Culture of Athens (Topic 1) - Dramatic Festivals

There were two main dramatic festivals in Athens - The City Dionysia and The Lenaia. There was also the Rural Dionisia, although this was a smaller festival held across Attica and the surrounding countryside, rather than being exclusively held in the city of Athens. 

All of these dramatic festivals honoured the god Dionysus. Although Dionysus was a god typically associated with wine, fertility, madness and intoxication, the Greeks also associated him with theatre. They considered theatre to be a form of intoxication, as the actors became somebody else, and the audience lost their own identities whilst they watched the performances.

The City Dionysia was the grandest and most important of the dramatic festivals. It was held in the Theatre of Dionysus on the slopes of the Agora in March or early April. The reason why it was a springtime celebration was because the seas would be calmer at this time of year, allowing other Greeks, and even non-Greeks, to travel to the festival.

The festival was on such a grand scale that preparations for it began months before. The first stage of the preparations was for the playwrights to submit their plays to the Eponymous Archon. The Eponymous Archon was the cheif official in Athens, and was in charge of The City Dionysia, amongst other things.

Tragic playwrights were required to produce a tetralogy (3 tragedies and a satyr play). Comic playwrights, on the other hand, only had to produce one play. In total, 3 tetralogies and 5 comedies were chosen by the Eponymous Archon.

After the plays were selected, the Archon assigned a choregos to each playwright. A choregos was a wealthy Athenian who payed for the cost of a playwright's production. This included everything from the costumes to the actors themselves. As the Athenians had no formal taxation system, this forced wealthy Athenians to contribute towards the state. This was called a liturgy.

Rehearsals for the festival ran up until the festival began, which proves just how important preparations for the festival were to the Athenians.

The festival itself was held over a period of 6 days:

Day 1 - Procession, Sacrifice, and Singing Competition

• As with all Athenian festivals, the festival began with a…