Theatre of Dionysus

“ Not far below the shrine lies the theatre of Dionysus, scooped out of the hillside as are most Greek theatres, with a paved, semi-circular “orchestra,” or dancing place, at its foot. Much of the original seating capacity is concealed by the overgrowth of grass, so that one is likely greatly to underestimate its former size. Once the seats rose far up toward the precinct of Asklepios, and the path that to-day traverses the slope passes through what was once the upper portion of the amphitheatre. ”

“ The Athens that rose in place of the old city was a marvel of beauty and art, adorned with hall and temple, court and gymnasium, colonnade and theatre, while under the active labors of its sculptors it became so filled with marble inmates that they almost equalled in numbers its living inhabitants. Such sculptors as Phidias and such painters as Zeuxis adorned the city with the noblest products of their art. The great theatre of Dionysus was completed, and to it was added a new one, called the Odeon, for musical and poetical representations. ”

“ Some twenty-five years ago, a very extensive and splendidly successful excavation was made on an adjoining site, when a party of German archæologists laid bare the Theatre of Dionysus—the great theatre in which Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides brought [pg 123] out their immortal plays before an immortal audience. There is nothing more delightful than to descend from the Acropolis, and rest awhile in the comfortable marble arm-chairs with which the front row of the circuit is occupied. ”

“ Of the hundred and more religious functionaries, male and female, who occupied the front rows in the Dionysiac theatre, not one could fail to hear from time to time some reference to the deity whom he served; though the priests of Apollo, of Artemis, and of Nemesis (probably a late comer) might feel at tragic representations a peculiar sympathy with the priest of Dionysus Eleuthereus, who occupied the central chair. ”

“ The Drama came to perfection with Athenian art generally, and with Athens herself in the period which followed the Persian war. The performance of plays at the Dionysiac festival was an important event in Athenian life. The whole city was gathered in the great open-air theatre consecrated to Dionysus, whose priest occupied the seat of honour. All the free men, at least, were gathered there; and when we talk about the intellectual superiority of the Athenian people, we must bear in mind that a condition of Athenian culture was the delegation of industry to the slave. ”

“ The songs and dances from which tragedy and the satyr-play developed were associated, at the period when they became truly dramatic, with the worship of Dionysus, and at that same period Dionysus was as truly a “god” (as distinct from a “hero”) as any that the Greeks ever knew. ”

“ It is a background more enveloping and animating than the ballroom of Maria Theresa. It is a background that accords with every mood, and is itself a unity.
The other problem is a psychological and a physical problem, the problem of life-principles in art. In the beginning the theater was masculine. Its essence was a thrust. The phallus was borne in the processional ritual at the opening of the Theater of Dionysus each spring; and its presence was significant. The greatest and the healthiest of the theaters have always plunged their actors into the midst of the audience. ”

“ From this strange design Mr. Pater has fashioned a curious mediæval myth of the return of Dionysus among men, a myth steeped in colour and passion and old romance, full of wonder and full of worship, Denys himself being half animal and half god, making the world mad with a new ecstasy of living, stirring the artists simply by his visible presence, drawing the marvel of music from reed and pipe, and slain at last in a stage-play by those who had loved him. ”

“ On the stage of the theater built under the acropolis is a statue of a man with a shield, who they say is Aratus, the son of Cleinias. After the theater is a temple of Dionysus. The god is of gold and ivory, and by his side are Bacchanals of white marble. These women they say are sacred to Dionysus and maddened by his inspiration. The Sicyonians have also some images which are kept secret. ”

“ The poet may, of course, have sometimes done so, and with good result; but it seems unlikely that either poet or audience would have felt this to be necessary. Drama at the Dionysia was an act of religious worship. The honour of Dionysus was the central idea of the festival. The thing primarily required by Athenian feeling was not that the tragedies should be connected with each other, but that each should be worthy of the god. The unity of the tetralogy in this paramount aspect—viz., as a religious tribute—was symbolised by the number of the tragic Chorus. ”

“ Along with these works may be classed the numerous pieces of sculpture that were put up as decorations for the theatre. Such were the εἰκόνες mentioned by Pausanias as being in the Dionysiac theatre at Athens. The periegete names the statues of Aischylos, Sophokles, Euripides, and Menander [10] .
A large number of reliefs that represent Dionysos receiving the worship of mortals, or advancing in a train of satyrs before a man lying on a couch, makes up another class of sculpture, which probably owed its origin to the drama. ”

“ It was at the Dionysia that, as we shall see, the Athenian drama took its rise as a service of worship to the god.
Literature found a whole-hearted patron in the great
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tyrant’s younger son Hipparchus. At his court were, among others, Simonides, Anacreon, and Onomacritus. Simonides of Ceos is specially associated with the dithyramb, the chorus in honour of Dionysus, which played a great part in the development of the chorus of tragedy. He was also a composer of odes of victory for successful athletes, though here his fame was eclipsed by his younger rival Pindar. ”

“ Just as the new Dionysion production had been decided upon—a Shakespearean comedy—and the scenic artists and the authorities on historic costume and furniture, whose services the theatre retained, were torturing their brains to produce an effect that should beat even the Dionysion record, the leading lady fell suddenly and dangerously ill and threw all the Dionysion arrangements into chaos. ”

“ The great tragedies handed down to us were all composed in this way, and brought out at Athens in honor of the god Dionysus. For a fee of two obols, granted him by the state, every citizen and his wife, at some contests even resident strangers, could go and sit at the theater, and hear four plays of Æschylus pitted against four plays of Sophocles, and four of Euripides. The endurance of an audience not given to reading, and not fond of staying at home, is of course much greater than that of our modern play-going people. ”

