00:01To honor their gods, the ancient Greeks created wonders that forced them to make extraordinary
00:06technological discoveries.
00:11One such breakthrough was a theatre built to honor the god Dionysius.
00:17It was the greatest theatre in the Western world, with the most advanced acoustic design.
00:25Hidden in the hills at Epidorus, about a hundred miles from Athens, the 14,000 seat theatre
00:32has dazzled audiences for two and a half thousand years.
00:37It is a feat of engineering, 55 rows of stone seats built into the hillside, with such precision
00:44that the theatre has perfect acoustics.
00:47This theatre at Epidorus is quite simply the most special theatrical space in the Western
00:53world.
00:54It's the largest of all the surviving ancient theatres.
00:58It's the most beautiful.
01:00This is somewhere where the spirit of the god of drama, Dionysius, still lives on.
01:05Surprisingly, the reason for siting the theatre in this remote place has its origin in medicine.
01:12Next to the theatre was a vast healing centre, and to the ancient Greeks, theatre was medicine.
01:21One way of trying to understand the link between the healing cult and this particularly exquisite theatre is that for
01:28the ancient Greeks, music, and Greek theatre is a fundamentally musical experience, was actually used in medical therapy.
01:36The great philosopher Aristotle actually writes about how people who are distressed and psychologically
01:43disturbed can come to a great resolution of that and to a much happier state of mind by listening
01:49to certain kinds of music and watching certain kinds of performance.
01:52At the adjacent healing centre, the god of medicine, Asclepios and his magical snakes, were said to work miracles.
02:02Medical cures and remedies were inscribed on stone tablets.
02:07Shrines were built to the cult of Asclepios and the centre developed into a wealthy healing sanctuary.
02:13People came from across the empire to cure every ailment and disability.
02:19One mother was so desperate because her daughter was dying of dropsy that she came all the way from Sparta
02:26and miraculously her daughter was cured.
02:30In 360 BC, the money collected from patients was used to build a vast theatre.
02:36The architect, Polyclitus, had already built a round house at the sanctuary but now set about a far grander circular
02:43design.
02:46He chose a bowl-shaped site facing west so the rising sun would light up the landscape behind the stage.
02:53He dug out the round performance space before creating the huge seating area known as the gazing space.
03:01Thousands of limestone blocks cut from local quarries formed the seats.
03:06His design was for 32 rows, although 23 more were added two centuries later.
03:13Behind the actors was the scanner, the origin of the word scene.
03:18A two-storey stage building, which was painted as a backdrop for the play.
03:23The scanner also enabled early special effects.
03:28When a play required a god to descend from the heavens, an actor was flown in on a hoist.
03:35The masked performers often played to audiences of up to 14,000 without the benefit of microphones.
03:42Polyclitus was able to create perfect acoustics.
03:47Even a coin being dropped at the centre of the performance circle can be heard clearly in the back rows.
03:56The design of the theatre also enhances the sound of the human voice.
04:00The secret lies in how sounds are reflected by the stone itself, reducing the amount of distorting echo.
04:11A sound is produced by somebody's mouth. It will hit a wall, that's a reflection.
04:17And what they've done in the upper diverse, in order to create a large quantity of short reflections,
04:22is that they've broken up the surface. There is no surface which is flat.
04:26So when a sound hits a wall, it's diffused in many, many directions.
04:31It enhances the original sound by kind of stretching it a little bit longer than it already is.
04:37And in the quest for perfection, the Greeks developed another technique to make the sound even clearer.
04:44When somebody speaks in a theatre, you can hear resonances.
04:48And if you have an ear for it, you know which resonances are going to get in the way of
04:52the dialogue.
04:54So if you were to find something that can take those resonances out, then you're laughing.
04:59And that's exactly what they tried to do.
05:01They used a resonator which they would tune to the frequencies that they wanted to take out
05:06and to the reflections they wanted to take out. And they would have embedded them in the wall.
05:11Two and a half thousand years later, the theatre is still entrancing audiences.
05:17The place that has inspired for millennia remains one of the world's finest theatres.
