Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Pleasure and Leisure 273
did so at least once in their lifetimes. To the best of our knowledge,
all 1,500 participants would have been men, though it is conceivable
that a few women assisted backstage, not least in preparing the
costumes.
If a tragic trilogy or comedy failed to be selected by the archon, its
chances of being performed in Athens or elsewhere were virtually
nil. There was no equivalent to an off-Broadway theater devoted
to experimental drama. Even so, as far as we know, no playwright
ever questioned the conditions to which he was forced to submit
in order to have his plays produced, nor did any ever complain
that state funding inhibited the free expression of his ideas. In the
first half of the fifth century b.c.e. , playwrights were required to
be composers, choreographers, designers, directors, and actors as
well. Increasingly, however, these roles were taken over by specialists,
though the playwrights still had to write the music for the chorus.
Being a playwright hardly amounted to having a profession in
the modern sense of the word, because they received payment only
if they won first prize. Some, however, may have earned a modest
income from the sale of copies of their plays.
The Theater
A Greek theater consisted of a theatron, or seeing space, which
was frequently cut into a hillside in the form of steeply raked tiers
of seats, and a circular orchêstra, or dancing space about twenty
meters in diameter, almost entirely surrounded by the theatron.
Seats were arranged in the form of wedges and were divided from
one another by vertical gangways. In the fifth century b.c.e. , the
seats were wooden, but in the next century stone became commonplace.
The best-preserved theater is at Epidauros in the northeast
Peloponnese, built in the fourth century b.c.e. , whose acoustics are
so refined that it is possible to hear a piece of paper being torn up
in the center of the orchêstra from the back row of seats over fifty
meters away. Recent research conducted by the Georgia Institute of
Technology suggests that this is due in part to the limestone seating,
which amplifies high-frequency sounds coming from the orchêstra
while filtering out low-frequency sounds, such as the shuffling and
murmuring of the audience.
The raised stage was an invention of the fifth century b.c.e. , as,
too, was scenery. The Greek skênê, meaning hut or tent and from
which the word scenery derives, describes the actors’ changing
room, the outside of which could be painted to resemble the façade