To my mind the meaning of all this is fairly clear. When Pratinas attempted to restore the Dionysiac element to contemporaneous drama at Athens, he kept the Peloponnesian name but did not venture to shock conservatives still further by disclosing to their eyes creatures so foreign and strange as the Dorian goat-men would have been. Accordingly, he transformed his satyrs so as to approximate the sileni of native tragedy.[81] After fifty or sixty years, however, satyric drama had become so thoroughly at home in Athens that the experiment was tried of imposing the Peloponnesian type unchanged upon the Attic choruses. But the reaction could not and did not endure. In two or three decades the final type had emerged, such as we see it in the Naples crater. Except for the goatskin about the loins, which is often highly conventionalized, the native sileni are at every point victorious.
Fig. 11.—A Satyr upon a Würzburg Cylix of About 500 B.C.
Fig. 12.—A Comus upon a Berlin Amphora
The Greeks were inordinately fond of associating every invention or new literary genre with some one’s name as discoverer (εὑρετής). In the case of tragedy the problem was unusually complicated. In later years Arion, Epigenes, and Thespis all had their partisans. The last named is the one most frequently mentioned, and strictly speaking this view is correct. But more broadly considered, the question largely depends upon the stage of development to which one is willing to apply the word “tragedy.” To many moderns, with almost two and a half millenniums of dramatic history as a background, Aeschylus will seem the first tragic playwright. At least, in his hands tragedy became for the first time real literature.
The foregoing treatment will show that I do not believe a study of the origin of religion to be indispensable for a discussion of the origin of Greek tragedy. Prior to Arion and Epigenes there was nothing which the most fanciful could recognize as akin to modern tragedy. After the work of Thespis and Aeschylus no one can fail to note its presence. To trace, so far as we may, the gradual unfolding of the new genre from a state of nonexistence to a period of vigorous growth seems to me a concrete problem and distinctly worth while. The songs and dances from which tragedy and the satyr-play developed were associated, at the period when they became truly dramatic, with the worship of Dionysus, and at that same period Dionysus was as truly a “god” (as distinct from a “hero”) as any that the Greeks ever knew. To abandon these plain facts and others like them in favor of vague theorizing on religious origins will never bring us satisfactory results. Now, in his Origin of Tragedy Ridgeway, who may serve as a protagonist of this method, recognized only the satyr-play as Dionysiac in origin, and attempted to dissociate tragedy and the dithyramb from that deity and to derive them from ceremonies at the tombs of heroes, i.e., from ancestor worship. I cannot conceive that many classical scholars will believe him to have succeeded in this attempt. Ridgeway evidently foresaw this and tried to forestall it by saying that “as Dionysus himself had almost certainly once been only a Thracian hero, even if it were true that Tragedy had risen from his cult, its real ultimate origin would still be in the worship of the dead” (op. cit., p. 93). What, then, was the point in his conceding that satyric drama was Dionysiac in origin? In that case the ultimate origins of tragedy and satyric drama must, after all, have been identical, and the differences in their origins must have consisted only of the minor divergencies in the final stage of their development. In practice, how does this result differ from the more usual procedure, which ignores the ultimate sources and concentrates attention upon the last stage of development? So far as I can see, it would differ only to the extent that the underlying religion of both genres would now be understood to be ancestor worship. But this distinction loses all meaning, for the reason that in his last volume Ridgeway maintains that “Vegetation, Corn, and Tree spirits, as well as those of rocks, mountains, and rivers, and what are collectively termed Totemistic beliefs,” fertility-rites, initiation-rites, mana, “the worship of Demeter and almost[82] all other Greek deities” are “not primary phenomena but merely secondary and dependent on the primary belief in the immortality and durability of the soul,” and consequently that tragedy and serious drama (being everywhere associated with some form of religion) not only in Greece but “wherever they are found under the sun have their roots in the world-wide belief in the continued existence of the soul after the death of the body.”[83] How much of truth there may be in Ridgeway’s contention that ancestor worship is prior to and the ultimate source of other forms of religion I shall not stop to discuss. But the practical value of so universal a generalization has been well expressed by another: “Even if it can be shown that your far-off ancestor was an ape, it does not follow that your father was an ape.”[84] In other words, in spite of any resemblance which may have obtained between the ultimate forms of Dionysiac worship and the true veneration of heroes, at the time when tragedy actually came into being the existing differences between them were of much greater significance than any alleged identity of origin in the far-distant past could have been. If it were possible for Ridgeway to substantiate his first position, viz., that tragedy arose directly from the worship of the hero Adrastus at Sicyon, or the like, there would be some meaning in his work. But his doctrine of ultimate derivation loses itself in primeval darkness.
The Origin of Comedy.[85]—The difficulty of this problem was recognized as early as Aristotle: