At Play in the Theater of Dionysus

Hello. Welcome to Have Toga, Will Travel, a podcast exploring the Mediterranean world, ancient and modern, through the eyes of two former classics professors. I'm Emily.

I'm Cam.

And we're your hosts.

Welcome back. First episode of 2026, I believe.

Yes, 2026, baby.

Going to take some time to get used to saying that. And we're going to kick off the year with an episode about one of Emily's favorite places. Also one of the major sites on the south slopes of the Athenian Acropolis: the Theater of Dionysus and the sanctuary associated with it.

And we'll post some pictures of the site on our blog over at havetogawilltravel.com for you to get a sense of what it looks like.

We mentioned this site a couple of times in recent episodes, and we want to dive into it little bit more because it's not necessarily a site that gets all of the attention that it deserves.

And the site is a really important site because it is where scripted drama as we know it in 21st century America is born. Now, that's not to say that there aren't other theater and performance traditions that develop all over the world. So for example, in Egypt, you know, there was ritual performance that happened. Usually it was a situation of someone reading a story while performers are miming it. But Athens itself is home to the oldest scripted drama in the world. And that drama found its home in the Theater of Dionysus.

Now, if you go to Athens, you can visit the theater and the associated sanctuary of Dionysus as part of the Acropolis ticket. The theater and the sanctuary both sit on the southern slope of the Acropolis towards its east end. So if you enter the Acropolis archaeological site from its southeast corner, you will literally walk past the theater and the Sanctuary of Dionysus on the way up to the top of the Acropolis, which is where people spend most of their time on site. If you enter the Acropolis from its west gate, on the other hand, you'll have to make an effort to walk around the south slope of the Acropolis and descend into the theater so that you don't miss it.

Yep. Now, another note, if you're visiting, is that there is another later Roman-era building called the Odeion of Herodes Atticus, or sometimes called the Herodei on, that sometimes people confuse with the Theater of Dionysus.

Especially since it's the first thing you encounter, pretty much, if you're coming in from the Western entrance.

Yeah, and it's a really large building. An Odeion in antiquity was something like a recital hall. So it would have been used for musical performances and things like that. This Odeion is a 2nd century CE building. It's a large semicircular stone building with a stage and stone seating. In antiquity, it would have had a roof, as would all Odeions. And this space, the Herodeion, if you will, is still used today as a space for musical performances, particularly in the big summer festival that happens in Athens and Epidavros. Now, just as a side note, this Odeion was commissioned and paid for by a man named Herodes Atticus, whom we have mentioned before, because he is the same man who commissioned the marble Panathenaic Stadium we mentioned in our first episodes on the marathon.

Now, the remains of the theater of Dionysus are a lot less flashy than the remains of Herodes Atticus' Odeion. In part, that's because the theater was open air from the beginning. So it wasn't quite as built up as the Odeion. It's also not as well preserved as the Odeion. We'll talk about what the theater looked like in a bit, but for now it's just worth mentioning that not much of the stone theater is still preserved, and very little of the temples to Dionysus that lay just to its south exist. If you go into the sanctuary, all you'll really see are foundations.

Now the sanctuary itself was founded sometime in the mid-6th century BCE. We have an altar fragment that dates somewhere from roughly 550 to 530 BCE. And then we also have some evidence that the festival of Dionysus that would have occurred at this sanctuary, the big festival celebrating Dionysus, the city Dionysia, was established no later than 534 and probably earlier, but that's when we know we have to have a festival in place. And the first temple to Dionysus in the sanctuary was built sometime in the 6th century, which, of course, makes sense with the development of the founding of the sanctuary and the festival. And then there is a second temple that's built later, a sort of bigger, better temple that's built sometime around 350. And this festival to Dionysus, the Dionysia, is where drama itself is going to grow and develop.

Now, the theater of Dionysus was established just the north of the sanctuary, outside its boundary, for the purpose of hosting performances during the city of Dionysia. It used the natural slope of the hill of the Acropolis, which provides a nice bowl for seating. By the beginning of the 5th century, there was probably a wooden seating complex in place. There's some evidence that the Athenians began to build a stone theater in the middle of the 5th century as part of the so-called Periclean building program that gave us a lot of other buildings like the Parthenon. But if so, that project was probably interrupted by the Peloponnesian War and was never complete.

