Out of sight to the right was the Temple of Dionysos and a yards long chopping block of an altar where upwards of 200 cattle were sacrificed to Dionysos, roasted, and then distributed among the 14,000 Athenians in attendance. The festivities were preceded by an indoor night of play previews and a morning parade  of all classes into the sacred precincts.

“Greek Theatre in the Time of Sophokles”

An excerpt from the introduction to Robert Bagg’s The Oedipus Plays, with notes and introductions coauthored by Mary Bagg.

For seven or eight days each spring, during the fifth-century heyday of Greek theatre, 1 Athenians flocked to the temple grounds sacred to Dionysos on the southern slope of the acropolis. After dark on the first day, a parade of young men hefted a giant phallic icon of the god into the nearby theater, having just transported it from a temple on the outskirts of the city where hymns had been sung in its honor. The “introduction” of this icon--a huge wooden shaft festooned with garlands of ivy and a mask of the god’s face--initiated a dramatic festival, the City, or Great Dionysia, and proclaimed the festival’s origins in Dionysian myth and rural celebrations of the god. 2

    The shaft also recalled an embarrassing (surely mythical) moment in the city’s history. When worshippers of Dionysos first attempted to organize his cult in Athens, citizens rejected the upstart god. To punish them--and demonstrate his power--the offended Dionysos imposed permanent erections on all Athenian men. The condition was relieved with the city’s subsequent agreement to worship him, and on the advice of an oracle, afflicted men manufactured large numbers of outsized phalloi to confirm their devotion. 3 Athens eventually developed a healthy relationship with the god. Certain aspects of Dionysiac cult worship dovetailed with the city’s burgeoning democracy: 4 an emphasis on collective activity; an outlook that valued life’s pleasures; rituals that diminished barriers of class, gender, and age; a propensity to punish enemies.

    Some ancient Greeks questioned (and modern scholars have, as well) why Dionysos presided over Athenian theatre. “Nothing to do with Dionysos!” was (and is) the doubters’ cry. 5 But the role-playing, mask-wearing, life-enhancing properties of drama have an undeniable affinity with the god who liberates his devotees from their ordinary lives. The prevalence of satyr drama is the most powerful evidence of Dionysiac influence on the Athenian festival. 6 Each of the three playwrights selected in a given year to present three of their tragedies also staged a satyr play. 7 Song and dance were intrinsic to both dramatic forms. But the chorus of satyrs (those mythical followers of Dionysos, “playful, violent, sensual creatures, part-human, part-animal”) performed in a wilder key--in “vehement contrast with the tone, style, music and costume of the choruses of tragedy.” 8

    But satyr plays were not grotesque afterpieces merely intended for comic relief. The raucous carousing of the satyr chorus put the audience in touch with the rural energies of the Dionysiac cult and with their own animal natures. For the chorus members who danced as devotees of the god--almost certainly the same actors who had just performed more soberly in the tragic dramas--the experience allowed them to embody, literally, a part of the worship itself. The satyr play, a culmination of a playwright’s four-part presentation, brought Dionysiac ritual center stage. 11

    If one Dionysian theme erupts into most tragedies (and some comedies as well) it is extreme, often frenzied, and occasionally insane behavior by both men and gods. Medea kills her children, Zeus tortures a fellow immortal, and Ajax commits suicide. Pentheus’ mother and her sisters tear him to pieces at a god’s command. Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter. Klytemnestra kills her husband and in turn is killed by her son. Poseidon, disguised as a bull, spooks the horses pulling Hippolytos’ chariot and causes it to crash, leaving him a dying wreck. Corrosive poison, in which Herakles’ wife soaked the cloak she gave him as a gift, dissolves his skin. What better-credentialed candidate than Dionysos--the god who inspires the release of all inhibitions and whose vengeance is terrifying--to preside over such savagery?

