Tragedy may have developed from the dithyramb, the choral cult song of the god Dionysus. Arion of Lesbos, who is said to have worked at Corinth in about 600, is credited with being the first to write serious poetry in this medium. Thespis (6th century BC), possibly combining with dithyrambs something of the Attic ritual of Dionysus of Eleutherae, is credited with having invented tragedy by introducing an actor who conversed with the leader of the chorus. These performances became a regular feature of the great festival of Dionysus at Athens about 534 BC. Aeschylus introduced a second actor, though his drama was still centred in the chorus, to whom, rather than to each other, his actors directed themselves.

At the tragic contests at the Dionysia each of three competing poets produced three tragedies and a satyr play, or burlesque, in which there was a chorus of satyrs. Aeschylus, unlike later poets, usually made of his three tragedies a dramatic whole, treating a single story, as in the Oresteia, the only complete trilogy that has survived. His main concern was not dramatic excitement and the portrayal of character but rather the presentation of human action in relation to the overriding purpose of the gods.

His successor was Sophocles, who abandoned for the most part the practice of writing in trilogies, reduced the importance of the chorus, and introduced a third actor. His work too was based on myth, but whereas Aeschylus tried to make more intelligible the working of the divine purpose in its effects on man's life, Sophocles was readier to accept the gods as given and to reveal the values of life as it can be lived within the traditional framework of moral standards. Sophocles' skill in control of dramatic movement and his mastery of speech were devoted to the presentation of the decisive, usually tragic, hours in the lives of men and women at once "heroic" and human, such as Oedipus.)

Euripides, last of the three great tragic poets, belonged to a different world. When he came to manhood, traditional beliefs were scrutinized in the light of what was claimed by Sophist philosophers, not always unjustifiably, to be reason; and this was a test to which much of Greek religion was highly vulnerable. The whole structure of society and its values was called into question. This movement of largely destructive criticism was clearly not uncongenial to Euripides. But as a dramatic poet he was bound to draw his material from myths, which, for him, had to a great extent lost their meaning. He adapted them to make room for contemporary problems, which were his real interest. Many of his plays suffer from a certain internal disharmony, yet his sensibilities and his moments of psychological insight bring him far closer than most Greek writers to modern taste. There are studies, wonderfully sympathetic, of wholly unsympathetic actions in the Medea and Hippolytus; a vivid presentation of the beauty and horror of religious ecstasy in the Bacchants; in the Electra, a reduction to absurdity of the values of a myth that justifies matricide; in Helen and Iphigenia Among the Taurians, melodrama with a faint flavour of romance.