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A
You don't need to know much about theatre or even go to it to know that ancient Greece has something to do with its origins. Two and a half thousand years ago, people gathered together in semicircular open air theatres to watch actors wearing masks performing tragedies and comedies accompanied by a singing chorus.
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Some of the plays, like Oedipus, the King, Medea and their writers like Sophocles and Euripides are still box office today, particularly if there's a Hollywood a Lister taking the title role. But how much connection is there really between what happened in ancient Athens and what happens on Broadway or in London's West End?
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A
Get into the nitty gritty of this and what stands out isn't how similar we are to the Greeks, but how different. For a start, you didn't just go to a show, have some dinner and go home to bed. A trip to the theatre in Athens was a much more ambitious and spectacular experience, involving not just a three hour play, but several days of state sponsored military parades and hymn singing, displays of war booty, processions of unmarried girls and orphans, and processions of large phalluses and
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a shocking, to our point of view, amount of animal sacrifice. And this wasn't just for the elite either. Half the male citizens might be in attendance.
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A
So if Greek theatre wasn't just about a good night out for those who could afford it, what was it? How much similarity is there really between what we call theatre and what they did? And since women weren't allowed to vote or participate in political discourse, would they even have been allowed in? Would you and me have been allowed in, Mary?
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That's what we're going to be exploring in today's episode. This is Instant Classics, the podcast that uncovers the ancient stories still shaping the world today. I'm Mary Beard.
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And I'm Charlotte Higgins. Each week we dive into the myths, the dramas and the characters of the classical world to discover what they still mean to us now.
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This episode, A Day at the Theatre in ancient Athens.
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To some, he is the revolutionary hero who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage.
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To others, he's a brutal despot accused of presiding over more civilian deaths than either Stalin or Hitler.
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Mao Zedong has one of the most recognizable faces in the world. Yet he started life in a muddy provincial village.
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A rebel son who hated his father, survived a 6,000 mile walk across China and rose to become a figure of titanic proportions.
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From Empire, the Goal Hangar World History Show. I'm Anita Anand.
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And I'm William Durmpel.
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In this six part series, we're joined by world renowned expert Rana Mitta to explore the life of the father of Communist China, Mao Zedong.
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We'll track his rise from a bookstore owner to a guerrilla commander. And we'll witness his ruthless elimination to secure total power. And we'll descend into the dark experiment of the Cultural Revolution, a time when ancient temples were burnt, children denounced their parents, and a nation worshipped a mango as a sacred relic.
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Subscribe to Empire wherever you get your podcasts to listen.
- [03:39]
B
Now that word day is pretty important because we're not in Athens thinking of Charlotte's evening out. We're not even thinking of matinees, we're thinking of a whole day spent watching drama. You know, when I say that, I think that when we compare ancient and modern theatre, we're, you know, we're very good at spotting some of the obvious differences. It's a daytime event. It's in an outdoor stone semicircular seating with a circular area where the action takes place, backed by some kind of stage building. We know that those kind of things are very different from our own experience. And I do think you do wonder about whether they took cushions. I think they did take cushions because the seats were very hard. But I think also we've got a checklist of the things that are different. The actors are wearing masks, there's a chorus involved which is a huge amount of singing. I mean, in some ways ancient theatre was more like opera than it was theatre in our terms. And it's all done in the natural light. And we're very dubious about the idea that they might even have clapped, like what goes together with our experience of theater. And they're wearing masks, of course. So we've got a hugely different appearance, dramatic appearance here. But I do think we tend to kind of go through that sort of checklist of why the ancient theatre is different, but then not think about those, about the less superficial aspects, the real different arrangements and point that lay behind Athenian theatre.
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A
So we are going to talk today, Mary, aren't we, about ancient Athens in the 5th century BCE because that is the time that we know most about and it is the time in which those playwrights who we know about today, whose plays survive today, I.e. aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides in times of tragedy and Aristophanes in terms of comedy, those guys were having their plays put on at that time. But, you know, performances went back earlier. You know, this stuff came from somewhere. We're not going to talk about that today. Because that's the origins of Greek theatre, has its own kind of long, disputed and murky story. And it went on later. And there were plays put on that not in Athens. There were plays put on in other cities around the Greek world. There were plays put on in villages, even some. So. But we're just going to talk mostly about Athens because. Pretty much entirely about Athens, because that's the kind of mothership and the epicenter, as far as we know, of the great sort of theatrical events of ancient Greece.
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B
Yeah, we know much more about the Athenian experience than the experience of anywhere else in the Greek world. But that said, when you come to actually say, well, how was all this put on? What were the rituals and the conventions surrounding it, how was it organized, who paid for it, et cetera, what you find is that the evidence, even in Athens, is tricky and pretty scary, sketchy. I mean, basically, it's not like anyone in Athens sat down and wrote a treatise or a kind of anthropology of what went on at the theatre. So what you have to do in order to work out the practicalities of theatrical performance is you have to glean what you can from tiny, casual references in a load of different sources, some of them rather unlikely ones. And one of the best bits of evidence for the tragic performances is actually Plato's dialogue, the Symposium, which is really all about the very nature of love. But the setting of it turns out to be just after one of the characters in the dialogue has just been a hugely successful playwright with his first prize winning play put on in the Athenian theatre. And you get all kinds of little asides in Plato's dialogue referring to what's been going on. So it's not as if you can come and say very straightforwardly what happened. And there are huge black holes, honestly, in what we know or think we know about what happened. And we'll be coming on in a bit to whether there are any women in the audience. We know that there were no women on stage, all the actors were male. But the jury is still out a bit on whether any women at all or only a few, could be spectators at the theatre. And I say spectators quite advisedly there because I think it's worth remembering that the Greek word theatre, which gives us our word theatre, actually means a place where you look, you go to look.
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A
Yes, and of course, worth saying, you know, it's one of those very obvious differences that all the performers would have been men. So we kind of know that. But I think one of the things that we want to talk about today, Mary is that it's even less like modern theatre than we think it is. Even in these superficial differences like it's outside, it's men, it's masks, there's lots of music. It's also the fact that there is an absolutely enormous infrastructure around these plays. So because we have these wonderful playtexts that still get performed in the modern theatre, we tend to think of Greek theatre as being those plays. But actually Greek theatre in the sense is the plays are part of it. But Greek theatre as an experience is a massive state and religious infrastructure that involves a huge amount. It involves year long organization, large numbers of the citizenry involved and a good deal of baggage around it. Processions, sacrifices, state events. But you know, one sort of basic thing to say is that going to the theater in Athens in the 5th century is when you see it, you're going to be attending one of two annual festivals, religious festivals in the city. One's called the Lanaia, which, which happens in January. It's a smaller scale affair. And the main one is called the City Dionysia or the Great Dionysia. And this was a big, big, big event in April. Crucially it's in the spring, it's when the sailing season has started. So people can also come to this from other parts of Greece. Okay, point one, in a sense, it's not about me buying my tickets and going to see one play in two weeks time in the evening. This is a huge days long event, getting huge numbers.
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B
I mean, it's a bit hard to estimate what the capacity of the main stage was in the 5th century, but a good guess would be that it could hold up to 14,000 people, which would, if you reckon that there's perhaps 30,000 male citizens, it could hold almost half of the whole citizen body. I mean, to put it crudely, you almost certainly got more Athenian citizens going to the theater than went and participated in voting and the assembly. It's a kind of. It is a hugely all encompassing set of events and rituals and whatever. And it's done under the kind of aegis of the God Dionysus. We often think of the God Dionysus as being the God of wine. And up to a point, that's right. But we talked recently in our episode on the goddess Athena that Greek gods are kind of more complicated than their sort of single couple of word definitions that weaves about them. And Dionysus, I mean, is the God of wine in a way, but more Dionysus is the God of not being yourself. I think that's of Being beside yourself, of being outside yourself. Now, one of the ways of being outside yourself or beside yourself is to get very drunk, you know, then you stop being you and you're kind of outside your normal person. But theatre also, and the impersonations and the dramatic side of theatre is also about not being yourself. And so there's a tie up, I think, between the idea of Dionysus as the God of the wild and the Dionysus who's the God of theatrical performance.