Now sometime in the mid to late 4th century, a full stone theater is built during the leadership of Lycurgus. It's usually referred to as the Lycurgan Theater. And so this was a theater that would have had stone seating all the way up. It's still using the natural hillside as its foundation, but we're not using the hillside for seating itself. And then this theater is rebuilt many times over the centuries. So there's a Hellenistic rebuild of the theater sometime 3rd to 1st century BCE. And this Hellenistic theater introduces some pretty significant changes. It adds a stage and a stone scene building, and we'll talk more about those later. And then there's going to be reconstructions as well during the Roman period. And so most of what you see today when you go reflects those Roman reconstructions, although some of the stone elements do go back to that fourth century Lycurgan Theater. And it's also worth mentioning that the Theater of Dionysus didn't just do performance stuff. It also became a place where the Athenian Assembly would meet. So initially, some of the meetings of the Assembly, usually two, I think, a year, would happen at the theater. Eventually, though, the Assembly as a whole moves from the Pnyx, which is the hill where the A ssembly primarily met, to the theater for all of its meetings. Somewhere between 300 BCE and the first century BCE is when that transition happens.

It's also worth pointing out that what you see of the stone theater today is a pretty dim reflection of what it looked like in its glory days when the stone seating extended much further up the hill of the Acropolis than it does today.

Yeah.

Today, the remnants of the stone seating really occupy only the lower few tiers of seating in the bowl. In antiquity, though, it may have extended all the way up to the rocky shoulder that now sits immediately below the retaining walls of the Acropolis.

Yeah. Yeah. And of course, nowadays, you can't get into the stone seating. You used to be able to go in there and actually sit down, and you can't do that anymore.

Yeah. You used to go sit on the fancy seats that were reserved for officials and dignitaries and things like this, but that hasn't been true for years, unfortunately.

Yeah.

Now, as we mentioned at the beginning, the theater was tied closely to the festival honoring Dionysus Eleutherios. That's Dionysus the Liberator. This was a god who had his original home at Eleutherai in the northwest portion of Attica. As that part of Attica became more closely tied to Athens during the 6th century, possibly during the reign of Paesistratus, who ruled Athens as a strong man for much of that century, the cult of Dionysus was imported from Eleutherai into Athens itself. We get a great little story about the Athenians initially rejecting the arrival of Dionysus in their city. Dionysus punished them by sending a plague, which affected men where it hurt the most, in their genitals. Much of what you read will dance around the issue of precisely what that plague was. Almost certainly it was priapism. Priapism, for those of you who don't know what it is, is a state of extreme sexual arousal in men that just doesn't go away. Something really closely associated with Dionysus. And in the story, the Athenians only were able to alleviate their discomfort after they accepted the worship of Dionysus into the city and agreed to honor him in appropriate ways. And as we'll see, that worship as it developed included a pretty fancy procession in which the Athenians carried mementos, I would say, of their suffering in a parade through the city, basically great big model phalluses.

Yeah. But let's talk a little bit more about the festival. So the festival of Dionysus is a key part of Athenian worship of Dionysus, and drama becomes a key component of that festival. Now, the nature of the worship of Dionysus in Athens in these festivals seems to first take root in a deme or an area of Attica known as Ikaria. Now, here we get a myth about a local hero, Ikarios, who befriended and offered hospitality to the young Dionysus, who in turn gave Ikarios the grapevine and taught him how to make wine.

Now, this myth does take a dark turn, because what happens is Ikarios shares his knowledge with his fellow townspeople, and they, having never encountered alcohol before, become riotously drunk and decide, oh, we really don't like that. Something's wrong here. And they end up murdering poor Ikarios. Dionysus, understandably miffed by this, decides to punish the people of Ikaria by once again afflicting them with priapism. Dionysus inflicts this on the people of Akaria by manifesting as a sexy young boy, getting them all excited, and then vanishing in a puff of thin air. And they're only able to cure themselves from their discomfort, as it were, by agreeing to worship Dionysus. So it's a story that has a lot of parallels with the story about how the worship of Dionysus gets imported into Athens.

