Dionysia

or even come close to any kind of representation of God's temple, which was all of nature and the heavens that man could behold.

Men were permitted to join the women in their worship of Bacchus, of Adonis, of the Bonadea and even of Priapus and so dissolute did the Dionysia become that the civil powers ladies and gentlemen were compelled to interfere with those of religion and the Bacchanalia were abolished by decree of the Roman Senate it was so depraved that even the depravity of what we have studied that were the men who occupied the great Senate of Rome could not stand it And the Jews, the chosen people of God, had not their religion changed? Had not God, weary with their sins, yielded them to captivity, scourged them with sorrow, menaced them with curses? They worshipped Baal Peor, the Priapus of Assyria.

They sacrificed their children to Moloch.

They had dancing girls in the holy temple.

That would be one way of putting it.

Well, in some sense, this might be a dissatisfying response, but it kind of has to be because it represents, this was kind of the discovery that Nietzsche made, right? The reason why it can't challenge Christianity is because it is not Dionysian.

It's not a true redemption of life and nature.

It's not a true embrace of all that which is animal and inhuman, and thus immoral, and thus barbarous within mankind.

Out of his estimated 70 total plays, only seven survive.

But all seven had won the prestigious first prize at the Dionysia Festival in Athens, where playwrights competed for honor, glory and recognition.

Only Sophocles won more prizes, but he also wrote more plays.

Pound for pound we can reasonably say that Aeschylus was the finest Athenian playwright.

Towards the beginning of the classical period, comedy began to develop.

The earliest date associated with the genre is 486 BC, when a competition for comedy became an official event at the city of Dionysia in Athens.

Though the first preserved ancient comedy is Aristophanes' Acarnians, produced in 425.

In ancient Greece society, music was ever-present and considered a fundamental component of civilization.