THE

QUARTERLY JOURNALOF ECONOMICS

Vol. LXXXV August 1971 No. 3

ECONOMICS OF ATHENIAN DRAMA:ITS RELEVANCE FOR THE ARTS IN A

SMALL CITY TODAY *

WILLIAM J. BAUMOL

I. The Greek audience, 366. —II. Financing the Greek festival, 370.—III.The magnitude of the financial burden, 373. — IV. Concluding comment: Rele-vance for contemporary urban planning, 375.

Perhaps our cities have grown too large for efiBciency in thesupply of services and amenities to their inhabitants. At least thisis a hypothesis one encounters fairly frequently in the literature ofurban economics. In discussing this view some writers have sug-gested that even the arts do not need a large metropolis in order tosurvive. While today activity in the theater is centered in the big-gest cities, in New York, in London, and in Paris, it has been sug-gested that the drama can, under appropriate circumstances, prosperin smaller communities. The case of ancient Athens has more thanonce been cited as an example.^ Greek cities were certainly smalltowns by current standards, and yet the vitality of its drama and

• I must express my gratitude to the Ford Foundation, whose support ofour urban project helped in the completion of this study. I must also thankfor their help F. R. B. Godolphin of the Princeton Department of Classics, Lsm-rence Stone and Henry N. Drewry of the Department of History, as well asK. J. Arrow, my colleague Daniel S. Hamermesh, and my research assistant,Mrs. Sibyl Silverman. My very deepest gratitude must go to my friend andcolleague Hourmouzis Georgiadis, for his enormous help in my attempts toarrive at a reasonable translation of the ancient currency.

1. Thus, e.g.: "Finally, still another argument frequently given [for policyto attract the niiddle classes to the central city rather than the suburbs] isbased on increasing returns rather than externalities. It is argued that culturalamenities require for support a large interested public, and this can only comefrom the niiddle classes. The necessary size is perhaps not so obvious; Athensin its classical period had a population little bigger than San Jose, and pre-sumably a much lower per capita income, even allowing for tribute payments."(Kenneth J. Arrow, "Criteria, Institutions and Function in Urban Develop-ment Decisions," in A. H. Pascal, ed., Contributions to the Analysis oj UrbanProblems; Santa Monica: RAND Corporation P-3868, Aug. 1968, pp. 49-50.)

366 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

its other arts is obvious enough. Does this not suggest that culturalactivities can flourish without being surrounded by eight millionneighbors? I will offer evidence that the circumstances of the Athe-nian theater were in fact very different from anything we can expectto find in our society and that the lesson of the Greek experience isof very limited significance for the arts today.

The real issue is the replicability of the Greek arrangements.Are the Athenian methods for the financing of the drama readilytransferable to our society? By what means did the Greeks attracttheir audiences and would their methods work for us?

In this note I undertake to describe the relevant facts so far asthey are known. Many readers will no doubt find them as surpris-ing as I did. I must add that this foray into a field in which I haveno qualifications involves even more than the obvious degree of pre-sumption. One of the standard references tells us in its openingsentence that it undertakes "to treat of a subject concerning hardlya detail of which can any statement be made without the possibilityof dispute. . . ." ^ To this we must add the near impossibility ofproviding a sensible interpretation of the prices and cost figures re-ported at various points in the discussion.

The economic difficulties of our own theater can usefully be sub-divided into two (interrelated) categories: the limited audience, andthe high and rising cost of live performance. It will be convenient todivide my discussion of the economics of the Greek drama accord-ingly.