    On the morning after the young men installed Dionysos’ icon within the theater precincts, a much larger procession arrived, some carrying other phallic images of the god. 12 A cross section of Athenian society brought provisions

    Performances began at dawn and must have lasted well into the afternoon. The 14,000 or more Athenians present very likely watched in a state of pleasurable anxiety. Whatever else it did to entertain, move, and awe, Athenian tragedy dramatized human vulnerability to the gods. Athenian audiences expected this essentially religious experience, 15 and that expectation separates their ability to appreciate the tragedies from our own. Modern audiences are least receptive to a feature of Greek tragedy that was constant and essential to the ancients--mournful keening that lingers on ruined lives and the disasters inflicted by the gods. Athenians wept openly during these scenes, of which Plato thoroughly disapproved. He warned against both the playwrights’ wringing of the audience’s emotions and the audience’s enjoyment of such unwarranted grief. 16 Nightmarish creatures also caused extreme visceral reactions. The sudden arrival of the snake-haired Furies in the original staging of Aeschylus’ Eumenides caused women in the audience to miscarry. 17

    Athenian soldiers captured in 413 by the Syracusan army received special treatment (and were often set free) if they could teach or sing choral odes from Euripides to their Sicilian captors--who even then were ardent fans of soaring arias. 18 Athenian politicians deliberately scheduled the Dionsysia after winter storms had abated so that foreign visitors could attend, and they orchestrated festival ceremonies to impress the Mediterranean world with more than their city’s flair for music and drama. 19 Indeed, Athens exhibited sheer civic and imperial power: by displaying the treasure received during the year from its subjugated cities; by parading in battle armor the sons of soldiers killed in the wars; and by awarding gold crowns to citizens whose achievements it wished to honor. Theater attendance itself was closely linked to citizenship; local town counsels awarded the price of a festival ticket to citizens in good standing. 20 A herald read aloud the names of slaves whose masters had dedicated them to Dionysos, thus setting them free; the ten generals who conducted Athens’ military campaigns poured a libation to the god. In the front row (eventually on stone chairs, some of which exist today) sat priests and priestesses of the city’s chief religious cults, as well as the gold-crowned, honored citizens. Members of the Boulê (the five hundred-member council) and the ephebes, or newly inducted soldiers, filled ranks of wooden seats, while the city’s tribal units congregated in their own wedge-shaped sections. The theater’s bowl seethed with a heady, sometimes unruly, brew of military, political and religious energy. 21

    Both drama and democratic politics rely on two or more characters that face off in front of an involved audience. Hillsides, whose slopes were wide and gentle enough to seat a crowd, made perfect settings for such encounters and were the earliest theaters. Ancient roads that widened below the hills, or open ground at the hill’s base, provided suitable, flat performance space. In such settings, archeological findings and the written record tell us, people gathered to celebrate a rite, perform dithyrambs, meet a crisis, hold a legal proceeding, or join in grief. Such sites (along with every city’s marketplace, the agora) were the main arenas of community life. Usually a temple dedicated to Dionysos or some other god stood nearby. Inscribed stone markers along roads leading to the theaters commemorated local victors: athletes, actors, playwrights, singers, and the plays’ producers, or choragoi. 22 Theaters, in every sense, were open to the flow of life.

    More formal theaters were hewn from the rugged and already dramatic Greek countryside; archaeologists have excavated hillsides all over the Greek

world that were architecturally transformed, most spectacularly those at Delphi and Epidauros (the latter constructed in the fourth century). Besides the Theater of Dionysos, Athens possessed several theater venues for democratic confrontation: the great assembly of all-male citizens (the Ekklesia) met to pass laws at the Pnyx hill; the five hundred Boulê members convened (in the building called the Bouleterion) to set the Assembly’s agenda.

