We return to our argument, holding steadily in our minds this connection. The Dithyramb is a Spring Song at a Spring Festival, and the importance of the Spring Festival is that it magically promotes the food-supply.
Do we know any more about the Dithyramb? Happily yes, and the next point is as curious as significant.
Pindar, in one of his Odes, asks a strange question:
“Whence did appear the Graces of Dionysos,
With the Bull-driving Dithyramb?”
Scholars have broken their own heads and one another’s to find a meaning and an answer to the odd query. It is only quite lately that they have come at all to see that the Dithyramb was a Spring Song, a primitive rite. Formerly it was considered to be a rather elaborate form of lyric poetry invented comparatively late. But, even allowing it is the Spring Song, are we much further? Why should the Dithyramb be bull-driving? How can driving a Bull help the spring to come? And, above all, what are the “slender-ankled” Graces doing, helping to drive the great unwieldy Bull?
The difficulty about the Graces, or Charites, as the Greeks called them, is soon settled. They are the Seasons, or “Hours,” and the chief Season, or Hour, was Spring herself. They are called Charites, or Graces, because they are, in the words of the Collect, the “Givers of all grace,” that is, of all increase physical and spiritual. But why do they want to come driving in a Bull? It is easy to see why the Givers of all grace lead the Dithyramb, the Spring Song; their coming, with their “fruits in due season” is the very gist of the Dithyramb; but why is the Dithyramb “bull-driving”? Is this a mere “poetical” epithet? If it is, it is not particularly poetical.
But Pindar is not, we now know, merely being “poetical,” which amounts, according to some scholars, to meaning anything or nothing. He is describing, alluding to, an actual rite or dromenon in which a Bull is summoned and driven to come in spring. About that we must be clear. Plutarch, the first anthropologist, wrote a little treatise called Greek Questions, in which he tells us all the strange out-of-the-way rites and customs he saw in Greece, and then asks himself what they meant. In his 36th Question he asks: “Why do the women of Elis summon Dionysos in their hymns to be present with them with his bull-foot?” And then, by a piece of luck that almost makes one’s heart stand still, he gives us the very words of the little ritual hymn the women sang, our earliest “Bull-driving” Spring Song:
“In Spring-time,[25] O Dionysos,
To thy holy temple come;
To Elis with thy Graces,
Rushing with thy bull-foot, come,
Noble Bull, Noble Bull.”
It is a strange primitive picture—the holy women standing in springtime in front of the temple, summoning the Bull; and the Bull, garlanded and filleted, rushing towards them, driven by the Graces, probably three real women, three Queens of the May, wreathed and flower-bedecked. But what does it mean?
Plutarch tries to answer his own question, and half, in a dim, confused fashion, succeeds. “Is it,” he suggests, “that some entitle the god as ‘Born of a Bull’ and as a ‘Bull’ himself? ... or is it that many hold the god is the beginner of sowing and ploughing?” We have seen how a kind of daimon, or spirit, of Winter or Summer arose from an actual tree or maid or man disguised year by year as a tree. Did the god Dionysos take his rise in like fashion from the driving and summoning year by year of some holy Bull?