SOURCE: Else, Gerald F. “Thespis: The Creation of Tragôidia.” In The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy, pp. 51-77. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965.

[In the following excerpt, Else discusses the significance of Thespis's name, credits him with being the originator of a new genre, explains his choice of meter, comments on how he was influenced by Solon and Homer, and explores the techniques he used to gain the sympathy of the common man.]

Unlike Solon and Pisistratus, Thespis can never be more than a name to us. The earliest extant mention of him—if it is indeed he—is in Aristophanes' Wasps in 421 b.c.¹ There is no proof or even likelihood that copies of his plays still existed in Aristophanes' time, much less in the fourth century, and therefore no likelihood that Aristotle or his pupils could have used them as sources.² The various other remarks about him from antiquity (carefully collected and discussed by Pickard-Cambridge in Dithyramb Tragedy and Comedy, pp. 97-121) give us very little solid evidence, and most of that little goes back to Aristotle but no farther.

There is in the first place a question about his name. ‘Thespis’ looks like one of the “short names” which were popular in Attica: for example Telon (for Telemachus), Admon (for Admetus), Parmis (for Parmenon), Zeuxis (for Zeuxippus).³ If so, it must be short for thespesios, ‘divine, divinely speaking,’ or possibly for thespiôidos, ‘divinely singing’: in either case a name which it is hard to imagine being given to an Athenian boy in the ordinary course of events. Another and more interesting possibility exists. Twice in the Odyssey, at 1. 328 and 8. 498, we find the phrase thespin aoidên (nominative case thespis aoidê), ‘divine song,’ referring to the singing of Demodocus and Phemius respectively; and at 17. 385 Phemius himself is called thespin aoidon (nominative thespis aoidos), ‘divine singer.’

Although these facts have been noticed, and the conjecture put forward that Thespis' name was somehow derived from the Odyssey passages, it does not appear that the problem has been taken very seriously. It is not just a question of whether ‘Thespis’ was Thespis' “real name.” What is significant is the possible link with the epic tradition, and more particularly with the tradition of epic recitation. I assume that in sixth-century Athens aoidos would have meant first and foremost an epic singer, a ‘bard,’ and that an Athenian of that day, especially after the regular recitations of the whole Odyssey had begun (at the Panathenaea), would not have heard the word thespis without mentally associating aoidê or aoidos with it. I therefore propose seriously two alternative hypotheses: (1) that ‘Thespis’ was indeed our man's real name, given him at birth, or (2) that it was a nickname or epithet given to him or taken by him at some later time. In the first case I should think it a likely further supposition that Thespis' father was himself an aoidos, and gave his son the name either in reference to his own singing or by way of prophecy of the son's achievements.⁴ Under the second hypothesis the epithet, whether assumed by Thespis himself or conferred on him by others, would still have been meant to connote some ‘bardic’ achievement, either in epic recitation or in some activity comparable to it. With our lack of further evidence it would be hard if not impossible to choose between these two hypotheses,⁵ and I cannot see that it is necessary for our purpose. The basic inference seems to me highly probable, that Thespis had something to do, either by inheritance or through his own activity, with the profession of epic song.

A word also as to Thespis' home in Attica. The Suda, in the biographical article under his name, gives it as Icarios (in northern Attica, near Marathon; also called Icaria). This is the only explicit statement. It does not carry decisive weight, and is offset by another in Clement of Alexandria⁶ which calls Thespis simply “Athenian.” Athenaeus …⁷ alleges that both tragedy and comedy were born at Icarios at the time of the vintage festival, and if one holds to Thespis as the inventor one might infer that he was an Icarian. But even this inference is not necessary—Athenaeus only says the event took place at Icarios—and the passage of Clement just mentioned makes Thespis an Athenian while calling Susarion, the alleged inventor of comedy, an Icarian. The fact of the matter appears to be that while reliable tradition spoke of Thespis simply as an Athenian, efforts were made in the course of the literary war …⁸, or thereafter, to attach his name to Icarios.⁹ Whatever the truth may be about the details, the issue involved is clear: the association with Icarios was a way of connecting him with Dionysus.¹⁰ Otherwise the tradition about Thespis, as we have emphasized before, shows no connection with Dionysus, the dithyramb, or anything Dionysiac. I think we may consider “Thespis the Icarian” another Dionysiac gambit in the game of claims and counterclaims.

Now, what did Thespis do? The explicit testimony from antiquity that has anything of value to tell us can be reduced to two, possibly three, items. Thespis is not mentioned in the extant part of the Poetics, but he was in the lost work—probably the lost dialogue On Poets—from which Themistius quotes:¹¹ “Aristotle says that at first the chorus as it came in used to sing to the gods, but Thespis invented a prologue and a (set) speech.”¹² Second, the statement of the Parian Marble that the first tragic contest took place in or very close to 534 b.c. is accepted, so far as I know, by all competent judges. The Marble identifies the contest as taking place at the City Dionysia, and our fifth-century evidence makes it certain that that festival was the original home of tragedy. Third and last, Aristophanes in the Wasps makes a character speak of “those old-fashioned dances with which Thespis used to compete”; and this Thespis may be, though as we have seen he is not certainly, the tragedian.¹³

That is all we know about Thespis by testimony early enough and solid enough to claim our respect. The statements of others—Dioscorides in the Greek Anthology, Horace, Athenaeus, et al.—are too late or too dubious, or both, to count. Here, then, conjecture and inference necessarily begin. The most important single clue is Aristotle's remark that Thespis invented a prologue and a set speech, a rhêsis. These two elements represent between them the dialogue or spoken portion of tragedy, and no responsible scholar doubts, so far as I am aware, that that was Thespis' contribution to the art. The question is, what did it amount to? I mean by this, did tragedy begin with the invention of a spoken part or was that simply a further step in the development of a genre that was already in existence?

… All the principal theories now in the field agree on the second alternative. That is, they assume that tragedy in some sense was already there and Thespis did or added something to it. On what he did and how he did it there is less agreement. According to the standard view, which as we have seen was probably that of Aristotle, Thespis' addition of a speaker simply developed a potentially dramatic element which was already present in the lyrical form of “tragedy.” This element would have been represented originally by the exarchôn or “leader-off” of the improvised dithyramb, and perhaps later by the coryphaeus or chorus leader. Whichever it was, Thespis converted him into an actor by separating him more distinctly from the chorus and giving him set lines to speak. Wilamowitz rejected this interpretation.¹⁴ His chief reason was that the spoken part as we find it in Phrynichus and Aeschylus is too different from the choral part in language and style to be an outgrowth from it. The choral odes have a thin but, on the whole, uniform Doric coloring (chiefly long a in place of long e); the dialogue, on the other hand, is basically in Attic dialect, though with some Homeric and Ionic infusions. Moreover Wilamowitz pointed out, and Aurelio Peretti later showed in detail,¹⁵ that the structure of the tragic rhêsis in the earliest plays of Aeschylus has nothing in common with choral lyric but goes back to Ionian models: epic, elegiac, and iambic poetry.

