Greek Theatre in the Fourth Century BC

Eric Csapo, Hans Rupprecht Goette, J. Richard Green, Peter Wilson, Eric Csapo, Hans Rupprecht Goette, J. Richard Green, Peter Wilson

• Editore: De Gruyter
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9783110373684
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Geschichte
• Categoria: Geschichte der griechischen Antike

Age-old scholarly dogma holds that the death of serious theatre went hand-in-hand with the 'death' of the city-state and that the fourth century BC ushered in an era of theatrical mediocrity offering shallow entertainment to a depoliticised citizenry. The traditional view of fourth-century culture is encouraged and sustained by the absence of dramatic texts in anything more than fragments. Until recently, little attention was paid to an enormous array of non-literary evidence attesting, not only the sustained vibrancy of theatrical culture, but a huge expansion of theatre throughout (and even beyond) the Greek world. Epigraphic, historiographic, iconographic and archaeological evidence indicates that the fourth century BC was an age of exponential growth in theatre. It saw: the construction of permanent stone theatres across and beyond the Mediterranean world; the addition of theatrical events to existing festivals; the creation of entirely new contexts for drama; and vast investment, both public and private, in all areas of what was rapidly becoming a major 'industry'. This is the first book to explore all the evidence for fourth century ancient theatre: its architecture, drama, dissemination, staging, reception, politics, social impact, finance and memorialisation.

List of Contributors

Zachary Biles is Associate Professor of Classics at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Athenian drama and especially Aristophanic comedy. He is author of Aristophanes and the Poetics of Competition (Cambridge 2011).

David Braund is Professor of Black Sea and Mediterranean History at the University of Exeter. His research interests lie in Greek and Roman history and historiography, with a particular focus on the Black Sea region. Among his many publications are Georgia in Antiquity (Oxford 1994), Scythians and Greeks (Exeter 2004) and Classical Olbia and the Scythian World (co-edited with S. D. Kryzhitskiy, Oxford 2007). He is currently preparing a general introduction to the region for Princeton UP, a history of the north coast of the Black Sea for Cambridge UP and a study of Amazons for IBTauris. He has a doctorate from Cambridge, an Honorary Diploma of the Russian Classical Association, and is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.

Eric Csapo is Professor of Classics at the University of Sydney. He has a special interest in ancient drama and theatre history. His publications include Actors and Icons of the Ancient Theater (Chichester 2010), Theories of Mythology (Oxford 2005), and he is co-author with William Slater of Context of Ancient Drama (Ann Arbor 1995). In collaboration with Peter Wilson, he is preparing a multi-volume history of the Classical Greek theatre to be published by Cambridge University Press.

Hans Rupprecht Goette, Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Giessen (Germany), worked for 16 years in Athens for the German Archaeological Institute, and is now employed by the same institution as the Director of the Library in Berlin. Among his main interests in the ancient Greek and Roman world are topographical studies of the Greek countryside that concentrate on evidence of the daily life of ancient inhabitants and their economy in rural areas. His iconographical studies in Roman art concern the social implications of dress and self-fashioning, as well as the semiotics of Roman portraiture.

J. Richard Green is Emeritus Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Sydney, and a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Classical Studies in the School of Advanced Study, University of London. He has written extensively on various aspects of Greek archaeology, particularly on ancient pottery, and about material remains as evidence both for theatre production and for its reception. His book on depictions of comedy on Greek and South Italian pottery will be published in the near future.

Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at King’s College London with an interest in Greek drama, literature and social and intellectual history. Among her many publications are Inventing the Barbarian (Oxford 1989), The Theatrical Cast of Athens (Oxford 2006) and Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris (New York 2012). She is Co-Founder and Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek & Roman Drama at Oxford and Chairman of the Gilbert Murray Trust.

Johanna Hanink received her PhD from the University of Cambridge and is currently Assistant Professor of Classics and the Robert Gale Noyes Assistant Professor of Humanities at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She has worked extensively on Attic drama and its reception in antiquity, and her monograph on the theatrical heritage in fourth-century Athens is due to be published in 2014.

Andrew Hartwig was recently an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Sydney. His research interests include Greek drama, especially comedy, Greek theatre, and ancient scholarship. He has published several journal articles on Aristophanes and Greek comedy and is currently preparing a monograph on ancient classical scholarship and its methods in creating and preserving many of the surviving testimonia on the dramatic poets.

Brigitte le Guen is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Paris 8 and Director of the research group THEATHRE (Ancient Theatre: texts, history, and reception) at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Paris). In addition to many articles on the history of the Greek Theatre, she is the author of Les Associations de Technites dionysiaques, 2 vols. (Nancy - Paris 2001). She also edited De la scène aux gradins (Toulouse 1997), A chacun sa tragedie? Retour sur la tragedie grecque (Tours 2007), L’Argent dans les concours du monde grec (Saint-Denis 2010) and L’Appareil scénique dans les spectacles du monde grec (forthcoming).

Vayos Liapis is Associate Professor of Theatre at the Open University of Cyprus. He has published extensively on Greek literature, especially drama and its reception. His latest book is A Commentary on the Rhesus Attributed to Euripides (Oxford 2012), and he is co-editor of Performance in Greek and Roman Theatre (Leiden 2013). He is coordinator of Our Heroic Debate with the Eumenides, a research project funded by the Research Promotion Foundation of Cyprus with the aim of producing an online database and a series of studies on the reception of Greek tragedy in modern Greek poetry and theatre.

Benjamin W. Millis was until recently a Research Associate in Greek Epigraphy at the University of Oxford for the ERC-funded project The Social and Cultural Construction of Emotions. Outside this project, one focus of his work is on the fragments of Greek comedy and another on the epigraphic evidence for dramatic production. Recent publications include Inscriptional Records for the Dramatic Festivals in Athens: IG II² 2318–2325 and Related Texts (co-authored with S. D. Olson).

Eoghan Moloney is Lecturer in Ancient Classics at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. His interests lie in the cultural history of Greek drama, and he is the author of a number of papers on the Argead appropriation of ancient theatre. Building on that work, he is currently completing the volume Theatre for a New Age : Macedonia and Ancient Greek Drama.

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Jean-Charles Moretti, Former Member of the École française d’Athènes and former Fellow of the Institut français d’études anatoliennes is the Director of Research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), and heads the Lyon office of the Institut de recherche sur l’architecture antique (IRAA), MSH MOM, Université Lumière Lyon 2. He directs the French excavations at Delos (Greece) and the French archaeological mission at Klaros (Turkey). His chief publications on the theatre are Théâtre et société dans la Grèce antique (Paris 2001, ²2011) and Exploration archéologique de Delos XLII, Le théâtre, co-authored with P. Fraisse (Paris 2007).

Sebastiana Nervegna is a Postdoctoral Fellow funded by the Australian Research Council. She is a member of the Department of Classics and Ancient History of the University of Sydney and a resident fellow in the Centre for Classical and Near Eastern Studies of Australia (CCANESA). She is the author of Menander in Antiquity: The Contexts of Reception...

Indice dei contenuti

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Conventions
• Introduction: Old and New Perspectives on Fourth-Century Theatre
• Section A: Theatre Sites
• Section B: Tragedy and Comedy
• Section C: Performance outside Athens
• Section D: Finance and Records in Athens
• Plates
• Illustration Credit
• Bibliography
• Indices
• Index Locorum
• General Index
• List of Contributors