FOUNDATIONS Ancient to 1700s

Aeschylus – Birth of Tragedy

He stands at the pivot where ritual becomes literature, where the thunder of drums and the circling of dancers turn into characters with names, guilt, motives, and choices. Before him the chorus shouted and stamped and called the god into the city; with him the god is still there—dark, implacable, tremendous—but now human beings step forward and speak in their own voices, and the city leans in to hear them. Aeschylus is less a single author than a change of state. The Greeks already had festivals, hymns, dithyrambs, masks, sacred frenzy; what they did not have until him was this particular fusion of song and argument, of dance and decision, of omen and verdict. He brings onstage a second actor, and with that spare addition everything alters: the chorus is no longer the whole, b ...