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Documentary, BBC Ancient Greece: The Greatest Show on Earth, Episode 2, Kings
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00:00In 405 BC, a new play by the tragedian Euripides won first prize at a festival in Athens.
00:09It was called The Bacchae, and it is one of the most powerful and disturbing plays ever written.
00:16It tells the story of the chaos wrought by the god of theatre and revelry, Dionysus.
00:23It tells of women lured to the mountains where they sing and dance in a frenzy,
00:28and it follows the fate of an unfortunate young king who is tricked into spying on them and is torn limb from limb.
00:36It's a play that suggests a changing world, dangerous and uncertain, where you never really know who or what to trust.
00:47Euripides himself did not live to see his victory.
00:51He died far away from Athens, having left the birthplace of drama behind.
00:58It is likely that Euripides composed The Bacchae here, in Macedon, on the northern fringes of the Greek world,
01:04an area thought by many of the ancient southern Greeks to be wild, unruly and unstable.
01:10And it was here that Euripides lived out his final days, not in the cradle of a democracy, but in the court of a king.
01:19Euripides' departure from Athens and the turmoil and disorder of his play The Bacchae foreshadowed a new era,
01:28one marked by war, instability and chaos.
01:32In the next century, Athens would lose its influence, its significance and even its democracy.
01:41And the balance of power in Greece would shift from democrats to kings.
01:47But drama, that most Athenian of inventions would thrive, spreading throughout the Greek world and beyond.
01:55This episode is the story of the dramatic decline of Athens and the remarkable triumph and transformation of theatre.
02:04During the fifth century, Athens was the preeminent city in Greece, confident, powerful and in control of a vast empire.
02:24It had given birth to two radical new ideas, democracy and theatre.
02:30And the dynamic relationship between these ideas had driven the city's rise to power.
02:37This was the time when the great Trededians, Sophocles and Euripides were staging epic plays like Oedipus and Medea,
02:45and the comedian Aristophanes was composing bawdy and fantastical comedies like Birds.
02:52As well as being great works of art, these plays engaged directly with Athenian democracy and Athenian life.
03:04But by the late fifth century, all of this was at risk.
03:08Athens was also fighting a war, the Peloponnesian War, against the great land power of Sparta.
03:15In 415 BC, still supremely confident, Athens launched a new phase in this war.
03:23She sent an expedition to attack the city of Syracuse on the island of Sicily,
03:29towards the western edges of a Greek world that spread from Marseille to the Black Sea coast.
03:34For two years, brutal fighting raged on the sea and land at Syracuse.
03:39Thucydides called it the greatest slaughter of the war.
03:43He wrote of bodies heaped on top of one another and of rivers clotted with blood.
03:48Finally, in 413 BC, the Athenians were decisively and disastrously defeated.
03:59Those who survived, some 7,000 of them, were imprisoned in these stone quarries.
04:06Amazingly, it is said that you can still see the marks from their chisels on the walls.
04:14Today, this is a famed tourist attraction, but the fun belies the horrific reality of this place in the ancient world.
04:21It was part of a much larger quarry where the Athenians, as prisoners of war, were brought as part of a labour camp.
04:28Can you imagine being forced to work here day in, day out, undertaking the back-breaking work of quarrying these stones,
04:34with no respite from the scorching sun?
04:37There was only one way to escape from this hell.
04:40The historian Plutarch tells us that some Athenians were freed when they were heard quoting lines from Euripides.
04:47Plutarch tells us that the Syracusans were absolutely mad for Euripides and the morsels of his plays that made their way over here.
04:54And he says that the Athenians who did make it home went to Euripides himself to thank him for saving their lives,
05:02because they'd been able to remember and recite some of the lines from his plays.
05:08It's amazing to think that knowing extracts from a play was enough to buy these prisoners their freedom.
05:15It's a sign that theatre was making an impact far beyond Athens.
05:20Such was the popularity of drama here in Sicily that a few decades before the great Aeschylus,
05:25the father of tragedy himself, had come here to produce his plays.
05:31And the message of one play in particular now looked to be coming home to roost.
05:35Aeschylus performed his play The Persians here in Syracuse.
05:39Now that play had critiqued the Persian arrogance that foreshadowed their failed invasion of Greece,
05:45but it had also contained a wider warning for the Athenians.
05:48Beware of hubris. If you overreach, you too could fall.
05:53And in the wake of the failed Athenian expedition here at Syracuse,
05:57many Athenians began to believe that Aeschylus had been right and that their moment of hubris had come.
06:06At first, the people of Athens couldn't believe the news.
06:10An army and an entire navy virtually wiped out.
06:14Many blamed the democracy for authorising such a foolish mission
06:18and the anger and tension even spilled into the streets where some Democrats were attacked.
06:24The great fear now was what would befall Athens in the wider war against Sparta.
06:31Serious issues like these were regularly addressed in the Athenian theatre.
06:36And in the midst of this chaos, the playwright Aristophanes was preparing a new comedy for performance at the theatrical festival.
06:43In 411 BC, Aristophanes put on a play called Lysistrata.
06:49It's one of his most well-known, not least because of its unabashed rudeness.
06:53It was actually banned in Britain until 1957,
06:56and even then the first performance of it was called savagely pornographic.
07:00But it's also one of his most popular because of its strong female protagonist,
07:05but also because its call for peace strikes a chord in our continuously conflict-ridden world.
07:12To 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.
07:23The women also seize control of the Acropolis, where the city's treasury is kept.
07:28When a magistrate, a Praboulos, arrives to retrieve funds for the war,
07:33Lysistrata berates him about the losses that the women have been forced to bear.
07:37Women have to take on more than twice your burden.
07:42Firstly, it's us giving birth to children, then we send them off as soldiers.
07:46The women dress the magistrate up in their clothes and send him away, humiliated.
07:53As the strike continues, the sex-starved men of Greece become increasingly desperate,
07:59until finally they agree to make peace.
