restrained, a sense of entering into higher places, filled with a larger
and a purer air--a sense of beauty born clean out of conflict and
disaster.

A suspicion dawns upon the spectator that, great though the tragedies in
themselves are, they owe their peculiar, their incommunicable beauty
largely to this element of the chorus which seemed at first so strange.

Now by examining this chorus and understanding its function--nay, more,
by considering the actual _orchestra_, the space on which the chorus
danced, and the relation of that space to the rest of the theatre, to
the stage and the place where the spectators sat--we shall get light at
last on our main central problem: How did art arise out of ritual, and
what is the relation of both to that actual life from which both art and
ritual sprang?

* * * * *

The dramas of Æschylus certainly, and perhaps also those of Sophocles
and Euripides, were played not upon the stage, and not in the _theatre_,
but, strange though it sounds to us, in the _orchestra_. The _theatre_
to the Greeks was simply "the place of seeing," the place where the
spectators sat; what they called the skēnē or _scene_, was the tent or
hut in which the actors dressed. But the kernel and centre of the whole
was the _orchestra_, the circular _dancing-place_ of the chorus; and, as
the orchestra was the kernel and centre of the theatre, so the chorus,
the band of dancing and singing men--this chorus that seems to us so odd
and even superfluous--was the centre and kernel and starting-point of
the drama. The chorus danced and sang that Dithyramb we know so well,
and from the leaders of that Dithyramb we remember tragedy arose, and