Democrats Ancient Greece: The Greatest Show on Earth

My bed, my bridal, all for misery.

And I cannot...

I cannot...save my child from death.

This is one of the most shocking stories ever written.

A mother, a princess, has lost her city and her husband in war.

Now, she has to face the news that she is to be sold into slavery

and her only son - killed.

This film version of an ancient Greek play called Trojan Women

has become a classic.

The first time I saw it, I was moved to tears, and it still moves me now.

It is a play about the most charged aspects of human life -

love, war, sacrifice, fear and death.

And although it is set amongst the gods, myths,

and peoples of ancient Greece, it is still utterly gripping today.

It is one of the main reasons I study Classics.

An Athenian called Euripides wrote this play

a little under two and a half thousand years ago.

Back then, he was often ridiculed as an angry young man.

But, over time, his plays have come to symbolise

the incredible sophistication of ancient Greek civilisation.

That civilisation has influenced almost every aspect of our lives.

Not just drama, but politics, language, philosophy,

art and architecture.

To understand ourselves, it turns out,

we need to understand the ancient Greeks.

And the best seat from which to do that, for my money,

is in the theatre.

This series is about how ancient drama changed our world.

It's the story of dramatists

like Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides,

who revolutionised storytelling through plays

like Trojan Women, Antigone, Oedipus, and The Oresteia.

It's the story of how the Ancient Greeks

gave birth to tragedy and comedy.

And it's the story of how theatre spread throughout Greece and beyond,

becoming a benchmark of civilisation,

not just for Greeks, but for the world -

then and now.

In this episode, I want to journey to Athens

to explore how drama first began.

From the very start, it was about more than just entertainment -

it was a reaction to real events, it was a driving force in history,

and it was deeply connected to Athenian democracy.

In fact, the story of theatre, IS the story of Athens -

the cultural hub of ancient Greece

and the stage for one of the greatest shows on earth.

The story of drama as we know it begins in a particular place,

and a particular time -

Athens in the 6th century before Christ.

At that time, Greece was not a single country

but a mass of competing city-states, or "poleis" -

the Greek term describing a body of citizens.

But in the late 6th century, the polis of Athens

pulled ahead of the others -

politically, economically and culturally.

In the last part of the 6th century BC,

Athens was the breeding ground for two extraordinary inventions.

The first was democracy.

Athens was ruled, not by kings or by cliques of aristocrats,

but by the votes of its own citizens.

But the second was theatre.

Athens invented an entirely new art form - drama.

And these two inventions were tightly intertwined

at the beating heart of Athenian society.

And both of them were the result

of an extraordinary cultural revolution.

At this time, the whole of ancient Greek culture

underwent a historic transformation.

The revolution extended from architecture to literature,

from vase painting to philosophy.

You can see the impact of that revolution clearly

in how Greek sculpture developed.

In the middle 6th century it was rigid, stylised,

lacking movement and life.

But then things began to change.

By the 5th century, Greek artists began

to produce some of the greatest life-like sculptures ever made.

It all amounted, not just to a new-looking world,

but to a whole new view of the world.

We call it the Classical World.

And in this ground-breaking epoch,

drama was perhaps the biggest innovation of them all.

Tales of love, death and war had always been passed on

by storytellers and epic poems like Homer's Iliad

and savage myths had been celebrated in choral dance and song.

BUT the Athenians added actors and invented the idea of performance.

These epic stories would now play out, not only in the mind,

but live on stage.

This was more than innovation, this was a revolution.

Never before in the Greek tradition that we know of,

in the Greek storytelling tradition,

were things enacted rather than narrated.

So, instead of having, "And then the king drew his sword and said..."

Instead, a person actually draws a sword and speaks.

I know we sort of say, "Well, children do that"

but to do it with serious storytelling,

with storytelling that actually delves into

important roots in human behaviour,

that is a very new step and to have it done in front of you,

I think that must have been a very, very startling innovation.

-ACTOR:

-The son of Thyestes...

Ancient Greek drama looked

and sounded very different from drama as we know it today.

There were no more than three or four actors.

There was a chorus who interrupted the action with song and dance,

and all the performers wore masks.

When an actor began to enact rather than narrate,

there's a kind of dangerousness about that,

that the actor has to become a woman,

the actor has to become a slave,

the actor, perhaps even more dangerously,

has to become a god and it's almost as if the mask

is a kind of signal of the profession,

that protects the actor against the danger of doing these things.

-ACTOR:

-Blood shoot of Aetrius...

'The chorus are costumed and masked in an identical'

or near identical way and they move and speak as a group.

The chorus is not a bunch of individuals -

for the Greeks, the chorus was a group.

In which, in a sense, they submerged their identity.

AND what the chorus does is, in its groupness,

it tries to make sense of what it's witnessing.

They're deeply emotionally involved, and the suffering becomes a song.

And the chorus, as a group, with its group response,

sings its choral lyrics.

-ACTOR:

-He plotted it? Single-handed? The people will stone him.

CHORUS: You don't stand a chance.

