A guide to Greek theatre

The Greek theatre is built into a hillside, never on flat ground. Its parts are few and exact: the theatron (viewing place — the curving stone seating); the orchestra (the circular dancing-floor for the chorus, with the altar of Dionysus at its centre); the skene (the long building behind the orchestra, which doubles as backdrop, dressing-room, and painted scenery); and the two parodoi — the side passages by which the chorus enters.

The earliest theatres were temporary wooden structures in the Agora. After the collapse of one such bleacher around 499 BCE — the Athenians, characteristically, abandoned the site as cursed — the city moved performances to the south slope of the Acropolis, where the stone Theatre of Dionysus stands today.

Written around 335 BCE — a century after the great age of tragedy was over — Aristotle's Poetics is the West's first work of literary criticism. It is short, dry, and at times almost a checklist. It is also the document that gave us the words plot, character, spectacle, and — most fatefully — catharsis.

Aristotle's argument, compressed: tragedy is an imitation (mimesis) of a serious action; it works by inducing in the audience the emotions of pity and fear; and through their controlled release the audience is purged — katharsis. The structural core of a tragic plot is the peripeteia (reversal) coupled with the anagnorisis (recognition): a moment in which what the hero knows changes and his fortune inverts.

The word tragōidia means, literally, "goat-song" — the original chorus may have worn goat-skins, or the prize for the best play may have been a goat. The genre's history is conventionally divided into three names.

• Aeschylus (c. 525 – 456 BCE) — added a second actor, making dialogue possible. The Oresteia, the only surviving complete trilogy, ends with the founding of Athens' first homicide court.
• Sophocles (c. 497 – 406 BCE) — added a third actor and increased the chorus to fifteen. Oedipus Tyrannus, Antigone, and Electra survive. He was elected general; he served as a state treasurer; he won twenty-four festivals.
• Euripides (c. 480 – 406 BCE) — the most controversial of the three. Put women, slaves, and barbarians at the centre of his plays. Was mocked relentlessly by Aristophanes. Posthumously, became the most performed tragedian of the ancient world.

If tragedy is the mood of fate, comedy is the mood of the agora. Athenian Old Comedy — chiefly the eleven surviving plays of Aristophanes — is political, obscene, fantastical, and remarkably specific. Generals are named; philosophers are caricatured; the city's own war strategy is satirised within blocks of the Assembly that voted for it.

The comic chorus often wore animal costumes (wasps, birds, frogs, clouds). The plot regularly turned on an absurd idea: a woman organising an Athenian sex strike to end the war (Lysistrata); a man flying to heaven on a dung-beetle (Peace). After the loss of the empire and the rise of Macedon, the political teeth of comedy were pulled — Middle and New Comedy turned domestic. Menander's lovers and mistaken identities are the ancestors of every sitcom plot since.

A satyr play followed each tragic trilogy — a short, riotous piece in which a chorus of satyrs (drunken, lecherous goat-men attendant on Dionysus) is dragged into a story from the same mythic cycle as the tragedies. Only one survives whole: Euripides' Cyclops. The satyr play seems to have functioned as a deliberate decompression: after watching a king blind himself, you watched his half-divine half-brother chased around the stage by goat-men. The festival programme was a curated emotional arc.

The chorus is the single feature most foreign to a modern audience and most central to Greek tragedy. Fifteen citizens in unison: dancing in the orchestra, singing in metres invented for the occasion, speaking sometimes as the playwright's voice, sometimes as the city's, sometimes as a single trembling character.

The chorus is what makes Greek theatre collective. The protagonist may suffer alone, but the chorus stands at the edge of his suffering and tells the city what it means. Without the chorus, tragedy would be a private grief. With it, tragedy is a public ritual.

Athenian tragedy and Athenian democracy were born in the same generation. The reforms of Cleisthenes (508 BCE) and the first tragic victory of Aeschylus (484 BCE) are separated by a single human lifetime. The two institutions shared a building stock, a citizen body, and a way of doing business.

An Athenian male citizen could, in a single year, vote in the Assembly on the Pnyx, sit on a jury in the Agora, march in the army at Marathon, and stand in the chorus of a tragedy at the Theatre of Dionysus. The theatre was not an entertainment that occasionally referred to civic life. It was civic life, in a different mode.

Plays staged the city's hardest cases — the limits of obedience to the state (Antigone), the morality of vengeance (The Oresteia), the cost of empire (The Trojan Women) — in front of the same men who would decide them by show of hands the following week.

Three civic spaces, walking distance apart, defined the Athenian week: the Pnyx, where citizens voted; the Agora, where they argued and tried each other; and the Theatre of Dionysus, where they wept.

1. c. 534 BCE
   Thespis

   The first 'actor' — Thespis — wins the inaugural tragic prize at the City Dionysia, stepping out of the chorus to play a single character. The word 'thespian' descends from his name.

2. 508 BCE
   Cleisthenes

   Cleisthenes' reforms inaugurate Athenian democracy. The deme system that organises the chorus is the same one that organises the army and the vote.

3. 472 BCE
   Aeschylus, Persians

   The oldest surviving Greek play — and the only surviving tragedy on a contemporary historical event, the defeat of Xerxes at Salamis eight years earlier.

4. 458 BCE
   The Oresteia

   Aeschylus' trilogy ends with Athena founding the Areopagus, Athens' first homicide court. Theatre dramatises the city's own legal institutions.

5. c. 441 BCE
   Antigone

   Sophocles' play on conscience versus the state. Tradition holds the Athenians were so impressed they elected him general.

6. 429 BCE
   Oedipus Tyrannus

   Performed during the plague that killed Pericles. A play about a city whose ruler cannot see the cause of its suffering.

7. 411 BCE
   Lysistrata

   Aristophanes stages a women's sex strike to end the Peloponnesian War. The play is performed two years after the disastrous Sicilian Expedition.

8. c. 335 BCE
   Aristotle's Poetics

   A generation after the great tragedians are dead, Aristotle writes the West's first work of literary theory.

9. 86 BCE
   Sack of Athens

   Sulla sacks Athens. The Theatre of Dionysus survives. The festival continues, in diminished form, into the Roman period.