eric csapo, hans rupprecht goette, j. richard green, peter wilson-greek theatre in the fourth...

Greek Theatre in the Fourth Century B.C.

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Greek Theatrein the Fourth Century B.C.

Edited by

Eric Csapo Hans Rupprecht Goette J. Richard Green Peter Wilson

De Gruyter



IV

ISBN 978-3-11-033748-8e-ISBN 978-3-11-033755-6

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VTable of Contents

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VII

Abbreviations and Conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IX

Introduction: Old and New Perspectives on Fourth-Century Theatre . . . . . . . . . 1

Section A: Theatre Sites

Christina Papastamati-von MoockThe Theatre of Dionysus Eleuthereus in Athens:New Data and Observations on its Lycurgan Phase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Hans Rupprecht GoetteThe Archaeology of the Rural Dionysia in Attica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

Jean-Charles MorettiThe Evolution of Theatre Architecture Outside Athens in the Fourth Century . . . . 107

Section B: Tragedy and Comedy

Oliver TaplinHow Pots and Papyri Might Prompt a Re-Evaluation of Fourth-Century Tragedy . . 141

Sebastiana NervegnaPerforming Classics: The Tragic Canon in the Fourth Century and Beyond . . . . . 157

Johanna HaninkLiterary Evidence for New Tragic Production:The View from the Fourth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

Andrew HartwigThe Evolution of Comedy in the Fourth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207



VI Table of Contents

Section C: Performance outside Athens

Eoghan MoloneyPhilippus in acie tutior quam in theatro fuit (Curtius 9. 6. 25):The Macedonian Kings and Greek Theatre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231

Brigitte Le GuenTheatre, Religion and Politics at Alexanders Travelling Royal Court . . . . . . . . 249

Vayos LiapisCooking Up Rhesus: Literary Imitation and Its Consumers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275

Zachary Biles Jed ThornRethinking Choregic Iconography in Apulia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295

Edward G. D. RobinsonGreek Theatre in Non-Greek Apulia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319

J. Richard GreenRegional Theatre in the Fourth Century.The Evidence of Comic Figurines of Boeotia, Corinth and Cyprus . . . . . . . . . . 333

David Braund Edith HallTheatre in the Fourth-Century Black Sea Region . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371

Section D: Finance and Records in Athens

Eric Csapo Peter WilsonThe Finance and Organisation of the Athenian Theatre in the Time of Eubulusand Lycurgus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 393

Benjamin W. MillisInscribed Public Records of the Dramatic Contests at Athens: IG II2 23182323aand IG II2 2325 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425

Plates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 447

Illustration Credit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 465

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 467

Indices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 527Museum Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 527Index Locorum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 535General Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 556

List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 575



VII

Acknowledgements

Over the course of three days in July 2011 (1921) the Centre for Classical & Near EasternStudies of Australia at the University of Sydney hosted a Colloquium, Death of Drama orBirth of an Industry?: the Greek Theatre in the Fourth Century B. C.. That Colloquiumand this volume, which derives from it, were made possible with the financial and logis-tical support of many individuals and institutions. We gratefully acknowledge the supportwe received from the Ian Potter Foundation; the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences andthe School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry; the Department of Classics & AncientHistory (and its William Ritchie Visiting Fellowship programme) and the Department ofArchaeology (at the University of Sydney); the Australian Research Council; the Centre forClassical & Near Eastern Studies of Australia (at the University of Sydney); the AustralianArchaeological Institute at Athens (and its Director, Alexander Cambitoglou, its ChiefOperating Officer, Wayne Mullen, and its Deputy Director, Stavros Paspalas); the NicholsonMuseum (and its Senior Curator, Michael Turner); the Womens College of the Universityof Sydney (and its Conference Manager, Gineke de Haan); Mr Christopher Flynn. Theirgenerosity also made possible the attendance and participation at the Colloquium of anumber of post-graduate students from Greece and the United Kingdom.

