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Greek Art and Architecture

Some of the following images were displayed in class; others are placed here to supplement your knowledge of Greek theater or to stimulate your curiosity to learn more about ancient Greek theater and culture. Click on a thumb nail sketch in order to view the image in full-scale.

One possible configuration of the theater of Dionysos in Athens, middle 5th century B.C. Aeschylus is generally credited with having introduced the second actor to tragedy, and Sophocles is supposed to have added a third. This became the required number; thus, if a poet wished to have more than three characters (as most tragedies do), his actors needed a place to change their costumes and masks to suit their roles. Here you see what this changing room, or skene (literally, "tent"), interposed between the temple and the orchestra, may have looked like.


The Greek theater reached its most famous and most familiar architectural form only in the Hellenestic period (roughly, mid-fourth to mid-first century B.C.)--ironically, some time after its chief poets were dead. It is a curious but suggestive irony that the "golden age" of theater occurred well in advance of the golden age of theater building. This is a sketch of the groundplan for the Theater of Dionysos in the 4th century B.C.; you can see that the architecture here creates a directional relationship between actors and viewers, and that this stage allows for more elaborate scenic backgrounds.


This is Dionysos, one of the most fascinating and ambiguous of the gods of ancient Greece. He is most frequently identified as the god of wine (as here, where on the vase he is painted apparently in a state of intoxication), but he has also been associated with masks and the theater (Dionysos was the patron deity of Greek theater), with ivy, and with transsexuality. The link between these various elements seems to be power, specifically, a kind of hidden but potentially transformative power. Grapes, left alone, can become alcohol; ivy, unlike other green plants, grows without need of sun or season; and the mask turns one person into another. Dionysos is "indestructible life," or what might be called the "life force." Such power is ultimately mysterious and by no means invariably benevolent. If this sounds foolishly primitivistic, you might recall Jurassic Park: in that film, one of the characters criticizes the hubris of humans who tailor creatures to their needs, warning that "life will find a way." He attributes to "life," in other words, both power and volition. What he calls vaguely "Life," fifth-century Athenians would have called Dionysos.


Actors dressed as birds, in the black-figure style of vase painting, about 500 B.C. The image predates Old Comedy and the work of Aristophanes by at least several decades, but it gives some indication of the elaborate costumes that may have been worn by the choruses of Greek comic drama. Aristophanes' plays are usually named after their choruses, many of which carry out an animal motif, for example, Birds, Knights, or Frogs. Whether or not such costumes perpetuate the use of animal disguises in certain early religious ceremonies, the assumption of animal forms by humans is one of the curious and recurring features of Old Comedy. The practice has a name, theriomorphism. Then, as now, "morphing" was a feature of dramatic art.

A tragic actor contemplates his mask; from a vase-painting of the late fourth century B.C. The eyes, mouth, and hair styles of the actor's mask are clearly realistic, not at all stylized; the exaggerated masks and costumes often associated with ancient Greek theater clearly belong to a later period. It is interesting to compare this image with another image of a tragic actor, below.


Ivory statuette from the second century A.D.showing a tragic actor.The actor wears a distorted mask, high headdress, and boots (cothurni). There is some doubt as to whether the statuette represents a Greek or a Roman actor; the majority of scholars believe it to be Roman.

One of the most interesting of all questions of theater history concerns the origins of theater itself. Hero-cult worship, religious celebrations, funerary rituals, shifts in the political order, and just plain individual inventiveness are some of the various explanations that have been proposed to account for the relatively sudden appearance in Athens of tragedy and comedy. You may wish to explore yourself some of this fascinating and controversial history of thinking.The subject begins with Aristotle's Poetics, in which Aristotle attributes the invention of tragic drama to the "leaders of the dithyramb" (a kind of lyric poem). From there you should go on to read Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, or Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, Jane Harrison's Themis, or F.M. Cornford's Origin of Attic Comedy. More recent studies include Theodor Gaster's Thespis and Gerald Else's The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy. There are Marxist theories of tragedy's origins and structuralist accounts as well; one of the best of these latter is Timothy Reiss's study, Tragedy and Truth. And there is even a popular film dealing with the subject, The Name of the Rose. The film (starring Sean Connery) is based on a novel of the same name by Umberto Eco, and describes the search for Aristotle's lost manuscript on comic drama.

The image above shows how basic to human life is the practice of mimesis, pretending to be something else. In the upper picture you see a hunter costumed like an ostrich in order to sneak closer to his prey. (You can easily tell the hunter from the rest of the birds; he's the one carrying a bow.)


Theater at Epidaurus, the most perfectly preserved of all ancient Greek theaters. Built at about mid fourth-century B.C., it is thought to be typical of Hellenistic theater architecture. Theaters were built during this period at an unprecedented rate: twelve were built in Attica alone, and others were constructed in Asia Minor, Africa, and Italy.The stage here is raised, and the orchestra remains fully circular.