The birth of tragedy is a subject about which scholars are still in deep disagreement. There is certainly value in looking at 'primitive' societies, particularly for the mask as a mode of transformation and for the phenomenon of divine possession (where the person imitating the demonic powers thinks that he/she feels them inside him/her). Farming festivals and religious rites have common roots and answer to universal human needs. Yet nowhere else was this form of expression carried to the same degree, with the creating of dramatic poetry, as in Attica. The institutions of democracy and free dialogue: these were the basic preconditions that altered the form and content of Dionysiac popular rituals and dithyrambic hymns. Within a very short space of time the subjects began to be drawn from other myths besides those about Dionysus. The form of the drama lost in improvisation, but gained in stability of structure. The role of the chorus was reduced, that of the actor enhanced.

It was (so tradition had it) during the reign of Pisistratus as tyrannos at Athens, round about the middle of the sixth [6th] century B.C., that the playwright Thespis 'farsed' the dithyramb, sung by a chorus in honour of Dionysus, with lines in a different metre and not set to music. In these lines the speaker, Thespis himself, 'replied' (hypekrineto, whence the term hypokrites, 'actor') to the words of the chorus. This is why Thespis is seen as the Father of Tragedy and of the Theatre in general.