I. THE GREEK AUDIENCE

The level of attendance at performances of the Greek drama isincredible by current standards. Though the size of the audience atany period is not in fact known, the Theater of Dionysus in Athens(actually built about 340 BC — after the golden age of Greek dramahad passed) is estimated to have held some 15,000 to 20,000 specta-tors.* It is even possible that there were additional persons standingon the hillsides above the theater. Audience figures as high as 30,000have been mentioned but seem implausible.* The population of allof Attica at the height of the Periclean Age may have included

2. Roy C. Flickinger, The Greek Theater and Its Drama (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1918), p. 1.

3. Albert A. Trever History oj Ancient Civilization, Vol. I (New York:Harcourt, Brace and World, 1936), p. 266.

4. Sir Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals oj Athens (Ox-ford: Clarendon Press, 1953), p. 268.

ECONOMICS OF ATHENIAN DRAMA 367

40,000 adult male citizens, perhaps some 120,000 free women andchildren, and perhaps more than 100,000 slaves (though only figuresfor the free adult males seem to have a dependable basis) .̂ It maybe guessed that the city of Athens itself contained some 70 percentof those numbers during the period we are discussing.

The enormous size of the Theater of Dionysus becomes clearwhen we recognize that today no Broadway theater seats more than2,000 persons. The total audience of all Broadway theaters togetheron a particularly good evening is on the order of 25,000 persons(with a total of some 33,000 seats available), which as a proportionof New York's eight million population is surely miniscule, com-paratively.

A number of elements help to account for the apparently vastAthenian audience. First, it should be recognized that performanceswere not available throughout the year. One could not simply de-cide to attend a play next Saturday. In the city itself plays weregiven only on two occasions — during two festivals. The main per-formances occurred during the great festival of Dionysus (Bacchus),held annually, early in the spring (roughly, in March). In Athensproper there seems to have been only one other dramatic festival,the Lenaia (held in about January), during which plays were givenfairly regularly.* Thus, in terms of audience-days per year, Athe-nian attendance at the theater was not all that large, say two or threedays per adult male citizen, since there were about five perfor-mance-days per year, with an audience of, say, 20,000 each.̂ In NewYork City some six or seven million theater tickets are sold annu-ally, so that even relative to its population it does not suffer so muchby the comparison.

The number and types of performance at the main festival, theGreat Dionysia, varied somewhat with the passage of time, but cer-tainly an enormous number of plays was squeezed into a very fewdays. During the time of Pericles the festival normally ran for someseven days, four of which were devoted to drama. On the first of

5. See Trever, op. dt., pp. 292-93 and compare H. Mitchell. The Eco-nomics oj Ancient Greece (New York: Macmillan, 1940), pp. 19-20.

6. Pickard-Cambridge, op. dt., p. 38.7. Perhaps frequency of attendance was even higher. We have no way of

knowing since we do not know either the population of the city itself or thenumber of persons who watched the performances from the hillsides above thetheater. As we will see presently, it is plausible that social pressures made itdifficult for any free adult male to absent himself from any of the (approx-imately) five days of performance per year. The number of day.s on whichdrama was pre.sented was, incidentally, not the same every year. During war-time one day of performance was, at least sometimes, elimin.ated from the mainfestival of Dionysus.

368 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

these, five comedies were presented in succession; and on each of thenext three succeeding days, three tragedies and one satyr play (acombination, rather scatological in content, of the contemporarytragic drama and an earlier dramatic form — the dithyramb) .̂ Theperformances began at sunrise and lasted through the day. Later,during the Peloponnesian War, the day of comedies was canceledand instead the other three days of dramatic performance werelengthened by the addition of one comedy each evening.*

These three- or four-day marathons of drama must have re-quired stamina of the audience, many of them sitting on backlessstone (earlier, wooden) benches. Performances began promptly atsunrise and continued on until dusk. Aristophanes must have strucka sympathetic chord when in The Birds he listed as one of the advan-tages of flying the possibility of escaping "from the long-windedtirades of tragedy" to get home for dinner and back in time for thecomic performances.

Thus, while the population of the city did not have dramaticperformances available to it during most of the year, when thedramatic season did come it seems to have provided a surfeit. Howthen did the theater manage to keep its audience?

