in 405 BC a new play by the tradan ureides won first prize at a festival in Athens it was called the backup and it is one of the most powerful and disturbing plays ever written it tells the story of the chaos wrought by the god of theater and rry dianis it tells of women lured to the mountains where they sing and dance in a frenzy and it follows the fate of an unfortunate young king who is tricked into spying on them and is torn limb from limp it's a play that suggests a changing World dangerous and uncertain where you never really know who or what to trust Ides himself did not live to see his victory he died far away from Athens having left the birthplace of drama behind it is likely that Ides compos the Bey here in Macedon on the Northern fringes of the Greek World an area thought by many of the ancient Southern Greeks to be wild unruly and unstable and it was here that ureides lived out his final days not in the Cradle of a democracy but in the court of a king ureides his departure from Athens and the turmoil and disorder of his play the backy foreshadowed a new era one marked by War in stability and Chaos in The Next Century Athens would lose its influence its significance and even its democracy and the balance of power in Greece would shift from Democrats to Kings but drama that most Athenian Of Inventions would Thrive spreading throughout the Greek world and Beyond this episode is the story of the dramatic decline of Athens and the remarkable Triumph and transformation of [Music] theater during the fifth century Athens was the preeminent City in Greece confident powerful and in control of a vast Empire it had given birth to two radical new ideas democracy and theater and the dynamic relationship between these ideas had driven the city's rise to power this was the time when the Great tragedians Sophocles and ureides were staging epic plays like edus and Meda and the comedian Aristophanes was composing bardy and Fantastical comedies like birds as well as being great works of art these plays engag directly with Athenian democracy and Athenian life but by the late fifth century all of this was at risk Athens was also fighting a war the pelian war against the great land power of Sparta in 415 BC still supremely confident Athens launched a new phase in this war she sent an expedition to attack the city of Syracuse on the island of Sicily towards the Western and edges of a Greek world that spread from Marseilles to the Black Sea Coast for 2 years brutal fighting raged on the sea and land at Syracuse fusades called it the greatest Slaughter of the war he wrote of bodies heaped on top of one another and of rivers clotted with blood finally in 413 BC the Athenians were decisively and disastrously defeated those who survived some 7,000 of them were imprisoned in these Stone quaries amazingly it is said that you can still see the marks from their chisels on the walls today this is a famed tourist attraction but the fun belies the horrific reality of this place in the ancient world it was part of a much larger Quarry where the Athenians as prisoners of War were brought as part of a labor camp can you imagine being for to work here day in day out undertaking the backbreaking work of quarrying these stones with no respite from the scorching Sun there was only one way to escape from this hell the historian plutar tells us that some Athenians were freed when they were heard quoting lines from ureides Pluto tells us that the syracusan were absolutely mad for ureides and the morsels of his plays that made their way over here and he says that the Athenians who did make it home went to Ides himself to thank him for saving their lives because they'd been able to remember and recite some of the lines from his plays it's amazing to think that knowing extracts from a play was enough to buy these prisoners their freedom it's a sign that theater was making an impact far beyond Athens such was the popularity of drama here in Sicily that a few decades before the great escolas the father of tragedy himself had come here to produce his plays and the message of one play in particular now looked to becoming home to roost isalus performed his play the Persians here in Syracuse now that play had critiqued the Persian arrogance that foreshadowed their failed invasion of Greece but it had also contained a wider warning for the Athenians beware of hubis if you overreach you too could fall and in the wake of the failed Athenian Expedition here at Syracuse many Athenians began to believe that iscus had been right and that their moment of hubis had come at first the people of Athens couldn't believe the news an army and an entire Navy virtually wiped out many blamed the Democracy for authorizing such a foolish Mission and the anger and tension even spilled into the streets where some Democrats were attacked the great fear now was what would befall Athens in The Wider war against Spartan serious issues like these were regularly addressed in the Athenian theater and in the midst of this chaos the playright Aristophanes Was preparing a new comedy for performance at the theatrical Festival in 411 BC Aristophanes put on a play called lysistrata it's one of his most wellknown not least because of its unabashed rudeness it was actually banned in Britain until 1957 and even then the first performance of it was called savagely pornographic but it's also one of his most popular because of its strong female protagonist but also because it's call for peace strikes a cord in our continuously conflict ridden world to put an end to the war lysistrata persuades women from all over Greece to go on a sex strike until the men agree to make peace the women also seize control of the Acropolis where the city's treasury is kept when a magistrate a Pros arrives to retrieve funds for the war lysistrata berates him about the losses that the women have been forced