Theatre as a Festival
For the Athenians, going to the theatre was not an evening out but part of a religious festival. Plays were offered to the god Dionysus, and the performances took place within a larger programme of sacrifices, processions and singing. The audience attended a public occasion in which the community honoured a god and watched poets compete. These same elements, taken together, are what scholars mean when they speak of Dionysian festivals.
Greek cities held other festivals with athletic or musical contests, such as the Olympic Games, which centred on athletes. Athens was unusual in the importance it gave to dramatic competition.
The City Dionysia
The City Dionysia was the grandest dramatic festival. It took place in the month of Elaphebolion, roughly March or April, when sea travel was resuming after winter, so foreign visitors could attend. The programme is reconstructed from inscriptions and later writers, and details vary by period, but the main elements are reasonably clear:
- A procession carried an image of Dionysus into the city, bringing him symbolically from the road to Eleutherae, from which, according to tradition, his cult had come.
- Sacrifices, including bulls, followed by shared feasting.
- Dithyramb contests, in which choruses of men and boys, representing the ten tribes of Athens, sang and danced.
- A pre-contest presentation, the proagon, at which poets introduced their works.
- The drama contests, at the Theatre of Dionysus.
Some ancient sources add that civic ceremonies took place before the plays, including the display of tribute from the allies in the Delian League tribute system, the announcement of citizens honoured by the city, and a parade of war orphans raised at public expense. These details are reported by later writers and apply to certain decades, so they should not be assumed for every year. They do suggest a festival that also served as a political stage.
The Lenaia and the Rural Festivals
The Lenaia took place in winter, in the month of Gamelion, around January or February. Because sea travel was still difficult, the audience was mainly Athenian. Comedies seem to have been the prominent event there. Tragedy was added to the Lenaia contests later, according to the sources, though the exact date is uncertain.
Beyond the city, many local districts of Attica held Rural Dionysia in midwinter, where plays were performed in village theatres. This helped the habit of theatre-going spread beyond the city centre. Plays that had succeeded in Athens could be repeated in the countryside.
Choregoi and the Cost of Drama
The state organised the competitions, but wealthy citizens paid for much of the expense. A man chosen as choregos funded the recruitment, training and costume of a chorus, a considerable personal expense. This was a form of public service imposed on the rich, and it also brought prestige. The best-known choregoi include Pericles, who is recorded on an inscription as having funded the production of Aeschylus’ Persians in 472 BCE. Themistocles is said by the later writer Plutarch to have been a choregos in the 470s, when a tragedy won first prize.
An official called the archon chose which poets would receive a chorus. That decision was crucial, since a poet without a chorus could not compete. The poets themselves taught the chorus and often took part in the production, and in the early period they may have acted too.
Judging the Contests
Prizes went to the poet and to the choregos, and later also to the leading actor, with the actors’ contest introduced into the programme in the fifth century, according to sources. The details of the judging process are not completely clear, but ancient accounts describe a system of selection by lot. Judges, one for each tribe, were picked, and only some of their votes were counted, which gave chance a role. This use of lotteries resembles other features of Athenian democracy, such as the lot-based selection of jurors for the courts. It sought to reduce corruption and the influence of the crowd’s noise.
The winner was crowned with an ivy wreath, and victory was commemorated in public records. Poets did not always win: Sophocles reportedly won many prizes, whereas Euripides won rarely, and some of the plays now regarded as masterpieces were defeated.
Who Attended
The audience was probably several thousand people. Citizen men formed the core, but there were also resident foreigners and visitors, and probably some slaves and boys. Whether women attended is debated. Some modern scholars think they did, while others point to the limited ancient evidence. Because we lack clear evidence, any firm statement is hard to defend.
Public money may have helped poorer citizens attend. Later writers describe a state fund, the theorika, which eventually helped pay for admission, but historians disagree about when and how it operated. Attendance in the earlier fifth century probably involved a small fee, as sources suggest.
Audiences were involved. They knew the stories well and reacted openly to speeches, jokes and political allusions. That is why tragedians could work with familiar myths and still surprise their viewers.
After the Show
Festival days ended with celebration. A victorious poet might hold a feast, and Plato’s dialogue the Symposium is set at a party held to celebrate the tragedian Agathon’s victory in 416 BCE, giving a glimpse of the Greek symposium that followed the formal events. Dramatic victories were also recorded: Athens kept official lists of winners, and fragments of these inscriptions are an important source for historians.
Why It Mattered
The festival system tied art to citizenship. Wealthy citizens were expected to give, ordinary citizens to watch and judge, and poets to address questions of public concern. Whether the Greeks “loved” theatre more than other peoples is not something the evidence can measure, but the scale of the investment in time, money and public attention shows how central it was. When Greek cities later built permanent stone theatres across the Mediterranean, they were building on a habit already formed in the fifth century BCE.