BBC Ancient Greece The Greatest Show on Earth - Democrats - 1/3

A look at how drama in Athens was deeply connected to Athenian democracy.

My bed, my bridal, all for misery.

And I cannot...

I cannot...save my child from death.

This is one of the most shocking
stories ever written.

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

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

and her only son - killed.

This film version of an ancient
Greek play called Trojan Women

has become a classic.

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

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

love, war, sacrifice,
fear and death.

And although it is set
amongst the gods, myths,

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

It is one of the main reasons
I study Classics.

An Athenian called Euripides
wrote this play

a little under two and
a half thousand years ago.

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

But, over time, his plays
have come to symbolise

the incredible sophistication of
ancient Greek civilisation.

That civilisation has influenced
almost every aspect of our lives.

Not just drama, but politics,
language, philosophy,

art and architecture.

To understand ourselves,
it turns out,

we need to understand
the ancient Greeks.

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

is in the theatre.

This series is about how
ancient drama changed our world.

It's the story of dramatists

like Aeschylus,
Sophocles and Euripides,

who revolutionised
storytelling through plays

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

It's the story of
how the Ancient Greeks

gave birth to tragedy and comedy.

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

becoming a benchmark
of civilisation,

not just for Greeks,
but for the world -

then and now.

In this episode,
I want to journey to Athens

to explore how drama first began.

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

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

and it was deeply connected
to Athenian democracy.

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

the cultural hub of ancient Greece

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

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

and a particular time -

Athens in the 6th century
before Christ.

At that time,
Greece was not a single country

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

the Greek term describing
a body of citizens.

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

pulled ahead of the others -

politically, economically
and culturally.

In the last part
of the 6th century BC,

Athens was the breeding ground
for two extraordinary inventions.

The first was democracy.

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

but by the votes of
its own citizens.

But the second was theatre.

Athens invented an entirely
new art form - drama.

And these two inventions
were tightly intertwined

at the beating heart
of Athenian society.

And both of them were the result

of an extraordinary
cultural revolution.

At this time, the whole of
ancient Greek culture

underwent a historic transformation.

The revolution extended
from architecture to literature,

from vase painting to philosophy.

You can see the impact
of that revolution clearly

in how Greek sculpture developed.

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

lacking movement and life.

But then things began to change.

By the 5th century,
Greek artists began

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

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

but to a whole new
view of the world.

We call it the Classical World.

And in this ground-breaking epoch,

drama was perhaps
the biggest innovation of them all.

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

by storytellers and epic poems
like Homer's Iliad

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

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

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

but live on stage.

This was more than innovation,
this was a revolution.

Never before in the Greek
tradition that we know of,

in the Greek storytelling tradition,

were things enacted
rather than narrated.

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

Instead, a person actually
draws a sword and speaks.

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

but to do it with
serious storytelling,

with storytelling that
actually delves into

important roots in human behaviour,

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

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

ACTOR: The son of Thyestes...

Ancient Greek drama looked

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

There were no more
than three or four actors.

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

and all the performers wore masks.

When an actor began to
enact rather than narrate,

there's a kind of
dangerousness about that,

that the actor has
to become a woman,

the actor has
to become a slave,

the actor, perhaps even
more dangerously,

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

is a kind of signal
of the profession,

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

ACTOR: Blood shoot of Aetrius...

'The chorus are costumed
and masked in an identical'

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

The chorus is not a bunch
of individuals -

for the Greeks,
the chorus was a group.

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

AND what the chorus does is,
in its groupness,

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

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

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

sings its choral lyrics.

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

CHORUS: You don't stand a chance.

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

a very strong emotional experience

and a very strong
thought experience.

When the Greeks came to
analyse their new art form,

they discerned three
different types of play.

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

But, in many ways,
modern tragedy has actually changed

from how ancient tragedy worked.

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

but for the ancient Greeks,
tragedy was a play

in which the events offered
the audience a tough decision.

And because no real ancient
tragedy ends conclusively -

siding with one
course of action or another -

what it does is face
the audience with a problem.

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

Take one of the most
famous plays ever written -

Oedipus The King by Sophocles.

It tells the story of Oedipus,

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

Although this outcome
is predicted by an oracle,

Oedipus himself makes
a series of free choices

that lead to its fulfilment -

choices that would have posed
serious questions for the audience.

The play ends with Oedipus
blinding himself in despair.

The issues dealt with in tragedy
were often so disturbing

that the plays were nearly always
set away from Athens,

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

And after a series of tragedies,

the Athenians were
offered a satyr play.

Now, we don't have
this any more today

but effectively the satyrs

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

who would be allowed
to run around the stage

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

But what we do have today is comedy.

And ancient comedy,
just like tragedy,

spoke directly to
contemporary Athenians.

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

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

The Birds is a play that mocks
the Athenian obsession

with litigation and politics.

It tells the story of two men

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

To escape, they turn
themselves into birds

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

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

Both comedy and tragedy
sought to have a direct bearing

on life in Athens.

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

religion and myth with
contemporary politics.

This means that a play
like The Oresteia by Aeschylus

can start with a mythic
tale from the Trojan wars

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

but can end in a courtroom,
in democratic Athens,

with Orestes on trial
for the murder of his mother.

The Oresteia is one of the
biggest hits in antiquity,

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

So what you have is three tragedies

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

How does tragedy take this
smorgasbord if you like,

and make it into a story?

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

as it might be for us.

You know there's not this
idea of anachronism.

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

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

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

which would have been familiar,
of course,

from 1st century
contemporary Athens.

So you have this brilliant genre

where you can zoom from your
present day into the past

and bring your past
into your present day.

And it's that relationship,

that tragedy uses to say things
about its contemporary society.

To find out more about how
drama and democratic Athens

became so intimately connected,

I want to look at how
theatre first emerged.

Everything in ancient Greece

came under the auspices
of a particular god,

and the god controlling theatre
was called Dionysus.

He was also the god
of wine and revelry

and many scholars think that
theatre evolved directly

out of the choral songs
performed in honour of Dionysus.

But there's also something
else going on here.

Something that is
suggested by the ruins

at a place called Thorikos,
near Athens.

This region was once home to
the ancient Athenian silver mines

but is also the site

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

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

with the ore washeries
and the mineshafts

just beyond the theatre here.

The first phase of this theatre
is late 6th century

and that puts it in the same time

as the invention of
Athenian democracy itself.

Which throws up another question -

just what is the relationship
between theatre and democracy?

And how did the two
help each other into being?

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

were theatre and democracy
connected from the very start?

Now I actually buy into the
story that tragic drama

IS a democratic invention.

I have a particular take

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

was deeply, strongly politicised.

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

of a particular sort and could
not have happened before Athens

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

The theatrical side
seems to coincide

fairly closely with
the political identity.

Theatrical activities of
some sort or another

were one of the ways in which
they expressed the fact

that now they all belonged together,

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

It's about, you know,

the local community feeling
itself to be a local community.

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

to try and find some more proof

about the connection
between drama and politics.

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

Now, neither for theatre
nor for democracy,

was there any kind of
immaculate conception.

Nor were either born
into the fully-developed form

that we recognize them today.

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

And all around us
as we drive in Attica,

we can see the building blocks,

the basis of the Athenian
democratic system.

People tend to think of
Athenians as city dwellers,

but much of the population

actually lived in village
communities called demes.

There were 139 demes making up
the Athenian democracy

and each deme governed itself.

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

it's called Rhamnous.

The people who lived here
were mostly farmers,

but all the male citizens
voted for the council,

and on local regulations
and on by-laws.

And right at the heart
of the community,

are the remains of what
was once a theatre.

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

an inscription that
shows us democracy

at its most local
level in operation.

"Dionisoi" - to Dionysus...

"Hypo tes boules" - from the Boule,

the local council controlling
this deme, here in Attica.

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

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

The privileged seats for the
distinguished local clientele,

and the stage set out before us.

Religion, politics, theatre...

at democracy's most local level.

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

they were places where the whole
deme would gather together.

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

just for a couple of days
of drama a year.

But the theatres here,

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

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

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

but also for democracy
and democratic action itself.

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

not only the demes,
but the deme theatres,

spreading across all of Attica.

The use of theatres
for democratic activity

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

but in the city of Athens itself.

Every year, the democratic
authorities spent a fortune

on the Great Dionysia Festival -
a drama competition

that took place in
the Theatre of Dionysus

in honour of the god of theatre.

It's through understanding the
different stages of this festival

that we can get closer to
understanding what ancient Athenians

experienced when they
watched and created drama.

The festival began
with a procession -

a rowdy affair with
feasting, drinking

and a great crowd of people
parading through the streets

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

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

the first thing that happened
was a holy dance.

The cult of Dionysus
is very much

a psychological thing.

Wine was, of course, very important,

everyone knows that,

but the thing was that by
drinking wine,

you were getting closer to the god

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

and get closer to the god.

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

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

wearing a mask...

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

you really become someone else.

And the Greek word is...
It's ecstasies.

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

And that's our ecstasy.
It is the ecstasy as we know it.

The ecstasy of the god. Yeah.

The procession then
surged through the streets

along a route lined with tripods -

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

Often politicians,

they spent fortunes
funding dramatic productions,

and marked their victories
with monuments like this one -

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

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

it was a chance for the
leading figures of Athens

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

Finally, having wound its way
right around the Acropolis,

the procession emerged noisily
into the precinct of Dionysus.

By now, the participants
were becoming a single entity.

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

You know, the whole city, so to say,

steps toward the god

in order to worship the god

and they show not only their piety

but also that they belong together.

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

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

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

it's no longer the farmer
and the individuals,

it is a collective of people
with a new identity

which is that of worshippers
of the god Dionysus. Yes, correct.

It's a bit different to going to the
theatre today, right? It is indeed.

All of this put the audience
into a receptive state

for the drama competition
that was to follow.

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

there was one more important
set of rituals to come.

The audience were seated here,

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

The citizens of Athens
who were acting on the stage,

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

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

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

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

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

in the centre of the
stage by the generals,

the military generals of the city.

Then, a parade of tribute,

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

to Athens, was literally
taken across the stage,

paraded in front of an audience
that contained members

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

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

was read out.

And finally, onto the stage
were brought the orphans,

those whose parents had died
fighting for the city in battle

and whom the city would now

take on the expenses of
bringing up and educating.

They came on, dressed themselves
in the armour of war

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

Only then could the plays begin.

From dawn until dusk, for five days,

the citizen audience watched
three playwrights

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

and some comedies.

At their heart were issues
of justice and loyalty,

war and peace,
vengeance and compassion,

which sent powerful
messages to the citizen audience.

In the centuries
of Athens' greatness,

over 1,000 plays were written
for the Dionysia.

But today, just 32 of them
survive in full.

And those 32 have survived, in part,

because they were considered
to be the greatest.

And they were all written
by just three people -

Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides -

the great tragedians
of the 5th century BC.

Aeschylus was the first.

He was the author of the Oresteia,

the only whole trilogy
to have survived.

Sophocles wrote
two of the most enduring plays -

Oedipus The King and Antigone,

which tells the tragic story
of Oedipus' daughter

who is sentenced to death

for breaking the law and
burying her rebel brother.

But, of all the playwrights,
Euripides is now considered

in many ways to have been the best.

He wrote the play Medea,
with its shocking tale

of a woman betrayed by her husband

who takes revenge
by killing her own children.

The playwrights of ancient Athens
were all gurus of the city

in one form or another -
Aeschylus the war hero,

Sophocles the civic official,

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

The Greek word for playwright
is "didaskalos",

which means "trainer", or "teacher".

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

in training the chorus
for their play,

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

in training the audience for
participation in democracy itself.

If we take Sophocles' Ajax,
as an example -

it's a retelling of a classic myth

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

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

but on the other it's also a lesson,

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

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

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

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

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

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

And ultimately, consumed
by the shame of his actions -

he is driven to suicide.

The motor of this play is a vote -

a process that would
have been very familiar

to the democratic citizens
of ancient Athens.

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

Ajax is the antithesis of
the good democratic citizen.

But the play also goes further.

Because, for me, the key moment

is actually what happens
after Ajax's death.

What Sophocles has
the other Greeks do

is debate about how
they should proceed.

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

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

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

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

"your hate to trample justice down."