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A
Do you know, I was thinking about this this week because I went to see some Noh theatre. So this is Japanese theater, the performers wear masks. I was thinking about that in relation to Dionysus and this act of putting on a mask and what it actually means when you see that as a spectator, it makes it very. And this sounds so obvious, but actually, stay with me, if you put on a mask, it really shows that you have taken on another character, that you're not being yourself, that you are becoming something that is beside yourself in the. Maybe in the Dionysian sense. And I think, you know, in a world where everyone's performing all the time, we're very self conscious about performance. We also watch naturalistic film and tv. It somehow. It somehow seems quite special. To imagine this, you know, in an ancient context, the act of putting on a mask shows that you're becoming something else for this place and time. You're not to be confused with your real self, which is kind of rather beautiful in its own way.
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B
I think that when. Now, I mean, I mean, outside Japanese Noh theater, when directors choose to stage Greek tragedy using masks, which sometimes they do, I always feel a bit disappointed because it feels that what's driving that is a kind of idea of authenticity. This is how the Greek theatre would have appeared, rather than what you're saying, which is we are now talking about people becoming somebody else. And that is what is absolutely central to Greek Athenian theatre. You know, I suppose, you know, it's to reiterate the point that we'd be making that of course, Athenian theater is different from ours, but it is yet weirder than we like to think. It's not just. It's different in some respects, it's yet weirder, partly because it's an absolutely central state operation. This is not state subsidized theatre, this is state theatre. Thousands of people in the city are involved in, actually, particularly when it comes to the great Dionysia, the big one, they are involved with getting the show on the road.
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A
So one of the key ways of doing that, for example, the city archon, which is a word that describes a sort of senior state administrator in Athens, that person would vet the proposals that had been submitted for plays. So it was a bit like saying, oh, you know, the Secretary of State for Defence or the. I don't know, the Chancellor of the Exchequer would be checking out the proposals for the plays. This is a really senior politician administrator. At least those proposals would be. If it was a tragic poet presenting ideas, they would present an idea for three tragedies, a trilogy, plus a thing called a satyr play. We have very little in the way of satyr plays, don't we, Mary? There's one, isn't there?
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B
Euripides, Cyclops, which is about the giant Polyphemus, the cyclops who appears in the Odyssey.
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A
Right. So these were comic plays set in the mythological world, featuring sort of lots of silly visual gags and a chorus of satyrs. And they are the mythological creatures that have kind of horses tails and big pieces, penises, basically.
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B
They're the traditional followers of Dionysus. You know, part of Dionysus wildness is that his entourage partly includes these half man, half animal satyrs. And they are. They provide the chorus in the final event of the tragic performance. You know, we tend to think now, and we usually just go to see an individual play. You know, we go to see Medea or Agamemnon or whatever. There was none of that in 5th century Athens. What you went to see was a trilogy of three plays, plus a satyr play in which the people who'd been the chorus in the first three plays then kind of dress up somehow as Satis. Now, why, of course, we don't tend to think of it in these terms is that we only have one surviving trilogy, which is Aeschylus, Oresteia, starting with the Agamemnon. And we don't, for that have what its satyr play was. So even though we got these plays surviving because they became, in a sense, great hits and were copied and reperformed, we only actually have fragments of what any Athenian audience would have seen. You know, and this is hours long. You go for a day and you see three tragedies plus a satyr play on Hard Benches in the Sun. That's a marathon.
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A
And a note on funding. As an arts journalist, one always wants to know a little bit about funding. That same magistrate, who, or not magistrate, but administrator who vetted these proposals. He would also allocate the plays to somebody called a Coregos. So this is a rich patron, basically someone who'd meet all the production expenses. And it feels like those rich people really threw money at it, or maybe they've is a kind of big prestige thing. So there is a kind of. There's a joke in a bit of surviving literature about the Coregos being dressed in rags whilst the chorus is dressed in gold. But at the same time there's, you know, also the people involved in this are not professionals in quite the same sense that we would think of them. So the people acting in the chorus were drawn from the citizenry and you know, the playwrights. It's not like that was their full time job. I mean, they were Sophocles. And Aeschylus, for instance, had definitely fought in the military. So they have other things going on. And you know, even the main actors were not professionals in the way that we would think of them, although they did have. They were capable of having this sort of star status and being well known for what they did. So everything about this sort of basic setup is already kind of pretty different, I think.
