Romans Ancient Greece: The Greatest Show on Earth

In this series,

I've looked at how theatre was first invented in ancient Athens

and at how it played a vital part in the lives of the Ancient Greeks.

I've also seen how it grew in scale and popularity,

spreading throughout the Greek world and beyond.

But in this episode,

I want to look at what happened to theatre when the Romans arrived

and when the era of Greek dominance and independence drew to a close.

It's a story that is symbolised

by a building that was constructed in Athens in the 2nd century AD

and which still looks proudly over the modern city.

This magnificent theatre

was paid for by one of Athens' richest citizens -

an intellectual called Herodes Atticus -

who had it carved out of the rock beneath the Acropolis,

at the heart of the very city where tragedy and comedy were born.

Herodes Atticus built this theatre

in memory of his recently deceased wife, Regilla.

It's not a bad way to say, "I miss you."

But although Herodes was Greek, and we're in Greece,

this is not your typical Greek theatre.

And that's because it was built when the Romans controlled Greece.

And that Roman influence is very discernable

in the way the 28-metre high solid-stone backdrop walls

meet absolutely with the seating on either side -

a very Roman conception of theatre, not a Greek one.

And as a result, the theatre is the perfect symbol

for what happened when the Romans took over Greece.

They adopted Greek art, architecture and culture,

and in doing so, preserved the legacy of Greek theatre

for us today. But they also adapted Greek theatre

for their own - very Roman - ends.

The ways in which that process of adoption and adaptation took place

give us a fascinating window into one of the most dynamic

and monumental periods of ancient history,

as the Romans turned the Mediterranean Sea

into "Mare Nostrum" - their lake.

In this episode,

I want to look at the vital part played by the Romans

in the preservation of Greek drama and in the history of theatre.

And I want to explore how this famous empire

provides one of the crucial connections between our modern drama

and the great plays of Ancient Greece.

Drama as we know it was invented in Athens in the 6th century BC.

At the very same time,

Athens created the world's first democracy.

One man, one vote.

And the two came together in an explosive mixture.

Year after year,

in the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens,

the city put on tragic drama and comedy for an audience of citizens.

Plays like Oedipus The King, The Persians,

Antigone and the Bacchae

told savage stories of murder, violence and incest

drawn from myth and legend,

while comedies like Birds and Lysistrata

mocked daily life in Athens

through bawdy humour, absurd fantasy and political satire.

All of these plays were more than just stories.

They unlocked issues of justice and loyalty,

war and peace, vengeance and compassion -

all issues the audience had to think about

as active citizens in a democracy.

For a century, theatre and democracy had helped to bring Athens

to a peak of political and cultural dominance.

But after 400 BC,

defeat in war destroyed the city's power and independence.

Democracy slowly gave way to autocratic kings

like Alexander the Great.

But despite this, theatre continued to prosper,

spreading far and wide across the Greek world

and throughout the empire built by Alexander.

I'm on my way to a remote valley in Epirus in north-western Greece

to look at the part theatre played

in this bigger, more autocratic world.

For the classical Greeks, this was a harsh and inhospitable place

at the north-western frontiers of the Greek world.

Thucydides went as far as to say

that people from here were "barbarians".

And yet at the same time, Aristotle claimed that the Hellenes -

the Greeks - originated from this part of the world.

In many ways, it was that curious ambiguity

that was this place's main attraction.

This is Dodoni, at the heart of the Epirus region.

In ancient times, it was the site of a famous oracle.

Greeks came here from all over to get answers to their problems

from Olympian Zeus, King of the Gods.

One popular story was that oracular responses were divined

by listening to the rustling of the leaves on the sacred tree.

Another that there was a series of bronze cauldrons around the tree

that made sonorous noises.

Now, this place was never as flash as other oracular sanctuaries,

like Delphi. That was, until the early 3rd century BC,

when everything changed.

The turning point was the death of Alexander the Great.

His enormous empire fragmented

and much of Greece came under the control of warlords,

autocrats and kings.

Dodoni was no exception,

and it eventually came under the control of a man called Pyrrhus.

These were more turbulent times,

and you might expect theatre to suffer as a result,

but the ruins here at Dodoni tell a different story.

This spectacular theatre could hold at least 20,000 spectators.

It was part of a huge building programme instigated by Pyrrhus,

and it was the centrepiece of a grand new annual festival.

Pyrrhus was a classic warlord

from the time following that of Alexander the Great,

to whom he was related. He was not a democrat, he was an autocrat,

the kind of guy who had his co-ruler murdered.

But in building, here at Dodoni,

this theatre and the athletic tracks,

and setting up the competitions and festivals,

Pyrrhus gave a concrete centre,

not only for the new alliance that brought Epirus together,

but also a concrete demonstration of his own personal power.

The very architecture of this theatre,

its retaining walls, look like Hellenistic fortress towers.

And by doing all this,

Pyrrhus put Dodoni, Epirus and himself on the map

as players in the wider Greek world.

Rather than taking a back seat

in the rivalries and conflicts that beset Greece,

theatre had become a tool in these power struggles.

It was a symbol of power and prestige.

But the plays that would have been performed at Dodoni

and at other theatres throughout Greece

were no longer the same democratically charged tragedies

and satirical comedies with which theatre began.