Now at Ikaria, Dionysus is celebrated in a festival that involves feasting and drinking and singing and dancing. And it seems that other festivals in Attica and the area around Athens were shaped by the nature of this festival. And so they all kind of take the same elements of worship. And this also includes the big festival to Dionysus in Athens, the city Dionysia.

Yeah, and it's worth pointing out here that if you spend some time touring around Attica itself, you'll find plenty of other places in Attica that have theaters which are almost always incorporated in some way into a sanctuary of Dionysus. So this idea, this link between Dionysus and performance is really well established in Attica and in Athens in the 6th century BCE. Now let's talk a little bit about how scripted drama proper emerges from the worship of Dionysus. One of the really old elements of the worship of Dionysus was the Dithyramb. This basically was a choral song sung by a group of men or boys in honor of the god Dionysus. It was a performance that incorporated dancing along with singing. We don't really know the origins of the Dithyramb, but we do have an early mention of it in the poetry of a 7th century author named Archilochus. And at some point, festivals of Dionysus evolved such that groups of choruses competed against each other as they delivered their dithyrambs. And in Athens, in the classical period, the 10 tribes into which Athenian citizens were divided, each fielded a chorus that competed against one another in two categories, the men's competition and the boys' competition, in which each chorus included up to 50 people.

So these dithyrambs were an original part of the events that happened during the festival. And at some point, somewhere around 530, this is the legend, a man named Thespis steps out of his chorus and engages in dialogue with them. And this is where we trace the beginnings of drama. So at the very beginning, drama is one actor having a conversation with a chorus. And this is also where we get the term Thespian, as someone who does theater, from this man Thespis.

The original actor.

The original actor, yes, the first actor, Thespis. Now, it is worth reiterating that from the very beginnings, Greek drama retains very strong choral elements, and that choral song and dance, over the development of tragedy, remains a key component of Greek drama. Theater, etymologically speaking, means a place of watching or seeing and not hearing. So the visual element of the performance is really central to the experience, the dancing, the costumes, all of that. And I think some people, because we don't know what those visual elements looked like, get a little too focused on the things we do have. So the scripts, the poetry, things like that. And of course, there would have been music as well, which we also don't have access to. So the plays that survive give us just a fragmentary view of what that full performance experience would have been like. It's also worth mentioning as we get into this that masking also becomes an important part of Greek drama. We don't have a lot of actors, and the use of masks is going to enable actors to play multiple characters, including female characters, because in this case, our actors are going to be exclusively men in the classical period. And eventually what's going to happen with Greek drama is it's going to develop from one actor to two actors to three actors. So you'll have three actors and a chorus made up of 12 to 15 people, depending on when we're talking about.

Now there's a lot we don't know about that development. Our oldest surviving play dates to 472. That's the Persians by Aeschylus, one of the three great tragic playwrights of classical Athens. So Aeschylus himself was born when this genre was still young. He was born around 525 BCE, just a little after Thespis's foray into this new medium. As far as we can tell, he first competed as a tragic playwright in the festival in 499, and his first victory was in 484. So there's a long stretch of time there between the creation of this genre and Aeschylus's Persians, our first surviving evidence for how these plays actually worked.