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B
Yeah. And I think in some ways the Coregos, the person who funds this, is in some ways quite crucial. And it's quite surprising because in a way that's not untypical in ancient Athens, if the state wants some funding for a big project, one of the ways they get that is, is they finger a rich citizen and the rich citizen has to come up with the cash. But at the same time, the rich citizen gets glory from coming up with the cash. So they really want to have the best tragedy. So they are plowing loads of money in. Now, in some ways that doesn't sound hugely democratic to us, but it is an absolutely fundamental tenet really of Athenian democracy that these rich guys should plow money into the state. I mean, it's a kind of bit like an unofficial high rate tax band, but it comes with honor and they pay for everything. I think the state itself pays for the actors, but the Corregos pays for the expenses. It pays for the chorus. And it's interesting also that they develop a fund so that citizens can get a refund on the price of their seat. So this really is citizenly activity.
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A
And then. So if we turn more to the actual festival, there's actually a lot going on even before we get to the performance of the plays. A lot going on. So there are a lot of processions. Now, because of the sort of slightly fragmentary and dodgy nature of the evidence, it's not 100% clear how many processions there are, but there is at least One. And some people think that there are two. So I'm just going to go with the two precession theory for right now. So according to some people, a few days before everything gets going, there is this symbolic taking of Dionysus. Well, a sort of image of Dionysus. You take him out of his sanctuary in Athens, you take him outside of Athens to an olive grove outside the city. And then crucially, you bring him back in in a procession. Like maybe he's, as far as we know, his. His image or even a mask is held on a pole and carried with hymns and singing by torch light back into his sanctuary in the city. And that is partly to symbolize the fact that Dionysus was like a young God. And he had, unlike all the other gods of Olympus, he had arrived in Greece, he had physically traveled to Greece and started his religion in person in Greece. So he's taken out, as it were, in the direction from which he came and then brought back in. And that symbolizes his arrival in the city. So there's that.
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B
And it means that although it would be possible for us to ignore the Dionysiac element of tragedy, you know, we can just read the plays or whatever, we don't bother with the God in Athens itself. This is very much under the sign of Dionysus. You couldn't ignore Dionysus here.
- [24:57]
A
And then there's another bit which is called in Greek, it's called the Proagon, which is like the pre performance event, which I think actually, oddly enough, is slightly more recognisable as an event to me than lots of other things. It's like the pre performance talk a few days before the performances start. The. The dramatist, the playwright and the actors and the chorus, apparently in costumes and wearing garlands, but not wearing their masks. So in their own human person, in their own characters, they talk about the plays, they discuss the plays in advance. And that's in Plato, basically. That's in this dialogue that Mary's talked about the Symposium, and Socrates is talking to his mate Agathon, who is a tragic playwright. And Agathon basically says, this bit is worse than the actual performance in terms of stage fright. It's just terrifying. And I can totally imagine that.
- [25:58]
B
I think that's absolutely right. But it also adds something to our understanding of these plays because we tend to say pretty casually, oh, look, so many of these plays, the plot is drawn from myth that all the audience would have known what was going to happen. It was no surprise that Agamemnon, for example, is Going to get killed. We know that. That's the upshot. What I think is interesting about the Pro Agon, they're actually explaining, it seems that they're explaining what the plays are all about in advance of the performance. Now, we don't know who was there to listen. It's a bit unclear, but whether the average citizen could show up and hear the tragedians talking about their plays. But it seems kind of odd if they couldn't. You know, we've already had a kind of sense of what the point of these plays are before they ever get on stage.
- [26:56]
A
The Dionysia. And if we're talking about the great Dionysia itself, that is four days long, right? That is a public holiday. There is no public or legal business. There is a sense that prisoners were released temporarily. Now, there is no prison system in ancient Athens. So this is kind of quite hard to work out. But some people were let out of incarceration temporarily for the duration of the festival. We know that because Demosthenes, a speechwriter, mentions it. But that seems to be kind of connected with this idea of Dionysus being about freedom. One of his sort of monikers, one of his names is Eleutherios, which means freedom. There's a kind of sense that the great Dionysia, things are turned a little bit on their heads. It's all part of this sort of sense of Dionysus allows things to take place in a way that they wouldn't normally take place. Then there's another, potentially another procession. And if we understand this procession, right, it's led supposedly by unmarried girls of aristocratic origin. Supposedly they're holding little golden baskets full of meat from sacrifices. There are young male citizens who are training for the military who are accompanying this bull that's going to be sacrificed. There are foreign residents who have a special status, particular status in Athens, are part of this. You know, there's lots of singing and dancing and there are a lot of sacrifices at the temple of Dionysus, right?