08:04So, Rosie, with a play like Lysistrata, can you give us a sense of just how bawdy,
08:10how grotesque the humour in old comedy really was?
08:13Well, it's the kind of thing that's, for example, difficult to stage in schools now,
08:18because it's got men with strapped-on phalluses, you know, very visible,
08:23and jokes, all the innuendos about whether or not they're going to get sex with their wives,
08:28and just the general bawdiness of that.
08:32All the jokes on the women's side, of course, about what it's like being married,
08:36what tricks they get up to, you know, even reference to sexual positions,
08:41the line on the cheese grater.
08:43So, if we look at this, this is from The Pronomous Vars,
08:47and it's actually from satay drama, which is a bit different from old comedy,
08:51but you get the idea from the costume, you can see...
08:55Of just how bawdy and in-your-face it is.
08:57Exactly, it's very explicit.
08:59And, I mean, the kind of jokes that you can make around this
09:03is that a messenger rod you're carrying, for example, it's easy humour.
09:09From our point of view, looking at this play,
09:11you can't believe that this is what they were seeing on stage.
09:14As part of an official festival within ancient Athenian democracy.
09:18Exactly.
09:20The plot is certainly outrageous, but it speaks to serious issues.
09:27The important thing about the Lysistrata is actually not the sex strike.
09:30The young women do have their sex strike,
09:32we all know that's just a silly joke,
09:33because all Athenian men could either have sex with each other,
09:35they could all have sex with each other, go to prostitutes.
09:37There wasn't a problem.
09:38They did not just have to have sex with their wives.
09:40The really important one was the older women,
09:42who, with Lysistrata, take over the place where the keys were owned
09:46by the high priestess of Athena, the inner sanctuary of the Acropolis,
09:50where all the money was stored.
09:53But does the sort of radicalness of the solution, as presenting Lysistrata,
09:56underline the seriousness of the problem?
09:59I think the city is in a state of extraordinary tension.
10:02There is not a family in the city that hasn't lost at least one man
10:05in the disaster in 413 in Sicily.
10:08We know that they had huge crisis over the population,
10:10because they freed a lot of slaves a few years later,
10:12just to fill up the citizen numbers.
10:14I think one of the reasons for me why it's so interesting is that
10:17citizen women have an integral part to play within the polis
10:20in all sorts of ways, in religion and within the oikos and so on,
10:24and yet they're not responsible in any way for what's been happening.
10:27And one of the things I think I see in Leicestershire
10:29is a huge loss of political confidence.
10:31The assault on male power is through the figure of the proboulos,
10:35who is thoroughly feminised and ridiculed.
10:38I think you have to put it into its political context.
10:41A terrible defeat,
10:43Athenians losing self-confidence really,
10:45and with some good reason,
10:47blaming the leaders for their bad advice, etc.
10:50On the other hand, the message overall is,
10:54should the Athenians make peace,
10:57or should they continue to fight the Peloponnesian War?
11:01And the outcome of the play is, of course, peace is great,
11:04because you have much more fun in peacetime than you do in wartime.
11:08You don't lose your husband or your brother or your lover in battle,
11:12and so on, so on.
11:14So the actual big issue is, internal politics,
11:17is Athens going to continue to be a democracy?
11:20And externally, should it or should it not make peace?
11:23A ridiculous plot to throw light on the political dilemmas facing Athens.
11:35But for me, it's the constant references to the harsh realities of war that really resonate.
11:42Athens was at war for most of Aristophanes's career,
11:45and despite the bawdy jokes and the innuendos and the strap-on fallacies,
11:51it's that sense of the horrible nature of war that just constantly comes through.
11:57In fact, the bawdy backdrop, in a way, makes the point more strongly than tragedy ever could.
12:04Despite Lysistrata's message, Athens did not make peace,
12:10and the Peloponnesian War continued grinding down Athenian manpower
12:14and the Athenian economy for a further seven years.
12:18Until, in 404 BC, Sparta finally proved victorious.
12:23Athens was humiliated.
12:28She lost her empire, she lost her navy, she lost her city walls,
12:33and worst of all, she lost her democracy.
12:35Here, on the Penix, the home of the Athenian assembly, the peace terms were worked out.
12:44And as the victorious Spartans looked on,
12:46some Athenians suggested that maybe democracy had had its day,
12:49and that it was time for something different.
12:51The hardcore Democrats walked out in disgust and in their absence.
12:55A motion was passed to do away with democracy and put Athens into the hands of 30 oligarchs.
13:04But democracy was not dead, and the Democrats were soon plotting their revenge.
13:12The Democrats focused their resistance at the port of Athens, the Piraeus.
13:18This area was the home of the Athenian trireme warships and their rowers,
13:22the poorer citizens of the polis who were the bedrock of the democratic system.
13:29It was here, under the cover of darkness, that the Democrats regrouped,
13:33determined to restore their democracy.
13:36The revolutionaries chose as their place of assembly the theatre in Piraeus.
13:41Now, we can't visit that theatre today because it's sadly underneath a couple of apartment blocks,
13:46but the Piraeus were so theatre-crazy that they built themselves a second one,
13:50and here it is, this one dating from the mid-second century BC.
13:54It might seem odd to have chosen a theatre as a meeting point for a revolution,
14:00but don't forget that theatres had always been civic gathering spaces in ancient Greece,
14:04and we know from the sources that armies, entire armies, used them as muster points.
14:09And indeed, the very same theatre in Piraeus had been used just a couple of years before
14:13as the rallying point for a revolution.
14:15So, when these revolutionaries were choosing where to meet for a revolution
14:20whose very intention was the reinstatement of democracy,
14:24the theatre was the obvious choice.
14:29The armies of the Democrats and the 30 oligarchs clashed in battle in the area surrounding the Piraeus Theatre,
14:35and the Democrats eventually managed to force a reinstatement of their democracy.
