The Play That Made Athens Cry

Transcript

The Athenians loved tragic plays in the theatre. They watched stories of war, murder, revenge, broken families and terrible choices. Usually, those stories came from the distant past. Then a playwright named Phrynichus brought something very different to the stage. Around 494 BC, the Greek city of Miletus had fallen to the Persian Empire after a failed revolt. The disaster was recent. And Phrynichus made a play about it. He called it The Capture of Miletus. The play itself has been lost, so we do not know exactly what the audience saw. But we know how they reacted. Herodotus tells us that the entire theatre burst into tears. The Athenians had come to watch a tragic play. This time, it was too close. The Athenians punished Phrynichus. They fined him one thousand drachmas for reminding them of a disaster that had caused them such pain. And they ordered that the play should never be performed again. Athens would become the city of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. A city that turned human suffering into some of the greatest theatre ever written. But this time, the wound was still open. The audience did not see distant heroes. They saw something painfully close to themselves. And Athens decided that one performance was enough.