Tragedy may mean goat song, or possibly a harvest hymn to barley
Nobody knows for sure where tragedy got its name. Aristotle linked it to a goat song sung by satyrs for Dionysus. Other scholars have proposed a race with a goat as prize, a word for teenage voices breaking, or even barley, meaning the first tragedies may have been harvest songs for the grain behind beer.
Tragedy was one of three main theatrical forms in ancient Greece, alongside comedy and the satyr play, and it reached its peak in 5th-century BC Athens. It probably grew out of rites for Dionysus, god of wine and theatre, and drew its plots mostly from myths handed down through archaic epic. Where epic was recited, tragedy put those stories in the mouths of actors, and its example shaped the theatre of Rome and, much later, the Renaissance.
Aristotle's Poetics is the main ancient witness, precious because he could study Attic performances first-hand, but not beyond doubt. He traced tragedy to the dithyramb, a danced hymn to Dionysus, which began short and jokey before turning serious, its metre moving from trochaic tetrameter to the more speech-like iambic trimeter. Ruth Scodel is blunter: with thin and unreliable evidence, we know almost nothing about how tragedy began. Jane Ellen Harrison tied the name to tragos, a barley used for Athenian beer, while J. Winkler pointed to tragizein, the breaking of adolescent voices.
Tradition names Thespis as the first performer to play a character rather than speak as himself, in 534 BC at the Dionysia founded by Peisistratus; he also won the first dramatic contest. Phrynichus added female characters and historical subjects, as in his Capture of Miletus. The Greek term for actor, hypocrites, may mean answerer, suggesting a figure who replies to the chorus and draws out its songs.
Aeschylus laid down the ground rules. He is credited with the trilogy, three linked tragedies staged across a whole day from sunrise to sunset, and with adding a second actor, which made on-stage conflict possible. After the final play came a satyr play to lift the audience's spirits. As the form matured, actors spoke more to one another and the chorus gradually shrank in importance.
Source: Greek tragedy