14:40They were honoured with a victory march to the Acropolis,
14:43and the Athenians agreed to move forward together,
14:46forgiving all crimes save those of the 30 oligarchs.
14:49It looked like Athens was getting back on track,
14:56but the grand celebrations for the reinstatement of democracy
15:00masked the fact that Athens' days of complete supremacy were now in the past,
15:05and things would never be quite the same again.
15:08Nowhere was this uncomfortable truth more obvious than on the stage.
15:13In 388 BC, Aristophanes staged a play called Plutos, or Wealth in English,
15:21and it spoke to the age-old conundrum.
15:24Why is it that in the disparity between rich and poor,
15:28those who are deserving and hard-working normally come off the worst,
15:32and those who are undeserving and cunning get rich?
15:36Kremolos is an honest, hard-working man disillusioned with the unfairness of life.
15:42Out on the road one day, he meets wealth,
15:45and realises that wealth is blind,
15:47and that is why he distributes his riches so unfairly.
15:51Kremolos takes wealth to a healing sanctuary,
15:55where his sight can be restored.
15:57The upshot is that the corrupt will be stripped of their riches,
16:01and the virtuous can finally prosper.
16:03But in a key moment in the play,
16:05Kremolos encounters the character of poverty,
16:08who casts doubt on the entire scheme.
16:11Just supposing wealth could get his sight back,
16:14and distribute all in equal portions.
16:16No one would develop any craft or expertise.
16:19Once there's no incentive,
16:20who is going to smelt the metal,
16:22build the ships or make the clothing,
16:24manufacture vehicles,
16:25stitch the footwear,
16:26brick the bricking,
16:27wash the washing,
16:28farm the farming?
16:31With this play,
16:33we're left with the feeling that despite the opening of wealth's eyes,
16:37the world will remain a very unfair place.
16:40It's a thought that we can well relate to today,
16:43and is perhaps why wealth is a play that still gets performed.
16:47I don't know.
16:48I don't know.
16:49I don't know.
16:50I don't know.
16:51I don't know.
16:52I don't know.
16:53I'm not even aware of what we're talking about today.
16:55Because, of course,
16:57it's very famous,
16:58even though the public expression,
17:00that the wealth is a common one.
17:02We say it daily.
17:04Without the interest of Aristotle,
17:06or the impoverished people have reached us.
17:08We believe that all of us,
17:10because of him,
17:11he often shares his money.
17:13So, the idea of this works,
17:15is that it's a myth.
17:17Do you think there are particular historical circumstances
17:20surrounding its creation,
17:22that help us understand why that play was written as it is?
17:26It's a different society.
17:28He was forced to bring the city to his city.
17:34Because, of course,
17:36you know,
17:37when these parties were treated,
17:38they were sent by and they were sent.
17:41They were sent by,
17:42and the people that were sent by,
17:44they would send
17:44it to their fault.
17:46When the great catastrophe was done,
17:50and it was developed.
17:51They ended up being great.
17:52And the grunt of money,
17:53and the dead Tรผrkans,
17:55who had a child who had his child,
17:58or was that his family of his friend,
18:01that he had read it,
18:02when he told his people to their friends,
18:04and he explained by the way?
18:05After the war of the Athenians and the war of Athens,
18:10Athens is a, with today's opinion, a civil society.
18:15Every citizen closes his head, his head,
18:18and he doesn't care for anything.
18:20He doesn't care for the public.
18:35It's not just a very passive and tired.
18:37Aristophanes' comedy has lost its biting satire
18:40and its direct commentary on individuals and the audience.
18:43Instead, its themes are more universal.
18:46Rich, poor, worthy, unworthy.
18:49It feels like comedy and theatre more generally
18:53has not only lost its edge
18:55but lost its specific Athenian identity.
18:59It's become more general
19:01and at the same time left the Athenians looking back,
19:04nostalgic for an era of lost glory.
19:11The decline of Athens marks a turning point,
19:14both in the history of Greece and in the history of theatre.
19:18Athens had invented drama,
19:20but how would this innovative and democratically charged art form
19:24fare in the new world that followed Athens' defeat?
19:29This new world of the fourth century
19:31saw the different city-states of Greece
19:33jostling for control while coming under increasing pressure from new powers,
19:37many of them led by tyrants and kings.
19:40In truth, the fourth century reads as a depressing catalogue
19:44of battles, wars and fractured alliances
19:47which played out in the plains of central Greece.
19:50In ancient times this whole region was known as the dancing floor of Ares, the god of war.
20:00It was here that the fate of Greece was decided on the battlefields time and time again.
20:05One conflict in particular symbolises the chaos of the period.
20:15In 371 BC, Sparta and Thebes fought an epic battle at Leuctra at the heart of the dancing floor of Ares.
20:22Against 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.
20:33Thebes' shock and awe tactics worked brilliantly.
20:36The battle was over in less than an hour, and on this spot, where the Spartan king was supposedly struck down,
20:42Thebes erected a victory monument topped with Spartan shields taken in the battle.
20:47And to rub salt in the wound, the Thebans demanded that Sparta's allies cleared their dead from the battlefield first,
20:54so that the scale of Sparta's loss could be humiliatingly on display.
21:00This monument marked a decisive change in the balance of power in Greece.
21:05But more than that, Cicero later claimed that this was the first ever battlefield memorial to a Greek-on-Greek conflict.
21:12This kind of monument was to become a defining feature of the century that followed,
21:17as Greek states jostled for power and engaged in their favourite pastime, fighting one another.
21:25It was a situation that Aristophanes had already warned against in Lysistrata.
21:31You worship at the selfsame holy altars, just as if you're a family.
21:36Olympia, Thermopylae, Delphi and elsewhere, yet with foreign armies at the ready to attack, what are you doing?
21:43Destroying our Greek cities, killing fellow Greeks.
21:50This is hardly the kind of context in which you would expect drama to thrive.