For assistance with the provision of images we would like to thank the following insti-tutions and individuals: the Allard Pierson Museum, Amsterdam and W. M. van Haarlem;the National Museum, Athens and Stavros Paspalas; the American School of ClassicalStudies at Athens (Agora Excavations) and Robert Pitt; Art Resource and Robbi Siegel; theAntikenmuseum und Sammlung Ludwig, Basel and Andrea Bignasca; the Museum of FineArts, Boston and Marta Fodor; Muses royaux dArt et dHistoire, Brussels and Greet vanDeuren; the Australian National University Classics Museum, Canberra and ElizabethMinchin; the Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen and John Lund and Bodil Bundgaard Ras-mussen; the Corinth Excavations, American School of Classical Studies at Athens and Iou-lia Tzonou-Herbst; the Delphi Archaeological Museum and the First Ephoreia of Prehis-toric and Classical Antiquities, Athens; the Groningen Institute of Archaeology, Universityof Groningen and Kirsten van der Ploeg; the Antikenmuseum of the University of Heidel-berg; the Pierides Laiki Bank Museum, Cyprus and Katerina Prodromou; the RegionalArchaeological Museum Luigi Bernab Brea, Lipari and Umberto Spigo; the British Mu-seum, London; the German Archaeological Institute in Athens; the Bildagentur fr Kunst,Kultur und Geschichte and Norbert Ludwig; the Staatliche Antikensammlungen undGlyptothek, Munich and Irene Bsel; the Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologicidi Napoli e Pompei and Soprintendente Teresa Elena Cinquantaquattro, Stefania Savianoand Alessandra Villone; the Bibliothque National de France, Paris and Pascale Kahn; theRunion de Muses Nationaux and Tiphaine Leroux; the Soprintendenza per i Beni Arch-eologici della Basilicata and Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Policoro and Soprinten-dente Antonio De Siena; the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton and J. MichaelPadgett; the Museo Archeologico Regionale Paolo Orsi di Siracusa and Angela MariaManenti; the Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa and William Zewadski and Seth D. Pevnick;



VIII Acknowledgements

the Martin von Wagner Museum (Antikensammlung), Wrzburg and Arcangela Carbone-Gross.

The Colloquium also benefitted enormously from the contribution of three Chairs Alastair Blanshard, Elizabeth Minchin and Frank Sear and of a participant whose paperdoes not appear in this book Robert Pitt; and from the energetic and efficient practicalassistance of various kinds given by Atticus Cox, Billy Kennedy, Sophie Morton andWendy Reade. Olivier Pollet helped to produce the map that appears in fig. 9.1; andMyriam Fincker the images in the chapter by Jean-Charles Moretti. We thank them all.Finally, we express our most sincere thanks to Sophie Morton and Andrew Hartwig fortheir fine editorial assistance.



Abbreviations and Conventions IX

Abbreviations and Conventions

Abbreviations

Journals and basic reference works are abbreviated according to the DAI List of Abbrevi-ated Journals, Series, Lexica and Frequently Cited Works available on-line at http://www.dainst.org/en/publication-guidelines?ft=all. We list here the abbreviations that aremost frequently used as well as abbreviations that do not appear in the DAI list.

ABL C. H. E. Haspels, Attic Black-Figured Lekythoi (Paris 1936)ABV J. D. Beazley, Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painters (Oxford 1956)Agora 16 A. G. Woodhead, Inscriptions: The Decrees, Agora XVI (Princeton

1997)Agora 19 G. V. Lalonde M. K. Langdon M. B. Walbank, Inscriptions:

Horoi, Poletai, Leases of Public Lands, Agora XIX (Princeton1991)

ARV2 J. D. Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters 2(Oxford 1963)Beazley Addenda2 T. H. Carpenter, Beazley Addenda: Additional References to ABV,

ARV2 and Paralipomena 2(Oxford 1989)Beazley, Para J. D. Beazley, Paralipomena (Oxford 1971)CIRB V. Struve, Corpus Inscriptionum regni Bosporani (Moscow 1965)CVA Corpus Vasorum AntiquorumFGrHist F. Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (Berlin 1923

1958)FHG K. Mller T. Mller, Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, 5 vols.

(Paris 1841; repr. Cambridge 2010)ID Inscriptions de Dlos (Paris 19261972)IE K. Clinton, Eleusis. The Inscriptions on Stone: Documents of the

Sanctuary of the Two Goddesses and Public Documents of the Deme(Athens 20052008)

IG Inscriptiones GraecaeIGBulg I2 G. Mihailov, Inscriptiones Graecae in Bulgaria repertae. I. Inscrip-

tiones orae Ponti Euxini 2(Sofia 1970)IGUR L. Moretti, Inscriptiones Graecae Urbis Romae (Rome 1968)IK Byzantion A. ajtar, Die Inschriften von Byzantion, Inschriften griechischer

Stdte aus Kleinasien 58 (Bonn 2000).IOrop. V. C. Petrakos, O upsilontilde #upsilondieresisgraveupsilontilde (Athens 1997)IosPE I2 B. Latyschev, Inscriptiones Antiquae Orae Septentrionalis Ponti Eu-

xeni Graecae et Latinae I 2(St. Petersburg 1916)IScM I D. M. Pippidi, Inscriptiones Daciae et Scythiae Minoris antiquae.