It is a question whether Wilamowitz assessed correctly the differences in language between dialogue and lyrical parts. In any case the Doric coloring of the odes presents a problem which we will examine ….¹⁶ Meanwhile, although Wilamowitz denied that the spoken part could have developed out of the choral and insisted that it must have been added to it from outside, he too held fast to the previous existence of “tragedy,” that is, tragôidia, the song of goats; so that Thespis' achievement still consisted merely in adding something to an already existing genre. This reduction of Thespis' act to a revision or adaptation of an existing form, and of the actor's part to an appendage, only destined to become the dominant element at a later stage, is not justified by the evidence if one takes all the evidence into account. I believe it can be shown that Thespis created a new genre, instead of merely tinkering with an old one, and that the actor's part and the choral part never existed independently but were invented together, with and for each other. This is a radical thesis, and to prove it or even make it plausible we shall have to marshal several independent lines of argument.

There is one such argument which seems to me decisive in itself, but it is a technical one and needs to be supplemented by other, broader considerations. Since I have presented it elsewhere, in my article on “The Origin of [Tragôidia],”¹⁷ and have nothing important to add to that presentation, I shall merely summarize it here. We saw … that both the etymology tragôidia = ‘song of goats’ and the historical development to which it commits us are impossible. Tragôidia, as we said there, is not a simple compound of tragos, ‘goat,’ and ôidia, ‘song,’ but a secondary compound formed from the primary compound tragôidos, ‘goat-singer.’ Thus the beginning of the development must be sought in tragôidos rather than in tragôidia. And there is good reason to believe that ‘goat-singer’ referred originally to the poet-actor, the reciter of spoken verses, rather than to the chorus.

We have in a fourth- and third-century inscription, named by Wilamowitz the ‘Fasti,’ fragments of a complete, year-by-year record of the dramatic and other contests at the Dionysia from the time when they were reorganized at the end of the sixth century.¹⁸ The record perhaps began originally with the year 509/508, more likely with 502/501. In it the word tragôidoi (plural) appears in two places, first in the heading at the top and again, this time in the genitive plural tragôidôn, as a subheading introducing the names of the winners of the tragic contest in each year. It is an easy—I would say a necessary—inference that tragôidoi was the official title of the contestants in tragedy, those who actually competed for the prize. But these contestants were just two in number: the so-called chorêgos or “chorus-leader” (actually the citizen who paid the costs of the production) and the poet, under the designation didaskalos, “teacher” or “trainer” (of the chorus). The tragic chorus itself was not a competitor and won no prize. Furthermore the chorêgos, in the special sense used here, certainly does not antedate the introduction of the choregic system, which we can place in one of the same years already mentioned, 509/508 or more likely 502/501. It follows that the original competitor in the tragic contest, and therefore the sole possessor of the title tragôidos before the year 509 or 502, was the tragic poet. And the poet was also his own actor; that was the role in which he actually appeared before the public, the conspicuous way in which he competed for the prize.

If this argument is correct, its importance is great. We have already said that the word tragôidia was made from tragôidos. But if the poet was the original and only tragôidos, then tragôidia did not originally denote an activity of the chorus, it did not refer directly to the chorus at all, but to the activity of the poet, that is, the poet-actor, or—derivatively—to the total performance of which he was the leading feature. Further, since Thespis was the first tragic poet to appear at the Dionysia he was the first tragôidos, and tragôidia was what he invented, the performance in which he took the leading role.

Technical arguments like the one just summarized will not carry us all the way. Also, the more logically or geometrically a literary proposition is demonstrated, the less many people are inclined to trust it. This attitude is not unreasonable; and anyhow there is more to be said. If Thespis was the first tragôidos and the inventor of tragôidia, what does this mean? What was it that he invented?

Here another danger faces us, one that has been mentioned before: the assumption that if Thespis invented ‘tragedy’ he must have invented the tragic drama. The farther we go back in the work of Aeschylus, and in the work of his older contemporary Phrynichus so far as we can penetrate it, the less overt drama we find. I take it that close to the heart of drama as we usually conceive it … is conflict of some kind between persons; and such conflict is at best marginal or intermittent in Aeschylus, except in his last two plays. Even Agamemnon and Clytemnestra do not quite meet in real conflict; they pass by each other in a curiously side-long fashion. Eteocles and Polynices do not meet at all on stage; indeed the absence of such an encounter is one of the most striking features of the Seven against Thebes. Except for the meeting of the King and the Egyptian Herald in the Suppliants, it is notable that Aeschylus does not use his first two actors to stage a conflict. Indeed in the two-actor stage, represented by Persians, Seven, and Suppliants, the second actor does not normally represent a person who could conflict with the hero at all.

If the two-actor form permits no conflict (and in this respect there is not likely to have been any difference between Phrynichus and Aeschylus), what of the one-actor form that preceded it? It is sufficiently clear from the sparse evidence that it was Aeschylus who introduced the second actor. Thespis had only one: himself. What did he do with himself? It has always seemed to me that scholars have pondered this question too little. For at least a full generation, from the 530's to the end of the sixth century, a period during which tragedy obviously flourished and established itself as a major genre, it had just one actor.

The easy answer is that the chorus was in effect a second actor. But this answer will not do. No ordinary group or representative of a group, like the chorus-leader, can take the part of an individual and conflict or even debate on equal terms with the hero.¹⁹ The chorus' collective character is fatal to drama—unless the poet can find a particular situation for it that is dramatic. And anyhow the chorus of Greek tragedy is almost invariably composed of persons below the social and moral level of the hero. The choruses of Suppliants and Eumenides are notable exceptions. I hope to show later that they are brilliantly and peculiarly Aeschylean innovations. We must not be misled by the false early dating of the Suppliants into thinking of the chorus as the protagonist in primitive tragedy. The chorus as protagonist is a sophisticated development, prompted by specific motives ….

The Thespian actor was alone, then. That is not to say that he did not converse or communicate with the chorus. But this kind of conversation is not proved, as many have assumed, by the Greek term for ‘actor,’ hypokritês.²⁰ The original meaning of hypokritês has been much discussed of late. Usually it is thought to mean ‘answerer,’ but recently several scholars have come round to the signification ‘explainer, interpreter.’ I believe that this view is wrong and the old, standard one is correct, that hypokritês means basically ‘answerer.’ But this does not prove that Thespis was called a hypokritês or that the first hypokritês, whoever he was, was so denominated because he answered the chorus. In the latter part of the fifth century the tragic actors, all of them, were called hypokritai. But down at least through Aeschylus—perhaps Sophocles also, in his early years—the poets were their own leading actors, and I have argued elsewhere and still maintain that at that time they were called tragôidoi.²¹ If so, they cannot also have been called hypokritai. Instead I would maintain that the term was first applied to those actors who were only actors and not tragôidoi—as we would say, the second and third actors. Later, when the poets gave up acting, the term was generalized and extended to cover the whole tragic company. Thespis, then, was a tragôidos, not a hypokritês.

