"Let us
go out into the fields," we say; a strange madness seems to lurk
among the flowers, ready to lay hold on us also; autika ga pasa
choreusei+--soon the whole earth will dance and sing.
Dionysus is especially a woman's deity, and he comes from the east
conducted by a chorus of gracious Lydian women, his true sisters--
Bassarids, clad like himself in the long tunic, or bassara. They
move and speak to the music of clangorous metallic instruments,
cymbals and tambourines, relieved by the clearer notes of the pipe;
and there is a strange variety of almost imitative sounds for such
music, in their very [65] words. The Homeric hymn to Demeter
precedes the art of sculpture, but is rich in suggestions for it;
here, on the contrary, in the first chorus of the Bacchanals, as
elsewhere in the play, we feel that the poetry of Euripides is
probably borrowing something from art; that in these choruses, with
their repetitions and refrains, he is reproducing perhaps the spirit
of some sculptured relief which, like Luca della Robbia's celebrated
work for the organ-loft of the cathedral of Florence, worked by
various subtleties of line, not in the lips and eyes only, but in the
drapery and hands also, to a strange reality of impression of musical
effect on visible things.
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