The answer, it would appear, lay in the religious character ofthe performance. The drama was able to draw so many spectatorsin fourth-century Athens for the same reason that permitted Bachto draw an audience for his music some 22 centuries later. Going tochurch simply was the right thing to do, and Bach's performance ofhis own music was just part of the ritual.

The sacred character of the performance in Athens even affectedthe Greek attitude toward the actor. Ancient Greece may well havebeen the only society before very recent times in which the actorwas regarded with favor. ". . . the actors were active participantsin a religious service and during the festival performances their per-sons were quasi-sacrosanct. As such, they were entitled to and re-ceived the highest respect. . . ."

It was considered essential that everyone attend the dramatic

8. The satyr play may have been introduced about 500 BC as a device toappease the more conservative members of the audience. It represented areturn to the Dionysiac subjects from which the tragedy had largely departed.Performers in the satyr play wore goat ears, horns, tails, and hoofs, presumably"in imitation of Dionysus' attendant sprites." In the earlier dithyramb theseperformers "were sometimes called tragoi, which is the Greek word for 'goats.' "Still later, as the form of the play developed, "it came to be called tragoidiaCgoat-song')" (Flickinger, op. dt., p. 3).

9. Margarete Bieber, The History oj the Greek and Roman Theater(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 97.

ECONOMICS OF ATHENIAN DRAMA 369

festivals. "Business was abandoned; the law-courts were closed;. . . even prisoners were released from jail, to enable them to sharein the common festivities." ^ Boys and slaves were admitted if theirtickets were paid for by their parents or owners. Pickard-Cambridgebelieves (though this has been questioned) that even women andgirls were permitted to attend.^(!)

It was, indeed, considered so important that everyone attendthe festival that the state provided a special fund that paid the dailyadmission fee (two obols * per day at the time of Demosthenes) for

1. Haigh, quoted by Flickinger, p. 120.2. This is surprising because of the "oriental-like seclusion" of women in

the Greek households and because the content of the comedies was decidedlyscatological. In the older coniedies a large phallic symbol was carried on a poleas part of the ritual procession, and the actor wore a large artificial phalluswhich subsequently was replaced by a "less indecent" variant. Flickinger re-marks (p. 121) that a respectable woman would have invited divorce by beingpresent at real scenes of the character of those they may have been permittedto witness in the Old Comedy and the satyric drama.

3. I may as well attempt at this point to do what I can to translate thecurrency. The basic coinage ran as follows: 6 obols = 1 drachma, 1 minna =100 drachmae, 60 minae = 1 talent. Records for the building of a temple abouttwo decades after Pericles indicate that the regular wage for all workers was 1drachnia per day. and jurors were paid 3 obols per day (Trever, p. 296). Thus,admission fees for one day's performances came to a third of a day's normalwages and were by no means nominal. As we will see later, standards of livingin ancient Greece were veiy low even at the height of the Greek civilization.As a very crude standard of comparison, I will take a day's wage to have beenworth $3 in current dollars. (This is slightly more than one quarter of what isnow considered to constitute the poverty line for a family of four by the De-partment of Health, Education and Welfare.) Then, the daily admission priceto the festival would have been about $1. Clearly, such a translation intodollars is largely fantasy, but it will serve as a convenient mnemonic device.In any event, since it has been suggested (Trever, p. 269) that 1 drachma suf-ficed to cover all the daily expenses of a family of four, the proposed con-vention, 1 drachma = $3, may not be excessive in terms of dollars of 1970purchasing power.

After writing an earlier draft of this footnote, I came across Colin Clark'smuch more careful attempt to reconstruct the purchasing power of ancient cur-rencies. Using dollars of 1925-34 purchasing power as his standard, Clark assignsthe following values for the drachma at the dates indicated: 480 BC, S4; 400BC, $2; 300 BC, $1.20. Since the price level in the United States has risen two tothree times from 1925-34 until 1970, my conversion rate seems to be moderatelyconsistent with his for the age of Pericles (about 460-430), though my rategives somewhat fewer 1970 dollars to the drachma than his. (See Colin Clark,The Conditions oj Economic Progress, London: Macmillan, 1951, p. 551.)

