15
Tragedy then gradually evolved as men developed each element that came to light and after going through many changes, it stopped when it had found its own natural form.
16
Thus it was Aeschylus who first raised the number of the actors from one to two. He also curtailed the chorus and gave the dialogue the leading part. Three actors and scene-painting Sophocles introduced.
17
Then as to magnitude.Being a development of the Satyr play,A Satyr play was an interlude performed by a troupe of actors dressed as the goat-like followers of Dionysus. Hence τραγῳδία, goat-song. Aristotle seems so clear about this that he does not trouble to give a full explanation. But we can see from this passage that the Satyr plays were short, jocose and in the trochaic metre which suited their dances, and that in Aristotle’s view tragedy was evolved from these. No example of a primitive Satyr play survives, but we can make inferences from the later, more sophisticated Cyclops of Euripides and the fragments of Sophocles’ Ἰχνευταί, The Trackers. We cannot be certain that Aristotle’s theory is historically correct; the balance of evidence is against it. it was quite late before tragedy rose from short plots and comic diction to its full dignity, and that the iambic metre was used instead of the trochaic tetrameter.
18
At first they used the tetrameter because its poetry suited the Satyrs and was better for dancing, but when dialogue was introduced, Nature herself discovered the proper metre. The iambic is indeed the most conversational of the metres,
19
and the proof is that in talking to each other we most often use iambic lines but very rarely hexameters and only when we rise above the ordinary pitch of conversation.
20
Then there is the number of acts. The further embellishmentsMasks, costumes, etc. and the story of their introduction one by one we may take as told,
21
for it would probably be a long task to go through them in detail.
