THE

QUARTERLY JOURNAL
OF ECONOMICS
Vol. LXXXV

August 1971

No. 3

ECONOMICS OF ATHENIAN DRAMA:

ITS RELEVANCE FOR THE ARTS IN A
SMALL CITY TODAY *
WILLIAM J. BAUMOL
I. The Greek audience, 366. II. Financing the Greek festival, 370.III.
The magnitude of the financial burden, 373. IV. Concluding comment: Relevance for contemporary urban planning, 375.

Perhaps our cities have grown too large for efiBciency in the
supply of services and amenities to their inhabitants. At least this
is a hypothesis one encounters fairly frequently in the literature of
urban economics. In discussing this view some writers have suggested that even the arts do not need a large metropolis in order to
survive. While today activity in the theater is centered in the biggest cities, in New York, in London, and in Paris, it has been suggested that the drama can, under appropriate circumstances, prosper
in smaller communities. The case of ancient Athens has more than
once been cited as an example.^ Greek cities were certainly small
towns by current standards, and yet the vitality of its drama and
I must express my gratitude to the Ford Foundation, whose support of
our urban project helped in the completion of this study. I must also thank
for their help F. R. B. Godolphin of the Princeton Department of Classics, Lsmrence Stone and Henry N. Drewry of the Department of History, as well as
K. J. Arrow, my colleague Daniel S. Hamermesh, and my research assistant,
Mrs. Sibyl Silverman. My very deepest gratitude must go to my friend and
colleague Hourmouzis Georgiadis, for his enormous help in my attempts to
arrive at a reasonable translation of the ancient currency.
1. Thus, e.g.: "Finally, still another argument frequently given [for policy
to attract the niiddle classes to the central city rather than the suburbs] is
based on increasing returns rather than externalities. It is argued that cultural
amenities require for support a large interested public, and this can only come
from the niiddle classes. The necessary size is perhaps not so obvious; Athens
in its classical period had a population little bigger than San Jose, and presumably a much lower per capita income, even allowing for tribute payments."
(Kenneth J. Arrow, "Criteria, Institutions and Function in Urban Development Decisions," in A. H. Pascal, ed., Contributions to the Analysis oj Urban
Problems; Santa Monica: RAND Corporation P-3868, Aug. 1968, pp. 49-50.)

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its other arts is obvious enough. Does this not suggest that cultural
activities can flourish without being surrounded by eight million
neighbors? I will offer evidence that the circumstances of the Athenian theater were in fact very different from anything we can expect
to find in our society and that the lesson of the Greek experience is
of very limited significance for the arts today.
The real issue is the replicability of the Greek arrangements.
Are the Athenian methods for the financing of the drama readily
transferable to our society? By what means did the Greeks attract
their audiences and would their methods work for us?
In this note I undertake to describe the relevant facts so far as
they are known. Many readers will no doubt find them as surprising as I did. I must add that this foray into a field in which I have
no qualifications involves even more than the obvious degree of presumption. One of the standard references tells us in its opening
sentence that it undertakes "to treat of a subject concerning hardly
a detail of which can any statement be made without the possibility
of dispute. . . ." ^ To this we must add the near impossibility of
providing a sensible interpretation of the prices and cost figures reported at various points in the discussion.
The economic difficulties of our own theater can usefully be subdivided into two (interrelated) categories: the limited audience, and
the high and rising cost of live performance. It will be convenient to
divide my discussion of the economics of the Greek drama accordingly.
I. THE GREEK AUDIENCE

The level of attendance at performances of the Greek drama is

incredible by current standards. Though the size of the audience at
any period is not in fact known, the Theater of Dionysus in Athens
(actually built about 340 BC after the golden age of Greek drama
had passed) is estimated to have held some 15,000 to 20,000 spectators.* It is even possible that there were additional persons standing
on the hillsides above the theater. Audience figures as high as 30,000
have been mentioned but seem implausible.* The population of all
of Attica at the height of the Periclean Age may have included
2. Roy C. Flickinger, The Greek Theater and Its Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1918), p. 1.
3. Albert A. Trever History oj Ancient Civilization, Vol. I (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World, 1936), p. 266.
4. Sir Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals oj Athens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), p. 268.

