The City Dionysia

Pegasus brings Dionysus across the border

Pegasus of Eleutherae brings Dionysus to Athens, but the city does not receive the god as a stranger. In Pausanias’s founding account, Delphi intervenes by reminding the Athenians that Dionysus had lived among them in the time of Icarius. The arrival becomes a readmission, and a man from a border town on the Boeotian road becomes its agent. The City Dionysia grows from that accepted crossing into the festival where tragedy competes before the city.

Which sanctuary was the oldest

Pausanias says the oldest sanctuary of Dionysus is the one near the theatre, and describes what was inside the precinct: two temples and two statues of the god, one the Eleuthereus, the Deliverer, and one that Alcamenes made of ivory and gold. He also lists the paintings, which are about the god rather than about the festival, among them Dionysus bringing Hephaestus up to heaven, Pentheus and Lycurgus paying for their insolence, and Ariadne asleep while Theseus puts out to sea.

Thucydides, writing six centuries earlier, points somewhere else. Arguing that the old city lay on and south of the citadel, he lists the temples in that quarter and includes Dionysus in Limnae, in whose honour the older rites were kept on the twelfth of the month Anthesterion. The two writers are describing different things, an older festival and a greater one, and the ancient evidence does not merge them.

The year the generals judged

The contests were competitive in the plain sense and the city took the result seriously. Plutarch tells the case that stayed famous. Sophocles, still a young man, entered with his first plays, and the archon Apsephion, seeing how high partisanship was running among the spectators, would not appoint judges by lot in the usual way. When Cimon and his fellow generals came into the theatre and made the customary libation to the god, he refused to let them leave, and made them take the oath and sit as judges, ten in all, one from each tribe. Sophocles won. Plutarch adds that Aeschylus took it so badly that he stayed only a little longer in Athens before going off in anger to Sicily, where he died and was buried near Gela.

What the poets said about where it came from

Two of the accounts Pausanias collects in the theatre are about inspiration rather than about staging. He saw portrait statues of the tragic and comic poets there, most of them of undistinguished men, with Menander the only comic poet among them who had a reputation and Euripides and Sophocles the two illustrious tragedians. Of Sophocles he repeats a story that after the poet’s death the Spartan commander invading Attica was told by Dionysus in a vision to give the new Siren all the customary honours of the dead, and understood it to mean Sophocles.

The Aeschylus he reports is the poet’s own. Aeschylus said that as a youth he fell asleep while watching grapes in a field, that Dionysus appeared and told him to write tragedy, and that when day came he tried it in obedience to the vision and found composing easy from then on. Pausanias is sceptical about the statue in the theatre, which he thinks was put up long after the man died, and repeats the dream without comment. The festival turns that private command into public judgment: a god tells a poet to write, ten sworn generals choose a winner, and the theatre above Dionysus’s sanctuary keeps the consequence in stone.