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DAWN PERFORMANCES Three Days in a Row? The spectators, thousands and thousands ofthem, begin arriving in the chill hours before the equinoctial dawn; a few torches cast huge shadows over the cavernous theatron as they move to their seats. Clutching woolen himations about them, they arrange the cushions that will soften the long sitting as well as insulate them from the night-chilled benches. The spectators are hushed, almost reverential, speaking to each other in low tones. They are not a people given to breakfasting: a few munch on olives and bread, while others tilt their wineskins for a dilute but still warming jolt of the grape. As the first streaks of light appear in the sky at the eastern side of the theatre (near the Stage Right parodos), the Watchman appears on the roof, eerily lit by the flaming brazier he carries onstage. While the audience listens to an already familiar exposition, it looks to the southwest, awaiting the flare of a beacon fire on the nearby Pnyx that will signal the fall ofTroy. This, except for the addition of the brazier as a possible lighting effect, represents the standard version of how a day of tragedy began at Athens' City Dionysia; it was a weighty, solemn, devout occasion. Comparisons are sometimes drawn with the sunrise services of a modern Easter; after all, both are spring ceremonials which celebrate the resurrection of a god. There is one important difference: if the tragedies were to be integrated into the Christian calendar, they would not be placed at the climax of a forty-day period of fasting and penitence; rather, they would join the events that are part of the joyous revelry preceding Lent. Like Mardi Gras, the Great Dionysia was a time offun. Pickard-Cambridge observes that, follow- ing a night of feasting, the initial day of the City Dionysia began with a formal dress-up parade (pompi), which wended its way through Athens, with stops at various shrines and temples. After the dithyrambic contests, the komos, a more relaxed, informal, and ribald parade or promenade, took place in the evening. "It may be assumed that the procession was enlivened by satirical songs such as were sung on all such occasions at Athens.... Naturally, the procession might also be the occasion ofsuch encounters and love-affairs as Menander often took as the starting-point ofhis plots." 1 Laissez les bons temps rouler could as well apply to the spring celebration at Athens as to the pre-Lenten festivities held each year in New Orleans. To follow a late night of drinking, singing, revelry, and lovemaking with a before-dawn walk to a chilly theatre is hardly the Greek way; sincere Christians may be able to journey from the feast of Mardi Gras to the famine of Lent, but the citizens of Athens showed little appetite for suffering and abnegation. A more Greek version of their theatregoing is offered by Philochorus, an Athenian who wrote a history of his city-state some time before 260 BCE. In a preserved fragment of his work, he writes of an earlier time when, at the Dionysiac festivals the Athenians, after they had finished their luncheon and their drinking, would go to the spectacle and gaze at it with garlands on their heads, and throughout the entire festival wine was served to them and sweetmeats were passed among them; when the choruses marched in they poured out drinks for them; and when they were marching out after the contest they poured again; this is attested by the comic poet Pherecrates [fl. 440-430 BCE], who says that up to his time the spectators were not left unfed? "Spectacle," that aspect of theatre so denigrated by Aristotle, surely refers to play performance, although the marching choruses may be those of the dithyrambic contests. Regardless of the event, Philochorus' laid-back atmosphere is meant to be applied to "the entire festival." This version fits the almost-universal pattern of sleeping-in on holidays. The Greeks, as with all societies before artificial lighting obliterated nighttime , normally rose with the sun; but with the celebrations of the previous evening, a later time for arising on the days of tragic competition is likely. Given the comfort-loving, even hedonistic, traits ofthe Classical Athenians, Philochorus' account better fits the occasion than does the more rigorous early-rising version. The latter would require a sleep-ridden, slightly hungover citizenry to leave their warm beds in the predawn hours, perform an DAWN PERFORMANCES...

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