ANCIENT TIMES TO 1850 19

You didn’t know that the classic tragedies and comedies of ancient
Greece were musicals? Small wonder! Most histories of world drama
hate to even note the existence of musicals, so the last thing that they
would admit to is that drama began as a form of musical expression.
Such snobbery is long overdue for debunking. Aeschylus, Sophocles,
and Aristophanes were not only playwrights; they were also compos-
ers and lyricists. Call their works lyric theatre if you like; that’s just
another way of saying that they wrote musicals. When you envision
the birth of musical theatre, don’t picture the bright lights of Broad-
way or London’s West End—think instead of a sun-drenched Athens
hillside in the fifth century B.C.E.
By that time, Athens was a thriving city-state of approximately
100,000 souls. With trade ties reaching far and wide, it was also one of
the Mediterranean’s first cultural centers. Its history stretched back to
the Stone Age, when humans first inhabited the Acropolis, a massive,
flattopped rock that rises some five hundred feet above sea level and
serves as the spiritual heart of the city. By the fifth century BCE, the
Acropolis was adorned with a spectacular collection of temples and
other public buildings, many built a century before during the reign
of the military dictator Pericles. These architectural marvels included
the first stone theatre ever built, a semicircular open-air structure cut
into the southern base of the Acropolis. To the Athenians, theatre was
not merely a place for entertainment, but a place to honor the gods, so
they dedicated their theatre to the divine patron of agriculture, the-
atre, wine, and even joy itself—Dionysus.
The Greeks had a tradition stretching back to prehistoric times of
honoring Dionysus with choral performances. These musical retell-
ings of mythological tales were known as dithyrambs. The writings of
Aristotle provide our only information on Thespis of Icaria, who may
have been a writer-composer as well as a performer. Since Thespis was
the first soloist to step out of a dithyramb chorus and enact specific
roles by singing and speaking lines, he invented two things: the art
of acting (which is why actors are sometimes referred to as “thespi-
ans”), and a new form of dithyramb that we call tragedy. When Ath-
ens held its first tragedy competition in 534 BCE, Thespis won. The
contest was part of the annual five-day celebration of spring known
as the City Dionysia, when Athens offered Dionysus a festival of ath-
letic and artistic events. Imagine the Super Bowl, World Series, World