to Bear women have to take on more than twice your burden firstly it's us giving birth to Children then we send them off a Soldiers the women dress the magistrate up in their clothes and send him away humiliated as the strike continues the sex starved men of Greece become increasingly desperate until finally they agree to make peace so Rosie with with a play like Lis strata can you give us a sense of of just how bardy how grotesque the humor in old comedy really was well it's the kind of thing that's for example difficult to stage in schools now because it's got men with strapped on fallaces you know very visible and jokes all the innuendos about whether or not they're going to get sex with their wives and just the the general baliness of that all the jokes on the women's side of course about what it's like being married what tricks they get up to um you know even reference to sexual positions the lion on the cheese grater so if we look at this this is from um the promus far and it's actually from sa drama which is a bit different from old comedy but you get the idea from the costume you can see of just how B in your face it is exactly it's very explicit and uh I mean the kind of jokes that you can make around this is that a messenger Rod you're carrying for example um it's um it's easy humor from our point of view looking at this play you can't believe that this is what they were seeing on stage as part of an official Festival within ancient Athenian democracy exactly the plot is certainly outrageous but it speaks to serious issues the important thing about the license stter is actually not to say strike the young women do have their sex strike but we all know that's just a silly joke because all Athenian men could either have sex with each they could all have sex with each other go to prostitutes there wasn't a problem they did not just have to have sex with their wives the really important one is the older women who with Lys strata take over the place where the keys were owned by The High Priestess of Athena the inner sanctuary of theop where all the money was stored but does the sort of radicalness of the solution as presenting list Str to underline the seriousness of the problem I think City's in a state of extraordinary tension there is not a family in the city that hasn't lost at least one man in the disaster in 413 in Sicily we know that they had huge crisis over the population because they freed a lot of slaves a few years later just to fill up the citizen numbers I think one of the reasons for me why it's so interesting is that citizen women have an integral part to play Within the PO in all sorts of ways in religion and uh within the oos and so on and yet they're not responsible in any way for what's been happening and one of the things I think I see in ler is a huge loss of political confidence The Assault on on male power is is through the figure of the pros um who is who is Thoroughly feminized and ridiculed I think you have to put it into its political context a terrible defeat Athenians losing self-confidence really with some good reason blaming the leaders for their bad advice Etc on the other hand um the message overall is should the Athenians make peace or should they continue to fight the pelian war and the outcome of the play is of course Peace is great because you have much more fun in peace time than you do in Wartime you don't lose your husband or your brother or your lover in battle and so on so on so the actual big issue is internal politics is Athens going to continue to be a democracy and externally should it or should it not make peace listor is classic Aristophanes he's used a ridiculous plot to throw light on the political dilemmas facing Athens but for me it's the the constant references to the harsh realities of war that really resonate Athens was at War for most of aristophanes's career and despite the bardy jokes and the innuendos and the strap-on fallacies it's that sense of the horrible nature of war that just constantly comes through in fact the boardy backd drop in a way makes the point more strongly than tragedy ever could despite lata's message Athens did not make peace and the pelian war continued grinding down Athenian Manpower and the Athenian economy for a further 7 years until in 404 BC Sparta finally proved [Music] Victorious Athens was humiliated she lost her Empire she lost her Navy she lost her City walls and worst of all she lost her democracy here on the panix the home of the Athenian assembly the peace terms were worked out and as a Victorious Spartans looked on some Athenians suggested that maybe democracy had had its day and that it was time for something different the hardcore Democrats walked out in disgust and in their absence a motion was passed to do away with democracy and put Athens into the hands of 30 oligarchs but democracy was not dead and the Democrats were soon plotting their Revenge the Democrats focused their resistance at the Port of Athens the peras this area was the home of the Athenian Tri warships and their rowers the poorest citizens of the polace who were the Bedrock of the democratic system it was here under the cover of Darkness that the Democrats regrouped determined to restore their democracy the revolutionaries chose as their place of assembly the theater in parus now we can't visit that theater today because it's sadly underneath a couple of apartment blocks but the pans were so the crazy that they built themselves a second one and here it is this one dating from the mid 2nd Century BC it might seem odd to have chosen a theater as a meeting point for a revolution but don't forget theaters had always been Civic Gathering spaces in ancient Greece and we know from the sources that armies intire armies used them as must points and indeed the very same theater irez had been used just a couple of years before as the rallying