- [28:46]
B
It's a hugely big deal. I mean, this is not a little carnival procession. This is the city out on display to itself and accompanied with that absolutely central religious ritual of sacrificing animals. The great modern classicist Edith hall did say, rather kind of spookily, that the sanctuary of Dionysus himself must have resembled a massive sunlit abattoir, because they are sacrificing animal after animal. You have to imagine that, you know, you can hear, but you're hearing the noise of these frightened creatures. And then, of course, sacrifice Always means not just that you offer the animal to the God, but the human beings eat the meat. So it's a sort of. It's a massive barbecue as well as being a way of honoring the God.
- [29:51]
A
And then finally we get onto some actual performance that apparently that same day, but it's not still not yet the performance of the plays. We have these choral competitions. So there's a sort of form of performance in ancient Greece called dithyrambs. Anyway, if we think of it as Choirs of 50 or so citizens competing for glory and singing competitions, you know, this is like a slightly weird thing again, you know, it's a sort of male voice, Welsh male voice choir competition.
- [30:24]
B
And there's hundreds of them. And this is in some ways for the Coregos, the bankroller, this is the most expensive bit because these choirs are of about 50 people each. And each of these so called tribes of Athens, the citizens are divided into 10 tribes. Each of these tribes puts on its own choir. So 50 times 10, that's 500 singers. So this is big news, right? 500 singers out of the citizen, male citizen population of under 30,000. I do find it hard to know and I think there's still a debate about this, which is, you know, how far does this feel? Does it feel more like, you know, a nice time at the theater, or does it feel like a religious ritual of Dionysus? And if it's a religious ritual of Dionysus, what difference does that make to the way people look at the place? And I think there has been a tendency, and it's the easiest thing to do, to kind of say, well, maybe the great Dionysia is a bit like our Christmas. You know, most people, you know, don't see the religion, they see the presents. And in the great Dionysia, maybe most people didn't see the God, they saw the place. But when you actually just list the bits of the ceremony that appear to be directly involving and parading Dionysus, I think it's quite hard to get rid of the religious aspect of it entirely.
- [32:09]
A
Yeah, I think that's right, Mo. Well, we are going to get onto the plays themselves, or at least the, the, the, the sort of rituals and modes in which the plays were performed. But let's do that right after this break. We've now arrived, Mary. After many days of preamble, we have now arrived on the day of the plays themselves. But actually there are several days of plays themselves. And as we've said, each day there's probably a trilogy of tragedies. Followed by a satire play. There may be a comedy later, or the comedies may come towards the end of this festival. There's a lot that we don't know, but certainly this three or four day festival is going to involve tragedies, satire plays and comedies.
- [33:02]
B
And each day of, as far as the tragedies are concerned, plus the satire play, that is the day of the individual playwright who is presenting his wares to the Athenian people in some ways. Now, what we've only just hinted at before, but is absolutely crucially important, is that it is, of course, a competition. The Athenians were desperately competitive. There's almost nothing in Athens that couldn't be turned into competition. The different playwrights set against one another. So there is, in the end going to be a judgment of whose tragic trilogy plus satyr play was best. And there would also be a judgment about whose comedy. Comedies come as singletons. Actually, they're not. You don't get comic trilogies. Comedies come as singletons. But there's also competition about whose comedy has won. And the kind of prestige of the Coregos, the bankroller and the actors and the writer is all bound up in that. And the Corregos, usually, if they win, celebrate by putting up a kind of commemorative monument to their. Their victory, often an absolutely permanent monument. So you're seeing that the plays become written into the history of Athens. You can see the monument that commemorates the winning performance of X. The performance is actually made permanent in some of the monuments that are put up alongside this.
- [34:54]
A
Yeah. And I think it's worth a note on, like, who were these judges? So we know a little bit about that. Again, it's all a little bit complicated and a little bit obscure, but
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B
what
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A
we sort of know is that you alluded to these 10 Athenian tribes earlier, Mary. These are kind of just subdivisions of Athens and its territory into different sort of voting blocs, effectively. And so each of those tribes appears to have submitted a list of possible candidates to serve as judges. And then the council, which is another kind of city administrative function, approves the candidates. The names are put into jars and sealed, taken to the state treasury on the Acropolis. At the beginning of the competition, the drafts are brought back into the theatre and the archon, this senior state administrator, who we mentioned earlier in front of the audience, selects one name from each jar. Selects. I don't know. How. Is it by chance? I don't know. A lot of this is a little bit obscure, but I think what we can take from this is that the business of judging is something that is taken very seriously. It's done in a very public way. There is. All parts of the city are represented. These are ordinary citizens. They take an oath that they're going to be impartial. They're put into a special VIP section of the theatre. So it's not like Britain's Got Talent or the Booker Prize or the Oscars, where it's people in the industry or experts that make these judgments. It is ordinary citizens.