Instead, the stories that played out in these grand arenas

were more down-to-earth affairs.

As Athens' power waned,

its brightest star was the comedian Menander,

whose universally acceptable and enjoyable situation comedy

meant that he and his plays debunked Athens' decline,

and spread throughout the now-much-wider Greek world

that went all the way into Asia,

and whose epicentres were now not in central Greece,

but in places like Alexandria in Egypt

or Pergamon in Asia Minor.

Indeed, what we have of Menander today has survived to us

because it was written down on papyri

in desert places like Egypt,

which is what makes it all so frustrating that, today,

despite his incredible popularity in the ancient world,

we only have one complete surviving play of Menander.

That is, until recently.

Because now we have enough bits and pieces of a second

to put its plot back together.

It was called the Woman Of Samos.

The woman of the title is a prostitute called Chrysis.

She has been invited to live with her lover, Demeas,

and his son, Moschion, in Athens.

But while Demeas is away on business,

Moschion gets the girl next door pregnant.

When the child is born, he gives it to Chrysis to nurse,

hoping to keep it a secret until a marriage can be arranged.

But when Demeas returns, a series of misunderstandings

lead him to believe that his son and his courtesan

have been having an affair.

Comedy and carnage ensue,

but eventually the play ends well, with Moschion's wedding

and the reconciliation of Demeas and Chrysis.

It's very much a domestic comedy

and a comedy of manners playing on stock characters.

You've got the courtesan

who's actually very good-natured,

you've got an angry old father

and the misguided young man who's trying to get married,

and, you know, the cook. The usual crowd.

It's about a family,

it's got a love story in it, of course,

it's about a couple who are eventually going to get married

one way or another.

I think it transfers very well culturally.

It's a comedy of errors, and these always work,

no matter where you are.

Plays like this pulled in audiences from Afghanistan to Marseilles,

throughout the wider Greek world

and what had once been Alexander's empire.

And nowhere were they more popular

than in the Greek colonies of Italy and Sicily.

Rich, cultured and powerful, these Greek settlements

were the opposite of a colonial backwater -

they were the equals of any Greek cities anywhere.

They were a byword for luxury and style,

and they adored theatre.

One of the most enthusiastic was here -

the city of Syracuse in Sicily.

Syracusan patrons had invited the great Athenian dramatists

Aeschylus and Sophocles to perform their plays here.

And Syracusan dramatists had written and produced plays back in Athens

and even introduced their own native form of drama - mime -

to the great city.

The success of theatre here in Sicily

demonstrates the pulling power of Greek culture

in the ancient world.

Greek drama, architecture, vase painting and sculpture

were an intoxicating attraction -

they were the height of sophistication.

And in 282 BC,

the wealth and culture of the Greeks in southern Italy and Sicily

attracted the attention of a new power - Rome.

It was at the Greek city of Taras, now Taranto,

that the Romans first forced their way into the Greek landscape.

The people of this city found themselves attacked from the sea

by a Roman fleet.

The Tarentines won this encounter,

but we all know their luck wasn't going to last.

Within little more than 250 years,

Rome would be calling the Mediterranean "Mare Nostrum" -

"Our Sea".

The Tarentines knew it too.

When Rome attacked, they sent out a call for help

to their fellow Greeks -

a call that reached the ears of the warlord Pyrrhus,

across the Adriatic in Dodoni.

Dodoni had long been connected

to the Greek colonies of southern Italy,

one of which was Taras,

and so it was in a fantastic position

to know that things in the west were changing.

And so when Rome attacked Taras, it's no surprise

that Taras came here, to Epirus and to Pyrrhus, to ask for help.

Pyrrhus, just a few years before, had failed in his campaigns

to expand his empire east.

This was his opportunity to head west.

Pyrrhus sailed for Italy to check the upstart Romans

with an army of 25,000 soldiers and 20 elephants.

But the Romans fought much harder than he had expected.

Even his victories cost thousands of lives.

"Another such victory," said Pyrrhus after one of them,

"and we shall be lost." In fact, one of Pyrrhus' greatest legacies

is the term "pyrrhic victory" -

a victory won at too great a cost to be worthwhile.

In the end, the attempts of Pyrrhus and the Greeks

to withstand the Romans failed.

And when Pyrrhus returned to Greece to expand his domains elsewhere,

he was killed in a street fight

and his empire collapsed like a house of cards.

When news of Pyrrhus' death reached Taras in 272 BC -

the death of a commander

Hannibal thought second only to Alexander the Great -

the city capitulated.

It was the beginning of the end. By the end of the century,

most of the Greek cities of Italy and Sicily were under Roman control.

And when the Romans took Taras,

they didn't just take its buildings,

they took its people.

And that, according to one source, included a playwright.

Theatre was about to enter the Roman bloodstream.

And it did so as part of a wider Roman desire for all things Greek.

When we think of the Romans,

we think of the grandeur of Empire and the glory of Rome

which are expressed here in the Forum,

the teeming centre of ancient Roman public life.

But when Rome first conquered Taras,

it had not yet become the centre of a mighty empire.

It was a city-state, a republic, on the hunt for power and prestige.

And one of the ways it could get it

was by absorbing the cultural achievements

of the conquered Greeks,

including architecture, literature and, of course, drama.