Series altera: Inscriptiones Scythiae Minoris graecae et latinae. I. In-scriptiones Histriae et vicinia (Bucharest 1983)



X Abbreviations and Conventions

IScM III A. Avram, Inscriptiones Daciae et Scythiae Minoris antiquae. Seriesaltera: Inscriptiones Scythiae Minoris graecae et latinae 3. Callatis etterritorium (Bucharest 2000)

LCS A. D. Trendall, The Red-Figured Vases of Lucania, Campania andSicily, BICS Suppl. 31 (London 1973)

Liddell Scott H. G. Liddell R. Scott H. S. Jones, A Greek-English LexiconJones 9(1996); Suppl. (1996)

LIMC Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae 18 (Zrich Mnchen 19811999)

MMC3 T. B. L. Webster J. R. Green, Monuments Illustrating Old andMiddle Comedy, BICS Suppl. 39 3(London 1978)

MNC3 T. B. L. Webster J. R. Green A. Seeberg, Monuments IllustratingNew Comedy, BICS Suppl. 50 3(London 1995)

MO B. Millis S. D. Olson, Inscriptional Records for the Dramatic Fes-tivals at Athens: IG II2 231825 and Related Texts (Leiden Boston2012)

MTS2 T. B. L. Webster, Monuments Illustrating Tragedy and Satyr Play,BICS Suppl. 20 2(London 1967)

PCG R. Kassel C. Austin, Poetae Comici Graeci, currently 18 (Berlin New York 1983ff.)

PhV2 A. D. Trendall, Phlyax Vases, BICS Suppl. 19 2(London 1967)RVAp A. D. Trendall A. Cambitoglou, Red-Figure Vases of Apulia 12

(Oxford 19781982)SEG Supplementum Epigraphicum GraecumSIG W. Dittenberger, Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum 3(Leipzig

19141924)SNG Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum (London 1931ff.).TGR P. Ciancio Rossetto G. Pisani Sartorio (eds.), Teatri greci e romani

alle origini del linguaggio rappresentato IIII (Roma 1994)TrGF Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta 15 (Gttingen 19712004)

Abbreviations for ancient Greek authors are listed as in Liddell Scott Jones XVIXLV,with the exception only of Plays by Aristophanes (Ar.) and the one work of Plato (Pl.), i. e.Laws, capable of being rendered with a monosyllabic English title. References to scholiastsare indicated by schol. followed by the author-abbreviation.

Abbreviations for Latin authors follow the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae Index (1900).Abbreviations for Papyrus collections are as they appear in Liddell Scott Jones

XLXLII.

Names

Like most contemporary authors we have walked the thin line between the extreme Latin-isation of Greek names, and the defamiliarisation of historical figures already well-knownby their Latinised names. Persons and places well enough known to head an entry inS. Hornblower A. Spawforth (eds.), Oxford Classical Dictionary 3(Oxford 1996) arespelled as in that heading. Thus Socrates is the famous philosopher, but Sokrates is a lessillustrious namesake. OCDs extreme Latinism made for many uncomfortable compro-



Abbreviations and Conventions XI

mises. Even editors have their limits and our line was drawn at Thoricus and Odeum:the place appears here as Thorikos and the building as Odeion.

Transliteration

Other Greek words and proper names follow the currently dominant standard conventionfor transliteration. We employ: ch for ; x for ; ph for ; y for upsilonaspertilde (but u in a diphthong);ai for ;oi for .

Dates

As a general rule all dates will be B. C. (bibliographic references of course excluded) unlessotherwise specified (or blatantly obvious).



XII Abbreviations and Conventions



Introduction 1

Introduction: Old and New Perspectiveson Fourth-Century Theatre

Until recently the fourth-century theatre has languished in the deep shadow of its fifth-century counterpart. To understand this neglect we need to reach back more than twocenturies to the very beginning of modern scholarship on Greek drama. Friedrich andAugust Schlegel built upon an organic model of literary history1. Their own model haddeep and complex ideological roots in romanticism and German nationalism2. It assimi-lated the fifth century to the bloom of the Greek spirit (of which tragedy was the highestexpression), and the fourth century to its decay3.

Others built upon this binary structure. Nietzsche sharpened the apex of transition inhis account of tragedys sudden demise in his Birth of Tragedy, especially in section 12where Euripides aesthetic Socratism, rationalism and realism are said rather sensationallyto have murdered tragedy, and in section 14 where the chorus, pictured as the religious andspiritual well-spring of tragedy, is said to have dried up. Here however the chronology isconfused by the observation that the chorus began to dwindle even in Sophocles, but itscollapse was accelerated through phases that follow one another with terrifying speed inEuripides, Agathon and New Comedy.