    But the rural components of the earliest theaters--and the Greek names that reflect their countryside origins--were incorporated into these urban settings and designs. Two roads that led into the Theater of Dionysos, for instance, connected it to Athens’ population center to the northeast and to the sacred city of Eleusis to the northwest. Dancers and actors used these roads (called the east parodos and the west parodos) as passageways, entering from and exiting toward destinations in which fictive and real topography sometimes coincided. (In Antigone, characters going to or from the battlefield would leave via the west parodos toward open country, while city-bound characters exited via the east.) Theatron, the root of our word theater, translates as “viewing place” and hence designated the curved and banked seating area. Orchestra was literally “the place for dancing.” The costumed actors emerged from and retired to the skenê, a word that originally meant, and literally was in the rural theaters, a tent. As theaters evolved to become more permanent structures, the skenê developed as well--into a “stage building” whose painted façade changed, like a mask, with the characters’ various habitats. Depending on the drama, the skenê could assume the countenance of a king’s grand palace, the Kyklops’ cave, a temple to the gods, or (reverting to its original form) an army commander’s tent.

    Debate, the democratic Athenian art practiced and perfected by politicians, litigators, and thespians--and relished and judged by voters, juries, and audiences--flourished in theatrical venues. Debate permeated daily Athenian life. Thucydides used it as an effective technique to narrate history and explain its participants’ motives by reproducing the speeches of politicians, generals, and diplomats who argued the case for a particular policy or a strategy in war. Many of Thucydides’ dialogues are indeed highly charged. 23 Plato, recognizing the open-ended, exploratory power of the agon, or verbal battle, wrote his philosophy almost entirely in dramatic form. The agon was simply the most readily available version of the Greeks’ addiction to all forms of competition, and it remains to this day our most powerful medium for testing and judging issues across the spectrum of civilized life; superior arguments emerge from debate and dialogue, and in them character is laid bare. Sold on the value of conducting their affairs in dramatic mode, the Athenians grasped the potential of artfully composed (and performed) drama--to tell exciting stories, to rouse healthy emotions, and to heighten awareness of the dangerous issues heroes and ordinary folk, past and present, must face.

    In official Athenian civic parlance playwrights were called didaskoloi, or “teachers,” to indicate their practical role in coaching lines, blocking actors, and rehearsing musical numbers with the dancers. But the plays these didaskoloi wrote delivered the most powerful lessons. Consider the “Hubris Ode” of Oedipus the King, in which the Chorus distinguishes between two kinds of intense ambition. The ode voices disgust for an overreaching tyrant full of hubris, or “the will to violate,” who scales the heights and stumbles to his death. But it immediately follows with praise for a healthier exercise of competitive will in public life, the kind that sustains and protects cities:

    But there's another fighting will

    I ask god never to destroy––

    the will that makes our city thrive. (879-881/1015-17)

Even a dramatic voice from another era had the power to stop a passerby in his tracks. The poet Simonides wrote the following couplet to be inscribed on the funeral monument for the three hundred Spartan warriors who were killed, in 480, defending the pass at Thermopolae from the Persian invaders:

    Stranger, go tell the Lakedemonians: we lie

    here still, obedient to their commands. 24

    The care Greeks took in siting and building their theaters measures their reverence and respect for dramatic form. Good acoustics were indispensable in projecting dialogue and choral song to audiences of thousands, especially since the intonation of an actor’s voice could drastically change the meaning of some ancient Greek words--one slight variation of a vowel might render an entire passage ambiguous. Accordingly, the Greeks constructed technological marvels from earth and stone. Director Peter Sellars sees these theaters as giant ears carved into the sides of mountains, ears capable of receiving intact both whispers of despair and roars of pain--in short, communal listening and transmitting devices of still unsurpassed simplicity and fidelity. 25

    The written dramas and their stone amplifiers survive, but we’re still uncertain as to how country dances and dithyrambs enacting incidents from myth evolved into the beautifully structured and remarkably pertinent plays we possess. In the mid-sixth century a Greek actor named Thespis might have made the crucial leap from narrative to dialogue by speaking in the first person as Dionysos, for instance, or as a Homeric hero like Hector or Agamemnon, and then engaging the chorus in a conversation. Some scholars question ancient texts that claim Thespis was the first performer to dramatize a narrative, but the Parian Marble identifies him as the winner of a dramatic competition in Athens c. 534. The prize that year was a goat. Since tragedy translates literally as “goat-dance,” it’s possible that the modest reward for which actors competed lent the great art form its name.