We've become so used today

to seeing Rome as the eternal city, the imperial city -

powerful, solid, indisputably in charge of all they survey.

But of course, we first need to dial ourselves back

to the very origins of this place,

to when it was a pugnacious republican city,

dominated by rival clans,

fighting to gain that supremacy and that power.

Not far from the Roman forum, in the Largo Argentina,

20 feet below the city streets of modern Rome,

you can see how this upstart Roman republic worked,

and how it responded

when it brushed up against the Greeks -

the cultural champions of the ancient world.

Today, when we look around Rome,

we're seeing mostly Imperial Rome, we're seeing the eternal city.

How would you sum up to someone

what it was like to be in Rome during the republican era?

If you can imagine a large mafia,

which doesn't use violence between the rival clans

and is also the state,

and also has a clientelistic relationship, like the mafia,

with the people low down,

that sense of the power of the individual family,

their competitiveness, their sense of personal honour,

the ease of front, and the vast amount of fixing

and the money that comes out of it,

I think those are all things that would strike a Greek visitor.

For these Romans, the conquest of the Greek cities in Italy

made Rome a city that mattered.

And incorporating aspects of Greek culture

was a great way to show it.

Are there elements of the Greek world

and of Greek architectural styles and art

that we can see within Roman buildings?

Yes. Things that aren't here any more.

The cult statues, things like that, were very Greek.

The orders - the Corinthian order, Doric order, Ionic order -

but also, if we can see over there, I don't know...

They understand that Greek temples have to glint.

They understand that they're made of white marble.

You can see this local, brown, rather crumbly stone - the tufo.

They understand that doesn't look like Greek temples.

You look on the columns over there, just the remains, the white stuff -

that's stucco. It looks rather like large amounts of chewing gum,

but actually it's stucco,

which is meant to clad this brown tufo stone.

And when you polish it, it shines.

It's got little bits of ground-up mica and marble in it

so it gives that effect that you would see

if you went to Greece or Sicily and saw a full-on marble temple.

So are these the Romans trying to compete with

the extraordinary examples of Greek architecture

or is it to sort of show they have somehow taken over the mantel

and incorporated them and are better than...?

I think initially it is competition - I think they opened their eyes

to what can be done and what should be done.

If you want a proper city with proper houses for the gods

which properly commemorate your relationship with them,

that's how you do it.

As we pass later towards the end of the Republic,

it becomes a discourse of dominance -

it's about saying "We've taken it, we've conquered it, we've earned it

"and now we're doing it bigger and better."

And one of the things that gets inserted into that mix

in the mid 3rd century is theatre, Greek theatre and Greek playwrights.

What does theatre offer and why is it taken up?

I think it offers something sophisticated,

so there's clearly an appreciation

that there's a superior culture, which manifests in this way,

in the sense that this is how a community ought to behave,

it ought to have these sort of ways of expressing itself.

Very important in the Roman context, as in the Greek context,

that these are plays staged at religious opportunities.

Like this temple, the plays are another acquisition of Empire.

Some types of poetry and drama

did already exist in the Roman world,

including forms of farce, mime and religious performance,

but soon after the capture of Taras, the Romans started staging plays.

These plays were put on at religious festivals

and relied heavily on Greek stories and the Greek style.

The man who wrote them was called Lucius Livius Andronicus.

Sadly, only fragments and titles of his works survive,

but they paint an intriguing picture.

Livius Andronicus was not a Roman,

but probably a Greek, potentially a slave,

and, according to some sources, from the Greek city of Taras,

the very city that the Romans had captured in battle.

And yet some of the greatest writers in Roman history

call him the father of Latin literature.

He began, it was said,

by translating Greek texts into Latin for use in schools,

and his own tragedies

had the names Achilles, Ajax, The Trojan Horse,

and, as the Roman poet Horace put it two centuries later,

"captured Greece, captured her uncouth conqueror

"and brought the arts to rustic Latinum."

But it was never going to be such a straightforward story

of Roman indebtedness to Greece.

Livius Andronicus marks the very beginning of Roman engagement

with Greece and Greek literature,

and the key thing is that his plays are in Latin.

Unlike other Mediterranean communities,

the Romans didn't just import Greek theatre whole.

They adapted elements of Greek drama

but they created their own new plays, from scratch, in Latin.

Sadly, very little of what was written has survived,

and what HAS is comedy.

The first author whose plays survive to us in full

is an ex-stagehand from Umbria called Plautus.

Now, all his comedies were based on the Greek model,

that of Menander.

In 1968, a papyrus was found with a play of Menander on one side

and a play of Plautus directly opposite.

And all of Plautus's plays are set in Greece, usually in Athens,

and there's lots of Greek borrowings into the Latin.

But all of this is not because Plautus thought

the Greeks and Greece were wonderful -

it's because he thought they were funny.

Plautus' comedy is full of ridicule for Greece.

His plays are lewd and bawdy,

and comedies like The Ghost show stupid Greek citizens

being outwitted by their scheming slaves.

In Plautus' play The Ghost, Philolaches is a no-good son,

who is having fun while his dad is away.

Their slave, Tranio, is helping out.

But when the dad suddenly returns, Philolaches panics,

and it's up to Tranio to save the day.

With his father out of town,

Philolaches does what any young man would do and throws a house party.

