The Greek theater and its drama

by Roy C. Flickinger

THEATER OF DIONYSUS IN ATHENS, LOOKING NORTH; CHOREGIC MONUMENT OF THRASYLLUS IN THE BACKGROUND

Copyright, Underwood & Underwood

Fig. 37

THEATER OF DIONYSUS IN ATHENS, LOOKING NORTH AND WEST

Copyright, Underwood & Underwood

Slight as may seem the theater remains which have been discussed up to this point, it must be noted before proceeding that they entirely exhaust the field. There is not a stone outside of Athens which can be assigned to any Greek theater before 400 B.C.[147] Yet all the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and all the extant comedies of Aristophanes, except two, were performed before this date! In the latter half of the fourth century Lycurgus, who was finance minister of Athens between 338 and 326 B.C., “completed”[148] the theater which is reproduced so clearly in Dörpfeld’s plan ([Fig. 32]) that it is unnecessary to describe it at length. Most of the stone remains now upon the site belong to this structure. So far as the auditorium is preserved, its arrangements and furnishings are almost entirely those of Lycurgus’ time. Most of the inclosing walls, the stone thrones in the front row for the use of dignitaries, and the stone seats for the rest of the audience all belong to this period ([Fig. 36]). The only part of the present orchestra which goes back to the fourth century is the gutter just inside the balustrade ([Fig. 37]), but this is sufficient to show that the Lycurgus orchestra was sixty-four feet and four inches in diameter or exactly sixty Greek feet. This figure is significant as showing that the orchestra was the starting-point in the measurements and not incidentally derived from some other part of the theater. Behind the orchestra and upon the old foundations was now erected a scene-building of stone, one hundred and fifty-two feet in breadth and twenty-one feet deep at its shallowest part. About its parascenia stood a row of stone columns, from which it can be estimated that the first story was about thirteen feet in height. But the stone connecting columns which Dörpfeld restored before the central part of the scene-building ([Fig. 32]) have been assailed on every hand and have now been relinquished by their sponsor.[149] This part of the proscenium was still of wood, for though the scenic requirements by this time were fairly standardized for each genre, the conventional setting for tragedy was quite different from that for comedy or satyric drama. Furthermore, the Greeks seem to have been slow to lose the notion that a wooden background was necessary in order to secure the best acoustic results.[150] This wooden proscenium probably did not stand so close to the scene-building as the drawing would indicate, but formed a portico as in the Hellenistic theater ([Fig. 38]). At the same time, or possibly at the close of the fifth century, a colonnade was built just behind the scene-building as a place of refuge from heat and sudden showers. There are two considerations which make the Lycurgus theater highly important to us: in the first place, here were produced the plays of the Greek New Comedy which furnished the originals of Plautus’ and Terence’s Latin plays and which has partially been restored to us by the recent discovery of large fragments of Menander’s comedies; and in the second place this fourth-century structure probably reproduced in stone the main outlines of the earlier theater in which the later tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides and all the plays of Aristophanes were performed. This supposition is strengthened by the fact that the extant fifth-century dramas could readily be “staged” in the Lycurgus theater.

Further alterations were made in the Athenian theater during the first or second century B.C. ([Fig. 38]).[151] So far as can now be established, this Hellenistic theater differed from its immediate predecessor only in two particulars. The front of the parascenia was moved back about six and a quarter feet,[152] the parodi being thereby enlarged to the same extent. What advantage was gained by this alteration has not yet been discovered. The other change consisted in the erection, at last, of a stone proscenium, about thirteen feet in height, between the parascenia and about six and a half feet in front of the central fore wall of the scene-building. At Epidaurus, Eretria, Delos, etc., the supports of the proscenium were only half-columns, and sometimes they had grooves or rims running vertically along their sides or had the rear half of the column cut into an oblong for the purpose of providing a firmer fastening for the painted panels (πίνακες) in the intercolumniations ([Fig. 72]). But at Athens the proscenium columns were whole and were not equipped with any of these devices.

Fig. 38.—Ground Plan of the Hellenistic Theater in Athens According to Dörpfeld.