In 405 BC, a new play by the tragedian Euripides
won first prize at a festival in Athens.
It was called The Bacchae
and it is one of the most powerful and disturbing plays ever written.
It tells the story of the chaos wrought by the god of theatre and revelry, Dionysus.
It tells of women lured to the mountains,
where they sing and dance in a frenzy,
and it follows the fate of an unfortunate young king,
who is tricked into spying on them and is torn limb from limb.
It's a play that suggests a changing world, dangerous and uncertain,
where you never really know who or what to trust.
Euripides himself did not live to see his victory.
He died far away from Athens, having left the birthplace of drama behind.
It is likely that Euripides composed The Bacchae here, in Macedon,
on the northern fringes of the Greek world,
an area thought by many of the ancient southern Greeks
to be wild, unruly and unstable.
And it was here that Euripides lived out his final days,
not in the cradle of a democracy, but in the court of a king.
Euripides' departure from Athens,
and the turmoil and disorder of his play, The Bacchae,
foreshadowed a new era.
One marked by war, instability and chaos.
In the next century, Athens would lose its influence,
its significance and even its democracy.
And the balance of power in Greece would shift from democrats to kings.
But drama, that most Athenian of inventions, would thrive,
spreading throughout the Greek world and beyond.
This episode is the story of the dramatic decline of Athens,
and the remarkable triumph
and transformation of theatre.
During the 5th century, Athens was the pre-eminent city in Greece -
confident, powerful, and in control of a vast empire.
It had given birth to two radical new ideas - democracy and theatre.
And the dynamic relationship between these ideas
had driven the city's rise to power.
This was the time when the great tragedians, Sophocles and Euripides,
were staging epic plays like Oedipus and Medea,
and the comedian Aristophanes
was composing bawdy and fantastical comedies like Birds.
As well as being great works of art,
these plays engaged directly
with Athenian democracy and Athenian life.
But by the late 5th century, all of this was at risk.
Athens was also fighting a war, the Peloponnesian War,
against the great land power of Sparta.
In 415 BC, still supremely confident,
Athens launched a new phase in this war.
She sent an expedition to attack the city of Syracuse,
on the island of Sicily,
towards the western edges of a Greek world
that spread from Marseille to the Black Sea coast.
For two years, brutal fighting raged on the sea and land at Syracuse.
Thucydides called it the greatest slaughter of the war.
He wrote of bodies heaped on top of one another
and of rivers clotted with blood.
Finally, in 413 BC,
the Athenians were decisively and disastrously defeated.
Those who survived, some 7,000 of them,
were imprisoned in these stone quarries.
Amazingly, it is said
that you can still see the marks from their chisels on the walls.
Today, this is a famed tourist attraction,
but the fun belies the horrific reality of this place in the ancient world.
It was part of a much larger quarry
where the Athenians, as prisoners of war, were brought
as part of a labour camp.
Can you imagine being forced to work here day in, day out
undertaking the backbreaking work of quarrying these stones
with no respite from the scorching sun?
There was only one way to escape from this hell -
the historian Plutarch tells us that some Athenians were freed
when they were heard quoting lines from Euripides.
Plutarch tells us that the Syracusans were absolutely mad for Euripides
and the morsels of his plays that made their way over here
and he says that the Athenians who did make it home
went to Euripides himself to thank him for saving their lives
because they'd been able to remember and recite
some of the lines from his plays.
It's amazing to think that knowing extracts from a play
was enough to buy these prisoners their freedom.
It's a sign that theatre was making an impact far beyond Athens.
Such was the popularity of drama here in Sicily
that, a few decades before,
the great Aeschylus, the father of tragedy himself,
had come here to produce his plays.
And the message of one play in particular
now looked to be coming home to roost.
Aeschylus performed his play, The Persians, here in Syracuse.
Now, that play had critiqued the Persian arrogance
that foreshadowed their failed invasion of Greece,
but it had also contained a wider warning for the Athenians -
beware of hubris, if you over-reach, you too could fall.
And in the wake of the failed Athenian expedition,
here, at Syracuse,
many Athenians began to believe that Aeschylus had been right
and that THEIR moment of hubris had come.
At first, the people of Athens couldn't believe the news -
an army and an entire navy virtually wiped out.
Many blamed the democracy for authorising such a foolish mission
and the anger and tension even spilled into the streets,
where some democrats were attacked.
The great fear now was what would befall Athens
in the wider war against Sparta.
Serious issues like these
were regularly addressed in the Athenian theatre
and, in the midst of this chaos,
the playwright Aristophanes was preparing a new comedy
for performance at the theatrical festival.
In 411 BC, Aristophanes put on a play called Lysistrata.
It's one of his most well known, not least because of its unabashed rudeness.
It was actually banned in Britain until 1957
and even then, the first performance of it was called "savagely pornographic".
But it's also one of his most popular because of its strong female protagonist,
but also because its call for peace strikes a chord
in our continuously conflict-ridden world.
To put an end to the war, Lysistrata persuades women from all over Greece
to go on a sex strike until the men agree to make peace.
