Theater's god thrives, in Athens and Phila.

ATHENS, Greece - I met up quite by chance with Dionysus, the god of theater and wine, among other things. It was on a recent Sunday, after I'd just arrived in Athens on an unusually warm winter day.

My jet lag probably led me to Dionysus. I decided, 16 hours after I'd left Philadelphia and finally touched down, to climb the Acropolis. I was too tired to focus on a map - travelers, you know the feeling - so I ended up scaling the wrong side.

I climbed and climbed, up narrow streets leading to the revered ancient Athens hilltop, having started out in the almost-as-ancient Plaka neighborhood - Athens' version of Old City, only way older. I was huffing and ready to give up.

I turned onto a curvy street heading steeply down, away from the Acropolis. That did it - the god of theater was peeking at me from the bottom of the great mount.

There, snuggled into the side of a hill below the Acropolis' huge southern wall, was the Theater of Dionysus - at about 2,500 years, arguably the oldest theater in the world, gorgeous in its open-air horseshoe of stone and marble ruins. Except for some young people ascending the mountain the hard way, and a couple sitting in a high row and fixed in intimate conversation, the Theater of Dionysus was empty.

I was hesitant to invade the space - and astonished that I could.

You enter the theater to the rear of its stone stage, which was installed later by Romans, who also rebuilt the rest of it after they took over Athens. In fact, the Athenians had already redone the place, ripping out the wood and putting in the world's first known stone theater - something substantial for the 17,000 people who would crowd into the annual festival of play competitions.

The stage is now roped off, and stage-rear is filled with beautiful antiquities from the site. Once you walk around the rope, you're in the seating area. You're free to climb the rows of seats, or hop carefully over the gaps time has cut into them. Or just sit down. Of more than 60 rows of seats, 14 are still in pretty good shape. The rest deteriorate as they rise up the hill.

Continue ascending the aisles and you'll head into a steep climb to the top of the Acropolis, where the Parthenon and other temples remain. There, you'll see all the folks who came up the other side of the hill, the easy way. These are the people who were not too tired to read a map. On the other hand, they never get to meet Dionysus.

I wanted to commune, so I sat down in the sixth row.

I spend a lot of time in theaters and always have. Many are beautifully old. Most of Broadway is like that and, of course, so is the oldest continuously operating theater in the United States: Center City's Walnut, now in its 198th season, a remarkable run but about 23 centuries younger than the place where I was sitting.

It's not every day that you trip into the first of its kind, and my mind began to race. I tried so hard to see Euripides' Medea as it may have unfolded in its opening 2,438 years ago. But all I could picture was the version Fiona Shaw did five years ago on Broadway, powerful in its staging and Shaw's terrifying rage, one of those nights that become indelible.

And then it struck me. I was not sitting in an antiquity, not really. Dionysus lives.

In ancient Greece, at the annual Dionysia festival on this site, three playwrights competed for the best new plays. Back home in Philadelphia, nine theater companies were about to launch a festival of new plays - nine world premieres in all. (The festival officially ended Sunday, but seven of the productions are still running. See the accompanying box.)

The plays were part of the season schedules of these Philadelphia theater companies, seasons that include an average four plays per company. Another dozen professional companies in metropolitan Philadelphia also are staging seasons of three or four plays a year. In order to bring this off, they get a lot of help from private and corporate donations and publicly funded grants, and the box office pays for just a portion of the productions - the same melange of money that has made theater possible almost since ancient times.

Such broad support also continues to make theater happen in the place where Western theater was born. About 90 professional companies operate in Athens, many of them small but stable, with a breadth of productions.

At one end of the spectrum, a determined woman named Tatiana Ligari puts on new shows in a train car, once a part of the Orient Express, now outfitted with a tiny stage and narrow rows of bleachers that seat 33 people: the Theater of Dionysus on side rails. At the other extreme, the National Theatre of Greece will mount more than 20 productions this season, from cutting-edge experimental stuff to Shakespeare.

In his hometown, Dionysus is doing quite well. When you sit in his theater and let your mind wander to the theaters you've sat in over the years, you understand that over more than two millennia, he has been thriving. And he shows no sign of doing otherwise.

Now back in Philadelphia, I had a chance to see a bit of the New Play Festival. I can attest that the nine theaters involved - even the nontraditional stages - all serve essentially the same function as the first theater ever, and are much more comfortable.

And I can tell you that although it's a treat, you needn't fly to Athens to meet up with the god of theater. In some way, Dionysus was in Philadelphia, at all nine plays.

Although the Philadelphia New Play Festival officially ended Sunday, seven of the nine world premieres continue their runs.

Dex and Julie Sittin' in a Tree at the Arden Theatre Company, through March 11.

Enemies, A Love Story at the Wilma Theater, through March 11.

Hearts & Soles by Theatre Exile (at Christ Church Neighborhood House), through March 25.