“ The other Olympians are above sorrow. Dionysus, like a strenuous mortal hero, like Hercules or Perseus, has his alternations of joy and sorrow, of struggle and hard-won triumph. It is out of the sorrows of Dionysus, then,—of Dionysus in winter—that all Greek tragedy grows; out of the song of the sorrows of Dionysus, sung at his winter feast by the chorus of satyrs, singers clad in goat-skins, in memory of his rural life, one and another of whom, from time to time, steps out of the company to emphasise and develope this or that circumstance of the story ”

“ In the case of the drama the religious origin and the persisting religious meaning are self-evident. Performed at a festival of Dionysus, beside his temple, in the presence of his altar and his priest, tragedy and comedy are the natural response to that Greek demand for the enrichment of worship by art.—Arthur Fairbanks. ”

“ Availing ourselves of Plato's terminology, however, we should have to speak of the tragic figures of the Hellenic stage somewhat as follows. The one truly real Dionysus appears in a multiplicity of forms, in the mask of a fighting hero and entangled, as it were, in the net of an individual will. As the visibly appearing god now talks and acts, he resembles an erring, striving, suffering [Pg 82] individual: and that, in general, he appears with such epic precision and clearness, is due to the dream-reading Apollo, who reads to the chorus its Dionysian state through this symbolic appearance. ”

“ At Athens the drama was one of the most powerful educative influences in the community. The remains of what was no doubt in its time the chief Dionysiac theatre may be seen in the neighbourhood of the Acropolis—part of the southern face of the rock having been scarped to form the back of the theatre. Plato speaks of it as accommodating 30,000 people, but this is probably an exaggeration, 20,000 being nearer the mark. ”

“ We remember also that Pausanias [191] , in his account of the South slope, says ‘the oldest sanctuary of Dionysos is beside the theatre.’ He sees within the precinct there two temples, the foundations of which remain to-day; one of them was named Eleutherian, the other we think may surely have belonged to Dionysos-in-the-Marshes. It is true that the ground about the theatre is anything but marshy now, nor could it ever have been very damp, as it slopes sharply down to the South-East. Still, from an ancient name it is never safe to argue [192] ”

“ The statue of Pallas, erected by him in the Acropolis, is standing at this day, although it has lost the gold with which it was formerly adorned, and also the building which supports the choragic tripods in the temple of Dionysus, for he often gained a victory when choragus, and never was vanquished.
It is said that once during the performance of a play at his expense, a slave of his appeared upon the stage habited as Dionysus; a tall and handsome youth, and still beardless. ”

“ In later times, too, the Greeks, and still more the Romans, extended a free hospitality to alien gods and legends, to Serapis, Isis, the wilder Dionysiac revels, and so forth. But this habit of borrowing was regarded with disfavour by pious conservatives, and was probably, in the width of its hospitality at least, an innovation. As Tiele remarks, we cannot derive Dionysus from the Assyrian Daian nisi, ‘judge of men,’ a name of the solar god Samas, without ascertaining that the wine-god exercised judicial functions, and was a god of the sun. ”

“ The cult of the wine-god, Dionysus, was thus fostered at Sicyon by Cleisthenes, and at Corinth by the Cypselids; while at Athens a new festival of this deity, which so completely overshadowed the older festival that it became known as the Great Dionysia, probably owed its institution to Peisistratus. Another festival, the Panathenaea, which had been instituted only a few years before his rise to power, became under his rule, and thanks to his policy, the chief national festival of the Athenian state. Everywhere, again, we find the tyrants the patrons of literature. ”

“ How much of beauty they have given to the world only an artist or a poet here and there understands.
"It is from this fantastic scene," says one of the fraternity, "that the beautiful wind-touched draperies, the rhythm, the heads suddenly thrown back, of many a Pompeian wall-painting and sarcophagus frieze are originally derived." And the same eye sees in the figure of Dionysus the "mystical and fiery spirit of the earth—the aroma of the green world is retained in the fair human body." ”

“ It is continually breaking through the thin veneer that civilization supplies. It has shown itself at different times in Europe. [28] This "passion of Dionysus" takes possession of the folk, of the people in the country, on heath or by sea. The impulse which seizes girls in modern Greece is so strong that they dance themselves to death on the hills. The dancers are victims of the Nereids, say the peasants. In ancient Greece, as Mr. Lang observes, they would have been saluted as the nurses and companions of Dionysus, and their disease would have been hallowed by religion. ”

“ Plutarch telling us how, before the battle of Salamis, with the assent of Themistocles, three Persian captive youths were offered to Dionysus the Devourer.
As, then, some embodied their fears of winter in Persephone, others embodied them in Dionysus, a devouring god, whose sinister side (as the best wine itself has its treacheries) is illustrated in the dark and shameful secret society described by Livy, in which his worship ended at Rome, afterwards abolished by solemn act of the senate. [49] He becomes a new Aidoneus, a hunter of men's souls ”

“ Now the sound of flutes is heard and the chorus of initiates enter. Dionysus and Xanthias crouch down, where they are, to listen (vs. 315) . Immediately the orchestra, which has just been a subterranean lake, is changed to the imagination into a flowery meadow (vss. 326, 351, etc.) . At vs. 431 Dionysus starts up from his lurking-place and inquires of the chorus, “Could you tell us where Pluto dwells hereabouts?” and the coryphaeus promptly replies: “Know that you have come to the very door” (vs. 436) . ”

“ The choice is hard to make: "I think the one clever, but I enjoy the other," says Dionysus. Eventually he leaves the decision to his momentary feelings and chooses Æschylus. It would be quite wrong to look on the play as a mere attack on Euripides. The case would be parallel if we could imagine some modern writer like the late Mr. Calverley, a writer of comedy and parody with a keen and classic literary taste, sending Dionysus to call Browning back to us, and deciding in the end that he would sooner have Keats. ”