point for a revolution so when these revolutionaries were choosing where to meet for a revolution whose very intention was the reinstatement of democracy the theater was the obvious choice the the armies of the Democrats and the 30 oligarchs clashed in battle in the area surrounding the parus theater and the Democrats eventually managed to force a reinstatement of their democracy they were honored with a victory march to the Acropolis and the Athenians agreed to move forward together forgiving all crimes save those of the 30 oligarchs it looked like Athens was getting back on track but the grand celebrations for the statement of democracy masked the fact that athens's days of complete Supremacy were now in the past and things would never be quite the same again nowhere was this uncomfortable truth more obvious than on the stage in 388 BC Aristophanes staged a play called plutus or wealth in English and it spoke to the age old conundrum why is it that in the disparity between rich and poor those who are deserving and hardworking normally come off the worst and those who are undeserving and cunning get rich cremos is an honest hardworking man disillusioned with the unfairness of Life out on the road one day he meets wealth and realizes that wealth is blind and that is why he distributes his riches so unfairly cremos takes wealth to a healing Sanctuary where his sight can be restored the upshot is that the corrupt will be stripped of their riches and The Virtuous can finally Prosper but in a key moment in the play cremos encounters the character of poverty who casts doubt on the entire scheme just supposing wealth could get his sight back and distribute all in equal portions no one would develop any craft or expertise once there's no incentive who is going to smelt the metal build the ships or make the clothing manufacture Vehicles Stitch the Footwear brick the bricking wash the washing Farm the farming [Music] with this play We're left with the feeling that despite the opening of Well's eyes the world will remain a very unfair place it's a thought that we can well relate to today and is perhaps why wealth is a play that still gets performed for do you think there are particular historical circumstances surrounding its creation that help us understand why that play was written as it is for what's really striking about wealth is how different it feels to a play like L strata lrat is an inventive and vigorous heroin whereas KLOS is passive and tired aristophanes's comedy has lost its its biting satire and its direct commentary on individuals in the audience instead its themes are more Universal Rich poor worthy unworthy it feels like comedy and theater more generally has not only lost its Edge but lost its specific Athenian identity it's become more General and at the same time left the Athenians looking back nostalgic for an era of lost Glory the decline of Athens marks a turning point both in the history of Greece and in the history of theater Athens had invented drama but how would this Innovative and democratically charged art form fair in the new world that followed athens's defeat this new world of the 4th Century saw the different city states of Greece jostling for control while coming under increasing pressure from new powers many of them led by tyrants and kings in truth the 4th Century reads as a depressing catalog of battles Wars and fractured alliances which played out in the plains of Central Greece in ancient times this whole region was known as the dancing flaw of Aries the God of War it was here that the fate of Greece was decided on the battlefields time and time again one conflict in particular symbolizes the chaos of the period in 371 BC Sparta and thieves fought an epic battle at lucra at the heart of the dancing floor of Aries against all the odds it was the thebans who triumphed due in no small part to the powerful attack of their Elite fighting force the sacred band thieves' shocken or tactics work brilliantly the battle was over in less than an hour and on this spot where the Spartan King was supposedly struck down thieves erected a victory Monument topped with Spartan Shields taken in the battle and to rub salt in the wound the thebans demanded that Sparta's allies cleared their dead from the battlefield first so that the scale of Sparta's loss could be humiliatingly on display this Monument marked a decisive change in the balance of power in Greece but more than that Cicero later claimed that this was the first ever Battlefield Memorial to a Greek on Greek conflict this kind of Monument was to become a defining feature of the century that followed as Greek States jostled for power and engaged in their favorite pastime fighting one another it was a situation that Aristophanes had already warned against in list strata you worship at the self-same holy altars just as if you're a family Olympia thopi Deli and elsewhere yet with foreign armies at the ready to attack what are you doing destroying our Greek cities killing fellow Greeks this is hardly the kind of context in which you would expect drama to thrive but what's really amazing is that while Greece was tearing itself a part theater seems to have been flourishing during the 4th Century BC theaters emerged all over the Greek World But the irony is that despite this explosion of theater construction we don't have a single complete tragedy surviving from this period after the deaths of escas Sophocles and ureides we are left with nothing but fragments it is true the great spread happens in the first half of the 4th century when every city that had cultural pretensions built a theater there seems to be a neat story Sophocles and edes die and within everybody's perception of it n says that Ides and Sophocles killed tragedy uh so the easy story would be important tragedy came to an end and sort of mass entertainment spread throughout the