Judging Athenian Dramatic Competitions

The judging procedure for Athenian dramatic contests is not well understood. In this paper, we present a new model that we believe takes account of all the relevant data, which possesses the additional virtue of clarity of execution, so that a large festival audience can easily follow the proceedings as the winner is determined publicly. It differs in certain important respects from other interpretations, in particular those of PickardCambridge, Pope, Csapo and Slater, and Wilson. While these discussions are important, none presents a completely satisfactory judging model, leaving cases unanswered or producing a nontransparent system. We cannot know for certain what the process was, and several assumptions do need to be made along the way. However, the attempt to come to grips with the evidence to produce a coherent voting procedure does reveal much about Athenian attitudes towards competition and drama. In this light, we believe our proposal possesses a plausibility that can be measured mathematically: this can therefore provide a benchmark against which other proposals may be evaluated. The initial four sections of the paper focus on the tragic competition at the Dionysia in which there were three competitors. Section V discusses comedy and the Lenaia, and section VI considers dithyrambic competitions.