21:55But what's really amazing is that while Greece was tearing itself apart, theatre seems to have been flourishing.
22:02During the fourth century BC, theatres emerged all over the Greek world.
22:07But the irony is that despite this explosion of theatre construction,
22:11we don't have a single complete tragedy surviving from this period.
22:15After the deaths of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, we are left with nothing but fragments.
22:21It is true that great spread happens in the first half of the fourth century,
22:25when every city that had cultural pretensions built a theatre.
22:30There seems to be a neat story.
22:32Sophocles and Euripides die, and within everybody's perception of it,
22:35Nietzsche says that Euripides and Sophocles killed tragedy.
22:38So the easiest story would be important tragedy came to an end,
22:42and sort of mass entertainment spread throughout the Greek world in a rather superficial way.
22:47I think it's much more complicated than that.
22:50It's really what happens in later antiquity.
22:53And the great three become educational set books.
22:56And that's really why we have them.
22:58And it was those three who were most read.
23:02So texts of the other tragedians, they simply weren't copied enough times to survive.
23:08It doesn't mean they weren't any good.
23:10There were very famous tragedians in the fourth century,
23:13people who made a big mark and people who were remembered in later centuries.
23:19The fragments of plays by these writers that have survived support the idea that this was an extremely active era.
23:27One Athenian playwright from this time was called Astadamus the Younger.
23:31He was a relative of the great Aeschylus.
23:33And he's said to have composed 240 plays during his career, won many first prizes,
23:39and even had a statue of himself put up by the Athenians.
23:42And what the surviving fragments also allow us is a unique window into how the subject matter of tragedy is changing during this period.
23:54Astadamus wrote a play called Antigone, just like Sophocles and Euripides had done in the fifth century.
24:00It again told the story of how Antigone had broken the law by burying her rebel brother and is sentenced to death by King Creon,
24:10against the wishes of his son Hymon, who is in love with her.
24:14In Sophocles' play, the key moment is the political debate between Creon and Hymon about leadership and justice,
24:21and the play ends with Antigone's and Hymon's suicide.
24:25In Astadamus' version, Hymon and Antigone run away and have a child together.
24:31They are both sentenced to death, but Heracles intervenes to try and save them.
24:36It's the same basic story, but the emphasis has shifted.
24:42Well, we've already got the sense in the fifth century of changing myth,
24:46where you might have one playwright who's already done an Antigone,
24:50so you want to change it and make it your own as a playwright.
24:54You get that even more in the fourth century.
24:57If you imagine they're using the same material, the same myths,
25:00but there's a taste for far more elaborate plots.
25:03You're still dealing with myth, but the interest has shifted.
25:07So, in that example of Antigone, the focus there is what happens in that relationship.
25:14You hear hardly anything about that relationship in the fifth century version,
25:18but in the fourth century, that becomes a real focus.
25:21Is that to do with tragedy's broadening appeal in this period, beyond the confines of democratic Athens?
25:27Well, I think the internationalisation is really important,
25:30because, after all, you want this to appeal.
25:33But you now have playwrights from all over the Mediterranean coming to compete.
25:38And so there's that shift.
25:40And, of course, the particular political circumstances are different in the different cities.
25:47So, I mean, a shift to the romantic themes, domestic, it has a broader appeal.
25:53Theatre was becoming more about spectacle and entertainment and less about political process and debate.
26:03And as Athens' power waned, the plots drifted away from Athens and from its democratic process
26:10to focus more on personal dilemmas and relationships,
26:15the kind of stuff that would be interesting and resonate with, well, pretty much anyone, anywhere.
26:20Indeed, tragedy was becoming very much more of what it is today.
26:25There's no better evidence for these trends than the ruins of a little-known city that was a product of the Battle of Leuctra.
26:35After their victory in that battle, the city of Thebes surrounded their defeated Spartan enemies
26:40with a series of newly established cities in the Peloponnese.
26:44I've come to this rather unpromising-looking industrial part of the Peloponnese
26:50in search of a city called Megalopolis, the great city.
26:53Now, I've read about this place lots in books and I've studied lots of floor plans,
26:57but I've never actually been here for real.
27:00And what I'm searching for, first of all, is the theatre,
27:03a theatre said by the ancient sources to be the biggest in the whole of mainland Greece.
27:08It held up to 20,000 people, and it is further evidence that,
27:18despite the turbulent times, theatre was growing in popularity.
27:25There's an extraordinary calm to this place,
27:28but what it symbolises is a place that's tried to put itself on the map out of nowhere,
27:35a sort of ancient version of Milton Keynes.
27:39When they built this place, they gave it everything a city should need.
27:41They gave it an assembly, they gave it an agora, they gave it a sports centre,
27:46and they gave it a theatre, a huge theatre.
27:50Theatre, by this stage, had become part of the dress code
27:55of what a Greek city should look like.
27:58And more important than that, a theatre had now become a symbol of Greekness itself.
28:08Theatre had become an essential part of any Greek community,
28:12but the role that it now played in that community was changing.
28:16And this transformation can be traced in the ruined remains of Megalopolis.
28:21When this theatre was built, it was placed directly facing the city's political assembly place.
28:28It's an extraordinary example of how these two facets of polis life, politics and theatre,
28:36were once thought to be intimately connected.
28:39But you know there's an irony here.
28:41As Megalopolis was being built, as this city was being created out of nothing,
28:46the very institution of the Greek city, the polis, was beginning to falter.
28:52Now we were in a very different world, a world of tyrants and kings.
28:56The very vitality and viability of the polis was beginning to be in doubt.
29:05And there's perhaps no better symbol of that gradual decay than here at Megalopolis
29:11and right here in the theatre.
29:13Because in the mid-2nd century BC, the people of Megalopolis built this.
29:18A solid, high stone wall that cut off the theatre from the assembly place.
29:26The people of this great city themselves cut off the umbilical cord between theatre and politics.
