In the 6th century BC, the Greeks often held festivals in ancient villages. Funeral elegies, wedding songs, birth ceremonies and harvest songs are all indispensable parts of various celebrations and ceremonies handed down from generation to generation by tribes. Even in the classical period, the connection with mysterious religious ceremonies remained in the combination of music and dance, as well as in the form of the whole performance of the choir. In 560 BC, bacchanalia, who was popular in the countryside, was moved to Athens, and the performance during the festival was the predecessor of the tragedy. In the era of slave-owner democracy. Athens leaders used this most extensive form of mass performance for publicity and education. Pericles granted theater subsidies, rebuilt the amphitheater, and held a grand theater performance every spring, which made the theater one of the centers of political forum and cultural life of freemen at that time. It was under such conditions that the Greek tragedy developed. This huge amphitheater is one of the greatest achievements of late Greek classical architecture. Epi Dorus is a city-state on the northeast coast of the Peloponnesus. In the middle of the 4th century BC, the building was centered on the most respected Temple of Pius in Schula, the most famous of which was the amphitheater. Its designer is the son of the famous sculptor Poliklitos. The ancient Greek theater originated very early, and its basic shape was to use hillside terrain. The audience arranged in a semicircle and stood up in rows, with a radial passage in the middle. The performance area is a circular plane in the center of the theater, followed by buildings for makeup and props. The theater is not only a place of entertainment, but also a place where free people gather, so it is huge in scale.
On the subject matter, tragedy gradually expanded to the scope of myth and the legend of heroes. The chorus form of Dionysian ode and the characteristics of lyric poetry are retained, and the dialogue in the play adopts poetic style. The form of tragedy is gradually developed and perfected. In the original "Ode to Dionysus", the chorus asks questions, and the author plays the respondent, so he is the first actor. The first tragic poet is said to be thespis. He adopted another actor around 534 BC and turned Ode to Dionysus into a tragedy. This is the first time that a tragedy was staged in Athens. At the beginning of the 5th century BC, Ashkelos (525 BC, 456 BC) increased the number of actors to two. In order to let the active audience who watch the performance in that open-air theater all day see the tragicomedy roles played by the actors, and also to make the actors have a burly image, each actor wears high-heeled boots and masks, and can take turns to play several roles. The choir was originally twelve, but later it was increased to fifteen. The chorus dances and sings to express sympathy for the people in the play, give advice, explain or predict the follow-up cleaning for the audience, express their feelings about the development of events in the play, and also play a role in changing the scene. Aeschylus initiated the tragic form of trilogy, and each of the trilogy can exist independently and are closely related to each other.
Sophocles (496-406 BC) pushed the tragic art to the extreme. He broke through the tragic form of lyric poetry, reduced the role of the chorus and strengthened the dramatic action. He gave up the original trilogy form and was able to express complex dramatic conflicts in a tragedy more concisely. Sophocles pays attention not to writing gods but to writing heroes, not to express the feelings of the characters in large paragraphs, but to portray the characters' personalities, which makes it the basic driving force for the development of the plot. He is also good at using the method of character contrast to make his characters special. Sophocles has a natural style, and the dialogue is very compact, which conforms to the identity of the characters. His chorus is also beautifully written, especially the first chorus in Oedipus of Kronos and the third chorus in antigone, which are regarded as the models of lyric poetry.
The third master of ancient Greek tragedy was euripides (484-406 BC), whose plays marked the end of ancient heroic tragedies. Tragedy reached his hands, and the realistic social problems were particularly clear and extensive. Sophocles once said that the characters in his own works are ideal and the characters in euripides's works are real. This famous saying points out one aspect of the development of ancient Greek tragedy. For the first time, euripides mainly described daily life in the play, and even regarded farmers, slaves, children and servants as tragic figures. Euripides is also good at describing the psychology of characters, especially women. His language is naturally fluent, close to spoken English and full of emotion.
The 5th century BC was the prosperous period of ancient Greek tragedy. At that time, many tragic poets created a large number of plays to participate in the competition, but the most famous ones were the three great tragic writers mentioned above. Only a small part of their works have been circulated in ancient Greek tragedies.
Ancient Greek comedy originated from carnival songs and dances and folk burlesque. This farce was produced around 600 BC, and then it gradually appeared in the form of poetry and became a comedy. In 487 BC, Athens officially decided to add comedy competitions to the bacchanalia in the spring. Comedy is mainly divided into political satire and social satire, and the object of satire is social celebrities, especially those in power.
Parody originated from the singing performance of wizards when they sacrificed to the gods. This is a short play, which is performed in the street. Quasi-drama describes daily life, satirizes customs and habits, and has a rough style. It influenced the folk comedies in medieval Italy and other countries.