The theatre was never just a stage. It grew up inside the sanctuary of Dionysus Eleuthereus, the god of wine and of theatre, and the plays were an act of worship as much as entertainment. Each spring the city held the City Dionysia, a festival that turned drama into a civic contest. Citizens packed the slope; metics, foreigners, and enslaved people attended too, while the public Theoric Fund underwrote tickets for poorer citizens. The earliest performances had taken place down in the Agora, until the wooden bleachers there collapsed under the crowd. That disaster pushed the festival up here, to the natural hollow of the Acropolis hill, where the rock itself became the first seating and the god looked on from his temple below.

In the fifth century BC, the slope witnessed an explosion of genius that has rarely been matched. The Oresteia of Aeschylus needed a palace door for its entrances and exits, hinting at painted scenery and a primitive stage building. Sophocles and Euripides built on that, and Aristophanes turned his comic fire on the politicians sitting in the front rows. Audiences here were anything but quiet. Plutarch records that in 468 BC, when Sophocles competed against the older Aeschylus, the crowd grew so unruly that the general Kimon had to march in and install his fellow commanders as judges to settle the contest. Laws may even have been passed to rein in how savagely comedy could mock the powerful.

For its first century the theatre was largely wood and earth, a temporary thing rebuilt each year. That changed in the fourth century BC under Lycurgus, the Athenian statesman who controlled the city's finances and rebuilt the theatre in lasting stone. The auditorium swelled to a capacity of up to 25,000, its seats divided by stairways into wedge-shaped blocks. The front rows survive best: sixty-seven marble thrones of honour, the prohedria, each later carved with the name of the priest or official who claimed it. The central throne belonged to the priest of Dionysus himself, who sat closest to the orchestra where the chorus once sang and danced.

The Romans reshaped the theatre for their own appetites. Under Nero the orchestra was relaid in coloured marble, and a marble barrier rose around it, most likely to shield spectators during gladiatorial combats. After the fifth century AD the place was abandoned. Its orchestra became the courtyard of a Christian basilica; its seats were quarried away for building stone. For more than a thousand years the birthplace of drama lay buried and forgotten, until excavators began uncovering it in 1861. Walk the site today and you trace eight centuries of construction in a single glance: archaic foundations, classical thrones, the Roman stage of the Bema of Phaidros, all layered into one slope beneath the Parthenon.