It seems to me, that the crucial thing is that it is simultaneously

a very strong emotional experience

and a very strong thought experience.

When the Greeks came to analyse their new art form,

they discerned three different types of play.

Two of which we still have with us today - tragedy and comedy.

But, in many ways, modern tragedy has actually changed

from how ancient tragedy worked.

For us, tragedy is a play with a sad ending,

but for the ancient Greeks, tragedy was a play

in which the events offered the audience a tough decision.

And because no real ancient tragedy ends conclusively -

siding with one course of action or another -

what it does is face the audience with a problem.

What would THEY do if they were in the same situation?

Take one of the most famous plays ever written -

Oedipus The King by Sophocles.

It tells the story of Oedipus,

a man who was destined to kill his father and marry his mother.

Although this outcome is predicted by an oracle,

Oedipus himself makes a series of free choices

that lead to its fulfilment -

choices that would have posed serious questions for the audience.

The play ends with Oedipus blinding himself in despair.

The issues dealt with in tragedy were often so disturbing

that the plays were nearly always set away from Athens,

in the land of myth and legend, or at very least a far away city.

And after a series of tragedies,

the Athenians were offered a satyr play.

Now, we don't have this any more today

but effectively the satyrs

were the half-male, half-goat companions of the god of revelry,

who would be allowed to run around the stage

doing lots of lewd and bawdy things as a bit of light relief.

But what we do have today is comedy.

And ancient comedy, just like tragedy,

spoke directly to contemporary Athenians.

Usually set in a topsy-turvy version of real life,

or in a realm of fantasy, they poked fun at contemporary Athens.

The Birds is a play that mocks the Athenian obsession

with litigation and politics.

It tells the story of two men

who are tired of a life of law courts and civic duties.

To escape, they turn themselves into birds

and create a bird city-in-the-sky called Cloud Cuckoo Land

where they reject all attempts to impose Athenian-style law and order.

Both comedy and tragedy sought to have a direct bearing

on life in Athens.

And most fascinating of all, is how they seamlessly blended together

religion and myth with contemporary politics.

This means that a play like The Oresteia by Aeschylus

can start with a mythic tale from the Trojan wars

where Agamemnon is murdered by his wife and avenged by his son Orestes,

but can end in a courtroom, in democratic Athens,

with Orestes on trial for the murder of his mother.

The Oresteia is one of the biggest hits in antiquity,

it's also one of the very few trilogies that we've got.

So what you have is three tragedies

and, in this case, it's got a connected story.

How does tragedy take this smorgasbord if you like,

and make it into a story?

Well it's not the same problem for the ancient Greeks

as it might be for us.

You know there's not this idea of anachronism.

Your mythical world, with the gods, with the Trojan war -

all of this that we've had in the first parts with the trilogy -

can then end in that third part with a law court in Athens,

which would have been familiar, of course,

from 1st century contemporary Athens.

So you have this brilliant genre

where you can zoom from your present day into the past

and bring your past into your present day.

And it's that relationship,

that tragedy uses to say things about its contemporary society.

To find out more about how drama and democratic Athens

became so intimately connected,

I want to look at how theatre first emerged.

Everything in ancient Greece

came under the auspices of a particular god,

and the god controlling theatre was called Dionysus.

He was also the god of wine and revelry

and many scholars think that theatre evolved directly

out of the choral songs performed in honour of Dionysus.

But there's also something else going on here.

Something that is suggested by the ruins

at a place called Thorikos, near Athens.

This region was once home to the ancient Athenian silver mines

but is also the site

of the oldest stone-built theatre in the Greek world.

We're in an industrial heartland of the ancient Athenian state,

with the ore washeries and the mineshafts

just beyond the theatre here.

The first phase of this theatre is late 6th century

and that puts it in the same time

as the invention of Athenian democracy itself.

Which throws up another question -

just what is the relationship between theatre and democracy?

And how did the two help each other into being?

It's a question that has been debated by scholars for centuries -

were theatre and democracy connected from the very start?

Now I actually buy into the story that tragic drama

IS a democratic invention.

I have a particular take

because I am one of those who think that Athenian tragic drama

was deeply, strongly politicised.

Not just, it happened in a polis but it happened in a polis

of a particular sort and could not have happened before Athens

became a polis of that particular sort, a democratic one.

The theatrical side seems to coincide

fairly closely with the political identity.

Theatrical activities of some sort or another

were one of the ways in which they expressed the fact

that now they all belonged together,

this was the place to which they came and in which they acted.

It's about, you know,

the local community feeling itself to be a local community.

I'm on my way to visit one of the smaller Athenian communities

to try and find some more proof

about the connection between drama and politics.

I want to see what the archaeology itself has to say.

Now, neither for theatre nor for democracy,

was there any kind of immaculate conception.

Nor were either born into the fully-developed form

that we recognize them today.

Both developed, arm-in-arm, over time.

And all around us as we drive in Attica,

we can see the building blocks,

the basis of the Athenian democratic system.

People tend to think of Athenians as city dwellers,

but much of the population

actually lived in village communities called demes.

