Notes · Classical CivilisationUK · A-Levels

Greek Theatre

Greek Theatre is one of the four Culture and the Arts options (Component 2), and studies the drama of fifth-century Athens through both literary and material evidence. This topic teaches the whole option: the City Dionysia and the civic and religious context of Athenian drama; the theatre space and stagecraft (theatron, orchestra, skene, parodoi, masks, the chorus and the stage machines); tragedy and its three great practitioners, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; Old Comedy and Aristophanes; and Aristotle's analysis of tragedy in the Poetics. It teaches the plays and playwrights accurately by name and models how to analyse dramatic texts and the physical evidence of the theatre together.

5 sections~26 min reading time2 competenciesLevel Foundation 1 · Standard 3 · Advanced 1

T·0333 / 10

Exam profile

AO1 · Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of Greek theatre, its plays, playwrights and contextAO2 · Analyse and interpret dramatic texts and material evidence, developing a substantiated response

Operators:analyseinterpretevaluateexplaincomparediscuss

basic level

AS-Level covers the theatre space and a defined selection of plays; the analytical demands are the same.

higher level

The full A-Level requires secure knowledge of the set plays, the context and the material evidence, with sustained analysis of both.

Depth

Text

Contents · 5 sections

Greek Theatre

The City Dionysia and its context#

FoundationOCR H408 Component 2 (Greek Theatre: context)DfE GCE Classical Civilisation subject content

The City Dionysia

Fig. 1The organisation of the City Dionysia: a religious festival of Dionysus that framed a state-run dramatic competition performed before the whole citizen body.

Greek drama as we know it was created in Athens in the fifth century BC, and it was from the start a public institution rather than private entertainment. Plays were performed at civic festivals, above all the City Dionysia (or Great Dionysia), a major festival held each spring in honour of the god Dionysus. Understanding this festival context is essential, because it shaped everything about the drama: its religious seriousness, its competitive form, its mass civic audience, and its place at the very centre of Athenian public life. A Greek tragedy or comedy was not a text to be read in private but an event performed once, before the assembled city, as an act of worship and of civic self-display.

The festival was sacred to Dionysus, the god of wine, of ecstasy and release, of masks and transformation - an apt patron for an art in which citizens put on masks to become other people. The Dionysia opened with religious ceremony: a procession, sacrifices, the carrying of the god's statue into the theatre, so that the plays were performed in the god's presence and under his protection. This religious frame is easy for modern students to forget, but it mattered: drama was a form of worship, its subjects often touched the gods directly, and its performance was hedged about with ritual. Analysing a play as a purely secular artwork misses the sacred occasion that gave it meaning.

It was also a competition, organised and funded by the state. A senior magistrate, the archon, chose the poets who would compete; each tragedian was granted a chorus and presented a set of four plays (three tragedies and a lighter satyr play); comic poets competed too. The productions were paid for by the liturgy system, in which a wealthy citizen, the choregos, financed the training and costuming of a chorus as a public service and a mark of status. A panel of judges awarded prizes, and victory brought great prestige to poet and choregos alike. The competitive structure drove the ambition and quality of the drama and made it a contest for civic honour.

The audience was, in effect, the citizen body of Athens: several thousand spectators gathered in the great open-air theatre on the south slope of the Acropolis. This mass civic audience made the theatre a place where the community looked at itself and debated its deepest concerns - justice, the gods, the family, war, the nature of the city - through the medium of myth (in tragedy) or of topical satire (in comedy). Drama was thus woven into the life of the democracy: it was funded by the city, judged by its citizens, attended by the community, and used to explore the questions that mattered to it. The theatre and the democratic polis grew up together.

The origins of drama are less certain and should be handled with due caution. Ancient tradition traced tragedy back to the dithyramb, a choral hymn sung and danced in honour of Dionysus, and credited a figure named Thespis with the decisive step of setting an actor in dialogue with the chorus, out of which drama grew; comedy was linked to the komos, a festive Dionysiac revel. These traditions are plausible but not securely documented, and the exam rewards knowing that drama emerged from Dionysiac choral worship without asserting a precise account of who invented what. What is certain is the festival setting - religious, competitive and civic - within which the great drama of the fifth century was created and performed.

