From Dancing Floor to Stone Theatre
The word “theatre” comes from the Greek theatron, “a place for seeing”. It named the seating area, and the architecture grew around the audience as much as the performers. The first thing to know is that the well-preserved stone theatres tourists visit today mostly date from later than the great fifth-century tragedies. In Classical Athens, the performance space was simpler, and many details of the original arrangement are debated.
Early performances took place in a flat dancing area, and spectators sat on wooden stands or on a hillside. Later tradition tells of a collapse of wooden seating, which supposedly led to more permanent construction, but this story is uncertain. The Theatre of Dionysus on the south slope of the Acropolis in Athens developed over time. The stone version associated with the statesman Lycurgus is usually dated to the later fourth century BCE, long after Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides had died.
The Main Parts
A typical Greek theatre has a few recognizable elements:
- The orchestra (“dancing place”), a flat circular or nearly circular area where the chorus sang and danced. This was the heart of the performance, and an altar to Dionysus may have stood there.
- The theatron or cavea, the tiers of seats, built into a natural hollow of a hillside to save on construction and support the audience.
- The parodoi, side passages used by the chorus and spectators to enter.
- The skene, literally “tent” or “hut”, originally a changing space for the actors behind the orchestra. It developed into a painted or built backdrop with doors, representing a palace or a house. The scholarly term for the front of it is the proskenion.
- Stage machinery, including the mechane, a crane used to lift gods or heroes into view, and the ekkyklema, a platform that is thought to have rolled out to reveal an interior scene, often the aftermath of a killing that could not be shown directly.
How high the actors were raised above the orchestra is a long-running scholarly question. For the fifth century, many scholars think actors and chorus performed on or near the same level, whereas raised stages are clearer in later periods.
Masks and Costume
All actors and chorus members wore masks. Actors were male, and a single performer could play several parts, including women, by changing masks and costumes. The masks were made of perishable materials such as linen, cork or leather, so almost none survive from the Classical period. Our knowledge comes from vase paintings, small terracotta copies, descriptions by later writers and sculptural reliefs, where Greek sculpture and pottery give us images of what the faces looked like.
Masks had expressive features, although these would have been read more as types of character than as detailed emotions. Their fixed expression suggests that movement, voice and gesture carried the performance. The tall boots and heavy costume sometimes associated with tragedy come from later periods, not from the days of Sophocles, and should not be assumed for the fifth century.
Epidaurus
The best-known surviving Greek theatre is at Epidaurus in the Peloponnese, part of the sanctuary of Asclepius, the god of healing. It is usually dated to the fourth century BCE, with ancient tradition connecting it to an architect called Polykleitos. The Epidaurus theatre is famous for being very well preserved and for its seating, which is commonly estimated to hold about 12,000 to 14,000 people. A sanctuary of this kind attracted many visitors seeking a cure, and the Asclepian healing temples hosted festivals as well as treatments, so the presence of a large theatre makes sense.
Epidaurus is also famous for its acoustics. Guides often demonstrate that a coin dropped or a match struck in the orchestra can be heard from the top rows. A study published in the 2000s proposed that the ranked limestone seats act as a filter that suppresses low-frequency background noise while letting higher voice frequencies carry. Not everyone agrees on how much of the effect was intended by the builders, and the theatre’s quiet rural setting today may exaggerate it. The safest statement is that the design clearly works well for voices, and that its precise reasons are still being studied.
Other Greek Theatres
The Greek model spread across the Mediterranean. Smaller theatres survive on Delos, at Dodona and elsewhere; the Hellenistic theatre at Pergamon is built into a very steep slope. Many cities of Asia Minor, such as the sites in the Ephesus excavations, have theatres that were remodelled under Roman rule. That is an important caution when visiting: a theatre that looks Greek may be largely Roman in its final form.
Roman theatres differed in an important way. They were often freestanding buildings with a semicircular orchestra, a tall stage building and vaulted substructures, made possible by Roman concrete, rather than being built into a hillside. The distinctive Greek shape came from the landscape; the Roman shape came from engineering.
The Audience Experience
A Greek audience was large, mixed and loud. In Athens, the theatre could hold many thousands of people, with estimates varying depending on the period and on how the seating is reconstructed. Spectators sat in tiers, with special front seats for priests and honoured guests, and ordinary citizens on benches that were wooden at first and stone later. People brought food, cushions and drink. Plays took place in daylight, during a festival day that could last many hours.
Spectators reacted openly. Ancient writers mention clapping, hissing and shouting, and sometimes throwing food at poor performers. Because the performance was outdoors, audiences could see each other as well as the actors, and this made attending a play a public social act and not a private one. Who exactly could attend, particularly women, is debated by scholars, as the ancient evidence is limited and sometimes contradictory.
Without electric light, the performance relied on voice, gesture and the natural setting. Music, played mainly on the double pipe called the aulos, accompanied the chorus, though the music itself is almost entirely lost.
What Remains
Greek theatres are among the few ancient public buildings still used for their original purpose. At Epidaurus and Athens, modern productions of ancient plays are staged in summer. That continuity is part of the appeal, but it is worth remembering that what we see is the result of centuries of rebuilding. The earliest theatres of the great tragedians were simpler, and much of what we know about them is inferred.