There were 139 demes making up the Athenian democracy

and each deme governed itself.

The deme I'm looking for is one of the remotest -

it's called Rhamnous.

The people who lived here were mostly farmers,

but all the male citizens voted for the council,

and on local regulations and on by-laws.

And right at the heart of the community,

are the remains of what was once a theatre.

This is what I've come looking for on this very hot afternoon -

an inscription that shows us democracy

at its most local level in operation.

"Dionisoi" - to Dionysus...

"Hypo tes boules" - from the Boule,

the local council controlling this deme, here in Attica.

And it's to Dionysus because, yes, you've guessed it,

we're in a theatre - a theatre, the space of Dionysus.

The privileged seats for the distinguished local clientele,

and the stage set out before us.

Religion, politics, theatre...

at democracy's most local level.

These theatres really were far more than just places of entertainment,

they were places where the whole deme would gather together.

No-one's going to bother to build a theatre

just for a couple of days of drama a year.

But the theatres here,

at the lowest, most basic level of the Athenian democracy,

seem to have also been used as multi-purpose civic spaces,

giving them all-year-round potential, not just for drama,

but also for democracy and democratic action itself.

And THAT is what the archaeology is really beginning to uncover -

not only the demes, but the deme theatres,

spreading across all of Attica.

The use of theatres for democratic activity

seems to have been the case, not just in the demes,

but in the city of Athens itself.

Every year, the democratic authorities spent a fortune

on the Great Dionysia Festival - a drama competition

that took place in the Theatre of Dionysus

in honour of the god of theatre.

It's through understanding the different stages of this festival

that we can get closer to understanding what ancient Athenians

experienced when they watched and created drama.

The festival began with a procession -

a rowdy affair with feasting, drinking

and a great crowd of people parading through the streets

with a statue of the god and a small herd of sacrificial animals.

When it reached the altar of the 12 Olympian Gods in the marketplace,

the first thing that happened was a holy dance.

The cult of Dionysus is very much

a psychological thing.

Wine was, of course, very important,

everyone knows that,

but the thing was that by drinking wine,

you were getting closer to the god

and the more wine you drink, the more you step out of yourself

and get closer to the god.

And that is also what happens when you're dancing,

you're getting outside yourself, so to say, but also by, for example,

wearing a mask...

The ancient people thought that when you were wearing a mask,

you really become someone else.

-And the Greek word is...

-It's ecstasies.

-So "ec" - out, "stasis" - of one's self, of one's stance.

-Yes.

-And that's our ecstasy.

-It is the ecstasy as we know it.

-The ecstasy of the god.

-Yeah.

The procession then surged through the streets

along a route lined with tripods -

monuments put up by the proud sponsors of the winning plays.

Often politicians,

they spent fortunes funding dramatic productions,

and marked their victories with monuments like this one -

put up by a winner from the 4th century BC.

So, the drama festival was more than an opportunity for staging plays,

it was a chance for the leading figures of Athens

to stage their generosity, and their success to the whole city.

Finally, having wound its way right around the Acropolis,

the procession emerged noisily into the precinct of Dionysus.

By now, the participants were becoming a single entity.

It was a religious but also a political incident, actually.

You know, the whole city, so to say,

steps toward the god

in order to worship the god

and they show not only their piety

but also that they belong together.

So... It's an extraordinary idea, isn't it?

That when they take their seats in theatre, it's no longer,

we would say in English, "It's no longer Joe Bloggs and somebody" -

it's no longer the farmer and the individuals,

it is a collective of people with a new identity

-which is that of worshippers of the god Dionysus.

-Yes, correct.

-It's a bit different to going to the theatre today, right?

-It is indeed.

All of this put the audience into a receptive state

for the drama competition that was to follow.

But first, as they took their seats in the theatre,

there was one more important set of rituals to come.

The audience were seated here,

perhaps in the same groupings as when they went to war.

The citizens of Athens who were acting on the stage,

were acting in the same groups as when they went to war.

And in the front seats of the theatre were the reserved seats

for various priests of the city, and for the important civic officials.

And then, before the plays began, there were a series of events.

First, a libation - an offering to the gods were poured

in the centre of the stage by the generals,

the military generals of the city.

Then, a parade of tribute,

of all the money paid by the cities and states of the Athenian empire

to Athens, was literally taken across the stage,

paraded in front of an audience that contained members

from those same city-states which had to pay all that money.

Then a list of all those who had benefited the city in some way

was read out.

And finally, onto the stage were brought the orphans,

those whose parents had died fighting for the city in battle

and whom the city would now

take on the expenses of bringing up and educating.

They came on, dressed themselves in the armour of war

and took their seats, their special seats here in the theatre.

Only then could the plays begin.

From dawn until dusk, for five days,

the citizen audience watched three playwrights

each put on three tragedies as well as a farcical satyr play,

and some comedies.

At their heart were issues of justice and loyalty,

war and peace, vengeance and compassion,

which sent powerful messages to the citizen audience.

In the centuries of Athens' greatness,

over 1,000 plays were written for the Dionysia.

