[2] Inspired by The Golden Bough, Gilbert Murray in 1913 proclaimed the killing of the year spirit as the "orthodox view of the origins of tragedy.
The year Daimon waxes proud and is slain by his enemy, who becomes thereby a murderer, and must in turn perish".
[3] A decade later, however, the excessively rigid application of Frazer's thesis to Greek tragedy had already begun to be challenged;[4] and by the sixties Robert Fagles could state that "The ritual origins of tragedy are totally in doubt, often hotly debated".
[6] Particularly affected by Émile Durkheim was F. M. Cornford, who used the French sociologist's notion of collective representations to analyze social forms of religious, artistic, philosophical, and scientific expression in classical Greece.
Other significant influences on the group, particularly on Harrison, were Darwin, James Frazer, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.