Now, Aristotle claims that Aeschylus is the person who introduced the second actor to drama. Whether that's true or not, we don't know. And of course, Aristotle's writing 150 years later. But it is true that by the time the Persians is written, there is a second actor. And we can tell this by how the play is structured. If you have two characters on stage talking to each other, then you need two actors. Now, Aristotle is then going to go on to claim that Sophocles, who's one of our other great Greek tragedians, introduced the third actor as well as scene painting. Now, Sophocles, just to give you some framework here, Sophocles was born around 496, so around the time that Aeschylus is starting his playwriting career. And Sophocles' first competition is probably 470, and his first victory is going to be 468. So it seems maybe a little too convenient that like the first great tragedian introduces the second actor, and then our next great tragedian introduces the third actor. I don't know if we can trust Aristotle in that one. It seems a little too pat. But what we do know is that the third actor is in use by 458 when Aeschylus writes his Oresteia, the oldest play that we can date that we know needs use three actors. Earlier plays that survive, which are all by Aeschylus, don't require three actors, including the play The Suppliants, which is now usually dated to 463, so only about five years earlier. Now, The Suppliants is kind of an unusual play, and people used to think it was a lot older because in The Suppliants, the chorus comprised of the daughters of Danaus is the main character. And so that was seen as maybe being a little more archaic. But one thing that I find kind of intriguing, and I could be totally like out of left field here with this, but by making the course the main character in a stronger way, it almost kind of mimics what it would be like to have a third actor. So maybe there's some prefiguring of that desire to have a third actor come in, because with three actors, you can do a lot more stuff. With two actors, usually what you've got is one actor, one character who's primarily on stage, and then the other actor playing different characters or the same character who are bringing news in and out from offstage. And with a third actor, the ability to have three people on stage together makes a much more dynamic piece.

Yeah, it's worth also noting that, you know, people tend to think of Greek tragedy as sort of an archaic, conservative genre.

Yeah.

And what you see in something like the suppliants is a lot of innovation. I mean, you see a playwright saying, okay, well, I've got to have a chorus in my play because that's just how things work. But what can we do with a chorus? They can do things other than just sing and dance around. They can be an integral component of the story that I'm telling.

Well, they're always an integral component, but the degree of integralness—

The degree of integralness, yes.

No, that's a really good point. Like, I think people miss just how innovative and experimental Greek theater is in the fifth century, constantly innovating on story, innovating on dramatic technique. And there's a lot of change that happens over the course of the fifth century. So even someone like Aeschylus or Sophocles, who have sometimes been labeled as like the conservative playwrights, they're still doing new and different things constantly. That's how you're going to win your audience over and win your prize.

And that, I guess, leads us into the topic of the festival itself. There are a couple of festivals dedicated to Dionysus at Athens, but the really big one was the so-called City Dionysia, as distinct from the festivals of Dionysus that happened in all the little towns around Attica. This was a major event that was held around the spring equinox, so late March, early April. It really heralded the opening of the sailing season in the Mediterranean. This was a multi-day festival. It incorporated a few different elements, including, first of all, a great big parade in which the statue of Dionysus was taken outside of the walls of Athens and brought back in in a procession to recreate his arrival in Athens in the prior century. This was a great big deal. It was full of spectacle. And probably one of its weirdest aspects to us was the fact that people carried essentially enormous floats depicting erect phalluses. And that's a clear callback to the nasty case of priapism that Dionysus inflicted on the Athenians and on the people of Ikaria in order to get them to worship him properly in the first place.

The ithyphallic floats.

The ithyphallic floats.

Your $60,000 word today, ithyphallic.

And these processions would have involved thousands and thousands and thousands of people. Pretty much everybody in Athens was participating in this parade some way, either as the bearer of one of these huge floats, or as a member of a chorus walking in the procession to open the festival. And the festival also drew people from the rest of the Aegean world, especially people from cities who in the 5th century were subject to Athenian power, who were likewise expected to show up and process along with a phallus of their own. After the procession, the next main element of these festivals were the Dithyrambic competitions, which persisted throughout the historical period. So these were competitions in which choruses representing the 10 tribes of the Athenian political body would compete to decide who was the best at singing and dancing in honor of Dionysus. And finally, these festivals would wrap up with the dramatic competitions, which featured the performance of tragedy and probably from the 480s or the 470s onward, comedy as well.

So in the fifth century, this festival would have been a five-day celebration. On day one, you're going to have the parade. There's going to be what they call the proagon, which is the announcement of the plays that are going to be performed that year, that judges are selected. And then there's also praise offered to notable citizens and foreigners who had benefited the city in the previous year. Eventually, during the Peloponnesian War, this is also when children who had been orphaned by the war, whose fathers died fighting for Athens, also are honored.

Yeah, it's a funny aspect of Athenian society that if your father's dead, you're an orphan, even if your mother is still alive.

