the same, the English miracle plays, mystery plays, and mummers' plays, the goat dancers of Scyros, and the
commedia dell'arte do throw some light on the nature of drama itself, and on the peculiar mixture of its origins.
The most important feature of early Greek tragedy that we should notice, apart from its extreme formality in
performance and its slow, controlled progression like that of music (and determined in fact by music and ritual
dancing) is that tragedy was a substitute for Homer. It was from Homer that tragedy took many of its themes, its
irony, its preoccupation with justice, and the inner form of tragedy itself: the destruction of a hero or a superman:
Homer is already tragic, and in everything but theatrical convention Homer in the first book of the Iliad is already
the greatest tragic dramatist. Aeschylus was right to say 'We are all eating crumbs from the great table of Homer.'
The influence of epic poetry on fifth-century Athenian theatre is vast and pervasive. Aeschylus in the Oresteia
consumes some two-thirds of the Agamemnon in setting history in the context of epic. Even the fact that we are
never given the precise origin of the curse on the house of Atreus can be seen as epic convention. True epic poetry
is always an episode, the origins belong to another genre, to poems like Hesiod's Theogony, and even they are full
of unexplained episodes.
Let us descend from these cloudy observations to what we know more exactly. The inscribed list of winners in
Athenian dramatic festivals seems to have been begun or reorganized by the newborn democracy; they were
festivals of the whole people. But the chief, and in the early fifth century the only, tragic festival was the Great
Dionysia in spring, which was probably organized originally by the tyrant Pisistratus and remodelled by
Cleisthenes. Clearly enough, the popularity of the tragic performances produced the development of the form and
the extension of the set days. At first three poets presented three tragedies each, and one satyr play.