How an ancient Greek monument is inspiring dramatists in Australia

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" asked Tertullian, the forthright early Christian, in about AD200. Greeks may be wondering what their capital has to do with Strasbourg today. Few of you may realise that the city also has something to do with Sydney in Australia.

On a hot afternoon in January 2013, I walked in the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney, that sweeping expanse of fine trees and shrubs, first established in 1816. Down by the harbour's edge, the garden becomes a mown green surface and the beds are rounded and full of summer bedding. Even the cannas are excellent and the view across the water was charming. On the Band Lawn, I encountered the monument that allows classicists in self-imposed exile to feel at home. The garden's most famous ornament is not an urn or a kangaroo in brown twisted wire. It is the Choregic Monument of Lysicrates, copied in golden brown sandstone and honoured in Sydney far from its home in Athens.

Choregic monuments have sadly gone out of fashion. In classical Athens they were put up by the winning backers and financiers of successful choruses and dramas at Athens's yearly Dionysiac festival. The occasion was unmissable, the source of so much that theatres are still staging 2,000 years after its first night. Lysicrates was the angel of a winning chorus in the boys' contest whose expenses he met by "voluntary" arrangement. Nowadays, film and theatre angels are found by accountants and then challenged by a disgruntled Inland Revenue after claiming tax relief. In classical Athens, they were nominated from a defined pool of richer citizens, roughly the group that will be knackered by Britain's mansion tax. Nomination as a theatre-angel was an offer "not to be refused". Greeks did not only grin and bear it. They competed with their peers and predecessors and, as ever, tried to put on the best possible show.

When I admired the Lysicrates monument in Sydney two years ago, there were signs that the sandstone pillar, built in 1870, was crumbling. As from this weekend it has been cleared up. The garden's monument has begun to be restored by the initiative of private donors, matched by public funding to the sum of A$80,000. Two groups of Australian musicians were due to play at its inauguration on January 30. An audience of 200, chosen by lot from many more, were due to watch a theatrical contest conceived on the Athenian Dionysiac model. Fourteen Australian dramatists submitted the first acts of new plays and three have been selected for competitive performance. The audience has been voting to decide the winner, casting pebbles Greek style, into one of three urns, one for each play. The winner will be given A$12,500 and a modern replica of an ancient Greek tripod, cast in bronze-coloured glass. A bronze tripod was the angel's prize in classical Athens. In 335-334BC Lysicrates had his trophy built into the top of his monument, still visible in Street of the Tripods below the Acropolis in Athens.

I am an apostle of drama in the garden. I like those neglected 18th-century features, "green theatres". Every year, we put on a Greek play in the gardens of my Oxford college and, once, I allowed the goddess Artemis to appear as a coup de theatre from a bush of white-flowering deutzia which I had planted six years earlier. Euripides's tragedy, Hippolytus, can never have ended so spectacularly. If the garden needs some life this summer, put on a play in it. Meanwhile, I asked the man behind Sydney's scheme, John Azarias, to explain what is driving his initiative.

He is inspired, he says, by Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, and a speech he gave last year comparing the UK capital with the golden age of Athens. Azarias, a Greek migrant to Australia, observes that "10,000 miles and several millennia away, here now is the new city of Sydney drawing its own inspiration from the classical past. Two great cities of the English-speaking world, one rich source". The ancient Athenians could not have phrased it better, though they happen never to have invented cricket, a game that would have excellently suited their Olympian gods. Imagine Mitchell Johnson as the new thunderbolting Zeus. Azarias's family are Greeks from the ancient Meander river valley in modern Turkey, who then moved south to Alexandria, the city whose culture is still one of his loves. Azarias and his wife, Patricia, have led the monument's restoration and the funding of a new Lysicrates Prize. Their hope is that it will stand beside Australia's famous Archibald Prize awarded each year to a winning portrait painter. Sydney's mayor and political leaders from both main parties in New South Wales were set to see its launch.

In 1762, the drawings of two young dilettanti, James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, brought Athens' Lysicrates monument to the notice of cultured English landscapers. Stuart was promptly asked to design a replica for the landscape garden at Shugborough in Staffordshire. Many others have followed, extending as far as Nashville, Tennessee, where the monument inspired the lantern-tower on the state capitol building. In New York in the late 19th century, it inspired the top of the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument on Riverside Drive, a memorial to the Union dead in the American civil war. Campaigns to restore it have been less successful than Sydney's and more expensive. In the spring of 2014, an appeal for $5.5m was launched to try to save New York's deteriorating monument.

Sydney's own monument is owed to a classically minded Irishman, James Martin, who was Premier of New South Wales three times in the 1860s and 1870s. The classical Greek impact transcends modern ethnic boundaries. However, all the worldwide replicas are based on an original of uncertain scope. The exact positioning of Lysicrates's tripod on the top of the monument is still controversial and scholars argue that the middle of it contained a statue of the god Dionysus himself. It had long gone when it attracted its most famous visitor, Lord Byron. By 1810, the monument had become incorporated into an adjoining Capuchin convent whose monks kept books inside it. Byron stayed and sported at the monument, feeling "vastly happy and childish", as he wrote, while engaging in Dionysiac activities with young Greek and Italian boys.

This month, the lovely water lotus, Nelumbo nucifera, has been named plant of the month at Sydney's botanical gardens. In fact it has a Hellenic link, too, as it was seen and misunderstood in Egypt and India by Alexander the Great. For once it has been upstaged. The three plays competing for the Lysicrates Prize are a black comedy by Lally Katz, called Fortune; an adaptation of Moliere's Les Femmes Savantes, called The Savvy Women; and Steve Rodgers' adaptation of the Australian novelist Peter Goldsworthy's Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam. My money is on Rodgers and the unhellenic Sunbeam to receive the prize from the hand of the state's premier. In Athens only the preselected judges voted. In democratic Sydney the entire audience was due to cast a pebble in a truly popular vote.

It is all a testimony to the Greek infrastructure that underlies our western minds. The way forward for London is now obvious. The city's classically trained mayor must take notice and introduce a twin prize in London, to be awarded on the steps of Piccadilly's Eros, that other Greek divinity within brightly lit distance of the theatrical West End.

Photographs: Jaime Plaza; Buyenlarge/Getty Images

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