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367

40,000 adult male citizens, perhaps some 120,000 free women and
children, and perhaps more than 100,000 slaves (though only figures
for the free adult males seem to have a dependable basis) .^ It may
be guessed that the city of Athens itself contained some 70 percent
of those numbers during the period we are discussing.
The enormous size of the Theater of Dionysus becomes clear
when we recognize that today no Broadway theater seats more than
2,000 persons. The total audience of all Broadway theaters together
on a particularly good evening is on the order of 25,000 persons
(with a total of some 33,000 seats available), which as a proportion
of New York's eight million population is surely miniscule, comparatively.
A number of elements help to account for the apparently vast
Athenian audience. First, it should be recognized that performances
were not available throughout the year. One could not simply decide to attend a play next Saturday. In the city itself plays were
given only on two occasions during two festivals. The main performances occurred during the great festival of Dionysus (Bacchus),
held annually, early in the spring (roughly, in March). In Athens
proper there seems to have been only one other dramatic festival,
the Lenaia (held in about January), during which plays were given
fairly regularly.* Thus, in terms of audience-days per year, Athenian attendance at the theater was not all that large, say two or three
days per adult male citizen, since there were about five performance-days per year, with an audience of, say, 20,000 each.^ In New
York City some six or seven million theater tickets are sold annually, so that even relative to its population it does not suffer so much
by the comparison.
The number and types of performance at the main festival, the
Great Dionysia, varied somewhat with the passage of time, but certainly an enormous number of plays was squeezed into a very few
days. During the time of Pericles the festival normally ran for some
seven days, four of which were devoted to drama. On the first of
5. See Trever, op. dt., pp. 292-93 and compare H. Mitchell. The Economics oj Ancient Greece (New York: Macmillan, 1940), pp. 19-20.
6. Pickard-Cambridge, op. dt., p. 38.
7. Perhaps frequency of attendance was even higher. We have no way of
knowing since we do not know either the population of the city itself or the
number of persons who watched the performances from the hillsides above the
theater. As we will see presently, it is plausible that social pressures made it
difficult for any free adult male to absent himself from any of the (approximately) five days of performance per year. The number of day.s on which
drama was pre.sented was, incidentally, not the same every year. During wartime one day of performance was, at least sometimes, elimin.ated from the main
festival of Dionysus.

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these, five comedies were presented in succession; and on each of the

next three succeeding days, three tragedies and one satyr play (a
combination, rather scatological in content, of the contemporary
tragic drama and an earlier dramatic form the dithyramb) .^ The
performances began at sunrise and lasted through the day. Later,
during the Peloponnesian War, the day of comedies was canceled
and instead the other three days of dramatic performance were
lengthened by the addition of one comedy each evening.*
These three- or four-day marathons of drama must have required stamina of the audience, many of them sitting on backless
stone (earlier, wooden) benches. Performances began promptly at
sunrise and continued on until dusk. Aristophanes must have struck
a sympathetic chord when in The Birds he listed as one of the advantages of flying the possibility of escaping "from the long-winded
tirades of tragedy" to get home for dinner and back in time for the
comic performances.
Thus, while the population of the city did not have dramatic
performances available to it during most of the year, when the
dramatic season did come it seems to have provided a surfeit. How
then did the theater manage to keep its audience?
The answer, it would appear, lay in the religious character of
the performance. The drama was able to draw so many spectators
in fourth-century Athens for the same reason that permitted Bach
to draw an audience for his music some 22 centuries later. Going to
church simply was the right thing to do, and Bach's performance of
his own music was just part of the ritual.
The sacred character of the performance in Athens even affected
the Greek attitude toward the actor. Ancient Greece may well have
been the only society before very recent times in which the actor
was regarded with favor. ". . . the actors were active participants
in a religious service and during the festival performances their persons were quasi-sacrosanct. As such, they were entitled to and received the highest respect. . . ."
It was considered essential that everyone attend the dramatic
8. The satyr play may have been introduced about 500 BC as a device to
appease the more conservative members of the audience. It represented a
return to the Dionysiac subjects from which the tragedy had largely departed.
Performers in the satyr play wore goat ears, horns, tails, and hoofs, presumably
"in imitation of Dionysus' attendant sprites." In the earlier dithyramb these
performers "were sometimes called tragoi, which is the Greek word for 'goats.' "
Still later, as the form of the play developed, "it came to be called tragoidia
Cgoat-song')" (Flickinger, op. dt., p. 3).
9. Margarete Bieber, The History oj the Greek and Roman Theater
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 97.

