Western theatre still speaks a Greek invented word
Theatre history is usually traced about 2,500 years, with Athenian drama as the root of the Western tradition—the word itself is Greek. Ritual shares costumes, masks, and pleasure with performance, yet historians caution there is no conclusive proof that theatre simply grew out of ritual.
Aristotle drew the line between drama and sacred rites himself. In the Poetics he noted that playgoers, unlike initiates of the mysteries, did not have to fast, drink the kykeon or walk in procession, yet theatre still purified and healed its audience through a vision, the theama, which gave the theatron its name. Brockett and Hildy suggest the spectacular parts of ritual, such as masks, costume and skilled performers, were gradually staged outside religious settings as societies grew complex.
In classical Athens drama sat inside a wider culture of performance that included law courts, assemblies, athletics, weddings and symposia. Attending the City Dionysia, the most prestigious festival, was part of being a citizen. Greek stages offered three genres: tragedy, comedy and the satyr play. Competing playwrights each presented three tragedies and a satyr play. Tragic performances there may date to 534 BC, with official records from 501 BC. Of more than a thousand tragedies staged in the 5th century, just 32 survive, by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Most retell myth, but The Persians, which won Aeschylus first prize in 472 BC, dramatised the defeat at Salamis only eight years earlier. Aristotle's Poetics, around 335 BC, is the oldest surviving work of dramatic theory.
Greek colonists carried theatre to southern Italy and Sicily, building stages at Syracuse, Segesta, Morgantina and, most famously, Taormina. Aeschylus spent long stretches in Sicily and died at Gela in 456 BC. The Syracusan Epicharmus, who worked for the city's tyrants, put gods on the comic stage before Aristophanes, and Aristotle credited him and Phormis with inventing comedy.
Italy had its own roots too. Livy reports that Rome summoned Etruscan performers during a plague, Varro names an Etruscan tragedian called Volnio, and the Samnites gave Roman drama the Atellan farce and theatres such as Pietrabbondante in Molise.
Source: History of theatre
