and were called the first, second, third, or fourth epitrite, according to the positions of the short step. The second epitrite was considered the most distinctly Doric.
The advent of the Dionysian[ 6 ] festivals in Greece threatened to destroy art, for those wild Bacchic dances, which are to be traced back to that frenzied worship of Bel and Astarte in Babylon, wild dances amenable only to the impulse of the moment, seemed to carry everything before them. Instead of that, however, the hymns to Bacchus, who was called in Phœnicia the flute god, from which the characteristics of his worship are indicated, were the germs from which tragedy and comedy developed, and the mad bacchanalian dances were tamed into dithyrambs. For the Corybantes, priests of the goddess Cybele, brought from Phrygia, in Asia Minor, the darker form of this worship; they mourned for the death of Bacchus, who was supposed to die in winter and to come to life again in the spring. When these mournful hymns were sung, a goat was sacrificed on the altar; thus the origin of the word “tragedy” or “goat song” (tragos, goat, and odos, singer). As the rite developed, the leader of the chorus would chant the praises of Dionysus, and sing of his adventures, to which the chorus would make response. In time it became the custom for the leader, or coryphæus, to be answered by one single member of the chorus, the latter being thus used merely for the chanting of commentaries on the narrative. The answerer was called “hypocrite,” afterward the term for actor.
This was the material from which Æschylus created the first tragedy, as we understand the term. Sophocles (495–406 B.C.) followed, increasing the number of actors, as did also Euripides (480–406 B.C.).
Comedy (komos, revel, and odos, singer) arose from the spring and summer worship of Bacchus, when everything was a jest and Nature smiled again.
The dithyramb (dithyrambos or Bacchic step,
