Tragedy and Comedy of Greece.  The Greeks place every event as happening in their country, and it is not surprising that they claim for themselves the inception of Tragedy and Comedy, which they undoubtedly were the originators of in Greece, but the religious festivals of Dionysus, Osiris, and Bacchus, to which we are supposed to owe the inception of Tragedy and Comedy, were known long before the Greeks knew them. (Dionysus was the patron and protector of theatres.) “The purport of the song was that Bacchus imparted his secret of the cultivation of vines to a petty prince in Attica, named Icarius, who happened one day to espy a goat brouzing upon his plantations, immediately seized, and offered it up as a sacrifice to his divine benefactor; the peasants assembled round their master, assisted in the ceremony, and expressed their joy and gratitude in music, songs, dances, and Pantomime on the occasion; the sacrifice grew into a festival, and the festival into an annual solemnity, attended most probably every year with additional circumstances, when the countrymen flocked together in crowds, and sang in rustic strains the praises of their favourite deity.”

Amongst the reported followers of these Bacchanalian festivals were those fabulous race of grotesque sylvan beings, previously referred to, known as the Satyrs.  They were of a sturdy frame, in features they had broad snub noses, and appeared in rough skins of animals with large pointed ears, heavy knots on their foreheads, and a small tail.  The elder Satyrs were known as Sileni.  The younger were more pleasing and not so grotesque or repulsive in appearance as the elder Satyrs.  To the Satyrs can be traced the variegated dress of the modern Harlequin, as in ancient Greek history mention is made of the performers enacting Satyrs being sometimes habited in a tiger’s skin of various colours, which encircled the performer’s body tightly, and who carried a wooden sword, wore a white hat, and a brown mask.  According to Servius (as we have seen) Pan had also a bright spotted dress “in likeness of the stars.”

From these rustic festivals originated the Satyr, or Satirical Drama, as did its Italian prototype, the Fabulae Atellanae or, Laudi Osci.  These rural sacrifices became, in process of time, a solemn fast, and assumed all the pomp and splendour of a religious ceremony; poets were employed by the magistrate to compose hymns, or songs, for the occasion; such was the rudeness and simplicity of the age that their bards contended for a prize, which, as Horace intimates, was scarce worth contending for, being no more than a goat or skin of wine, which was given to the happy poet who acquitted himself best in the task assigned him.

From such small beginnings Tragedy and Comedy took their rise; and like (as the best writers on these subjects tell us) every other production of human art, extremely contemptible; that wide and deep stream, which flows with such strength and rapidity through cultivated Greece, took its rise from a small and inconsiderable fountain, which hides itself in the recesses of antiquity, and is almost buried in oblivion; the name alone remains to give us some light into its original nature, and to inform us, that Tragedy and Comedy, like every other species of poetry, owe their birth to Religion.