Worked example

The significance of the festival setting

Explain how the festival setting shaped the meaning of Athenian drama.

The religious frame
Performed at the festival of Dionysus, after procession and sacrifice, the plays were an act of worship in the god's presence, lending them sacred seriousness.
The competitive frame
State-funded and judged for prizes, the drama was a contest for civic honour that drove ambition and quality.
The civic frame
Performed once before the assembled citizen body, a play let the whole community confront its shared concerns through myth or satire.
Draw it together
The setting made drama at once religious, competitive and civic - a central institution of the polis, not private entertainment.

Result: The festival made Athenian drama a religious act, a civic contest and a communal self-examination at once, so that its meaning is inseparable from the occasion of its performance.

Typical mistakes

Treating Greek plays as purely secular literature, forgetting the religious festival of Dionysus in which they were performed as an act of worship.
Asserting a precise, confident account of drama's origins (dithyramb, Thespis) as fact rather than as ancient tradition.

Active revision

Explain how the context of the City Dionysia - religious, competitive and civic - would have shaped the way an original Athenian audience experienced a tragedy.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Classical Civilisation (H008, H408) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA))

The theatre space and stagecraft#

StandardOCR H408 Component 2 (Greek Theatre: the theatre space)DfE GCE Classical Civilisation subject content

The Greek theatre space

Fig. 2The plan of a Greek theatre: the banked theatron looks down on the circular orchestra (with its altar, the thymele), backed by the skene, with the two parodoi as side entrances.

The physical theatre in which the plays were performed is prescribed material evidence for this option, and its layout directly shaped how drama worked, so its parts must be known precisely. The classic example is the Theatre of Dionysus, built into the south slope of the Acropolis in Athens - an open-air space, performed in by daylight, holding many thousands of spectators. Its three principal elements are the theatron, the orchestra and the skene, joined by the parodoi. Learning these Greek terms and what happened in each space is the foundation of the whole option, because the drama's conventions follow from the theatre's form.

The theatron - literally the seeing-place - is the banked seating, curved around and above the performance area so that the great audience could see and hear. At the centre and lowest point lies the orchestra, the dancing-place: a large, roughly circular area where the chorus sang and danced, with an altar (the thymele) at its heart, a reminder of the theatre's religious character. Behind the orchestra stood the skene, originally a hut and later a substantial stage building, which provided a scenic backdrop (usually a palace or temple front), a set of doors for entrances and exits, and a roof that could be used as a higher acting level (for gods, or for a watchman). The parodoi were the two side passages between the theatron and the skene, through which the chorus entered and by which arrivals from the city or the harbour came and went.

Performance in this space was highly conventional, not realistic, and its conventions are central to analysis. All the performers were men and boys, who played female roles as well as male. Every actor wore a mask (with an attached wig), which stylised the character, projected a fixed emotional type across the huge space, and - crucially - allowed a single actor to play several parts. Athenian tragedy worked within a three-actor rule: no more than three speaking actors shared out all the individual roles between them by doubling, while the chorus (twelve or fifteen strong in tragedy) acted as a collective character. The mask and the doubling meant that the number of characters in a scene was limited, and playwrights composed with these constraints in mind.

A few pieces of stage machinery extended what the theatre could show, and they were used for particular, meaningful effects. The mechane was a crane that could swing a performer through the air above the skene, used above all to bring on a god - the origin of the phrase deus ex machina, the god from the machine, who could descend to resolve a plot (a device especially associated with Euripides). The ekkyklema was a low wheeled platform that could be rolled out through the central doors to reveal an interior scene - characteristically a tableau of the dead, since violence in Greek tragedy happened offstage and its bloody results were then displayed. Both machines respond to the same convention: the Greek stage showed relatively little action directly, relying on report, on the chorus and on these devices to present what could not be enacted.