But today, just 32 of them survive in full.

And those 32 have survived, in part,

because they were considered to be the greatest.

And they were all written by just three people -

Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides -

the great tragedians of the 5th century BC.

Aeschylus was the first.

He was the author of the Oresteia,

the only whole trilogy to have survived.

Sophocles wrote two of the most enduring plays -

Oedipus The King and Antigone,

which tells the tragic story of Oedipus' daughter

who is sentenced to death

for breaking the law and burying her rebel brother.

But, of all the playwrights, Euripides is now considered

in many ways to have been the best.

He wrote the play Medea, with its shocking tale

of a woman betrayed by her husband

who takes revenge by killing her own children.

The playwrights of ancient Athens were all gurus of the city

in one form or another - Aeschylus the war hero,

Sophocles the civic official,

and Euripides, the sort of enfant terrible of Athenian society.

The Greek word for playwright is "didaskalos",

which means "trainer", or "teacher".

Now, in part, that refers to the playwright's role

in training the chorus for their play,

BUT many believe it also refers to the role of the playwright

in training the audience for participation in democracy itself.

If we take Sophocles' Ajax, as an example -

it's a retelling of a classic myth

set in the time of the legendary war between the Greeks and the Trojans.

And, on the one hand, it's just that

but on the other it's also a lesson,

a lesson in the sacrifices that have to be made for democracy to work.

Ajax was one of the warriors who fought with the Greeks at Troy.

After the death of Achilles, the greatest hero of them all,

the Greeks take a vote on who should get his weapons.

They choose Odysseus, not Ajax, and Ajax is furious.

Unable to accept the result of the vote, he goes on a killing spree.

And ultimately, consumed by the shame of his actions -

he is driven to suicide.

The motor of this play is a vote -

a process that would have been very familiar

to the democratic citizens of ancient Athens.

But it's a vote that Ajax refuses to accept.

Ajax is the antithesis of the good democratic citizen.

But the play also goes further.

Because, for me, the key moment

is actually what happens after Ajax's death.

What Sophocles has the other Greeks do

is debate about how they should proceed.

And some argue that Ajax should not be buried because of his actions

but Odysseus steps in to argue that he should be buried.

"Do not fling his body out unburied, treated so unfeelingly.

"And don't let force have such control of you that you allow

"your hate to trample justice down."

For scholars, this is the critical point in the play.

There's a real danger in Ajax

that because you've got these two extraordinary episodes

that are bloody and shocking,

you think the play is about those two episodes

that are bloody and shocking.

But I think the play is about the process of debate

that leads to decisions

in the wake of actions that really you haven't been able to cope with.

So, this is a play that stages debate

and it stages it in all its forms.

One way of thinking about Ajax is as a hermetical bronze age

or archaic warrior stuck in a much more modern political system.

He has values about being an individual and being a hero,

not being a co-operative person...

that make him very difficult,

as if individuals can no longer be powerful figures in a democracy.

-A man out of time, out of place?

-Yes.

So, this may be someone who is hardly a role model citizen

but there are going to be lots of people in Athens

who are hardly role model citizens.

Athens, no doubt, had its own fair share of bigheads

and glory seekers - people who just wouldn't work within the democracy.

And this play plays out the dilemma

of what do you do with those kinds of people?

How do you keep the democracy on track?

And that, for me, is why Odysseus' intervention is so crucial,

because he shows that you need to have empathy with these people

and you need to let justice run its course.

Odysseus offers a way for the community

to come back together, make a joint decision and move forward.

And that's why this play is such a great example

of what theatre did in ancient Athenian society -

it told a story, it posed problems,

it asked questions, questions of the audience

about what would you do in this kind of situation,

a situation which they would undoubtedly have to face up to

at some point in their lives.

Theatre was vital to the processes that played out

here on the Pnyx, home of the Athenian assembly.

It was the oil that allowed democracy to function.

A contained space which allowed for a continual process

of risky reflection, self-doubt and debate.

It's no accident that the most important words

in any Greek tragedy are "Ti draso?" -

"What shall I do?"

Theatre and democracy had grown up together

and were now inextricably linked in Athenian minds

and every year, for almost the next two centuries,

the Athenians came to the theatre

to rework the old myths into tragic dramas

that spoke to the problems that had beset

and were fundamental

to one of the most important and interesting stories in history -

The Rise and Fall of Athens.

And, at the same time, those very same people were here,

in the assembly, making the decisions

that affected those events.

It's therefore no surprise

that a common subject matter in Athenian drama

was a problem that constantly dogged the Athenian assembly - war.

And one war in particular fired the imagination

of the playwright Aeschylus,

who lived through the real life drama

and was inspired to write what is now

the first ancient Greek play to survive in full.

In 490 BC, less than 20 years after the democracy was established,

Athens was attacked by the greatest power on earth - the Persian empire.

The first crisis came at Marathon, 26 miles from the city of Athens.

A Persian fleet arrived with an enormous army.

Although outnumbered, the Athenians attacked,

and against all the odds, they triumphed.

