Tragedy began as goat-song and still means structured human suffering
A tragedy stages sorrowful catastrophe for a central character to stir an accompanying response in spectators. The form crystallized in ancient Greece some twenty-five hundred years ago; only fragments of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and later Roman writers survive.
Tragedy dramatises terrible events striking a central figure or group, aiming at catharsis, a pain that paradoxically yields pleasure for the watcher. Many cultures have forms that do this, but the word usually names one Western lineage, broken and restarted many times, which Raymond Williams saw as binding Greeks to Elizabethans and pagans to Christians. It runs from the scraps of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides and Seneca's Roman plays, through Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Racine and Schiller, to Ibsen, Strindberg, Beckett and Heiner Müller.
The name means goat song, from Greek words for he-goat and ode. One guess is that a goat was the prize in choral dancing contests; another, that a chorus danced around a goat before sacrificing it. Athenaeus offered a rival root, trygodia, a grape-harvest song. Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy in 1872 linked the name to a chorus of goat-like satyrs.
Aristotle's Poetics of 335 BCE, written well after Athens's fifth-century peak, gives the oldest surviving origin story: tragedy grew from improvisations by leaders of dithyrambs, hymns danced for Dionysos, just as comedy grew from phallic processions. He defined it as an enacted, serious and complete action in heightened language that works through pity and fear toward relief. Some scholars doubt the dithyramb link because the choruses and dances differ, proposing instead shared roots in older fertility and burial rites.
The Poetics also made tragedy a sorting tool, set against epic and lyric in poetry and against comedy on stage. Modern critics added melodrama and the tragicomic as foils, so some Greek plays now look like melodramas. Brecht and Augusto Boal built their epic theatre explicitly in opposition to tragic models.
Source: Tragedy
