Pausanias tells us that when Aeschylus was a boy, he fell asleep while guarding a vineyard, and the god Dionysus appeared to him in a dream, urging him to write tragedies – which Aeschylus found, to his great surprise, that he could do with ease upon waking. (Aeschylus is said to have later been killed by an eagle, which mistook his bald head for a rock and tried to crack open a tortoise’s shell by dropping it from a great height.) Pausanias also connects Sophocles to Dionysus: the leader of the Spartan forces invading Attica in 406 BC reportedly dreamed that Dionysus ordered him to honor the “new Siren” with proper funeral honors, a vision he took to refer to Sophocles, who died just as the invasion began. Euripides, who died the same year in far-off Macedonia, was rumored (unverifiably) to have been torn apart by wild dogs, in divine vengeance for the disdain he had always shown the gods. Origins of “Theater” as We Know It The idea of performing songs and dances for an audience began as worship of Dionysus, who first appeared in Greece in Boeotia, north of Attica, as the god who taught humanity to cultivate grapes for wine. When Dionysus came to Attica, a local king accepted his gift, but his people, unfamiliar with wine’s effects, feared they had been poisoned and killed him; the terrible punishment that followed taught them Dionysus’ true divinity, and they established a cult and winter festival in his honor, in which women ran wild in ecstatic ritual, hoping for the dead world to be reborn after winter. An even more elaborate spring festival celebrated the renewal of life: men dressed in goat-skins (tragados), imitating satyrs, and sang songs of praise to the god – odi tragon, “goat-song,” is the origin of our word “tragedy.” Festival of Dionysus Introduced to Athens This crude celebration of the grape harvest gradually formalized, and by the fifth century BC drama had become the leading public institution of the new democratic polis – one reason “Greek” drama, as we know it through masters like Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, is really almost exclusively Athenian drama. The tyrant Peisistratus introduced the cult of Dionysus to Athens in the 6th century BC, and theater as we know it was born. Of the four separate festivals of Dionysus, it was the Greater (City) Dionysia, celebrated across Attica each spring, where poet-playwrights competed for top prizes, much like the Olympics, which similarly sprang from religious ritual while appealing to the Greek competitive spirit. Thespis (source of our word “thespian”) won the first competition in 534 BC; in his day, a single dramatist wrote the play, composed its music, choreographed the dance, designed the costumes, and played the lead role, with citizens covering all expenses, including actors’ pay, masks, and costumes. A panel of judges determined the winner. By the mid-fifth century BC, the dramatic competition lasted three days: each of three playwrights was given an entire day to present three tragedies and one satyr play (a comic farce), performed from dawn to dusk. Successful Athenian dramas later toured the countryside, reappearing at the winter Rural Dionysia. In Pericles’ time, admission cost 2 obols, roughly a day’s minimum wage, though the government provided free tickets to the indigent so that all citizens, rich or poor, could attend; in later ages, admission became free for everyone, and the audience voted for its favorite by applause. Choregic Monuments The wealthy citizen who financed a winning play, the choregos, was entitled to erect a “choregic” monument commemorating the achievement, inscribed with the names of the choregos, the ruling archon, and the contributing artists. The Choregic Monument of Lysikrates (known in medieval times as the “Lantern of Demosthenes”) still stands nearly intact on what is now called the Street of Tripods in the Plaka district of Athens. Two columns of the Choregic Monument of Thrasyllos still stand above the Theater of Dionysus, on the south slope of the Acropolis, and a good portion of the original inscription from Nikias’ Choregic Monument (319 BC) survives, reused in the later Roman-era Beule Gate at the Acropolis entrance. Both the Lysikrates and Thrasyllos monuments show evidence of the bronze victory tripod traditionally dedicated to Dionysus that once crowned each structure.