The Athenian dead were commemorated by a memorial barrow

near the battlefield,

which is impressive even today.

But ten years later, the Persians were back with an army

said to have been more than a million strong.

As it bore down on Athens, the assembly passed a heroic decree

at the urging of a leading general called Themistocles.

Amazingly, a later copy of the decree

actually survives in an Athens museum.

This is one of the most evocative inscriptions surviving to us today.

It's a decree of the people of Athens and here's the key word -

"Salamina" - Salamis.

This is the decree recording the decision

by the Athenian people to evacuate their home city

and go to the island of Salamis

to save themselves from the invading hordes of Persians.

This is the record of one of the most key moments

in the whole of ancient history.

The Athenians abandoned their city and took to their ships,

leaving only a few men barricaded on the Acropolis.

The Persians ransacked the city, destroying the temples.

But the Athenian gamble paid off -

the Athenian fleet defeated the Persians

in the narrows off Salamis.

Greece was saved.

And witnessing it all, not from afar but at close range, was Aeschylus.

Aeschylus wasn't just a playwright - he was also a soldier.

He stood in the Athenian ranks on the plane at Marathon,

on that fateful day when the Persians first arrived.

He was part of the victorious Athenian army,

but he also lost his brother on the battlefield.

Aeschylus, in his own epitaph,

preferred to be remembered for his role here at Marathon,

rather than for his plays.

Without doubt, it was his extraordinary experiences

here on the battlefield that gave him a unique perspective

and allowed him to represent war on stage

in a way that has echoed ever since.

Aeschylus composed over 90 plays in his lifetime

and of the few that survive,

the play that he composed about these great events

is one of the most moving, and one of the most fascinating.

In 472 BC, Aeschylus produced a play called The Persians,

and it's the first ancient tragedy to survive to us in full today.

Its sponsor was no-one less than the future democratic hero Pericles.

But what's really surprising about it is its subject matter,

because it tells the story of how the Persians

reacted to the news of their defeat at the battle of Salamis,

a battle that those in the audience had fought and won

just eight years before.

The play is set in the Persian capital.

A messenger arrives at the Persian court

with the news of the Greek victory.

The Persians cannot believe that they have been defeated,

and they fall to pieces.

In their misery,

they summon the ghost of the previous King Darius for advice.

The ghost of Darius tells the Persians

that they themselves are to blame for their defeat,

because their pride and their ambition

has led them to disregard the gods.

"The voiceless heaps of slaughtered corpses shall eloquently show

"that no one human should puff up inflated thoughts.

"You see how insolence, once opened into flower,

"produces fields ripe with calamity

"and reaps a harvest-home of sorrow."

This is the crucial theme of the play.

Well, I think, really, at its heart, it's almost a tragedy about hubris.

-Hmm.

-This idea of, sometimes translated as "arrogance",

something like that - going too far, crossing a line, transgressing.

And the Persians had done that.

They thought big, they thought they could go and take Greece.

They didn't win and, actually,

part of what the play is exploring

is the idea that big empires can fall.

What kind of resonance

and implications does a play like The Persians have for us today?

It deals with one of these eternal themes - it looks at war.

It looks at the destruction, the loss,

the risks you run if you go to war.

They became really popular with the Gulf War

and with the Iraq War as well and this is a really interesting one.

In some modern productions,

what you get is costume that really tells you

that the audience should be making a link with contemporary war.

What point is Aeschylus making, do you think, with that?

I mean this is an amazingly difficult question to answer,

you can't even imagine how this must have felt for the audience.

They'd had their city sacked, they'd really come close

to being completely occupied by Persia.

-This play is, on one level really celebratory...

-Yeah.

But you have to imagine it operating on another level as well

because there are incredibly moving speeches in this -

the language isn't just victorious, if you like.

I think it tells us a lot about what tragedy is doing,

it is complex and it doesn't make it easy on the audience

and it's really asking the society to reflect.

This play, for me, is both an exception to normal tragedy

AND a fantastic example of it.

It's an exception because unlike most that focus on mythical stories,

this focuses on real and recent history.

But it's a fantastic example of what tragedy does

because it doesn't just allow the Athenians

to gloat over their victory.

Instead, it offers a warning.

For the Persians, pride came before a fall,

and at a time when Athens and the Athenians

were beginning to grow in their own power within the Greek world,

the play offers that same message -

"be careful or you too could end up just like the Persians."

This warning had a direct bearing on the current situation in Athens.

In the aftermath of the Persian wars,

Athens reached the peak of her power and influence

and the fleet that had secured victory at Salamis

now reached out across the Aegean.

Athens became the leading city-state in a new anti-Persian alliance.

But what began as a free coalition, was soon under Athenian control.

The financial muscle at Athens' command allowed it eventually

to turn the free alliance of Greek cities and states,

that had been brought together to wreak revenge on the Persians,

into an empire solely to support the glory of Athens.

And it was policed by the mighty

and yet brutal majesty of the supreme Athenian fleet.