He has also borrowed money to free his favourite slave girl.

The drinking is in full flow when his father returns.

But Tranio moves fast. He locks the revellers in the house

and tells Philolaches' father that the house is haunted.

Through his quick thinking,

he buys enough time for the revellers to escape

and for the money Philolaches owes to be repaid.

Now, that's a pretty similar plot

to Menander's Woman Of Samos, for example.

Somebody leaves, things happen in their absence

and chaos ensues when they return.

But what's different here is it's now the Greeks who are the fools.

It's the slave who saves the day.

Plautus has completely turned the tables

about who has the last laugh.

The fact that the Romans were watching plays about Greeks,

and were laughing at Greeks,

has given scholars an interesting insight

into both the ambitions and boundaries of Roman society.

You have a situation

where you have ostensibly Greek characters, living in Athens,

expressing the ambition to Greek it up, or live like Greeks,

and one of the things that that is reflecting

is the Roman obsession with Greek luxury

as a form of wish fulfilment, so it reflects the way

that also Roman society is becoming more Greek

and more luxurious. This is an idealised form of Hellenism

and it's also, in some ways, a very comic form of Hellenism

that is about as Greek as the version of Germany and France in 'Allo 'Allo

is either French or German.

But it's interesting, isn't it, what Greeks are NOT in Roman comedy?

Greeks are not dynamic, macho, heroic figures, are they?

They're generally sort of foppish,

aristocratic, rather clueless figures.

There is obviously more general freedom allowed to the poet

in the characterisation,

if they're dealing with Greek characters.

You can have relationships

that you don't have in Rome, you have slaves doing things

that would not be allowed in Rome.

One of the things about comedy set in Ancient Athens, Aristophanes,

is it pokes very bitter, pointed fun at Athenians in the audience.

Could the Romans laugh at themselves in the same way

that we understand the Greeks to have been laughing at themselves?

You do get references to Romans in Roman comedy.

For example, there's a line where a character is said

to be smellier than a group of Roman rowers.

So, yeah, you do get this mockery of Romans,

but it's always displaced into the mouths of non-Romans

mocking Romans for being barbarians.

As the Romans took over the domestic form of comedy,

there is no direct political jokes as we have in Greek old comedy,

where politicians are more or less directly named and portrayed.

One of Plautus's great contemporaries and predecessors, Naevius,

actually ended up getting banged up in prison under a libel law,

specifically for having made jokes at the family of the Metelli,

and therefore the type of humour about families or individuals

that Aristophanes was able to indulge in

is very much impossible for a comic writer such as Plautus.

Mocking political leaders on the stage had been fine in Athens

because it was a way of keeping the democracy in check.

But Rome was ruled by powerful aristocrats,

and mocking them would have been a difficult and dangerous game.

For the authorities in Rome,

controlling the story was paramount,

and this helped to give birth to a new kind of drama -

a drama that is reflected

in the spectacular monuments to Roman history

that still litter the city.

One of the most famous structures of this kind

comes from the time of the Roman Empire.

It's called Trajan's Column.

This is one of the most famous landmarks in Rome today,

known because of the way it tells a visual historical narrative

spiralling up the column,

that of Emperor Trajan's military campaigns.

But this interest in telling stories, historical narrative,

goes right back to the roots of Roman culture.

And in the 3rd century BC,

the Romans actually created their own form of drama,

that mixed tragedy with reality, with historical narrative -

telling the stories of some of their most famous adventurers.

The Romans had adapted tragedy

into what would become a new theatrical genre -

the history play.

And one such play commemorated a man who played an important role

in the subjugation of Greece.

In the 2nd century BC,

the Romans set about conquering the Greek mainland, and in 168 BC,

Lucius Aemilius Paullus won an epic victory.

This spectacular 18th-century painting

shows him returning to Rome and showing off his Greek prisoners

in a lavish triumph ceremony.

But the commemorations didn't end there.

As part of his victory triumph,

following the subjugation of the Greeks,

Aemilius Paullus commissioned a historical narrative drama,

and its title was Paullus,

and it told the story of Paullus's triumphant campaign.

He clearly agreed with the Roman maxim

that virtue deserves praise. And was it any good?

Well, the problem is, we've only got four lines surviving.

One describes, we think, the march of the Romans to Olympus.

Another is a snatch of prayer before a battle.

The third is a line about spears flying,

and the fourth quotes an unlucky Roman calling for help.

And that's it.

We can tell that the author Pacuvius's Latin

is both elegant and educated.

But if his other plays are any guide,

it's likely that this one ended

not with a question for the audience to consider

or a moral dilemma for them to wrestle with,

but with a sense of a world restored from disorder -

a triumph.

This kind of play was very different from Greek tragedy,

but the development of this new drama

is one of Roman theatre's greatest legacies.

Part of the problem in Greece, in Athens,

when they're experimenting with tragedy

at the beginning of the 5th century, is that actually,

these history plays can be a bit close to the bone.

There's an example of a playwright who actually gets fined

because of doing a tragedy on recent history

and getting it wrong.

He makes the audience feel terrible

about how they didn't help out their allies and they don't like it.

So they fine it and that play is never performed again.

With the Romans,

I think there's something slightly different going on with it.

