* * * * *

We shall see this more clearly if we examine for a moment this Greek
word _mimesis_. We translate mīmēsis by "imitation," and we do very
wrongly. The word _mimesis_ means the action or doing of a person called
a _mime_. Now a _mime_ was simply a person who dressed up and acted in a
pantomime or primitive drama. He was roughly what we should call an
_actor_, and it is significant that in the word _actor_ we stress not
imitating but acting, doing, just what the Greek stressed in his words
_dromenon_ and _drama_. The actor dresses up, puts on a mask, wears the
skin of a beast or the feathers of a bird, not, as we have seen, to copy
something or some one who is not himself, but to emphasize, enlarge,
enhance, his own personality; he masquerades, he does not mimic.

The celebrants in the very primitive ritual of the Mountain-Mother in
Thrace were, we know, called _mimes_. In the fragment of his lost play,
Æschylus, after describing the din made by the "mountain gear" of the
Mother, the maddening hum of the _bombykes_, a sort of spinning-top,
the clash of the brazen cymbals and the twang of the strings, thus goes
on:

"And bull-voices roar thereto from somewhere out of the unseen,
fearful _mimes_, and from a drum an image, as it were, of thunder
underground is borne on the air heavy with dread."

Here we have undoubtedly some sort of "bull-roaring," thunder-and
wind-making ceremony, like those that go on in Australia to-day. The
_mimes_ are not mimicking thunder out of curiosity, they are making it
and enacting and uttering it for magical purposes. When a sailor wants a