The key evidence for the early theatre in Athens is a rough arc of stones excavated by Wilhelm Dörpfeld in the 1880s (referred to by him as R [see the illustration provided on the main history page]). Dörpfeld linked this arc with a smaller line of stones (Q) too small to identify a curve, and a shallow cutting made in the bedrock probably to assist drainage (V), in order to project a circular boundary for a primitive acting/dancing area with a diameter somewhere between 24 and 27 metres. The diameter is comparable with theatres like Megalopolis (30 metres) and Aigai (28 ½ metres). Seen by the visitor today, the arc of stones makes a striking contrast to the rectilinear lines of all the later walling around it, and Dörpfeld’s conclusions would seem an obvious inference: R should belong to a wall which supported a circular dancing area half cut into the hillside and extending from it.

Unfortunately, Dörpfeld’s conclusions did not commend themselves to his successor at the excavations, Ernst Fiechter. Fiechter seems to have been a man obsessed with geometrical perfection and determined to make Athens conform to the ideal of Epidauros. Scholars of Dörpfeld’s generation were steeped in a romanticism which found its academic fruition in the work of Cambridge anthropologists. For them, primitivism was nothing to be ashamed of, and, though unexpected, Dörpfeld’s primitive stone circle was for a time acceptable. There was a very different attitude to order in the Germany of the 1930s, and Fiechter’s Apolline view of the Greek Theatre stems from a view of Athens as the acme of European civilisation. Theatre fell into the self-justifying category of ‘art’, and social context was of no interest to him. Nor was archaeological context. In order to realise his vision of the theatre, Fiechter introduced a new smaller circle centred on the axes of the later auditorium and eisodi, and at a tangent to a later stage wall. His reconstruction is entirely a projection backwards from later remains, and effectively takes no stock of Dörpfeld’s finds. The arc of stones, because one end seems to flatten slightly, was identified as part of an S shaped retaining wall. Why the Athenians did not prefer a sturdier and aesthetically tidier straight wall as at Thorikos was not explained. The other smaller group of stones on Dörpfeld’s circumference formed a tangent with the new circle, but this was dismissed by Fiechter as mere coincidence since these stones could have had no structural function buried deep in the midst of the presumed terrace.

Fiechter’s vision has had an extraordinary hold over subsequent scholarship because of the way it salvages a balanced, orderly and hermetic environment for the Greek tragedians. Two important followers in essentials were Arthur Pickard-Cambridge (in his still standard monograph on the theatre published in 1946) and John Travlos. Travlos’ contribution was to accept the arc as an arc and convert the S-shaped terrace wall back to a neat outer semi circle, framing a postulated inner circle inspired by Fiechter and Epidauros. Having eliminated asymmetry from the retaining wall, Travlos took a further step in order to remove all remaining asymmetry from Fiechter’s model. He shifted the axis of the early theatre westwards, in order to align his semi-circular auditorium with an older retaining wall that on the west side once shored up the flank above the eisodos (Dörpfeld’s wall C). This helped to release the theatre from any troublesome relationship with the nearby Odeon. Later writers of popular introductions have felt free to follow these authorities. [e.g. Oliver Taplin, Greek Tragedy in Action. Fig. 1; Graham Ley, a Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theatre Fig. 2. The circle with skênê behind it is taken for granted in J. Michael Walton, The Greek Sense of Theatre; (London, 1984).

A more recent and currently fashionable challenge to Dörpfeld comes from those who reject the orchestral circle entirely, and reconstruct a quadrilateral theatre. The reference point for these scholars is not Epidauros but Thorikos, though always a sanitised, Apolline version of Thorikos. The argument began when Carlo Anti in 1947 identified a series of rectangular playing spaces in sixth-century Crete, and pointed to similarities with Thorikos. Margarete Bieber helped to popularise his work , favouring a polygonal auditorium in the second edition of her
History of the Greek and Roman Theater. An essay published by the American archaeologist Elizabeth Gebhard in 1974 did most to tip the scales of scholarly opinion in favour of a rectilinear theatre [see ‘The form of the orchestra in early Greek theatre’ Hesperia 43 (1974) 428 – 40. Recent converts to agnosticism over the shape of the orchestra include J. R. Green in ‘On seeing and depicting the theatre in ancient Athens’ Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 32 (1991) 15 – 50, p. 19; Rush Rehm Greek Tragic Theatre (London, 1992) 33; and Oliver Taplin, ‘Greek Theatre’ in The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre ed J. Russel Brown (Oxford, 1995) 13 – 48. There is a useful survey of the debate in Clifford Ashby, ‘The case for the rectangular/trapezoidal orchestra’ Theatre Research International 13 (1988) 1 – 20.] In 1990 Anti’s pupil Luigi Polacco published a monograph on the theatre of Dionysus, reconstructing a trapezoidal auditorium and rectangular playing area complete with stage.

The rationale for the existence of the Theatre of Dionysos was precisely its difference from the Agora and from the Pnyx. It is possible, as Travlos believes, that a circular orchêstra above the precinct of Dionysos was in the first instance, built for dancing, and that only subsequently was drama transferred from the Agora to the dancing space. The principal dance at the festival of Dionysos was the dithyramb, and this was consistently known in antiquity as the ‘circular chorus’. Modern scholars tend to be interested in the dithyramb because of Aristotle’s statement that tragedy stemmed from it [Poetics, iv. 12 – 1449a]. In the classical period, however, although the dithyramb only occupied the first five days of performance, we must remember that this first day accounted for almost three-quarters of choregic expenditure on the festival, and involved 1,000 citizen performers. Surviving monumental tripods commemorate victory in the dithyramb, not drama. If the dithyramb was the primary event of the Dionysia, it would seem to demand a circular space.