Yeah. And this event would have been eventually held in the Odeon of Pericles. So this is another one of those recital halls. It would have sat right next to the theater. Again, this is a covered building. And this was built sometime around 435. And then you have two days for the Dithyrambic contest and three days for the dramatic contests, or at least the tragedy contests. And then possibly once comedy is added, another day for comedy. We're not quite sure how that worked.

So dramatic competition was clearly a really important component of this festival. Dionysus loved watching plays, apparently.

And in Athens, it's probable that his statue was brought from the temple and sat in the theater to watch the performances.

Yeah, it's pretty clear that in other sanctuary and theater complexes in Attica, the god was present during the play because the theater area was right in the sanctuary, usually. Sometimes even between the altar and the temple. So the god would sit in the temple and look out and see the performance as he gazed in the direction of his altar. In Athens, just because the topography meant that the theater had to be situated a little bit away from the sanctuary, this became the way to invite the god into the performance, you actually bring the statue into the theater so the god can sit there and enjoy the show. Because after all, the whole point here is to put on a show that will entertain the god. It entertains people, of course, but the god is the major person you're trying to satisfy. And the Athenians took the process of staging this competition really, really seriously. In the year leading up to the Dionysia, the process started when the Athenian state selected three playwrights to produce plays for the upcoming festival. Each playwright was charged with writing what's sometimes called a tetralogy that consisted of three tragedies and a satyr play. The three tragedies were not necessarily trilogies in the sense that they were connected directly to one another—

No we only have one trilogy that survives and that's the Oresteia.

which is the exception to this rule.

Which is the exception. It is—it is a definite trilogy. All of the other plays that survive were not part of trilogies and that doesn't really seem to have been the rule so it's three plays but they're not telling the same narrative.

Right, so you'd go and you'd sit and you'd watch the three tragedies produced by one playwright, followed by the satyr play that he had also written. What's a satyr play, you may ask?

It is a mythological burlesque. That's how it's sometimes described, a lot of times described.

And what made it, dare I ask, a burlesque?

Well, that's because the chorus for the satyr play was made up entirely of satyrs. And satyrs are critters that are half man, half goat. They are strongly associated with the worship of Dionysus, and they run around with giant erect phalluses.

Hmm, I'm sensing a theme here to these Dionysiac rituals.

So we don't have a lot of satyr plays that survive. We have one by Euripides and part of one by Sophocles. And they're taking the same sort of mythological storylines that tragedy uses, but they're doing them in kind of funny, silly ways. And you've got this chorus of satyrs running around.

But what's weird is that these are on some level related to comedies, but not quite the same.

Yeah.

Because in comedies too, you end up with choruses, which are not necessarily satyrs, but also members of the choruses in comedies wear...

Erect phalluses.

Erect phalluses and so on.

Yeah. Satyr plays aren't always as funny as comedies are. They almost feel like parody a little bit, but they're not as over the top, sort of ridiculous in the way that comedy of this period is. I always would make the comparison, for lack of anything better, that what it was like to watch three tragedies and a satyr play is like watching the original Star Wars trilogy and then watching Spaceballs.

That's a good analogy.

Now, granted, that's imagining a connected tetralogy where all the plays are sort of in the same story verse and all of that. But I think that's kind of the vibe of like very serious story and then kind of ridiculous, silly story playing in the same themes and in the same kind of world.

Right. Now, as you'd guess, I mean, if you're watching four plays all written by one playwright, this is basically an all-day affair.

Yeah, probably. I would guess. We don't know how much time they would take, but a Greek tragedy takes an hour, a little bit more, just to read through. And of course, we don't know what the musical elements would have added, but they're not like three hour plays each. They're like an hour and change each.

But a tetralogy is probably a four- to six- hour commitment.

Oh yeah.

And that's why it takes a day for each playwright to do his thing. When the comedy competition happened, on the other hand, there were anywhere from three to five playwrights, depending on the period.

Even six at some points.

And they just produced one play each. So that could all be concentrated into one day.

Yeah.

A lot of other elements of this competition were also complex and carefully managed by the Athenian state. The most bizarre component of this...

You mean other than the satyrs running around with giant phalluses?

