SOURCE: Green, J. R. Introduction to Theatre in Ancient Greek Society, pp. 1-15. London: Routledge, 1994.

[In the following essay, Green examines the transition of Greece from an oral society to a combined oral and written one, the social function of the theater in this environment, and factors contributing to the success of drama.]

Condamnés à expliquer le mystère de leur vie, les hommes ont inventés le théâtre

Louis Jouvet, Témoignages sur le théâtre

To our eyes and ears Greek tragedies seem complex in both structure and thought, yet the establishment of the genre happened almost unbelievably quickly. According to tradition, Thespis first distinguished an actor from the choral group which lay at the basis of tragedy some time about 534 bc.¹ Aeschylus, who was born only a decade later, began producing tragedies very early in the fifth century and had his first victory in the dramatic contests in 484 bc. Our earliest surviving tragedy dates to 472 bc, our latest to 405 bc. We have no complete tragedy written after that date and it would seem that scholars of Late Antiquity did not think later pieces worth preserving. Our surviving classical comedies are from an even shorter period. Aristophanes' Acharnians was produced in 425 bc, his Plutus in 388 bc.

If one asks the question how it is that the development to so sophisticated a style of drama could have happened in so short a period, the answer must surely lie not simply in the genius of the playwrights involved but, since playwrights create for their public, in the importance given to theatre, in its reception, in the role it had in Athenian society of this period.

In attempting to discover this role, it is worth considering at the same time why it may have been that Athenian tragedy of the years after Euripides was not thought worth preserving. The fourth century was not without men of genius, and there is good evidence that theatre remained popular—indeed our evidence strongly suggests that it became more popular. It is clear that comedy, while slower to develop a sophisticated form, changed its style to suit new conditions; but in changing its style it changed its function. It may be that tragedy was not able to change so radically so effectively and that it lost its direction as a major force.²

In the course of the well-known debate that Aristophanes concocted between Aeschylus and Euripides in the latter part of his Frogs of 405 bc, the two agree (lines 1008-1009) that ‘one should admire poets … for their cleverness and advice, and because we make men in cities better’. A few lines later (1031), the character Aeschylus claims that noble poets are ‘beneficial’ to society, in part because they represent admirable figures and invite their audience to emulate them. Aeschylus is made to present his own mind as moulded by the ‘godly Homer’. ‘By Zeus, I didn't create sluts like [Euripides' characters] Phaedra and Stheneboia; in fact, nobody knows of my creating a woman in love at all’ (1043-1044). Aeschylus (as re-created by Aristophanes in a comedy) sees a corrupting influence in Euripidean tragedy. At some points in the debate Euripides is presented as the kind of dramatist who selects from the common body of myths stories of people in shameful situations (such as women in the grip of illicit passion) but presents them in a realistic and sympathetic way. It is, then, taken as a given that the theatre has an educative function, but at the same time the case is presented by a figure who represents the old school, and one has the impression that by the later fifth century this attitude with regard to publicly performed poetry is a slightly old-fashioned even if deeply ingrained one.³

Plato, who seems to have been becoming involved in philosophy about the time Frogs was produced, should to some extent represent the reactions of the new generation. Certainly by the time he wrote his Republic (towards 380 bc) he seems to be looking at the figures of epic poetry and tragedy by reference to norms of good and bad character, such as bravery, self-control and their opposites. He is concerned with the long-term effect of poetry on the moral character of the citizen-audience (Republic 377-401, 603-608). (One might compare the debate about the effects of watching violence on television, particularly on the young.) All this may well reflect a new consciousness of the role of publicly performed poetry, and, perhaps more importantly, a serious questioning of what was assumed in Aristophanes, that the older poetry (at least from Homer to Aeschylus) was necessarily good and improving in its effect. In the Hipparchus (228 bc), attributed to but surely not by Plato, it is simply stated that Hipparchos, the son of the tyrant Peisistratos, organised the rhapsodes' recital of Homer and brought over Anacreon and Simonides ‘in a desire to educate the citizens, so that he might rule over the best possible subjects, since he was so good and noble that he did not think he should grudge anyone wisdom’.

Theatre of the kind we are talking about needs a written text for it to exist at all, but we must recognise that for much of the fifth century the audience was still largely at the point of transition from being an ‘oral’ society.⁴ Most Athenians (or more accurately, perhaps, most Athenian males) were able to read, but it seems likely that before the later years of the fifth century they were not in the habit of reading extensively. Detienne has made the important point that writing had no role in the process of government of a city like Athens at this period.⁵ The results of the governing process—laws, treaties and agreements—may be recorded in writing as permanent information that could not be altered in individual memory, but day-to-day affairs and discussion were conducted by word of mouth. Writing still had a role that was restricted to the area in which it was found useful initially: one can compare the early use of computers as high-capacity mathematical calculators, before new activities were developed that were inconceivable before them. The new technology had not yet created its own programme of activity. Similarly, it is worth recalling a passage of Euripides' Palamedes:

I invented writing and so made possible overseas letters, wills, and contracts.⁶

The play was produced in 415 bc and even at this date these items are seen as among the more obvious benefits of the technology. They are items that have an important and practical value, aimed at overcoming the tyranny of time and distance.

Written texts of any length were still comparatively new, and one may remember that Herodotus in effect published his Histories in Athens in 446 bc by reciting passages of it. His seems to have been the first written history of a discursive and explanatory nature in prose; and it has been pointed out that there is a sense in which his history represents an oral style (at least in its attitudes) put down on paper. Thucydides, by contrast, in the last years of the fifth century, had made the transition and in describing his work as a ‘possession for ever’ is conscious of the nature of what he is doing. He had literate attitudes in the closely textured, rather terse style of his composition—but he none the less introduced speeches into his narrative whenever he wanted to examine motives for action, in part because he believed in motivation by individuals rather than by larger forces, but in part because even he seems to have thought that the semblance of verbal communication brought more immediacy. It is no accident either that early in the fourth century Plato wrote about philosophy as a series of spoken dialogues.

Pericles is said to have been the first to have delivered a written speech in the courts, whereas all his predecessors had spoken ex tempore.⁷ Our source for this statement is late and unlikely to be reliable, but at an anecdotal level it still has value: it is a statement that was credible in Antiquity. It implies that some time perhaps around the middle of the fifth century, speeches began to be written. They came to be written because the arguments were becoming more complex and the style of language more highly refined. More sophisticated forms of rhetoric began from about this point, and it is against this background that we should set the visit of the Sicilian rhetorician Gorgias to Athens in 427 bc, a visit which caused an enormous stir because of the new directions in which he took rhetoric and the spoken word. But this was a style of speaking that needed careful preparation on paper.

The whole question of the existence and ownership of books in the fifth century is a very complex and difficult one, beginning with the problem of how one translates the Greek words biblos and biblion. They seem to mean everything from papyrus as a material to what we tend to mean by ‘book’, in much the same way that we can use ‘paper’, from the material, to ‘newspaper’, to ‘a paper’ (sc. ‘article’ or ‘pamphlet’).⁸ But we should always be conscious that because of the mechanical problems of copying ‘books’ by hand, the number of copies was always limited and there may not have been the same expectation of a replica that we have automatically from printed texts; and while there was probably a sense of ownership of ideas or intellectual property, there was surely no idea of copyright as we understand it.⁹ Gian Franco Nieddu has presented good arguments to suggest that in the late fifth century the acquisition of books or pamphlets is something like the acquisition of status symbols, and he thus makes good sense of the line in the Frogs where Aristophanes has his chorus say that the members of the audience are not uneducated, because everyone has a biblion (line 1114).¹⁰ Similarly, at Frogs 1409, where Euripides is invited to get onto the scale-pan together with his books to be weighed against Aeschylus, part of the joke is that Euripides is in any case lightweight, with or without his books, but he has his books with him throughout this scene because they typify what sort of man (and therefore poet) he is. Nieddu has also made the point that at this period books are acquired by people in areas of specialisation, especially in areas of ‘science’ such as medicine, astrology, architecture, geometry and other aspects of philosophy: that is, most books were technical and rather short. He also quotes the case of the mathematician and astronomer Oinopides of Chios (in the second half of the fifth century) who uses the expression ‘not in the (book-) box but in the mind’ to admonish a young man who accumulated books so as to appear educated.¹¹ I am reminded of the analogy of one of my students who, when I asked him if his essay was anywhere near ready yet, said yes, he had photocopied the articles listed in the bibliography. In both cases there is a feeling of possession in having the information stored and at hand.

It is on similar lines that one should interpret the well-known passage in Xenophon (Anabasis VII, 5, 12-14): ‘they arrived at Salmydessos. Here many of the ships that sail into the Pontus run aground and are wrecked, for there are shoals that extend well out into the sea. And the Thracians of that area have boundary markers set up and each group plunders the ships wrecked in their section … Here were found many couches, many boxes and many written books, together with all sorts of other things that shipowners carry in wooden chests.’ This at the turn of the fifth and fourth centuries. While it is not entirely easy to be sure of Xenophon's point here, one suspects that he remarks on these finds because they represented not only Greek material found in foreign parts, but because things like symposium couches and boxes of books were particularly representative of the Greek as opposed to the foreign way of life. Even if one goes so far as to translate bibloi here as pamphlets or short texts (rather than as ‘pieces of paper’), this is good evidence that the use of papyrus and writing was common enough for sea-captains to carry, and normal enough to be taken as symptomatic of the Greek lifestyle at this period.

This last third of the fifth century, was, then, a period of rapid change in these respects as in so many others, and it was the change itself that fostered the final flowering of tragedy (before it wilted), and a style of comedy that one suspects became more sophisticated with Aristophanes. It was a period when writers and thinkers were exploiting the advantages of written culture while the advantages of the more traditional ‘oral’ culture still survived. It was a time when most members of the audience were used to listening intently and acutely and were used at the same time to remembering the spoken word. (We should remember too that they were not subjected, as we are, to radio, television, records and the like, with all those words which in sheer self-protection we only half hear, thus building in a habit of not treating spoken words all that seriously. We have an often naive faith in the printed word, as if written were somehow better.) In the fifth century one is dealing with a society which was still used to a great deal of its information storage being in people's heads, not on paper or in books.

The transmission of one's culture is a fragile thing, and even more so when it has no independent storage, for example on paper. In a pre- or proto-literate society, education (or the transmission of one's culture) did not involve the teaching of abstract ‘facts’ which were to be absorbed without immediately practical aim. It lay rather in the passing on of experience whether by example and/or practical training (as in social behaviour—where we are more used to such an approach—or hunting, or farming or fighting) or by word of mouth.¹² With the latter, the use of myth and legend seems to have been particularly important in Greek society, and this is apparent in their art as well as in the surviving literature. Thus as a warrior, Achilles can be the paradigm for a young man's behaviour, and when we see an arming scene on a vase, there seems to be a ready transference between an ‘everyday’ arming and that of a hero, and in pictures of battle scenes it is often difficult to tell the difference between the combats of mortals and those between, say, Achilles and Hector. It is typical of many societies that story-telling (whether by word of mouth or through what we call art) has the effect of binding those societies or communities together. The common experience these stories represent reinforces the communal aspect of their life. It is experience shared, and the expression and arousal of the fears, the pleasures, the sorrows and the laughter involved in the stories strengthen this binding process and give the more straightforward knowledge-aspect some context, and further, and perhaps more importantly, can teach the hearer how the community expects him/her to react in a given situation.¹³ One aspect of this communal experience is the history of the community, which, with the Greeks as with many other societies, was often related genealogically to what we would call mythical figures, figures who were therefore integrated into the real life of the storyteller and his audience.

Much of this story-telling was done in verse, because poetry through its rhythm was more readily memorable in the long term than prose and thus more readily transmitted from one generation to another as part of an inherited experience or education. It was in this way that the Homeric legends had such an important place in Greek society. Another vital factor in binding a community together was its shared rituals. These normally had a religious setting, that of honouring or propitiating a divinity, but it has often been observed, particularly among so-called more primitive societies, that the ritual itself is just as important as the object of that ritual: the process of ritual involves shared knowledge of an important routine at important times of the year or critical times of life, and meeting as a community under these terms can develop a sense of group identity and pride.¹⁴ The Greeks combined both these elements—the telling of stories and the ritual occasions—and developed meetings (often festivals) when the telling of stories became vital elements in the proceedings. There has rightly been a good deal of emphasis in recent scholarship on the performance aspect of early poetry, and therefore on the interpretation of that poetry in terms of the circumstances in which it was presented.¹⁵ We need not pursue the details here, but it is worth emphasising that poetry in the earlier periods was not created in the study for the studious, but that, even as it came to be written and slowly became more ‘literary’ in its approach, the setting for its transmission (or its ‘reading’) was still that which had been habitual in an oral society. And second, that theatre was not the only kind of poetry to be designed for public performance; rather, theatre developed in a context where a level of ‘public’ performance was the norm, and where stories were heard rather than read. Third, it evolved in a situation where the role of the poet was to some degree thought of as educational, even if in a very broad sense, a sense that was based on tradition. And finally, theatre was at the same time a product and an aim of community activity.

The fifth-century Athenian was able to see major theatrical performances twice a year, at a festival called the Lenaia in January and at the City Dionysia in late March. Earlier in the winter period, in December, were celebrations of the Rural Dionysia at local theatres around Attica. These were the cooler times of year (indeed December and January are, nowadays at least, the rainy period), but the more important point is that December-January is not a very urgent period in the farmer's year. By late March he could also afford to take time off because the seed should be sown, and indeed coming through the ground. We know comparatively little about the Rural Dionysia except that it seems to have originated as an agricultural festival, and historical evidence of a background in a fertility festival is to be seen in the processions with phallos-poles. Celebrations were organised in each local area or deme and the equivalent of the local mayor (or demarch) seems to have been responsible for the practicalities. We do not know at what period theatrical performances were first incorporated in the festivities, but there is evidence for the performance of both tragedy and comedy by the middle of the fifth century, and one could speculate that comedy, at least, could well have had an early if informal background in such a context. Inscriptional evidence from the fourth century and later reveals a continuing local pride in successful celebration of the occasion, even if modern scholars tend to suppose that the plays performed were less important pieces or repeats of successes from the City Dionysia.

The Lenaia was celebrated in Athens, and though not reckoned as being as important as the City Dionysia, none the less was a venue for major plays by major playwrights, particularly comedies: five comic poets competed, each with one play, while there were two tragic poets, each with two plays (it seems there was no satyr-play).¹⁶ In this case the formal organisation of contests goes back no earlier than the middle of the fifth century, but this does not mean that there were no performances of any kind earlier.

The City Dionysia (also known as the Great Dionysia, or simply the Dionysia) was the major occasion on which dramatic performances were staged. It was also the major festival in honour of the god Dionysos. Among other celebrations and processions, there were competitions between ten men's choruses performing dithyrambic poetry (each representing one of the ten tribes), as well as between ten boys' choruses, and then the competitions between five comic playwrights (each presenting one play) and three tragic playwrights (each presenting a set of three tragedies and a satyr-play). This seems to have been the basic arrangement for much of the fifth century. In the fourth century and later, different combinations were developed in answer to changing taste, part of which included the revival of old plays.

What is immediately clear from these sorts of arrangements is that, unlike us, the Athenians, in the fifth century at least, were not invited or solicited by playwrights, producers or managers to attend the theatre. The contrary was the case: the Athenians themselves arranged command performances. Their agents, the magistrates, selected from the plays on offer those they wished to have performed at the festival. They, through a kind of honour-enforced code known as liturgies, provided sponsors to finance the performances. They offered inducements by way of prizes to writers and actors as well as what may have been substantial honoraria to the writers.¹⁷ They provided the numerous young men needed to sing and dance in the choruses, and, for many families, this must have been at some cost to the economy of the household given the rehearsal time involved. By the mid-fourth century they also tried to ensure, by way of state subsidy through a fund called theorikon, that no citizen was prevented from joining the celebration through extreme economic hardship.

It has become fashionable to emphasise the social function of Greek theatre in the fifth century, and especially that of tragedy and its performance at the festival of the City Dionysia which was clearly an event of great state importance. It is less easy to construct such cases for the Lenaia or the Rural Dionysia where there was less pomp, no representatives of the so-called allied states presenting tribute, no crowning of distinguished citizens or visitors, no parade of war-orphaned military cadets (ephebes) in their new armour. These other more exhibitionist events were added, surely, because the occasion was a grand one and because it was an occasion when the community was gathered together.¹⁸ There are plenty of ethnographic parallels for this sort of magnetic attraction if one wants to seek them out. On the other hand one should not minimise the central civic role these festivals and performances had in Athenian life. Nor should one ignore the impact that simple things such as the seating arrangement in the theatre, tribe, must have had on the way the Athenians looked at themselves and at the occasion. There is also the point that these were religious festivals in honour of Dionysos with all that that implies about the state of heightened tension and heightened awareness for the audience. For people who did not meet as a large group very often, there must have been an excitement in the very fact of meeting in this way, not least for those who had left home and travelled some distance and who may well have slept in the sanctuary overnight in the company of the god. One tends to think of those coming in from the countryside, and we know from the opening of Plato's Republic that it was thought reasonable to walk from town down to the Piraeus for a day to participate in a festival. On the other hand I would doubt that all that many people would want to make the trip even from the Piraeus every day for several days in a row for events that probably lasted through most of the daylight hours. Far better to stay in town and enjoy the evening festivities, join in the occasion, and escape from the drudgery and responsibilities of the normal daily round.¹⁹

The audience was also used to enjoying a level of participation in a range of other events which we would call ritual, and these events often involved something that one could call performance.²⁰ The celebration of a divinity, whether at a festival or not, was often a group activity in which everyone joined even if the group had its delegated leaders, whether priests or others. In early drama and what one can hypothesise as proto-drama, the chorus acted on behalf of the larger group, the audience, but one might suppose that the distinction between performers and the inactive was somewhat blurred. We should remember too that all this took place in the open air but within the confines of a sanctuary where everyone had assembled for the purpose of honouring and celebrating the god. The growing part given to actors slowly eroded the function of the chorus and in doing so it most probably eroded the participatory sense of the larger group, the audience. Indeed the history of theatre has to some extent been the history of the growing passivity of the audience, particularly once theatre went indoors and the stage was separated from the seating by lighting and darkness. But one can think of many variants along the way.

In so-called primitive societies, the dividing line between audience and participant in ritual performances is quite regularly unclear. Experts in some aspects of the performance such as dance or particular categories of song or music-making or knowledge of procedure may be prominent at one point or another, as may members of the community who have a special role in the context of the particular occasion because of their place in the social network of the community. In ancient Greece the dividing lines were only just being established and there was probably a much greater sense of general involvement than we are used to. Dramatic performances were, as we have seen, put on by and for the community, and although foreigners were allowed to attend the Great Dionysia, they were not involved in the other festivals, and direct participation in any case remained an Athenian prerogative. By the fourth century at least there were legal prohibitions against participation in the performances as members of the choruses by aliens or of course by Athenians who had been disenfranchised. Resident aliens were allowed to participate in the Lenaia but not in the Dionysia. Equally, while participation was a privilege of Athenians, it was also compulsory for those young members of the community selected. This would have involved some sacrifice for a less well-off family if a son's labour was needed, for example in working the land. Yet in addition to these legalities, there is evidence, for example on a gravestone of the turn of the fifth and fourth centuries where a young man is depicted holding a chorus-mask, that participation was regarded as an honour.²¹

The performances belonged to the community, the audience. They were theirs. Once one includes the members of the choruses for all the plays, tragic and comic, there was a substantial number of performers, and they came from a comparatively small community. In the performance of the type of song called dithyramb the choral group was made up of representatives from each of the tribes. Something similar may well have been arranged for more formal drama. Winkler's suggestion that the choruses were made up of ephebes, young men who were fulfilling their so-called military service, and that the choruses were therefore representative of the community in a further sense is not unattractive.²² In either case, the audience could reasonably be supposed to have viewed the chorus as in some way representing themselves, perhaps in very specific fashion of identification with the tribal groups to which they belonged. The numbers involved at any given Dionysia were not small. Each tribe presented a dithyrambic chorus of fifty men and one of fifty boys (10 × 2 × 50 = 1,000). Each comedy had 24 chorusmen (5 × 24 = 120). Sophoclean and Euripidean tragedies had 15 chorusmen, but the total numbers are less certain: perhaps 3 sets × 15 = 45, but it may be that each tragedy and satyr-play had different chorusmen, i.e. 3 × 4 × 15 = 180.²³ Add to these the various trainers and organisers, costumers and musicians (not to mention the actors and mask-makers involved in formal drama), and a noticeable proportion of the free male population would have been involved.

One tends to watch the people one knows or identifies with in a performance in a special way; doing so increases one's sense of participation in the proceedings and sharpens one's observation of what is done and the way it is done. In this respect, the size of the audience was irrelevant, it was the size of the community that mattered.²⁴ In Athens the citizen community was small enough for one to stand some chance of knowing most of its prominent members at least on sight (as anyone who has ever lived in a comparatively small country town will remember). It was also a participatory democracy, so that one came to know one's fellow citizens more actively than we are used to. And then if one didn't actually know people personally, one would be able to identify them by hearsay and by their being related within a network of family or kinship groups. This acquaintance would also work between the members of the audience and the other performers, particularly in the fifth century when the writers and key actors were members of prominent families. Pavlovskis and Jouan have also argued persuasively that although the faces of the performers were hidden by masks, one would quickly come to know the voices and mannerisms of the more famous actors.²⁵ They went on further to suggest that Sophocles, for example, structured his plays to take best advantage of the skills of his actors, and to allow the actors to show their best. So although Athenians did not create the opportunities to see theatrical performances more than a few times a year, when they did see them it was with a keen participatory interest and with a degree of what they regarded as inside knowledge.

To come back to the broader issue of the social setting of drama, a further factor which affected the way Athenian drama was created and received is the very straightforward point that the audience has the experience of external events, and even if the playwright makes no overt reference to them, those events will sharpen reaction to certain sorts of situations created on stage. We are surely unaware of most because they have slipped through the historians' net. Local disasters from warfare to disease, weather or earthquake would alert an audience to any evocation of such kinds of events or parallel disasters in a mythical context, or might prompt a writer to venture into or stay clear of certain themes. There must also have been political causes célèbres. We are aware of some of the big events like the Persian Wars which were seen as turning points in history, and in looking at surviving plays we see references to them whether implicit or explicit, just as we can see them in surviving art where the reference is usually made through choice of myth. The pursuit of political references in Greek tragedy and comedy has filled many scholarly pages over the years, not all of them profitably or convincingly, and ultimately one's judgement of the amount and complexity of political reference tragedians inserted into re-creations of myth-history is based on one's own assessment of what is credible. The audience was, after all, listening in the open air, not reading a book quietly in a comfortable armchair. James Redfield, however, has made the excellent point that in tragedy the contemporary material was used to lead the audience into the reality of the legend. The modern example helped illuminate the problems or potential of the historical situation, thereby prompting a more active intellectual participation from members of the audience.²⁶

The overriding theme of such tragedies as we have is man's relationship with the gods, and other aspects are incidental to that, whether the question of how that relationship may affect a man's relationship to the state, or the young-hero (ephebe) age of a number of key subjects. I suspect that the fascination with man's relationship to the state was historically a temporary question, and it is likely that myths with young heroes (by contrast with, say, Agamemnon or Oedipus) became more popular in tune with the widely growing emphasis on the younger generation during the later years of the fifth century. The choice of subjects of drama was not particularly biased in favour of what else went on at the Dionysia. Louis Jouvet, quoted at the head of this [essay], is much closer to the point.²⁷ It was this broad and basic exploration of human problems through the medium of people re-enacting the impact of their own often gruesome history which was the exciting thing about early theatre. Because the experience was at second hand, it was comparatively painless, but because it involved the actions of their own ancestors and because the audience was convinced by what it saw on stage in the performance of a tragedy to a greater degree than we are, it was real enough.

While Tragedy took the Greeks in general as its basis, Old Comedy had a strong parochial element which must have served to reinforce the bonds within the community through this sense of sharing the occasion, through sharing laughter at and about people one knew, or through treatment of non-Athenians, even other Greeks, almost as foreigners.²⁸ It is probable that the traditional choruses of animals, foreigners or particular categories of men (for which we have visual evidence from as early as the middle of the sixth century) were characteristically non-Athenian, and so served to prove to the audience (perhaps through the overturning of the aliens' power) the advantages and pleasures of being Athenian. One thinks of titles such as Birds of various kinds …, Gnats, Fig-Flies, Frogs, Lydians, Titans, Persians or Assyrians, Babylonians, foreign Knights …, Ostrich-Riders, or people who ride dolphins …. This pattern is becoming lost in the plays of Aristophanes, even though it appears that Pherekrates wrote a play called Savages or Wild-Men as late as 420 bc. Aristophanes' earlier comedies, however, are still very much Athenian and their humour rests very much in Athenian material. His later work becomes less particular and more generally applicable, as part of the development to what we call Middle Comedy, but we can still find social groups that are abnormal from the dominant male perspective, such as women (celebrating the Thesmophoria festival or taking over the Assembly).

In general it is important to maintain a historical perspective. We should realise that even at any given moment, the social function of theatre had many facets, and that it changed, perhaps quite radically, during the course of the fifth century. Theatre had only just been invented, and like many innovations it probably took some time before the full potential of its role in society was realised. We can also see that its role changed, for example in the fourth century, and it continued to develop later. So much more reason then to suppose that it changed quite rapidly in the earlier years. We should not take the narrow period of the surviving texts as being typical of the whole. Although the Dionysia and the theatrical performance that went with it were closely linked to the democracy of Athens, and they surely served to foster the democracy just as the democracy in its turn served to foster the festival and its theatre, the uses to which theatre was put were never static, and it is not unrewarding to consider the themes pursued by the three tragedians in that light.²⁹

Another socio-political dimension of theatre resides in the status of its creators. The public use of myth had for long been in the hands of the upper classes. It is normal in most cultures for myth to be used consciously or unconsciously to support its ideologies, and for that matter for particular groups or individuals to use it in the same way, to support their causes or justify their points of view. In Greece, upper-class families regularly claimed descent from gods or heroes of myth. There is therefore a tendency for the traditional myths to become equated with aristocrats and their attitudes. There was nothing unusual in this; one can suppose that the population at large simply assumed this to be the case. One might compare the common expectation that the oracles pronounced at Delphi were likely to be subject to political manipulation. This observation on the political use of myth is a general one, not particularly related to the theatre, and although the institution and/or growth of theatre at Athens was tied to the institution of democracy, we should remember that the running of the democracy and its programme of events was largely in the hands of members of a small number of well-to-do families until well on in the fifth century.

During the first three-quarters of the fifth century, the emerging genre of formal, written theatre was being developed by a fairly small group. They were necessarily well-to-do. They must have belonged to the privileged families to have had a fully literate education, and to have had the time to devote to play writing and the intensive final stages of play production. The speed at which Classical playwrights wrote has always been a matter for speculation and discussion, but there is some evidence to suggest that tragedians in the later fifth century produced on average a set of four plays every other year whereas comic writers tended to turn out one a year (and that they could run late doing it).³⁰ The mechanics of actual writing must have meant it was fairly slow—given the nature of the available material, the available pens, the style of script, the handling of rolls of papyrus and the fact that one wrote with the papyrus roll on one's knee.³¹ (We do not know if the actors and chorus were each given copies of the text—which would have meant quite a lot of copying—or if they learned orally from a single script. We may also recall that papyrus was expensive.) Late antique sources on the lives of the poets are often inventions or at best unreliable, but there is reasonable evidence to believe that Sophocles was elected a general as well as being state treasurer in 443/2 bc, which means that he was a notable member of the community in addition to being a playwright. Aeschylus' son Euaion, who appeared on stage as an actor, at least in his teens and early twenties, is labelled kalos (handsome) on a number of vases of the middle of the fifth century. This is an epithet which vase-painters conventionally restricted to the sons of the well-to-do, and especially when, as in this case, his father's name is given as well. There is some inscriptional evidence that Aristophanes was a member of a fairly privileged circle. There seems to be reasonable evidence of Euripides' good birth. We may add to all this the undoubted fact that at least down to the period of Sophocles and at times quite likely beyond, writers often acted in their own plays: it was part of the carrying-through of the creative process, as with some other forms of poetry. Theatrical involvement also tended to run in families over two and three generations. All three major tragedians as well as Aristophanes had sons who became dramatic poets. We have just mentioned Euaion, son of Aeschylus, whom we know to have acted in at least one play written by his father and two by Sophocles. Melanthios, son of the tragedian Philokles and therefore great-nephew of Aeschylus, also seems to have been an actor, as does Euripides' son Mnesilochos. Crates is said to have been an actor for Cratinus before becoming a comic poet in his own right, and it seems that Carcinus too was both actor and poet. The implication of this kind of pattern is, as has often been stated, that the production of drama through much of the fifth century was to a large degree one of personal involvement on the part of the poet, and that it was the sort of activity in which a son might help his father and follow in his footsteps. The creation of theatrical performances must have been regarded as a fairly specialised activity and one that developed its own special talents. Only more slowly, as the genre became established, did many others feel they could participate in the process.³²

The new tragedy of Euripides is among other things representative of the new democratic spirit of the fifth century in that through his use of the myths he questions the traditional aristocratic views of the gods and heroes. This is perhaps one reason why he was popular and perhaps one reason why he was linked with sophistic teaching (which also rejected the old values) and perhaps why Aristophanes accused him of being low-born (not that he necessarily was—the accusation is enough). The high period of tragedy (at least in the view expressed in the Frogs) is linked with that period in which Athens is developing as a democracy led by aristocrats—people like Kimon and Pericles. And the decline of tragedy matches that when ideals rather like those of the gentleman amateur and the concept of selfless dedication to the state were dying away. It is possible to regard the famous Funeral Speech of Pericles as a last gasp of a dying creed, a protestation on behalf of values that no longer obtained automatically.

It is sometimes argued that the establishment of a prize for acting in or about 449 bc implies that actors were now becoming semi-professional. I am not sure that that is the right view. Prizes were regularly given at athletic contests, but until late in the fifth century the sort of people who won victories were of aristocratic background. They again were the ones who could afford the time to practice and develop their skills, or, in some events like horse-racing, afford the equipment. It seems more likely that the prize is a sign of the growing development of the medium and a recognition, first, of the separation of the contributions of actor and writer, and then of the skills needed in an activity that was becoming increasingly demanding as a tradition of expectation built up, and as the audience for its part became more critical and more expert.³³

With the benefit of hindsight we can identify a number of factors which facilitated the development of formal drama and then encouraged it to flourish. Essentially they rest in that typically Greek combination of the traditional and the innovative, the primitive and developed. One thinks of factors such as the particular attitude to myth and history, the advent of developing literacy in a society with sophisticated orally-based systems, an emerging democracy which could still call on the sense of responsibility and/or self-advertisement of its upper-class families, the willingness to use existing religious settings for the development of new activities aimed at their political good in the broadest sense, to explore their place in the world. There are two other inter-related factors which we should also bear in mind. One is the existence at this period of something of a surplus of wealth in the community, and the other is the development of a more urbanised society. A relatively large group from which creators, performers and audience could be drawn is a sine qua non. It is also a matter of the style and sophistication in social contact that comes with urban society. In this sense the experience of the procedures of that phenomenon called Athenian democracy was important. The celebration of the dramatic festivals in town was also costly, both in direct financial terms and in terms of time off from other duties for the considerable number of performers. And then, despite the time of year chosen, when there was relatively little to be done in the fields, there also had to be enough surplus of people in the family economy to have some stay behind to look after the property or the animals while others took the equivalent of a week at a time to attend the theatre. The Athenians of this period were prepared to put a sizeable part of their income into this kind of activity as well as into the construction of temples on the Acropolis and public buildings in the Agora. In other words the Athenians were prepared to pay for it because they wanted it and enjoyed it.

Notes

1. M. L. West has cast legitimate doubts on the reliability of the chronology for early theatre (CQ 39, 1989, 251-254) as does Connor (Classica et Mediaevalia 40, 1989, 7-32) who also argues for a close link between the establishment of tragedy and the establishment of Cleisthenic democracy, although one might have expected later records to make something of it if a direct link existed. On the question of origins (which I find a largely unprofitable pursuit), the standard work is G. F. Else, Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy [Martin Classical Lectures 1965] (New York 1972). G. A. Privitera, ‘Origini della tragedia e ruolo del ditirambo’, SIFC 84, 1991, 184-195 has recently given a sane and salutary discussion. Also worth reading is W. Burkert, ‘Greek Tragedy and Sacrificial Ritual’, GRBS 7, 1966, 87-121 as well as DTC² 60-131.

2. Bruno Snell rather neatly suggested that the available myths became unsuitable for the types of enquiry that were becoming popular, so that the tradition developed by Aeschylus and Euripides was picked up by Socrates and Plato: Discovery of the Mind (Oxford 1953), esp. Ch. 5, ‘Myth and Reality in Greek Tragedy’, and Ch. 6, ‘Aristophanes and Aesthetic Criticism’ (from Die Antike 1944 and 1937 respectively).

3. See also lines 943, 1436, 1448, 1458, 1501. There are useful recent comments on these issues for example in L. Woodbury, ‘The Judgment of Dionysos: Books, Taste and Teaching in the Frogs’, in M. Cropp, E. Fantham and S. E. Scully (eds), Greek Tragedy and its Legacy. Essays Presented to D. J. Conacher (Calgary 1986) 241-257, although he argues that teaching as a function of poetry seems to derive from contemporary sophistic ideas, even if at the same time admitting that there is an important element in early, archaic and classical verse that might broadly be called educational or culturally formative: Homer, Hesiod, Solon, Xenophanes, Theognis.

4. On the role of the theatre in a proto-literate society, see C. Segal, ‘Tragédie, oralité, écriture’, Poétique 50, 1982, 131-154; id., ‘Greek Tragedy: Writing, Truth, and the Representation of the Self’, in H. D. Evjen (ed.) Mnemai. Classical Studies in Memory of Karl K. Hulley (Chico, California, 1985) 41-67, or ‘Vérité, tragédie et écriture’, in M. Detienne (ed.), Les savoirs de l'écriture en Grèce ancienne (Lille 1988) 330-358; B. Gentili, ‘Tragedia e communicazione’, Dioniso 54, 1983, 227-240; E. A. Havelock, ‘The Oral Composition of Greek Drama’, QUCC no. 6, 1980, 61-113, and a number of articles in M. Vegetti (ed.), Oralità scrittura spettacolo (Turin, 1983). There is now a large literature on the generic differences between so-called oral and literate societies. Basic is Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London and New York, 1982); one may also note the same author's somewhat over-brief presentation ‘Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought’, in G. Baumann (ed.), The Written Word. Literacy in Transition (Oxford 1986) 23-50. See too E. A. Havelock The Literate Revolution in Greece & its Cultural Consequences (Princeton 1982), together with the comments on it by L. Woodbury in Echos du Monde Classique 27, 1983, 329-352. There are also very useful observations (and counterbalance to Havelock) from G. F. Nieddu, ‘Testo, scrittura, libro nella Grecia arcaica e classica: note e osservazioni sulla prosa scientico-filosofica’, Scrittura e Civiltà 8 (1984) 213-261, as well as the same author's earlier ‘Alfabetismo e diffusione sociale della scrittura nella Grecia arcaica e classica: pregiudizi recenti e realtà documentaria’, Scrittura e Civiltà 6 (1982) 233-261; also the fine article by S. Flory, ‘Who Read Herodotus’ Histories?’, AJP 101, 1980, 12-28, and J. A. Davison, ‘Literature and Literacy in Ancient Greece’, Phoenix 16, 1962, 141-156 and 219-233. Those committed to a high level of literacy include E. G. Turner, Athenian Books in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries b.c. (London 1951, second edn 1971); F. E. Harvey, ‘Literacy in the Athenian Democracy’, REG 79, 1966, 585-635 (with a good collection of references to the literary sources); and A. Burns, ‘Athenian Literacy in the Fifth Century b.c.’, JHI 42, 1981, 371-388. Note recently R. Johne, ‘Zur Entstehung einer “Buchkultur” in der zweiten Hälfte des 5. Jahrhunderts v.u.Z.’, Philologus 135, 1991, 45-54. For what is now a classic article on the effect of literacy on thought processes, see J. Goody and I. Watt. ‘The Consequences of Literacy’, in J. Goody (ed.), Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge 1968) 27-68, as well as his ‘Literacy and Achievement in the Ancient World’, in F. Coulmas and K. Ehlich (eds.), Writing in Focus (Berlin-Amsterdam-New York, 1983) (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs, 24) 83-98. Further, J. Goody, The Interface between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge 1987); W. V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, Mass., 1989) although I find the latter somewhat disappointing. Very handy is the summary and critical assessment of views to that date by M. Fantuzzi, ‘Oralità, scrittura, auralità. Gli studi sulle techniche della comunicazione nella Grecia antica (1960-1980)’, Lingua e Stile (Milan) 15, 1980, 593-612.

   Current investigation is moving away from determination of generic differences between oral and literate societies to studies of particular reactions to the change in particular cultures.

   More generally on the relationship between theatre and society, see J. Gregory, Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians (Ann Arbor 1991), esp. Introduction; and B. Knox, ‘Sophocles and the Polis’, in Sophocle: Entretiens sur l'antiquité classique xxix (Vandœuvres-Geneva 1983) 1-27 ….

5. M. Detienne, The Creation of Mythology (Chicago 1986) (= L'invention de la mythologie, Paris 1981), Ch. 2; see also Rosalind Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge 1989). Note also Aeschylus, Supplices 946-949.

6. Fr. 578 N².

7. Suda, s.v. Pericles: 1180 Adler (quoted by Woodbury, op. cit.).

8. But see recently T. Dorandi, Prometheus 16, 1990, 225-226.

9. One could look, for example, at Aristophanes' and other comic poets' complaints about the stealing of ideas and material, even if their complaints seem a quasi-formulaic way of asserting their own originality when competing for the prize in the theatre.

10. Something of this idea had already occurred to Denniston, CQ 21, 1927, 117-119. It is interesting that a century earlier, according to Athenaeus (3A), notable collectors of books were the tyrants Polykrates and Peisistratos. For pictures of people with rolls of papyrus, see H. R. Immerwahr, ‘Book Rolls on Attic Vases’, in Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies in Honor of B. L. Ullman, i (Storia e Letteratura 93, 1964) 17-48, and ‘More Book Rolls on Attic Vases’, AntK 16, 1973, 143-147; or G. M. Parassoglou, ‘Dexia cheir kai gonu. Some Thoughts on the Postures of the Greeks and Romans when Writing on Papyrus Rolls’, Scrittura e Civiltà 3, 1979, 5-21, and ‘A Roll upon his Knees’, YCS 28, 1985, 273-275. The problem here rests in identifying the sorts of people depicted and the sorts of buyer the vases were aimed at.

    The perception of books as status symbols has parallels in the medieval period, especially in the production of lavish books for particular patrons, for example in and around Chaucer's circle. Again the rise of a status-seeking merchant class in fourteenth-century London has been connected with the appearance of ateliers for producing manuscripts.

11. Gnomol. Vat. 743 St. (41 A4 D.-K.).

12. This is not a book on comparative ethnography, but I cannot help but recall that the Australian aborigines, who as hunter-gatherers used to cover vast tracts of land that we would regard as featureless and inhospitable, had poems which described and fixed the geography of areas perhaps 150 km across. This was of course a particular response to particular needs, but it is a fine example of a possible and very practical use of oral poetry.

13. Plato's negative reaction to the emotions expressed in the theatre as being habit-forming seems an instinctive recognition of this function.

14. See W. Burkert, Greek Religion. Archaic & Classical (London 1985), passim.

15. For a good example, see W. Burkert, ‘The Making of Homer in the Sixth Century b.c.: Rhapsodes versus Stesichorus’, in Papers on the Amasis Painter and his World (Colloquium … Getty Museum, Malibu 1987) 43-62. Note too the challenging book by B. Gentili, Poetry and its Public in Ancient Greece from Homer to the Fifth Century (Baltimore 1988). This is a somewhat revised version of his Poesia e pubblico nella Grecia antica da Omero al V secolo (Rome-Bari 1984). Note too the story preserved in Plutarch, Solon 8, 1-2, of Solon and the Salamis crisis and the way that he appeared in the Agora in a traveller's cap (pilidion), stood upon the Herald's Stone and delivered his poem beginning: ‘I come as a herald from lovely Salamis …’. On the other hand one has to admit that, according to Plutarch's account, he had pretended to have taken leave of his senses. …

16. It was long thought that the number of comedies at the Dionysia and Lenaia was reduced to three during the period of the Peloponnesian War, but W. Luppe seems persuasive in his arguments that this is a misconstruction: Philologus 116, 1972, 53-73 and Nikephoros 1, 1988, 185-189.

17. See Pickard-Cambridge, Festivals² 80, and recently J. M. Bremer, ‘Poets and their Patrons’, in H. Hofmann and A. Harder (eds), Fragmenta dramatica. Beiträge zur Interpretation der griechischen Tragikerfragmente und ihrer Wirkungsgeschichte (Göttingen 1991) 39-60.

18. For the reality of tragedy as performed and perceived, see my article in GRBS 32, 1991, 15-50. For ancient willingness in general to believe in the part played, see W. R. Connor on Peisistratos and Phye and other similar cases in JHS 97, 1987, 42-47, or the forthcoming article by Rebecca Sinos on epiphanies. On broader issues of the Dionysia, see for example, S. Goldhill whose article ‘The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology’ has appeared in three forms, in JHS 107, 1987, 58-76, in P. Ghiron-Bistagne (ed.), Anthropologie et théâtre antique (Cahiers du GITA 3, 1987), and in J. J. Winkler and F. I. Zeitlin (eds), Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in its Social Context (Princeton 1989) 97-129. Note the useful linking with democracy by W. R. Connor, above, n. 1.

19. I do not know of much that has been done recently on these aspects of festivals, but note from the trade viewpoint, L. De Ligt and P. W. De Neeve, ‘Ancient Periodic Markets: Festivals and Fairs’, Athenaeum 66, 1988, 417-426.