The women also seize control of the Acropolis,
where the city's treasury is kept.
When a magistrate, a proboulos,
arrives to retrieve funds for the war,
Lysistrata berates him about the losses that the women have been forced to bear.
The women dress the magistrate up in their clothes
and send him away humiliated.
As the strike continues,
the sex-starved men of Greece become increasingly desperate
until, finally, they agree to make peace.
So, Rosie, with a play like Lysistrata,
can you give us a sense of just how bawdy, how grotesque
the humour in Old Comedy really was?
Well, it's the kind of thing that, for example,
it's difficult to stage in schools now,
because it's got men with strapped-on phalluses very visible
and jokes, all the innuendos
about whether or not they're going to get sex with their wives
and just the general bawdiness of that.
All the jokes on the women's side, of course,
about what it's like being married,
what tricks they get up to, you know, even references to sexual positions,
the lion on the cheese grater.
So if we look at this, this is from the Pronomos Vase,
and it's actually from a satyr drama,
which is a bit different from Old Comedy,
but you get the idea from the costume, you can see...
Of just how bawdy and in-your-face it is.
Exactly, it's very explicit. Yeah.
And, I mean, the kind of jokes that you can make around this -
"Is that a messenger rod you're carrying?", for example.
It's...it's easy humour.
From our point of view, looking at this play,
you can't believe that this is what they were seeing on stage.
As part of an official festival within ancient Athenian democracy.
Exactly.
The plot is certainly outrageous,
but it speaks to serious issues.
The important thing about the Lysistrata is actually not the sex strike.
The young women do have their sex strike, but we all know that's just a silly joke,
cos all Athenian men could either have sex with each other,
go to prostitutes, there wasn't a problem,
they did not just have to have sex with their wives.
The really important one is the older women
who, with Lysistrata, take over the place where the keys were owned
by the High Priestess of Athena,
the inner sanctuary of the Acropolis where all the money was stored.
But does the sort of radicalness of the solution in Lysistrata
underline the seriousness of the problem?
I think the city is in a state of extraordinary tension,
there is not a family in the city
that hasn't lost at least one man in the disaster in 413 in Sicily.
We know that they had a huge crisis over the population
because they freed a lot of slaves a few years later
just to fill up the citizen numbers.
I think one of the reasons, to me, why it's so interesting
is that citizen women have an integral part to play
within the polis in all sorts of ways,
in religion and within the oikos and so on,
and yet, they're not responsible in any way for what's been happening
and one of the things I think I see in Lysistrata
is a huge loss of political confidence.
The assault on male power is through the figure of the proboulos,
who is thoroughly feminised and ridiculed.
I think you have to put it into its political context -
a terrible defeat, Athenians loosing self-confidence, really,
and, with some good reason, blaming the leaders
for their bad advice, et cetera.
On the other hand, the message overall,
is should the Athenians make peace
or should they continue to fight the Peloponnesian War
and the outcome of the play is, of course, peace is great,
because you have much more fun in peacetime than you do in wartime.
You don't lose your husband or your brother or your lover in battle
and so on and so on.
So the actual big issue is internal politics,
is Athens going to continue to be a democracy
and, externally, should it or should it not make peace?
Lysistrata is classic Aristophanes - he is using a ridiculous plot
to throw light on the political dilemmas facing Athens.
But, for me, it's the constant references
to the harsh realities of war that really resonate.
Athens was at war for most of Aristophanes' career
and despite the bawdy jokes
and the innuendos and the strap-on phalluses,
it's that sense of the horrible nature of war
that just constantly comes through.
In fact, the bawdy backdrop, in a way, makes the point more strongly
than tragedy ever could.
Despite Lysistrata's message,
Athens did not make peace,
and the Peloponnesian War continued grinding down Athenian manpower
and the Athenian economy for a further seven years,
until, in 404 BC, Sparta finally proved victorious.
Athens was humiliated.
She lost her empire. She lost her navy.
She lost her city walls and, worst of all, she lost her democracy.
Here, on the Pnyx, the home of the Athenian assembly,
the peace terms were worked out.
And as the victorious Spartans looked on,
some Athenians suggested that maybe democracy had had its day
and that it was time for something different.
The hardcore democrats walked out in disgust,
and, in their absence, a motion was passed to do away with democracy
and put Athens into the hands of 30 oligarchs.
But democracy was not dead
and the democrats were soon plotting their revenge.
The democrats focussed their resistance
at the port of Athens, the Piraeus.
This area was the home
of the Athenian trireme warships and their rowers -
the poorest citizens of the polis,
who were the bedrock of the democratic system.
It was here, under the cover of darkness,
that the democrats regrouped,
determined to restore their democracy.
The revolutionaries chose as their place of assembly
the theatre in the Piraeus.
Now, we can't visit that theatre today,
because it's sadly underneath a couple of apartment blocks,
but the Piraeuns were so theatre-crazy
that they built themselves a second one, and here it is,
this one dating from the mid-2nd century BC.