29:34This gradual transformation in the role of theatre was aided by a crucial innovation
29:46which we know occurred in the early 4th century BC.
29:49The proof is here, in this inscription at the Epigraphic Museum.
29:53It says that in exactly 386 BC,
29:56palaeon, drama, proton, paradidaxan.
30:02For the first time, an old drama was put on as an extra at the festival.
30:08The 4th century saw the start of revivals.
30:13This meant that old plays by the great tradidians of the 5th century,
30:17Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides,
30:19could be performed alongside current playwrights like Astadamus.
30:23It was the birth of a classic repertoire,
30:26and it fuelled another of the most important theatrical shifts of the period.
30:31We're now 45 years later in 341 BC,
30:35and this inscription lists the playwrights and the plays
30:38that were put on at the city Dionysia in Athens in that year.
30:41And here's our man, Astadamus, who actually won first prize this year,
30:44and it tells us the names of his three tragedies,
30:47including Antigone, that he put on.
30:49But what's also fascinating about this inscription
30:52is the prominence it gives to the actors.
30:55Not only does it give us the name of the lead actor in each of the plays,
30:59but also, here's the key line,
31:01it tells us Neoptolemos, one of the actors,
31:04Enica, he won.
31:06He won the prize for the best actor at the festival as well.
31:10And indeed, Neoptolemos was a busy guy that year
31:13because he was lead actor in more than one of the plays,
31:16and it tells us that he was the producer for one of the old plays
31:21that was being re-performed as well.
31:23And what this stone symbolises is this growing shift
31:27during the course of the century in importance
31:29from the tragedians, the playwrights,
31:31towards the actors as being the real kings of the theatre.
31:35They were the great entertainers of their day,
31:44and they had magnificent physique, they had magnificent voices.
31:48Actually, the tragic actors and the comic actors,
31:50people didn't do both.
31:52That's rather interesting.
31:53You were one or the other.
31:54The tragic actors, though, were very famous for their voices,
31:57and some of them were even employed to go on diplomatic missions and so on.
32:00Right, so you want to send an embassy, you hire an actor to go along
32:04and put the case as well as he possibly can on your behalf.
32:07And this is Neoptolemos?
32:09Yeah, yeah, well, and others as well.
32:12One thing, though, one has to bear in mind is that the cultural movement
32:16within ancient Greece doesn't seem to have obeyed military history.
32:19Generally speaking, artists, musicians, including actors,
32:23seemed to have travelled across the boundaries of hostility.
32:28And so that meant that cities, which might well be on very bad terms,
32:32were all competing to set up their own cultural activities.
32:36Cities laid out large sums of money, built wonderful theatres,
32:41supplied wonderful facilities in order to attract the best actors
32:45to their city to put on performances.
32:48Theatre had become a sort of cultural currency.
32:53Competition for the best actors and playwrights was extremely fierce,
32:56and fees soared, giving rich kings the upper hand.
33:00But theatre's transformation into a hugely popular
33:03and lucrative entertainment business
33:05raised questions about its value to society.
33:09Two different views of the value of theatre
33:12can be found in the works of two of the greatest thinkers of the age,
33:16Plato and Aristotle.
33:18Now, for Plato, in his ideal society,
33:21poetry and theatre are actually banned
33:23because they're just entertainment.
33:25Worse than that, they're imitation, not truth.
33:29Yet they can seem like the truth.
33:31And as a result, they can lead people astray.
33:34But for Aristotle, it's a very different case.
33:36He sees a place for theatre in the ideal society
33:40because it is able to speak to universal emotions and ideals of humanity.
33:46And more than that, it gives the audience what he calls catharsis.
33:50And catharsis is a notoriously difficult word to translate,
33:53but it means something along the lines of purification,
33:57a purging of emotion that comes as a result of watching tragedy,
34:01and as a result can give people the ability to better control their emotions.
34:08But the very fact that two such eminent thinkers are so vociferously arguing
34:13about the value of theatre at this time in the fourth century
34:16suggests that there really is something of a crisis of confidence
34:21about the value and role of theatre in ancient Greek society itself.
34:26Theatre's role was made increasingly uncertain by the changing balance of power in Greece.
34:33By the mid-fourth century, after years of conflict,
34:36the richest and most powerful figure in the Greek world was not a democrat but a king,
34:41Philip II of Masten.
34:43At the site of the Macedonian royal tombs at Agai,
34:47archaeologists have discovered an extraordinary array of treasures
34:51testifying to the wealth and might of Philip's kingdom.
34:55Philip created a strong army and made canny alliances.
34:59He brought the best craftsmen to his kingdom
35:01and secured the greatest thinker of the age,
35:03Aristotle as tutor for his son Alexander,
35:06the boy who would later become Alexander the Great.
35:09It's one of the more unfair characterisations of ancient history
35:13that Macedon was some kind of savage and uncultured place.
35:16Far from it.
35:17It was a hive of creativity and high culture.
35:20Not just in terms of using precious metals for vessels
35:23or creating extraordinary armour, but also in terms of the theatre.
35:27Philip brought dramatists from across Greece
35:29to compete in his own dramatic competitions.
35:31Poets followed him in his campaigns
35:33and actors came to live, work and reside in Macedon.
35:38Neoptolemus sold his place in Athens and moved north.
35:41And Philip used all of this as a crucial part of his campaign
35:46for political and cultural supremacy.
35:49Well, he was the super patron.
35:56He was the Louis the 14th of the day.
35:58And so if you wanted to get the best space, the best support,
36:02the biggest fees, and you are now becoming more professional.
36:07So actors move.
36:08They don't just perform as citizens in their own city.
36:11So Philip is there. It all comes together.
36:14He accelerates the process.
36:16Actors become far, far more important.
36:18They knew all these stories off my heart.
36:20And we get superbly rich and famous actors like Neoptolemus
36:23or Theodorus, who's the Laurence Olivier of antiquity
36:28and fantastically rich.