Other than the satyrs running around, yeah. I won't even say bizarre, but let's say the most interesting thing, other than the satyrs running around with their phalluses, was the way the financing was structured. These productions could cost a lot of money because you are putting them on in honor of the god Dionysus and you really want to give that god a show. And that involves training your chorus really well so they know all the moves. It involves commissioning music. It involves working with your actors over a long period of time.

Costumes, props.

All that stuff.

Yeah.

The Athenian state, of course, had some resources of its own, which it extracted in various kinds of taxation. And it did devote some of those resources to these competitions. But a lot of the onus actually fell on wealthy citizens who belonged to the upper stratum of Athenian society and were required by virtue of their wealth and status to contribute money to collective enterprises like this, either to funding a chorus at the Dionysia or helping to offset the cost of running a warship in the navy. So plenty of rich Athenians over the course of the 5th and 4th centuries laid down a lot of their own money to finance these productions. As far as we can tell, one of these wealthy citizens was assigned more or less randomly to each of the playwrights selected to write the plays for a particular festival. And the choregos, we'll call him the producer, often took this job really seriously and really wanted to put on the best day of performances. And in fact, they competed against one another. And the playwright, who was judged to have put together the best performance, won a prize. But so too did the choregos, who financed the whole thing.

It's like in the Oscars, the person who takes home the Oscar for best picture is the producer.

Yeah, that's actually the best analogy, right? It's very, very similar.

Yeah. And eventually you do also get prizes for your lead actor, your protagonist.

Your protagonist, yes.

Which literally means the first actor.

Among other things, the victorious choregos was awarded a tripod and they would display these on top of monuments along what became known as the street of the tripods, a street whose name is still born by one of the streets in Plaka in modern Athens.

Street of the Tripods. No reference to the giant phalluses.

You're assuming there.

Yeah, fair enough. Now let's talk a little bit more about what the performance space in the theater was actually like, because what you see when you go there today is not what it would have been like in the fifth century. So first of all, we have the orchestra. Now the orchestra is our primary performance space. It's where the actors and the chorus would have both performed. And it's just a flat area of ground. In the 5th century, it probably was just packed earth. There was an altar in the middle of it, which was dedicated to Dionysus. And the name orchestra literally means place for dancing, right? And this comes from the fact that the chorus was singing and dancing and that tragedy has its origins and that kind of choral performance.

And I think probably the most famous orchestra is the one at Epidaurus.

Yeah.

The theater of Epidaurus, that is modern Epidavros. But Epidaurus is an exceptional theater.

By all levels. It's also a much later theater. It's a fourth century theater.

There, the orchestra is round, essentially. It forms pretty much a perfect circle at the base of a really impressively engineered hemicircular theater. In Athens, the orchestra in the original wooden theater for much of the 5th century probably didn't look like that. It was probably rectilinear because the wooden seating area itself was rectilinear. So it would have been more of a square shape rather than the nice, it's kind of oval now in the Roman reconstruction of the Lycurgan Theater. The next thing that was important in the 5th century theater was the skēnē. This was essentially a wooden building at the back of the orchestra. So the performance typically took place in front of the skēnē. It had, as far as we can tell, one central double door. And as a building, it served both as the scene house and potentially as a set for the play. It could represent a building in front of which the action was taking place or something like that. A playwright could also stage some of the action on the roof of the skēnē if he wanted to. And playwrights used that device particularly for the appearance of gods, for example, in some plays. Although in a very famous example, the Medea, Medea actually escapes on a chariot drawn by winged serpents. And that scene was probably staged from the top of the scene house as well.

Yes. And maybe from the top of a ladder if you don't have a skēnē to do it on, as I did.

Right.

So we have the orchestra, we have the skēnē, and then we have two paradoi. So one parados on either side. And these are basically two entrances on either side of the back of the orchestra in front of the skēnē. And generally speaking, you would have, you know, one parados that would take you towards the town or the city or, you know, wherever the play was set. And then one that would take you out to the countryside or to the sea or wherever. So away from town. So one towards town, one away from town. Now, that could change, right? That wasn't like a fixed thing, but generally that's your setting in a Greek tragedy. You've got the building you're at and then towards civilization one way and away from civilization the other. And so those are sort of our entrance places. You can come from the scene house, from the interior of the building, or from either of the paradoi.

