Modern discussion of the issue of origins is in large part an extended commentary on Aristotle’s brief treatment in the Poetics. The key passages are these:
Coming into being from an improvisational beginning - both it [tragedy] and comedy, the former from those leading the dithyramb, the latter from those leading the phallic songs, which even at the present day are still a customary practice in many cities - it was enhanced little by little as they developed each element of it that became manifest, and after passing through many changes tragedy ceased to change, since it had attained its own nature. Aeschylus first increased the number of actors from one to two, diminished the choral elements, and made speech play the leading role; Sophocles introduced three actors and scene-painting. And then, with respect to grandeur, because it changed from being satyric [dia to ek saturikou metabalein] it was late that tragedy left behind simple plots and humorous diction and became dignified. In addition its meter became the iambic trimeter instead of the trochaic tetrameter; at first they used the tetrameter because the poetry was satyric and more closely connected with dance... (1449a9-23)
...As for the number of episodes and the other elements, how they are said to have been embellished, let us take all these things as read, for it would perhaps be a big task to go through them one by one. (1449a28-31)
... The changes in tragedy and those who made them have not been forgotten, but no attention was paid to comedy at first because no one took it seriously. It was, indeed, some time late in its development that the archon ‘‘granted a chorus’’ of comedians; until then they were volunteers. Memory of those called poets of comedy is preserved only from the period when it already had some formal features. Who introduced masks or prologues or numbers of actors, and all that sort of thing, is unknown. (1449a37-1449b5)
Most modern scholars have concluded that what Aristotle tells us, however sketchy it may be, must be sound. Lesky, who speaks of‘‘according full authority to Aristotle’s remarks,’’ says that ‘‘the range and type of his sources on the question of tragedy can no longer be determined, but that does not mean they never existed’’ (1983, 5). Doubt about the evidentiary basis of Aristotle’s statements has, however, deepened since Lesky’s day. There are strong reasons for believing that no one in the fifth century or later had access to tragic texts, documents, or any kind of reliable information going back before 500 bce. West has made the fundamental observation that the dates given in the tenth-century Suda lexicon for the earliest tragedians (Thespis, Choerilus, Phrynichus, Pratinas) are a product of schematization, the poets being arbitrarily located at intervals of three Olympiads in the chronological unknown (West 1989, 251; cf. Scullion 2002b, 81-82). Aristotle does not name any of these poets, which in the case of Thespis would seem a glaring omission, but he may be eschewing the sort of pseudo-knowledge preserved in the Suda. Beyond these names and dates and four probably inauthentic fragments of Thespis we have no precise information about sixth-century tragedy, and it is hard to understand why, if such information was available, none of it is preserved in Aristotle or our other sources.
That such history of sixth-century tragedy as was in circulation was a product of the familiar ancient techniques of synchronism and schematization is reflected in what Aristotle himself tells us. Since competitions were organized by the state, it can hardly have been individual playwrights who ‘‘introduced’’ additional actors, and Aristotle must be drawing inferences from the number of actors implied by whatever earlier tragic texts were available to him or combining inference from Aeschylus’ two-actor plays with schematization of the next phase of tragic development as Sophoclean. So too Aristotle is clearly assuming that the lost history of comedy will have been precisely parallel to that of tragedy, with a series of individual poets introducing masks and prologues and adding actors. Yet even in the case of the tragic history Aristotle is very reticent - it would not, as he claimed, have been a ‘‘big task’’ briefly to mention the various innovations - and one wonders if that again reflects circumspection about the reliability of the information.
There is in fact more to Aristotle’s statements than analogy between the history of tragedy and the lost history of comedy. In the first sentence quoted above Aristotle is using a developmental schema - a modest beginning developed and enhanced little by little - that occurs often, with verbal parallels, elsewhere in his work (for example, Constitution of the Athenians 3.3.11, Politics 1274a9-11; see Else 1957, 152-53). At Sophistical Refutations 183b22-34 he schematizes in the same way the ‘‘enhancement’’ of rhetoric, naming specific individuals who gradually developed it, and adds that such a scheme suits ‘‘practically all the other arts.’’ Hence it is not just that he concludes on no evidence that comedy must have developed by the same process as tragedy, but that even in the case of tragedy he is applying a theoretical scheme of developmental process. Convinced that the scheme itself was sound, Aristotle was perhaps therefore the more inclined to be cautious about the details, and so only named those who introduced changes in tragedy when he was dealing with fifth-century developments and so felt some confidence. There is little to be said for the easy assumption that it was the other way round, that Aristotle’s scheme of development was generated by his knowledge of the details, and that if he had chosen to lay out what he knew we would have a fairly full and reliable history (cf. Halliwell 1987, 79).
