OCR Classical Civilisation Greek Theatre overview quiz quiz

The circular dancing-space where the chorus performed

The sunken pit at the front where the musicians sat to play the aulos

The tiered seating area cut into the hillside for the watching audience

The painted backdrop building standing behind the performance space

Seating the watching audience on tiers cut into the natural hillside slope

A backdrop, a changing room and the source of entrances and offstage action

Storing the animals and other offerings used for sacrifices to the god Dionysus

Providing the circular flat space in which the chorus sang and performed its dances

A crane used to lift gods and other characters into the air above the action

A type of tragic mask worn by the leading actor to signal a change of character

A wheeled platform rolled out to reveal interior scenes, especially bodies

The long side entrance used by the chorus to enter and leave the orchestra

The ekkyklema, the wheeled platform rolled out to reveal interior scenes

The parodos, the long side entrance into the orchestra for the chorus

The chorus, the group of singers and dancers who comment on the action

The mechane, a crane used to lift or lower gods into the action

It shows a whole satyr-play troupe with masks, chorus and the aulos-player

It is a precise photographic record of an actual performance as it was staged

It records the complete written script of a lost tragedy by the poet Sophocles

It gives an accurate architectural plan of the Theatre of Dionysus at Athens

Aphrodite

Dionysus

Persephone

Poseidon

The panel of judges who awarded the prizes in the dramatic competition

The members of the chorus themselves, who sang and danced in the plays

Wealthy citizens who funded the chorus as a public service (liturgy)

The priests of Dionysus who oversaw the religious side of the festival

Oedipus secretly knows the whole truth and only pretends ignorance to the city

The chorus of Theban elders deliberately deceives Oedipus about his true origins

The prophet Tiresias knowingly lies to Oedipus to protect the real murderer

Oedipus hunts the killer of Laius without knowing he is hunting himself

He is torn apart (sparagmos) by the maenads, led by his own mother Agave

He is killed in pitched battle leading the Theban army against an invading force

He drowns in the river while attempting to flee the city of Thebes in disguise

He takes his own life in despair after Dionysus reveals his true divine nature

Whether the gods exist at all, or are merely a fiction invented by mortal men

Whether Dionysus' punishment is so excessive that it questions divine justice

Whether the gods can ultimately be defeated and overthrown by determined mortals

Whether Dionysus is truly a god, or simply a charismatic foreign impostor and fraud

A great war fought between an army of frogs and an army of mice in a marsh

The trial of the philosopher Socrates before a jury of Athenian citizens

Dionysus travels to the underworld to bring back a great tragedian to save Athens

The mythical founding of the city of Athens by its first king and the goddess Athena

A formal structured debate or contest fought out between two opposing characters, known as the agon

The opening prologue that sets out the situation before the chorus first enters

A scene of slapstick physical comedy in which a character is comically beaten

A part where the chorus drops the fiction to address the audience in the poet's voice