Ancient Greek Theatre
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50 free Ancient Greek Theatre trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Western drama starts on a hillside in Athens some 2,500 years ago. In the space of a few generations the Athenians invented tragedy and comedy, built the first great playhouses, and coined a vocabulary that directors, critics and screenwriters still use. This quiz covers the ground an introduction to Greek theatre usually does: where the plays were staged and what each part of the building was called, how the festivals and the chorus worked, the terms Aristotle used to explain why tragedy moves us, and the surviving works of Sophocles, Euripides and their rivals, comic writers included. It is written for students revising a drama, classics or literature unit, for teachers and quiz hosts who need a dependable round, and for anyone curious about where so many everyday stage words came from. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which English word for a kind of pretender comes from the ancient Greek term for a stage actor?
Hypocrite
Hypocrite comes from hypokrites, the Greek technical term for a stage actor. The orator Demosthenes ridiculed a rival who had once been an actor as a hypokrites whose stage skills made him untrustworthy.
Q 02Which Latin phrase for a contrived plot rescue recalls the crane that lowered gods onto the ancient Greek stage?
Deus ex machina
Deus ex machina means 'god from the machine', after the crane that swung actors playing gods above the stage. Around half of the surviving tragedies of Euripides are resolved by one.
Q 03Which Greek tragedian, a veteran of Marathon, was killed in legend by a tortoise that an eagle dropped on him?
Aeschylus
Aeschylus died at Gela in Sicily, and the Roman writer Valerius Maximus says the eagle mistook his head for a rock to crack the shell on. His epitaph mentions Marathon but none of his plays.
Q 04Which Greek god, whose wooden statue was paraded to the theatre, was honoured by the drama festivals of Athens?
Dionysus
Dionysus, god of wine, gave his name to the City Dionysia, where three tragedians competed each year. Among Athenian festivals only the Panathenaia ranked higher.
Q 05What did every actor in ancient Greek tragedy wear so that one performer could play several different roles?
Masks
Masks let a performer reappear as several characters. None survive, because they were made of perishable stiffened linen, leather, wood or cork and were dedicated to the god after the show.
Q 06The Greek 'tragoidia', source of the word 'tragedy', literally means what, perhaps recalling an early prize for poets?
Goat song
Goat song is the literal sense, from tragos, a he-goat, and oide, a song. A goat may have been the prize in early choral contests, or the animal the chorus danced around before its sacrifice.
Q 07In which tragedy by Sophocles does a king of Thebes blind himself after learning he has married his own mother?
Oedipus Rex
Oedipus Rex took only second place at its first performance, yet Aristotle later counted it among the greatest of all tragedies.
Q 08In which ancient Greek comedy do the women of warring cities refuse sex until their husbands agree to make peace?
Lysistrata
Lysistrata, whose name means 'army disbander', was first staged in 411 BC, while Athens was still fighting the Peloponnesian War against Sparta.
Q 09Which Greek poet, said to have toured with a wagon of costumes, is credited as the earliest actor to play a character?
Thespis
Thespis won the first recorded tragedy contest at Athens in 534 BC, and his name survives in 'thespian', the word for an actor.
Q 10Which part of an ancient Greek theatre, lying at the foot of the seating, was the circular floor used by the chorus?
Orchestra
Orchestra literally means 'dancing place', because the chorus danced there as well as sang. The modern word for a large body of musicians comes from the same space.
Q 11The theatre where Sophocles staged his tragedies stands on the south slope of which Athenian landmark?
The Acropolis
The Acropolis hill gave the theatre its natural bowl. Rebuilt in stone under the statesman Lycurgus in the fourth century BC, it stayed in use into Roman times.
Q 12Which Greek theatre, built beside a sanctuary of the healing god Asclepius, is famed for its near-perfect acoustics?
Epidaurus
Epidaurus is considered the most perfect Greek theatre for acoustics. Its summer festival, revived in 1954, has even hosted the soprano Maria Callas.
Q 13Which medical word for purging the body did Aristotle borrow to describe the effect of tragedy on pity and fear?
Catharsis
Q 21Which trilogy, the only one to survive complete from ancient Greek theatre, ends with a play called The Eumenides?
The Oresteia
The Oresteia ends with the goddess Athena setting up a jury trial in Athens to stop a cycle of family revenge killings. It won first prize at its first performance.