For analysis, the space and its conventions are not mere background but tools the playwright used, and the strongest answers read the drama through them. The vast open-air theatre demanded bold, clear, large-scale performance and the projection of the mask; the circular orchestra kept the chorus central to the experience; the skene's single facade and doors focused the action on one location and made entrances and exits significant; the parodoi gave meaning to arrivals from elsewhere; and the offstage-violence convention shaped how horror was conveyed. When analysing a scene, ask how it exploits the theatre - the space, the masks, the chorus, the machines, the conventions of entrance and report - and you turn knowledge of the material evidence into genuine dramatic analysis.

Worked example

How the space shaped the drama

Explain how two features of the theatre space shaped Greek tragedy.

The orchestra and chorus
The large circular orchestra kept the singing, dancing chorus physically central, so the chorus remained a constant presence framing and responding to the action.
The skene and its doors
The single scenic facade with central doors fixed the action before one building and made every entrance and exit through those doors significant.
The ekkyklema and offstage violence
Because violence occurred offstage, the wheeled ekkyklema could roll out its bloody results, turning horror into a displayed tableau rather than an enacted act.
Draw the conclusion
The space thus enforced a drama of choral presence, meaningful entrances and reported or revealed violence - conventions that are part of a scene's meaning.

Result: The orchestra kept the chorus central, the skene focused and dignified entrances, and the convention of offstage violence (served by the ekkyklema) shaped how tragedy presented its most terrible events - the space is inseparable from the drama's form.

Typical mistakes

Confusing the parts of the theatre or muddling the Greek terms (using orchestra in its modern sense, for instance).
Describing the stagecraft in the abstract without analysing how a particular scene exploits the space, the masks or the machines.

Active revision

Draw and label the parts of a Greek theatre, then analyse how one convention (the mask, the chorus in the orchestra, the ekkyklema, or offstage violence) would shape the staging and impact of a scene you know.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for classical civilisation (Department for Education)

Tragedy and the tragedians#

StandardOCR H408 Component 2 (Greek Theatre: tragedy)DfE GCE Classical Civilisation subject content

The conventions of Greek tragedy

Fig. 3The building-blocks of a tragedy: a structure alternating actors' episodes with choral odes, framed by a prologue and exodos, performed in masks on mythic subjects.

Athenian tragedy is the supreme achievement of Greek theatre, and three playwrights from the fifth century BC are its great practitioners, whose works survive and are studied: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Knowing each poet's distinctive character and contribution is a basic requirement of the option. Aeschylus (the eldest, active in the early fifth century) is the grandest and most religious, concerned with the justice of the gods across generations; his surviving Oresteia is the only complete trilogy we possess, tracing a cycle of vengeance to its resolution in the founding of a law court. Tradition credits him with adding a second actor, making true dialogue possible.

Sophocles (active in the mid-to-late fifth century) is often regarded as the master of tragic construction. He is credited with adding a third actor and with introducing scene-painting, and his plays are admired for their tautly ironic plots, their powerful and dignified central figures, and their exploration of human suffering and endurance in a world governed by forces beyond human control. His Oedipus the King is the classic tragedy of a man who, in seeking the truth, uncovers his own guilt, and Antigone dramatises the collision of duty to the gods and the family with duty to the state. Euripides (the youngest of the three) is the most questioning and psychologically probing: he brings myth down to a more human, sometimes shocking level, gives searching voice to women and the marginal, and casts doubt on the justice of the gods, as in the Medea and the Bacchae.

Whatever the poet, a tragedy is built on a recognisable structure, which it is useful to be able to name. It typically opens with a prologue that sets the situation, followed by the parodos, the entry-song of the chorus into the orchestra. The main action then alternates between episodes (scenes of dialogue between the actors, the equivalent of acts) and stasima (choral odes sung and danced between the episodes), until the exodos, the final scene and the chorus's departure. This alternation of actors and chorus is the fundamental rhythm of Greek tragedy, and recognising it helps you analyse how a play controls its pace, reflection and emotional build.

The chorus is the feature of Greek tragedy most alien to modern drama and most important to understand. A group of a dozen or more, singing and dancing in the orchestra, the chorus is a collective character - often citizens, elders or women connected to the action - that reacts to events, voices communal wisdom, fears and hopes, sets the emotional tone, and in its odes broadens the particular story into reflection on the gods, fate and the human condition. It can advise, lament, warn and pray, but usually cannot act decisively. Analysing the chorus - what it represents, how it responds, how its odes comment on the action - is central to writing well about any tragedy.

