ABSTRACT
For Europe-and Europe alone provided tragedy as we know it, until it lent its findings to the rest of the world-tragedy began in Greece, and our first records are from the fifth century B.C. As Allardyce Nicoll (World Drama, 1949, pp. 25-6) has pointed out, Egypt may have provided an example in the second or third millennium B.C., but the earliest texts are from Athens. We have evidence enough that the form arose from a choral song in honour of Dionysus, that this became first an alternation between a single actor’s speech and the chorus, and then (in Aeschylus) a use of either monologue (as prominently in the Agamemnon) or duologue in alternation with the chorus; in Sophocles and Euripides there could be three actors simultaneously used, with the chorus occupying a smaller but still important part.
