Entertainment / Literature / Dionysia: The Athenian religious festivals celebrating Dionysus in March-April. Dionysus (Roman Bacchus) was the god of intoxication, celebration, powerful emotion, and loss of self-control. At his festival, priests would sacrifice goats on the theater stage, and then actors would perform tragic plays in honor of the god, interspersed with brief comedies. (The word tragedy itself may originate in the Greek tragos--a goat song, or possibly in a pun on 'billygoat singers.') See tragedy, Lenaia.
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Entertainment / Literature / Lenaia: An Athenian religious festival occurring shortly after the Dionysia. While the Dionysia focused on tragedies, with only short interludes of comedy, in the Lenaia, comedies were performed as the main e MORE