Thus ends the first phase of the festival. So far all has been mirth and
revelry; but now comes a sudden change of tone. Dionysus, god of wine
though he be, has also his tragic aspect; of him too there is recorded a
"descent into hell"; and to the glad celebration of the renewal of life
in spring succeeds a feast in honour of the dead. The ghosts, it is
supposed, come forth to the upper air; every door-post is smeared with
pitch to keep off the wandering shades; and every family sacrifices to
its own departed. Nor are the arts forgotten; a musical festival is
held, and competing choirs sing and dance in honour of the god.

Such, so far as our brief and imperfect records enable us to trace it,
was the ritual of a typical Greek festival. With the many questions that
might be raised as to its origin and development we need not concern
ourselves at present; what we have to note is the broad fact,
characteristic of the genius of the Greeks, that they have taken the
natural emotions excited by the birth of spring, and by connecting them
with the worship of Dionysus have given them expression and form; so
that what in its origin was a mere burst of primitive animal spirits is
transmuted into a complex and beautiful work of art, the secret springs
and fountains of physical life flowing into the forms of a spiritual
symbol. It is this that is the real meaning of all ceremonial, and this
that the Greeks better than any other people understood. Their religion,
one may almost say, consisted in ritual; and to attempt to divide the
inner from the outer would be to falsify from the beginning its
distinctive character.

Let us pass to our second illustration, the great city-festival of
Athens. In the Anthesteria it was a moment of nature that was seized and
idealized; here, in the Panathenaea, it is the forms of social life, its