In assessing the relationship between art and the theatre in the ancient world, we must be clear about a number of issues, not least the importance of theatre itself in ancient society, since it was surely its perceived importance above all that prompted echoes of its activity in more permanent form.

From the perspective of the audience, Greek theatre possessed a number of significant attractions. They included the very spectacle of the presentation, with its processions, colourful costumes, music, and the element of competition between the writers, between the sponsors and between the actors. It was presented at key religious festivals which were themselves highlights in the communities' annual calendar. The audience therefore participated with a heightened sense of awareness and it must have recalled the festivals in much the same way. Important in the plays themselves was the enjoyment of the dramatic situation and of the competing agendas and motives of the participating characters; but one should not forget, either, the visualization of events, their instantiation before the eyes of the audience. We in our society have become so used to the process, so sated with images from cinema, television, newspapers, books, magazines, billboards in public spaces, that we tend to blot them out of our consciousness in self-defence at the overload of information. Classical Greeks had no such experience. Paintings were comparatively rare, and when they did exist - as in the Painted Stoa in Athens - they were found striking and became famous. The rarity of visual media also helps explain the importance of architectural sculpture in friezes and pediments, items that are by and large out of fashion in modern society where the need for images is catered for by other means. In a similar way, this search for a means of creating images of another world (that was at the same time their own) helps explain the way that pictures on pottery became such an important medium in the archaic and classical world.