Page:Sophocles (Classical Writers).djvu/19



rise of Tragedy in connection with the Dionysiac festivals has been clearly described by Professor Jebb in his Primer of Greek Literature.. All that is here necessary is to allude in general terms to the religious influences under which the art grew up, and the religious associations which clung to it, and then pass on to the consideration of other elements of thought and feeling which were no less essential to its life.

Tragedy has been regarded as the meeting-point of Dorian lyric poetry and the Ionian epos upon Attic soil. But this is not a complete account of its origin. That which had the power to fuse these divers elements, and combine them into a new whole, the red blood which animated this new creature, was the orgiastic impulse of a peculiar form of Nature-worship, which, according to Herodotus, was not indigenous to Hellas, but had been imported from the east. The worship of Bacchus or Dionysus had come into Attica by way of Eleutheræ from Thebes, and had been fused with other mystic rites, especially those of the Eleusinian Demeter.

Nature-worship and the drama.—Few mental phenomena are more difficult to grasp, while none is more certain, than the union of sport with seriousness, the mingled sadness and gaiety, with which men in early times expressed their reverence for Nature. Some interesting traces of this may be found in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, where the tone of festive