36:30Philip II certainly invited famous actors to his court.
36:35He got famous actors going on diplomatic missions for him.
36:39And he tried to use theatre one way or another
36:42to help affirm his power.
36:45Philip understood that having the best plays and performers
36:50would enhance his own greatness.
36:52He also understood that kingship is itself a form of theatre.
36:56And in befriending famous actors like Neoptolemus,
36:59he ensured that positive reports about his regime
37:02found their way back to Athens
37:04and into the political debates taking place on the Ponyx.
37:07It was here in the assembly that the Athenians debated the growing threat from Macedon
37:13and tried to decide whether Philip should be considered friend or foe.
37:18Heading the pro-Philip faction was an actor turned politician called Escanes.
37:25Arguing against him was the politician and orator Demosthenes
37:28who believed Athens had to oppose Philip if necessary by force.
37:33Here, on the Ponyx, time and time again Demosthenes and Escanes clashed over the Philip question.
37:43Demosthenes' argument was that Escanes had effectively taken bribes to work in the king's interest
37:49and not in those of his home city.
37:51But what's really interesting is the language he uses to make his case.
37:55He refers to Escanes as Hippocrates, the Greek word for an actor.
38:02You, Escanes, are a Hippocrates, a bit player of parts,
38:07while I am the one sitting in the audience.
38:10You always serve our enemies' interests in politics, I those of our country.
38:16The Greek word for actor, Hippocrates, is the root for our word, hypocrite.
38:23So where did this uncertainty come from?
38:26Well, as Greece became more and more dominated by rich, powerful leaders,
38:31so the corrupting force of money and the fear of the corrupting force of money increased.
38:36Actors were, at the end of the day, like mercenary soldiers.
38:39They sold their services to the highest bidder
38:41and, more importantly, they had the ability to imitate and to deceive.
38:45So what everyone was worried about was that Philip was writing his own play
38:51and getting the public figures of Athens to star in it as his key actors.
38:57It was only a matter of time before Athens would have to decide one way or the other.
39:03In 338 BC, Demosthenes persuaded the assembly to vote in favour of meeting Philip in battle.
39:12This battle, Demosthenes versus Philip, Democrats versus Kings, would determine the future of Greece and the fortunes of theatre.
39:22Philip amassed his forces here in the plains of Cyreneia, right at the heart of the dancing floor of Ares.
39:29The king himself led his army and, leading the cavalry, his son Alexander,
39:34who would become Alexander the Great, then just 18 years old.
39:38And facing up against them, the combined forces of Athens and Thebes,
39:42and in the Athenian ranks, the orator Demosthenes.
39:50Philip was victorious, while Demosthenes, whose words had so inflamed the conflict, is said to have fled the scene.
39:59Two monuments to the battle remain visible to this day.
40:02They stand for more than just the graves of the fallen.
40:06They stand for the end of the independent and free politics of Greek city-states.
40:11Beneath these trees lie the ashes of Philip's fallen warriors.
40:16Their bodies were burned on a grand funeral pyre decorated with weapons,
40:21before being buried beneath a huge mound of earth.
40:25The second monument to the battle sits beside the modern town of Cyreneia.
40:32This is the lion at Cyreneia, proudly facing the battlefield.
40:37Its origins are somewhat mysterious, but what's really crucial is what's underneath it.
40:42254 skeletons laid out in seven rows, a mass grave, belonging to, we think,
40:49members of the Theban sacred band who fell in the battle.
40:53And their skeletons testify to the ferocity of the clash, leg bones broken in two, skulls fractured.
41:00And today the Greeks, as they do with all cemeteries, have lined it with cypress trees,
41:05forever marking the sanctity and importance of this place.
41:09I defy anyone to come here and not feel the importance of this place,
41:18this place where the fortunes of Greece changed forever.
41:24The world that had given birth to theatre was no longer governed by city-states or democrats.
41:35It was a world controlled by a king.
41:39But the story of the relationship between history and theatre would take a shocking and dramatic twist.
41:46Tragedy and real life were about to clash.
41:49In 336 BC, the famous actor Neoptolemus, now a resident of Macedon,
41:57was preparing an important performance for the king at the royal city of Agai.
42:02He was to present pieces from his tragedy repertoire at a royal banquet
42:06on the eve of the celebration of Philip's daughter's marriage.
42:11We don't know the name of the tragedy he chose, but the historian Diodorus preserved the words.
42:17Your thoughts now reach higher than the air.
42:21But there is a swift-footed one who makes a way with the far-reaching hopes of mortal men.
42:27He is Hades, source of woe.
42:30Philip was delighted with the performance,
42:32and after the banquet the crowd raced to the theatre at Agai
42:36where the festivities would continue at daybreak.
42:39This was the scene of the celebration.
42:42The spectators took their seats before dawn.
42:44Every seat was filled, and as the curtain of darkness rose, the procession began.
42:50Here, in the theatre, carried amidst the procession were thirteen lavishly adorned statues.
42:57Twelve of them representing the gods,
43:00and the thirteenth representing Philip as their enthroned companion.
43:05And a little way behind the statues walked Philip himself, clothed in white,
43:11and without a bodyguard to demonstrate his omnipotence.
43:15And at that moment, one of his own soldiers rushed into the theatre and stabbed him to death.
43:25The sources suggest that Philip's attacker nursed a personal grudge against the king,
43:30but will never know the whole truth.
43:33The assassin was killed as he tried to flee the scene.
43:36The whole sequence of events was worthy of a tale by Euripides himself.
43:41And in fact, later in life, the actor, Neoptolemus, was asked what was his favourite scene in tragedy.
43:46And he replied, not one in any play, but one on a much greater stage,
43:50watching Philip enter as the thirteenth god and then being killed here in the theatre.
44:02Philip's body was placed on a pyre and burned in traditional Macedonian fashion
44:07before his bones were wrapped in purple cloth, encased in an ossuary of hammered pure gold,
44:13and buried here in this tomb alongside some of the riches of his kingdom.