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369

festivals. "Business was abandoned; the law-courts were closed;

. . . even prisoners were released from jail, to enable them to share
in the common festivities." ^ Boys and slaves were admitted if their
tickets were paid for by their parents or owners. Pickard-Cambridge
believes (though this has been questioned) that even women and
girls were permitted to attend.^(!)
It was, indeed, considered so important that everyone attend
the festival that the state provided a special fund that paid the daily
admission fee (two obols * per day at the time of Demosthenes) for
1. Haigh, quoted by Flickinger, p. 120.
2. This is surprising because of the "oriental-like seclusion" of women in
the Greek households and because the content of the comedies was decidedly
scatological. In the older coniedies a large phallic symbol was carried on a pole
as part of the ritual procession, and the actor wore a large artificial phallus
which subsequently was replaced by a "less indecent" variant. Flickinger remarks (p. 121) that a respectable woman would have invited divorce by being
present at real scenes of the character of those they may have been permitted
to witness in the Old Comedy and the satyric drama.
3. I may as well attempt at this point to do what I can to translate the
currency. The basic coinage ran as follows: 6 obols = 1 drachma, 1 minna =
100 drachmae, 60 minae = 1 talent. Records for the building of a temple about
two decades after Pericles indicate that the regular wage for all workers was 1
drachnia per day. and jurors were paid 3 obols per day (Trever, p. 296). Thus,
admission fees for one day's performances came to a third of a day's normal
wages and were by no means nominal. As we will see later, standards of living
in ancient Greece were veiy low even at the height of the Greek civilization.
As a very crude standard of comparison, I will take a day's wage to have been
worth $3 in current dollars. (This is slightly more than one quarter of what is
now considered to constitute the poverty line for a family of four by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.) Then, the daily admission price
to the festival would have been about $1. Clearly, such a translation into
dollars is largely fantasy, but it will serve as a convenient mnemonic device.
In any event, since it has been suggested (Trever, p. 269) that 1 drachma sufficed to cover all the daily expenses of a family of four, the proposed convention, 1 drachma = $3, may not be excessive in terms of dollars of 1970
purchasing power.
After writing an earlier draft of this footnote, I came across Colin Clark's
much more careful attempt to reconstruct the purchasing power of ancient currencies. Using dollars of 1925-34 purchasing power as his standard, Clark assigns
the following values for the drachma at the dates indicated: 480 BC, S4; 400
BC, $2; 300 BC, $1.20. Since the price level in the United States has risen two to
three times from 1925-34 until 1970, my conversion rate seems to be moderately
consistent with his for the age of Pericles (about 460-430), though my rate
gives somewhat fewer 1970 dollars to the drachma than his. (See Colin Clark,
The Conditions oj Economic Progress, London: Macmillan, 1951, p. 551.)
Professor Georgiadis has helped me to conduct some further checks of the
suggested conversion rate. We have some figures for wheat prices in Periclean
Athens indicating that 50 liters of wheat cost some 3 drachmas. Making a
rough attempt to calculate a retail price equivalent for today gives us something less than $2 per drachma. On the other hand, utilizing a weighted average for the urban and rural work force for modern Greece, we arrive at an
average daily wage that translates into a bit less than 84. If, as Clark suggrst?.
the output per man-year in ancient Greece was higher than it is today, the
drachma, one day's wage, should perhaps be valued somewhat higher. In any
event, the choice within the range that seeins plausible does not affect the di.scussion materially since I am concerned primarily with the ratio of the ticket
price to the daily wage, the ratio between the subsidy to the festivals and the
t;otal budget of the state, etc. My attempt to find a reasonable conversion rate

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anyone who felt he could not afford it. There are even hints that
potential members of the audience were bribed more substantially
for attending.* Thus, state subsidy for the drama seems to have
begun rather early.
II. FINANCING THE GREEK FESTIVAL