Right, depending on the needs of the plot.

Yeah.

Now, we've already mentioned that Greek drama was innovative. And is the introduction of this thing called the ekkyklēma. This was basically a rolling platform that could be rolled out from those double doors from the interior of the skēnē or the scene building to reveal interior tableaus. So you could have a bedroom basically wheel out if you wanted to stage action in something that was clearly a bedroom. We don't know when this was devised. I think it's probably definitely in place by the late fifth century.

Yeah, I mean, you'll get the argument that it's in place by the time the Oristeia is produced because of the reveal of Clytemnestra with the dead bodies. But there's also been people who've argued against it. But we do have later plays in the fifth century where you're like, yeah, no, this is definitely an Ekkyklēma scene.

Right, where the action can't really happen, or it doesn't make sense for the action to happen unless we imagine a tableau being temporarily brought out of the skēnē.

Yeah, like the Ajax comes to mind, right? To get his dead body on stage, to get that reveal, and things like that. And then one of these other, let's say, technical theater aspects that comes about is what's called the mechanē. Now, this literally means "the machine." Mechanē. And this was a crane that was used to fly performers in and out from the top of the skeine. So if you were staging a scene on the top of the skēnē, your god's not just like climbing up a ladder, right? They're going to have him fly in on this crane or her and you do the scene and then maybe fly off, right? Medea and her chariot is going to like fly off in this crane. And this is actually where we get the term deus ex machina from, or in Greek, theos ek tēs mechanēs. And this happens in some tragedies where you've got a plot that's not going to resolve itself easily. Maybe you're at some sort of impasse. People can't come to a agreement or don't know what to do. And a god will appear at the end of the play to solve the problem, give advice, tie things up, whatever it might be. And of course, this god is going to be coming in with this crane onto the roof. And so this god showing up at the end from the machine to end the play then becomes like a metaphor for not knowing how to solve a problem and having some sort of magical resolution. In this term, deus ex machina, god from the machine, is literally a reference to this technical aspect of Greek tragic performance. Oh, and this, of course, famously gets parodied by Aristophanes in The Clouds, where Socrates comes flying in on a giant cockroach. And I think there's also jokes about how much noise the crane is making and things like that. That's also actually how we know about the Ekkyklēma too, is that it gets parodied in Aristophanes. I should add, Aristophanes is the sort of great comedic playwright from the fifth century, the late fifth century.

Yeah, these things gave tons of opportunities for all sorts of metatheatrical jokes.

Yeah.

I did want to quibble a little bit with modern conceptions of the deus ex machina as like an unearned conclusion.

Yeah, it's not always like that.

No, I was going to say in Philoctetes, one of Sophocles' plays, where a conflict is resolved at the end by the manifestation of Heracles, who basically convinces Philoctetes to abandon his desire for vengeance, essentially, and reunite with the other Achaeans and go to Troy. And that's not really an unearned resolution. I mean, that's Heracles kind of stepping in and making a claim to a friendship that is referenced constantly throughout the play and very much on the spectators' minds.

Yeah, yeah. So the deus ex machina, as gods are used in Greek tragedy, doesn't really work the same way as our stereotype of deus ex machina as like modern literary device. They're different, yeah.

Right, exactly. Now, we've been talking mostly about how the theater looked and how performances in that theater worked during the 5th century and probably for much of the 4th century. But as time went by, the structure of the theater changed, and those changes were perhaps correlated with changes in how drama worked, especially an apparent decline in the importance and use of the chorus. So for example, at some point we get a raised stage in addition to the orchestra. At that point, the chorus tended to stay in the orchestra, but the actors performed on the stage. So it's a physical development in the space that seems to give a little bit more prominence to the actors than had been the case before when actors and chorus were all performing in the same physical space. And here it's worth noting again that the chorus grew out of organic Greek traditions that were alien to dramatic arts as they developed elsewhere. And partly for that reason, the chorus is the first thing that gets minimized or cut completely once other people start adopting Greek tragedy.