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

There's a real danger in Ajax

that because you've
got these two extraordinary episodes

that are bloody and shocking,

you think the play
is about those two episodes

that are bloody and shocking.

But I think the play is about
the process of debate

that leads to decisions

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

So, this is a play
that stages debate

and it stages it in all its forms.

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

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

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

not being a co-operative person...

that make him very difficult,

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

A man out of time, out of place?
Yes.

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

but there are going to
be lots of people in Athens

who are hardly role model citizens.

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

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

And this play plays out the dilemma

of what do you do with
those kinds of people?

How do you keep
the democracy on track?

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

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

and you need to let
justice run its course.

Odysseus offers a way
for the community

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

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

of what theatre did in
ancient Athenian society -

it told a story, it posed problems,

it asked questions,
questions of the audience

about what would you do
in this kind of situation,

a situation which they would
undoubtedly have to face up to

at some point in their lives.

Theatre was vital to the
processes that played out

here on the Pnyx,
home of the Athenian assembly.

It was the oil that allowed
democracy to function.

A contained space which allowed
for a continual process

of risky reflection,
self-doubt and debate.

It's no accident that
the most important words

in any Greek tragedy are
"Ti draso?" -

"What shall I do?"

Theatre and democracy
had grown up together

and were now inextricably
linked in Athenian minds

and every year, for almost
the next two centuries,

the Athenians came to the theatre

to rework the old myths
into tragic dramas

that spoke to the problems
that had beset

and were fundamental

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

The Rise and Fall of Athens.

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

in the assembly,
making the decisions

that affected those events.

It's therefore no surprise

that a common subject matter
in Athenian drama

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

And one war in particular
fired the imagination

of the playwright Aeschylus,

who lived through
the real life drama

and was inspired
to write what is now

the first ancient Greek play
to survive in full.

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

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

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

A Persian fleet arrived
with an enormous army.

Although outnumbered,
the Athenians attacked,

and against all the odds,
they triumphed.

The Athenian dead were commemorated
by a memorial barrow

near the battlefield,

which is impressive even today.

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

said to have been
more than a million strong.

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

at the urging of a leading
general called Themistocles.

Amazingly, a later copy
of the decree

actually survives
in an Athens museum.

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

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

"Salamina" - Salamis.

This is the decree
recording the decision

by the Athenian people
to evacuate their home city

and go to the island of Salamis

to save themselves from the
invading hordes of Persians.

This is the record of
one of the most key moments

in the whole of ancient history.

The Athenians abandoned their city
and took to their ships,

leaving only a few men
barricaded on the Acropolis.

The Persians ransacked the city,
destroying the temples.

But the Athenian gamble paid off -

the Athenian fleet
defeated the Persians

in the narrows off Salamis.

Greece was saved.

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

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

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

on that fateful day when
the Persians first arrived.

He was part of the
victorious Athenian army,

but he also lost his brother
on the battlefield.

Aeschylus, in his own epitaph,

preferred to be remembered for
his role here at Marathon,

rather than for his plays.

Without doubt, it was his
extraordinary experiences

here on the battlefield that
gave him a unique perspective

and allowed him
to represent war on stage

in a way that has echoed ever since.

Aeschylus composed over
90 plays in his lifetime

and of the few that survive,

the play that he composed
about these great events

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

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

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

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

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

because it tells the story
of how the Persians

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

a battle that those in the
audience had fought and won

just eight years before.

The play is set in
the Persian capital.

A messenger arrives
at the Persian court

with the news of the Greek victory.

The Persians cannot believe
that they have been defeated,

and they fall to pieces.

In their misery,

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

The ghost of Darius
tells the Persians

that they themselves
are to blame for their defeat,

because their pride
and their ambition

has led them to disregard the gods.

"The voiceless heaps of slaughtered
corpses shall eloquently show

"that no one human should
puff up inflated thoughts.

"You see how insolence,
once opened into flower,

"produces fields ripe with calamity

"and reaps a harvest-home
of sorrow."

This is the crucial
theme of the play.

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

Hmm. This idea of, sometimes
translated as "arrogance",

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

And the Persians had done that.

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

They didn't win and, actually,

part of what the play is exploring

is the idea that
big empires can fall.