They really want to commemorate their victories

and actually, by doing this culturally,

this is part of conquest -

you're saying, "Look what we've done, we've got this, this is our genre

"and we're celebrating our own victories through it."

You have to think about performances

in the context of all the other performances that are going on -

triumphal processions, gladiatorial spectacles

where you're literally bringing everything to Rome

to show off about your conquest,

and this is really an extension of that.

By 150 BC, Roman theatre had come of age

in the service of Rome's governing elite.

It had its own political dynamic and purpose.

And it included writers

who have entered the canon of Western literature -

writers like Plautus, and even more so, Terence.

Terence is a classic case.

He was a foreigner, brought to Rome as a slave from Carthage,

Rome's deadliest enemy,

and yet went on to become a famous writer of Roman comedy

that was performed on temporary stages all over the city.

The most famous is right behind me here on the Palatine,

in front of the temple of Magna Mater.

Now, Terence used Greek models for his comedies

but his Latin was so pure, so sophisticated,

that in later generations,

he became the textbook from which to learn the language.

One person said, "Good morals, good taste,

"good Latin, as Terence has."

So this is no longer Roman comedy

borrowing, begging, stealing Greek models -

this is Roman comedy standing on its own two feet,

confident in its own Roman-ness, its "Romanitas."

This Roman confidence was evident

when Roman soldiers returned to Athens many years later,

in 87 BC, to put down a revolt.

The general leading the Roman forces was called Lucius Cornelius Sulla.

He laid siege to Athens

and, despite the city's impressive cultural reputation,

he showed no mercy.

He used wood from sacred groves, he plundered temples,

and when Athens finally fell,

the slaughter was said to be so great

that the streets were flowing with blood.

BATTLE CRIES ECHO

Sulla was not just the man who had captured Athens for Rome.

He was also the epitome of a breed of Roman

who was fully immersed in Greek culture,

yet not overawed by it.

When he captured Athens,

he is said to have quoted one of Athens's own playwright's lines

right back at them.

It was a line from Aristophanes' play, The Frogs.

"First learn to row, before you can steer."

And in that one line, Sulla had brilliantly taken

two of Athens's most treasured accomplishments

in all of its history -

the theatre and their supremacy at sea with the fleet -

and combined them into one of history's most sarcastic put-downs.

The Athenians were forced to eat their own humble pie.

Ouch!

The Romans had succeeded in making drama their own,

but it didn't play the same role or have the same status

that it had had in Greece.

I want to find out more

about the differences between these two societies.

And I think that the different designs of their theatres

could be a good place to start.

The Ancient Greek world was littered with monumental theatres,

many of which survive to this day,

evidence of Greek architectural skill and ambition.

To harness and contain the emotional power of their plays,

the Greeks had developed very special places for performance.

Their theatres were open spaces, easy to get into and out of,

and usually with views over the stage

to the landscape beyond.

They were part of the landscape and part of the community,

both religious and political.

This theatre at Epidaurus

is probably the most perfect example to survive.

Even today, visitors here respond.

There's something I notice every time I come to this theatre.

And that's whatever nationality, whatever language,

whether you're a show-off or a recluse,

everyone is drawn to the very centre of the stage.

Now, partly I think that's to do

with the visual sightlines of the theatre all meeting here

and the perfect acoustics

which make this such an extraordinary experience.

But...I think there is an honesty and a nakedness

to the design of the Greek theatre and its stage

that allows the audience to empathise more easily

with the performers.

And as a result, the very design of the Greek theatre

builds on what all the religious rituals that happened beforehand

were trying to do - to eliminate the gap

between them in the audience and us on the stage,

to create not two different entities, but one body.

This same design was used all over the Greek world.

But in Rome, theatres were very different indeed.

To begin with, there was no permanent accepted venue.

Terence and other writers

had to perform their plays on temporary stages,

in places like the Forum or in a sanctuary,

or here in the Circus Maximus, more usually used for chariot races.

Reconstructions by modern scholars,

following ancient depictions like that in the house of Livia in Rome,

revealed that these structures could be very lavish indeed.

But I want to know what their temporary nature tells us

about the role of theatre in Roman society.

You can see temporariness as a form of popular control.

The senate pays for the dramatic festival every year,

someone pays to have the stage put up.

If it isn't there permanently,

one of the threats is, "Well, if you don't behave yourself,

"it won't be here next year."

One other way in which you can measure

the value of theatre and theatrical production in Rome

is to think about the status of actors.

In the Greek world, they're relatively high-status,

we know there's this guild of actors, the Artists of Dionysus.

In the Roman world, they're "infames",

they're the lowest of the low -

that's basically what being an infames means.

But then we also get these very strange arguments

about the morally corrupting nature of sitting down at the theatre.

What was the morally corrupt aspect of sitting down?

I think the Greeks conducted their assemblies while sitting down

and the Romans didn't, so you were more virtuous and strong.

The funny thing is that the Greek word for civil strife, "stasus",

seems to be associated with ideas of standing up,

whereas the Roman word for civil strife, "sedition",

is actually connected with ideas of sitting down,

and therefore sitting in the theatre

might be a dubious and morally damaging activity.

Roman theatres reflect the aristocratic nature

of Roman society, and unlike Greek theatres,

which encouraged the audience to explore their emotions,

they betray a sense of social unease.