Yeah. Then we also get an expanded skēnē. So we get wings built, which actually enables you to then have more building entrances. So you go from one to basically three doors. And it is possible that some of these changes start showing up in the Lycurgan Theater, so the fourth century theater. In particular, there might have been something of a raised stage there. We don't know. But part of the argument is that by the time the Lycurgan Theater is built, new comedy, what's called new comedy, is coming onto the scene, which is different from old comedy, which is the comedy of the fifth century. And one of the particular differences is that new comedy does not use a chorus. Old comedy did, new comedy doesn't. And new comedy also has a very different sort of aesthetic to its performance and to its humor. And we talked a little bit about new comedy when we talked about A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

Right. It's worth reiterating that the Roman comedies of Plautus drew explicitly on Greek new comedy, much of which was inspiring Plautus' adaptations, recreations, whatever we want to call them.

Yeah. And now whatever changes there might have been in the Lycurgan Theater, we do know by the time the Hellenistic Theater is built that these changes are in place. There's a raised stage, there's the expanded skēnē, all of that. And those changes get even more magnified in the Roman period. And like we said, if you go to the theater today, what you're really seeing is the remains of the Roman theater. And you'll notice there's a really high raised stage. There's a large stone scene house, all of that.

In spite of these changes, the Dionysia remained incredibly important at Athens, and it continued right through late antiquity. And in fact, I think its celebration is attested until at least the very early 5th century CE, when finally it, like many other aspects of classical paganism fell by the wayside as Christianity increasingly became the dominant religion in the Roman Empire, and as various features of old pagan worship were increasingly actively suppressed.

Outlawed entirely?

Yes.

So I think that the continuity of the Dionysia speaks to the staying power and the popularity of tragedy. You know, we look at the three great tragedians, right, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. And they're all, you know, products of sixth, arguably, and fifth century Athens. But the writing and performance of drama continues well beyond them, both in space and in time, and creates this incredibly long-lasting legacy. So even by the mid-fifth century, Aeschylus is being invited to the court at Syracuse on Sicily to be a poet in residence and to put on plays for them. And theater becomes an incredibly important part of all sorts of religious festivals and then expands even outside of religious festivals. And we know that there would have been troupes touring the countryside doing performances. For all of its elements that are sort of weird and alien and not understood, the Greeks managed to tap into something that really resonated with people. And even people outside their own culture, even when they didn't get bits of it, there was something about it that compelled people. And so this kind of weird little phenomenon that starts in Athens becomes a, I want to say a worldwide, but that's too broad, but Mediterranean-wide phenomenon and persists even till today. And to be able to go to the theater and the sanctuary where this started and think about the legacy that that location carries, for me, is just incredibly moving.

I agree, even though I think we do miss out by not getting to see actors prancing around with big phalluses anymore.

I mean, you can. People do do that when they do stage performances sometimes.

In the occasional revival, yes.

Yes. But, you know, there's so much that we don't know. And yet, because great drama was, as we mentioned, so innovative, I feel like—I'd like to think, I guess, that these tragedians would look at modern stagings of their work and be intrigued by them, you know, to see that, (A) that their work is continued, but also that people are continuing to innovate with it. And don't feel compelled to do a sort of stale, fossilized version of what we think these performances might have been.

No, I don't know that we made this point explicitly. But these playwrights, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, the dozens of other people who worked in this genre whose plays have not survived, they were taking well-known, long-established stories and adapting them, changing them, working with them in all sorts of interesting and innovative ways that took audiences by surprise or played on expectations only to undercut them and things like this. So these are artists for whom experimentation was a virtue.

Yeah. And I think we lose sight of that a lot. So I think they would welcome... they may not like it, but I think they would appreciate the artistic inclination.

That's a good way to put it. Yes.

So we will wrap up there. We will be back January 15th, thereabouts, with a new episode. So tune in then. So I've been Emily.

I'm Cam.

And this has been Have Toga Will Travel. Find and follow us wherever you get your favorite podcasts or on havetogawilltravel.com. You can also follow us on all the socials. And if you have any questions or topics you'd like to see us cover, please feel free to reach out.

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