Theodore Grammatas

Abstract

Drama always consisted of an invaluable “database” for the culture and education of the ancient Greek spectators, who used to watch it as a performance that derived from the already existing literary types and forms (epic and lyric poetry) on which it was based and which included up to a certain degree; namely, in Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides’ tragedies and Aristophanes’ comedies, almost all the ideas, the messages, the moral values and the knowledge that constitute the so called “Ancient Greek Thought and Philosophy”, coexistand consist of the values of the ancient Greek culture as a whole. However, these do not represent the accumulation of some valuable material, but the creative conjunction and composition of qualitative and quantitative data in an astonishing analogy and harmony that expresses the basic principles and virtues of the ancient Greek Thought such as Moderation, Harmony, Symmetry, Equilibrium and the correspondence between form and content. This explains why the ancient Greek drama has been characterized by scholars as the “Theatre of Ideas” (Arrowsmith, 1963: 32) and the dramatic poets as “Educators” (Arnott, 1970: 35), since they used the stage in order to criticize their world, to promote the ideas rather than the heroes’ characters in their plays, thus providing an integrated culture and education for their spectators.