In the great amphitheater of Athens, curious tourists can see an inscription on each of the marble seats of honor near the stage: Reserved for the priest of Dionysus. The carved letters, still readable after 2,500 years, attest to the religious significance of the theater in the culture of ancient Greece.
For the Greeks of the fifth century B.C., the theater represented a sacramental place, where the actors and audience joined together to worship. The drama — whatever its subject — was an offering to the gods, a ritual that might bring blessing to the city.
The stage itself, actually a dancing area in the style of a threshing floor, recalled the most ancient forms of communal worship. At harvest, people traditionally celebrated the culmination of the growing season by worshipping the god of vegetation in wild, frenzied dances. At the Festival of Dionysus, the stage became a more sophisticated platform for a similar experience — the masked actors' loss of self in music and art for the creation of an emotional closeness with divine power. And the chorus, while chanting their poetry, maintained the simplicity of the older tradition in their obligatory dancing.
Sophocles underscores the connections between drama and the traditions of the fertility god in Oedipus the King. Evidence of the trouble in Thebes emerges as a plague, a blight on the land that ruins crops and causes women to miscarry. The close association of human and vegetative fertility — and the connection of both to the capability of the king — represents one of the earliest forms of religious belief. In Sophocles' time, the mysterious but vital union of humans and nature still informed the culture. Accordingly, Oedipus' immorality — however unconscious — pollutes the land, and only his removal and punishment will bring back life to Thebes. In this context, Sophocles offers a ritual of death and rebirth, as well as a formal tragedy in Oedipus the King.
