Thespis was already beginning to develop tragedy, and on account of its novelty the matter was engaging general attention but had not yet been brought into a public contest. Now Solon, who by nature was fond of hearing and learning, to a still greater extent in old age gave himself up to leisurely amusement and even to conviviality and music. Therefore, he went to see Thespis himself act, as was customary for the earlier poets. And when the spectacle was over, Solon addressed him and inquired if he had no sense of shame to lie so egregiously before so many. Moreover, when Thespis said that it was no crime to say and enact such things in sport, Solon struck the ground violently with his staff and said: “Yet if we praise and honor this ‘sport’ under these circumstances, it will not be long before we discover it in our contracts.”[42] To so straightforward a man as Solon such a facile abandonment of one’s own personality might well seem like barefaced lying, and to augur and even encourage similar shuffling prevarications in the more serious affairs of life. To Ridgeway, however, all this appears in a different light. In the first place, after citing Diogenes Laertius to the effect that “in ancient times the chorus at first carried on the action in tragedy alone, but later Thespis invented an actor in order to allow the chorus intervals of relief,”[43] he declares flatly: “But this cannot mean, as is commonly held, that Thespis first separated in some degree the coryphaeus from the chorus and made him interrupt the dithyramb with epic recitations, for, as we have seen above, before his time the poet or coryphaeus used to mount a table and hold a dialogue with the chorus.”[44] In the cross-reference Ridgeway had quoted Pollux iv. 123: “The ἐλεός was a table in the olden days upon which in the period before Thespis some one mounted and made answer to the choreutae,” and _Etymologicum Magnum_, _s.v._ “θυμέλη”: “It was a table upon which they stood and sang in the country when tragedy had not yet assumed definite form.” These late notices are manifestly vague and inexact references to rudimentary histrionicism among the choreutae themselves or between them and their coryphaeus. The first of them is probably due to a false inference from a scene in some comedy.[45] It is true that the invention of the first actor is expressly attributed to Thespis only by Diogenes, yet it may be inferred in several other connections. Evidently the matter is largely one of definition. Ridgeway himself concedes all that is important, when he continues: “There seems no reason to doubt that Thespis in some way defined more exactly the position of the actor, especially by the introduction of a simple form of mask.” In the second place, Ridgeway considers that Thespis made the “grand step” in the evolution of tragedy when he