Why tragic and comic poets, with their divergent approaches to drama, converge in their ambivalence to democratic oratory, is a fascinating question, since on the face of it, dramatists and orators have much in common. Like orators, dramatists were citizens of Athens authorized by the democracy and occupied a prestigious place within the city’s speech regime. Dramatists, like orators, competed for victory before mass audiences, though five judges randomly selected from a pool of ten determined victory in dramatic contests, not a majority of spectators. Their audiences, though not identical, overlapped; Demosthenes calls jurors as witnesses to events that transpired in the theater (21.18, 226). As Simon Goldhill writes, “to be in an audience is not just a thread in the city’s social fabric, it is a fundamental political act.” Most scholars believe that performances of tragedies and comedies at festivals in honor of Dionysus, god of wine and life-giving liquids, were in some sense political. How political were they? This essay discusses the anatomy of fifth-century theater’s negative engagements with democratic oratory and orators and suggests that its symbolic violence towards democratic speech regimes aroused a potentially anti-democratic nostalgia for a fictionalized time of unitary socioeconomic, political, and moral orders, the time of the fathers expressed in the slogans “ancestral constitution” and “ancestral laws.”