A place in the middle of the city where people tell each other lies

From The Bad Boy of Athens by Daniel Mendelsohn, The New York Review of Books.  

In particular, the dialogic nature  of drama made it a perfect vehicle for giving voice to - literally acting out - the tensions that underlay the smooth ideological surface of the aggressively imperialistic Athenian democracy.  Tensions, that is, between personal morality and the requirements of the stat or army (as in Sophocles' Philoctete), between the ethical obligations imposed by family and those imposed by the city (Antigone); and the never-quite-satisfying negotiations between the primitive impulse toward personal vengeance and the civilized rule of law (Oresteia).  Greek tragedy was political theater in a way we cannot imagine, or replicate, today; there was more than a passing resemblance between the debates enacted before citizens participating in the assembly, and those conflicts, agones, dramatized before the eyes of those same citizens in the theater.  Herodotus tells the story of a Persian king who bemusedly describes the Greek agora, civic meeting space, as "a place in the middle of the city where people tell each other lies."  That's what the theater of Dionysus was, too.