Professor Georgiadis has helped me to conduct some further checks of thesuggested conversion rate. We have some figures for wheat prices in PericleanAthens indicating that 50 liters of wheat cost some 3 drachmas. Making arough attempt to calculate a retail price equivalent for today gives us some-thing less than $2 per drachma. On the other hand, utilizing a weighted aver-age for the urban and rural work force for modern Greece, we arrive at anaverage daily wage that translates into a bit less than 84. If, as Clark suggrst?.the output per man-year in ancient Greece was higher than it is today, thedrachma, one day's wage, should perhaps be valued somewhat higher. In anyevent, the choice within the range that seeins plausible does not affect the di.s-cussion materially since I am concerned primarily with the ratio of the ticketprice to the daily wage, the ratio between the subsidy to the festivals and thet;otal budget of the state, etc. My attempt to find a reasonable conversion rate

370 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

anyone who felt he could not afford it. There are even hints thatpotential members of the audience were bribed more substantiallyfor attending.* Thus, state subsidy for the drama seems to havebegun rather early.

II. FINANCING THE GREEK FESTIVAL

We turn next to the costs of the festival and the means by whichthey were met. The revenues were clearly not inconsiderable. As-sume that the audience was in fact 15,000 per day and that eachattendee paid his 2 obols admission. Over the course of the festivalif admissions were collected for six days (including the two days inwhich no plays were performed) this would yield a gross of 5 talentsor, at our arbitrary conversion rate of $6 per drachma, about $90,000.

The expenses of the festival are not entirely clear. The person-nel involved in the dramatic portion included the author of the play,the chorus, which for the tragedy at different times consisted oftwelve to fifteen persons, and the actors, who at the time we areconsidering, according to Flickinger,^ generally numbered no morethan four persons.* Of course, expenses were reduced substantiallyby the very small number of actors, and for that reason it is stillconsiderably cheaper to produce a Greek drama than, say, a typicalElizabethan play.' Nevertheless, because of the sheer number ofpresentations, despite the small number of actors in each play, thecombined size of the casts involved in the festival was enormous."The number of participants was also astonishing. The dithyrambsalone needed 500 choreutai, with at least ten flute players. In eachcomedy there were about five actors and 24 choreutai with theirflute players and sometimes citharists. In each tragedy, of whichnine were presented, there were three actors, fifteen chorus members,and probably at last two musicians. In each of the three satyr

is intended only to convey a rough sense of order of magnitude, indicating thatthe drachma was worth neither 5 cents nor $50.

4. Pickard-Cambridge, pp. 270-73, and Mitchell, p. 364.5. Flickinger, pp. 182-83.6. This often required the actors to play several parts. Sometimes, more-

over, a single part seems to have been divided among several actors. Thus,Flickinger suggests that the important role of Theseus in Sophocles' Oedipusat Colonus was "played in turn by each of the three actors!" (p. 181).

7. Moreover, the cast had grown only gradually to this size. In the earlierchoral performances there was a chorus leader (coryphaeus), usually the poethimself, who answered questions posed by the chorus. Gradually he was givena more distinctive role and replaced by an actor. Aeschylus apparently intro-duced the second actor, and Sophocles the third (in about 470 BC) (Flickinger,pp. 166-67). It was only with Sophocles, whose voice seems to have been weak,that the poet ceased taking the leading roles.

ECONOMICS OF ATHENIAN DRAMA 371

dramas there were three actors, and chorus members with their fiuteplayer. There must have been 700-800 choreutai, 30-50 actors and20-40 musicians. If we add the mute characters, choregi, chorusteachers, magistrates, judges and stage hands, the number of activeparticipants must have been not much less than one thousand."*Today even grand opera rarely involves much over 300 performers.However, the figures refer to the entire festival, including someseventeen plays. If we subtract the 500 performers in the dithy-rambs, this leaves us with some thirty performers per play. In anyevent, when plays went on the road after the Athenian festival, thecompanies were kept very small.