We turn next to the costs of the festival and the means by which
they were met. The revenues were clearly not inconsiderable. Assume that the audience was in fact 15,000 per day and that each
attendee paid his 2 obols admission. Over the course of the festival
if admissions were collected for six days (including the two days in
which no plays were performed) this would yield a gross of 5 talents
or, at our arbitrary conversion rate of $6 per drachma, about $90,000.
The expenses of the festival are not entirely clear. The personnel involved in the dramatic portion included the author of the play,
the chorus, which for the tragedy at different times consisted of
twelve to fifteen persons, and the actors, who at the time we are
considering, according to Flickinger,^ generally numbered no more
than four persons.* Of course, expenses were reduced substantially
by the very small number of actors, and for that reason it is still
considerably cheaper to produce a Greek drama than, say, a typical
Elizabethan play.' Nevertheless, because of the sheer number of
presentations, despite the small number of actors in each play, the
combined size of the casts involved in the festival was enormous.
"The number of participants was also astonishing. The dithyrambs
alone needed 500 choreutai, with at least ten flute players. In each
comedy there were about five actors and 24 choreutai with their
flute players and sometimes citharists. In each tragedy, of which
nine were presented, there were three actors, fifteen chorus members,
and probably at last two musicians. In each of the three satyr
is intended only to convey a rough sense of order of magnitude, indicating that
the drachma was worth neither 5 cents nor $50.
4. Pickard-Cambridge, pp. 270-73, and Mitchell, p. 364.
5. Flickinger, pp. 182-83.
6. This often required the actors to play several parts. Sometimes, moreover, a single part seems to have been divided among several actors. Thus,
Flickinger suggests that the important role of Theseus in Sophocles' Oedipus
at Colonus was "played in turn by each of the three actors!" (p. 181).
7. Moreover, the cast had grown only gradually to this size. In the earlier
choral performances there was a chorus leader (coryphaeus), usually the poet
himself, who answered questions posed by the chorus. Gradually he was given
a more distinctive role and replaced by an actor. Aeschylus apparently introduced the second actor, and Sophocles the third (in about 470 BC) (Flickinger,
pp. 166-67). It was only with Sophocles, whose voice seems to have been weak,
that the poet ceased taking the leading roles.

ECONOMICS OF ATHENIAN DRAMA

371

dramas there were three actors, and chorus members with their fiute
player. There must have been 700-800 choreutai, 30-50 actors and
20-40 musicians. If we add the mute characters, choregi, chorus
teachers, magistrates, judges and stage hands, the number of active
participants must have been not much less than one thousand."*
Today even grand opera rarely involves much over 300 performers.
However, the figures refer to the entire festival, including some
seventeen plays. If we subtract the 500 performers in the dithyrambs, this leaves us with some thirty performers per play. In any
event, when plays went on the road after the Athenian festival, the
companies were kept very small.
We do not seem to know how much the actors were paid. We
do know that in the middle of the third century they were organized
into a guild, called the "Dionysiac Artists," apparently a powerful
organization. The guild members formed themselves into companies.
A record for the years 272-69 BC of twenty-two companies, all members of the Athenian guild, lists exactly three actors' names for each
company. The actors were normally paid by the state. They also
took part in contests and may have been able to supplement their
incomes with prizes.
Prizes, substantial in magnitude, were also offered to the playwrights. We do not know their amounts in the Athenian festivals.
However, we do know that toward the close of the fourth century
prizes of 10, 8, and 6 minae were presented to the dithyrambic victors at the festival of Piraeus, with one such prize to each contestant
who had been selected to participate.* Recalling that a mina was
equivalent to 100 drachmae, and that a drachma could cover a
day's expenses for a family of four, we see that the poet could
probably live comfortably for over a year on his prize money. (At
our fictitious rates of exchange the first prize of 10 minae conqes to
$3,000.)
The finances of the festival involved, primarily, three different
groups: the lessees of the theater, the government itself, and a very
interesting institution, the choregus. The first of these was the only
source of funds not amounting to pure subsidy. ". . . although the
dramatic festivals were under the direct control of the state, the
financial management was relegated to lessees, who agreed to keep
the theater in repair and to pay a stipulated sum into the public
treasury in return for the privilege of collecting an admission fee.
During the fourth century BC the lessees of the Piraeus theater paid
8. Bieber, p. 53.
9. Flickinger, p. 269.

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thirty-three minae [about $10,000 on our concocted exchange rate]