- [36:40]
B
And they're obviously worried that there could be a bit of corruption because. So they're putting off the announcement of the names of the judges as long as possible, presumably to stop the judges being tampered with.
- [36:55]
A
That's a really good point. So right before. You don't know until you were just about to start. That's a strong point. And then we're almost at the plays, but even before we're on the day of the plays being performed, that even before those plays get performed. There are a lot of fascinating rituals, Mary, aren't there?
- [37:17]
B
These are what I find even more extraordinary than all the sacrifices and the processions and the Dionysiac rituals. Those are surprising in some ways, but they're not half as surprising as what happens before you get down to the first play, right, which is on day one of the great Dionysia. You start off with, it is said again, evidence a bit fragile, but it looks like you start off with the sacrifice of some very young piglets, Right, which is to ritually purify the theatre. And I have to say, when I see words like ritually purify, I kind of, you know, I think, what's this euphemism for? But anyway, you start off again with a sacrifice of young piglets. You then get the generals, the most senior elected officials of the Athenian state, both military and political leaders. The 10 generals come together and they pour more libations, oil, wine, etc. They pour libations to the gods. Now, you might think that that sounds pretty standard. That's what kind of Athenians would do before a major event. This is one of the very, very few occasions in the Athenian annual calendar when the 10 generals all come together to do something as 10 of them. Normally, they're operating pretty individually. Here you're seeing all those 10 military officials, military and political officials getting together to pour libations to the gods. But it doesn't end there. Right?
- [39:12]
A
There is more
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B
next. Come on, Charlotte, tell us what's next.
- [39:17]
A
Well, there are heralds who name benefactors of the city. So if you've given a Lot of money for this, that and the other your name gets, gets shouted out. When the public is actually sitting in its seats, there is a display of gold, golden, you know, bars of gold, which is the sort of imperial revenue from the states that Athens was protecting, you know, and that may be a rather, a little bit of a euphemism for rather aggressively looking after as an imperial power. So imagine all this gold is put down, which is what you've gleaned as taxation from. Not exactly taxation, but tribute from your vassal state. And that's plonked down in the middle of the theater. Well, that is a massive statement of, look how powerful we are. This is our imperial might.
- [40:19]
B
Yeah, it's imperialism writ really large. You know, you're all there, you know, thousands of you. And what you are watching is the golden tribute from Athens. Subject peoples being plonked in front of the citizenry.
- [40:38]
A
A reminder that Athens was at war with Sparta, another Greek city. For a chunk of this period. At a certain period in time, armor was given to the sons of the war dead of military age. That is, you know, if your father had died in war and you were old enough to fight, you were given a suit of armor. Apparently this also happens publicly. This is also happening before the plays even get going. You know, that's another kind of mind bendingly different idea, that there's a sort of militaristic aspect. You're preparing these young men whose fathers have been killed for them, doing their bit for the country, for the city.
- [41:30]
B
It just all goes so much weirder than what we normally think of as the differences. It isn't just that everybody's masked or that there's only male performers and probably only men in the audience, though that's a bit uncertain. We're here seeing a ritual that utterly transcends those, you know, ultimately micro differences. It sets the performance of three days of tragedy plus comedy. It is setting those tragedies at the very heart of a series of rituals which are glorifying the city, that are involving the city, that are part of a kind of idea of parading the city to itself. And that is so different from anything we used to. When we show up at the theater on, on a Saturday night, you have to say, so what's the big difference that that all makes to how we understand the tragedies that we now see or read?
- [42:53]
A
It's such an interesting question, Mary, because I mean, the reality, you know, if you go to the theater in Britain now, today, I think in some ways you expect to see Something on the stage that might subvert our ideas of people in power or politicians in some way. You know, theatre is offering you a different way of seeing. It will often be quite critical of the status quo. And perhaps it's also true to stay, in quite a limited way, the idea that today's theatre people would. Could in any way cope with the idea that, you know, war orphans would sort of appear before your performance, or that, you know, that our imperial vassals, if we had any, the money that they'd brought in, would be displayed. It's utterly alien.
