THE BOOK WAS DRENCHED - OUDL Home

xiv General Introduction
upon this rich literary tradition which was their heritage, but it must
also be remembered that the audiences for which these dramatists wrote
shared deeply in the inheritance. For the Athenian of the fifth century
B.C., poetry was not alone something which would give him insights
into life, but it was likewise an integral and meaningful part of his life.
In the absence of libraries and books "published" in large numbers, the
individual came in contact with "literature," that is, almost exclusively
poetry, through oral presentations of the epic, lyric or dramatic forms.
He spent long hours hearing this poetry and as a result it became part
of his nature. The audiences which witnessed the great tragedies must
have been made up of individuals who were thus steeped in poetry, for
on no other theory can we explain how plays, replete with choral odes
of intricate metrical structure and brilliant imagery, could have been so
widely popular.
Most introductions to the reading of Greek tragedy begin with an
account of the origins of the form. For the purposes of the general reader,
it seems far better to postpone a consideration of this subject until somewhat
later, and at the outset rather to stress the fact that in Greek tragedy
as we now have it we meet a fully developed dramatic form, which was
presented to an audience possessed of a high degree of sophistication,
again in the best and purest sense of the word. In the first place, it is
absolutely necessary for anyone who desires to apprehend as completely
as possible these Greek plays, to re-create them imaginatively as dramas,
that is, as actual plays, produced dramatically before an audience. Such
an apprehension or understanding can be facilitated, first, by a description
of the theatre in which these plays were acted, plus an analysis,
external in character, of the actual form of the plays, with particular
emphasis upon those features of the Greek plays that differentiate them
from dramatic productions with which we are familiar on our own contemporary
stage. Having approached the dramas from an external point
of view, we shall then be able better to analyze them from the internal
point of view, in the effort to determine what is their essential nature,
what meaning or meanings they possess as works of art.
A spectator of a Greek dramatic performance in the latter half of the
fifth century B.C. would find himself seated in the theatron, or koilon,
NOTE. The diagram opposite, which was prepared by Professor A. M. Friend, of
the Department of Art and Archaeology in Princeton University, does not reproduce
any particular ancient theatre. It is, hence, a kind of "ideal" diagram, which should
make clear the relationships which the several elements of the theatre bear to each
other. It combines in it material drawn primarily from the Theatre of Dionysus
in Athens, and from the famous theatre at Epidaurus. In studying the diagram,
reference should be made to the frontispieces of Volume I and Volume II of this
book.