ABSTRACT
Greek tragedy, scholars are increasingly willing to grant, is not an accidental accompaniment to democracy, but in some sense what democracy needed to help it function. The drama seems to show 'a social body carrying out quite publicly the maintenance and development of its mental infrastructure', as one classicist has recently phrased it; and 'the mental underpinning of such a daring society can certainly have been no simple matter'.1 Before scrutinizing the plays themselves for what they tell us about this from the inside, we may note some of the external features of the situation, which might help explain the extraordinary level of creativity reached by the Greeks of the fifth century BCE. Who were the playwrights and the audience, and what was their democracy like?