    Could tragic drama as we know it actually have come, not from the choral dithyramb, but from some surprising unknown source? P. E. Easterling explains why the problem might be insoluble:

    The early history of performance at the Dionysia … is a notoriously unclear

    and disputed area, with almost no reliable evidence to work from. One …

    [fact] that is definitely known is that satyrs in Dionysiac cult … predate the

    introduction of plays … into the Dionysia, but there is no record of the

    process whereby the tragic competition came to be defined as a contest of

    three tragedies and one satyr play. 26

Jean-Pierre Vernant sums up the situation succinctly: we can and do know tragedy’s “antecedents” but not its “origins.” 27 Still, tragedy’s raw material, its immediate relatives and “contributing institutions” are not in dispute; they all derive from and inform Athenian political, cultural, and religious life. Every surviving playwright, including the comedian Aristophanes, confronted aspects of the agonizing and not easily resolvable political and moral problems that beset Athens. The debates and speeches of the assembly and the law courts honed (and sometimes echoed) the plays’ verbal infighting. Carved figures of gods and mortals (and painted ones that enlivened pottery) inspired and reflected the masks worn by actors. The frequent public recitations of Homeric poems provided a world-view in which personal honor, compulsory retaliation, and meddling gods were prominent.

    Structurally, Athenian tragedy was somewhat formulaic but never static: five to seven dramatic scenes usually separated by four to six choral interludes, or odes, although Sophokles’ Philoktetes had but one. The  odes, performed originally by twelve male members (until Sophokles, always a theatrical innovator increased the number to fifteen) were most likely accompanied by rhythmic, dance-like movements and by music of an aulos, a reed instrument similar to the oboe. The Chorus, in unison or represented by its Leader, participated in the spoken dialogue with the characters. In Aeschylus’ earliest tragedies two masked actors were hired to perform all the dramatic roles, so that each exited several times to return in a different guise. Later, when he and other poets employed three actors, the opportunities for complex conversation increased. (Occasional additions to the cast, or “mute” stand-ins, allowed characters to remain on stage for long periods of time to witness, but not verbally participate in, the action.) The dramatic episodes themselves included formal ingredients: several long expository speeches in which characters voiced their opinions on crucial issues; intervals of stichomythia, or rapid-fire one-liners exchanged by two, or sometimes three, characters; at least one speech by a Messenger, almost always the bearer of bad news who vividly described disastrous events that happened offstage; the kommos, an extended polyphonic passage by characters who grieve for what they’ve lost. In the threnos, the concluding portion of the tragedy, the characters discussed and concluded their suffering or, in the case of Euripides’ later tragedies, their escape from disaster and suffering, the divine source of which was sometimes explicit and at other times only implied.

    The radical strangeness of ancient Greek divinities, so different from their Judeo/Christian counterpart in significant respects, is a potential source of confusion for modern audiences. Though gods from both traditions could denounce, inhibit, and punish forbidden conduct, Greek gods, unlike those from the Hebraic tradition, represented the full range of human engagement with life. A vast, intricate network of myth, poems, and plays showed the gods in action--and enhanced the Greeks’ ability to comprehend and deal with virtually anything they might encounter in their own lives from birth until death. The gods provided imaginative writers with an emotional, intellectual and moral vocabulary: Zeus is the fatherly source of power and authority, Ares the hated god of warriors. Athena is the patroness of the wise and clever, Aphrodite of the wanton and the fecund. Eros provokes desire and encourages its fulfillment; Dionysos intoxicates and deranges via life-transforming fluids (blood, wine, sap, and semen). Artemis is both huntress and midwife; Poseidon gives men power over horses and the sea. Hephaestus inspires the craftsman, Hermes the news-bringer. Apollo is the source of human destiny and its historian, artistic creativity.

