In The Messingkauf Dialogues, Bertolt Brecht analyses the 'commerce' between stage and auditorium, the exchange that occurs between the actors and the spectators during a performance. In the ancient theatre of Greece and Rome, festivals usually provided the context in which that exchange took place. But what was a festival, and what sorts of festivals included theatrical performances? How did these festivals change across time and place, and how were those changes reflected on stage? What was asked of the audiences in these varying circumstances, and what did they ask for in return?

What was a festival?

Festivals in the ancient world were religious occasions, in the root sense of religio, Latin for the 'tie' that binds people and places to the gods. The Greeks and Romans almost always characterized these deities as immortal anthropomorphic beings, more powerful and inscrutable than their human models. Given their power, the gods may have welcomed protestations of faith, but they required of their worshippers specific actions (rituals). These usually involved blood sacrifice or other offerings, performed in particular places and times as the means to please or placate them. Festivals provided important public occasions for such ritual worship.

Given the changing forces of nature (all ancient cultures lived close to the land) and the wide variety of human experience, polytheism represented the Mediterranean norm – many gods for many things, each god with several aspects. In the great Athenian theatre festival, the City Dionysia, the city honoured the god Dionysus under his cult title Eleutherios, ‘from Eleutherai’, a border town between Attica and Thebes. The Athenians associated this traditional home of the god with eleutheria (freedom).