- [43:57]
B
The problem, I think, is bigger than that, isn't it? Because actually the plays they're watching absolutely, are often subverting or critiquing or being very anxious about civic order. You know, the comedies in the 5th century were really having a very tough go at politicians. And many of the tragedies are showing cities, communities at the point of breakdown, sort of in civil war, after civil war, families being torn apart. So what I can't fully get my head around is the idea that you have this enormous panoply of state powers, state cohesion, the citizens coming together to. To enact the city to themselves, while then what they watch on the stage is a. Is often, not always, but is often about political institutions sitting as torn apart and under threat. And I don't quite see how I put those two together.
- [45:11]
A
I agree, I agree, and I think it's incredibly hard to do that. And I don't think we're going to solve that conundrum in. In this episode. But I suppose one thing I'd say is that almost all the plays that we have, and almost all the plays, in fact, that we don't have, but we sort of know about broadly, are set in the mythological. I'm talking about tragedy here, are set in the mythological misty past. And actually, I think, crucially, a lot of them are not set in Athens. So, in fact, most of them are not set in Athens. A lot of plays actually are set in places like Thebes, which is
- [45:51]
B
a
- [45:51]
A
day's walk if you're super fit and is quite often an enemy of Athens. So you're seeing bad things happening in Thebes a lot. You know, this is where the play Oedipus is set, for example. So you're seeing something weird and strange that isn't democratic. You know, none of these plays are set in democracies. The plays are set. Set in where there are kings. You're seeing something in a way that perhaps is super unlike your own city, in a way, but that doesn't account for comedy, because comedy is on the nose. Comedy is satirizing, poking fun at specifically often named politicians, isn't it?
- [46:38]
B
And named politicians from Athens. I mean, you know, I'm tempted to say, in part, at least in terms of the comedies, though I can't. This doesn't entirely figure for the tragedies. Is that that whole panoply of asserting our. Almost our allegiance to the state is what then allows it. That creates a safe space within which we can then criticize the state because it's somehow off limits. It's surrounded by rituals which uphold the state's values. And then within which you can take your potshot. Because somehow it's in the theatrical sphere, it's not real. And it is so bounded by patriotism, by actually imperialistic, jingoistic patriotism.
- [47:42]
A
I think that's a really, really good point. And it's almost. It's also like the insurance policy is that it's all about Dionysus. And so, as we've said, it is this sort of special space where we step out of being who we really are. We put on a mask and we become something completely different. I think it would be glib to say that it was like a pressure valve for Athens where it allowed it to let off steam. But I think there may be an element of that.
- [48:11]
B
One of the things that we don't really know is whether there were women in attendance or if there were how many. I think most people working on tragedy now think that there were either none or very few.
- [48:32]
A
Some scholars think that there were probably a couple maybe of very important priestesses in the audience and not very many, you know, that sort of full stop. So, you know, maybe, Mary, we could have had a chance if we had been very, very important priestesses in Athens, which I wouldn't rule out.
- [48:50]
B
It must have felt weird to be a couple of priestesses amongst thousands of blokes watching the plays. In the end, it is very hard to kind of nail Athenian drama. Much harder than we ever imagined in our kind of. We over familiarize it, we take away its weirdness. I do think we're going to be coming on later to look at some individual plays produced for this regime. And I think that you should never let out of your sights or your mind the real strangeness of the context in which they took place. The jingoistic, imperialistic strangeness of the context in which these things were performed.
- [49:39]
A
I completely agree, Mary. And even I thought I knew quite. I thought I knew a bit about Greek tragedy, but actually taking away one's sort of focus from the tax and the productions that we see now, and thinking, really trying to put your head inside this extraordinary world of ritual, religion, procession, state involvement at every step, I think really makes you see these things. It makes you see the drama differently.
- [50:13]
B
What on earth did it feel like to be there? We don't know.
- [50:18]
A
As ever, we want to know your thoughts on and comments, ideas, questions. And so if you have them, please do send them to us@instantclassicspodgmail.com or on our social media nstantclassicspod.
- [50:34]
B
Bye bye.