Greek world uh in a rather superficial way I think it's more much more complicated than that it's really what happens in later Antiquity and the great three become educational set books and that's really why we have them and and it was those three who were most read so texts of the other tragedians they simply weren't copied enough times to survive it doesn't mean they weren't any good there were very famous tragedians in the 4th Century people who made a big Mark and people who um were Remembered in later centuries the fragments of plays by these writers that have survived support the idea that this was an extremely active era one a playwright from this time was called aedus the younger he was a relative of the great escalus and he's said to have composed 240 plays during his career won many first prizes and even had a statue of himself put up by the Athenians and what the surviving fragments also allow us is a unique window into how the subject matter of tragedy is changing during this period aamus wrote a play called antigon just like Sophocles and Ides had done in the fifth century it again told the story of how Antony had broken the law by burying her Rebel brother and is sentenced to death by King Creon against the wishes of his son hyon who is in love with her in sophocles's play the key moment is the political debate between cron and hyon about leadership and Justice and the play ends with antigon and hyon's suicide in asus' version hon and Antony run away and have a child together they are both sentenced to death but Heracles intervenes to try and save them it's the same basic story but the emphasis has shifted well we've already got the sense in the fifth century of changing myth um where you might have one playwriter already done an Antony so you want to change it and and U make it your own as a playright you get that even more in the 4th Century if you imagine they're using the same material the same myths but there's a taste for far more elaborate plots you're still dealing with myth but the interest has has shifted so in that example of Antony you know the the focus there is what happens in that relationship you hear hardly anything about that relationship in the fifth century version but in the fourth Century that becomes a real focus is that to do with tragedy's broadening appeal in this period beyond the confines of democratic Athens well I think the internationalization is really important because after all you want this to appeal but you now have play rights from all over the Mediteranean coming to compete and so there's that that shift and of course the particular political circumstances are different in the the different cities so I mean a shift to the Romantic themes domestic it it has a border [Music] appeal theater was becoming more about spectacle and entertainment and less about political process and debate and as athens's power Wan the plots drifted away from Athens and from its Democratic process to focus more on personal dilemas and relationships the kind of stuff that would be interesting and resonate with well pretty much anyone anywhere indeed tragedy was becoming very much more of what it is today there's no better evidence for these Trends than the ruins of a little known city that was a product of the battle of luku after their victory in that battle the city of Thieves surrounded their defeated Spartan enemies with a series of newly established cities in the pelones I've come to this rather unpromising looking industrial part of the pipines In Search of a city called megalopolis the great City now I've read about this place Lots in books and I've studied lots of floor plans but I've never actually been here for real and what I'm searching for first of all is the theater a theater said by the ancient sources to be the biggest in the whole of Mainland Greece it held up to 20,000 people and it is further evidence that despite the turbulent Times theater was growing in popularity there's an extraordinary calm to this place but what it symbolizes is a a place that's tried to put itself on the map out of nowhere a sort of ancient version of Milton ke when they built this place they gave it everything a city should need they gave it an assembly they gave it an agar they gave it a sports center and they gave it a theater a huge theater theater by this stage had become part of the dress code of what a Greek city should look like and more important than that it a theater had now become a symbol of greekness itself theater had become an essential part of any Greek Community but the role that it now played in that Community was changing and this transformation can be traced in the ruined remains of megalopolis when this theater was built it was placed directly facing the city's political assembly place it's an extraordinary example of how these two facets of Polish life politics and theater were once thought to be intimately connected but you know there's an irony here as megalopolis was being built as this city was being created out of nothing the very institution of the Greek city the polace was beginning to falter now we're in a very different world the world of tyrants and Kings the very vit ity and viability of the poce was beginning to be in doubt and there's perhaps no better symbol of that gradual Decay than here at megalopolis and right here in the theater because in the midc century BC the people of megalopolis built this a solid high stone wall that cut off the theater from the assembly place the people of this great City themselves cut off the umbilical cord between theater and [Music] politics this gradual transformation in the role of theater was aided by a crucial Innovation which we know occurred in the early 4th Century BC the proof is here in this inscription at the epigraphic Museum it says that in exactly 386 BC Pion drama proton parad deedaan for the first time