The Sanctuary and The Theatre Of Dionysos (1995)

With the Sanctuary and Theatre of the god Dionysos, the Odeion of Pericles, the choragic monuments, the Stoa of Eumenes and the Odeion of Herodes Atticus, the South Slope was, for about a thousand years, the centre of the artistic and, above all, the theatrical life of ancient Athens enjoying prestige and influence on a pan-Hellenic scale (fig.1-2). Ancient drama was born and perfected in this area where the vine-growers of Athens worshipped Dionysos, the god of wine, and participated in the primeval rituals. Here, below the sacred monuments on the Acropolis, with the plain of the river Ilissos and the sea of the Saronic gulf forming a natural backdrop, the great Greek playwrights, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes and Menander, presented their immortal plays.

The visitor should never, not even for a moment, lose sight of the fact that this area was always a scene of activity and life, sometimes glorius and brilliant, sometimes, after the end of antiquity, insignificant and obscure.
Over the course of centuries and changing ideas, the monuments on the south side of the Acropolis, like the monuments on the Sacred Rock itself, underwent modifications of function or offered up their building material to the Athenians for the construction of churches and other building, for the erection od defence walls in Byzantine times and during the period of Turkish domination and even for the building of houses in modern Athens, during the early years of the existence of the Greek state after the War of Independence of 1821.