urrection festival.

* * * * *

We return to our argument, holding steadily in our minds this
connection. The Dithyramb is a Spring Song at a Spring Festival, and the
importance of the Spring Festival is that it magically promotes the
food-supply.

* * * * *

Do we know any more about the Dithyramb? Happily yes, and the next point
is as curious as significant.

Pindar, in one of his Odes, asks a strange question:

"Whence did appear the Graces of Dionysos,
With the Bull-driving Dithyramb?"

Scholars have broken their own heads and one another's to find a meaning
and an answer to the odd query. It is only quite lately that they have
come at all to see that the Dithyramb was a Spring Song, a primitive
rite. Formerly it was considered to be a rather elaborate form of lyric
poetry invented comparatively late. But, even allowing it is the Spring
Song, are we much further? Why should the Dithyramb be bull-driving? How
can driving a Bull help the spring to come? And, above all, what are the
"slender-ankled" Graces doing, helping to drive the great unwieldy Bull?

The difficulty about the Graces, or Charites, as the Greeks called them,
is soon settled. They are the Seasons, or "Hours," and the chief Season,
or Hour, was Spring herself. They are called Charites, or Graces,
because they are, in the words of the Collect, the "Givers of all
grace," that is, of all increase physical and spiritual. But why do they
want to come driving in a Bull? It is easy to see why the Givers of all
grace lead the Dithyramb, the Spring Song; their coming, with their
"fruits in due season" is the very gist of the Dithyramb; but why is the
Dithyramb "bull-driving"? Is this a mere "poetical" epithet? If it is,
it is not particularly poetical.

But Pindar is not, we now know, merely being "poetical," which amounts,
according to some scholars, to meaning anything or nothing. He is
describing, alluding to, an actual rite or _dromenon_ in which a Bull is
summoned and driven to come in spring. About that we must be clear.
Plutarch, the first anthropologist, wrote a little treatise called
_Greek Questions_, in which he tells us all the strange out-of-the-way
rites and customs he saw in Greece, and then asks himself what they
meant. In his 36th _Question_ he asks: "Why do the women of Elis summon
Dionysos in their hymns to be present with them with his bull-foot?" And
then, by a