The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [123]
And pre-show manners were hardly something to write home about. Finding one’s seat in the open-air auditorium could resemble a stampede.
… People would rush for seats and even occupy places during the night before the performance, there were shoving matches, battles and beatings.2
Democrats clumped together in tribal formation. Priests and highranking officials had their own seats towards the front, but such favouritism was not popular. In the middle of the fourth century BC when Demosthenes invited ambassadors from Philip of Macedon’s court to the theatre in Athens, giving them ringside positions with plump cushions and a purple throw on top, the anger was audible: ‘people hissed at the disgrace’.3 So to beat the rush, men often arrived at the theatre half a day or so before the performance.
[SOCRATES TO CRITOBOULOS:] As it is, I’ve known you to get up very early in the morning and walk a very long way to see a comedy and eagerly urge me to go along and see it with you.4
Socrates grew up with theatre beating its juvenating rhythm out to his city. In 472 BC, three years before the philosopher was born, Aeschylus had been inspired to exalt Athenian victory at Salamis with The Persians. When Socrates was fourteen, Euripides first competed in the Great Dionysia festival, and it was said that in later life the two became as thick as thieves, Socrates furnishing the playwright with inspiration and ideas:
The Phrygians, that’s a new play by Euripides;
Actually, Socrates puts on the firewood.
Again he says:
… Euripidean [tragedies?], nailed up by Socrates …
And Aristophanes says in the Clouds;
He’s the chap who writes tragedies for Euripides,
Those wordy, clever ones.5
When Socrates was around twenty, at the foot of the Acropolis, drama was given a permanent home: a wooden theatre auditorium was consecrated to Dionysos, the greedy god who demanded festivals across one whole third of the Athenian year.6 Dionysos was a god for the ‘whole’ of democratic Athens – for everyone in this shiny, new-look city. As one scholar puts it: ‘A master of illusions, he produces drunkenness and madness; he destroys the barriers between man and animal, male and female, young and old, free and slave, city and country, man and god.’7 Dionysos was known as ‘mainomenos Dionysos’8 – raving Dionysos – but also as Psilax – he who gave men’s minds wings.
Theatre was a consecrated act in fifth-century BC Athens, an entertainment that brought Athenians closer to the gods; it was also the right and the responsibility of those in the democratic state. That theatre token, fingered by so many democratic Athenians queuing for the day-long entertainments (comic and tragic), marked you out as a stakeholder in one of the most adventurous cities ever known. Sitting together in the sunlight, Athena’s democrats explored complicated, awkward, inspiring ideas together. The rich were obliged to pay for choruses (chorus members, like the actors, were themselves Athenian citizens) and specific aspects of the production. In Socrates’ day tragedy was fresh, raw, an idea with the celerity of novelty. As with so much in Athenian society, the drama festival was also an agon, a competition. Plays were performed just once. Every dramatist, every producer was fiercely competitive – winning here, in front of your peers, really mattered.
To call Greek drama an ‘art-form’ is somewhat anachronistic. The Greeks (unlike many modern-day bureaucrats) didn’t distinguish drama as ‘art’ – something separate from ‘society’, ‘politics’, ‘life’. Theatre was fundamental to democratic Athenian business. Aristophanes via one of the characters in his comedies declares, ‘Poetry makes people better in their societies.’9 Members of the chorus were exempt from military service. A fund was set up to support those too poor to buy their own tickets.
Now tourists, on their way from the Plaka shopping district up to the Acropolis, wander a little listlessly through the Theatre of Dionysos. Tour guides give a good impression of the ‘what’ and the ‘how’, but not the ‘why’. Yet in the fifth