Of the three musical contests celebrated at the greater Dionysia, each kind, namely, the tragedies with the satyric dramas, the comedies, and the cyclic choruses had their special judges. At the appointment of the choragi, which took place a long while before the festival, the Council of the Five Hundred, probably under the presidency of the Archon, in the presence of the elected choragi, elected these by ballot, and the lot once more decided which of them was to pronounce judgment. We know for certain that five judges were appointed for comedy, probably the same number was required for tragedy, although an exceptional case is mentioned, during a contest between Aeschylus and Sophocles, in which there were ten judges, a departure from the ordinary custom, which was required by the great excitement in the public and the fear that the judges might be influenced in their decision by it. The judges had to pronounce on three points: the work of the poet, the performance of chorus and choragus, and the acting. The reward for the victorious poet was a wreath of ivy; the choragus received permission to set up a public monument in token of his victory, and, as already mentioned, the choragi in the tragic choruses usually dedicated tripods, those of the comic choruses fillets, thyrsus wands, and other festive apparatus; their decisions were also commemorated by inscriptions. The prize of the actors probably consisted in additional gifts of money besides the fees that were legally due to them.
The Heroic Period--Tribal Wars--The Chariot--Characteristics of Greek Warriors--The Spartans--The Athenian Array--Greek Arms--Cavalry--Greek Sieges--Greek Ships--The Trireme.
Scarcely any changes seem to have taken place in the character of the offensive and defensive arms of the Greeks from the most ancient period until the Roman time, though the conduct of warfare made enormous advances in the thousand years between the Trojan War and the age of Alexander the Great and his successors. Our authorities for the earliest period are but few, but the wars of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. have been carefully described by historians, some of whom themselves possessed military knowledge. We must therefore be content to obtain our knowledge of warfare in early times from the descriptions of poets, who naturally aimed at a very different result from the historian. The Homeric Epics are not authorities which we can follow absolutely in every respect, but still they enable us to form a picture of the warfare of that period, and gain some general notion of the mode in which it was conducted.