Leaving etymologies aside, however, neither can Thespis' function as an actor have consisted in answering the chorus. The very text that might seem to confirm this supposition invalidates it. Aristotle says, we recall, “At first the chorus as it came in used to sing to the gods, but Thespis invented a prologue and a rhêsis.” Neither of these latter terms smacks of conversation, question and answer. But we have more positive evidence to go on than inferences from Aristotle. There are prologues and rhêseis in early Aeschylean plays. Here again understanding has been impeded, this time by the fact that the Suppliants has no prologue. For that matter neither has the Persians, which we now know to be the earliest extant play. But we also know that the Persians was written as some kind of counter to the Phoenician Women of Phrynichus, produced four years earlier, in 476 b.c., and the Phoenician Women did have a prologue.²² Thus after some years of misapprehension we can again accept the idea that tragedy had a prologue from the time of Thespis, as Aristotle says it did.

What was the content of Thespis' prologues? Were they dramatic, that is, spoken in character, or expository, spoken by the poet in his own person to introduce the play, set forth the background of the story, and ask for a favorable hearing? We cannot say for sure. The parallels in the epic and lyric domain, in the so-called “Homeric hymns,” which are really prooimia or preludes to epic recitation, and the proomion of the Apollinian nome, are not decisive. Yet it seems to me that much the most plausible source for the Thespian prologue—that is, for the idea of a prologue—is the bard's or rhapsode's prelude. The wandering bard needed to introduce himself to the public, announce his theme, and arouse the curiosity and if possible the benevolence of his audience toward his song, or if nothing more, simply to give time for the babble of voices to die down so that he could be heard. Choral poetry had less need of such preliminaries vis-à-vis its audience; the group's entrance and taking of position, or the first notes of the flute, would suffice. (Even so it is worth remarking that Pindar and Bacchylides incorporate introductory matter of some kind into most odes, as a way to get started.)—Surely it is no accident that the nome, a solo performance and itself ultimately derived from epic song, is the one lyric genre with a formally marked prooimion.

One thing, I think, we can be fairly sure of: the original tragic prologue was not spoken, as it often is in Euripides, by a god. There is no reason to believe that gods appeared on the stage before Aeschylus. It is more likely that Thespis' prologue was simply and frankly introductory. But we cannot exclude the possibility that he appeared in character as the hero of the piece, introducing himself and reminding the audience of the background of his story.

With the other innovation which Aristotle ascribes to Thespis, the rhêsis or set speech, we are on firmer ground. The earlier plays of Aeschylus abound in rhêseis. Peretti has studied their structure, their êthos, and their function in the play and shown²³ that they have three marked traits in common: (1) a rather strict tripartite structure (“ring composition”), such that the thought enunciated at the beginning of the speech is restated at the end, after an intermediate section of development; (2) an objective mode of presentation, dry and logical rather than lyrical in spirit; and (3) a decisive effect of the rhêsis upon the following scene: that is, the rhêsis determines or sets in motion what follows, including usually the next song of the chorus. Almost always the content of the rhêsis is either a parainesis, an exhortation to action, or a description of a state of affairs which is thus brought before the hearer and elicits a response from the chorus. In other words the actor's rhêsis and the reaction of the chorus appear in that order, as cause and effect. The actor determines and shapes the participation of the chorus, not the other way round. The chorus appears throughout as the passive, the receiving partner.

Peretti's analysis, including a comparison with later plays of Aeschylus, leaves no doubt that these features of the older Aeschylean rhêseis are survivals from an earlier stage of tragedy. “Ring-composition” especially is a well-known archaic mode. The formal ties with elegy and elegiac parainesis are particularly close. On the other hand the tragic rhêseis are not in elegiac couplets but in trochaic tetrameters or iambic trimeters, mainly the latter. The use of these meters has to be explained. Actually they are one of our most important clues to the original form and spirit of tragedy.

Aristotle says in the Poetics (4.1449a21 ff.) that trochaic tetrameter was the original verse of tragedy because trochaics are a dance rhythm and early tragedy was mainly a dance performance. “Then,” he says, “when speech [as opposed to song] put in an appearance, the meter changed to iambic trimeter”—because, he adds, iambic is the natural rhythm of speech, dialogue. Rightly interpreted, Aristotle's remark does not refer to Aeschylus or even to Sophocles, as it has been thought to do, but to Thespis; for it was Thespis, according to Aristotle himself, who introduced speech into tragedy. In any case the spoken verses in the earlier extant plays are in fact overwhelmingly iambic; trochaic tetrameters figure importantly only in the Persians, and then not as a dance meter. There are no hexameters or elegiac couplets. And this limitation must go back to Thespis: we know of no one after him who could have enforced it. Iambic is the chosen medium of tragic dialogue.

‘Iambic,’ as a class, embraces iambics, usually in the form of iambic trimeters, and trochaics, usually in the form of tetrameters. In the ancient tradition iambic poetry figures as the invention of Archilochus, and it was always considered to have a special êthos or character: sharp, vituperative, satirical. This recognized êthos of iambic constitutes a problem. Why did tragedy, of all literary genres, choose the particular verse form that was identified with satire, vilification, the uninhibited expression of personal hatreds and animosities? Thespis cannot have adopted it for such a reason. We have to assume another use of iambic which was quite different from that of Archilochus, yet so significant and impressive that Thespis felt impelled to use it for his new purpose. Once the problem is put this way, the answer is clear. There is only one possible model: those iambic and trochaic poems of Solon …. Solon had chosen these verse forms, in preference to the elegiac couplet, as the appropriate vehicle for that parainesis or exhortation of his fellow citizens which was also his ripest and most direct self-revelation. If Thespis adopted them from Solon, it must have been for a similar reason. But in that case what idea was it that he wanted to convey, that could be carried better by iambics than by hexameters or elegiac couplets?

Here, by way of the verse form, we begin to approach the heart of the matter, the inner content and purpose of Thespis' new creation. But we cannot assay that content and purpose until we have considered another large aspect of the question: the tragic myth. On this subject a great deal of nonsense has been spread abroad in the last fifty years. Thanks in part to the ancient theories of an origin out of dithyramb and/or satyr-play, in part to modern developments in anthropology, psychology, etc., the concepts of myth and ritual have got tangled up together in well-nigh hopeless confusion. So far as tragedy is concerned, one of the ideas to which this has led is that it must have begun as some kind of ritualistic representation of the doings or sufferings of Dionysus (Dionysus broadly or narrowly conceived) but later lost its direction, or simply reached out for other material, and came to deal more and more with other gods and heroes. Or, alternatively, as we saw, a similar connection is postulated with hero-cult, the worship of dead ancestors in various parts of Greece.

