" or "goat-songs." Arion, whose
goat-chorus may perhaps have some connexion with an early Arcadian
worship of Pan, associated it permanently with Dionysus, and thus became
the inventor of "lyrical tragedy"--a transition stage between the
dithyramb and the regular drama. His invention, or the chorus with which
it dealt, was established according to fixed rules by his contemporary
Stesichorus. About the time when Arion introduced these improvements
into the Dorian city of Corinth, the (likewise Dorian) families at
Sicyon honoured the hero-king Adrastus by tragic choruses. Hence the
invention of tragedy was ascribed by the Sicyonians to their poet
Epigenes; but this step, significant for the future history of the Greek
drama, of employing the Bacchic chorus for the celebration of other than
Bacchic themes, was soon annulled by the tyrant Cleisthenes.

The rhapsodes.

The element which transformed lyrical tragedy into the tragic drama was
added by the Ionians. The custom of the recitation of poetry by
wandering minstrels, called _rhapsodes_ (from [Greek: rhabdos], staff,
or from [Greek: rhaptein], to piece together), first sprang up in the
Ionia beyond the sea; to such minstrels was due the spread of the
Homeric poems and of subsequent epic cycles. These recitations, with or
without musical accompaniment, soon included gnomic or didactic, as well
as epic, verse; if Homer was a rhapsode, so was the sententious or
"moral" Hesiod. The popular effect of these recitations was enormously
increased by the metrical innovations of Archilochus (from 708), who
invented the trochee and the _iambus_, the latter the arrowy metre which
is the native form of satirical invective--the species of composition in
which Archilochus excelled--though it was soon used for other purposes
also. The recitation of these iambics may already have nearly approached
to theatrical declamation. The rhapsodes were welcome guests at popular
festivals, where they exercised their art in mutual emulation, or
ultimately recited parts, perhaps the whole, of longer poems. The
recitation of a long epic may thus have resembled theatrical dialogue;
even more so must the alternation of iambic poems, the form being
frequently an address in the second person. The rhapsode was in some
sense an actor; and when these recitations reached Attica, they thus
brought with them the germs of theatrical dialogue.

Invention of the tragic drama.

The rhapsodes were actual