It might seem odd to have chosen a theatre
as a meeting point for a revolution,
but don't forget that theatres had always been civic gathering spaces in ancient Greece
and we know from the sources
that armies, entire armies, used them as muster points
and indeed the very same theatre in Piraeus had been used just a couple of years before
as the rallying point for a revolution.
So when these revolutionaries were choosing where to meet
for a revolution whose very intention was the reinstatement of democracy,
the theatre was the obvious choice.
The armies of the democrats and the 30 oligarchs clashed in battle
in the area surrounding the Piraeus theatre
and the democrats eventually managed
to force a reinstatement of their democracy.
They were honoured with a victory march to the Acropolis
and the Athenians agreed to move forward together,
forgiving all crimes, save those of the 30 oligarchs.
It looked like Athens was getting back on track.
But the grand celebrations for the reinstatement of democracy
masked the fact that Athens' days of complete supremacy were now in the past
and things would never be quite the same again.
Nowhere was this uncomfortable truth more obvious than on the stage.
In 388 BC, Aristophanes staged a play called Plutus,
or Wealth, in English.
And it spoke to the age old conundrum -
why is it that in the disparity between rich and poor,
those who are deserving and hard-working normally come off the worst
and those who are undeserving and cunning get rich?
Chremylos is an honest, hard-working man disillusioned with the unfairness of life.
Out on the road, one day he meets Wealth
and realises that Wealth is blind
and that is why he distributes his riches so unfairly.
Chremylos takes Wealth to a healing sanctuary
where his sight can be restored.
The upshot is that the corrupt will be stripped of their riches,
and the virtuous can finally prosper.
But in a key moment in the play,
Chremylos encounters the character of Poverty,
who casts doubt on the entire scheme.
Just supposing Wealth could get his sight back
and distribute all in equal portions,
no-one would develop any craft or expertise.
Once there's no incentive, who is going to smelt the metal,
build the ships or make the clothing,
manufacture vehicles, stitch the footwear,
brick the bricking, wash the washing, farm the farming?
With this play, we're left with the feeling
that despite the opening of Wealth's eyes,
the world will remain a very unfair place.
It's a thought that we can well relate to today,
and is perhaps why Wealth is a play
that still gets performed.
HE SPEAKS IN GREEK
Do you think there are particular historical circumstances surrounding its creation
that help us understand why that play was written as it is?
What's really striking about Wealth is how different it feels
to a play like Lysistrata.
Lysistrata was an inventive and vigorous heroine,
whereas Chremylos is passive and tired.
Aristophanes' comedy has lost its biting satire
and its direct commentary on individuals in the audience.
Instead, its themes are more universal -
rich, poor, worthy, unworthy.
It feels like comedy and theatre, more generally,
has not only lost its edge,
but lost its specific Athenian identity.
It's become more general and, at the same time,
left the Athenians looking back, nostalgic, for an era of lost glory.
The decline of Athens marks a turning point,
both in the history of Greece and in the history of theatre.
Athens had invented drama,
but how would this innovative and democratically-charged art form fare
in the new world that followed Athens' defeat?
This new world of the 4th century
saw the different city-states of Greece jostling for control
while coming under increasing pressure from new powers,
many of them led by tyrants and kings.
In truth, the 4th century reads as a depressing catalogue
of battles, wars and fractured alliances,
which played out in the plains of central Greece.
In ancient times, this whole region was known
as "the dancing floor of Ares", the god of war.
It was here that the fate of Greece was decided on the battlefields
time and time again.
One conflict in particular symbolises the chaos of the period.
In 371 BC, Sparta and Thebes
fought an epic battle at Leuktra,
at the heart of the dancing floor of Ares.
Against all the odds, it was the Thebans who triumphed,
due, in no small part, to the powerful attack
of their elite fighting force - the Sacred Band.
Thebes' shock-and-awe tactics worked brilliantly -
the battle was over in less than an hour,
and on this spot, where the Spartan king was supposedly struck down,
Thebes erected a victory monument
topped with Spartan shields taken in the battle.
And to rub salt in the wound,
the Thebans demanded that Sparta's allies
cleared their dead from the battlefield first
so that the scale of Sparta's loss could be humiliatingly on display.
This monument marked a decisive change
in the balance of power in Greece.
But, more than that, Cicero later claimed
that this was the first ever battlefield memorial
to a Greek-on-Greek conflict.
This kind of monument was to become a defining feature
of the century that followed, as Greek states jostled for power
and engaged in their favourite pastime - fighting one and other.
It was a situation that Aristophanes
had already warned against in Lysistrata -
you worship at the selfsame holy altars,
just as if you're a family -
Olympia, Thermopylae, Delphi and elsewhere.
Yet, with foreign armies at the ready to attack, what are you doing?
This is hardly the kind of context
in which you would expect drama to thrive.
But what's really amazing
is that, while Greece was tearing itself apart,
theatre seems to have been flourishing.
During the 4th century BC,
theatres emerged all over the Greek world.
But the irony is that, despite this explosion of theatre construction,
we don't have a single complete tragedy surviving from this period.