annually. This system explains why the authorities, when they
wished to enable even the poorest citizens to attend the dramatic
exhibitions, did not simply throw open the doors to all. . . ." ^
The state seems to have contributed the wages of the actors,
their costuming, the honoraria of the poets, and the prizes, as well
as the admissions subsidies that we have already noted.^ These
must have constituted some of the more substantial outlays on the
festivals.
However, a very heavy burden also fell on the choregi. The
highest state official involved in the festival had as one of his first
duties the appointment of a number of choregi from among the
wealthier citizens. These persons, in effect, were "volunteered" to
bear a substantial portion of the expenses of the Dionysia. They
paid for the training of the chorus, for their costumes, the wages of
the singers and their trainer, perhaps also for the fiute player, and
were responsible for any special scenery that was needed. There is a
speech listing the expenses of one choregus who may have been on the
generous side. It lists 30 minae ($9,000) for choregia in tragedy in
410 and 50 minae ($15,000) for a dithyrambic chorus of men in 409.
In another year his expenses for a comedy came to 16 minae (about
$5,000 at our artificial exchange rate). In a country in which wealth
was scare, these were very heavy sums.*
The choregi were selected from among the wealthy Athenian
citizens in rotation. A citizen appointed to take on the position of
choregus could ask to be excused on the ground that he had already
assumed other public burdens, or he could suggest that it be taken on
by someone else better able to do so. Under the law the person who
was challenged in this way either had to assume the position of
choregus or had to trade estates with the challenger.* However,
citizens would characteristically take on the task more often and
would spend more generously than they were required to." This
was fortunate from the point of view of the playwrights, the success
1. Ibid., pp. 269-70.
2. Pickard-Cambridge, p. 91.
3. Ibid., pp. 88-89.
4. Flickinger, p. 270.
5. The choregi had a very considerable incentive to contribute to the
theater. Sponsors financed the plays of specific playwrights, and when the prizes
were awarded, naturally, a great deal of the honor went not only to the author
but also to the financial backer. When inscriptions of the festival prizes were
prepared, the name of the financial sponsor was at least sometimes inscribed
above tha.t of the author of the winning play. For example, the name of Pericles is written above that of Aeschylus, who won the prize for the play The
Persians in 472 BC. Moreover, financia,l supporters would sometimes back plays
with a particular political slant coinciding with their own interests.

ECONOMICS OF ATHENIAN DRAMA

373

of whose production might be damaged severely by the niggardliness

of a choregus.
In sum, the dramatic festivals were made possible by a two-part
system of subsidy, involving generous grants by the state and lavish
contributions by private citizens that were, in part, voluntary but
whose philanthropy was enforced by law and custom.
III. THE MAGNITUDE OF THE FINANCIAL BURDEN

The fragmentary state of our financial information clearly

makes it very difficult to draw any conclusions about the real strain
that drama imposed on the Greek economy. Before turning to what
little information we have on the public finances of the Athenian
state, we may first consider some relevant general principles.
Live performance is, of course, very close to being a pure service
activity. Because of the comparative difficulty in instituting laborsaving innovation in the services, they rise cumulatively in relative
cost as an economy's productivity and real income grows. We all
know how rapidly the relative price of a haircut rises as we go from
an underdeveloped country to a country of moderate wealth to a
highly prosperous area. We have also seen the cost of household
services rising with the growing prosperity of our economy. Our
theater has suffered from just this problem. Cost per performance
has risen cumulatively at a rate significantly exceeding the general
price level (and the rate of increase in ticket prices, for that matter).
For wages in the theater have gone up steadily along with the level
of real incomes in our economy, while productivity of the actor in
live performance has remained essentially unchanged it takes as
many man-hours today to produce a play of Sheridan's as it did in
the eighteenth century. With man-hour productivity in the economy
as a whole growing as much as 4 percent per year, the continued
rise in the cost of theatrical performance becomes easier to understand.^
6. Cf. Victor R. Fuchs, The Service Economy (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1968), pp. 50 #. I emphasize the word "comparative" to avoid being misunderstood to be saying that productivity increases in
the services are impossible.
7. In the United States one manifestation of this phenomenon has been
the increasing length of runs of plays in the commercial theaters. One simply
cannot afiford to produce plays unless the period of time over which they can
be expected to run increases along with the production cost. It is noteworthy,
therefore, that in ancient Athens a play was normally performed only once,
though a successful drama might be repeated in the provinces. Only after 386
BC, after the great age of playwriting was over, was provision made for revival
of earlier dramas as part of the Athenian festivals (Pickard-Cambridge, p.
100).