Eventually permanent theatres were constructed in Rome,

but these too were different from the Greek style.

As the Roman republic grew,

it fell into the hands of rival politician warlords -

men like Sulla, the subjugator of Athens,

and Pompey, Julius Caesar and Augustus.

And the competition between these men

helped to drive the construction of permanent theatres in Rome.

In 55 BC, while Julius Caesar was raiding in Britain,

his rival, Pompey the Great,

dedicated the first purpose-built theatre in Rome.

It still exists, but as a ghost in the Roman street plan.

So, Ed, where are we now?

We are in the heart of medieval Rome,

and the great thing about medieval street plans

is they exploit pre-existing structures

and they fossilise the previous urban texture,

and where we are right now, we're in the Theatre of Pompey.

So the curvature of this entire street here

is following the line of the Theatre of Pompey?

It follows the internal line of the theatre.

So if you imagine the edge of the orchestra,

this is the curve of the orchestra.

-So this is the stage right here?

-You'd be looking at the stage.

The good thing about the height of this building

is it allows you to imagine really well the height of the stage,

its enormous, highly sculpted, elaborate stage facade.

And on this side,

this is the beginning of the spectators' seating?

This is the curve of the seats, yes,

so we would imagine, from pretty much where we are,

the seats running up, up and up.

But again, look at the size of that thing,

the scale, the elevation -

it gives you an idea of what a monster this thing was,

a cauldron of sound and noise, atmosphere.

Pompey's monster marked a new epoch for theatre.

This reconstruction, based on the work of the architect Luigi Cannina,

reveals its scale and ambition.

It could hold up to 40,000 spectators,

even more than Greek theatres like Epidaurus.

And it was a very different kind of building.

It was completely enclosed.

Behind the 100-metre stage

rose a lavishly decorated scene building, three storeys high,

and the whole thing was part of a walled complex

which included a park and a new building for the Senate.

I mean, this was an unmistakable and unmissable marker

on the city plan of Rome, wasn't it?

It's the biggest thing that's been built in the city up to this point.

Staking ownership and dominance over the entire place.

Yes, it's a fantastically daring piece of victory building.

This kind of theatre design

reflected the hierarchical nature of the Roman world,

a world that soon went from being a republic to being an empire.

This theatre, the theatre of Marcellus,

was built by an Emperor, the Emperor Augustus.

It's a structure that still evokes a sense of power, order and control.

Where you had once enjoyed theatre in a public open space,

this was a permanently enclosed building.

And unlike Greek theatres, where people arrived all together,

at this theatre, people entered through a large number

of separate, narrow entrances,

because Roman leaders had a fear of large crowds.

After that, stairways took you into different levels of the theatre

which were assigned to people of different social classes.

Senators in the best seats and the plebs at the top.

In the Greek world,

theatre was an inherently open, socially risky process,

but here in the Roman world,

the risk just isn't part of the calculation.

This became the archetypal model for Roman theatres

spreading across the Mediterranean.

It didn't just keep people in order in their seats.

The stuff that was being put on the stage

was also increasingly anodyne as well.

And at the end of the day, that was all due to the man

who was responsible for pretty much everything we can see here -

the Emperor Augustus and his plan for peace and harmony.

Augustus' reign as emperor

marked the start of an unprecedented period of stability in Rome.

And this ordered, harmonious climate

would ultimately give birth to a new kind of drama.

Long ago, the Greek poets had spoken of an age of gold,

an age of peace and harmony.

And now, after the long and vicious years of civil war

that had torn the Roman world in two,

Augustus promised a new age of peace.

His poets sang of it, and most importantly,

he celebrated it here in marble at the Altar of Peace.

It's called the Ara Pacis Augustae, the Altar of Augustan Peace.

It is perhaps the most spectacular example

of Roman sculpture in the world.

And it all has a political message.

It's an altar on which sacrifices would be made

to the goddess of peace.

The garlands around it indicate the prosperity

which will hopefully result.

On the end walls,

mythological scenes depict the new golden age

which will come with Augustus's peace.

And on the sides, we meet the people who have brought it about -

Augustus and his entourage, not forgetting the Roman people.

The whole building mirrors the content of Roman plays -

a combination of history and mythology

with a heavy dose of propaganda.

Peace had never much been worshipped in Rome before this,

but now Augustus put it at the very heart of his message for Rome

and for her empire.

And the delicate subtlety of the carving on this building

belies the brick-in-the-face message it contained.

This was to be a world of peace, but also a world

in which every element, every part of Rome's empire was united -

united UNDER the power of Rome.

This was to be a place, and a world,

unlike any that had been seen before.

This united, pacified world gave birth to a new kind of play -

one that could cross linguistic and cultural boundaries.

It was called pantomime.

But it was not pantomime as we know it.

Augustan pantomimes were mythically fraught episodes

communicated through mute dancing.

All the action was handled

by a solo dancer performing all the parts,

changing masks as he went on,

hence the word "panto" - "every",

"mime" - "part".

Alessandra Zanobi is both a scholar and a dancer.

I think the closest comparison we can make

is with Katakhali dance,

which is this Indian dance drama.

In a way, I think it's the thing which comes closest

to ancient pantomime,

even if the two traditions are so different, you know?

