The Greeks were inordinately fond of associating every invention or new literary genre with some one’s name as discoverer (εὑρετής). In the case of tragedy the problem was unusually complicated. In later years Arion, Epigenes, and Thespis all had their partisans. The last named is the one most frequently mentioned, and strictly speaking this view is correct. But more broadly considered, the question largely depends upon the stage of development to which one is willing to apply the word “tragedy.” To many moderns, with almost two and a half millenniums of dramatic history as a background, Aeschylus will seem the first tragic playwright. At least, in his hands tragedy became for the first time real literature. The foregoing treatment will show that I do not believe a study of the origin of religion to be indispensable for a discussion of the origin of Greek tragedy. Prior to Arion and Epigenes there was nothing which the most fanciful could recognize as akin to modern tragedy. After the work of Thespis and Aeschylus no one can fail to note its presence. To trace, so far as we may, the gradual unfolding of the new genre from a state of nonexistence to a period of vigorous growth seems to me a concrete problem and distinctly worth while. The songs and dances from which tragedy and the satyr-play developed were associated, _at the period when they became truly dramatic_, with the worship of Dionysus, and _at that same period_ Dionysus was as truly a “god” (as distinct from a “hero”) as any that the Greeks ever knew. To abandon these plain facts and others like them in favor of vague theorizing on religious origins will never bring us satisfactory results. Now, in his _Origin of Tragedy_ Ridgeway, who may serve as a protagonist of this method, recognized only the satyr-play as Dionysiac in origin, and attempted to dissociate tragedy and the dithyramb from that deity and to derive them from ceremonies at the tombs of heroes, i.e., from ancestor worship. I cannot conceive that many classical scholars will believe him to have succeeded in this attempt. Ridgeway evidently foresaw this and tried to forestall it by saying that “as Dionysus himself had almost certainly once been only a Thracian hero, even if it were true that Tragedy had risen from his cult, its real ultimate origin would still be in the worship of the dead” (_op. cit._, p. 93). What, then, was the point in his conceding that satyric drama was Dionysiac in origin? In that case the ultimate origins of tragedy and satyric drama must, after all, have been identical, and the differences in their origins must have consisted only of the minor divergencies in the final stage of their development. In practice, how does this result differ from the more usual procedure, which ignores the ultimate sources and concentrates attention upon the last stage of development? So far as I can see, it would differ only to the extent that the underlying religion of both genres would now be understood to