[402]. The Eleusinian mysteries contained no secrets at all. Everyone knew what went on. But upon the believers they exercised a strange and overpowering effect, and the “betrayal” consisted in profaning them by imitating their holy forms outside the temple-precinct. See, further, A. Dieterich, Kleine Schriften (1911), pp. 414 et seq.
[403]. See Vol. II, pp. 345 et seq.
[404]. The dancers were goats, Silenus as leader of the dance wore a horsetail, but Aristophanes’s “Birds,” “Frogs” and “Wasps” suggest that there were still other animal disguises.
[405]. See pp. 283 et seq.
[406]. As the student of cultural history to-day is not necessarily familiar with technical Greek, it may be helpful to reproduce from Cornish’s edition of Smith’s “Greek and Roman Antiquities,” s.v. “Tragoedia,” the following paragraph, as clear as it is succinct:
“Tragedy is described by Aristotle (Poet., VI, 2) as effecting by means of pity and terror that purgation [of the soul] (κάθαρσις) which belongs to [is proper for] such feelings.”... Tragedy excites pity and terror by presenting to the mind things which are truly pitiable and terrible. When pity and terror are moved, as tragedy moves them, by a worthy cause, then the mind experiences that sense of relief which comes from finding an outlet for a natural energy. And thus the impressions made by Tragedy leave behind them in the spectator a temperate and harmonious state of the soul. Similarly Aristotle speaks of the enthusiastic worshippers of Dionysus as obtaining a κάθαρσις, a healthful relief, by the “lyric utterance of their sacred frenzy.”—Tr.
[407]. The evolution of ideals of stage-presentation in the minds of Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides successively is perhaps comparable with that of sculptural style which we see in the pediments of Ægina, of Olympia and of the Parthenon.
[408]. It must be repeated that the Hellenistic shadow-painting of Zeuxis and Apollodorus is a modelling of the individual body for the purpose of producing the plastic effect on the eye. There was no idea of rendering space by means of light and shade. The body is “shaded” but it casts no shadow.
(Contrast with this Dante’s exact and careful specification of the time-of-day in every episode of the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, sublimely imaginative as these poems are.—Tr.)
[409]. The great mass of Socialists would cease to be Socialists if they could understand the Socialism of the nine or ten men who to-day grasp it with the full historical consequences that it involves.