The City Dionysia

Pegasus brings Dionysus to Athens

The City Dionysia was the greater of the festivals Athens held for the god Dionysus. It took place at his sanctuary, a sacred precinct, on the south slope of the Acropolis, the citadel of Athens. The surviving Greek tragedies were first performed at this festival.

Its founding story is about an arrival, and the travel writer Pausanias records it. A man named Pegasus brings Dionysus to Athens from Eleutherae, a border town on the road to Boeotia. But the city does not receive the god as a stranger. The oracle at Delphi, a shrine where people asked a god for answers, steps in. It reminds the Athenians that Dionysus had lived among them once before, in the days of a man named Icarius. So the arrival becomes a return. From that accepted crossing, the City Dionysia grows into the festival where tragedies compete before the whole city.

Which sanctuary was the oldest

Pausanias says the oldest sanctuary of Dionysus is the one near the theatre. Inside the precinct he saw two temples and two statues of the god. One was Dionysus Eleuthereus, the Deliverer. The sculptor Alcamenes made the other of ivory and gold. Pausanias also lists the paintings there. They show stories of the god, not of the festival. Dionysus brings the god Hephaestus up to heaven. Pentheus and Lycurgus pay for their insolence. Ariadne lies asleep while Theseus puts out to sea.

The historian Thucydides, writing six centuries earlier, points somewhere else. He argues that the old city lay on the citadel and south of it. He lists the temples in that quarter, and among them is the temple of Dionysus in Limnae. There the older rites of the god were held on the twelfth of the month Anthesterion. The two writers are describing different things: an older festival and a greater one. The ancient evidence does not merge them.

The year the generals judged

The plays competed for a prize, and the city took the result seriously. The writer Plutarch tells the case that stayed famous. The tragic poet Sophocles, still a young man, entered with his first plays. The archon Apsephion, one of the city’s chief officials, saw how strongly the spectators were taking sides. So he would not choose the judges by lot, which was the usual way.

Then the general Cimon and his fellow generals came into the theatre. They poured the customary libation, a drink offering, to the god. Apsephion would not let them leave. He made them take the oath and sit as judges, ten in all, one from each tribe of the city. Sophocles won. Plutarch adds that the tragic poet Aeschylus took the defeat badly. He stayed in Athens only a little longer. Then he left in anger for Sicily, where he died and was buried near Gela.

Statues of the poets

Pausanias collects two stories in the theatre about inspiration rather than staging. He saw portrait statues of tragic and comic poets there. Most of them, he says, were of men of no distinction. Menander was the only comic poet among them with a reputation. Euripides and Sophocles were the two famous tragic poets.

About Sophocles, Pausanias repeats a story set after the poet’s death. A Spartan commander was invading Attica, the land around Athens. Dionysus appeared to him in a vision. The god told him to give the new Siren all the usual honours of the dead. The commander understood that this meant Sophocles.

Aeschylus and the dream

The story of Aeschylus that Pausanias reports is the poet’s own. Aeschylus said that as a youth he fell asleep while watching grapes in a field. Dionysus appeared and told him to write tragedy. When day came, he tried it in obedience to the vision. From then on he found writing easy.

Pausanias doubts the statue of Aeschylus in the theatre. He thinks it was put up long after the poet died. He repeats the dream without comment.

At the festival, that private command became a public contest. A god told a poet to write. Ten generals under oath chose a winner. The theatre above the sanctuary of Dionysus kept the result in stone.