Against this modern obsession with myth and ritual, or ritual origins of myth, we must insist on two facts: (1) The content of the overwhelming majority of known tragedies (and we know the titles and/or the content of many more than are now extant) is heroic myth or legend, from Homer and the epic Cycle. Affiliations with cult-myths and cult-rituals, especially those of Dionysus, are secondary both in extent and importance.²⁴ In other words the regular source of tragic material is heroic epic, not religious cult. (2) Above all, the standard tragic myths are not Athenian. As we said before, Attica was poor in myths compared to most of her neighbors on the mainland. Connections of the heroic legend with Attica, either by bringing the hero there—Orestes before the Areopagus, Iphigenia to Brauron, Oedipus to Colonus—or by sending an Athenian abroad—Aegeus to Corinth in the Medea, Theseus to Thebes in the Hercules Furens—are clearly secondary, as is the development of purely Attic material (Theseus is the chief example of the latter). There is, moreover, no reason to suppose any change in these respects between Thespis and Aeschylus. The conclusion is obvious: tragedy did not begin as cult-drama, Dionysiac or otherwise, and its mythical material normally had nothing to do with Athens.

How are we to explain this paradox, that the most uniquely Attic genre began with non-Attic content? The answer cannot be given in full detail and with complete confidence, because we are dealing with a creative act which can only be approached tentatively and indirectly (creativity is not fully explainable even if one knew all the external facts). Thespis' creative act was to express epic content, drawn from heroic myth, in Solonian form (iambic verses) combined with choral songs. In my article on “The Origin of [Tragôidia]” I suggested that tragedy grew out of the rhapsodes' recitations of Homer, and I connected the event with the fact, already mentioned here, that Athens was the one place in Greece in the sixth century where Homer was recited regularly and in full to the whole people. This formulation is still valid, I believe, but it needs to be qualified and extended.

The mysterious event we are trying to apprehend can perhaps be characterized provisionally this way: Thespis felt in Homer the compelling reality of the heroic nature and the heroic fate; he wanted to give this vision and feeling some immediate expression, more direct and pungent than it received in the recitations of Homer; and finally, something in Solon's use of iambic and trochaic verse suggested to him that this was the appropriate medium. Thespis' new creation, therefore, brought together three different things which had never been joined before: the epic hero, impersonation, and iambic verse.²⁵ The hero is the subject; he presents himself directly, in his own character, instead of through quasi-impersonation by the rhapsode; and he speaks in iambics and trochaics instead of hexameters. Each of these elements calls for some further elucidation before we can understand what it was that Thespis produced by combining them.

First, the epic hero; not the epic as such. Greek tragedy was never at any stage of its development simply a dramatization of epic narrative. (We may contrast Shakespeare, who often dramatized narrative material, historical or fictional.) It concentrates upon a few incidents, even a single incident, in the hero's career. I suggest that this concentration, which has always been remarked by judicious critics, must have been a feature of tragedy from its birth. In Aeschylus, and especially in the early works, it goes so far that hardly anything happens in the play at all. In the Persians, strictly speaking, nothing happens; the disaster is over before the play begins. In the Seven against Thebes Eteocles mans the gates, fights his brother, and dies; that is all, and none of these events actually takes place on stage. Moreover both these plays center upon a single hero. Eteocles' isolation is an essential, not an accidental, part of his situation. The epic scene is crowded with heroes; the oldest tragedies present a single one.

We are entitled to extrapolate from these facts, to argue back from them to the form and spirit of Thespian tragedy. Tragedy did not begin as a transposition of epic material into dramatic form, complete with debate, conflict, battle; it began as a self-presentation of a single epic hero. Not of the hero's actions; that comes later. And not simply of the hero himself either, as a person: a study of his character or his thoughts and feelings. But it was a self-presentation none the less, of the hero's situation, his fate. And this situation has a special focus: not what the hero does but what he suffers; not his display of prowess, his moment of glory on the battlefield or in council, but his moment of disaster or failure: death, loss, humiliation. I propose to call this moment the hero's pathos: borrowing a term from the Poetics²⁶ but giving it a somewhat wider extension than Aristotle does. And I propose a further thesis, one of the most important in this book: that the whole development of Greek tragedy, from the beginning to the end of its life span, was a flowering from this single root, the hero's pathos. (Perhaps one corollary might be pointed out at once. It is often said that Greek tragedy, unlike later tragedy, was not always tragic. That is partly true, partly false. Greek tragedies do not always end tragically; but their root is always a tragic situation.)

Why did Thespis choose the pathos as his center? Because for some reason it was what impressed him most about the hero, spoke most directly to his sensibility. Not the hero's life but his death, not his success but his failure, not the superhuman valor and might which set him off from the rest of us who eat the bread of earth, but that which allies him with us: death, mortality, suffering. For the same reason Thespis did not present the hero quite alone. He added another element, the chorus, to be a sounding board for the heroic passion. The chorus is made up of ordinary mortals like us, and through their emotional participation in the hero's fall we too are drawn into the ambit of his pathos. The chorus is our link with him.

This link is not an arbitrary one. The tragic hero, whatever his antecedents in myth, is not a demigod. His force and powers may be beyond ours but he is also, as Aristotle says, “like us.” He can err and suffer and die, and this human liability to error and suffering and death, combined with his greatness, is what moves the chorus to lament him and moves us to join in the lament. Seldom in Greek tragedy (save perhaps in the Oedipus at Colonus) is the stark fact of death softened by any suggestion of survival, and then not in the sense of personal immortality. Except in men's memories and affections there is no life beyond the grave, no assurance of ultimate victory over our human condition.

But the link provided by the chorus is not merely human and generic. Fifth-century tragedy has two kinds of choruses, male and female. Tradition has it, and plausibly, that female roles, both individual and choral, were introduced by Phrynichus.²⁷ The male choruses of Aeschylus and Sophocles fall into two classes: (1) followers or dependants of the hero, as in Aeschylus' Myrmidons, Phrygians, etc., Sophocles' Ajax and Philoctetes; and (2) citizens, most often elders and councillors of state, as in Persians and Agamemnon, Antigone and Oedipus Rex. These two categories represent groups bound to the hero by special ties: in the one case a feudal, quasi-familial relationship, in the other a civic one. There is no visible reason why both types should not go back to Thespis. The citizen chorus is the root manifestation of the political element in Greek tragedy, an element which distinguishes it clearly from epic. Through it the audience is bound into a special relationship with the hero. In Agamemnon the audience becomes a part of the citizen body of Argos; in Oedipus, of Thebes. Or, alternatively, these heroes become as if they were Athenians. Thus in mourning the hero the chorus, and through it the audience, is lamenting its king or great man and so lamenting in its own cause. The expression of sorrow is a communal act, a shared experience of the whole body politic. I would urge that this was an essential, indeed the essential, feature of Thespian tragedy.

Cantarella in his book on Aeschylus²⁸ points out that the epic tradition, and more specifically the heroic myth, reached a crisis about the middle of the sixth century. By that time the tradition was ancient and venerable and fast becoming the common patrimony of all Greeks, carried to every nook and corner of the nation by the rhapsodes. Yet inwardly it was dying, if not already dead. The epic machinery and conventions, the exploits and postures of the heroes, still commanded respectful, even rapt attention. But they had less and less pertinence to real life. What did the epic have to say to a man, especially a commoner, caught up in the fierce struggle for moneymaking (“money, money [chrêmata] is the man,” was the motto of the time), economic misery and insecurity, political stasis between nobles and commons, religious qualms and religious indifference, the hard battle to earn a living and be a citizen?

