Part 22 (1/2)

199. The Eleusinia.--Our first festival is the Eleusinia, the festival of the Eleusinian mysteries. It is September, the ”19th of Boedromion,” the Athenians will say. Four days have been spent by the ”initiates” and the ”candidates” in symbolic sacrifices and purifications.[*] On one of these days the arch priest, the ”Hierophant,” has preached a manner of sermon at the Painted Porch in the Agora setting forth the awfulness and spiritual efficacy of these Mysteries, sacred to Demeter the Earth Mother, to her daughter Persephone, and also to the young Iacchus, one of the many incarnations of Dionysus, and who is always a.s.sociated at Elusis with the divine ”Mother and Daughter.” The great cry has gone forth to the Initiates--”To the Sea, ye Mystae!” and the whole vast mult.i.tude has gone down to bathe in the purifying brine.

[*]Not all Athenians were among the ”initiated,” but it does not seem to have been hard to be admitted to the oaths and examination which gave one partic.i.p.ation in the mysteries. About all a candidate had to prove was blameless character. Women could be initiated as well as men.

Now on this fifth day comes the sacred procession from Athens across the mountain pa.s.s to Eleusis. The partic.i.p.ates, by thousands, of both s.e.xes and of all ages, are drawn up in the Agora ere starting.

The Hierophant, the ”Torchbearer,” the ”Sacred Herald,” and the other priests wear long flowing raiment and high mitres like Orientals.

They also, as well as the company, wear myrtle and ivy chaplets and bear ears of corn and reapers' sickles. The holy image of Iacchus is borne in a car, the high priests marching beside it; and forth with pealing shout and chant they go,--down the Ceramicus, through the Dipylon gate, and over the hill to Eleusis, twelve miles away.

200. The Holy Procession to Eleusis.--Very sacred is the procession, but not silent and reverential. It is an hour when the untamed animal spirits of the Greeks, who after all are a young race and who are gripped fast by natural instinct, seem uncurbed. Loud rings the ”orgiastic” cry, ”Iacche! Iacche! evoe!”

There are wild shouts, dances, jests, songs,[*] postures. As the marchers pa.s.s the several sanctuaries along the road there are halts for symbolic sacrifices. So the mult.i.tude slowly mounts the long heights of Mount aegaleos, until--close to the temple of Aphrodite near the summit of the pa.s.s--the view opens of the broad blue bay of Eleusis, shut in by the isle of Salamis, while to the northward are seen the green Thrasian plain, with the white houses of Eleusis town[+] near the center, and the long line of outer hills stretching away to Megara and B?otia.

[*]We do not possess the official chant of the Mystae used on their march to Eleusia. Very possibly it was of a swift riotous nature like the Bacchinals' song in Euripides ”Bacchinals” (well translated by Way or by Murray).

[+]This was about the only considerable town in Attica outside of Athens.

The evening shadows are falling, while the peaceful army sweeps over the mountain wall and into Eleusis. Every marcher produces a torch, and bears it blazing aloft as he nears his destination.

Seen in the dark from Eleusis, the long procession of innumerable torches must convey an effect most magical.

201. The Mysteries of Eleusis.--What follows at Eleusis? The ”mysteries” are ”mysteries” still; we cannot claim initiation and reveal them. There seem to be manifold sacrifices of a symbolic significance, the tasting of sacred ”portions” of food and drink--a dim foreshadowing of the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist; especially in the great hall of the Temple of the Mystae in Eleusis there take place a manner of symbolic spectacles, dramas perhaps one may call them, revealing the origins of Iacchus, the mystical union of Persephone and Zeus, and the final joy of Demeter.

This certainly we can say of these ceremonies. They seem to have afforded to spiritually minded men a sense of remission of personal sin which the regular religion could never give; they seem also to have conveyed a fair hope of immortality, such as most Greeks doubted. Sophocles tells thus the story: ”Thrice blessed are they who behold these mystical rites, ere pa.s.sing to Hades' realm. They alone have life there. For the rest all things below are evil.”[*]

And in face of imminent death, perhaps in hours of s.h.i.+pwreck, men are wont to ask one another, ”Have you been initiated at Eleusis?”

[*]Sophocles, ”Frag.” 719.

202. The Greater Dionysia and the Drama.--Again we are in Athens in the springtime: ”The eleventh of Elaphebolion” [March]. It is the third day of the Greater Dionysia. The city has been in high festival; all the booths in the Agora hum with redoubled life; strangers have flocked in from outlying pars of h.e.l.las to trade, admire, and recreate; under pretext of honoring the wine G.o.d, inordinate quant.i.ties of wine are drunk with less than the prudent mixture of water. There is boisterous frolicking, singing, and jesting everywhere. It is early blossom time. All whom you meet wear huge flower crowns, and pelt you with the fragrant petals of spring.[*]

[*]Pindar (”Frag.” 75) says thus of the joy and beauty of this fete: ”[Lo!] this festival is due when the chamber of the red-robed Hours is opened and odorous plants wake to the fragrant spring. then we scatter on undying earth the violet, like lovely tresses, and twine roses in our hair; then sound the voice of song, the flute keeps time, and dancing choirs resound the praise of Semele.”

So for two days the city has made merry, and now on the third, very early, ”to the theater” is the word on every lip. Magistrates in their purple robes of office, amba.s.sadors from foreign states, the priests and religious dignitaries, are all going to the front seats of honor. Ladies of gentle family, carefully veiled but eager and fluttering, are going with their maids, if the productions of the day are to be tragedies not comedies.[*] All the citizens are going, rich and poor, for here again we meet ”Athenian democracy”; and the judgment and interest of the tatter-clad fishermen seeking the general ”two-obol” seats may be almost as correct and keen as that of the lordly Alcmaenoid in his gala himation.

[*]It seems probable (on our uncertain information) that Athenian ladies attended the moral and proper tragedies. It was impossible for them to attend the often very coa.r.s.e comedies. Possibly at the tragedies they sat in a special and decently secluded part of the theater.

203. The Theater of Dionysus.--Early dawn it is when the crowds pour through the barriers around the Theater of Dionysus upon the southern slope of the Acropolis. They sit (full 15,000 or more) wedged close together upon rough wooden benches set upon the hill slopes.[*] At the foot of their wide semicircle is a circular s.p.a.ce of ground, beaten hard, and ringed by a low stone barrier.

It is some ninety feet in diameter. This is the ”orchestra,” the ”dancing place,” wherein the chorus may disport itself and execute its elaborate figures. Behind the orchestra stretches a kind of tent or booth, the ”skene.” Within this the actors may retire to change their costumes, and the side nearest to the audience is provided with a very simple scene,--some kind of elementary scenery panted to represent the front of a temple or palace, or the rocks, or the open country. This is nearly the entire setting.[+] If there are any slight changes of this screen, they must be made in the sight of the entire audience. The Athenian theater has the blue dome of heaven above it, the red Acropolis rock behind it. Beyond the ”skene” one can look far away to the country and the hills.

The keen Attic imagination will take the place of the thousand arts of the later stage-setter. Sophocles and his rivals, even as Shakespeare in Elizabeth's England, can sound the very depths and scale the loftiest heights of human pa.s.sion, with only a simulacrum of the scenery, properties, and mechanical artifices which will trick out a very mean twentieth century theater.

[*]These benches (before the stone theater was built in 340 B.C.) may be imagined as set up much like the ”bleachers” at a modern baseball park. We know that ancient audiences wedged in very close.

[+]I think it is fairly certain that the cla.s.sical Attic theater was without any stage, and that the actors appeared on the same level as the chorus. As to the extreme simplicity of all the scenery and properties there is not the least doubt.