an old drama was put on as an extra at the festival the 4th Century saw the start of revivals this meant that old plays by the great tradan of the fth century escas Sophocles and ureides could be performed alongside current playwrights like asadas it was the birth of a classic repertoire and it fueled another of the most important theatrical shifts of the period we're now 45 years later in 341 BC and this inscription lists the playwrights and the plays that were put on at the city daer in Athens in that year and here's our man AED dharmas who actually won first prize this year and it tells us the names of his three tragedies including Antony that he put on but what's also fascinating about this inscription is the prominence it gives to the actors not only does it give us the name of the lead actor in of the plays but also here's the key line tells us naop toos one of the actors Ana he won he won the prize for the best actor at the festival as well and indeed n Tas was a busy guy that year because he was lead actor in more than one of the plays and it tells us that he was the producer for one of the old plays that was being rep performed as well and what this Stone symbolizes is this growing shift during the course of the century in importance from the tradan the playwrights towards the actors as being the real Kings of the theater they were the Great entertainers of their day and they had magnificent physique they had magnificent voices um actually the tragic actors and the comic actors people didn't do both that's rather interesting you you were one or the other the tragic actors though were very famous for their voices and some of them even employed to go on diplomatic missions and so on right so you want to send an embassy you you hire an actor to go along and put the case as well as he possibly can on your behalf and this is now Tolus we're talking about well and and and others as well one thing that one has to bear in mind is that the cultural movement within ancient Greece doesn't seem to have obeyed military history generally speaking uh artists musicians including actors seem to have traveled across the the boundaries of of hostility um and so that meant that cities which might well be on very bad terms were all competing to set up their their own cultural activities Cities laid out large sums of money built wonderful theaters supplied wonderful facilities in order to attract the best actors to their City to put on performances theater had become a sort of cultural currency competition for the best actors and playwrights was extremely Fierce and fees soared giving Rich Kings the upper hand but theater's transformation into a hugely popular and lucrative entertainment business raised questions about its value to society two different views of the value of theater can be found in the works of two of the greatest thinkers of the age Plato and Aristotle now for Plato in his ideal Society poetry and theater are actually banned because they're just entertainment worse than that their imitation not truth yet they can seem like the truth and as a result they can lead people astray but for Aristotle it's a very different case he sees a place for theater in the ideal Society because it is able to speak to Universal emotions and ideals of humanity and more than that it gives the audience what he calls cathis and catharus is a notoriously difficult word to translate but it means something along the lines of purification a purging of emotion that comes as a result of watching tragedy and as a result can give people the ability to better control their emotions but the very fact that two such eminent thinkers are so vifly arguing about the value of theater at this time in the 4th Century suggests that there really is something of a crisis of confidence about the value and role of theater in ancient Greek society itself theater role was made increasingly uncertain by the changing balance of power in Greece by the mid-4th century after years of conflict the richest and most powerful figure in the Greek world was not a Democrat but a King Philip II of Masten at the sight of the Macedonian Royal tombs at agai archaeologists have discovered an extraordinary array of treasures testifying to the wealth and might of Philip's Kingdom Philip created a strong Army and made canny alliances he brought the best Craftsman to his kingdom and secured the greatest thinker of the age Aristotle as tutor for his son Alexander the boy who would later become Alexander the Great it's one of the more unfair characterizations of ancient history that Macedon was some kind of Savage and uncultured place far from it it was a hive of creativity and high culture not just in terms of using precious metals for vessels or creating extraordinary armor but also in terms of the theater Philip brought dramatists from across Greece to compete in his own dramatic competitions poets followed him in his campaigns and actors came to live work and reside in Macedon neop tus sold his place in Athens and moved North and Philip used all of this as a crucial part of his campaign for political and cultural Supremacy well he was the Super Patron he was the Louis the 14th of the the day and so if you wanted to get the best space the best support the biggest fees uh and you are now becoming more professional so actors move they don't just perform as Citizens in their own City so Philip is there it all comes together he accelerates the process actors become far far more important they knew all these stories off my heart and we get superbly rich and famous actors like NEP tus or theodoris who's the Lawrence Olivier of Antiquity and fantastically Rich Philip II certainly invited uh famous actors to his court he got famous actors going on diplomatic missions for him um and he tried to use theater one way or another to help um affirm his his power Philip understood