What the epic had to say to sixth-century men was something that had lost some of its immediate but none of its ultimate relevance: a message for the mind and heart. It spoke of the heroic spirit, of valor and courtesy and self-respect and devotion to an ideal of conduct; and it spoke of death and suffering. The Homeric ideal of bravery in the face of death had already been caught up and transmitted to the citizen-soldier of the seventh century through the elegies of Callinus and Tyrtaeus. But that was a relatively easy ideal to transmit, it had firmness and grandeur but little spiritual depth; and the times had changed. The Spartan of Tyrtaeus' day, or even later, might be fired by simple exhortations to bravery, honor, self-sacrifice for the fatherland; Archilochus was already deaf to them in the seventh century, as he was to the whole official apparatus of heroism; and in sixth-century Athens they had lost even more of their resonance. The Athenians were no Spartans. For them the Homeric message could be made a reality again only through a new approach, a new, inward apprehension of what it means to be a hero and die a hero. Such an apprehension would have to grasp not only the heroic but the tragic side of the Homeric vision.

Solon was not quite a Homeric hero. He himself was too sober, too concentrated on present reality, perhaps too intellectual (it is not easy for the intellectual man to be a hero or to be taken as one).²⁹ But Solon was profoundly serious; he struggled hard to realize an ideal greater than himself, and his struggle ended in apparent failure, the negation of what he had worked for. To a sympathetic observer in his later years he might well seem a new Hector who had sacrificed himself in vain for his homeland and the welfare of his people. With this difference: that Solon was conscious of his own historical position, and he was superbly self-expressive. Certainly he was the one Athenian in the sixth century who came nearest to heroic stature, and he was the one who presented himself with the greatest vividness, especially in his iambic and trochaic poems. Was it not, then, from him or through him—from what other figure, living or dead, could it have been?—that Thespis caught the idea of a self-presentation of the hero?

As we said earlier, three things were wrapped up together in Thespis' creation: self-presentation of the hero and his pathos in iambic verses. Idea and form or inner and outer form came together. Probably Thespis could not have separated them, so closely were they identified with each other in his own mind. Theoretically, however, and even historically, we can make a certain disjunction. The use of iambic verse for this kind of purpose could have come to Thespis only from Solon. The other side of his invention, the direct impersonation of a character, had two roots, one in Solon, the other in the recitations of Homer. We referred … to Solon's impersonation of a herald in the delivery of his own poem “Salamis.” That kind of political dramatization was matched and surpassed by Pisistratus, who paved the way to his first tyranny by stage-managing an ambush of which he was the apparent victim, and who made his second entry into Athens as the new Odysseus, escorted by a live Athena standing beside him in a chariot. But back of Solon and Pisistratus stands Homer, the Homer of the rhapsodes. I have discussed this subject elsewhere³⁰ and can be brief here. The rhapsodes did not merely recite Homer, they acted him, and from this quasi-impersonation of Homeric characters it was only a step to full impersonation, from the rhapsode who momentarily spoke in the person of Achilles or Odysseus to the “actor” who presented himself as Achilles or Odysseus.

It has been claimed that dramatic impersonation in Greek tragedy stems, as it often has elsewhere, from magic and ritual: that it involves a self-identification of the cult-actor or participant in cult with his god or demon. This allegation, plausible as it sounds, is refuted by two stubborn facts that have already been mentioned: (1) the Greek tragic actor's impersonation is not normally of gods or demons but of epic heroes, and heroes who for the most part did not possess a cult in Attica; and (2) the actor's speeches, as we first glimpse them in Aeschylus, are not spoken as if by one possessed, but on the contrary in a sober, rational, even pedantic style, without a trace of frenzy. Actually, as Cantarella pointed out,³¹ the logos, the speech or discourse of the tragic actor, is not only un-dithyrambic and un-Dionysiac, it is anti-Dionysiac. The tragic hero presents himself as an irreducibly separate person. His self-awareness is at the opposite pole from the Dionysiac frenzy of self-abandonment, the drowning of all individuation in a mystical unity. There is no place in the development of the tragic actor for Ergriffenheit or “possession,” Dionysiac or other.

The genetic connection between epic rhapsode and tragic actor is confirmed, I believe, by the etymological situation. We have already surveyed that portion of the evidence which suggests that the poet-actor was originally called tragôidos. Now rhapsôidos and tragôidos are analogous though not identically formed compounds. In my article on the origin of tragôidia I proposed an explanation of rhapsôidos (‘stitch-singer’ or ‘stitch-bard’), tracing it to the peculiar kind of Homeric recitation from a fixed text which was prescribed at the Panathenaea. But the etymology is not essential to our present argument. Whatever the original meaning and application of rhapsôidos, its phonetic shape betrays it as an Attic word. The same is true of tragôidos, and I suggest that the latter was modeled on the former.

We have seen how much havoc has been wrought by the idea that tragôidia must mean ‘song of goats.’ Tragôidos does not really mean ‘goat-singer’ either. It is true that the root aeid-aoid- (aeidô, aoidos, -ôidos, aoidê, ôidê) means ‘sing.’ But the aoidoi or epic bards certainly went over from singing to some form of recitation at some period and yet continued to be called ‘singers’; and the rhapsôidoi did not sing, they recited. In other words, by the sixth century if not before, the word aoidos and the suffix -ôidos no longer necessarily denoted actual singing. They were conventional terms: much as we can still call a poet a “singer” if we like, without meaning that he utters musical notes. Tragôidos was cut from the same cloth as rhapsôidos, and did not mean either that its bearer sang or that he impersonated a goat. What it did mean is sufficiently clear from the Parian Marble, which tells us that the original prize for which the “tragedian” competed was a goat. Very likely the name was ironic when it was first bestowed: “goat-bard” might convey the suggestion.

We have considered the tragôidos, and we have suggested two possible types of tragic chorus. What did the chorus actually do? Almost everything is possible except that it was a goat-chorus or that it sang real dithyrambs; for the dithyramb is the one lyric genre of which there is little or no trace in fifth-century lyrics. Otherwise Aeschylus' choruses sing a great variety of songs, and it is possible that Thespis already covered much of this range. At any rate there are two varieties of lyric which we can assign to him with great plausibility: the hymn, and the thrênos or lamentation. We recall that according to Aristotle “at first the chorus as it came in used to sing to the gods.” More particular evidence is afforded by the plays of Aeschylus, every one of which contains a hymn to Zeus and/or other gods, or at least elements of the hymn. Most often it comes at the beginning, in the parodos of the chorus. And the end of the Persians and that of the Seven, the two oldest extant plays, contain equally clear examples of the thrênos. Peretti and Hölzle,³² following in the footsteps of Martin Nilsson, have shown that these thrênoi of tragedy, with their epirrhematic structure (alternation of speech and song), their repetitive cries and refrains, and their passionate spirit of lamentation, are survivals of an older form which had clearly marked features. The dochmiac meter in particular, which appears in tragic thrênoi and other passages of similar êthos, and which was always restricted to tragedy (neither choral lyric nor comedy uses it), is very probably an Attic-Ionic verse-form traditionally associated with the lamentations for the dead. The lyric iambics of which Aeschylus is so especially fond, and which are often associated with dochmiacs, belong to the same Attic-Ionic sphere.³³

