Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/202

174 play without wearing a mask was one which never occurred to the mind of those responsible for the Greek stage.

The next point which I wish to make is this, and here I follow the view set forth by Dr. Ridge way in his Origin of Tragedy. Masking and acting, if they date back to the time of the rude forefathers of the ancient Greeks, go back to a time long before the god Dionysus, or any other god had come to be worshipped. The view, established and commonly accepted by classical scholars, that the Greek drama had its origin in the worship of Dionysus, is obviously erroneous; masking and acting were known to and practised by the forefathers of the Greeks long before the worship of Dionysus was established, even though it was in connexion with the worship of Dionysus that masking and acting reached their highest development.

The accepted view, that the Greek drama had its origin in the worship of Dionysus, is confronted with a fact which it indeed cannot explain, but which, on the other hand, this conjecture would account for. That fact is that in Sicyon, about 600, tragic choruses were performed, not in honour of the god Dionysus, but in honour of a deceased hero, Adrastus. Herodotus, who reports this fact, cannot understand it, because by this time tragedy had come to be intimately associated with the worship of Dionysus; but he puts the fact on record. And the fact is of great importance. It shows conclusively that tragedy—for I am now speaking of the tragic and not of the comic or satyric drama—had its origin in the worship of heroes. It indicates, as Dr. Ridgeway has shown in The Origin of Tragedy, that tragedy had its origin, not in the worship of Dionysus, or any god whatever, but in the worship of deceased ancestors.

But what has this to do with the wearing of masks, to which, on my conjecture, we must look for the origin of acting? To find an answer to this question we have only to enquire whether deceased ancestors are or were ever repre-