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meter and vocabulary seem to originate in choral lyric. How these have come to be associated with one another remains a mystery however.

Speculating on the problem, Scodel writes that:

Three innovations must have taken place for tragedy as we know it to exist. First, somebody created a new kind of performance by combining a speaker with a chorus and putting both speaker and chorus in disguise as characters in a story from legend or history. Second, this performance was made part of the City Dionysia at Athens. Third, regulations defined how it was to be managed and paid for. It is theoretically possible that all these were simultaneous, but it is not likely.

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