For Students
Exactly how the theatre came into being is not known. While it is indisputable that the traditions born in ancient Athens have dominated Western theatre and the theories of Western drama up to the present, it is impossible to state with certainty what the theatre was like even a few years before the appearance of Aeschylus’s earliest extant play, Persians (472 bce). Legend attributes the invention of the dithyramb, the lyrical ancestor of tragedy, to the poet Arion of Lesbos in the 7th or 6th century bce, but it was not until the creation of the Great Dionysia in Athens ...(100 of 8217 words)