But at this point we must face a problem which was mentioned earlier … but postponed.³⁴ We said there that Wilamowitz had called attention to the difference between the choral parts of fifth-century tragedy, which show a uniform Doric coloring, and the dialogue, which is essentially in Attic dialect, though with some Homeric and Ionic infusions. This difference did not disturb Wilamowitz, since he believed that the dialogue part stemmed from the sphere of Ionic epic and elegy and was merely added externally, juxtaposed, to a choral element (tragôidia) derived from Peloponnese. But a theory like the one proposed here, which insists that tragedy was an exclusively Athenian affair in origin, cannot rest content with this solution. If the choral parts do indeed have a uniformly Doric coloring, is not that a sign that they were derived from Peloponnese after all, as the conventional theory maintains?

Unfortunately the question cannot be argued in full here. For one thing the facts are much more complex than our previous brief mention would lead the reader to suppose. Doric words and forms also appear in tragic dialogue. Björck, after a thorough investigation of them, concluded that they represent various special types of borrowing, particularly where no exact Attic equivalent was available.³⁵ It follows that they are not in very different case from the Homeric and Ionic borrowings. On the other hand, Homericisms and Ionicisms also appear in the choral parts, though in considerably less density.³⁶ The true fact of the matter appears to be that the basic texture of both parts, dialogue and choral, is Attic, but with Homeric and Ionic influences more prominent in the dialogue and Doric in the choral odes.³⁷ (One significant feature is that the syntax almost without exception, so far as we can tell, is Attic.)

The language of Attic tragedy in both its subvarieties, sung and spoken, is a Kunstsprache, an artificial language never actually spoken by anybody but created or developed for poetic purposes. Thanks to the labors of several generations of scholars we are now tolerably familiar with another such Greek language, the Homeric Kunstsprache, and we can see that it, though basically Ionic, is not identical with any actual Ionic dialect of any period.³⁸ Indeed its most striking trait is its complexity; and this complexity includes a strong admixture of non-Ionic forms. Some scholars would like to trace the language of tragedy, in the choral parts, to an equally developed and well-defined Doric Kunstsprache, the language of sixth-century choral melic poetry. But although the tendency towards a Doric choral koinê certainly existed, we shall probably never be able to define it with any great precision, because of the sparsity of our material; and what is more important, it almost certainly never attained a fixity and uniformity comparable to that of the Homeric koinê—partly because the genre, by its very nature, was originally attached primarily to local occasions, partly because of the great variety of song forms included under it, partly because choral lyric had no internationally recognized and stable professional body of singers comparable to the rhapsodes to give its language stability and permanence.³⁹

Thus when we speak of a Doric choral language which was transmitted to or imitated by Attic tragedy we are in danger of ascribing too much consistency and definiteness to what was in fact no more than a general tendency. And when we try to apply the concept to tragedy we are bothered again by the relative sparseness of our material—thirty-two tragedies out of many hundreds, perhaps thousands, that were written in the fifth century—and also by more than a passing suspicion that our tragic texts are not reliable on this very point.⁴⁰

In spite of these limitations and reservations, there is no doubt that the choruses of tragedy have a certain Doric coloring—thin and not highly consistent, but unmistakable. How is it to be explained? When we consider that the choruses show very few Doricisms in diction and word formation which are not repeated or paralleled in the dialogue portions, except the “Doric” long a (which for that matter is common to all Greek dialects outside of Attic and Ionic), the most circumspect explanation would seem to be that the Kunstsprache of tragedy as a whole has been influenced by the somewhat earlier Kunstsprache of Dorian choral lyric, but that the influence is more evident and more extensive in the choral parts, as we should expect it to be.

When the matter is put in this way, the period of the Dorian influence and the channel through which it came are not hard to divine. In the last quarter of the sixth century, possibly a little earlier, the dithyramb was imported into Athens—no doubt chiefly from Corinth, although on that point we have no direct information—and cultivated thereafter with great enthusiasm. The two chief men who are associated with this development in our tradition are Lasos and Simonides.⁴¹ Both were active in the dithyrambic contests: Simonides indeed well into the fifth century, if he could correctly boast around 478 that he had won fifty-six prizes in Athens, and Lasos may actually have been instrumental in setting up the first contests, under the Pisistratids.⁴² It would be absurd to suppose that tragedy and dithyramb could have been vigorously cultivated side by side in Athens, at the same festival, for thirty or forty years without influences passing from one to the other. And on the choral side the greater influence would naturally come from the dithyramb, with its international standing and its longer tradition (going back to Arion).⁴³

One warning: when we say “dithyramb” here we mean the literary dithyramb as Arion had shaped it, dealing with heroic legend and having hardly any more relevance to Dionysus than we have ascribed to tragedy.

The idea of a stylistic influence exerted by the heroic dithyramb upon tragedy in Athens during the last quarter of the sixth century and the beginning of the fifth, is worlds removed from the traditional derivation of tragedy from the dithyramb, whether in Peloponnese or Athens. The essential thing about tragedy—its form—could never have been derived from the dithyramb or from any lyric genre. The self-presentation of the hero is a new idea. And the tragic chorus likewise is a new thing. Its function and status, its raison d'être, can only stem from its relation to the hero. Once created, however, the tragic chorus was a chorus also. It sang songs: hymns, paeans, prosodia, whatever was required. The structure and diction of these songs naturally reflected that of choral lyric. And it sang laments, thrênoi. The best witness to the strength of the dithyrambic influence, but also to the vitality and integrity of the tragic form, is the fact that the thrênoi of Aeschylean tragedy, though they show the same superficial Doric coloring as the other odes, have preserved their ancient Attic structure and spirit.

Phrynichus must have cultivated the threnetic element with special success. The two plays of his which we know something about, the Capture of Miletus and the Phoenician Women, would appear to have been little more than long-drawn-out thrênoi. And this is in harmony with the tradition that Phrynichus introduced female roles and female choruses; for women were traditionally the chief carriers of lamentation for the dead. But the ritual form of the thrênos is very old. It and its constituent elements go back far beyond Homer, to the beginnings of Greek culture, not as a literary form but as a part of life.⁴⁴ There is no reason, therefore, why Thespis could not have transplanted it into tragedy. But here a fundamental distinction is necessary. As we saw, Nilsson and others, dissatisfied with the dithyramb-satyr-play theory, wanted to derive tragedy as a whole from ritual thrênoi. But that theory will not work either, as it stands. The key to the dilemma is that the tragic thrênos is a ritual element introduced into a non-ritual setting and for a new purpose, to bewail a person who is neither a member of the family nor an object of worship but a hero of poetry. The feelings and forms traditionally associated with the cult of one's own dead are here transferred to a poetic individual, a figure of the imagination with whom one has no direct ties of blood or family.