After the deaths of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides,
we are left with nothing but fragments.
It is true the great spread happens
in the first half of the 4th century,
when every city that had cultural pretensions built a theatre.
There seems to be a neat story - Sophocles and Euripides die,
and within everybody's perception of it,
Nietzsche says that Euripides and Sophocles killed tragedy.
So the easy story would be important tragedy came to an end
and mass entertainment spread throughout the Greek world
in a rather superficial way.
I think it's much more complicated than that.
It's really what happens in later antiquity
and the great three become educational set books
and that's really why we have them.
And it was those three who were most read,
so texts of the other tragedians,
they simply weren't copied enough times to survive.
It doesn't mean they weren't any good.
There were very famous tragedians in the 4th century,
people who made a big mark
and people and who were remembered in later centuries.
The fragments of plays by these writers that have survived
support the idea that this was an extremely active era.
One Athenian playwright from this time was called Astydamas the Younger.
He was a relative of the great Aeschylus
and he's said to have composed 240 plays during his career,
won many first prizes and even had a statue of himself put up by the Athenians.
And what the surviving fragments also allow us is a unique window
into how the subject matter of tragedy is changing during this period.
Astydamas wrote a play called Antigone,
just like Sophocles and Euripides had done in the 5th century.
SHE CRIES
It again told the story of how Antigone had broken the law
by burying her rebel brother
and is sentenced to death by King Creon
against the wishes of his son Haemon, who is in love with her.
In Sophocles' play, the key moment is the political debate
between Creon and Haemon about leadership and justice,
and the play ends with Antigone's and Haemon's suicide.
In Astydamas' version,
Haemon and Antigone run away and have a child together.
They are both sentenced to death,
but Heracles intervenes to try and save them.
It's the same basic story, but the emphasis has shifted.
Well, we've already got this sense in the 5th century of changing myth,
where you might have one playwright
that's already done an Antigone and say he wants to change it
and make it your own as a playwright.
You get that even more in the 4th century.
If you imagine, they're using the same material, the same myths,
but there's a taste for far more elaborate plots.
You're still dealing with myth, but the interest has shifted,
so, in that example of Antigone,
you know, the focus there is what happens in that relationship.
You hear hardly anything about that relationship
in the 5th century version,
but in the 4th century, that becomes the real focus.
Is that to do with tragedy's broadening appeal in this period
beyond the confines of democratic Athens?
Well, I think the internationalisation is really important,
because, after all, you want this to appeal.
You now have playwrights from all over the Mediterranean
coming to compete.
And so, there's that shift
and, of course, particular political circumstances
are different in the different cities.
So, I mean, a shift to the romantic themes, domestic,
it has a broader appeal.
Theatre was becoming more about spectacle and entertainment
and less about political process and debate.
And as Athens' power waned,
the plots drifted away from Athens and from its democratic process
to focus more on personal dilemmas and relationships -
the kind of stuff that would be interesting
and resonate with, well, pretty much anyone anywhere.
Indeed tragedy was becoming very much more of what it is today.
There's no better evidence for these trends
than the ruins of a little-known city
that was a product of the battle of Leuktra.
After their victory in that battle,
the city of Thebes surrounded their defeated Spartan enemies
with a series of newly-established cities in the Peloponnese.
I've come to this rather unpromising-looking industrial part of the Peloponnese
in search of a city called Megalopolis - the great city.
Now, I've read about this place lots in books
and I've studied lots of floor plans,
but I've never actually been here for real.
And what I'm searching for, first of all, is the theatre,
a theatre said by the ancient sources
to be the biggest in the whole of mainland Greece.
It held up to 20,000 people.
And it is further evidence that, despite the turbulent times,
theatre was growing in popularity.
There's an extraordinary calm to this place, but what it symbolises
is a place that's tried to put itself on the map out of nowhere.
A sort of ancient version of Milton Keynes.
When they built this place, they gave it everything a city should need -
they gave it an assembly, they gave it an agora,
they gave it a sports centre,
and they gave it a theatre, a huge theatre.
Theatre by this stage had become
part of the dress code of what a Greek city should look like
and, more important than that,
a theatre had now become a symbol of Greekness itself.
Theatre had become an essential part of any Greek community.
But the role that it now played in that community was changing.
And this transformation can be traced in the ruined remains of Megalopolis.
When this theatre was built,
it was placed directly facing the city's political assembly place.
It's an extraordinary example of how these two facets of polis life
politics and theatre, were once thought to be intimately connected.
But, you know, there's an irony here.
As Megalopolis was being built,
as this city was being created out of nothing,
the very institution of the Greek city, the polis, was beginning to falter.
Now, we were in a very different world, a world of tyrants and kings,
the very vitality and viability of the polis
was beginning to be in doubt,
and there's perhaps no better symbol of that gradual decay
than here, at Megalopolis, and right here, in the theatre.
Because in the mid-2nd century BC,
the people of Megalopolis built this -
a solid, high stone wall
that cut off the theatre from the assembly place.
The people of this great city
themselves cut off the umbilical chord
between theatre and politics.
