Figure Of An Actor on a fragment of a vase from Tarentum, painted about 340 BC. He is shown holding a mask,
as for a king, carries a sword, and wears elaborate stage buskins.
For most of the fifth century, the staging of plays was very simple, even to naivety, with two or three actors and a
chorus of twelve or later fifteen.' In 488/7, comedies began to be organized at the Dionysia. Until then comedy was
in the hands of 'volunteers'. It was a wilder growth, and it existed elsewhere in Greece; Epicharmus was composing
comedies in Sicily in the early fifth century. At Athens, by 440 B.C., comedy had spread to the Lenaea, a winter
festival of the same god at which the weather cannot always have been clement (about 2 February). Tragedy
spread to that festival about 432 B.C.: usually two poets with two tragedies each, it seems. Comedies were more
numerous, five at each festival, except during wartime when the number was three. Were tragedies more expensive
and grander? Or was comedy more popular? They were both popular, since in the fourth century they both spread
through villages of the Athenian countryside at the Country Dionysia in autumn. As time went on they spread all
over the Greek world, and travelling groups of players must have had trouble, as athletes did, in keeping their
numerous appointments. The Athenian drama was never quite isolated: Aeschylus wrote plays in Sicily, and
Euripides and Agathon were lured to Macedonia. At the Athenian Lenaea resident aliens were permitted to