Dionysus Eleuthereus, who occupied the central chair.[1]
The same enlargement of the original scope of Bacchic song appeared also in the variation of the subject. The sorrows of Dionysus could not always be the vehicle of expression. As the people of Sicyon had found the calamities of Adrastus, their native hero, a more congenial theme for tragic choruses, so we can readily understand how an Athenian concourse might often prefer to have their feelings moved by a scene from the life of Theseus or of Erechtheus.
III. And the utterance of emotion at the Dionysiac festival, while thus becoming more catholic and more national, became also more essentially dramatic. This was the only form of early religious feeling which had either force or freedom enough to call for downright impersonation and to make it possible.
The Eastern story-teller sits in the midst of a circle of enchained listeners in his ordinary garb. He may often suit his gestures to his words, and mimic looks and tones. But the imagination of the listeners is satisfied without his directly representing those of whom he tells his tale.
Seat the epic rhapsodist on a throne above his audience, with a wand to beat time to the measured cadence of his recitative, and he will charm the placid Ionian multitude through a summer's day. They do not ask that the heroes should step forth from the stately framework of the narrative.
Arion puts on his robe of inspiration and tunes his lyre, and he is at once divine, and the rough Corinthian sailor forgets his toil and his rapacious greed in listening to him. His hearers become responsive to every variation in his strain; but they do not as yet demand to see an actual concrete embodiment of what so moves them.
- ↑ It is a noticeable fact, though, as several of the seats are lost, it may be accidental, that Ares the Destroyer, and Aphrodite the Goddess of Love, are not named in any of the places at present marked in the Dionysiac theatre.
