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 piece of luck that almost makes one's heart stand still, he
gives us the very words of the little ritual hymn the women sang, our
earliest "Bull-driving" Spring Song:

"In Spring-time,[25] O Dionysos,
To thy holy temple come;
To Elis with thy Graces,
Rushing with thy bull-foot, come,
Noble Bull, Noble Bull."

It is a strange primitive picture--the holy women standing in springtime
in front of the temple, summoning the Bull; and the Bull, garlanded and
filleted, rushing towards them, driven by the Graces, probably three
real women, three Queens of the May, wreathed and flower-bedecked. But
what does it mean?

Plutarch tries to answer his own question, and half, in a dim, confused
fashion, succeeds. "Is it," he suggests, "that some entitle the god as
'Born of a Bull' and as a 'Bull' himself? ... or is it that many hold
the god is the beginner of sowing and ploughing?" We have seen how a
kind of _daimon_, or spirit, of Winter or Summer arose from an actual
tree or maid or man disguised year by year as a tree. Did the god
Dionysos take his rise in like fashion from the driving and summoning
year by year of some holy Bull?