This transference can be connected, I think, with another reform which is ascribed to Solon in our tradition. The great Dipylon vases of the Geometric period in Athens (9th and especially 8th century) were funerary offerings. They show us the pomp and splendor of funerals in the great Athenian families: corteges crowded with mourners, lamentations at the bier, costly offerings. By Solon's time these funerals had become the occasion for such outrageous displays of family wealth and pride that he was moved to curtail them drastically.⁴⁵ Solon's motive was not, like the elder Cato's, puritanism. He knew his Athenians and their love of funerals, but he also saw that funerary display was helping to confirm the self-esteem of the great families and thus to perpetuate the division between nobles and commoners. I would not go so far as to suggest that Thespis' invention of tragedy was part of Solon's reforms or directly prompted by political motives. We do not even know whether Thespis instituted his new kind of performance before Solon's death.⁴⁶ But its effect was in accord with Solon's purpose.

In a deeper sense I think it can be said that Thespis' invention carried forward the whole work of Solon on a new front. The Iliad, with its dual vision of heroism and the tragic limits of heroism, is the root of all tragedy in the Western world, and therefore of all tragedy. But it took Thespis' act of genius to bring the Homeric vision into focus for a new age. The Iliad deals only with the heroes; the common man is present only as backdrop, stage setting, or else as the audience, sitting and listening to a far-off tale of long ago. Tragedy for the first time brought the far-away directly into the present and the great man into direct contact with the little man. It did these two things through the twin devices of the ‘actor’ and the chorus. Through the actor, who was the hero standing before him, and the chorus, which was “like himself,” the ordinary Athenian was enabled to feel, to sympathize, with the hero in a new, direct way. Here all Athenians, noble and commoner alike, could meet on common ground, in a common surge of emotional identification with the heroic spirit. And all this was done through forms—iambic verse, rhêsis, hymn, thrênos—which were familiar, a living part of Athenian experience, and therefore sure of their emotional effect. Tragedy represented, in effect, the beginning of a new spiritual unification of Attica.

We cannot venture a sample scenario of a Thespian tragedy. No doubt the plays—if we can call them that—were even shorter than those of Aeschylus. We can be sure that the performance normally began with a prologue, and that its central feature was the self-presentation of an epic hero. There may have been several short scenes or “episodes,” each followed by a song of the chorus. The burden of the whole was a pathos, the death or suffering of a hero. The chorus entered with a hymn to Zeus and/or other gods; later, normally at the end, it sang a thrênos or formal lamentation over the hero. Such, in barest outline, was the earliest form of tragedy.

As before, we have left Pisistratus to the very end. His function, here too, was that of organizer and continuator. His motive for supporting tragedy must have been at least to some extent pedagogical: he wanted tragedy to stand forth as the educator of his people, as Homer did at the Panathenaea. And perhaps we can conjecture that he had an even more specific idea in mind: tragedy, along with Homer, as an instrument for the rapprochement of the classes, an emotional unification of all Athenians in a common sympathy for fallen greatness.⁴⁷ Whatever his motives, Pisistratus gave tragedy what it most needed for survival after his death: an institutional home and a modus vivendi. He established it as the center and crown of his new festival for all Athenians, the Dionysia. The way was now made ready for the eventual coming of the second genius who would transform tragôidia into tragic drama.

Notes

1. Wasps 1479: “the ancient dances with which Thespis used to compete.” For the old and vexed question whether this is our Thespis or another one, a dancer by the same name, see Ervin Roos, Die tragische Orchestik im Zerrbild der altattischen Komödie (Lund 1951) pp. 107-115.

2. The Suda gives the names of four plays, Games of Pelias or Phorbas, Priests, Young Heroes, and Pentheus. But we have no idea where these titles came from. The plays they designate may be the ones, or some of the ones, which Aristoxenus accused Heraclides Ponticus of having fabricated and attributed to Thespis (Diog. Laert. 5, 92). See further DTC 117.

3. See Fick-Bechtel, Die griech. Personennamen, ed. 2 (Göttingen 1894); E. Locker, Glotta 22 (1934) 85-87 (short names in -is); E. Schwyzer, Griech. Gram. (Handbuch d. Alt.-wiss.) I 636-637. It should be added that the stem thesp- appears nowhere else in Attic names, except for a Thespios from the 2nd cent. b.c. (?): Kirchner, Prosop. Att. no. 7205. In other words Thespis seems to be an isolated formation among Attic names.—A headless herm found at Aquae Albulae near Rome in 1902 (Notizie degli Scavi 1902, p. 111) carries the inscription Thespis Themônos Athênaios, i.e., “Thespis, son of Themon, Athenian.” Themon also is a Kurzname. But we have no idea where this information, if it is information, came from.

4. Both usages are found, the former especially in the epic. Astyanax was not “lord of the city” nor Telemachus a “far-fighter,” but their fathers were. We know that the bardic profession often passed from father to son; cf. the Homeridae of Chios.

5. Obviously much depends on one's dating of Thespis and one's guess—it cannot be more—as to the exact chronological and spiritual relationship between his new tragôidia and the recitations at the Panathenaea. See further below.

6. Stromateis 1, 79.

7. …chap. I n. 18 in Else, Gerald F. The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1965. Pickard-Cambridge, DTC 102-103, shows that a famous line from Eratosthenes' Erigone quoted by Hyginus, 2, 4: “At that time the Icarians danced around a goat,” probably has nothing to do with tragedy.

8. …pp. 23-24 in Else, Gerald F. The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1965.

9. See Wilamowitz, Hermes 21 (1886) 620 n. 2. M. Pohlenz, Nachrichten Akad. Gött. Phil.-Hist. Kl. (1928) 298-321, and E. Tièche, Thespis (Leipzig and Berlin 1935) 22 ff., attempt to show that in the attachment of Thespis to Icarios another and later theory was at work, Alexandrian rather than Peripatetic, which sought to derive tragedy from rustic revels (trygôidia, i.e., comedy) rather than satyr-play. But there are some difficulties about the distinction and I do not think the last word has been said on the subject.

10. According to tradition Icarios (-ia) was the place where Dionysus first landed in Attica, after his voyage across the Aegean, and thereafter a kind of Dionysiac headquarters for Attica (the modern name for the locality is Dionyso).

11. App. 3.

12. It may be asked why I am ready to accept this piece of evidence, brief and indirectly attested as it is, when I reject so much of what Aristotle says or appears to say in the Poetics as theorizing. The answer is twofold: (1) As to its authenticity: Themistius is an excellent authority, learned, intelligent, and deeply versed in Aristotle's works. See Lesky, Trag. Dicht. 41. (2) As to its value as evidence: I do not believe that Aristotle had available to him any archives, or indeed any systematic written documents, from the period before the democratic reorganization of the tragic contests in 502/501 b.c. I am prepared to believe, however, that some general tradition of what Thespis had done survived into the fifth century and so eventually (for example, through Sophocles' book On the Chorus, mentioned by the Suda) reached Aristotle. And I am the more prepared to believe this because the quotation in Themistius has the appearance of representing a native Athenian tradition, uncontaminated by the Dorian propaganda claiming an origin out of satyr-drama, or even by Aristotle's own probable sympathy with the Dorian cause.