What kind of resonance

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

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

It looks at the destruction,
the loss,

the risks you run if you go to war.

They became really popular
with the Gulf War

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

In some modern productions,

what you get is costume
that really tells you

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

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

I mean this is an amazingly
difficult question to answer,

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

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

to being completely
occupied by Persia.

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

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

because there are incredibly
moving speeches in this -

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

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

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

and it's really asking
the society to reflect.

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

AND a fantastic example of it.

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

this focuses on real
and recent history.

But it's a fantastic example
of what tragedy does

because it doesn't
just allow the Athenians

to gloat over their victory.

Instead, it offers a warning.

For the Persians,
pride came before a fall,

and at a time when Athens
and the Athenians

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

the play offers that same message -

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

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

In the aftermath
of the Persian wars,

Athens reached the peak
of her power and influence

and the fleet that had
secured victory at Salamis

now reached out across the Aegean.

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

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

The financial muscle at Athens'
command allowed it eventually

to turn the free alliance
of Greek cities and states,

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

into an empire solely to
support the glory of Athens.

And it was policed by the mighty

and yet brutal majesty
of the supreme Athenian fleet.

The war-chest for
that free alliance,

which had been kept on
the sacred island of Delos,

was moved to Athens,
placed on the Acropolis

and eventually into
a building - the Parthenon -

which has today become synonymous
with democracy and freedom.

And yet which was originally built

with the blood-money of
Athenian empire.

Every year, each city
in the alliance or empire,

contributed money
in silver as tribute,

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

at the Great Dionysia Festival.

But when any members of the
empire refused these payments,

Athens sent a fleet to attack them.

Having an empire meant
that the Athenian assembly

was now making
life-or-death decisions,

not just about themselves but about
cities and peoples far away

who had no real say in the matter.

These decisions were far from
easy, as the Athenians discovered

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

In 428 BC, the city of Mytilene

rebelled against
the Athenian empire.

The Athenian assembly met
to decide how to respond.

The hardliners
wanted to execute every man

and enslave every woman
in the city -

the moderates just to execute
the ringleaders.

On the first day of debate,

the Athenian assembly
sided with the hardliners.

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

And yet when they met
on the second day,

the Athenian assembly started
to doubt its own decision.

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

which got there just in time.

Now these events not only brought
great relief to the Mytileneans

but it also brought home to the
Athenians the critical importance

of thinking through properly their
decisions before taking action.

Dealing with life and death
decisions like this

had always lain at the heart
of Athenian drama.

And authors like the prize-winning
Sophocles forced the audience

to experience vicariously
the consequences of sloppy thinking.

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

with his play Antigone.

Now, Sophocles was a man
intensely involved

with the affairs
of the Athenian state.

He had been a general
and he would go on

to become one of
its closest advisers

during its darkest hours
in future years.

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

how to debate and argue
through the difficult

and yet critical issues
that face a city.

And what can happen
when it all goes terribly wrong.

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

When Antigone buries
the body of her rebel brother,

she is following
the law of the gods.

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

Creon is furious,
and condemns her to death.

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

urges his father to reconsider.

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

But Creon is stubborn
and uncompromising.

He refuses to listen,
and refuses to back down.

The play ends with Antigone and
Haemon both committing suicide

and with Creon facing the
displeasure of his people

and of the gods.

Creon has to face the fact
that his actions,

and his alone,
have caused this disaster.

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

where they're faced
with either very bad luck

where they're faced
with either very bad luck

or very bad management, or both.

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

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

How do you react to that?

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

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

faced with THE most incompetent
leader in all of Greek literature

and that is saying something.

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

to think about what
a good leader might be

through showing them
the worst possible leader

and the Athenians loved that

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

Creon is getting pretty
a bad stick from Edith

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

is an issue that arises
even in Athenian law.

In Athenian law,
if someone is a traitor

they are not to be buried -

you have to take
them beyond the borders

and you can then bury them outside.

If you're a dimark in Athens

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

So, immediately that clash of,

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

arises if the dead body
happens to be a traitor.

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

and Creon may make a
complete fist of resolving it

but he makes a fist because

there are two diametrically
opposed, justifiable views

and you then have to pick
your way through these.

