The Drama Festivals

Athens was a community of shared experiences and there could hardly have been a more communal activity than drama. The drama festivals were celebrations of Dionysus, god of fertility and sexual abandon. His festivities, throughout Greece, were ones in which conventions were thrown aside and women, in particular, took the chance to engage in wild dancing among the pine forests. Traditionally the cult worship of Dionysus involved participants changing identity and wearing masks. In Athens, however, the celebrations of the god became more formal. At the Great Dionysia, held each spring, Dionysus’ statue, alongside phalluses, symbols of the sexual licence acceptable to the god, was carried in open procession to the theatre just below the Acropolis. Then the city and its visitors congregated to hear a range of dramatic performances in which poets competed with each other for prizes. (An estimated 14,000 people, including 1,200 actors and singers, participated in the Great Dionysia, probably the largest gathering in the Greek world outside the

Olympic Games.) The Dionysia had an added importance as a propaganda exercise—it was the occasion at which tribute from the empire was presented to the city and the ten generals met to offer libations. A smaller festival, the Lenaea, was held in January, a time of year when travel was too difficult for foreigners to attend. Drama was a fusion of religion, democratic pride, and creative thought.

The supreme examples of Athenian dramatic art are the tragedies. (See Pat Easterling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, Cambridge and New York, 1997.) The origin of the word is obscure. The Greek tragoidia means ‘goat song, and ingenious but inconclusive attempts have been made to link the plays to sacrifice of a goat or the winning of a goat as a prize. The roots of drama appear to lie in the late 500s after Eleutherae, a town on the border of Attica, had been incorporated into Athenian territory. Eleutherae had its own important festival to Dionysus ‘of the black goatskin’ and the rituals of this festival appear to have been transferred to Athens, where they were performed in public, as a means of confirming the integration of Eleutherae into the city-state. At some point one of the chorus appears to have stood aside from the rituals to explain their relevance to the watching audience. The next step, attributed to the Athenian tragedian Aeschylus, was to introduce a second ‘actor, and thus allow scenes between actors with the chorus left to introduce themes or comments on events as they unfolded. Sophocles added a third, allowing even more complex interactions between characters.

By the fifth century the rituals of the drama festivals were well established. Each festival began with twenty dithyrambs, lyric poems sung by a chorus of fifty. Each of the ten tribes of Athens entered a men’s and boys’ chorus. Then came the tragedies. Three poets were selected for each festival and they each produced three plays that could be linked in theme. Each trilogy was followed by a satyr play. The satyrs were the companions of Dionysus, and with large pendulous phalluses attached to their waists were represented in wild frolics. Finally, on the fourth day of the festival, five different poets offered a comedy each. The plays were financed by the choregos, a rich citizen who was honoured for taking this role, an element of aristocratic patronage that continued into democratic times. The final result has been described, by the classical historian J. K. Davies, as an amalgamation of upper-class lyric poetry with out-of-town bucolic Dionysiac ritual to produce entertainment of a type that hugely appealed to the newly enfranchised citizenry.

The earliest theatre to survive from the early fifth century is at Thorikos in southern Attica. The performances were held on a circular dancing floor, the orchestra, with a backdrop behind, the skene (hence the English ‘scene’), which housed a dressing-room. The audience watched from the theatron (the name given to any space where spectators sat and the origin of the English word ‘theatre’), seated in a semicircle, later provided with stone seats. The Theatre of Dionysus, on the southern slope of the Acropolis, was first given stone seats in the fourth century and there is a magnificent example of the same date at Epidaurus, its acoustics perfect for even the highest of its 14,000 seats. Those seats remaining at Athens are Roman, but one can still sit today in the Theatre of Dionysus and read a speech from a tragedy on the very spot where it was first performed. Actors traditionally wore masks, and

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Many of these were stylized so that stock characters were easily recognizable. Smaller theatres were placed throughout Attica and plays could be repeated or revived in them.

The settings of tragedy, with rare exceptions such as Aeschylus’ contemporary play The Persians, were in the myths with which Greek minds were saturated. The poet would adapt the story to suit his ends, but he could be sure that the audience would know something of the main characters and the events that unfolded. The theme usually centred on the tortured relationship between human beings and the gods. The human characters in Greek tragedy are often trapped. They have either committed some unforgivable sin or they are forced to choose between two honourable but incompatible courses of action. Either way they will offend a sacred code and are doomed. The dramatists did not take sides in the daunting dilemmas they portrayed. Aeschylus treated the Persians, in his play of that name, with scrupulous fairness, even though his audience was sitting among the ruins of the city the Persians had sacked only eight years before. The skill lay in allowing the full horror of the story gently but inexorably to unfold.

What is lost from the surviving plays is their music. Tunes and songs were normally passed on by example and so most have vanished. Music (from mousike, the art of the muses) was an essential ingredient in the drama festivals. The dithyramb consisted largely of dancing and singing and the tragedies and comedies were accompanied by flutes. Sophocles, in fact, was first known for his singing and dancing, and a legend says that it was he who led the paean (the name given to a cult hymn to Apollo) after the great victory of Salamis.