This gradual transformation in the role of theatre was aided by a crucial innovation
which we know occurred in the early 4th century BC.
The proof is here,
in this inscription at the Epigraphic Museum.
It says that, in exactly 386 BC -
"Palaion drama proton paredidaxan."
For the first time, an old drama was put on as an extra at the festival.
The 4th century saw the start of revivals.
This meant that old plays by the great tragedians of the 5th century -
Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides -
could be performed alongside current playwrights like Astydamas.
It was the birth of a classic repertoire
and it fuelled another of the most important theatrical shifts of the period.
We're now 45 years later, in 341 BC,
and this inscription lists the playwrights and the plays
that were put on at the City Dionysia in Athens in that year.
And here's our man, Astydamas,
who actually won first prize this year and it tells us
the names of his three tragedies, including Antigone, that he put on.
But what's also fascinating about this inscription
is the prominence it gives to the actors.
Not only does it give us the name of the lead actor in each of the plays,
but also, and here's the key line,
tells us Neoptolemus, one of the actors,
"enika", he won, he won the prize
for the best actor at the festival as well.
And indeed, Neoptolemus was a busy guy that year,
because he was lead actor in more than one of the plays
and it tells us that he was the producer for one of the old plays
that was being re-performed as well.
What this stone symbolises is this growing shift,
during the course of the century,
in importance from the tragedians, the playwrights,
towards the actors as being the real kings of the theatre.
They were the great entertainers of their day
and they had magnificent physique, they had magnificent voices.
Actually, the tragic actors and the comic actors, people didn't do both,
that's rather interesting, you were one or the other.
The tragic actors, they were very famous for their voices
and some of them were even employed to go on diplomatic missions and so on,
so you want to send an embassy, you hire an actor to go along
and put the case as well as he possibly can on your behalf.
And this is Neoptolemus we're talking about?
Yes, well, and others as well.
One thing that one has to bear in mind is that the cultural movement
within ancient Greece doesn't seem to have obeyed military history.
Generally speaking, artists, musicians, including actors,
seem to have travelled across the boundaries of hostility
and so, that meant that cities which might well be on very bad terms
were all competing to set up their own cultural activities.
Cities laid out large sums of money, built wonderful theatres,
supplied wonderful facilities in order to attract the best actors
to their city to put on performances.
Theatre had become a sort of cultural currency.
Competition for the best actors and playwrights was extremely fierce
and fees soared, giving rich kings the upper hand.
But theatre's transformation
into a hugely popular and lucrative entertainment business
raised questions about its value to society.
Two different views of the value of theatre can be found in the works
of two of the greatest thinkers of the age - Plato and Aristotle.
Now, for Plato, in his ideal society,
poetry and theatre are actually banned because they are just entertainment.
Worse than that, they're imitation, not truth,
yet they can seem like the truth and, as a result, they can lead people astray.
But for Aristotle, it's a very different case -
he sees a place for theatre in the ideal society
because it is able to speak to universal emotions and ideals of humanity.
And more than that, it gives the audience what he calls catharsis.
And catharsis is a notoriously difficult world to translate,
but it means something along the lines of purification,
a purging of emotion that comes as a result of watching tragedy
and, as a result, can give people the ability to better control their emotions.
But the very fact that two such eminent thinkers are so vociferously arguing
about the value of theatre at this time, in the 4th century,
suggests that there really is something of a crisis of confidence
about the value and role of theatre in Ancient Greek society itself.
Theatre's role was made increasingly uncertain
by the changing balance of power in Greece.
By the mid-4th century, after years of conflict,
the richest and most powerful figure in the Greek world
was not a democrat but a king - Philip II of Macedon.
At the site of the Macedonian Royal Tombs, at Aegae,
archaeologists have discovered an extraordinary array of treasures
testifying to the wealth and might of Philip's kingdom.
Philip created a strong army and made canny alliances.
He brought the best craftsmen to his kingdom
and secured the greatest thinker of the age, Aristotle,
as tutor for his son Alexander,
the boy who would later become Alexander the Great.
It's one of the more unfair characterisations of ancient history
that Macedon was some kind of savage and uncultured place.
Far from it - it was a hive of creativity and high culture,
not just in terms of using precious metals for vessels
or creating extraordinary armour, but also in terms of the theatre.
Philip brought dramatists from across Greece to compete in his own dramatic competitions,
poets followed him in his campaigns
and actors came to live, work and reside in Macedon.
Neoptolemus sold his place in Athens and moved north.
And Philip used all of this as a crucial part of his campaign
for political and cultural supremacy.
He was the super patron, he was the Louis XIV of the day
and so, if you wanted to get the best space,
the best support, the biggest fees,
and you are now becoming more professional, so actors move,
they don't just perform as citizens in their own city.
So Philip is there, it all comes together,
he accelerates the process.
Actors become far, far more important,
they knew all these stories off by heart
and we get superbly rich and famous actors like Neoptolemus or Theodoros,
who's the Laurence Olivier of antiquity and fantastically rich.
