We have noted that the early dithyramb did not require impersonation (see p. 10, above). Even at an advanced stage it was probably much like a sacred oratorio of modern times in which the performers may sing words which are appropriate to characters and yet make no attempt by costume, gestures, or actions to represent those characters. Thespis changed all this. Since he assumed an actor’s rôle himself, first of all probably that of Dionysus, the choreutae could no longer conduct themselves as worshipers in disguise, but must now not merely look like real attendants of Dionysus but also behave as such. This is a fundamental matter. Only after this step had been taken could real drama in the modern sense become possible. Neither honoring the sorrows of Adrastus nor the “fore-doing” of imitative magic, not even the primitive δρώμενα at Eleusis or elsewhere demanded or presupposed actual impersonation. This development took place at Icaria and by the agency of Thespis. I cannot do better than to quote certain sentences of Miss Harrison’s: We are apt to forget that from the _epos_, the narrative, to the _drama_, the enactment, is a momentous step, one, so far as we know, not taken in Greece till after centuries of epic achievement, and then taken suddenly, almost in the dark, and irrevocably. All we really know of this momentous step is that it was taken sometime in the sixth century B.C. and taken in connection with the worship of Dionysus. Surely it is at least possible that the real impulse to the drama lay not wholly in “goat-songs” and “circular dancing places” but also in the cardinal, the essentially dramatic, conviction of the religion of Dionysus, that the worshipper can not only worship, but can become, can _be_, his god. Athene and Zeus and Poseidon have no drama, because no one, in his wildest moments, believed he could become and be Athene or Zeus or Poseidon. It is indeed only in the orgiastic religions that these splendid moments of conviction could come, and, for Greece at least, only in an orgiastic religion did the drama take its rise.[41] Thespis’ invention of impersonation probably provides the clue for understanding the clash between him and Solon: