SOURCE: Aylen, Leo. “Historical Summary.” In The Greek Theater, pp. 30-40. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1985.

[In the following essay, Aylen traces the development of Greek theater, including the effect of military defeats and changing religious attitudes.]

The history of the Greek theater is, as I have said, the history of a hundred years or so of life, twelve hundred years of imitation. To study the life and how it died is the center of all study of the Greek theater. But it may be as well to precede this with a summary of the main events that affected the development of the theater, as a background to the plays we possess.¹

In 534 b.c., the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus founded the festival of the City Dionysia, whose main purpose was the presentation of plays and dithyrambs as a sacred competition.² During the preceding century a form of dance drama had been developed to considerable subtlety, mainly in the Dorian parts of Greece. During the thirty years in which Pisistratus had been in power, an Athenian poet-choreographer called Thespis had developed this dance drama in the countryside of Attica, and he had then introduced spoken prologues and interludes between dances and thereby extended the possibilities of storytelling in this new art form, which had clearly become very popular by the time it was made the center of the new festival in 534.

Two years after Pisistratus died in 527, Aeschylus was born. His childhood was spent in Athens ruled by the tyrant's sons, Hipparchus and Hippias, who continued their father's keen patronage of the arts. Hipparchus was assassinated in 514, however, for a personal grudge, and Hippias reacted by changing what had been a benevolent rule to something much more savage. He was expelled in 510, and an upper- to upper-middle-class democracy was installed in Athens. The tyrants had patronized the arts; with the sense of freedom aroused by the institution of democracy, the arts developed even further. This mood of effervescence helped Athens to confront the Persian invasion. In 490 the middle-class Athenians—among them Aeschylus—enlisting as heavy-armed part-time infantry, as was the custom in all Greek cities (except Sparta, whose army was full-time) confronted on their own the vast Persian army at Marathon and made it flee. It was a victory to change the course of history. Encouraged by this, the Athenians, under their new leader Themistocles, led an alliance of Greek cities against the second Persian invasion in 480. Themistocles had insisted that Athens build ships, and it was this new navy that defeated the Persians. Aeschylus also fought as a hoplite at Salamis, the naval battle, and so proud was he of his military experience that his epitaph makes mention of this only, not mentioning his poetry at all. By this time, however, he had won his first victory in the dramatic festival of 484 and was a friend of Themistocles, who was now the leader of a radical movement to extend political power more widely through the classes. Although the war with Persia continued, Themistocles was keener to protect Athens from her former Greek ally, Sparta. Two parties developed, and Themistocles was forced to leave Athens and go into exile. In a major attempt to save him, the two most important poets of Athens, Aeschylus and his older contemporary Phrynichus, had put on plays dealing with the defeat of Persia: in 476, Phrynichus' The Phoenician Women, and in 472, Aeschylus' The Persians, the earliest extant Greek play. The Persians requires two actors for its performance. Aeschylus had introduced a second actor besides himself, and this became the usual practice for some years.

After the exile of Themistocles, Aeschylus does not seem to have been so closely involved with politics. He made more than one visit to Sicily, where there was a flourishing theater patronized by the tyrants of Syracuse and Gela. We do not hear of any Sicilian tragic poets, but there are many fragments from the work of Epicharmus, a comic poet who flourished there at this time. From what we can gather, his work shows great diversity; the fragments refer frequently to food, and there are comic lists. His plays were often mythological burlesques. He probably had a chorus, though there are no fragments in lyric meters, and therefore the chorus may never have sung and danced in systems but only chanted. Nor does his comedy appear to have had any of the political reference that was central to Athenian Old Comedy. It is argued as to whether Epicharmus was writing successfully before or after the introduction of competitions for comedy in Athens. This took place in 486, when the first victor was Chionides, about whom virtually nothing is known.

Sophocles was born in 495. His first public appearance as a boy of fifteen, in 480, was to lead victory celebrations after Salamis with a nude dance to his own lyre accompaniment. His first victory in the tragic competitions was in 468. Although he was clearly an excellent dancer and appeared as Nausicaa in one of his early plays, he soon gave up acting because of a “small voice.”³ Relatively early in his career Sophocles managed to raise the number of actors from two to three, an innovation that Aeschylus was soon to make use of also.

Sophocles was a friend of Pericles, an aristocrat who as a young man took up the leadership of the radical party vacated by Themistocles. The spokesman of this class was Aeschylus, although there is no evidence that he was a friend of Pericles himself. The climax of the radical program was a series of reforms introduced by Pericles and Ephialtes in 462, which deprived the Areopagus, up till then a political upper house, of all powers except that of being the supreme court of law. Aeschylus' The Suppliants, probably produced in 463, is very much concerned with democracy, but the climax of his work, the Oresteia, refers directly to these reforms brought in four years before its production in 458.

By this time Athens had become very rich. After the defeat of the Persian invasion, a league of maritime Greek states had been formed under the leadership of Athens to free the subdued Greek cities of Asia Minor. This campaign had been successful and, at the same time, had become more and more an exclusively Athenian venture. The allies had preferred to pay tribute money rather than themselves fight in their own ships. Four years after the Oresteia, in 454, the league's treasury was moved from the island of Delos to Athens, ostensibly for safer keeping; its removal is usually taken as a symbol of the change from a league of freely associating cities to an Athenian empire compelled to pay tribute, which Pericles would partly use to build temples to the gods in Athens.

Athens became also the intellectual capital of the Greek-speaking world. The thinkers, philosophers, and scientists from Ionia came to Athens. It seems likely that Aeschylus met Anaxagoras, who was in Athens at this time. Certainly some of his ideas are related to ideas expressed in the writing of all three tragic poets. But it was Euripides, born in the year of Salamis, who was most influenced by the new attitudes of thought that derived from the presence of these newcomers.

After the Oresteia, Aeschylus returned to Sicily and produced his Prometheus Bound in Gela, which had recently expelled its tyrants and instituted a democracy. Soon after that he died. After his death it seems to have ceased to be usual practice for a poet to act the principal role in his play. Now even the leading part was given to an actor after the custom introduced by Sophocles. The importance of the actor was officially recognized when a competition for leading actors was made part of the City Dionysia in 449.

Euripides had been selected to enter the competition for the first time in 455 and won his first victory in 441. Sophocles presented the Ajax in the mid 440s, and the Antigone probably in 440. As a result of this play he was elected one of the generals under the supreme command of Pericles for the war against Samos, one of the most powerful of Athenian “allies,” which had revolted and had to be subdued. The office of general was political as well as military, and it may be that Sophocles was elected into the most important office of state more as an “ideas man,” rather as Milton was co-opted into Cromwell's government. But it is important when we consider Sophocles' work to realize that he had first-hand experience of command and, by his friendship with Pericles, was in close touch with all important decisions taken during the period of Athens's supremacy.

In 446, the probable year of Aristophanes' birth, a thirty-year peace between Athens and Sparta was signed. It was not to be kept longer than fourteen years, and it was during this short period of peace, interrupted anyhow by the Samian War, that most of the great temples in Athens were built. Pericles was responsible also for rebuilding the theater, and probably for introducing stone seats. He also built the Odeion, which was completed in 443, where the proagōn, … would be held. To this period belongs Euripides' Alcestis.

It is right to notice that the achievements of fifth-century Athens coincided with a period of almost continuous fighting—with Persia, Sparta, and her own rebellious so-called allies. But the war that started in 432 was more serious. It was Pericles' policy to rely mainly on his fleet, while insisting that the Athenians abandon their farms and crowd within the city fortifications. Pericles' policy had he remained to guide it would very likely have proved completely successful. But he died in 429. With their fleet able to import corn, the Athenians could afford to let the invading Spartan armies ravage their land. But plague broke out in the cramped conditions within the fortifications, and although the first Peloponnesian War left Athens rather more powerful than before, there was a great war-weariness by the time peace was made in 421.

To this period belong The Women of Trachis and Oedipus the King of Sophocles, the latter seared by the facts of the plague. We have also a number of Euripides' plays: the Medea, Children of Heracles, Hippolytus, Hecuba, and perhaps Cyclops, Heracles, and The Suppliant Women. We also possess some of the early successes of Aristophanes, whose first production was in 427, and who was victorious with The Acharnians at the Lenaia, … in 425, with the Knights, also at the Lenaia, in 424. The Clouds came third in 423, The Wasps was presented in 422, and was either first or second, and The Peace came second at the Dionysia in 421. For a comic poet, a victory at the Lenaia seems to have been just as satisfying as one at the Dionysia. But for tragic poets a Lenaia victory was less prestigious, although both Sophocles and Euripides entered tragedies there. The competitions both for comic poets and comic actors at the Lenaia had been instituted in either 442 or 440. The competitions for tragic poets and tragic actors came a few years later.

Throughout the Peloponnesian War the fleet's importance meant that the lowest classes, who provided the rowers, began to realize their power in the state. After the death of Pericles a series of popular demagogues gained control of Athenian policy, relying for their influence on the lower classes, to whom the war was on the whole beneficial. For they had no land to be ravaged, and the constant need for the fleet kept them employed and paid. The first of these warmongering demagogues was Cleon, who became the most powerful man in Athens. It is indeed doubtful whether peace would have been signed in 421 if he had not been killed the year before. Both Euripides and Aristophanes devoted their main political energies to opposing the war. Aristophanes' second production, The Babylonians, when he was still under twenty, had been an attack on the way that Athens treated her subject allies, and a personal attack on Cleon. For this Cleon indicted him on a charge of impiety. No doubt the political motivation was obvious. Aristophanes does not seem to have been abashed. After the daring pacifism of The Acharnians, he attacked Cleon again in The Knights. With a first prize two years running for these plays, Aristophanes was now too popular; Cleon could not touch him. Euripides was also prosecuted by Cleon for impiety, presumably for the same political motive.⁴ By this time he had already presented two of his most savage antiwar plays, the Hecuba and Suppliant Women.

At the age of ninety-three, old Cratinus had beaten Aristophanes' Clouds into third place. His working life must have spanned almost the entire life of Old Comedy since it was first officially recognized in 486. The few fragments show that his work was recognizably of the same genre: there is surrealist fantasy, political satire, and mythological burlesque. Nothing that survives shows anything approaching the sheer intensity of lyric poetry that we find in Aristophanes' greatest songs, but this may be merely the chance of papyrus finds.

There is an important fragment (307) of Cratinus that connects Aristophanes and Euripides as the up-to-date bright fellows:

Hey, the theater gossip's going, get you, what a wise one!
What a supersubtle whizzing wit, what Euripidaristophanizing.

It is usually said by scholars that Aristophanes hated Euripides. For this there is no real evidence. In The Frogs Euripides is mocked. So is Aeschylus. In Aristophanes' Acharnians Euripides appears as a character in an amusing scene, where his role is that of the kitchen-sink dramatist. The agōn is a beautiful parody of Euripides' nonextant Telephus, with Dikaiopolis (Just City)⁵ defending his life by threatening to kill his hostage, the charcoal basket (331 ff.). The Women at the Thesmophoria is entirely devoted to Euripides. The women decide to revenge themselves on him for the unkind things he has said about them. But Euripides was known to be very sympathetic to the cause of women and wrote many beautiful passages that show great sensitivity to their situation. We think for instance of Medea's speech on the lot of women (Medea, 230 ff.) and especially her remark that she would rather face enemy spears three times than bear a child once (250-51). The Women at the Thesmophoria contains scenes in which the character Euripides appears as hero of parodies of his recent successful plays. One of the things that the play deals with is the nature of poetic, theater reality. Euripides is presented as the type of the poet. Nothing could be more complimentary. Even in The Frogs there is a delight in Euripides' poetry as it is mocked. Aristophanes and Euripides must have met frequently at the festivals. At the very least, the younger comic admired the older tragic poet, who shared his sympathy for women and hatred of war. Certainly they must have had many conversations together over matters theatrical.

Because Socrates is caricatured as the central character in The Clouds, unimaginative scholars have suggested that Aristophanes hated him too. There is a tradition that Socrates stood up in the audience to be recognized at the first performance of The Clouds.⁶ More important is the evidence of Plato's Symposium or Drinking Party, written in the 380s, some time after Socrates' death, describing a party in 417 given by the young tragic poet Agathon to celebrate his first prize. Here Socrates and Aristophanes are shown as good friends, still arguing about tragedy and comedy through a haze of alcohol and sleep after the other guests have collapsed (223C-D).

I have gone into such detail about this point because it is important to grasp that Athens at this time was a tightly knit community where the poets, artists, and thinkers all knew each other well. Much of Aristophanes' satire appears to us more savage than it really is. It is, as it were, satire within the family. Members of a family may abuse each other with great violence but the abuse means something different from abuse of or by outsiders. It is often said that a modern production of Aristophanes can work only within a university, for a modern university, with its strong sense of community, its savage in-fighting, and its possession of time for discussion or conversation, is the nearest our society can come to the life of fifth-century Athens, where the middle classes lived off the proceeds of their farms but left them to be run by slaves, while they themselves spent their time in bodily, mental, and spiritual exercises.

Euripides and Aristophanes also shared acquaintance if not friendship with the poet-musician Timotheos, who was responsible for developing a new musical style characterized by its mixture of many tempi, its independence of the system, and, as a result, its increasing dominance over the words. Both Euripides and Aristophanes developed his innovations with obvious delight. But we can see in some of Euripides' work in the last ten years of his life a looseness of poetry incompatible with the Gesamtkunstwerk, where every syllable and gesture has point. The new music was one of the developments that would kill fifth-century drama.

Five years of peace had encouraged Athenian aggressive imperialism. First they attacked the small Dorian island of Melos, which had never been a member of either the Athenian or the Spartan bloc. When Melos finally fell the Athenians voted to put all the men to death. This act of brutality was quickly followed by a decision to send an expedition to Sicily. Ostensibly to help a Sicilian ally, it was in effect an attempted invasion of Syracuse, the most powerful city of the island, and an act of unmitigated aggression. The inspiration behind the expedition was the brilliant and unstable relative of Pericles, Alcibiades. He was made one of the generals, another being the cautious Nikias, much against his will. Just before the expedition sailed a scandal struck Athens. It was the custom to have outside one's house a herm—a statue of a fertility spirit or household god, to which incense was burned and prayers offered. As fertility spirits, the statues had erect penises. One May morning, it was discovered that a great number of statues had been mutilated. This sacrilege was regarded as an extremely ill omen. The enormous expedition was allowed to sail after a while, but when it was on its way to Sicily, Alcibiades was recalled to face trial, as he had been implicated in the sacrilege. He chose instead to escape to Sparta, where he gave two pieces of advice to the Spartans that were very largely responsible for Athens's eventual defeat: they should build a fort on Athenian soil, from which they could ravage the land continually; and they should send a Spartan general to Syracuse to take command. As a result, the Athenians in Sicily, under the incompetent command of Nikias, suffered a total defeat two years later, losing all of their ships and all of their men.

In 415, just before the expedition sailed, Euripides presented one of his few trilogies, of which we possess the third play, The Trojan Women, possibly the greatest antiwar poem ever written. It was voted second, clearly not being to the mood of the time. The next year Aristophanes presented The Birds. Although this is apparently pure fantasy, there are quite recognizable allusions to Athenian aggression and to sacrilege. The central character, a typical brash Athenian, is presented with brilliant ambivalence: he is a lovable rogue. But the play won only second prize, though many people now think that it is Aristophanes' best.

Almost certainly, that year also saw the Iphigeneia in Tauris, the first of a series of plays by Euripides that have a feeling of fantasy about them. About this time Agathon presented his Antheus, the first tragedy with an invented plot. The Iphigeneia in Tauris is the earliest play where it is possible to analyze its structure in terms of the interrelation of characters, which we call “plot,” without losing too much of what the play is about. Two years later, in 412, Euripides presented the Ion and Helen, which are even more plays of plot, beginnings of the modern theater. They are no longer rites, but pieces that can exist in a secularized theater as fantasy. Although the Philoctetes of Sophocles is not a play of this nature, its structure bears some relation to this new theater of plot. Sophocles, now well over eighty, was not above learning from his younger contemporaries.

Aristophanes' plays during the last ten years of the war are more intensely and more obviously rites, activities of worship. These three—the Lysistrata in 411, Women at the Thesmophoria in 410, and Frogs in 405—are also his most perfect plays formally. In the latter two there is a deep exploration of the nature of theatrical reality. Pun and parody, always central to his humor, acquire in and through these masterpieces the status of a world view. It is central to our understanding of Athenian culture that we should realize that these wild fantasy-farces are also major religious poems.

After the Sicilian disaster in 413, Athens never fully recovered. The Spartan side now had a navy and were able to encourage Athenian subject states to revolt. The Athenians appointed ten commissioners to oversee public affairs, one of whom was Sophocles. At his age his job must have been largely to boost morale. In 411 there was a coup d'etat by a group of oligarchs, members of the upper classes. But the rule of the Four Hundred, so-called from the number of the conspirators, lasted only a few months. A new constitution was created, giving franchise to the Five Thousand, the men of some property, and Alcibiades was recalled to treat with Persia and prevent her coming into the war on the Spartan side. A year later Alcibiades defeated and destroyed the Peloponnesian navy at Cyzicus, and full democracy was restored. In the summer of 407 Alcibiades returned to Athens and was voted command of the war. With an escort of soldiers he made sure that the annual festival procession from Athens to Eleusis could take place that September. Since the Spartans had occupied the fort of Decelea, this had been impossible. But in the spring of 406, the Athenian fleet suffered a minor defeat at Notion at the hands of the new, brilliant Spartan admiral, Lysander. Alcibiades, though not present, was voted out of office, left Athens for his castle on the Hellespont, and took no further part in the war.

Having presented the Orestes, a piece of mad, baroque savagery and one of the most brilliant explorations of the many levels of theatrical reality, Euripides left Athens, disappointed at the lack of success that he had met with in his life. At the court of the king of Macedon, he wrote and probably produced The Bacchants, and then died early in 406. Sophocles, hearing the news at the beginning of the City Dionysia as he was going into the proagōn to announce his play, brought on his performers in black, without wreaths. The Bacchants, Iphigeneia at Aulis, and the lost Alcmaeon at Corinth were produced posthumously and won first prize.

Athens had won another naval victory, at Arginusae in 406. But many seamen were lost in a storm that followed the battle. In anger at the loss of these men, the Assembly accused the generals in charge of failing to pick them up. Eight generals were condemned to death and six executed, two having prudently sailed away. The Spartans again advanced peace terms on the basis of the status quo, and offered to evacuate Decelea—the same terms as they had proposed after the battle of Cyzicus, four years before. Again the peace was rejected, this time at the instigation of the demagogue Cleophon.

For this desperate situation the ninety-year-old Sophocles wrote his Oedipus at Colonus but died before he could see it produced. With both tragic poets dead, Aristophanes wrote his Frogs as a plea for unity in Athens and peace with Sparta. It was produced in 405 at the Lenaia and won first prize to great acclaim. But peace was not made, and in the summer the Athenian navy, stupidly commanded, was destroyed by Lysander at Aegospotami. The war was over, although Lysander delayed some months before sailing to Athens, destroying the fortifications and imposing an oligarchic government—the Thirty.

Athens was bankrupt, and many were very hungry, since the economy had relied on importing corn. The Spartan-supported oligarchy lasted less than two years, but it is not an exaggeration to say that the spirit of Athens was broken. The restored democracy put men to death as acts of political reprisal, among whom the most notoriously innocent victim was Socrates, forced to drink hemlock in 399. Reference was made to The Clouds at his trial,⁷ and this, on top of the defeat of Athens, may well have broken Aristophanes' heart. His next play was not presented until 393, and it is like a shadow of his earlier work. There were no longer funds for a proper comic chorus. There are none of the complex dances of the earlier plays. But there is also a lack of political intensity; how could there be the satire of a play like The Knights in a society that had put Socrates to death?

Quite suddenly also, perhaps within a generation, there was a major change in religious attitude. The last two plays of Aristophanes are unique in containing neither prayer, hymn, nor dance invocation of the gods, nor celebration of a rite. Gold had been melted off the statues of the gods to pay for the war, and still Athens had lost. The ceremonials of the city's worship no longer seemed to relate to religious experience. A split developed between the intellectuals, of whom Plato was typical, and the ordinary people, the latter developing more incoherent magical superstitions, the former, … adopting an attitude somewhat the equivalent of Protestantism. Rites and ceremonies no longer seemed to have any real function in life. Philosophy was more important than poetry. The major function of the theater was to provide sensational entertainment and display opportunities for the actors, who now became much more important than the poets.⁸

The squabbling politics of the Greek city states continued for most of the fourth century. But the kingdom of Macedonia was becoming the most important power. In 338 Athens and Thebes were defeated at Chaeronea by Philip of Macedon, and from then on Athens would never be fully in control of its political identity. About this time Lycurgus rebuilt the theater and encouraged the revivals of fifth-century plays. It was the beginning of the process that dignified and ossified tragedy into grand opera. Soon after appeared the first examples of what is known as New Comedy, which was to last as the standard comedy for centuries and influence the modern theater at every turn. The only examples we possess in Greek are by Menander, one of the first—if not the first—writer of this genre, a kind of play making derived from plays like Euripides' Iphigeneia in Tauris, and now based upon an endlessly repeatable formula. They are plays of ordinary life whose success depends on the skilful manipulation of coincidence to form a plot that keeps the audience guessing. They involve no issues of importance, and the humor consists merely of amusing situations or witty remarks; there is nothing of the total laughter of an Aristophanes play.

Plays were now written to be toured, and the festival of Dionysus became relatively much less important. New Comedy could be played all over the new empire established by the conquests of Philip's son, Alexander, and a little later even in the Western empire, governed by Rome but culturally dominated by Greek thought, Greek writers, and Greek theater. Menander was born in 343 and wrote about a hundred plays in his relatively short life, of which we possess one complete, early example, three nearly complete plays, three plays of which about half the text remains, and a number of sizable fragments. We have twenty-six adaptations of New Comedy into Latin: twenty by Plautus, who lived about a century after Menander, and six by Terence, a freed Carthaginian slave brought up in Rome in the generation following. Plautus probably started life as an actor; Terence was a favourite of the leading intellectuals in Rome in the middle of the second century b.c., though he was not outstandingly successful and left Rome at the age of twenty-five never to return.

Plautus and his contemporaries were able to watch the Greek theatrical performances in Sicily and the south of Italy, where drama seems to have flourished consistently since the fifth century, though we hear little of any writers of note. Perhaps most interesting is the first writer of prose sketches, Sophron of Syracuse, none of whose work survives.⁹ It certainly, however, influenced Theocritus, who was born in Syracuse but spent most of his life in Alexandria, the city founded by Alexander at the mouth of the Nile, which was rapidly to become the most important cultural capital as the center of the Ptolemies' Egyptian empire. But although Theocritus has an ear for dialogue and character, none of his dramatic poems were meant to be acted. And although Alexandria in the third century had a flourishing community of poets, there seem to have been no plays of distinction. Webster has noted that we know the names of sixty tragic poets between the third and the end of the first centuries b.c., but not a line of their work survives.¹⁰ The only dramatic writing of this period surviving in Greek are the seven sketches of Herodas, who spent some of his life in Alexandria, although he does not seem to have been born there.

It is a strange story. Performances of tragedy and comedy seem to have continued under the Roman Empire, and new plays were being presented in Athens in the reign of Hadrian, at the end of the first century a.d. Tragedy consisted of a relatively small series of stock plots into which minor variations were introduced, no doubt to suit the voice or temperament of the actor-manager of the particular tour. The chorus had been relegated to unimportance by the time of Lycurgus, though choruses were occasionally employed throughout later antiquity as decorative additional entertainment. From the reign of Nero we possess nine tragedies by Seneca, all of them variations of Greek originals. But high-born Romans did not write for the degrading theater; these plays are written for reading aloud in a salon, not for acting. Almost certainly they received their first stage presentation during the Renaissance.

The major dramatic art form of the Roman Empire¹¹ was the pantomime, invented in 22 b.c. by two freed slaves, Bathyllus of Alexandria and Pylades of Cilicia. A solo dancer performed a dance mime while a chorus at the side sang an accompanying story. It was enormously successful, and the great pantomimists became people of importance, the most notable of all being Theodora, who caused a furore by her marriage to the emperor Justinian in the sixth century a.d. At no stage was the profession of pantomimist respectable, as the profession of tragic actor in Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries had been.

Since these are the facts, any history of the theater of antiquity is bound to spend far longer on fifth-century Athens than on all the rest of antiquity put together. For a study such as this, which concentrates on those plays that we possess in a state to make it reasonable to ask how they can be produced in the theater, the balance is even more one-sided. We possess seven plays of Aeschylus, seven of Sophocles, eighteen of Euripides, and eleven of Aristophanes. We possess an anonymous tragedy, almost certainly of the early fourth century, attributed to Euripides, the Rhesus. Of Menander we have one play, three nearly complete plays, and three half-plays, and we possess twenty-six Latin adaptations of Greek New Comedies, twenty by Plautus and six by Terence. There are the seven versions of tragedy by Seneca not intended for performance, and the Octavia by pseudo-Seneca, a play made on the same lines as his, but with a plot based on recent events in the reign of Nero. With the exception of the sketches of Herodas and what else we can glean about the popular, mainly nonverbal theater, that is all.

How willingly would one barter the corpus of New Comedy for the last play of the Oresteia. Interesting though some of the details of Menander, Plautus, or Terence are, there is in general little for the modern theater to learn from them. Such inspiration as they have to offer has already been absorbed. The Comedy of Errors is an adaptation of The Brothers Menaechmus, by Plautus, which improves on its original. Molière is the greatest writer of New Comedy, and the best way to study details of the variations on a stock formula that is the essence of New Comedy would be to consider the way in which the formula has survived changes of language and culture throughout the centuries from the Greeks of the fourth century b.c. and their adapters to the playwrights of the Renaissance in several countries, whose tradition continues unbroken in the work of such writers as Oscar Wilde and Georges Feydeau, to the way in which the formula is still maintained in television serials of today. In a short study of the Greek theater such as this, the trivia of New Comedy must be only a postscript. To us now, searching for a new raison d'être for our theater, it is important to understand that, for its time, the theater of fifth-century Athens was everything that theater can ever be, and that in the study of forty-three plays by four poets we can discover everything about how theater lives and dies, and possibly even how theater may live again.

Notes

1. See Appendix 1 [in Aylen, Leo. The Greek Theater. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1985] for a chronological table with dates.

2. See Appendix 3 [in Aylen, Leo. The Greek Theater. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1985] for meanings of terms used.

3. Life of Sophocles 4.

4. Satyrus Life of Euripides 39 X.

5. For the translation of Aristophanes' character names, see Appendix 2 in Aylen, Leo. The Greek Theater. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1985.

6. The story is told by Aelian in his History 2.13. Webster assumes that Socrates stood up to show what a good likeness the stage representation was. See T. B. L. Webster, Greek Theatre Production, 2d ed. (London: Methuen, 1970). Dover assumes the opposite, that Socrates' action was to imply, “Do I look like the sort of man who's playing the fool on stage?” See Aristophanes, The Clouds, ed. Sir Kenneth Dover (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). However we interpret the action, it must surely have been a good-humored one.

7. Plato Apology 18.D.2.

8. In 341 it was decreed that each actor must perform for all three poets, in one play by each of them. This obviously indicates that to have the winning actor was by then considered an impossibly unfair advantage for any poet, and it therefore demonstrates the major importance of the actors.

9. The usual word for these sketches is “mime,” which is merely a transliteration of the Greek word. It is, unfortunately, confusing, because these “mimes” were not mimes in the modern sense at all, but short sketches in dialogue. For further discussion, see Chapter 12 in Aylen, Leo. The Greek Theater. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1985.

10. T. B. L. Webster, Art and Literature in Fourth Century Athens (London: Athlone Press, 1956), p. 114.

11. In a study such as this it is important to remember that the so-called Roman Empire was in all senses except politically a Greek empire. Apart from Rome itself, every important city was Greek-speaking, not Latin-speaking. More or less every development in thought and art came about through Greek speakers, not Latin speakers, although the former were by no means all Greek by race.