It is customary to refer to the tragedies that have survived the ancient world as “Greek” although tragedy as we know it, was developed in Athens. Tragedies were written and produced in Athens by Athenians for Athenians. But gradually the popularity of Athenian drama led to the building of theaters throughout the Greek and Roman world.
Our knowledge of Greek tragedy is limited. Close to 900 tragedies were presented at Athens in the fifth century BC. We know that the three great tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, wrote about 220 tragedies. We have seven surviving plays from Aeschylus and Sophocles each and nineteen from Euripides, of which at least one is not a tragedy, but a satyr play. All in all, only 32 tragedies have survived.
What does the word tragedy mean? One dictionary definition says: “any play or narrative that seriously treats of calamitous events and has an unhappy but meaningful ending” or just “any dramatic, disastrous event.” But when you compare the word’s etymological meaning with its current meaning, something surprising is revealed: tragoidia, the ancient Greek word for tragedy, originally meant “he-goat song.” What does tragedy have to do with a “he-goat?” There are a number of theories about the origin of tragedy, but we will look at only one, that of the German scholar Walter Burkert. You should not take this theory as gospel, because the origins of tragedy probably can never be retrieved, but it at least provides a plausible explanation of the unlikely connection between the sublime genre of tragedy and the smelly he-goat (tragos).