But this combination of story, words, gestures, movement,

it's something so special,

that not even opera maybe could be compared.

There is a story sometimes, but the story is really inferred

just from the movements.

So we're talking about...

The dancer would be would be mute,

but there would be a storyteller alongside, is that right?

Basically the dancer was mute, he wore a mask,

a beautiful mask with a closed mouth,

and he would be backed by a choir or a singer

who were singing the words of the story,

and then a large orchestra usually used to accompany the dance.

You can imagine the impact must have been really powerful.

-It's quite a spectacle.

-Yeah, a big spectacle.

So, obviously, using gesture and dance,

it makes pantomime a very universal medium.

To what extent, really, was it a universal medium

and to what extent was it so popular in Augustan Rome and beyond

BECAUSE it was a universal medium?

Yes, I think that...

Yes, this is a very good point.

I mean, it was so popular

and I think that Augustus, in a way,

supported it because it could cross linguistic boundaries

and ethnic boundaries as well,

and so it embodied, in a way,

Augustus's ideology of a world pacified and united under his reign.

Pantomime was something that could be enjoyed by everyone,

and as a result, it was a fantastic symbol

for the Augustan cultural programme -

uniformity for all.

It's also a sign of a shift away from serious drama

towards mass entertainment.

In Ancient Rome,

theatre had always had to compete directly with other entertainments -

spectacles like gladiatorial combats.

The playwright Terence complained

that on one occasion, half the audience left

when they heard that a rope-dancer was performing next door.

Now, in the age of Empire, lavish public entertainments

were used to augment the power and status of the emperors,

and the desire for this kind of spectacle increased.

Over time, new amphitheatres like the Colosseum

would not only dwarf even Pompey's great theatre,

but would also be dedicated to real - not stage - violence,

bloodily performed before audiences of up to 50,000 at a time.

With spectacles like this to see, performances of plays would dwindle

and drama would become more of a writers' medium.

But not before Latin drama had one last hurrah

in the reign of Emperor Nero.

Nero today is not remembered for many good things.

But from our perspective, he was not only a Hellenophile,

a man who had visited Greece, competed in the Olympic Games,

he was also a lover of the arts.

Cultural life during his reign

was thought to be extremely important, and flourished.

Indeed, it's Nero's time

that sees one of the last real flowerings of Latin literature.

These included a number of plays written by Nero's tutor, Seneca.

Seneca wrote nine tragedies,

which retold stories from Greek myth.

Thyestes was one of Seneca's Greek-style tragedies,

and comparing it to an original Greek tragedy

gives us a fascinating insight into just how far drama had come,

and into the differences between the two great cultures

of Greece and Rome.

The twin brothers Atreus and Thyestes

are rivals for the throne of Mycenae.

Thyestes has been banished after seducing Atreus' wife,

and Atreus, thrown into a violent rage,

concocts a cruel and bloody revenge.

He lures Thyestes back to the kingdom

with false promises of peace.

Then he brutally sacrifices Thyestes' children.

With his own hands he cuts the body into parts...

His terrible vengeance

culminates with him feeding Thyestes his dead children for dinner.

With Seneca, what you get is a lot more rhetoric,

so you get longer speeches - and this is part of the argument

that perhaps these were actually recited rather than performed.

Some of these descriptions, particularly messenger speeches,

where you're reporting something that took place off stage,

some of these are very graphic.

So I'll read you a bit from the messenger speech in the play,

and this is where Atreus is sacrificing his nephews.

"Torn from the still living breasts, the vitals quiver,

"the lungs still breathe and the fluttering heart still beats.

"But he handles the organs and enquires the fates

"and notes the markings of the still warm entrails."

And to what extent do you think that sense of gore

responded to the types of things Romans would see about them

on a fairly daily basis?

I think you have had this cultural shift,

and I think if we think about spectacles like gladiatorial shows

and understand this as entertainment,

then that really perhaps helps us to understand what's going on

with these descriptions.

The plain fact of the matter is

that however influential Seneca's plays may have been,

they were probably rarely performed.

And that meant their influence was confined to the written page.

They'd lost that sense of mass participation

and political dynamism that accompanied theatre

back at its very inception.

And that raises a fundamental question -

in this brave new world,

what happened to drama and theatre back in its birthplace,

in Greece, in Athens,

particularly now that power was held not in the hands of many,

but in the hands of one man?

Back in Greece, theatre had remained part of public life.

But there are signs that drama now faced competition

from Roman spectacular entertainments.

This is Argos,

a classic middle-of-the-road Ancient Greek city-state.

But the impressive Greek theatre here

was given some very Roman renovations.

This place vies for the title of the biggest theatre in Greece.

What we are seeing is not just the centre section,

there would have been seats going all the way round to the sides,

making this a space for 20,000 people.

And it made it the kind of opportunity

the Romans were never going to pass up on.

And, by God, they didn't.

But the best thing they did is over here.

The Romans didn't just use Greek theatres for drama,

but also for gladiatorial combat.

And that led to problems,

because here, in the first reserved row,

where religious officials sat,

gladiators kept falling over and dying on them.

So the Romans came up with a solution. And here it is.

These large potholes that run all the way along the front row

were used for large wooden posts, along which could be strung nets,

and these nets would keep out not only dying gladiators,

but also the wild beasts that the Romans brought onto the stage.