44:18The findings here at the royal tombs reveal the extravagance of the funeral.
44:23This gold myrtle wreath is made up of 80 leaves and 112 flowers.
44:29Philip's luxurious funeral arrangements were organised by the new king, his son Alexander.
44:37What happened next is the stuff of legend.
44:40By the age of 25, Alexander was no longer just king of Macedon and leader of the Greeks.
44:46He ruled an empire that comprised two million square miles and reached as far east as Afghanistan.
44:52And everywhere he went, he took theatre.
44:55Alexander could quote Euripides by heart, he read Greek tragedies on campaign,
45:00and he held Greek festivals of drama.
45:03In just over a decade, Alexander single-handedly changed the nature of the ancient world.
45:09But as Alexander's horizons grew, Athens' were limited to her own borders and she had to adapt accordingly.
45:16One politician who came to define this era was called Lycurgus.
45:20He dealt with Athens' defeat by using the funds available to celebrate the glory days of theatre.
45:26The most lasting legacy of Lycurgus' time in office is actually here.
45:32In 330 BC, he commissioned the first permanent stone theatre of Dionysus here in Athens.
45:39Indeed, throughout the entire time of the glory period of Greek tragedy and comedy,
45:43it had been a temporary theatre here, made of wooden stacks put up every year, year on year on year,
45:49with a few permanent seats below.
45:51Now it was a glorious monument to the greatness of Athenian cultural glory.
45:59It doubled the size, the number of spectators that could be taken,
46:02now nearly 17,000 rather than the 10,000 before,
46:06and indeed the Athenians loved it so much that they started using this place
46:10as their official political assembly place, more than the Ponyx,
46:13the place where it had been during the 5th century.
46:16And perhaps the most interesting bit is actually here, or at least it was here once upon a time.
46:21A monument was set up with three towering bronze statues
46:26to none other than Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the great Tredegians.
46:36In addition, Lycurgus ordered that copies be made of all of their plays
46:40which were preserved in the public archives.
46:43Their works were now classics.
46:46Lycurgus ensured that although Athens may have lost everything else,
46:50she still had theatre.
46:54Lycurgus era, if you call it that, was consequent upon a disastrous defeat
46:59which is almost equivalent to the defeat by the Spartans in 404.
47:04So Lycurgus made a big point, big thing about back to the future.
47:09The way we go forward, guys, is by consolidating, by going back to
47:14what we were really good at before, and part of that is literally setting in stone
47:19three Tredegians with, you know, all those other hundreds getting forgotten as a result.
47:26Paul's absolutely right that the crisis of the defeat
47:30that brought about the whole Lycurgian culture was terrible, and Athens did go back to the future.
47:37But they knew they could no longer try for political power.
47:40This was obviously hopeless under the new regime.
47:44But what they could do was claim that they had invented theatre and that they'd invented philosophy,
47:50which is very much true.
47:52It's very much about celebrating the great theatrical past.
47:56It's very self-consciously building on the repertoire.
48:00One of the things, going back slightly before Lycurgus,
48:02is the export market for both tragedy and comedy has boomed in the fourth century.
48:06And it's difficult to say whether that has a sort of a feedback effect
48:11into the kind of drama that's being produced in Athens
48:13and whether the kind of forms of drama that proliferate in the fourth century
48:17are due to the demands of the export market as well.
48:20I mean, if you look at the plays of Aristophanes that seem to have had some kind of life outside of Greece,
48:24they're the ones where you've got hardly any kind of political references.
48:28It's clear that theatre was still central to Athens,
48:33but the reasons why people came here had changed.
48:37Whereas once they had come here to connect and to be challenged,
48:40now they came here to be comforted.
48:43There was certainly much here to be proud of,
48:46but it's hard to shake the feeling that behind this new splendour,
48:49something significant had been lost.
48:54These changes were reflected on the Athenian stage itself,
48:57in a new kind of drama, one that focused on more mundane affairs,
49:02everyday people and everyday life.
49:04Inspiration for this new kind of drama came from a scholar called Theophrastus.
49:09His most important works were his studies in botany,
49:12but when he wasn't categorising plants,
49:15Theophrastus turned his expert powers of observation to people-watching.
49:20This is a copy of Theophrastus' characters.
49:23Now, character comes from the Greek word to etch, to make...
49:26permanent imprint, and Theophrastus applies it here, not to things, but to us,
49:31and to the inner nature of human beings themselves.
49:34It's a brilliant piece of acute observation.
49:37Theophrastus says there are 30 character types out there.
49:40The flatterer, the boring person, the person who's always got bad timing,
49:47the person who's got bad taste, and the person who's got petty ambition.
49:52And the thing is, these character types don't just give us a fantastic window onto the people of ancient Athens.
49:59They can be applied to any city, anywhere in the world, at any time.
50:04The Mean Man.
50:07He examines his boundary marks every day to see that they have not been touched.
50:12He forbids his wife to lend salt, observing that these trifles make a large sum in the course of a year.
50:18The Garrulous Man.
50:20Your garrulous man is one who sits beside a stranger and tells the dream he had last night,
50:25everything he ate for supper, how the present age is sadly degenerate,
50:29that wheat is selling very low, and that hosts of strangers are in town.
50:33The Exquisite Man.
50:36He has his hair cut frequently, his teeth are always pearly white.
50:41While his old suit is still good, he gets himself a new one,
50:44and he anoints himself with the choicest perfumes.
50:48Everyday character types like these provided moulds for writers of what we now call New Comedy,
50:54and the most famous of the New Comedy playwrights was one of Theophrastus' students, Menander.
51:00Sadly, hardly any examples of this new style have survived.
51:04We have lots of names and titles, but only one complete play.
51:08It was only revealed in 1957 after being discovered in Egypt buried in a sealed jar,
51:13and it was by Menander.