The war-chest for that free alliance,

which had been kept on the sacred island of Delos,

was moved to Athens, placed on the Acropolis

and eventually into a building - the Parthenon -

which has today become synonymous with democracy and freedom.

And yet which was originally built

with the blood-money of Athenian empire.

Every year, each city in the alliance or empire,

contributed money in silver as tribute,

and this money was displayed in the theatre, in Athens,

at the Great Dionysia Festival.

But when any members of the empire refused these payments,

Athens sent a fleet to attack them.

Having an empire meant that the Athenian assembly

was now making life-or-death decisions,

not just about themselves but about cities and peoples far away

who had no real say in the matter.

These decisions were far from easy, as the Athenians discovered

when they had to decide how to deal with the city of Mytilene.

In 428 BC, the city of Mytilene

rebelled against the Athenian empire.

The Athenian assembly met to decide how to respond.

The hardliners wanted to execute every man

and enslave every woman in the city -

the moderates just to execute the ringleaders.

On the first day of debate,

the Athenian assembly sided with the hardliners.

They even dispatched a trireme to Mytilene to carry out those orders.

And yet when they met on the second day,

the Athenian assembly started to doubt its own decision.

And indeed they went on to reverse it, sending a second trireme

which got there just in time.

Now these events not only brought great relief to the Mytileneans

but it also brought home to the Athenians the critical importance

of thinking through properly their decisions before taking action.

Dealing with life and death decisions like this

had always lain at the heart of Athenian drama.

And authors like the prize-winning Sophocles forced the audience

to experience vicariously the consequences of sloppy thinking.

In 442 BC, Sophocles won yet another victory at the City Dionysia

with his play Antigone.

Now, Sophocles was a man intensely involved

with the affairs of the Athenian state.

He had been a general and he would go on

to become one of its closest advisers

during its darkest hours in future years.

And his play Antigone deals with exactly this kind of thing -

how to debate and argue through the difficult

and yet critical issues that face a city.

And what can happen when it all goes terribly wrong.

The play tells the sad story of Oedipus' daughter Princess Antigone.

When Antigone buries the body of her rebel brother,

she is following the law of the gods.

But the city's law and her uncle, King Creon have forbidden it.

Creon is furious, and condemns her to death.

Creon's son Haemon, who is in love with Antigone,

urges his father to reconsider.

He argues that "A city is not a city if it is the holding of one man."

But Creon is stubborn and uncompromising.

He refuses to listen, and refuses to back down.

The play ends with Antigone and Haemon both committing suicide

and with Creon facing the displeasure of his people

and of the gods.

Creon has to face the fact that his actions,

and his alone, have caused this disaster.

All of Greek tragedy stages dilemmas that cities under leaders have,

where they're faced with either very bad luck

or very bad management, or both.

Now, at one end of that spectrum you've got Oedipus,

who has very, very, very bad luck - he's doomed before he's even born.

How do you react to that?

How do you conduct yourself in a situation with very bad luck?

Right at the other end is the story of Oedipus' daughter Antigone,

faced with THE most incompetent leader in all of Greek literature

and that is saying something.

Creon simply cannot put a foot right, so Sophocles is asking people

to think about what a good leader might be

through showing them the worst possible leader

and the Athenians loved that

so much that Antiquity said they made him general in response.

Creon is getting pretty a bad stick from Edith

but there is a real sense in which the issue at the centre of the play

is an issue that arises even in Athenian law.

In Athenian law, if someone is a traitor

they are not to be buried -

you have to take them beyond the borders

and you can then bury them outside.

If you're a dimark in Athens

and there is a dead body in your deign you are obliged to bury it.

So, immediately that clash of,

"Yes, you must bury it but no, you can't"

arises if the dead body happens to be a traitor.

So this isn't a non issue, this is a real issue

and Creon may make a complete fist of resolving it

but he makes a fist because

there are two diametrically opposed, justifiable views

and you then have to pick your way through these.

Due to his dogged determination for others to do

exactly what he wants, his inability to listen, to compromise,

Creon ends up paying the ultimate price -

the loss of his family and his authority.

It's a play about listening, debate, compromise,

what it takes to be a leader.

Those are issues which, of course, had relevance

to the ancient Athenians watching the play,

but they're also issues that are relevant to any society at any time.

That's what makes Antigone so timeless.

It's got universal appeal because it's about someone

fighting against the system and a system that's wrong.

I mean, that's how it gets picked up now

and that's what really appeals to modern audiences, I think, about it.

A play like Antigone,

what kind of resonance does that have for us today?

Thinking about this adaptation that Jean Anouilh

produced in 1944 in France while it was being occupied by Nazis -

that's a real example where you've got this play

which is really taken on and championed by the Resistance.

How did it ever get permission to be performed

if it's such a play of resistance?

Well, I think that's the ambiguity of the play.

So, for the occupying force, for the Vichy government,

actually, you can look at this play and think,

"This is a play about law and imposing law"

and actually this is a silly little girl

who breaks that law and she gets what's coming to her.

So, it's that ambiguity that allows, even in those circumstances,

this great play of resistance, for some people, to be put on.

