Tragoidia is attested from the classical period for the dramatic genre performed at the Dionysia. Its compound of tragos and oide is uncontested. Ancient and modern explanations diverge: Parian Marble-era tradition connects early contests with a goat prize, other accounts invoke goat sacrifice or goat-costumed satyr choruses, and Aristotle derives tragedy from satyric performance without settling the goat.
Each generation picks its favorite goat. Classicists who favor the prize theory cite contest inscriptions, ritualists favor the sacrifice, and theater historians favor the satyr play. The debate survives because the evidence is genuinely thin and the answer is genuinely lost.
A minority reading holds the goat song name preserves a memory of the genre's origin in animal-mask ritual, making tragedy a tamed sacrifice rather than an invented art. Evocative, thinly evidenced, and permanently unfalsifiable.
The most serious art form we have carries a barnyard in its name, and two and a half millennia of scholarship have not settled which barnyard. What else noble has a ridiculous receipt we lost?