 The word tragedy comes from the ancient Greek words for he goat and to sing, so literally a tragedy is the song of a goat. Scholars aren't sure exactly why, but they have a couple of theories. Number one, in ancient Athens where tragedy was first performed on stage, Dionysius, the Greek god to whom the plays were dedicated, was associated with satyrs, a sort of mythological goat. Or two, goats might have been sacrificed during the performance of tragedies in ancient Athens. Or three, a goat might have been the prize for writing a winning tragedy. We don't know which one of these answers is the real one. In spite of this mystery though, we're stuck with the word tragedy to refer to a narrative arc in which things start out in order and end in disarray. In his poetics, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle defined tragedy as a morally ambiguous genre in which a noble hero goes from good fortune to bad. For Aristotle, the tragic hero can't be totally evil or purely good, but instead must be a character between these two extremes, whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty, also known as ha-martia, that is, by a fatal flaw. The point of Greek tragedy is to use this morally ambiguous character's death to create an emotional effect in its audience, a purifying sort of emotional release that Aristotle terms catharsis. In ancient Greece, tragic theater was a ritual performance where the negative emotions of a society could be purged and the end result had political goals, a better functioning Athenian democracy. But Aristotle died over 2,000 years ago and the definition, purpose and focus of tragedy has changed a bit in that time. In ancient Greece, tragedy was a ritual performance of the downfall of a great man, usually a king or nobleman, brought low because of some sort of fault. In the medieval period, tragedy was concerned with noble or illustrious men too, but these tales usually took on a Christian moral valence. In Shakespeare's tragedies, which are some of English literature's most famous, the tragic action nearly always focuses on one central character, like Hamlet, King Lear or Othello. But Shakespeare's tragedies also focus on how broader political consequences follow as a result of a great man's death. The fall of Denmark and Hamlet, for instance, are the Ottoman-European political conflict at the heart of Othello. Modern tragedy, however, is a little different. It doesn't tend to focus on just great men and their political actions. Instead, it focuses on the middle class. We might think of Arthur Miller's death of a salesman as a good example. Modern tragedies might be ironic or sarcastic too, playing on two millennia of the idea of tragedy to both seriously entertain the drama of life while making light of it, and giving readers of all classes an opportunity to connect with and share in the emotions and political import of private devastation. When Willie Lohman dies in the death of a salesman, the tragedy is just as much about his failings as it is about the failure of mid-century economic and political systems. So, just as the origins of the word tragedy are ambiguous, so too does a sort of ambiguity and flexibility define the genre of tragedy. However, by and large, if a narrative begins with everything in order and ends with everything in disarray, you can probably classify it as a tragedy.