This lecture examines the role and status of Athenian drama in Athenian society. Picking up where the last lecture (on the Peloponnesian War) left off, Dr Gillian Shepherd looks at the finale of the Sicilian Expedition, and the event that preceded it: the Melian Dialogue, which purports to recount events which just might have influenced one of the three great 5th century Athenian tragedians, Euripides, when he wrote his play The Trojan Women. This play, as well as others by Euripides and those by Aeschylos and Sophocles, were performed in the Theatre of Dionysos in Athens as part of the Great Dionysia. This was a religious festival in honour of the god Dionysos, but it was also more than that – it was an integral part of Athenian society and politics in the fifth century BC.

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