The subject matter of tragedy was myth - the stories of the great heroic houses and the gods - and this choice is itself significant. By setting their dramas in the legendary past, the tragedians could explore the largest and most dangerous questions - divine justice, fate and free will, the claims of the family against the state, the causes and costs of suffering, the limits of human knowledge - at a safe distance from contemporary Athens, yet with obvious relevance to it. Tragedy characteristically shows a person of high standing brought to catastrophe, and it asks the audience to feel pity and fear and to reflect on the human condition. To analyse a tragedy is to see how, through a mythic story and the interplay of actors and chorus, the playwright makes his audience confront these questions.

Worked example

Analysing the function of the chorus

Explain the dramatic functions of the chorus in Greek tragedy.

A collective character
The chorus is usually a group with a stake in the action - elders, citizens, women - who watch and respond as a community.
Emotional and moral commentary
Through its odes it laments, fears, hopes and warns, setting the play's tone and voicing communal wisdom about events.
Widening the theme
Its songs step back from the particular story to reflect on the gods, fate and the human condition, enlarging the play's meaning.
Structural rhythm
By alternating with the actors' episodes, the choral odes control pace and give the audience space to absorb and reflect.

Result: The chorus works as a collective character, a voice of communal reflection, a widener of the play's themes and a controller of its rhythm - which is why it is central to analysing any Greek tragedy.

Typical mistakes

Blurring the three tragedians into one, missing their distinct styles and contributions.
Treating the chorus as a decorative interruption rather than as a collective character central to a tragedy's meaning.

Active revision

Analyse the role of the chorus in a tragedy you know: what does it represent, how does it respond to the action, and how do its odes deepen the play's themes?

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Classical Civilisation (H008, H408) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA))

Comedy: Aristophanes and Old Comedy#

StandardOCR H408 Component 2 (Greek Theatre: comedy)DfE GCE Classical Civilisation subject content

Tragedy and comedy compared

Fig. 4The two dramatic genres compared: a serious drama of the mythic past beside a satirical comedy of the present, sharing the Dionysiac festival, the chorus, masks and a civic role.

Alongside tragedy, the same festivals staged comedy, and the comedy of fifth-century Athens - Old Comedy - is a very different but equally civic form. Its one playwright whose complete plays survive is Aristophanes, whose works (among them the Acharnians, the Knights, the Clouds, the Wasps, the Birds, the Lysistrata and the Frogs) are our main evidence for the genre. Where tragedy is set in the mythic past and treats the gravest human questions with dignity, Old Comedy is set in the contemporary present, is riotously funny, and mixes fantasy, obscenity, slapstick and biting political satire. Studying it requires holding this contrast with tragedy clearly in view while recognising that both belong to the same Dionysiac festival.

The most striking feature of Old Comedy is its topicality: it mocks real, living Athenians by name and lampoons current politics, ideas and personalities. Aristophanes ridicules the populist politician Cleon (as a bullying slave in the Knights), caricatures Socrates and the new intellectuals (in the Clouds), and parodies the tragedian Euripides (in the Frogs and elsewhere). Public figures, policies (especially the ongoing Peloponnesian War), and fashionable ideas are all fair game. This gave comedy a role as a kind of licensed civic free speech - a space in which the democracy could laugh at its leaders and argue about its choices - and makes the plays a vivid, if distorting, source for Athenian public life.

The plots are gloriously fantastic, built on a single absurd premise carried through with mad logic: a private citizen makes a personal peace treaty in the middle of the war (the Acharnians); the women of Greece go on a sex-strike to force the men to make peace (the Lysistrata); two Athenians persuade the birds to build a city in the sky (the Birds). This fantasy is the vehicle for the satire, letting Aristophanes stage impossible solutions to real problems and follow their comic consequences. The comic hero is often an ordinary man of common sense who cuts through the follies of the city, and the plays delight in wordplay, parody, costume, indecency and direct appeals to the audience.