Due to his dogged determination
for others to do

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

Creon ends up paying
the ultimate price -

the loss of his family
and his authority.

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

what it takes to be a leader.

Those are issues which,
of course, had relevance

to the ancient Athenians
watching the play,

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

That's what makes
Antigone so timeless.

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

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

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

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

A play like Antigone,

what kind of resonance
does that have for us today?

Thinking about this
adaptation that Jean Anouilh

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

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

which is really taken on and
championed by the Resistance.

How did it ever get
permission to be performed

if it's such a play of resistance?

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

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

actually, you can look
at this play and think,

"This is a play about
law and imposing law"

and actually this
is a silly little girl

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

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

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

Tragedy was an effective way of
engaging with the issues

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

There was also comedy.

Comedy was irreverent,
rude and bawdy,

and it was also personal,
targeting real individuals.

And just like today, ordinary
Athenians in the marketplace

were deeply suspicious
of their elected political leaders.

Some people, it seems,
were just naturally born

to successfully navigate

the slippery waters
of Athenian politics.

And one of those guys
was a man called Cleon.

HE SPEAKS GREEK

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

He would be with the aristocrats
or he would be spurring

on the lowest of the low
of the Athenian citizenry.

And the ancient commentators
are fairly hard on Cleon.

Today we'd probably
be a bit more balanced,

but without a shadow of a doubt

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

Naturally, he had his enemies.

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

but for fresh-caught tuna,

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

How could the democracy
keep people like this in check

while not killing off
their energy and enthusiasm

that at the end of the day
benefited the city?

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

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

Comedies, while performed
at the Dionysia Festival,

also had their own smaller festival.

It was called the Lenaia.

It took place early in January,

long before the season
for sailing started,

so there were no foreigners present.

This meant that comic writers
could really let rip

without letting the city down.

What you have is
really lively plays,

very outrageous plays sometimes

but they are politically involved.

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

You have comedies that
go to the underworld,

they go to hell

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

This is a frog that was used

in the King's College Greek play.

Animal choruses are
quite common in comedy.

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

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

I mean, this is a
great source of comedy.

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

in ancient comedy?

It's extremely personal,

there's insults really
of quite an infantile nature.

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

very thinly disguised,

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

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

even the mask can reflect
characters from Athenian society.

This was the sort of thing
that lay in store

for ambitious politicians
like Cleon.

And the man who was
the real expert at this

was a comic playwright
called Aristophanes.

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

they even came
from the same village.

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

It portrays Cleon
as a cunning servant

working for an old man called Demos.

Demos represents the people,
and as his crafty servant,

Cleon misuses his position

for the purposes of
extortion and corruption.

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

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

and he is reduced
to selling sausages

outside the Athens' city gates.

Aristophanes didn't
pull any punches -

this play brings Cleon
right back down to earth.

And, of course, the politicians,

about whom the jokes
were being made,

were right here, visible
to all in the audience.

So it's like having
one of our shows,

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

being played out in
an important civic space -

the Capitol or
the House of Commons -

with the people they're
taking the piss out of

sitting right here in the audience,

having to take it
in front of everyone.

The Greeks even had a word
for this -

they called these people,
the "komedoumenoi",

those made fun of in comedy.

And this isn't just
some sort of sideshow.

This, many ancient commentators saw,

as the hallmark of
ancient Athenian democracy

and of freedom and free speech.

The laughter didn't
stop Cleon's career.

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

But the effect of comedy
was more subtle than that.

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

skewer pretensions and remind
those in positions of power

of their responsibilities and of
the limits of their ambitions.

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

in our own democracy today.

By the time of Cleon, this
experiment in Athenian democracy

was heading towards its centenary.

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

to cultural supremacy,
to empire, to wealth.

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

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

And desperate times called
for desperate measures.

The war between Sparta
and Athens started in 431 BC

and lasted for decades.

It was a fight to the death.

Sparta ruled by land,
Athens ruled at sea.

But there was one island

that had never submitted
to Athenian domination

and tried instead
to remain neutral -

the small island of Melos.

In 416 BC, the Athenian
democrats had had enough -

it was time for
the Melians to submit.

So the Athenians sent their
fleet to enforce their demands.

