Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

274 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
of a palace or temple and thus provide a sense of place. There was
no other form of stage setting.
The Theater of Dionysos in Athens could probably accommodate
about 20,000 spectators. (Plato mentions 30,000 in the Symposium, but
this is almost certainly an exaggeration.) Even if only 10,000 attended,
this probably amounted to a quarter of the citizen body. The front
rows were reserved for priests, magistrates, and distinguished visitors.
In the center of the front row was the throne of the priest of
Dionysos Eleuthereus (“Liberator”). Special areas were reserved for
ephebes, members of the council, and metics. Probably the rest of the
audience sat in blocks allocated to each of the 10 tribes. Even prisoners
were let out on bail so that they could attend performances. The
price of admission was two obols, though, from the fourth century
b.c.e. onward and possibly earlier, citizens were admitted free. We
do not know for certain whether women were permitted to attend.
Although it may seem inherently unlikely that slaves were permitted
to attend, we cannot rule out the possibility that some Athenians,
particularly if they were elderly, were accompanied by slaves who
assisted them to their seats and perhaps sat with them.
Going to the theater was hardly a relaxing experience in the modern
sense of the word, because the audience was expected to sit
through four plays a day at least, or five if the tragic plays performed
in the morning were followed by a comedy in the afternoon.
That amounts to about ten hours of uninterrupted performance
per day. There were no intervals, except between plays. Not surprisingly,
audiences became extremely restless if they were bored
or displeased. We hear of several instances when a hostile crowd
pelted the performers with stones and fruit. In the fifth century
b.c.e. , plays received only a single performance when first produced.
The only exception was Aristophanes’ Frogs, first performed
at the Lenaia in 405 b.c.e. , whose political message was judged to be
so relevant that the play was given a second performance, probably
at the City Dionysia two months later. Deme theaters, however,
regularly reprieved plays. In addition, some time before 425 b.c.e.,
the Athenians passed a decree permitting anyone who wished to
revive Aeschylus’s plays at the City Dionysia. (Aeschylus had died
in 456 b.c.e. ). In the fourth century, revivals of what were called “old
tragedy” became commonplace even in the theater of Dionysos in
Athens, as the plays of the three great tragedians became, in effect,
canonized. Sometime between 340 and 336 b.c.e., a law was passed
requiring that an official version of their plays be preserved in the
state treasury.