The modern history of the ancient theatre was invented under the spell of these meta-phors and images. But one had to wait for German scholarship to be exported for the op-position between fifth and fourth century to become systematic enough to override the evi-dence itself. In the first general history of ancient Greek theatre to be written in English(1889), Arthur Haigh (drawing directly on the already extensive German scholarship) leftlittle doubt about the social cost of a loss of empire, explaining that in the fourth century,after the fall of the Athenian empire, the political splendour of the City Dionysia came toan end, with the consequence that the fourth century is a period of decay as far as tra-gedy is concerned4. But Haigh was keen to drive the lesson home and felt the need to findan actual death for tragedy to supplement what was merely a moral death. That the fourthcentury theatre included revivals of fifth-century tragedy had long been recognised and im-mediately problematised as something that quashed originality and also encouraged themanipulation of canonical texts by actors (always, it would seem, for the worse)5. Haighconverted the existence of revival into a proof of the loss of vitality: a sure symptom ofdecay, both in tragedy and comedy, was the tendency to fall back upon the past, andreproduce old plays as regards tragedy this practice had already become prevalent bythe middle of the fourth-century. But Haigh evidently wanted to suggest more than a loss

1 F. Schlegel 1794a. 1794b. 17951797. 1798.1815; A. Schlegel 1809.

2 See e.g. Behler 1993, 72130; Duff 2009.3 The organic paradigm has mainly been of in-

terest to Euripidean studies because initially atleast Euripides (and later, late Euripides) is held

responsible for the decay: Michelini 1987,311; Riley 2008, 154174; Mastronarde2010, 12.

4 Haigh 1889, 12. 27.5 E.g. Grysar 1830, 28.



2 Introduction

of vitality and he hints at an actual (organic!) death without actually saying so: by themiddle of the fourth century the career of Attic tragedy began to draw to a close therewere signs of decay in productive power.6

Others would follow the metaphor to its necessary conclusion, putting an end to bothtragedy and comedy (and much else) and not waiting for the middle of the fourth centuryto let them die. Even if today we are more likely to use words like decline rather thandecay, and much less likely to express regret that the specific qualities of fourth-centurytheatre grew to such a height as to become a positive vice, and to sap the military energiesof the people7, the biological metaphor is still alive and well, as are the facts it generated.A rapid and casual survey of books published in the last two decades yields abundant newsof tragedys or comedys death in the fourth century and even several permutations of thejust-as-easily-disprovable claim that fourth-century theatre contained nothing but revivalsof fifth-century classics: With Sophocles and Euripides both dead, and leaving no suc-cessors, the fourth-century theatre contented itself with revivals (Arnott 1989, 46);in the fourth century new tragedies ceased to be produced and revivals of the classicworks occupied the stage instead (McNeill 1991, 262); what is clear is how the lossof spiritual weight in the drama [after Euripides] coincided inevitably with the decline oftragedy and drama generally in an exhausted, overwrought Athens, and with it the qualityof the writers drawn to the art (Lee 2005, 197); tragedy primarily survived in the formof revival in the fourth century (Rogers 2007, 17); Erskine and Lebow (2012, 7) takefor granted the decline and all but disappearance of tragedy at the end of the fifth centuryBCE. If any of this were true, then one could learn all one needed to know about fourth-century drama by studying the fifth-century texts, and this, it seems, is a convenienceworth any rationalisation, since for the most part the fourth-century texts are just notthere.

By the latter half of the twentieth century, the ideological roots of the organic modelwere dead, even if much of its superstructure continued to darken scholarship. A newand still more powerful paradigm appeared in the 1960s, most brilliantly in the writingsof the structuralist Jean-Pierre Vernant8. Vernant placed the already polarised divisioninto a binary chain that marked off the fifth century as the moment of tragedy. Tragedywas a tool for solving problems and relieving tensions created by the transition from anideology founded in aristocratic, agrarian, mythic and ritual values, to a new ideology ofthe democratic polis founded in reason. But by the fourth century (as Nietzsche had al-ready observed) polis values were already established and the moment of tragedy wasover.

The idea that tragedy (and by extension comedy) served to define the values of a demo-cratic citizen was taken up in a somewhat reductive form as a kind of propaganda of Athe-nian civic self-definition, usually at the expense of some foreign other, especially in Cold-War America, Britain and France. Ancient drama took on the thought-policing role per-formed by the modern mass-media.