We do not seem to know how much the actors were paid. Wedo know that in the middle of the third century they were organizedinto a guild, called the "Dionysiac Artists," apparently a powerfulorganization. The guild members formed themselves into companies.A record for the years 272-69 BC of twenty-two companies, all mem-bers of the Athenian guild, lists exactly three actors' names for eachcompany. The actors were normally paid by the state. They alsotook part in contests and may have been able to supplement theirincomes with prizes.

Prizes, substantial in magnitude, were also offered to the play-wrights. We do not know their amounts in the Athenian festivals.However, we do know that toward the close of the fourth centuryprizes of 10, 8, and 6 minae were presented to the dithyrambic vic-tors at the festival of Piraeus, with one such prize to each contestantwho had been selected to participate.* Recalling that a mina wasequivalent to 100 drachmae, and that a drachma could cover aday's expenses for a family of four, we see that the poet couldprobably live comfortably for over a year on his prize money. (Atour fictitious rates of exchange the first prize of 10 minae conqes to$3,000.)

The finances of the festival involved, primarily, three differentgroups: the lessees of the theater, the government itself, and a veryinteresting institution, the choregus. The first of these was the onlysource of funds not amounting to pure subsidy. ". . . although thedramatic festivals were under the direct control of the state, thefinancial management was relegated to lessees, who agreed to keepthe theater in repair and to pay a stipulated sum into the publictreasury in return for the privilege of collecting an admission fee.During the fourth century BC the lessees of the Piraeus theater paid

8. Bieber, p. 53.9. Flickinger, p. 269.

372 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

thirty-three minae [about $10,000 on our concocted exchange rate]annually. This system explains why the authorities, when theywished to enable even the poorest citizens to attend the dramaticexhibitions, did not simply throw open the doors to all. . . ." ^

The state seems to have contributed the wages of the actors,their costuming, the honoraria of the poets, and the prizes, as wellas the admissions subsidies that we have already noted.^ Thesemust have constituted some of the more substantial outlays on thefestivals.

However, a very heavy burden also fell on the choregi. Thehighest state official involved in the festival had as one of his firstduties the appointment of a number of choregi from among thewealthier citizens. These persons, in effect, were "volunteered" tobear a substantial portion of the expenses of the Dionysia. Theypaid for the training of the chorus, for their costumes, the wages ofthe singers and their trainer, perhaps also for the fiute player, andwere responsible for any special scenery that was needed. There is aspeech listing the expenses of one choregus who may have been on thegenerous side. It lists 30 minae ($9,000) for choregia in tragedy in410 and 50 minae ($15,000) for a dithyrambic chorus of men in 409.In another year his expenses for a comedy came to 16 minae (about$5,000 at our artificial exchange rate). In a country in which wealthwas scare, these were very heavy sums.*

The choregi were selected from among the wealthy Atheniancitizens in rotation. A citizen appointed to take on the position ofchoregus could ask to be excused on the ground that he had alreadyassumed other public burdens, or he could suggest that it be taken onby someone else better able to do so. Under the law the person whowas challenged in this way either had to assume the position ofchoregus or had to trade estates with the challenger.* However,citizens would characteristically take on the task more often andwould spend more generously than they were required to." Thiswas fortunate from the point of view of the playwrights, the success

1. Ibid., pp. 269-70.2. Pickard-Cambridge, p. 91.3. Ibid., pp. 88-89.4. Flickinger, p. 270.5. The choregi had a very considerable incentive to contribute to the

theater. Sponsors financed the plays of specific playwrights, and when the prizeswere awarded, naturally, a great deal of the honor went not only to the authorbut also to the financial backer. When inscriptions of the festival prizes wereprepared, the name of the financial sponsor was at least sometimes inscribedabove tha.t of the author of the winning play. For example, the name of Peri-cles is written above that of Aeschylus, who won the prize for the play ThePersians in 472 BC. Moreover, financia,l supporters would sometimes back playswith a particular political slant coinciding with their own interests.

