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Each year the Greeks looked forward to being entertained at several festivals held in honor of the gods. The festivals were mainly religious events. A festival consisted partially of a procession and sacrifices to the god being honored. It was also a social occasion for the Greeks to get together and enjoy the excitement of plays and athletic events.

The main social event of some of the festivals was the dramatic competition. Examples of such festivals in Athens include the Festival of the City Dionysia, held in honor of Dionysus (god of wine and drama), and the Great Panathenaic Festival, held in honor of the city's patron goddess, Athena.

This is where it all began: the Theater of Dionysus in Athens. According to legend, late in the sixth century BC a man named Thespis first had the idea to add speaking actors to the performances of choral song and dance which occurred on many occasions throughout Greece. (That's why actors are sometimes called 'thespians'.) Masked actors performed outdoors, in daylight, before audiences of 10,000 or more at festivals in honor of Dionysus, the god of theater.

Drama, an important contribution to Western civilization, was invented by the Greeks. Greek playwrights produced a large number of high-quality plays, some of which have survived in today's literature. The plays were of two kinds: tragedies and comedies. In tragedies, the subject matter dealt mostly with mythological stories, although some plays were based on historical events. The themes of the stories consisted of disasters, bloody revenge, or the suffering of the human conscience. The comedies dealt with the ridiculing of political or social issues at hand.

In a public performance, only three actors played the various characters in a play. Masks were used to distinguish one character from the other, which made it easier for one actor to play several roles. Essential to all the plays was the chorus. The chorus was a group of performers who danced and sang at intervals throughout the play, commenting on the events of the play. The fifth century Greece produced some of history's finest playwrights. They include Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (the tragedians) and Aristophanes (the comic poet).

Women did not act in Greek plays. Usually there were only three or four actors, so they wore masks to portray the various characters.

One famous Greek tragedy was Oedipus the King by Sophocles. It tells of Oedipus, the son of a king, who was told by the Delphic oracle that he would kill his father and marry his mother. The prophesy was fulfilled, and at the end he gouged out his eyes with his mother's (wife's) broach. The play ends with his life in ruins.

One of Aeschylus's surviving plays, The Persians, dealt with the historical Battle of Salamis in 480 B.C. The battle was described so vividly that he must have been an eyewitness of the event, if not a participant, as well.

Many Greek plays are still being presented today, 2500 years later. Now, women play the women's parts, and men play men's parts.

Aristophanes is famous for his parodies of his rival playwrights, philosophers, and statesmen, as well as for making a mockery of the Athenian democracy. The plots of his plays were outlandish, sometimes involving talking animals. He used vulgar language and made obscene jokes. The building in which the plays were held was the theater. The Greek theater was a semi-circular structure, usually built on the slope of a hill. The main feature of a theater was the orchestra, the central acting area, which was surrounded three-quarters of the way by the seating area. At the open end of the orchestra stood the stage building or skene, where the actors could change and store their belongings. The first theaters were simple structures built on the natural slope of the hill and made of wood. In the fourth century B.C., the structures became permanent and were made of stone.

Many of the stone theaters still stand today. The most famous theater is at Epidaurus, in the Peloponnese. It is still used today for the performance of ancient Greek plays.

Many Greeks from far away places flocked to see the festivals. They were very religious people who did not want to anger the gods by not attending the festivals. At the same time, the festivals were social events that were not to be missed.