Philip II certainly invited famous actors to his court,
he got famous actors going on diplomatic missions for him
and he tried to use theatre one way or another to help affirm his power.
Philip understood that having the best plays and performers would enhance his own greatness.
He also understood that kingship is itself a form of theatre.
And in befriending famous actors like Neoptolemus,
he ensured that positive reports about his regime found their way back to Athens
and into the political debates taking place on the Pnyx.
It was here, in the assembly,
that the Athenians debated the growing threat from Macedon
and tried to decide whether Philip should be considered friend or foe.
Heading the pro-Philip faction
was an actor turned politician called Aeschines.
Arguing against him was the politician and orator Demosthenes,
who believed Athens had to oppose Philip, if necessary by force.
Here, on the Pnyx, time and time again,
Demosthenes and Aeschines clashed over the Philip question.
Demosthenes' argument was that Aeschines
had effectively taken bribes to work in the king's interest
and not in those of his home city,
but what's really interesting is the language he uses to make his case.
He refers to Aeschines as "hypokrites",
the Greek word for an actor.
"You, Aeschines, are a hypokrites, a big player of parts,
"while I am the one sitting in the audience.
"You always served our enemy's interests in politics,
"I those of our country."
The Greek word for actor, hypokrites,
is the root for our word hypocrite.
So where did this uncertainty come from?
Well, as Greece became more and more dominated by rich, powerful leaders,
so the corrupting force of money
and the fear of the corrupting force of money increased.
Actors were, at the end of the day, like mercenary soldiers -
they sold their services to the highest bidder
and, more importantly, they had the ability to imitate and to deceive.
So what everyone was worried about
was that Philip was writing his own play
and getting the public figures of Athens
to star in it as his key actors.
It was only a matter of time before Athens would have to decide
one way or the other.
In 338 BC, Demosthenes persuaded the assembly
to vote in favour of meeting Philip in battle.
This battle, Demosthenes versus Philip, democrats versus kings,
would determine the future of Greece and the fortunes of theatre.
Philip amassed his forces here, in the plains of Chaeronea,
right at the heart of the dancing floor of Ares.
The king himself led his army
and leading the cavalry, his son, Alexander,
who would become Alexander the Great, then just 18 years old.
And facing up against them, the combined forces of Athens and Thebes
and in the Athenian ranks, the orator Demosthenes.
Philip was victorious,
while Demosthenes, whose words had so inflamed the conflict,
is said to have fled the scene.
Two monuments to the battle remain visible to this day.
They stand for more than just the graves of the fallen,
they stand for the end of the independent and free politics of Greek city-states.
Beneath these trees lie the ashes of Philip's fallen warriors.
Their bodies were burned on a grand funeral pyre decorated with weapons
before being buried beneath a huge mound of earth.
The second monument to the battle
sits beside the modern town of Chaeronea.
This is the Lion of Chaeronea, proudly facing the battlefield.
Its origins are somewhat mysterious,
but what's really crucial is what's underneath it -
254 skeletons, laid out in seven rows,
a mass grave belonging to, we think,
members of the Theban Sacred Band who fell in the battle.
And their skeletons testify to the ferocity of the clash -
leg bones broken in two, skulls fractured.
And today, the Greeks, as they do with all cemeteries, have lined it with cypress trees,
forever marking the sanctity and importance of this place.
I defy anyone to come here and not feel the importance of this place,
this place where the fortunes of Greece changed forever.
The world that had given birth to theatre was no longer governed
by city-states or democrats -
it was a world controlled by a king.
But the story of the relationship between history and theatre
would take a shocking and dramatic twist.
Tragedy and real life were about to clash.
In 336 BC, the famous actor Neoptolemus,
now a resident of Macedon,
was preparing an important performance for the king at the royal city of Aegae.
He was to present pieces from his tragedy repertoire at a royal banquet
on the eve of the celebration of Philip's daughter's marriage.
We don't know the name of the tragedy he chose,
but the historian Diodorus preserved the words.
Philip was delighted with the performance
and, after the banquet, the crowd raced to the theatre at Aegae
where the festivities would continue at daybreak.
This was the scene of the celebration.
The spectators took their seats before dawn,
every seat was filled and, as the curtain of darkness rose, the procession began.
Here, in the theatre,
carried amidst the procession were 13 lavishly adorned statues.
12 of them represented the gods
and the 13th representing Philip as their enthroned companion.
And a little way behind the statues walked Phillip himself,
clothed in white and without a bodyguard
to demonstrate his omnipotence.
And at that moment, one of his own soldiers rushed into the theatre
and stabbed him to death.
The sources suggest that Philip's attacker nursed a personal grudge against the king,
but we'll never know the whole truth -
the assassin was killed as he tried to flee the scene.
The whole sequence of events was worthy of a tale by Euripides himself.
And, in fact, later in life, the actor Neoptolemus was asked what was his favourite scene in tragedy.
And he replied not one in any play, but one on a much greater stage -
watching Philip enter as the 13th god
and then being killed here, in the theatre.