51:18But from this one surviving play and a number of other fragments,
51:21we can get a pretty good idea what New Comedy was really like.
51:24And in fact, many of Menander's titles could have come from Theophrastus' characters.
51:29He has plays called The Flatterer, The Woman-Hater, or The Superstitious Man.
51:34But the key thing is here that, just like Theophrastus, the titles are of ordinary people.
51:39No mythical heroes, no political leaders, just people like you and me.
51:44The importance of these stock character types for New Comedy is also demonstrated by the fact
51:51that there are lots of stock character masks surviving that would have been used on the stage.
51:56So we have, for example, the ruler-slave, or the courtesan, or my personal favourite, the first old man.
52:03And a number of these can be found in Menander's sole surviving complete play, The Grouch.
52:10The Grouch is a man named Knaemon.
52:13He hates the outside world and wants to shut himself away from life.
52:17He shouts at servants, insults his neighbours, and pelts visitors with stones.
52:22But Knaemon's seclusion is threatened when a wealthy young man, Sostratos, falls in love with his daughter and wants to marry her.
52:31Knaemon 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 love-lorn Sostratos.
52:42This ordeal forces Knaemon to realise that no man is an island.
52:47I admit I may have made one error.
52:50That was thinking that a single person could exist who's fully self-reliant with no need of anyone.
52:57New Comedy is far less bawdy.
53:00You still have some slapstick, you still have a little bit of innuendo here and there,
53:05but for the main part, you know, the strap-on phalluses are gone.
53:10A lot of the jokes about bodily function are gone.
53:13There's a shift to concern about the domestic and, well, you get the emergence of stock characters.
53:20In the example of The Grouch, you have a boy falling in love with a girl and there's going to be some obstacle.
53:27In this case, the obstacle is Knaemon, the father of the girl, who is this terrible misanthrope.
53:35Okay, he just does not want to speak to anyone ever at all.
53:39And what sense of the key elements of New Comedy do you think resonate with the comedy that we understand today?
53:50If we think about The Grouch and this misanthropic figure who's right at the centre of it,
53:57then you might think about more relatively recent playwrights.
54:01So you might think about Mollier and his misanthrope.
54:04Here's a production that was done in Liverpool's Playhouse.
54:07And here you see Alsest, the misanthrope in the play.
54:11He, like Knaemon in Menander, is resisting the rules of society.
54:17And the same thing you can see being explored in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens.
54:23You have a central character who's really grumpy with society.
54:29Here he is in this dinner party with his apparent friends,
54:33who turn out just to be using him for his wealth.
54:36You know, while these aren't directly drawn from Menander,
54:40they take that original idea as a way of really shaping the entire play.
54:54The Grouch is a work entirely unlike that of early Aristophanes.
54:59Its world is the home.
55:00Domestic bliss and equal amounts of domestic strife,
55:03but absolutely nothing to do with the wider world,
55:06and particularly with politics.
55:08It's the ancient equivalent of one foot of the grave,
55:11men behaving badly, or comedies like Frasier and Friends.
55:15It's kitchen sink drama.
55:17And in reality, that was really the only horizon Athenians had left.
55:22This new comedy symbolises the end of an era,
55:26the decline of Athens.
55:28But it is also a truly revolutionary moment in drama.
55:34Menander, or Menandros, made a very big impact.
55:37Comedy changed into a new type of comedy,
55:41a comedy of families,
55:44a comedy of errors,
55:46a comedy of manners,
55:47a comedy of mistakes,
55:49and of identity.
55:51Much more like the comedy that comes down
55:54through the Roman comedians,
55:56through Plautus and Terence,
55:57to Shakespeare and Moliere and Oscar Wilde.
56:02And if you look at Ben Jonson's poem
56:04facing the portrait of Shakespeare in the first folio,
56:08he actually alludes to Shakespeare as the Menander of his day.
56:13So, while tragedy remained fundamentally,
56:18I would say, the same kind of thing,
56:20all the way from 500 down as far as we can trace it,
56:24comedy did fundamentally change its nature
56:27from the absurdly fantastical and wonderful
56:33carnival comedies of Aristophanes and his contemporaries
56:37down to what we think of as comedy.
56:48Theatre began the century as a place of biting
56:50and pointed political commentary,
56:52and more than that, as the obvious choice,
56:54as a rallying point for democratic revolution.
56:57And yet, as the years passed,
56:59whereas Athens suffered in a constantly changing
57:02and unsettled world,
57:04theatre went from strength to strength,
57:06spreading across the Hellenistic Empire.
57:11It had also become more like theatre as we know it today,
57:15professional and exportable,
57:17with powerful actors, touring companies,
57:19and a rich and varied repertoire.
57:22Theatre had become a symbol of Greekness
57:25and a tool of power and influence
57:27coveted by kings and commoners alike.
57:30It had outgrown its birthplace and spread,
57:33not just through Greece,
57:35but to Italy, Egypt, Libya and as far east as Afghanistan.
57:40It's an amazing story,
57:42but for Athens it is also a story of loss.
57:45Theatre's success is a direct reflection of Athens' loss of power,
57:50influence and uniqueness during the course of the 4th century.
57:55Athens was no longer the city,
57:57it was just a city in a much bigger world.
58:01And there was another city to the west,
58:03whose inhabitants would change the story of theatre
58:06and indeed of the entire Mediterranean.
58:09Rome.
58:11Join the Open University as we explore the connections
58:19between Greek theatre and modern day democracy.
58:22Go to bbc.co.uk slash ancient Greece
58:25and follow the links to the Open University's free learning website.
58:34International drama here on BBC4 later this week,
58:37this time from the sun-kissed Italian islands.
58:40The filmmaking of a detective inspector
58:42in a new series of Young Montalbano,
58:44starting on Saturday at nine.
58:46Next tonight though,
58:47exploring a 20th century battlefield with Dan and Peter Snow.
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