Theatre of ancient Greece

• 1. Introduction

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  The Theatre of Ancient Greece gave the world the words tragedy, comedy, and scene itself. Around 532 BC, a man named Thespis stepped forward in Athens as the earliest recorded actor, winning the first theatrical contest the city ever held. That moment planted something that would outlast every empire that followed. Today, Western theatre borrows its genres, its technical vocabulary, and a great many of its plots and character types directly from what the Athenians invented. But the questions worth sitting with are these: why did a festival honouring a god become the birthplace of drama? How did masks, cranes, and wheeled platforms become the tools of a civilization's most serious art? And what does it mean that the Greek word for a performer, thespian, still carries the name of that single man from the 6th century BC?

• 2. A Festival for Dionysus

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  Athens placed theatre at the centre of its religious life through a festival called the Dionysia, which honoured the god Dionysus. The City Dionysia, sometimes called the Great Dionysia, was organised around 508 BC, possibly to build loyalty among the newly formed tribes of Attica created by the statesman Cleisthenes. The spoken word was the engine of Greek culture. Bahn and Bahn record the belief that to the Greeks, "the spoken word was a living thing and infinitely preferable to the dead symbols of a written language." Socrates held that once something was written down, it lost its capacity for change and growth. Oral storytelling thrived in that atmosphere, and the festival formalised it. Tragedy emerged late in the 500s BC, comedy appeared from 490 BC, and the satyr play stood alongside both as a third dramatic form. Athens eventually exported the festival to its many colonies, carrying these forms across the ancient world.

• 3. Thespis and the First Rivals

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  Thespis won the earliest theatrical contest in Athens, but the record surrounding him is complicated. He is sometimes listed as late as 16th in the chronological order of Greek tragedians. The statesman Solon is credited with writing poems in which characters speak in their own voices. Spoken performances of Homer's epics by rhapsodes were already popular at festivals before 534 BC. By the time Thespis competed, the dithyramb had moved far from its ritual roots, shaped by heroic epic, Doric choral lyric, and the innovations of the poet Arion into something closer to narrative ballad. Three other early competitors are known by name: Choerilus, Pratinas, and Phrynichus. Of these, Phrynichus left the clearest trail. He won his first competition sometime between 511 BC and 508 BC. He was the first poet known to use a historical subject, staging The Fall of Miletus in 493-2 BC, which chronicled what happened to that city after it was taken by the Persians. Herodotus recorded the aftermath: the Athenians fined Phrynichus a thousand drachmas for bringing a calamity so close to home, and banned the play from ever being performed again. Phrynichus is also thought to have been the first playwright to use female characters, though female performers were never part of the picture.

• 4. The Golden Age of Drama

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  After the Achaemenid forces destroyed Athens in 480 BC, the city rebuilt both its physical fabric and its cultural ambitions. The century that followed is regarded as the Golden Age of Greek drama. The Dionysia took place twice yearly, once in winter and once in spring, and its centrepiece was a competition at the Theatre of Dionysus between three tragic playwrights. Each submitted three tragedies along with a satyr play, a comedic burlesque treatment of a mythological subject. From 486 BC each playwright also submitted a comedy. Aristotle credited Aeschylus with adding a second actor, the deuteragonist, and credited Sophocles with introducing a third, the tritagonist. Greek playwrights never worked with more than three actors at once. Tragedy and comedy were treated as entirely separate territories; no play ever combined the two. Satyr plays handled mythological material but handled it as pure comedy. Until the Hellenistic period, every tragedy was written for Dionysus and performed only once; what survives today is what was still remembered well enough to be revived when repeating old plays became fashionable, filtered further by the tastes of Hellenistic librarians.

• 5. Architecture of Sight and Sound

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  Greek cities typically occupied hillsides, and that geography became a design principle. Seating was cut into the slope to form the theatron, literally the "seeing place," and audiences of up to fourteen thousand people could fill these spaces. Where no suitable hill existed, builders piled up banks of earth. At the base of the seating was the orchestra, a circular performance area with an average diameter of 78 feet, whose name means "dancing place." A chorus of typically twelve to fifteen people performed plays in verse there, accompanied by music. Tall arched entrances called parodoi or eisodoi gave actors and chorus members a formal path in and out. After 465 BC, playwrights began using a backdrop called the skené, from which the modern word "scene" descends; it served both as a visual backdrop and a changing room for actors. After 425 BC, a stone wall supplement called the paraskenia became common. By the end of the 5th century BC, the skené had grown to two stories. The acoustics these theatres achieved compare favourably with modern standards. Greek mask-maker Thanos Vovolis has proposed that the masks themselves functioned as resonators for the head, enhancing vocal quality and presence rather than simply amplifying sound.

• 6. The Life of the Mask

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  The Ancient Greek word for a mask was prosopon, meaning literally "face." Masks carried religious weight before they carried theatrical weight; the most direct evidence comes from a handful of vase paintings from the 5th century BC, including the Pronomos Vase, which shows actors preparing for a satyr play. No physical mask has survived, because they were made from organic materials including stiffened linen, leather, wood, or cork, with wigs of human or animal hair, and were dedicated at the altar of Dionysus after performances rather than stored. The masks covered the entire face and head like a helmet, with openings for the eyes and a small aperture for the mouth. Vervain and Wiles challenged an older idea from the 1960s that the small mouth opening meant the mask functioned as a megaphone; the opening was simply too small for that to be plausible. Masks allowed only two or three actors to move between multiple roles without the audience tracking who was beneath. They also conveyed sex, age, and social status to a crowd many rows away, and unique masks were made for specific characters: the Furies in Aeschylus' Eumenides, and Pentheus and Cadmus in Euripides' The Bacchae. The chorus wore matching masks to present a unified presence, all twelve or fifteen members treated as a single character. Male actors used masks to play female roles. The mask-makers were called skeuopoios, a word that translates roughly as "maker of the props," suggesting their responsibilities ranged well beyond masks alone.

• 7. Costume, Character, and Stage Machinery

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  Actors playing tragic roles wore elevated boots called cothurnus, which raised them visibly above the rest of the cast. Comedic actors wore a thin-soled shoe called a soccus, or sock. The contrast between these two footwear choices gave rise to the expression "sock and buskin" as a shorthand for dramatic art. Male actors playing female roles wore a wooden chest structure called a posterneda to suggest breasts, and a stomach structure called a progastreda to soften the silhouette. White body stockings lightened the apparent skin tone. Characters of divine or heroic standing wore long robes called chiton that reached the floor; goddesses and powerful women wore purple and gold; queens and princesses wore cloaks decorated with gold stars and other jewels; warriors appeared in armor with plumed helmets. The Pronomos Vase, which depicts actors at an after-party, remains the richest single source for costuming detail, since the garments themselves did not survive. Stage machinery extended what the body alone could do. The mechane was a crane that lifted an actor to represent flight, giving rise to the concept of the deus ex machina. The ekkykleme was a wheeled platform used to roll dead characters into view, since it was considered wrong to stage a killing before the audience. Death was always heard from behind the skené, not seen. Pinakes were pictures hung to suggest scenery; thyromata were more elaborate pictures built into the upper story of the scene wall. Plays began in the morning and ran through the evening.