    The typical tragic plot, judging from the thirty-three surviving plays, dramatizes the gods’ destruction of a household or an extended family. 28 The range of issues and human predicaments explored is both exotic and familiar: the consequences of sexual desire and adultery; the futility of resistance to a god; disputes over unburied warriors; the ravages of guilt on an individual conscience; sacrifice of innocent lives; and stark issues of justice and morality, such as the treatment of defeated peoples by their conquerors, a recurring theme of Euripides. Each playwright altered the mythical stories he inherited and reused--sometimes radically, and frequently with both ingenuity and genius. As we will see in the case of Sophokles’ Theban plays, these alterations seem inspired by an understanding of human potential and responsibility that deepened during his lifetime.

    Tragedy in time became a mode of learning in which there was substantial give and take between the city and her playwrights. The archon, an elected official, chose the playwrights--and most likely listened to influential citizens who lobbied for favorite poets or for popular stories and themes. Though it seems that prior censorship was rarely a factor, playwrights could get into trouble. Aeschylus was tried for revealing sacred Eleusinian mysteries. Phrynichos was heavily fined for depressing the festival audience. His play, The Capture of Miletus, reawakened memories of a massacre perpetrated by the Persians against a valued ally, and the assembly banned any future performance of the tragedy. 29 Euripides was excoriated (by Aristophanes, repeatedly) for presenting women as treacherous, overbold, and oversexed. He rewrote Hippolytos in apparent response to such criticism. In the first version Phaidra directly propositions her stepson. In the revised version, the one we possess, Phaidra becomes so desperately lovesick that her nurse begs Hippolytos to “cure” his stepmother by sleeping with her; his refusal proves deadly to both.

    Ancient Greek playwrights gravitated to the worst possible violence mortals could suffer and commit, and for the Greeks the most feared and hated crimes were incest and parricide. The story of Oedipus organized these fears in their most powerful, concentrated form. Sophokles first used the Oedipus myth (most likely, but not certainly) in Antigone. He returned to Oedipus twice more, each time shifting his attention backward in time from Antigone’s death to trace how incest and kin murder worked themselves out through three generations of the Labdakid clan. We see Oedipus, his mother, and his children internalize the deadly grip of fate, so that the greater interest that links all three plays becomes the psychological distortion that Oedipus’ “crimes” impose on himself and his blood kin. The evil mechanism by which Fate or the gods harm families becomes less interesting, particularly to a modern audience, than the characters’ experience of living through the havoc the gods wreak--they fear it, suffer it, and wait for it to strike again.

    Oedipus, for instance, is compelled to learn new meanings for words that name his closest relationships: son, husband, parent, friend, enemy. His children become his siblings; his wife his mother; his protector his destroyer. He also must cease for a time to trust the justice of the gods. As he discovers his horrific new identities during the final phase of Oedipus the King, all he can do is proclaim his disgust at the very source of human life. Oedipus extrapolates from his own and his parents’ marriage to all marriages, and he no longer conceives of marriage, at its best a joyful, nurturing and hopeful partnership, as anything but a destroyer of humankind. 30 Vernant believes that such disorienting discoveries involving language are central to Greek tragedy, and that the dilemma is salutary:

    [T]he tragic message, when understood, is precisely that there are zones of

    opacity and incommunicability in the words that men exchange. Even as he

    sees the protagonists clinging exclusively to one meaning, and thus blinded,

    tearing themselves apart or destroying themselves, the spectator must

    understand that there really are two or more possible meanings. The

    language becomes transparent and the tragic message gets across to him only

    provided he makes the discovery that words, values, men themselves, are

    ambiguous, that the universe is one of conflict, only if he relinquishes his

    earlier convictions, accepts a problematic vision of the world and, through

    the dramatic spectacle, himself acquires a tragic consciousness. 31

    Aristotle provides anecdotal evidence that Sophokles’ could step back and view his own personal conduct during a violent political era with the complex awareness that he builds so consistently into the language of his plays. As Aristotle tells it, Sophokles, one of ten elder statesmen elected to rescue Athens from the aftermath of her catastrophic invasion of Sicily, had just agreed to replace the democratic assembly of male citizens with an oligarchy of four hundred aristocrats. One of the new oligarchs asked Sophokles if he had approved abolishing the assembly, the founding institution whose recent folly and incompetence ultimately led to Athens’ catastrophic decline:

    “Sophokles answered, ‘Yes.’”