Tragedy was an effective way of engaging with the issues

that beset the democracy, but it was not the only way.

There was also comedy.

Comedy was irreverent, rude and bawdy,

and it was also personal, targeting real individuals.

And just like today, ordinary Athenians in the marketplace

were deeply suspicious of their elected political leaders.

Some people, it seems, were just naturally born

to successfully navigate

the slippery waters of Athenian politics.

And one of those guys was a man called Cleon.

HE SPEAKS GREEK

Now, Cleon was what we would call today an opportunistic politician.

He would be with the aristocrats or he would be spurring

on the lowest of the low of the Athenian citizenry.

And the ancient commentators are fairly hard on Cleon.

Today we'd probably be a bit more balanced,

but without a shadow of a doubt

he would do whatever it took to get whatever he wanted.

Naturally, he had his enemies.

They accused him of being greedy, not just for power,

but for fresh-caught tuna,

seen back then as a luxury desired by the rich and anti-democratic.

How could the democracy keep people like this in check

while not killing off their energy and enthusiasm

that at the end of the day benefited the city?

Well, one of the ways they did it was in the theatre,

by taking the piss out of them, right in their very face.

Comedies, while performed at the Dionysia Festival,

also had their own smaller festival.

It was called the Lenaia.

It took place early in January,

long before the season for sailing started,

so there were no foreigners present.

This meant that comic writers could really let rip

without letting the city down.

What you have is really lively plays,

very outrageous plays sometimes

but they are politically involved.

The settings can be amazing in the real sense, incredible.

You have comedies that go to the underworld,

they go to hell

and that's where you get these animal choruses like frogs.

This is a frog that was used

in the King's College Greek play.

Animal choruses are quite common in comedy.

You've got, for example, the chorus here...

These guys performing and the songs that they get to sing,

I mean, this is a great source of comedy.

What kind of level of biting satire are we talking about here

in ancient comedy?

It's extremely personal,

there's insults really of quite an infantile nature.

You have plays which put politicians as one of the characters,

very thinly disguised,

but they'll be the leading politicians of the day.

Their policies will be clear, the way they speak might be parodied,

even the mask can reflect characters from Athenian society.

This was the sort of thing that lay in store

for ambitious politicians like Cleon.

And the man who was the real expert at this

was a comic playwright called Aristophanes.

And for Aristophanes and Cleon, it was a grudge match -

they even came from the same village.

In 425 BC, Aristophanes wrote a play called The Knights.

It portrays Cleon as a cunning servant

working for an old man called Demos.

Demos represents the people, and as his crafty servant,

Cleon misuses his position

for the purposes of extortion and corruption.

Yet, in the end, is it Demos who has the last laugh.

Cleon's corrupt ways are exposed, he loses his position

and he is reduced to selling sausages

outside the Athens' city gates.

Aristophanes didn't pull any punches -

this play brings Cleon right back down to earth.

And, of course, the politicians,

about whom the jokes were being made,

were right here, visible to all in the audience.

So it's like having one of our shows,

The Daily Show in the States or Have I Got News For You here,

being played out in an important civic space -

the Capitol or the House of Commons -

with the people they're taking the piss out of

sitting right here in the audience,

having to take it in front of everyone.

The Greeks even had a word for this -

they called these people, the "komedoumenoi",

those made fun of in comedy.

And this isn't just some sort of sideshow.

This, many ancient commentators saw,

as the hallmark of ancient Athenian democracy

and of freedom and free speech.

The laughter didn't stop Cleon's career.

Despite his slippery reputation, he was elected again and again.

But the effect of comedy was more subtle than that.

What it did do, was police the boundaries of behaviour,

skewer pretensions and remind those in positions of power

of their responsibilities and of the limits of their ambitions.

It's a kind of satire that we can still see at work

in our own democracy today.

By the time of Cleon, this experiment in Athenian democracy

was heading towards its centenary.

And in that time it had seen it all, from fighting for survival,

to cultural supremacy, to empire, to wealth.

And it was, still, at war, not now with Persia

but with Greece's greatest fighting force - the Spartans.

And desperate times called for desperate measures.

The war between Sparta and Athens started in 431 BC

and lasted for decades.

It was a fight to the death.

Sparta ruled by land, Athens ruled at sea.

But there was one island

that had never submitted to Athenian domination

and tried instead to remain neutral -

the small island of Melos.

In 416 BC, the Athenian democrats had had enough -

it was time for the Melians to submit.

So the Athenians sent their fleet to enforce their demands.

Now, according to Thucydides, the contemporary Athenian historian,

the Athenians sent in not just their fleet

but also some diplomats to put the case.

The case was very simple, it was this - join us or die.

But what happened next, according to Thucydides,

was an extraordinary debate between the two sides.

"These envoys the Melians did not bring before the popular assembly,

"but bade them tell in the presence of the magistrates

"and the few what they had come for."

The envoys gave the Melians an ultimatum -

surrender and pay tribute to Athens or be destroyed.

The Melians argued that they were a neutral city, not an enemy.