Philip's body was placed on a pyre
and burned in traditional Macedonian fashion
before his bones were wrapped in purple cloth,
encased in an ossuary of hammered pure gold
and buried here, in this tomb, alongside some of the riches of his kingdom.
The findings here, at the Royal Tombs,
reveal the extravagance of the funeral.
This gold myrtle wreath is made up of 80 leaves and 112 flowers.
Philip's luxurious funeral arrangements were organised
by the new king - his son, Alexander.
What happened next is the stuff of legend.
By the age of 25,
Alexander was no longer just king of Macedon and leader of the Greeks.
He ruled an empire that comprised two million square miles
and reached as far east as Afghanistan.
And everywhere he went, he took theatre.
Alexander could quote Euripides by heart,
he read Greek tragedies on campaign
and he held Greek festivals of drama.
In just over a decade,
Alexander single-handedly changed the nature of the ancient world.
But as Alexander's horizons grew,
Athens' were limited to her own borders
and she had to adapt accordingly.
One politician who came to define this era was called Lycurgus.
He dealt with Athens' defeat by using the funds available
to celebrate the glory days of theatre.
The most lasting legacy of Lycurgus' time in office is actually here.
In 330 BC, he commissioned the first permanent stone Theatre Of Dionysus,
here, in Athens.
Indeed, throughout the entire time
of the glory period of Greek tragedy and comedy,
it had been a temporary theatre here made of wooden stacks
put up every year, year on year, with a few permanent seats below.
Now, it was a glorious monument
to the greatness of Athenian cultural glory.
It doubled the size, the number of spectators that could be taken,
now nearly 17,000 rather than the 10,000 before,
and indeed the Athenians loved it so much
that they started using this place
as their official political assembly place more than the Pnyx,
the place where it had been during the 5th century.
And perhaps the most interesting bit is actually here,
or at least it was here once upon a time.
A monument was set up with three towering bronze statues
to none other than Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides -
the great tragedians.
In addition, Lycurgus ordered that copies be made
of all of their plays, which were preserved in the public archives.
Their works were now classics.
Lycurgus ensured that, although Athens may have lost everything else, she still had theatre.
The Lycurgun era, if you call it that,
was a consequent upon a disastrous defeat,
which is almost equivalent of the defeat by the Spartans in 404,
so Lycurgus made a big point,
a big thing about back to the future.
The way we go forward, guys, is by consolidating,
by going back to what we were really good at before
and part of that is literally setting in stone three tragedians
with, you know, all these other hundreds
getting forgotten as a result.
Paul's absolutely right that the crisis of the defeat
that brought about the whole Lycurgun culture was terrible
and Athens did go back to the future,
but they knew they could no longer try for political power,
this was obviously hopeless under the new regime,
but what they could do was claim that they had invented theatre
and that they'd invented philosophy, which is very much true.
It's very much about celebrating the great theatrical past,
it's very self-consciously building on the repertoire.
One of the things going back slightly before Lycurgus
is the export market, for both tragedy and comedy,
has boomed in the 4th century
and it's difficult to say whether that has a sort of feedback effect
into the kind of dramas being produced in Athens
and whether the kind of forms of drama
that proliferate in the 4th century are due to the demands
of the export market as well.
I mean, if you look at the plays of Aristophanes that seem to have had
some life outside of Greece,
they're the ones that had hardly any political references.
It's clear that theatre was still central to Athens,
but the reasons why people came here had changed.
Whereas once they had come here to connect and to be challenged,
now they came here to be comforted.
There was certainly much here to be proud of,
but it's hard to shake the feeling that, behind this new splendour,
something significant had been lost.
These changes were reflected on the Athenian stage itself
in a new kind of drama,
one that focused on more mundane affairs -
everyday people and everyday life.
Inspiration for this new kind of drama came from a scholar called Theophrastus.
His most important works were his studies in botany.
But when he wasn't categorising plants,
Theophrastus turned his expert powers of observation to people-watching.
This is a copy of Theophrastus' Characters.
Now, "character" comes from the Greek word to etch,
to make permanent, to imprint.
And Theophrastus applies it here not to things,
but to us and to the inner nature of human beings themselves.
It's a brilliant piece of acute observation.
Theophrastus says there are 30 character types out there -
the flatterer, the boring person,
the person who's always got bad timing,
the person who's got bad taste and the person who's got petty ambition.
And the thing is these character types don't just give us a fantastic window
onto the people of ancient Athens,
they can be applied to any city, anywhere in the world at any time.
"The mean man - he examines his boundary marks every day
"to see that they have not been touched.
"He forbids his wife to lend salt,
"observing that these trifles make a large sum in the course of a year.
"The garrulous man - your garrulous man is one who sits beside a stranger
"and tells the dream he had last night,
"everything he ate for supper, how the present age is sadly degenerate,
"that wheat is selling very low
"and that hosts of strangers are in town.
"The exquisite man - he has his hair cut frequently,
"his teeth are always pearly white,
"while his old suit is still good, he gets himself a new one,
"and he anoints himself with the choicest perfumes."