    “Why? Did you not think it a terrible decision?”

    “Yes,” he said.

    “So were you not doing something terrible?”

    “That’s right,” he said. “But there was no better alternative.” 32

There was no better alternative to Athens’ defeated democracy than an aristocratic junta! This rueful admission, coming as Athens’ and Sophokles’ great century winds down, lacks the high drama of the poet’s best dialogue but has its own deep sadness. And it reminds us that for the Greeks, honest talk was truth’s home ground.  Nonetheless, it’s bracing to hear the Sophokles we know from his tragedies--a realistic, self-aware intelligence--speak in person from an ancient text.

(To read more about the life of Sophokles, click here.)

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1 Unless otherwise noted, all dates will be BCE (Before the Common Era). Spelling note: theatre refers to dramatic performance as an art, theater to the physical space in which drama is performed.

2 An icon of the god, called Dionysos Eleuthereus, was first brought to Athens from the temple at Eleutherai, north of the city, possibly as early as the sixth century, and probably by a missionary of the Dionysiac cult. Its permanent home in the fifth century was the temple of Dionysos within the theater precincts. Shortly before the festival, young men of military age moved the icon to a different temple on the road to Eleutherai so that the processional back to Athens would reenact its first arrival in the city. Pickard-Cambridge, 57-62. See also Csapo and Slater, 105-06 for a discussion of the procession and photographs of ancient vases depicting the icon (plates 19A and 19B).

3 Pickard-Cambridge, 37. Earlier rural ceremonies of the cult typically enacted plots in which Dionysos’ divine wrath punished human resistance to him, but they also enticed the god to ensure the fertility of their fields and their women.

4 The city’s gradual adoption of democratic governance began with the liberalizing reforms of Solon in the mid-sixth century and continued in earnest, after the last tyrants were finally deposed, with Kleisthenes’ widening of the electorate in the late sixth century. Democracy, Athenian style, was fully achieved in the mid-fifth century when Perikles expanded the assembly and granted citizenship and voting rights to every free male of military age whose parents were both Athenians.

5 The late John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin, the editors of Nothing To Do With Dionysos?, argue that dramatic festivals had everything to do with the god.

6 Easterling, 38.

7 The most important of Athens’ nine chief magistrates, the “eponymous archon” for whom the year was named, chose the playwrights; the criteria he used, other than talent, remain obscure. Csapo and Slater, 105.

8 Easterling, 38. Besides Euripides’ Kyklops and a large portion of Sophokles’ The Trackers, no other satyr play survives in complete form or with a date.

9 Easterling, 41, quotes François Lissarague, whose interpretation of satyr drama is based on the study of sixth- and fifth-century vase painting.

10 The Kyklops opens with Silenus, the horse-eared, -tailed, and -hoofed leader of the satyrs, pouring a libation of goat’s milk for Dionysos and praying that the god not take offense. Passages in quotes are from my translation of the play in Liberations, Spiritus Mundi Press, 1961.

11 The “Pronomos Vase” (Attic, c. 400), now in Naples’ archeological museum, is the best-preserved and single most important representation of Athenian drama. It depicts the backstage excitement of actors and chorus members costumed and masked for a satyr play. Dionysos, thyrsus in one hand and opposite arm embracing a female figure, dominates the scene.

12 Mock phalloi were also frequent props in the satyr plays and comedies presented during the festival.

13 For documentation of the details of the procession see Csapo and Slater, 106.

14 Winkler and Zeitlin (p. 4, n. 3) agree that this was the probable order of events.

15 Taplin, 162, disagrees that religious ritual was intrinsic to the festival: “[T]he Great Dionysia was an occasion to stop work, drink a lot of wine, eat some meat” and witness ritual and ceremony “part of such holidays the world over.” But Gould (1990, 130-40) and Simon Goldhill (in Winkler and Zeitlin, 96-129) both argue persuasively in favor of the festival’s religious nature.

