In Ancient Greece (primarily Athens, for that is the city from which the literature of plays has come to us) thecrole of Theatre was initially a religious one associated with annual festivals celebrating the Gods at the festival of Dionysus , which developed into a competitive celebration of the city's wealth and power and then on to include social and political comment. There are three Athenian writers of plays in the Tragic genre, Aeschylus Sophocles and Euripides, whose work survives to show this development in the fifth century BCE. As the democracy developed the expression of comment and dissent emerged in a new type of secular satirical play which survives in the comedies of Aristophanes, but after the fall if Athens the comedy no longer had its political role and a new type of comedy of situational entertainment emerged as shown in the comedies of Menander with complicated family plots involving lovers, deception, mistaken identity, and clever plot twists. So Greek theatre performed many roles in society religious secular political and entertaining, at different times and in different strands of society.