ECONOMICS OF ATHENIAN DRAMA 373

of whose production might be damaged severely by the niggardlinessof a choregus.

In sum, the dramatic festivals were made possible by a two-partsystem of subsidy, involving generous grants by the state and lavishcontributions by private citizens that were, in part, voluntary butwhose philanthropy was enforced by law and custom.

III. THE MAGNITUDE OF THE FINANCIAL BURDEN

The fragmentary state of our financial information clearlymakes it very difficult to draw any conclusions about the real strainthat drama imposed on the Greek economy. Before turning to whatlittle information we have on the public finances of the Athenianstate, we may first consider some relevant general principles.

Live performance is, of course, very close to being a pure serviceactivity. Because of the comparative difficulty in instituting labor-saving innovation in the services,® they rise cumulatively in relativecost as an economy's productivity and real income grows. We allknow how rapidly the relative price of a haircut rises as we go froman underdeveloped country to a country of moderate wealth to ahighly prosperous area. We have also seen the cost of householdservices rising with the growing prosperity of our economy. Ourtheater has suffered from just this problem. Cost per performancehas risen cumulatively at a rate significantly exceeding the generalprice level (and the rate of increase in ticket prices, for that matter).For wages in the theater have gone up steadily along with the levelof real incomes in our economy, while productivity of the actor inlive performance has remained essentially unchanged — it takes asmany man-hours today to produce a play of Sheridan's as it did inthe eighteenth century. With man-hour productivity in the economyas a whole growing as much as 4 percent per year, the continuedrise in the cost of theatrical performance becomes easier to under-stand.^

6. Cf. Victor R. Fuchs, The Service Economy (New York: National Bu-reau of Economic Research, 1968), pp. 50 #. I emphasize the word "compara-tive" to avoid being misunderstood to be saying that productivity increases inthe services are impossible.

7. In the United States one manifestation of this phenomenon has beenthe increasing length of runs of plays in the commercial theaters. One simplycannot afiford to produce plays unless the period of time over which they canbe expected to run increases along with the production cost. It is noteworthy,therefore, that in ancient Athens a play was normally performed only once,though a successful drama might be repeated in the provinces. Only after 386BC, after the great age of playwriting was over, was provision made for revivalof earlier dramas as part of the Athenian festivals (Pickard-Cambridge, p.100).

374 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

Thus, the surprising poverty of the ancient Greeks suggests thatthe opportunity cost of services must have been much lower than itis today. That is, the relative cost, in terms of material consump-tion goods, of an hour of theatrical performance must have heenminiscule compared to what it is currently.*

Some idea of the standard of living of the Athenian in the ageof Pericles is offered hy the nature of his food and shelter. Theordinary houses were built side by side with a common wall betweenthem. Burglars found it easier to break through the walls than topick the locks. The bedrooms were "mere cells." "The averageAthenian was satisfied with the most meager fare — barley or wheatcake or porridge with a much diluted sour wine and relish (opsonion)of salt fish or onions to make it go down. The monotony might berelieved by goat's cheese, honey, green vegetables, and an occasionalegg or bit of mutton, but meat was usually reserved for festivaldays." * Perhaps this passage, as one reader has commented, de-scribes consumption patterns that were more Spartan than Athe-nian, but it is, nevertheless, suggestive.

