THE CYCLOPS
doubtful.4 On the whole, scholars have preferred to believe
that both satyr-drama and tragedy are independent develop-
ments of Dionysiac ritual and that satyr-drama was probably
adopted by the dramatist Pratinas from a Peloponnesian
source and attached to the Attic festivals. Alternatively, it is
held that the double aspect of Dionysiac ritual—mourning for
the dead god and joyous celebration at his resurrection—
accounts for the connection between tragedy and the satyr-
play. On this theory tragedy contains the agon of the dying
god, while the satyr-play, like comedy, exhibits the happy
celebration for the reborn god and the ritual of the sacred
marriage and rounds off the complete drama of the rite
in a sportive coda. The presence in the Cyclops of an attenu-
ated komos and a hinted mock (male) marriage between
Silenus and Polyphemus offers some slight evidence for the
theory. But it is this very attenuation of the ritual element in
the play that reminds us that a theory of formal origins does
not really explain what we need to know—the literary use and
the meaning of the developed form. An account of origins
may perhaps explain the conventions of a given form, but it
will seldom explain the conscious literary deployment of those
conventions.
For the rest our information is tantalizingly slight. Thus we
know that the satyr-plays were briefer than the tragedies (the
Cyclops is the shortest of extant plays); they had their own
peculiar choral dance, the sikinnis, and they allowed, in pros-
ody and diction, a very slight relaxation from tragic standards
in the direction of colloquial speech. For its material satyr-
drama drew upon the same sources in myth and epos as
tragedy. Thus the Oresteia appears to have been followed by
the Proteus, a satyr-play dealing with Menelaus' Egyptian
adventure with the Old Man of the Sea, while the Cyclops is
a conflation of the Polyphemus episode from the ninth book
of the Odyssey with the story of the capture of Dionysus by
Lydian pirates.5 Both the chorus of satyrs and its "father"
4. Cf. A. W, Pickard-Cambridge, Dithyramb, Tragedy and Com-
edy (Oxford, 1927), p. 124.
5. Cf. Homeric Hymn to Dionysus.