"To us also leap for full jars, and leap for fleecy flocks, and
leap for fields of fruit and for hives to bring increase."

And yet not strange if we remember the Macedonian farmer (p. 32), who
throws his spade into the air that the wheat may be tall, or the Russian
peasant girls who leap high in the air crying, "Flax, grow." The
leaping of the youths of the Cretan hymn is just the utterance of their
tense desire. They have grown up, and with them all live things must
grow. By their magic year by year the fruits of the earth come to their
annual new birth. And that there be no mistake they end:

"Leap for our cities, and leap for our sea-borne ships, _and for
our young citizens_, and for goodly Themis."

They are now young citizens of a fencèd city instead of young tribesmen
of the bush, but their magic is the same, and the strength that holds
them together is the bond of social custom, social structure, "goodly
Themis." No man liveth to himself.

* * * * *

Crete is not Athens, but at Athens in the theatre of Dionysos, if the
priest of Dionysos, seated at the great Spring Festival in his beautiful
carved central seat, looked across the orchestra, he would see facing
him a stone frieze on which was sculptured the Cretan ritual, the armed
dancing youths and the child to be year by year reborn.

We have seen what the Dithyramb, from which sprang the Drama, was. A
Spring song, a song of Bull-driving, a song and dance of Second Birth;