Even the relatively aflSuent Athenians were not terribly wealthy.In figures on the distribution of wealth in fourth-century Athensonly seventeen persons are reported to have possessed over 5 talents($90,000 on our contrived standard). All of this suggests that in-dustry and productivity were indeed at a stage at which the costof performance was relatively low.̂

Despite this, and despite the substantial contributions of thechoregi, the public festivals made very great inroads on the publicpurse. The budget for the purpose has been estimated by Mitchell ^at no less than 40 talents per year (about 3/4 million dollars onour conversion scale) out of a total annual budget on the order of700 talents (about $12 million) .̂ That is, the festival expenses came

8. Clark (p. 552) uses the data provided by the Edict of Diocletian (301AD) to investigate relative costs of various types of goods and services in theancient world. He concludes that "the purchasing power of the denarius washighest . . . over personal services . . ." (i.e., these were relatively cheap), asour discussion suggests.

9. Trever, p. 295. See also Mitchell, pp. 132 jj.1. Yet, Clark estimates (p. 461) that " . . . the average production per

man-year of the whole working community was still probably in the neighbor-hood of [$500 of 1925-34 purchasing power]. This is a good deal higher thanthat of present-day Greece or of most southern or eastern European countries."

2. Mitchell, p. 371.3. In a letter. Professor Arrow comments rather persuasively that the sub-

sidy figure seems very high. If half the total budget for the festivals weredevoted to the roughly seventeen plays offered during the Great Dionysia, thereported figure comes to some $20,000 per performance. In a period of low realwages the figure is hard to believe.

Mitchell does, however, cite another writer who "reduces the estimate [of

ECONOMICS OF ATHENIAN DRAMA 375

to well over 5 percent of the annual costs of the entire government,including the "military and naval forces." It is hard to imagine acontemporary government that is prepared to budget that high aproportion of its revenues for the arts. In New York City, for ex-ample, it would call for an annual subvention to the arts of some$250 million — more than twice the 1964—65 budget for all non-profit organizations of fully professional performance in the UnitedStates combined!

IV. CONCLUDING COMMENT: RELEVANCE FOR

CONTEMPORARY URBAN PLANNING

This superficial survey of the economics of the Athenian theateroffers us little reason to expect that in our modern economy a smallcommunity can serve as a center for the performing arts. Certainlythe circumstances of the arts in Athens were vastly different fromthose in our society, and there is nothing to lead us to expect thatwe can replicate them. There seems little prospect of governmentsubsidy on the vast relative scale provided by the Athenian state.It is hard to imagine our wealthier citizens agreeing to be appointedas involuntary philanthropists — and then vying in the generosityof their patronage.

Perhaps most important, we have no substitute for the religiousassociations of the Greek drama, which helped to make possible thelarge public subsidies and private subventions, and which broughthuge audiences into the theater. Today, with no religious fervor topack the houses and with television competing for the audiences,a community in which 5 percent of the population is drawn to a livedramatic performance is unusual indeed. The enormous proportionof the Athenian population that attended the theater is surely un-attainable for today's cities.

Even if all this could somehow be duplicated, the rising relativecosts of live performance mean that the opportunity cost of this sup-port would have grown enormously since the time of Pericles. Itwould no doubt cost much more today in terms of goods and servicesforegone, i.e., relative to the general price level, to finance a givenlevel of dramatic activity, and we can expect these costs to continueto grow cumulatively.

the festival's budget] to 40,000 drs. [$180,000], a very small sum" (p. 371, fn.2). Actually even this amount is not all that small — it is nearly V/t percent ofthe total expenditure of the Athenian state. Clark (p. 466) reports the revenueof the Athenian treasury at 6 milliori drachmae ($18 million) in 433 BC andstates that "in 422 BC, a war year, this revenue was doubled." He adds that"the former figure represents 17 percent of the national income."

376 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

The sad fact is that, short of a revolution in attendance pat-terns, the minimum size of city needed to support a theater or asymphony orchestra seems very likely to grow even larger than itis today as rising real costs of performance make it necessary tolook ever more widely for sources of support.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY AND NEW YORK UNIVERSITY