The cult of Asclepius is not without some bearing on fifth-century drama in Athens, for the shrine of Asclepius was built next to the Theatre of Dionysus in the 420s. The cults of Asclepius and Dionysus were not only spatially but temporally contiguous, for the feast and procession of Asclepius coincided with the proagon, the preliminary festive day of the Dionysia. Sophocles is said to have become a priest of Asclepius, and his last two plays are plainly concerned with the idea of healing. These plays may be signs of a broader historical move away from the agonistic or dialectical idea of drama towards the holistic, cathartic ideal embodied by Epidaurus. Vitruvius, when laying out a theatre, chose to give equal cultic significance to Apollo and Dionysus. Nietzsche’s famous dichotomy of the Apolline and the Dionysiac offers a useful way of formulating the change that took place in the Greek conception of theatre. Asclepius was the son of Apollo, and his theatre at Epidaurus exemplifies the Apolline ideal: a space embodying order, and acoustically perfect for the paean, Apollo’s lyre and Homeric recitation. The deme theatres of Attica are the embodiment of Dionysiac disorder, respecting the irrational at the expense of aesthetic harmony. Somewhere between these polarities we might expect to locate the theatre of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. I have stressed the innovative and unusual nature of Epidaurus because it has dominated popular conceptions of fifth-century theatre. Standard introductions to Greek theatre commonly offer a plan or photograph as the guide of how things were in Athens. The Apolline model is seductive, and we must be cautious of it…

David Wiles, Tragedy in Athens: Performance Space and Theatrical Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) pp. 43 – 44.