If Aristotle’s account of the relatively recent history of drama is skimpy and schematic, what he says about the remotest origins of tragedy and comedy seems likely to be more schematic still (Pickard-Cambridge 1927, 121-31; Dale 1969, 176-77 n. 2; Else 1965, 12-22; Scullion 2002a, 102-10). His sketch of the earliest developments looks like another product of general considerations, which are not far to seek. The elements of Aristotle’s scheme - tragedy, comedy, ‘‘the satyric’’ or satyr-play, dithyramb, and phallic songs - also occur together in the festivals of Dionysus at Athens, the context in which tragedy ‘‘attained its own nature.’’
It is typical of Aristotle, as his reconstruction of the history of rhetoric shows, to identify precursors that would lead comprehensibly to, or in other words are identified on the basis of, the developed ‘‘natural form’’ he knew. Thus he took the view that the art of rhetoric began in Sicily with Empedocles and was developed there by Corax and Tisias and by Gorgias, who transferred it to Athens, where it came to fulfillment (see A 5 Radermacher; Russell 1981, 117, 166). According to Cicero (Brutus 12, 46-48), Aristotle said that the first handbooks of rhetoric were composed when the Sicilian tyrants had fallen and judicial procedures for the recovery of private property began to be instituted; that is, when circumstances resembling those of democratic and litigious Athens came into being in Sicily. Aristotle’s account is arbitrary and schematic and hence problematic. Gorgias is clearly the cardinal figure, and the generative notion is that the origins should point forward teleologically to the Athenian fulfillment, which is to say that the reconstruction was driven by the teleology.
Aristotle seems to have employed an analogous procedure in reconstructing the origins of drama, though in this case he had little or no factual flesh to put on the bones of his scheme. Tragedy, comedy, satyr-play, dithyramb, phallic song, and aspects of the relationships between them, are retrojected into the remote past as a scheme of development. Thus satyr-play, associated with tragedy in the festival context, is associated with it in the reconstruction. Very likely it is ‘‘the satyric’’ rather than ‘‘satyr-play’’ (saturikon might mean either) that Aristotle, with deliberate vagueness, says tragedy ‘‘changed out of’’ or ceased to be. The Suda states that satyr-play was introduced to Athens by Pratinas of Phlius around 500 bce (Suda p 2230 Adler); vase-painters first depict satyrs with human feet and in spheres of myth and life other than their own about 520 to 510, and clearly theatrical satyrs make an appearance in the third decade of the fifth century (Brommer 1959). Whatever we may make of the Suda’s notice about Pratinas, it is consistent with the unmistakable evidence of the vases that satyr-play developed much later than tragedy and comedy (Burkert 1966, 89). Aristotle may have known this, and it would in any case be unlike him to derive tragedy from the developed form of satyr-play. On the model of organic growth that is typical of his thought the seeds of the satyric drama performed with tragedy in the fifth century must have been present in an undifferentiated satyro-tragic drama out of which tragedy and satyr-play developed - differently, but in institutional tandem. What ‘‘satyric’’ in that context may have meant to him is a question we will return to.
The descent of comedy from phallic songs is a straightforward concept and makes intuitive sense (though there are other, equally plausible, lines of descent). The role of dithyramb, however, remains to be explained. Aristotle says that tragedy ‘‘changed from being satyric,’’ but he clearly regarded dithyramb as its proper ‘‘beginning’’ (arche), doubtless because tragedy shares with dithyramb choral song-and-dance as formal element and heroic myth as content. In the course of his discussion of origins it emerges that Aristotle considered epic the most important precursor of tragedy, since the two share significant common features of content, tone, and construction (1449b16-20; cf. Halliwell 1986, 253-59). Tragedy’s inheritance from epic is vastly more important to him than that from dithyramb, but epic cannot account for tragedy’s choral component. Dithyramb not only can do that, but can also anchor tragedy in the specific Athenian milieu in which it came to fruition.
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