ABSTRACT
Greek drama was said to have originated with a performance staged in Athens by one Thespis in the year 538 B.C.. We know nothing of what this first performance was like, but it is a safe assumption that it bore little resemblance to the surviving plays of the three great fifth-century tragedians. Aeschylus, earliest of the three, was probably born about 525 (he fought at the Battle of Marathon in 490) and could well have been presenting plays by 500 or soon after, yet the first one we can securely date is the Persians of 472. Thus Attic tragedy, as we now have it, is essentially a Classical genre, developing in the years after the Persian invasion of 480/79 and ending with the late works of Sophocles and Euripides, in the last decade of the fifth century. Although Pindar and Bacchylides might well have witnessed productions of their contemporary Aeschylus, whether the originals in Athens or revivals in Sicily, it is fair to say that their victory odes and dithyrambs represent the end of an Archaic tradition in Greek poetry, while the playwright heralds the creation of a new Classical genre.
