This entry reminds us, as it no doubt reminded its first readers, that the word
drama properly meant a '(decisive) act', deriving as a "concrete" verbal noun in -ma from the verb
dra/w 'act, achieve' (
delta 1488,
delta 1489). The semantic history of the word to mean a play acted in a theatre is unclear. The ancient word for an actor,
u(pokri/ths, means an 'answerer', referring to his role in the earliest tragedies in answering the choral songs of a chorus. In this entry I translate the related noun as 'playing a speaking part', but by the time of the Suda it meant no more than dramatic performing. It also meant the 'declaiming' of an orator, and this meaning might suit the citation better than "in imitation as in acting a part."
Some scholars link the word to the use of the verb
dra/w for performing a sacrifice (LSJ II, web address 1; cf.
delta 1508,
delta 1510), a ritual that almost certainly lay at the origin of the first dramas.
1Likewise or similarly in Photius and other lexica. ↩2From the scholia to Aristophanes, Frogs 902; in a slightly different and better form ("finding an opportunity to deceive" rather than "he planned to deceive") at alpha 4235, with a false attribution to Aristophanes, in a discussion of the word for 'smart, witty, urbane' (cf. alpha 4234, beta 488 note 1). ↩3Eunapius fr. 4 FHG (fr. hist. 43.3 Blockley), more fully at epsilon 2143. (See also alpha 4641.) "This" is an error for "to this," tou/tw|. For Musonius see generally mu 1306; for Eunapius, OCD(4) p.548.