Ancient Greek Theatre

One way of trying to understand the link between the healing cult and this particular exquisite theater is that for the ancient Greeks, music and Greek theaters of fundamentally musical experience was actually used in medical therapy. The great philosopher Aristotle actually writes about how people who are distressed and psychologically disturbed can come to a great revolution of that and to a much happier state of mind by listening to certain kinds of music and watching certain kinds of performance. At the adjacent healing center, the God of medicine asclepios and his magical snakes were said to work miracles. Medical cures and remedies were inscribed on stone tablets. Shrines were built to the cult of asclepios, and the center developed into a wealthy healing sanctuary. People came from across the empire to cure every ailment and disability. In 360 BC, the money collected from patients was used to build a vast theater. The architect Polish letters had already built a round house at the sanctuary, but now set about a far grander circular design. He chose a bowl shaped site facing west, said the rising sun would light up the landscape behind the stage. He dug out the round performance space before creating the huge seating area known as the gazing space. 

Thousands of limestone blocks cut from local quarries formed the seats. His design was for 32 rows, although 23 more were added two centuries later. Behind the actors was the scanner, the origin of the word scene, a two story stage building, which was painted as a backdrop for the play. The scanner also enabled early special effects. When a play required a guard to descend from the heavens and actor was flown in on a hoist. The masked performers often played to audiences of up to 14,000 without the benefit of microphones. Holly colitis was able to create perfect acoustics. Even a coin being dropped at the center of the performance circle can be heard clearly in the back rows. The design of the theater also enhances the sound of the human voice. The secret lies in how sounds are reflected by the stone itself, reducing the amount of distorting echo. A sign is produced by somebody's mouth, it will hit a wall, that's a reflection. And what they've done in epidurals, in order to create a large quantity of short reflections, is that they've broken up the surface. There is no surface which is flat. So when a sound, it's a wall, it's diffused in many, many directions. It enhances the original sound. 

By a kind of stretching it a little bit longer than it already is. And in the quest for perfection, the Greeks developed another technique to make the sound even clearer. When somebody speaks in a theater, you can hear resonances. And if you have an ear for it, you know which resonances are going to get in the way of the dialog. So if you were to find something that can take those resonances out. Then you're laughing and that's exactly what they try to do. They used a resonator which they would tune to the frequencies that they wanted to take out and to the reflections they wanted to take out. And it would have been better in the war. Two and a half thousand years later, the theater is still entrancing audiences. The place that is inspired from millennia remains one of the world's finest theaters. The ancient Greeks produced some of the most astonishing buildings in history.