Old Comedy has its own structural conventions, of which the most distinctive is the parabasis. At a certain point the dramatic action pauses and the chorus - frequently costumed as something fantastical, giving several plays their titles (wasps, birds, frogs, clouds) - comes forward to address the audience directly, often speaking for the poet himself on matters of the day or on his own art. The plays also typically contain an agon, a formal debate in which two opposed positions (war and peace, old education and new, one poet and another) are argued out. These conventions make comedy a place of open argument and direct address, closer to the audience than the more sealed world of tragedy.

For analysis, comedy should be read as a serious part of the festival despite its jokes, and its relation to tragedy is illuminating. Both were performed at the festivals of Dionysus, both used a chorus and masks and competed for prizes, and both were civic institutions in which Athens examined itself - but comedy did so through ridicule of the present rather than reflection on the mythic past. Its obscenity and abuse were part of the Dionysiac licence of the festival, and its mockery of the powerful was tolerated as a feature of democratic free speech. Analysing a comedy means enjoying the humour while asking what it targets and why - what anxieties about war, politics, education or the city the laughter addresses - so that the jokes are read as the comedy's serious civic work.

Worked example

Comedy as civic free speech

Explain how Aristophanes' topical satire did serious work within the democracy.

Name the targets
Aristophanes mocked living politicians (Cleon), thinkers (Socrates) and poets (Euripides), and lampooned current policy, above all the long Peloponnesian War.
The comic vehicle
A fantastic premise - a private peace, a women's sex-strike, a city in the sky - let him stage the folly of the city's choices and imagine alternatives.
The parabasis
In the parabasis the chorus addressed the audience directly, often for the poet, turning the play into open comment on the day's affairs.
The civic function
This licensed ridicule of the powerful was tolerated as democratic free speech, letting Athens laugh at and argue about its leaders and decisions.

Result: Through named satire, fantastic plots and the direct address of the parabasis, Aristophanic comedy functioned as a form of civic free speech in which the democracy examined and mocked its own choices.

Typical mistakes

Treating comedy as mere entertainment, missing its role as topical satire and a form of democratic free speech.
Assuming Aristophanes' caricatures are accurate portraits (of Socrates, Cleon or Euripides) rather than comic distortions.

Active revision

Analyse how Aristophanes uses a fantastic premise and topical satire in a play you know; explain what current concern (war, politics, education) the comedy targets and how the humour does serious civic work.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for classical civilisation (Department for Education)

Aristotle's Poetics on tragedy#

AdvancedOCR H408 Component 2 (Greek Theatre: Aristotle's Poetics)DfE GCE Classical Civilisation subject content

Aristotle's analysis of tragedy

Fig. 5Aristotle's anatomy of tragedy: the six elements ranked from plot (the soul of tragedy) to spectacle, and the concepts - hamartia, peripeteia, anagnorisis, catharsis - that drive its effect.

The single most influential piece of ancient writing about drama is Aristotle's Poetics, and it is a key prescribed source for this option. Aristotle (384-322 BC) wrote it about a century after the great age of tragedy, as a work of analysis and theory rather than as a playwright's manual, and it is the earliest substantial work of literary criticism to survive. It aims to describe what tragedy is, what its parts are and how it achieves its effect. Because it has shaped the way tragedy has been understood ever since, it is studied both as evidence for ancient views of drama and as a set of analytical tools that can be applied to the plays.

Aristotle begins from the idea of mimesis - imitation or representation. All the arts, for him, are forms of imitation, and tragedy is the imitation of an action: specifically, he defines it as the imitation of an action that is serious, complete and of a certain magnitude, presented in dramatic (not narrative) form, in heightened language, and arousing pity and fear so as to accomplish the catharsis of such emotions. Every part of this famous definition rewards attention, but its most discussed element is catharsis - the purging, cleansing or clarification of the emotions of pity and fear that tragedy arouses - a term Aristotle does not fully explain and which has been debated ever since. The definition frames tragedy as a serious imitation designed to move and, through moving, to do something valuable to its audience.

