Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

334 Daimon and Hero [ch.
luck to the village for the season, and they are popular because
they invariably end with a quete. They are intolerant of development
because of their periodic nature, and fixed factors—the fight,
the death, the resurrection, on which this ' luck ' inherently and
essentially depends.
The mythos, the plot which is the life-history of an Eniautos-
daimon, whether performed in winter, spring, summer or autumn,
is thus doomed by its monotony to sterility. What is wanted
is material cast in less rigid mould ; in a word Xeyo/xeva not
bound by hpwfxeva, plots that have cut themselves loose from
rites. The dithyramb, which was but the periodic festival of the
spring renouveau, broke and blossomed so swiftly into the Attic
drama because it found such plots to hand ;
in a word
—
the forms
of Attic drama are the forms of the life-history of an Eniautosdaimon;
the content is the infinite variety of free and individualized. *
1 .'
heroic saga— in the largest sense of the ivord 'Homer
The Homeric Saga.
We are perhaps tired of being told that zEschylus 2
said his
tragedies were ' slices from the great banquets of Homer,' and we
feel the ugly metaphor is worthier of the learned and ingenious
Diners who record it than of the poet on whom it is fathered.
Yet the metaphor is instructive. The plots of Attic drama are
things cut off {reixd^n). They are mythoi that have worked
themselves loose from the cults of which they were once the
spoken utterance 3 , and are thereby material to be freely moulded
at the artist's will.
1 Following Dieterich rather than Prof. Ridgeway, I had long vaguely held tbat
the threnos and peripeteia of Greek tragedy arose from mysteries based on the death
and resurrection of the year rather than from the tomb-ritual of any mere, historical
hero. But I date my definite enquiry into the daimonic origin of these forms from a
lecture On the Form and Technique of Greek Tragedy delivered by Prof. Murray at
Oxford in the Easter term of 1910. For detailed and to me conclusive evidence I am
now able to refer to the Excursus which Prof. Murray has with great kindness
appended to this chapter and which embodies the result of his independent
investigations. By tbe kindness of Dr M. P. Nilsson I have just received a preprint
of his valuable monograph, Der Ursprung der Tragodie, which appears in
Ilberg's Neue Jahrbiieher fur das klassische Altertumsgeschichte und deutsche
Literatur, xxvu. 9, p. 609.
- Athen. vm. 39. 347 ot'5' ewi vovv j3a.XX6fj.evos to. tov kclXov nai Xafnrpov Aio~x i'Xov,
5s ras clvtov rpaywdias re/xaxv ttvai i-Xeye timv Ofx-qpov fj.eyd.Xiov 8eiirvoov.
3 I am aware of course that these 'tied' mythoi, even while they were tied,
attached to themselves a certain amount of floating historical legend. This has
been very well shown by Mr Chambers (op. cit.) in his account of the various local
elements of folk story attracted by the Mummers' play, vol. i. p. 211.