that having the best plays and performers would enhance his own greatness he also understood that kingship is itself a form of theater and in friending famous actors like neoplus he ensured that positive reports about his regime found their way back to Athens and into the political debates taking place on the panix it was here in the assembly that the Athenians debated the growing threat from Macedon and tried to decide whether Phillip should be considered Friend or Foe heading the pro- Philip faction was an actor turned politician called escanes arguing against him was the politician and deines who believed Athens had to oppose philli if necessary by force here on the panix time and time again deanes and esin clashed over the Phillip question Dean's argument was that escanes had effectively taken bribes to work in the king's interest and not in those of his home City but what's really interesting is the language he uses to make his case he refers to esan as hypocrates the Greek word for an actor you escanes are a Hippocrates a bit player of Parts while I am the one sitting in the audience you always serve our enemies interests in politics I those of our country the Greek word for actor hypocrates is the root for our word hypocrite so where did this uncertainty come from well as Greece became more and more dominated by Rich powerful leaders so the corrupting force of money and the fear of the corrupting force of money increased actors were at the end of the day like mercenary soldiers they sold their services to the highest bidder and more importantly they had the ability to imitate and to deceive so what everyone was worried about was that Philip was writing his own play and getting the public figures of Athens to star in it as his key actors it was only a matter of time before Athens would have to decide one way or the other in 338 BC deanes persuaded the assembly to vote in favor of meeting Phillip in battle this battle deanes versus Philip Democrats versus Kings would determine the future of Greece and the fortunes of Thea Philip amassed his forces here in the plains of kirona right at the heart of the dancing floor of Aries the king himself LED his army and leading the Cavalry his son Alexander who would become Alexander the Great then just 18 years old and facing up against them the combined forces of Athens and thieves and in the Athenian ranks the oror deanes Phillip was Victorious while deanes whose words had so inflamed the conflict is said to have fled the scene two monuments to the battle remain visible to this day they stand for more than just the graves of the Fallen they stand for the end of the independent and free politics of Greek city states beneath these trees lie the ashes of Philip's Fallen Warriors their bodies were burned on a grand funeral P decorated with weapons before being buried beneath a huge mound of Earth the second Monument to the battle sits beside the modern town of kir this is the lion at kir proudly facing the battlefield its Origins are somewhat mysterious but what's really crucial is what's underneath it 24 skeletons laid out in seven rows a mass grave belonging to we think members of the thean Sacred band who fell in the battle and their skeletons testify to the ferocity of the Clash leg bone broken into two skulls fractured and today the Greeks as they do with all cemeteries have lined it with cypress trees forever marking the sanctity and importance of this [Music] place I defy anyone to come here and not feel the importance of this place this place where the fortunes of Greece changed forever [Music] the world that had given birth to theater was no longer governed by city states Or democrats it was a world controlled by a king but the story of the relationship between history and theater would take a shocking and dramatic twist tragedy and real life were about to clash in 336 BC the famous actor neop tus now a resident of Macedon Was preparing an important performance for the king at the Royal City of AGI he was to present pieces from his tragedy repertoire at a Royal Banquet on the eve of the celebration of Philip's daughter's marriage we don't know the name of the tragedy he chose but the historian diodorus preserved the words your thoughts now reach higher than the air but there is a swift-footed one who makes a way with the far-reaching hopes of mortal men he is Hades source of Woe Philip was delighted with the performance and after the banquet the crowd raced to the theater at a guy where the festivities would continue at Daybreak this was the scene of the Celebration The Spectators took their seats Before Dawn every seat was filled and as the curtain of Darkness Rose the procession began here in the theater carried amidst the procession were 13 lavishly adorned statues 12 of them representing the gods and the 13th representing Phillip as their enthroned companion and a little way behind the statues walked Phillip himself clothed in white and without a bodyguard to demonstrate his omnipotence and at that moment one of his own soldiers rushed into the theater and stabbed him to death the sources suggest that Philip's attacker nursed a personal grudge against the king but will never know the whole truth the Assassin was killed as he tried to flee the scene the whole sequence of events was worthy of a tale by Ides himself and in fact later in life the actor neoptolemus was asked what was his favorite scene in tragedy and he replied not one in any play but one on a much greater stage watching Phillip enter as the 13th God and then being killed here in the theater [Music] Philip's body was placed on a p and burned in traditional Macedonian fashion before his bones were wrapped in purple cloth encased in an Oster of hammered pure gold and buried here in this tomb alongside some of the riches of his kingdom the findings here at the Royal tombs reveal the extravagance of the funeral this gold Myrtle wreath is made up of 80 leaves and 112 flowers Philip's luxurious funeral arrangements were organized by the new king his son Alexander what happened next is the stuff of legend by the age of 25 Alexander was no longer just king of Macedon and leader of the Greeks he ruled an Empire that comprised 2 million square miles and reached as far east as Afghanistan and everywhere he went he took Theater Alexander could quote uid by heart he read Greek tragedies on campaign and he held Greek festivals of drama in just over a decade Alexander singlehandedly changed the nature of the ancient world but as Alexander's Horizons grew Athens were limited to her own borders and she had to adapt accordingly one politician who came to Define this era was called like kgus he dealt with athens's defeat by using the funds available to celebrate the Glory Days of theater the most lasting Legacy of laus's time in office is actually here in 330 BC he commissioned the first permanent Stone Theater of diis here in Athens indeed throughout the entire time with the glory period of Greek tragedy and comedy it had been a temporary theater here made of wooden Stacks put up every year year on year on year with a few permanent seats below now it was a glorious Monument to the greatness of Athenian cultural Glory it doubled the size the number of Spectators that could be taken now nearly 177,000 rather than the 10,000 before and indeed the Athenians loved it so much that they started using this place as their official political assembly Place more than the penix the place where it had been during the fifth century and perhaps the most interesting bit it's actually here or at least it was here once upon a time a monument was set up with three towering Bronze Statues to none other than escalus Sophocles and Ides the great trdan in addition lerus ordered that copies be made of all of their plays which were preserved in the public archives their Works were now Classics lerus ensured that although Athens may have lost everything else she still had theater Logan era if you call it that was consequent Upon A disastrous defeat which is almost equivalent to the defeat by the Spartans in 404 so like hus um made a big Point big thing about Back to the Future the way we go forward guys is by consolidating by going back to what we were really good at before and part of that is literally setting in stone three tragedians with um you know all those other hundreds getting forgotten as a result Paul's AB absolutely right that um the crisis of the defeat um that brought about the whole leran culture was was was terrible and Athens did go back to the future um but they knew they could no longer try for political power this was obviously hopeless under the new regime but what they could do was claim that they had invented theater and that they' invented philosophy which is very much true it's very much about um celebrating the great theatrical pass it's very self consciously building on the repertoire one of the things I'm going back slightly before lus is the export market for both tragedy and commy has you boomed in the 4th century and and it's difficult to say whether that has a sort of feedback effect into the kind of drama that's being produced in Athens and where the kind of forms of of drama that proliferate in the 4th Century are due to the demands of the export Market as well I mean if you look at the plays of Aristophanes that seem to have had some kind of life outside of Greece they're the ones that where you've got hardly any kind of political references it's clear that theater was still Central to Athens but the reasons why people came here had changed whereas once they had come here to connect and to be challenged now they came here to be comforted there was certainly much here to be proud of but it's hard to shake the feeling that behind this new Splendor something significant had been lost these changes were reflected on the Athenian stage itself in a new kind of drama one that focused on more mundane Affairs everyday people and everyday life inspiration for this new kind of drama came from a scholar called theophrastus his most important Works were his studies in botony but when he wasn't categorizing plants theophrastus turned his expert powers of observation to people watching this is a copy of theophrastus is characters now character comes from the Greek word to to etch to make permanent imprint and theas applies it here not to things but to us and to the inner nature of human beings themselves it's a brilliant piece of acute observation theas says there are 30 character types out there the flatterer the boring person the person who's always got bad timing the person who's got bad taste and the person who's got petty ambition and the thing is these character types don't just give us a fantastic window onto the people of ancient Athens they can be applied to any City anywhere in the world at any time the mean man he examines his boundary marks every day to see that they have not been touched he forbids his wife to lend salt observing that these Trifles make a large sum in the course of a year the gous man your gous man is one who sits beside a stranger and tells the dream he had last night everything he ate for supper how the present age is sadly degenerate that wheat is selling very low and that hosts of strangers are in town the Exquisite man he has his hair cut frequently his teeth are always pearly white while his old suit is still good he gets himself a new one and he anoints himself with the choicest perfumes everyday character types like these provided molds for writers of what we now call new comedy and the most famous of the new comedy playwrights was was one of the' students Manda sadly hardly any examples of this new style have survived we have lots of names and titles but only one complete play it was only revealed in 1957 after being discovered in Egypt buried in a sealed jar and it was by Manda but from this one surviving play and a number of other fragments we can get a pretty good idea what new comedy was really like and in fact many of manda's titles could have come from theophrastus his characters he has plays called the flatterer the woman hater or the superstitious man but the key thing is here that just like theas the titles are of ordinary people no mythical Heroes no political leaders just people like you and me the importance of these stock character types for new comedy is also demonstrated by the fact that there are lots of stock character masks surviving that would have been used on the stage so we have for example the ruler slave or the corisan or my personal favorite the first old man and the number of these can be found in manda's sole surviving complete play the Grouch the Grouch is a man named Kon he hates the outside world and wants to shut himself away from life he shouts at servants insults his neighbors and pelts visitors with stones but Canon's seclusion is threatened when a wealthy young man sostratos falls in love with his daughter and wants to marry her Canon 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 L laor sostratos this ordeal forces Kon to realize that no man is an island I admit I may have made one error that was thinking that a single person could exist who's fully self-reliant with no need of anyone new comedy is far less boardy you still have some slapstick you still have a little bit of inuendo here and there but for the main part you know the the strap-on fallaces are gone a lot of the jokes about bodily function are gone there's a there's a shift to concern about the domestic and um well you get the emergence of stock characters in the example of the grout you have a boy falling in love with a girl and there's going to be obstacle in this case the obstacle is Clon the father of the girl who is this terrible missen thrope okay he just does not want to speak to anyone ever at all and what sense of of of the key elements of new comedy do you think um resonate with with the comedy that we understand today if we think about the the Grouch and this misanthropic figure who's right at the center it then you might think about more relatively recent playwrights so you might think about molia and his missing Thro here's a production that was done in Liverpool's Playhouse and here you see alest the missing thrope in the play he like nmon in Manda is resisting the rules of society and the same thing you can see being explored in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens you have a essential character who's uh really grumpy with Society here he is in this dinner party with his apparent friends who turn out just to be using him for his wealth you know while these aren't directly drawn from Manda they take that original idea as a a way of really shaping the entire play the Grouch is a work entirely like that of early Aristophanes its world is the home domestic Bliss and equal amounts of domestic Strife but absolutely nothing to do with the wider world and particularly with politics it's the ancient equivalent of one foot in the grave Men Behaving Badly or comedies like Frasier and friends it's kitchenn drama and in reality that was really the only Horizon Athenians had left this new comedy symbolizes the end of an era the decline of Athens but it is also a truly revolutionary moment in drama manand or mandros made a very big impact comedy changed into a new type of Comedy uh a comedy of families a comedy of errors uh a comedy of manners comedy of mistakes and of identity much more like the comedy that comes down through the Roman comedians through and Terren to um Shakespeare and molier and Oscar wild and if you look at um Ben Johnson's poem facing the portrait of Shakespeare in the first folio he actually alludes to um Shakespeare as the menander of his of his day so while tragedy remained fundamentally I would say the same kind of thing all the way from 500 down as far as we can trace it comedy did fundamentally change it nature from the the um absurdly Fantastical uh and wonderful uh Carnival comedies of Aristophanes and his contemporaries down to the what we think of as [Music] comedy theater began the century as a place of biting and pointed political commentary and more than that as the obvious choice as a rallying point for democratic Revolution and yet as the years passed whereas Athens suffered in a constantly changing and unsettled World Theater went from strength to strength spreading across the helenistic [Music] Empire it had also become more like theater as we know it today professional and exportable with powerful actors touring companies and a rich and varied repertoire Thea had become a symbol of greekness and a tool of power and influence coveted by Kings and commoners alike it had outgrown its birthplace and spread not just through Greece but to Italy Egypt Libya and as far east as Afghanistan it's an amazing story but for Athens it is also a story of loss Thea's success is a direct reflection of athens's loss of power influence and uniqueness during the course of the 4th Century Athens was no longer the city it was just a city in a much bigger world and there was another city to the West whose inhabitants would change the story of theer and indeed of the entire Mediterranean [Music] Rome join the open University as we explore the connections between Greek Theater and modern day democracy go to bbc.co.uk/topgear open University's free learning website International drama here on BBC 4 later this week this time from the sun-kissed Italian Islands the making of a detective inspector in a new series of young Mont Albano starting on Saturday at 9:00 next tonight though exploring a 20th century Battlefield with Dan and Peter snow