Aristotle analyses tragedy into six elements, ranked in order of importance: plot, character, thought, diction, melody (song) and spectacle. His insistence on the priority of plot (mythos) over character is central and often surprising to modern students: for Aristotle, tragedy is above all the imitation of an action, and character exists to serve the action rather than the reverse. He calls plot the soul of tragedy. Spectacle - the visual staging - he ranks last, as the least essential and the most dependent on others than the poet. This hierarchy is itself an argument about what matters in drama, and it can be tested against, and used to analyse, the plays themselves.

The most useful of Aristotle's concepts for practical analysis concern the ideal plot. A good tragic plot, he argues, is a unified whole with a beginning, middle and end, in which the events follow one another by necessity or probability. The finest plots turn on a change of fortune brought about through two devices: peripeteia, a reversal in which an action produces the opposite of its intended effect, and anagnorisis, a recognition or discovery in which ignorance turns to knowledge - most powerfully when the two coincide. The tragic effect is greatest, he adds, when the central figure is a person of high standing who is neither wholly virtuous nor simply wicked, and who falls not through vice but through hamartia - an error or misjudgement. These terms - hamartia, peripeteia, anagnorisis - are the sharpest tools the Poetics offers for analysing a tragedy.

For the exam, the Poetics should be used critically as well as applied. It is an immensely powerful analytical framework: applying hamartia, peripeteia and anagnorisis to a play like Oedipus the King - which Aristotle himself admired and which fits his model closely - illuminates how its plot works. But it is also a partial, retrospective account: Aristotle wrote after the event, generalised from a limited set of plays, and his emphases (the priority of plot, the ideal of unity, the single flawed hero) do not fit every tragedy, least of all the more experimental work of Euripides. The strongest answers both deploy Aristotle's concepts to analyse the drama and evaluate how far his framework really captures the plays - using the Poetics as a tool and assessing its limits.

Worked example

Applying Aristotle to Oedipus the King

Use Aristotle's concepts to analyse the tragic effect of Oedipus the King.

The hero and hamartia
Oedipus is a great man, neither wholly good nor bad, whose downfall comes through error and misjudgement rather than sheer wickedness - Aristotle's ideal tragic figure.
Peripeteia
The messenger who comes to relieve Oedipus's fears in fact reveals his true parentage, so the action produces the opposite of its intended effect - a textbook reversal.
Anagnorisis
That reversal coincides with recognition: Oedipus discovers who he truly is and what he has done, ignorance turning to terrible knowledge.
Pity, fear and catharsis
The unified plot, driving through reversal and recognition to catastrophe, arouses the pity and fear whose catharsis Aristotle makes the aim of tragedy.

Result: Oedipus the King fits Aristotle's model closely - a flawed great man, a coinciding reversal and recognition, a unified plot arousing pity and fear - which is why Aristotle himself treated it as a model tragedy, though such a fit is not typical of every play.

Typical mistakes

Translating hamartia as a moral flaw of character rather than an error or misjudgement, and taking catharsis as a settled idea rather than a debated one.
Applying Aristotle as if his framework fits every tragedy, instead of testing and evaluating it against the plays (especially Euripides).

Active revision

Apply Aristotle's concepts of hamartia, peripeteia and anagnorisis to a tragedy you know, then assess how well his framework accounts for the play as a whole.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Classical Civilisation (H008, H408) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA))

References & sources

Sources

OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA)

OCR AS and A Level Classical Civilisation (H008, H408) specification

Department for Education

GCE AS and A level subject content for classical civilisation

Greek Theatre

5 sections~26 min reading time2 competenciesLevel Foundation 1 · Standard 3 · Advanced 1

Greek Theatre

Key points

The significance of the festival setting

Key points

How the space shaped the drama

Key points

Analysing the function of the chorus

Key points

Comedy as civic free speech

Key points

Applying Aristotle to Oedipus the King

Sources

Greek Theatre

Key points

The significance of the festival setting

Key points

How the space shaped the drama

Key points

Analysing the function of the chorus

Key points

Comedy as civic free speech

Key points

Applying Aristotle to Oedipus the King

Sources