Every-day character types like these provided moulds
for writers of what we now call New Comedy
and the most famous of the New Comedy playwrights
was one of Theophrastus' students - Menander.
Sadly, hardly any examples of this new style have survived -
we have lots of names and titles, but only one complete play.
It was only revealed in 1957 after being discovered in Egypt,
buried in a sealed jar.
And it was by Menander.
But from this one surviving play, and a number of other fragments,
we can get a pretty good idea of what New Comedy was really like.
And, in fact, many of Menander's titles could have come from Theophrastus' characters.
He has plays called The Flatterer, The Woman-Hater
or The Superstitious Man.
But the key thing is here that, just like Theophrastus,
the titles are of ordinary people.
No mythical heroes, no political leaders,
just people, like you and me.
The importance of these stock characters types for New Comedy
is also demonstrated by the fact
that there are lots of stock character masks surviving
that would have been used on the stage,
so we have, for example, the ruler-slave
or the courtesan
or, my personal favourite, the first old man.
And a number of these can be found
in Menander's sole surviving complete play - The Grouch.
The Grouch is a man named Knemon.
He hates the outside world and wants to shut himself away from life.
He shouts at servants, insults his neighbours
and pelts visitors with stones.
But Knemon's seclusion is threatened when a wealthy young man, Sostratos,
falls in love with his daughter and wants to marry her.
Knemon is having none of it.
That is until he falls down a well and is only able to escape
with the help of his stepson and the lovelorn Sostratos.
This ordeal forces Knemon to realise that no man is an island.
"I admit I may have made one error - that was..."
New Comedy is far less bawdy.
You still have some slapstick,
you still have a little bit of innuendo here and there,
but for the main part, you know, the strap-on phalluses are gone,
a lot of the jokes about bodily functions are gone.
There's a shift to concerns about the domestic
and, well, you get the emergence of stock characters.
In the example of The Grouch,
you have a boy falling in love with a girl
and there's going to be some obstacle.
In this case, the obstacle is Knemon, the father of the girl,
who is this terrible misanthrope, OK,
he just does not want to speak to anyone ever at all.
And what sense of the key elements of New Comedy
do you think resonate with the comedy that we understand today?
If we think about The Grouch and this misanthropic figure
who's right at the centre of it,
then, you might think about more relatively recent playwrights,
so you might think about Moliere and his Misanthrope.
Here's a production that was done in Liverpool's Playhouse
and here you see Alceste, the misanthrope in the play.
He, like Knemon in Menander, is resisting the rules of society.
And the same thing you can see being explored
in Shakespeare's Timon Of Athens,
you have a central character who's really grumpy with society.
Here he is in this dinner party with his apparent friends,
who turn out just to be using him for his wealth.
You know, while these aren't directly drawn from Menander,
they take that original idea as a way of really shaping the entire play.
The Grouch is a work entirely unlike that of early Aristophanes.
Its world is the home,
domestic bliss and equal amounts of domestic strife,
but absolutely nothing to do with the wider world and, particularly, with politics.
It's the ancient equivalent of One Foot In The Grave,
Men Behaving Badly or comedies like Frasier and Friends.
It's kitchen-sink drama and, in reality,
that was really the only horizon Athenians had left.
This New Comedy symbolises the end of an era, the decline of Athens,
but it is also a truly revolutionary moment in drama.
Menander, or Menandros, made a very big impact -
comedy changed into a new type of comedy - a comedy of families,
a comedy of errors, a comedy of manners, a comedy of mistakes
and of identity much more like the comedy that comes down
through the Roman comedians, through Plautus and Terence,
to Shakespeare and Moliere and Oscar Wilde.
And if you look at Ben Jonson's poem
facing the portrait of Shakespeare in the First Folio,
he actually alludes to Shakespeare as the Menander of his day.
So while tragedy remained fundamentally, I would say,
the same kind of thing, all the way from 500
down as far as we can trace it,
comedy did fundamentally change its nature
from the absurdly fantastical and wonderful carnival comedies
of Aristophanes and his contemporaries
down to what we think of as comedy.
Theatre began the century as a place
of biting and pointed political commentary
and more than that, as the obvious choice
as a rallying point for democratic revolution.
And yet, as the years passed,
whereas Athens suffered in a constantly changing and unsettled world,
theatre went from strength to strength
spreading across the Hellenistic Empire.
It had also become more like theatre as we know it today -
professional and exportable with powerful actors,
touring companies and a rich and varied repertoire.
Theatre had become a symbol of Greekness
and a tool of power and influence,
coveted by kings and commoners alike.
It had outgrown its birthplace and spread not just through Greece,
but to Italy, Egypt, Libya and as far east as Afghanistan.
It's an amazing story, but for Athens, it is also a story of loss -
theatre's success is a direct reflection of Athens' loss of power, influence and uniqueness
during the course of the 4th century.
Athens was no longer THE city,
it was just A city in a much bigger world.
And there was another city to the west
whose inhabitants would change the story of theatre
and indeed of the entire Mediterranean - Rome.
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