Kings Ancient Greece: The Greatest Show on Earth

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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