I. Introduction

Abstract

Greek drama is a complex of poetry, music, song, dance, and spectacle, and the original audience received the impact of the whole complex in its day-long sessions in the Theatre of Dionysos. The original audience was steeped in a continuous tradition of drama: an old man who saw the Persae in 472 could have seen the first tragedy of Thespis in 534, and a very old man who saw Menander’s Dyskolos in 317 might just have been taken as a child to Aristophanes’ Plutus in 388. We on the other hand have only texts, always damaged by the passage of years and sometimes irreparably disfigured, and texts of a mere handful of plays produced between 472 and about 300.