ART AND RITUAL 9

II PRIMITIVE RITUAL: PANTOMIMIC DANCES 29

III PERIODIC CEREMONIES: THE SPRING FESTIVAL 49

IV THE PRIMITIVE SPRING DANCE OR DITHYRAMB,
IN GREECE 75

V THE TRANSITION FROM RITUAL TO ART: THE
_DROMENON_ AND THE DRAMA 119

VI GREEK SCULPTURE: THE PANATHENAIC FRIEZE
AND THE APOLLO BELVEDERE 170

VII RITUAL, ART AND LIFE 204

BIBLIOGRAPHY 253

INDEX 255

ANCIENT ART AND RITUAL

CHAPTER I

ART AND RITUAL

The title of this book may strike the reader as strange and even
dissonant. What have art and ritual to do together? The ritualist is, to
the modern mind, a man concerned perhaps unduly with fixed forms and
ceremonies, with carrying out the rigidly prescribed ordinances of a
church or sect. The artist, on the other hand, we think of as free in
thought and untrammelled by convention in practice; his tendency is
towards licence. Art and ritual, it is quite true, have diverged to-day;
but the title of this book is chosen advisedly. Its object is to show
that these two divergent developments have a common root, and that
neither can be understood without the other. It is at the outset one
and the same impulse that sends a man to church and to the theatre.

* * * * *

Such a statement may sound to-day paradoxical, even irreverent. But to
the Greek of the sixth, fifth, and even fourth century B.C., it would
have been a simple truism. We shall see this best by following an
Athenian to his theatre, on the day of the great Spring Festival of
Dionysos.

Passing through the entrance-gate to the theatre on the south s