Now, according to Thucydides,
the contemporary Athenian historian,

the Athenians sent in
not just their fleet

but also some diplomats
to put the case.

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

But what happened next,
according to Thucydides,

was an extraordinary debate
between the two sides.

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

"but bade them tell in
the presence of the magistrates

"and the few what
they had come for."

The envoys gave the Melians
an ultimatum -

surrender and pay tribute
to Athens or be destroyed.

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

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

But the Athenians were unmoved -

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

the empire would look weak.

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

This is a classic example

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

You could have seen it in
the philosophical lecture hall

or in the political assembly
or in the law courts,

or indeed on the stage
in the theatre.

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

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

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

And that was the Athenian argument.

The strong do as they can.

The weak suffer what they must.

And that's exactly what happened.

The Athenians invaded
the island of Melos,

they executed all the men,

they enslaved all the women
and the children,

and they established
an Athenian colony there.

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

in the centre of Athens,

Euripides, the enfant
terrible of Athenian drama,

staged a play called Trojan Women.

Its subject matter was what
happened to the women at Troy

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

So the Athenians
sat down to watch a play

which laid before them on the stage

the tragic reality
of what they had done,

just the year before,
to the island of Melos.

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

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

and the surviving Trojan women,

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

But for Princess Andromache,
there's worse -

her son is to be taken
from her and slaughtered.

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

SHE WAILS

WOMEN ALL SCREAM

MAN: Hush.

SHE PANTS

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

..the child will have no burial...

..and without pity...

So bear your fate as best you can.

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

..and you will find
the Greeks...

more kind.

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

but Euripides was also crucially

sending a broader message
about the disillusionment

that was taking hold in Greece

after years of
relentless, savage war

and the terrible impact

that such conflict has on
all members of society.

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

would have generated
such terrific outrage

when the Spartans had done something

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

I mean that's purely historically.

On the other hand,
the coincidence of date means,

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

what is the big campaign
the Athenians are involved in

that is going to involve
women as slaves of war?

Well, there is no other
campaign going on

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

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

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

as a way of life brings
nothing but misery

to both victors and vanquished.

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

you actually miss that point.
Exactly.

The more you think
that this is a sort of,

"Oh, there's been a terrible
atrocity..." Yes. Exactly.

..the more you miss

that this is about war and
how irrational and terrible.

Euripides is presenting
a view of all the Greeks

as having barbarised themselves

during the course of
the Peloponnesian War.

Euripides was not the only one

to despair at the state
of affairs in Greece,

or criticise Athenian behaviour.

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

of over-reaching pride.

And anyone who had ever
seen a Greek tragedy

would have been aware
of what could happen next.

Here at Rhamnous in the 6th century,

the people had built a temple

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

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

meaning to give what is due.

Now, after the Melian atrocity,

it seemed like Athenian
ambition and pride

was beginning to over-reach itself.

They not only had enemies abroad -

they had an increasing number
of enemies in Greece,

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

who were beginning
to think of democracy

as perhaps the immoral
inversion of the righteous order.

The question was,

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

how would theatre and democracy,

which had so spectacularly
grown up together,

survive in a much harsher
and more difficult world?

Although the future of Athens
now looked uncertain,

the past century had
been a spectacular era,

Athens had invented and pioneered
an array of things

which underpin our own civilisation.

From classical sculpture
and architecture

to new directions
in philosophy and history.

But for me,
out of all those legacies,

two stand out as the most
extraordinary...

First, democracy -

Athens created the first
democratic constitution in history

which has become a beacon
across the centuries.

And second - at the very same time,

Athens invented a powerful
and incisive new art form -

theatre - an innovation
without which perhaps,

that democracy might
never have survived.

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

And if there is one thing
that has become abundantly clear

it's that theatre was
never just mere entertainment,

never a passive spectator -

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

From tragedy making our most
important beliefs uncomfortable,

to comedy questioning
and policing citizenship,

and keeping people in check.

Theatre was an institution that
plugged into religious, civic,

political and military aspects
of ancient Athenian society.

It was an extraordinary,
and extraordinarily uncomfortable,

risky and yet essential
part of Athenian life.

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the connections between Greek
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