13. See n. 1 above.

14. Einleitung in die gr. Trag. 87-88.

15. Aurelio Peretti, Epirrema e tragedia (Florence 1939) 227-253.

16. See … pp. 71-73 in Else, Gerald F. The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1965.

17. “Origin” (see … [Abbreviations]) 23-25.

18. Most convenient account, with the extant fragments, in Pickard-Cambridge, Dr. Fest. 103-126.

19. See Schmid, Gr. Lit. II 38 n. 5.

20. On the following see my article … Wiener Studien 72 (1959) 75-107.

21. “The Case of the Third Actor,” TAPA 76 (1945) 1-10.

22. Walter Nestle, Die Struktur des Eingangs in der attischen Tragödie (Stuttgart 1930) 13, 23.

23. Epirrema e tragedia, referred to above, n. 15.

24. Lesky, Trag. Dicht. 33-34.

25. The nearest thing to this was perhaps the recitation of verses of Archilochus, which we know to have taken place: Heraclitus fr. 42 Diels; Pl. Ion 531a; Clearchus in Athen. 14, 620c.

26. See the index rerum of A.'s Poet., p. 663, s.v. ‘Pathos.’

27. Suda s.v. Phrynichos.

28. Eschilo (Florence 1941) 41-42; see also Jaeger, Paideia I 239-241.

29. Yet does not the death of President Kennedy, and the profound emotional reaction to it around the world, prove that it is possible?

30. “Origin” 34ff.

31. Eschilo 92-96; cf. Lesky, Trag. Dicht. 15: “der logosbestimmten Welt der Tragödie.”—For the same reason I cannot see any need to associate the tragic mask with Dionysus. See Pickard-Cambridge, DTC 110-112.

32. Peretti, Epirrema e tragedia (Florence 1939) 229-253; R. Hölzle, Zum Aufbau der lyrischen Partien des Aischylos (Marbach 1934); also E. Reiner, Die rituelle Totenklage der Griechen (Stuttgart-Berlin 1938).

33. Wilamowitz, Griechische Verskunst (Berlin 1921, repr. 1958) 208: “eo adducor, ut legitimos hos numeros in naeniis Atheniensium fuisse credam,” and cf. 204, 206.

34. …p. 55 in Else, Gerald F. The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1965.

35. Gudmund Björck, Das Alpha Impurum und die Attische Kunstsprache (Uppsala 1950) 214-222; and cf. 358-361 on the intrusion of ē (where we would expect the “Doric” ā) in tragic choruses. Björck's remarks are fundamental to the discussion which follows.

36. On Homericisms in tragedy see Otto Hoffmann—Albert Debrunner, Geschichte der griechischen Sprache, I, ed. 3 (Berlin 1953) 113-115; on Ionicisms, ibid. 115-117 and H. W. Smyth, The Sound and Inflections of the Greek Dialects, I, Ionic (Oxford 1894) 69-73.

37. The most recent independent sampling of the evidence appears to be by Vittore Pisani in Enciclopedia Classica, sec. II, Lingua e letteratura, vol. V, Storia della lingua greca (Torino, etc., 1960) chap. IV. Pisani says at the beginning, p. 80, that the Dorian origin of the choral part is obvious from its language, which is the “solita lingua poetica colorita di dorico,” while the dialogue is substantially Attic. But on the very next page he notes that many Atticisms also invade the choral parts and says that here the Doricism, being limited to a few traits like ā for ē and -ân for -ôn in the genitive plural of 1st declension nouns, often seems [he adds, “especially in Euripides”] to be a disguise (“travestimento”) of the “corpo ionico-attico che forma la sostanza dell' espressione.” The discrepancy between the two statements is obvious. Pisani's examples fully bear out the second one, and not only for Euripides.

38. See G. S. Kirk, The Songs of Homer (Cambridge 1962) 192-196.

39. It is worth noting also that not a single major choral poet was a Dorian native of a purely Dorian city. Arion came from Aeolic Lesbos; Alcman was perhaps a Lydian, perhaps an Ionian; Stesichorus was a native of the linguistically mixed Himera, Ibycus of the equally mixed Rhegium; Pindar was a Boeotian; Simonides and Bacchylides were Ionians from Ceos.

40. Hoffmann—Debrunner, Geschichte der griechischen Sprache, 108-109.

41. On Lasos see Pickard-Cambridge, DTC 22-24. Lasos came from the “Dryopian” town of Hermione near the Argolid. Whether a Dorian or not, he undoubtedly followed the Dorian tradition in the dithyramb, and the Ionian Simonides surely did the same.

42. DTC 23.

43. On the other side, that of the over-all form, a converse influence is also possible, from tragedy to dithyramb. This has often been suggested for the curious “Theseus” (no. 18) of Bacchylides, which the Alexandrians apparently labeled a dithyramb.—We do not know what to make of the statements in the Suda, s. vv. Pindaros and Simonides, that these poets also wrote tragedies.

44. Nilsson, “Der Ursprung der Tragödie” (…chap. I n. 73 in Else, Gerald F. The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1965) 618-624.

45. Plut. Solon 21.

46. …chap. II n. 35 [in Else, Gerald F. The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1965], on Plutarch's account of their meeting.

47. It is not impossible that family pride also had something to do with it. Pisistratus was a Neleid, or claimed to be, and the glory of that family had certainly shone brighter in the heroic age than it had in Athens in his own time. Nestor is given a special place of honor in the Iliad, and he and his son, Pisistratus' own namesake, are the first to welcome Telemachus on his journey in search of his father in the Odyssey. Pisistratus may have been well content to let the heroes of that greater time shine out above the luminaries of Attica (the ancestors of the Eupatridae) in the Homeric recitations and in tragedy.

Bibliographic Note

… A very few works are cited in the book in abbreviated form:

Pick-Camb., DTC = Arthur W. Pickard-Cambridge, Dithyramb Tragedy and Comedy (Oxford 1927); DTC[sup2 ] = second edition revised by T. B. L. Webster (Oxford 1962).

———, Dr. Fest. = Sir Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens (Oxford 1953).

Schmid, Gr. Lit. = Wilhelm Schmid, Geschichte der griechischen Literatur, Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft, VII i (Munich, vol. I, 1929; vol. II, 1934).

Lesky, Trag. Dicht. = Albin Lesky, Die tragische Dichtung der Hellenen (Göttingen, 1956), especially chaps. I, “Die Ursprungsprobleme,” pp. 11-38, and II, “Thespis,” pp. 39-44.

Else, A.'s Poet. = Gerald F. Else, Aristotle's Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge, Mass. 1957).

———, “Origin” = Gerald F. Else, “The Origin of ΤΡΑGOΙDΙΑ”, Hermes 85 (1957) 19-46.