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Thus, the surprising poverty of the ancient Greeks suggests that

the opportunity cost of services must have been much lower than it
is today. That is, the relative cost, in terms of material consumption goods, of an hour of theatrical performance must have heen
miniscule compared to what it is currently.*
Some idea of the standard of living of the Athenian in the age
of Pericles is offered hy the nature of his food and shelter. The
ordinary houses were built side by side with a common wall between
them. Burglars found it easier to break through the walls than to
pick the locks. The bedrooms were "mere cells." "The average
Athenian was satisfied with the most meager fare barley or wheat
cake or porridge with a much diluted sour wine and relish (opsonion)
of salt fish or onions to make it go down. The monotony might be
relieved by goat's cheese, honey, green vegetables, and an occasional
egg or bit of mutton, but meat was usually reserved for festival
days." * Perhaps this passage, as one reader has commented, describes consumption patterns that were more Spartan than Athenian, but it is, nevertheless, suggestive.
Even the relatively aflSuent Athenians were not terribly wealthy.
In figures on the distribution of wealth in fourth-century Athens
only seventeen persons are reported to have possessed over 5 talents
($90,000 on our contrived standard). All of this suggests that industry and productivity were indeed at a stage at which the cost
of performance was relatively low.^
Despite this, and despite the substantial contributions of the
choregi, the public festivals made very great inroads on the public
purse. The budget for the purpose has been estimated by Mitchell ^
at no less than 40 talents per year (about 3/4 million dollars on
our conversion scale) out of a total annual budget on the order of
700 talents (about $12 million) .^ That is, the festival expenses came
8. Clark (p. 552) uses the data provided by the Edict of Diocletian (301

AD) to investigate relative costs of various types of goods and services in the
ancient world. He concludes that "the purchasing power of the denarius was
highest . . . over personal services . . ." (i.e., these were relatively cheap), as
our discussion suggests.
9. Trever, p. 295. See also Mitchell, pp. 132 jj.
1. Yet, Clark estimates (p. 461) that " . . . the average production per
man-year of the whole working community was still probably in the neighborhood of [$500 of 1925-34 purchasing power]. This is a good deal higher than
that of present-day Greece or of most southern or eastern European countries."
2. Mitchell, p. 371.
3. In a letter. Professor Arrow comments rather persuasively that the subsidy figure seems very high. If half the total budget for the festivals were
devoted to the roughly seventeen plays offered during the Great Dionysia, the
reported figure comes to some $20,000 per performance. In a period of low real
wages the figure is hard to believe.
Mitchell does, however, cite another writer who "reduces the estimate [of

ECONOMICS OF ATHENIAN DRAMA

375

to well over 5 percent of the annual costs of the entire government,

including the "military and naval forces." It is hard to imagine a
contemporary government that is prepared to budget that high a
proportion of its revenues for the arts. In New York City, for example, it would call for an annual subvention to the arts of some
$250 million more than twice the 196465 budget for all nonprofit organizations of fully professional performance in the United
States combined!
IV. CONCLUDING COMMENT: RELEVANCE FOR
CONTEMPORARY URBAN PLANNING

This superficial survey of the economics of the Athenian theater

offers us little reason to expect that in our modern economy a small
community can serve as a center for the performing arts. Certainly
the circumstances of the arts in Athens were vastly different from
those in our society, and there is nothing to lead us to expect that
we can replicate them. There seems little prospect of government
subsidy on the vast relative scale provided by the Athenian state.
It is hard to imagine our wealthier citizens agreeing to be appointed
as involuntary philanthropists and then vying in the generosity
of their patronage.
Perhaps most important, we have no substitute for the religious
associations of the Greek drama, which helped to make possible the
large public subsidies and private subventions, and which brought
huge audiences into the theater. Today, with no religious fervor to
pack the houses and with television competing for the audiences,
a community in which 5 percent of the population is drawn to a live
dramatic performance is unusual indeed. The enormous proportion
of the Athenian population that attended the theater is surely unattainable for today's cities.
Even if all this could somehow be duplicated, the rising relative
costs of live performance mean that the opportunity cost of this support would have grown enormously since the time of Pericles. It
would no doubt cost much more today in terms of goods and services
foregone, i.e., relative to the general price level, to finance a given
level of dramatic activity, and we can expect these costs to continue
to grow cumulatively.
the festival's budget] to 40,000 drs. [$180,000], a very small sum" (p. 371, fn.
2). Actually even this amount is not all that small it is nearly V/t percent of
the total expenditure of the Athenian state. Clark (p. 466) reports the revenue
of the Athenian treasury at 6 milliori drachmae ($18 million) in 433 BC and
states that "in 422 BC, a war year, this revenue was doubled." He adds that
"the former figure represents 17 percent of the national income."

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The sad fact is that, short of a revolution in attendance patterns, the minimum size of city needed to support a theater or a
symphony orchestra seems very likely to grow even larger than it
is today as rising real costs of performance make it necessary to
look ever more widely for sources of support.
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY AND NEW YORK UNIVERSITY