Word: rite
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Dates: during 1890-1899
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Then again, as a representative form of amusement in which the Romans took great delight, and which was associated with their great religious festivals, the play is worth attention. A play was originally a rite, a fact which accounts for the extremely conventional character and frequent unreality of the earliest Greek drama. Our modern dramatic realism is a thing of very late development and, though a Roman play was in one sense far from being religious, it retained many traces of its ancient origin. The religion of the Greeks and Romans was almost entirely free from introspection, self-abasement...
...virtue of the power to perform the rite of marriage, the clergyman becomes a civil officer, responsible to the state. Ignorance of the laws of divorce often leads the clergyman into unhappy blunders...