Proagon

The proagon was the occasion prior to the opening of the Great Dionysia dramatic festival in Athens at which the playwright/director of a tragedy could announce and inform his potential audience the topic of his forthcoming play and what changes he had made in his own new version of an old myth. It was usually held, in the case of the Great Dionysia, on the 8th of the Attic month of  Elaphebolion, the same day as the sacrifice to Asklepios. It took place on a mounted platform in the great hall next to the Theatre of Dionysos, in a building known as the Odeion. This was a very large building which could hold a huge crowd of people. [On occasions this building was also used as a law court. Indeed it has been suggested that the nature of the forthcoming dramatic festivals, whether the Lenaia or the Great Dionysia were, in a very considerable sense, trials in which the audience or public would act as jurors deciding the outcome of the cases, and that the proagon was the ordeal which they had to undergo.] The formal institution of the proagon gave the choregoi, that is the financial sponsors of the plays, the opportunity to put themselves publicly on display, along with the poet-playwrights, the actors, and the choral dancers. All were unmasked before their public so that they could be seen exactly who they were.


References

Simon Hornblower; Antony Spawforth; Esther Eidinow (29 March 2012). The Oxford Classical Dictionary. proagon: OUP Oxford. pp. 1212–. ISBN 978-0-19-954556-8

Peter Wilson (2003). The Athenian Institution of the Khoregia: The Chorus, the City and the Stage. Before the Agones: Proagon and Procession Cambridge University Press. pp. 95–. ISBN 978-0-521-54213-5.

John J. Winkler (1992). Nothing to Do with Dionysos?: Athenian Drama in Its Social Context. Princeton University Press. pp. 99–. ISBN 0-691-01525-2.

Olivier Hekster; Richard Fowler (2005). Imaginary Kings: Royal Images in the Ancient Near East, Greece and Rome. Franz Steiner Verlag. pp. 73–. ISBN 978-3-515-08765-0.

Paul Kuritz (1988). The Making of Theatre History. pp. 20–. ISBN 978-0-13-547861-5.

Robin Mitchell-Boyask (2007). Plague and the Athenian Imagination: Drama, History, and the Cult of Asclepius. Cambridge University Press. pp. 111–. ISBN 978-1-139-46823-7.

Mogens Herman Hansen (1989). The Athenian Ecclesia II: A Collection of Articles, 1983-1989. Odeion: Museum Tusculanum Press. pp. 234–. ISBN 978-87-7289-058-6.

Zachary P. Biles (2011). Aristophanes and the Poetics of Competition. Parabasis and Proagon ...: Cambridge University Press. pp. 40–. ISBN 978-1-139-49472-4.

Kate Gilhuly; Nancy Worman (22 September 2014). Space, Place, and Landscape in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture. Cambridge University Press. pp. 265–. ISBN 978-1-107-04212-4.

Karen Bassi (1998). Acting Like Men: Gender, Drama, and Nostalgia in Ancient Greece. University of Michigan Press. pp. 141–. ISBN 0-472-10625-2.

David Kawalko Roselli (2011). Theater of the People: Spectators and Society in Ancient Athens. University of Texas Press. pp. 123–. ISBN 978-0-292-74477-6.

The Odeion in the Athenian Agora

Homer A. Thompson

Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens

Vol. 19, No. 2, American Excavations in the Athenian Agora: Thirty-Ninth Report (Apr. - Jun., 1950), pp. 31-141

Published by: American School of Classical Studies at Athens

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/146791

Programm und Festzug der Grossen Dionysien
E. Bethe
Hermes
61. Bd., H. 4 (Oct., 1926), pp. 459-464
Published by: Franz Steiner Verlag
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4474021