20. There are worthwhile things to read on performance beyond that of the theatrical type discussed here. One thinks particularly of Victor Turner and such books as From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York 1982) or such articles as ‘Dramatic Ritual/Ritual Drama: Performative and Reflexive Anthropology’, in J. Ruby (ed.), A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology (Philadelphia 1982) 83-97, and ‘Liminality and the Performative Genres’, in J. J. MacAloon (ed.), Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle (Philadelphia 1984) 19-41; or of Richard Schechner, e.g., Essays on Performance Theory (New York 1977), or (with M. Schuman), Ritual, Play and Performance (New York 1976).

    Turner is also useful in pointing out that the level of competitiveness present in ‘primitive’ performances is high, as individuals jockey for position in their community. One could argue that the competitiveness of Greek theatre was a formal development of such patterns of behaviour.

21. E. Tsirivakos, ‘Iniochos technis tragikis’, ADelt 29, 1973-74 (1977), 88-94. The piece is also discussed by N. W. Slater, ‘Vanished Players: Two Classical Reliefs and Theatre History’, GRBS 26, 1985, 333-344. I do not share their interpretation of the piece, despite Slater's attractive argument that this is a young poet with mask: I do not see evidence that that motif has evolved by this date, rather the contrary.

22. J. J. Winkler, ‘The Ephebes' Song: Tragoidia and Polis’, in Winkler and Zeitlin, op. cit., 20-62.

23. Performance in all three tragedies and the satyr-play of a set would not have been an impossible task for a boy in his later teens, but it would have been a severe test given the complexity of words, music and dance. Since not all tragedies were arranged in a trilogy or connected sequence of three, continuity is not a strong argument. Chorusmen in a satyr-play, which came at the end of the sequence, needed to be fresh and vigorous. On chorus numbers, see Pickard-Cambridge, Festivals² 234-236.

24. Despite all that has been written, the size of the audience in the fifth-century Theatre of Dionysos is unknown and probably unknowable: the physical remains of the structure are too unclear. On issues of principle, see L. Gallo, ‘La capienza dei teatri e il calcolo della popolazione. Il caso di Atene’, in I. Gallo (ed.), Studi salternitani in memoria di R. Cantarella (Salerno 1981) 271-289.

25. For the arrangement of the audience, see in the first instance Pickard-Cambridge, Festivals² 263ff.—more recent discussions have not added anything new. On participation in choruses, D. M. MacDowell, ‘Athenian Laws about Choruses’, in Symposion 1982. Vorträge zur griechischen und hellenistischen Rechtsgeschichte (Santander, 1.-4. September 1982) (Cologne 1989) 65-77. On the chorus and the part of ephebes, J. J. Winkler, ‘The Ephebes' Song: Tragoidia and Polis’, Representations 11 (1985) 26-62, and the revised version in Winkler and Zeitlin, op. cit., 20-62. I do not believe however that they can have been ephebes in the fourth century. On the interaction of writer and actor, Z. Pavlovskis, ‘The Voice of the Actor in Greek Tragedy’, Classical World 71, 1977, 113-123; F. Jouan, ‘Réflexions sur le rôle du protagoniste tragique’, in Théâtres et spectacles dans l'antiquité. Actes du colloque de Strasbourg, 5-7 novembre 1981 (Leiden 1983) 63-80. The question of the dramatist writing with his actors in mind has been pursued further by M. Damen, ‘Actor and Character in Greek Tragedy,’ Theatre Journal 41, 1989, 316-340.

26. James Redfield, ‘Drama and Community: Aristophanes and Some of his Rivals’, in Winkler and Zeitlin, op. cit., 314-335. On theatre and current affairs, there is a sane statement by W. G. Forrest, ‘The Stage and Politics’, in M. Cropp, E. Fantham and S. E. Scully (eds.), Greek Tragedy and its Legacy. Essays Presented to D. J. Conacher (Calgary 1986) 229-239. Also M. Heath, Political Comedy in Aristophanes (Hypomnemata 87, Göttingen 1987). Recently: Chr. Meier, ‘Politik und Tragödie in 5. Jahrhundert’, Philologus 135, 1991, 70-87.

27. Témoignages sur le théâtre (Paris 1952), 133.

28. This said, Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian. Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford 1989), is useful in pointing up the use of foreigners within the restricted theme of surviving tragedies.

29. Note R. Brock, ‘The Emergence of Democratic Ideology’, Historia 40, 1991, 160-169 where he points out (161) that ‘imagery applied favourably to the demos is hard to find’, but we should realise that democratic ideology and support for the demos is by no means the same thing as civic ideology and support for Athens (at least in Aristophanes' eyes).

30. For tragedy, see more recently C. A. Müller, Zur Datierung des sophokleischen Oedipus (AbhMainz 1984 no. 5) 60ff. For comedy, A. C. Cassio, ‘I tempi di composizione delle commedie attiche e una parafrasi di Aristofane in Galeno (Ar.Fr. 346 K.-A.)’, RFIC 115, 1987, 5-11. The latter contains the implication that a lot of the work was done after the award of the chorus. Similarly, J. Henderson on the need to re-write Lysistrata in the light of the rapidly changing events of 411 bc, in the Introduction to his edition.

31. See for example the article by Parassoglou mentioned above in n. 10.

32. On the unreliability of the biographical material, M. R. Lefkowitz, The Lives of the Greek Poets (London 1981). On the club of which Aristophanes was a member, see IG II² 2343, and for discussion, (among others) H. Lind, MusHelv 42, 1985, 249-261. More generally, P. Ghiron-Bistagne, Recherches sur les acteurs dans la Grèce antique (Paris 1976). D. F. Sutton, ‘The Theatrical Families of Athens’, AJP 108, 1987, 9-26, has a useful collection of material althogh he does not deal with Euaion. For Euaion, see recently A. Shapiro, ‘Kalos-Inscriptions with Patronymic’, ZPE 68, 1987, 107-118.

33. There are good comments on the institution of the prize and what it implies by N. W. Slater, ‘The Idea of the Actor’, in Winkler and Zeitlin, op. cit., 385-395.