Q 22Which tragedy, the oldest Greek play to survive, is the only extant one based on events of its own time?
The Persians
The Persians shows the court of Xerxes hearing of the defeat at Salamis. It was staged in Athens only eight years after the battle, and the young statesman Pericles paid for the production.
Q 23In which ancient Greek comedy does the god of theatre travel to Hades to bring a dead tragedian back to Athens?
The Frogs
Catharsis meant 'cleansing' or 'purification' in Greek. Aristotle compared what tragedy and music do to a spectator's mind with the effect of a purge on the body, and scholars dispute exactly what he meant.
Q 14Which Greek word, a crime of outrage in Athenian law, now names the excessive pride that undoes a tragic hero?
Hubris
Hubris in Athenian law meant using violence to shame a victim. In myth and tragedy it became the overconfident pride that provokes the gods to punish a mortal.
Q 15In which tragedy by Sophocles does a princess of Thebes defy King Creon to bury her brother Polynices?
Antigone
Antigone is condemned to be shut alive in a cave for the deed and hangs herself there. It is thought to be the second-oldest surviving play by Sophocles.
Q 16In which tragedy by Euripides does a princess from Colchis kill her own children to punish her unfaithful husband?
Medea
Medea earned Euripides only the lowest prize at the festival of 431 BC, yet it became the most frequently performed Greek tragedy of the 20th century.
Q 17Which building behind the acting area of a Greek theatre served as both the backdrop and the actors' changing room?
Skene
Skene means 'tent' or 'hut', because the earliest ones are thought to have been temporary shelters of cloth or light wood. English gets the word 'scene' from it.
Q 18The Greek word 'theatron', source of the English 'theatre', originally named which part of the playhouse?
The tiered seating
The tiered seating was the theatron, meaning 'seeing place'. The name later spread to the whole complex, which is how English got the word 'theatre'.
Q 19Which literary term began as the ancient Greek name for the actor who took the chief part in a drama?
Protagonist
Protagonist joins the Greek for 'first' to a word meaning both actor and competitor. Athenian actors really were contestants: a jury of ten citizens picked the best actor as well as the best author.
Q 20In classical Athenian theatre, who performed female roles such as queens, goddesses and the heroines of Greek tragedy?
Male actors
Male actors took every part in Athenian drama. To play women they changed their outline with padding worn on the chest and stomach under the costume.
The Frogs is named after a croaking chorus that annoys the god on his way down. Its climax is a contest in which two dead poets have their lines weighed on a balance.
Q 24Which ancient Greek comedy imagines a city in the sky, the origin of the English phrase 'cloud-cuckoo-land'?
The Birds
The Birds has an Athenian talk the birds into building the city so that they can blockade the Olympian gods. It is the longest surviving play by its author.
Q 25Which Greek tragedy opens with a Titan being chained to a mountainside for giving fire to humankind?
Prometheus Bound
Prometheus Bound has its hero fettered in remote Scythia by the smith god Hephaestus, who does the job reluctantly, and he stays pinned there for the whole play.
Q 26In which tragedy by Euripides is King Pentheus of Thebes torn apart by his own mother and her fellow worshippers?
The Bacchae
The Bacchae was first staged after the death of Euripides, probably directed by his son or nephew, and won first prize.
Q 27Which daughter of Agamemnon is the title character of surviving revenge tragedies by both Sophocles and Euripides?
Electra
Electra, in the version by Sophocles, saves her young brother by sending him away, then waits years for him to return and take revenge. Each of the three great tragedians dramatised the story.
Q 28Which queen of Mycenae in Greek tragedy murders her husband Agamemnon on his return from the war at Troy?
Clytemnestra
Clytemnestra also kills Cassandra, the captive princess he brought home as a war prize. The queen was the half-sister of Helen, whose abduction began the war.
Q 29Which blind prophet of Thebes warns rulers of their mistakes in several tragedies by Sophocles and Euripides?
Tiresias
Tiresias is scorned by the kings he advises and then proved right. In myth he was also said to have spent seven years living as a woman.
Q 30Which Athenian playwright, often called the Father of Comedy, caricatured the philosopher Socrates in The Clouds?
Aristophanes
Aristophanes wrote forty plays, of which eleven survive almost complete. Plato singled out his mockery in The Clouds as a slander that helped bring Socrates to trial.