16 Republic, Book X.

17 Pickard-Cambridge, 264-65. Since it’s not certain that women attended the Dionysia, the anecdote may be apocryphal. Jeffrey Henderson sums up the most convincing case for women’s attendance in “Women and the Athenian dramatic festivals,” TAPA, 121: 133-47, 1992.

18 Plutarch, Nicias, 29.

19 Thuycidides (1.70) records the qualities, as identified by Korinthians, that enabled Athenians’ dominance in the ancient world: “[They] are addicted to innovation, and their designs are characterized by swiftness alike in conception and execution….[T]heir bodies they spend ungrudgingly in their country’s cause; their intellect they judiciously husband to be employed in her service….[T]o them laborious occupation is less of a misfortune than the peace of a quiet life. To describe their character in a word, one might truly say they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others.” Throughout the entire range of human accomplishment Athenians exercised the same imagination, skillful organization of resources, and political assertiveness that was evident in their Dionysian Festival. Their concepts, formal models, vocabulary, standards of judgment, even the imperative to innovate itself, are permanently imbedded in modern culture and science, from Architecture to Zoology. Athenians asked the right questions: “What is the prime virtue of a good person?” “What is the most powerful and inexhaustible artistic subject?” “Who should rule a nation?”  Their answers, ”wisdom,” “the human form,” and “its people,” retain their authority.

20 Winkler and Zeitlin, 4.

21 Athenian audiences often fortified themselves during the lengthy performances with wine, sweets, and dried fruit, the latter being perfectly suited to pelting actors they didn’t like. Spectators raucously applauded and cheered in appreciation--and booed, hissed or clicked their heels against the seats in disapproval. But physical violence in the theater was against the law and, in extreme circumstances, punishable by death. The sanctity of and laws governing the festival were taken seriously. After the Dionysia ended, the Ekklesia met in the theater to investigate the complaints of misconduct lodged against both officials of the festival and participants in it, and of injuries received.  Pickard-Cambridge, 69 and 272-73.

22 Production costs for the festival--costumes, props, actors and dancers salaries--were paid for by choregai (sing. Choragos, or Chorus-person), wealthy citizens appointed by the archon, the city official in charge of the Dionsyia. The “honor” of the appointment was considered part of that citizen’s tax base. To assure equal access to acting talent, the state assigned actors according to their abilities to the three competing dramatists. Winkler (in Winkler and Zeitlin, “The Ephebes’ Song: Tragoidia and Polis,” 20-62) makes an interesting argument that young men of military age served as the dancers for the Dionysia productions.

23 Thucydides chronicles the most chilling and famous political debate on record in his History. In that exchange, which took place on the island of Melos, a delegation of Athenians patiently explain to the Melians--who had rebelled and wished to detach themselves from the Athenian empire, or Delian League--the reasons why they must ruthlessly suppress the revolt, the most calculated reason being that any leniency shown to the Melians would encourage other of Athens’ subject cities to defect, a most unacceptable prospect. Athens did not extend her democratic principles of self-determination to cities whose loyalty was exacted by force.

24 For the Greek text of the poem I translate here see Moore, 42.

25 Sellars has directed memorable revivals of Greek drama, notably The Persians and, most recently, The Children of Herakles. He spoke about the theater as a “giant ear” during a talkback session after a performance of the latter play at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., on January 25, 2003.

26 Easterling, 39.

27 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, 25.

28 Seaford, 334-62.

29 Csapo and Slater, 11.

30 See Oed King, 1591-96 and Oed King introduction, <49-50>.

31 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, 43.

32 Aristotle, Rhet. 3, 18, 1419 A 25.

33 Athens prevailed not only through superior fighting skills in close naval combat, but also through superior strategy, enticing the Persians to sail so far up a narrow bay in Salamis that their warships, squeezing closely together, lost the ability to maneuver and thus were vulnerable to a swift enveloping maneuver of the Athenian fleet. Sophokles would remember this tactic and “employ” it, as I later explain, in a social encounter.