And if you've ever seen a bullfight,

you'll know how necessary these nets are.

Frankly, I think I'd prefer a seat a couple of rows back.

Now, the man responsible for all this was the emperor Hadrian.

And he came to Greece in the 120s

and not only built an enormous aqueduct

that was able to bring water to this perpetually dry city,

but as a result, he was able to build

the massive baths behind me,

and of course, this theatre here as well.

Now, Hadrian's family was Italian,

but had been living in Spain for a long time,

and yet he was a lover of all things Greek.

He had a beard, he liked Greek philosophy,

he had a Greek lover called Antinous,

and it was here in this theatre

that he established a cult in his honour.

Today, we remember Hadrian

for the great wall that he constructed in Britain,

but it's his classical enthusiasm that is his greatest legacy.

And nowhere benefited more than Athens,

the city which had given birth to theatre half a millennium before.

Hadrian's aim was to restore Athens

to what he saw as its ancient cultural glory.

He even managed to finish their gigantic temple of Olympian Zeus,

started nearly 600 years before.

Hadrian pulled out all the stops for Athens.

That went from building temples like this,

to intervening in the olive oil trade,

to laying down the water pipe system

that Athens, in part, still depends on today.

Not for nothing was Hadrian given the title "Graeculus" -

"the Greekling".

Hadrian also made improvements to the Theatre of Dionysus.

Whereas his predecessors had staged gladiator fights in the theatre,

building a wall in front of the seats

to separate the action from the spectators,

Hadrian attempted to reinforce its dramatic origins

by adding an elegant frieze to the stage building.

A little later, a new theatre was constructed

by the tutor of Hadrian's children, Herodes Atticus.

Today, this theatre of Herodes Atticus

is at the epicentre of modern Greek drama in Athens.

I last saw a performance of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night here,

in Greek. Plays put on this stage inherit a fascinating tradition

that stretches back over 2,500 years.

From the great tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides

and the sparky comedy of Aristophanes and Menander,

the plays still speak to the ongoing issues

that occupy human society.

And it would be nice to think that when this theatre was built,

it ushered in a whole new era

of new tragedies and new playwrights,

a new golden age.

But sadly, it was not to be.

There was no new golden age of theatre.

And perhaps that was inevitable.

The riches showered on Athens

were the direct product of Hadrian's patronage.

When he died, it all began to dry up.

And in the end, his interest was fundamentally a literary one,

a love of all those brilliant writers of the past golden age.

So it's no surprise

that Hadrian's most spectacular monument here now

is not a temple or a theatre,

but a library.

This is the business end. This is where the books were kept.

These alcoves once held wooden bookcases for the papyrus scrolls

not just of poetry, philosophy or state archives,

but also plays, comedies.

And with this repository of knowledge,

the Library of Hadrian here in Athens

was set to rival the great Library of Alexandria

and become the intellectual focus for the Mediterranean.

It was perhaps the most luxurious public building in Athens,

with gilded ceilings, marble columns imported from Turkey,

and elegant pools and gardens in the courtyard.

Revered the great works of Greek literature

may have been by the Romans,

but that reverence came intertwined

with a Roman treatment of Greece a bit like a theme park -

a place to go and play at being Greek

and use those great works of literature for debate practice

or just entertainment.

And like with any theme park, there came a time when you went home

and the Romans became fully Roman again.

And yet, it was because of that curious mix

of reverence, make-believe and a little bit of tackiness

that the tragedies and comedies of Ancient Greece survive for us today.

I'm returning to what has become my home from home,

the British School of Athens.

It's the nerve centre of British archaeology in Greece,

and it was here I decided not just to study Ancient Greece,

but to make it into my career.

And one of the reasons for my decision

was my fascination with the plays to be found on its shelves.

For more than two millennia,

it's thanks to the innumerable anonymous hands

writing on I don't know how many different types of paper

in locations littered across the globe

that we still have surviving in our hands today these plays,

these extraordinary examples of human creativity.

And yet it's not until you take the words off the page

and put them on the stage that you realise

not only the incredible emotional impact and innovation

that theatre represented in the ancient world,

but also how crucial theatre was

to the story of the Greek and Roman empires.

Ancient Greek drama began as an astonishing innovation

in a revolutionary world.

It guided and shaped democracy in Athens

and became extraordinarily popular

throughout the Greek world and beyond.

And when the Romans arrived, Greek theatre wasn't lost.

It was adopted and adapted for the new Roman world,

but most importantly, it was preserved.

The influence of Menander,

and of Roman playwrights like Plautus and Terence

can be seen in the works of Shakespeare, Ben Johnson

and Oscar Wilde,

not to mention in modern dramas, romantic comedies and in sitcoms.

But more than that,

we still stage epic performances of the original plays themselves -

a truly astonishing outcome

when we consider that the oldest surviving Ancient Greek drama

is now 2,500 years old.

These plays still speak to us today.

They reveal the fundamental contradictions,

emotions and possibilities

that are represented in human existence.

And that, for me, means that they are going to be around with us

for a long time to come.

Join The Open University as we explore

the connections between Greek theatre and modern-day democracy.

Go to bbc.co.uk/ancientgreece and follow the links

to The Open University's free learning website.

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