But now we come to a strange thing. A god presides over the theatre, to
go to the theatre is an act of worship to the god Dionysos, and yet,
when the play begins, three times out of four of Dionysos we hear
nothing. We see, it may be, Agamemnon returning from Troy, Clytemnestra
waiting to slay him, the vengeance of Orestes, the love of Phædra for
Hippolytos, the hate of Medea and the slaying of her children: stories
beautiful, tragic, morally instructive it may be, but scarcely, we feel,
religious. The orthodox Greeks themselves sometimes complained that in
the plays enacted before them there was "nothing to do with Dionysos."

If drama be at the outset divine, with its roots in ritual, why does it
issue in an art profoundly solemn, tragic, yet purely human? The actors
wear ritual vestments like those of the celebrants at the Eleusinian
mysteries. Why, then, do we find them, not executing a religious
service or even a drama of gods and goddesses, but rather impersonating
mere Homeric heroes and heroines? Greek drama, which seemed at first to
give us our clue, to show us a real link between ritual and art, breaks
down, betrays us, it would seem, just at the crucial moment, and leaves
us with our problem on our hands.

Had we only Greek ritual and art we might well despair. The Greeks are a
people of such swift constructive imagination that they almost always
obscure any problem of origins. So fair and magical are their
cloud-capp'd towers that they distract our minds from the task of
digging for foundations. There is scarcely a problem in the origins of
Greek mythology and religion that has been solved within the domain of
Greek thinking only. Ritual with them was, in the case of drama, so
swiftly and completely transmuted into art that, had we had Greek
material only to hand, we might never have marked the transition.