Once again golden-haired Love strikes me with his purple ball and summons me
to play with the girl in the fancy sandals; but she – she comes from Lesbos with its
fine cities – finds fault with my hair because it is white, and gapes after another –
girl.Tragedy: festivals and conventions
Very little is known about the origins or even about the immediate antecedents of
tragedy. The word itself means ‘goat song’ but the surviving plays have long lost any
connection with rituals involving goats. Tragedy seems to have been an Athenian
invention (little is recorded of drama in other cities) and was performed at the annual
spring festival of the god Dionysus, called the Great or City Dionysia to distinguish it
from the lesser rural festivities in honour of Dionysus. The Dionysia as a state
institution is first associated with the tyrant Peisistratus and thereafter appears to have
been reorganized by Cleisthenes. The city festival involving choral lyrics and drama
was held over several days in March starting with a procession in honour of the god,
for Peisistratus had established a temple on the southeastern side of the Acropolis.
The first dramas seem to have been acted in the agora. A major advance is associated
with the name of Thespis, the actor/dramatist (whence Thespian), who separated
himself from the singing and dancing chorus to converse with the chorus leader.
Aristotle accredits Aeschylus with the introduction of a second actor and Sophocles
with a third (Poetics, 4). Comedies were introduced into the Dionysia shortly before
the Persian Wars. By the time of the earliest extant play of Aeschylus, the City
Dionysia consisted of a day of procession, followed by a contest in dithyrambic odes
involving ten choruses, a day given over to comedies (five in number) and then three
days of tragedies presented on a competitive basis. On each day, one playwright
presented three tragic plays, which might be linked like the three plays that make up
the Oresteian trilogy but usually were not related in plot (though it is difficult to believe
that they did not form some sort of sequence in mood or theme). These were followed
by something completely different, a grotesque satyr play, a kind of bawdy phallic
romp, which doubtless had the function of providing comic relief at the end of the
day. On the next and last day, judges (kritai, whence critic) drawn from the ten tribes
and elected by lot gave their verdict. The competitive element existed from earliest
times; Thespis is reputed to have won first prize for his drama in about 535. Plays
might be revived in the rural Dionysia but had only one city performance. All our
extant plays were written in the period after the Persian Wars and before the end of
the Peloponnesian War. We have six plays by Aeschylus (525–456) and a record of
more than eighty titles to his name. The authorship of the Prometheus, traditionally
ascribed to him, has been disputed by some modern scholars. We have seven plays
LITERATURE 145