Before the close of the sixth century the dithyramb had become a regular form of literature—a chorus of fifty, dancing and singing formal compositions. In 508 B.C. a contest of dithyrambic choruses of men was made a standing feature of the program at the City Dionysia in Athens. Simonides (556-467 B.C.) is known to have composed a dithyramb entitled _Memnon_, the exclusively Dionysiac character of the genre being then, if not earlier, abandoned. But it is important to remember that originally the dithyramb was extemporaneous and confined to the worship and exaltation of Dionysus. In the new notice concerning Solon and Arion, von Wilamowitz finds “die Bestätigung dass die τραγῳδοί vor Thespis bestanden” (cf. _op. cit._, p. 470). This development could scarcely have taken place at Corinth in Arion’s time, for there was no need of coining a new word to designate the performers so long as they appeared as satyrs. And if a term had then been derived from the choreutae to designate their performance, it must have been *σατυρῳδία and not τραγῳδία. Neither could the new term have been derived at this period from the _prize_, for then the goat was only the third award.[28] Let us therefore turn to Sicyon. In a well-known passage (v. 67) Herodotus tells how the Sicyonians used to honor their former king, Adrastus, in other ways, and in particular celebrated his sorrows with “tragic” (or “goat”) choruses (τραγικοῖσι χοροῖσι) and how their tyrant Clisthenes in anger at Adrastus assigned these choruses to Dionysus and the other features of the rites to Melanippus. Melanippus in his lifetime had killed Adrastus’ brother and son-in-law, and Clisthenes had brought his bones from Thebes and transferred to him part of the honors which had previously been paid to Adrastus, in order to insult the latter as outrageously as possible. The superimposition of the worship of Dionysus upon that of the local hero and the reference to tragic choruses have furnished Ridgeway a foundation upon which to rear his theory that tragedy developed from ceremonies at the tombs of heroes. In this passage the meaning of the word τραγικοῖσι has provoked much discussion. I believe that Herodotus meant τραγικός here in the sense current in his own day, viz., tragic, but I do not believe that he stopped to consider whether these Sicyonian dances “were sufficiently like the choruses in the tragedies of his contemporaries to be called ‘tragic.’”[29] I think he employed that adjective simply because τραγικοὶ χοροί was the Sicyonians’ own designation for their performances. If so, whatever τραγικοῖσι χοροῖσι connoted to Herodotus, or even to contemporaneous Sicyonians, originally τραγικός in this phrase must have meant “goat,” and these choruses must originally have been, for whatever reason, “goat” choruses.