And that it would be shameful and cowardly to submit without a fight.

But the Athenians were unmoved -

they countered that if they didn't extract surrender from Melos,

the empire would look weak.

They argued that the strong have the right to exert their authority.

This is a classic example

of what we call in Greek an "agon" - a debate.

You could have seen it in the philosophical lecture hall

or in the political assembly or in the law courts,

or indeed on the stage in the theatre.

And it's summed up... Well, it's summed up rather well, actually,

by an enthusiastic student who seems to have had this copy before me.

And who has written rather pithily in the margin, "Might is right".

And that was the Athenian argument.

The strong do as they can.

The weak suffer what they must.

And that's exactly what happened.

The Athenians invaded the island of Melos,

they executed all the men,

they enslaved all the women and the children,

and they established an Athenian colony there.

And yet, just the very next year, in the Theatre of Dionysus,

in the centre of Athens,

Euripides, the enfant terrible of Athenian drama,

staged a play called Trojan Women.

Its subject matter was what happened to the women at Troy

after the Greeks had besieged, invaded and destroyed the city.

So the Athenians sat down to watch a play

which laid before them on the stage

the tragic reality of what they had done,

just the year before, to the island of Melos.

The play is set in the aftermath of the legendary siege of Troy.

The city has fallen, all the Trojan men are dead,

and the surviving Trojan women,

who make up the chorus in the play, are to be sold into slavery.

But for Princess Andromache, there's worse -

her son is to be taken from her and slaughtered.

When she argues, the messenger tells her to be brave - "might is right".

SHE WAILS

WOMEN ALL SCREAM

MAN: Hush.

SHE PANTS

If you say words that make the army angry...

..the child will have no burial...

..and without pity...

So bear your fate as best you can.

Then you need not leave him dead without a grave...

..and you will find the Greeks...

more kind.

Trojan Women may well have spoken to Athenian actions on Melos,

but Euripides was also crucially

sending a broader message about the disillusionment

that was taking hold in Greece

after years of relentless, savage war

and the terrible impact

that such conflict has on all members of society.

Why should WE think that what the Athenians did to the Melians

would have generated such terrific outrage

when the Spartans had done something

-very similar to the people of Hisiai just a few years earlier.

-Exactly.

I mean that's purely historically.

On the other hand, the coincidence of date means,

it seems to me, that as Euripides is writing this,

what is the big campaign the Athenians are involved in

that is going to involve women as slaves of war?

Well, there is no other campaign going on

as Euripides is writing it in the winter of 416-5

but he could have thought it at any time, that's the thing.

By 416/415, I think Euripides really has seen that war

as a way of life brings nothing but misery

to both victors and vanquished.

And from that point of view, if you focus on Melos,

-you actually miss that point.

-Exactly.

The more you think that this is a sort of,

-"Oh, there's been a terrible atrocity..."

-Yes.

-Exactly.

..the more you miss

that this is about war and how irrational and terrible.

Euripides is presenting a view of all the Greeks

as having barbarised themselves

during the course of the Peloponnesian War.

Euripides was not the only one

to despair at the state of affairs in Greece,

or criticise Athenian behaviour.

Many in Greece now felt that Athens was guilty of hubris,

of over-reaching pride.

And anyone who had ever seen a Greek tragedy

would have been aware of what could happen next.

Here at Rhamnous in the 6th century,

the people had built a temple

to the Greek goddess responsible for punishing those guilty of hubris.

She was called Nemesis, a name that comes from the Greek verb "nemein" -

meaning to give what is due.

Now, after the Melian atrocity,

it seemed like Athenian ambition and pride

was beginning to over-reach itself.

They not only had enemies abroad -

they had an increasing number of enemies in Greece,

and indeed an increasing number of enemies at home as well,

who were beginning to think of democracy

as perhaps the immoral inversion of the righteous order.

The question was,

as the glorious golden age of the 5th century drew to a close,

how would theatre and democracy,

which had so spectacularly grown up together,

survive in a much harsher and more difficult world?

Although the future of Athens now looked uncertain,

the past century had been a spectacular era,

Athens had invented and pioneered an array of things

which underpin our own civilisation.

From classical sculpture and architecture

to new directions in philosophy and history.

But for me, out of all those legacies,

two stand out as the most extraordinary...

First, democracy -

Athens created the first democratic constitution in history

which has become a beacon across the centuries.

And second - at the very same time,

Athens invented a powerful and incisive new art form -

theatre - an innovation without which perhaps,

that democracy might never have survived.

Drama comes from the Greek word, "dram" - to do, to act, to perform.

And if there is one thing that has become abundantly clear

it's that theatre was never just mere entertainment,

never a passive spectator -

it was a performer in Athens' story in the ancient world.

From tragedy making our most important beliefs uncomfortable,

to comedy questioning and policing citizenship,

and keeping people in check.

Theatre was an institution that plugged into religious, civic,

political and military aspects of ancient Athenian society.

It was an extraordinary, and extraordinarily uncomfortable,

risky and yet essential part of Athenian life.

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