This paradigm encouraged the belief that tragedy and comedy were by Athenians, forAthenians and completely concerned with representing what it meant to be Athenian. Butthe fourth century just did not fit well into this paradigm. There was in the fourth centuryoverwhelming evidence that drama was no longer uniquely Athenian: tragedy and comedywere manifestly performed elsewhere, and even in Athens foreigners were manifestly active

6 Haigh 1889, 32. 39.7 Haigh 1889, 317.

8 Esp. VernantVidal-Naquet 1972, chapters 1and 2.



Introduction 3

in the theatre. Moreover, the chorus, the surrogate of the citizen body, no longer domi-nated the drama. As a result little attention was spared for fourth-century development.But there was distortion, too. The paradigm was saved only at the cost of denying and re-pressing increasing evidence for the export or reperformance of drama even in the fifthcentury.

In this and many other respects the new paradigm grew complicit with the old. Fromat least 1830 a dogma had arisen about the single performance: Grysar wrote with con-fidence that: habebant veteres Graeci iam antiquitus atque inde a cultioris tragoediaeprimordiis hoc institutum, ut fabulae semel in scenam productae non iterum darentur9.But Grysar then went on to list a huge body of evidence to the contrary by way of excep-tion. These exceptions were forgotten by post-war scholarship. The belief that until wellinto the fourth century individual dramas were normally performed only once and for anexclusively Athenian audience had until the 1990s, congealed into dogma. It received itsmost authoritative expression even in the most unexpected places. Webster urged that theGreek dramatist could only be certain of a single presentation of his tragedy on the stage(1956b, XI f.). But the subtlety of Websters only certain is lost in Pickard-Cambridge(1968, 99): in the fifth century the only performances of old plays (with an exception tobe noticed) were presentations of unsuccessful plays in a revised form. Starr (1991, 320)says the same thing but excepts only more successful works. The exceptions are evi-dently in doubt, but the rule was needed to save a generation of deeply Athenocentricstudies of Greek theatre. By the late 1980s ancient drama was no longer Greek but se-curely Athenian, a view most monumentally advertised in the edited collection by Winklerand Zeitlin (1990) with the subtitle Athenian Drama in its Social Context, where (394)we are urged to remind ourselves that fifth-century plays were written for single perform-ances. The notion is still echoed in much more recent books and by leading experts10.Scholarship shied away from the fourth century. To say that theatre is Athenian in the fifthcentury but international in the fourth, and that its real function was Athenian self-defini-tion, is effectively to say that in the fourth century it is an empty shell.

Why does this vision of the fourth century theatre prove so resilient in an age less drivenby romantic, nationalistic or cold-war binaristic agendas? Some responsibility must beborne by the shape of the ancient evidence. In the case of tragedy, particularly, all of theweight seems to be on one side of the divide. All but (possibly) one of our complete tragediesbelong to the fifth century11. Our one complete satyr play is fifth-century. Most comedy isfifth-century. It is true that the best evidence for revivals of old tragedy and old comedy isfrom the fourth century. It is true that in our fourth-century dramatic texts the chorus isscarcely visible. Ancient commentators testify to the superiority of the fifth century, themost important being Aristophanes whose Dionysus complained that since the death ofEuripides and Sophocles there were no more creative tragedians, even if it was a feeder for ajoke; and Aristotle, the ultimate source of the biological model, himself suggested that thetragedy of his day was characterless and elsewhere implies, or can be understood to imply,

9 Grysar 1830, 3: the ancient Greeks had estab-lished from former times, and indeed from thefirst beginnings of tragedys refinement, therule that plays once brought upon stage shouldnever again be produced.

10 E.g. Garland 2004, 3; Slater 2002, 54; evenCalder 2006, 3 who challenges Websters infer-ences. The last two are reprints of earlier pieces.

11 Even general consensus that Rhesus was fourthcentury was only reached after 1964 becauseof and despite Ritchies (1964) attempt toprove it Euripidean. The play only survivedbecause in antiquity it was mistaken to be byEuripides.



4 Introduction

that its choruses were deficient12. It is true, finally, that the fourth century canonised thefifth, exalted its poets as culture heroes and models and that fourth-century dramatists insome (limited) ways idolised and emulated the fifth-century dramatists. To fourth-centuryeyes the fifth century was incomparably great in every respect but most paradigmatically inits poets, choruses and actors13. But this is the great crux and paradox of the problem. Ifthe shape of our evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of the fifth century, it is largely be-cause the fourth century shaped it this way. In assuming the vast superiority of fifth-centurytheatre, we are accepting, too often without question, a fourth-century judgement.

Aristophanes and Aristotle, rightly or wrongly, could be interpreted to endorse the no-tion that the fourth century was all about imitation and decay. The non-survival of post-fifth century dramatic texts could be understood, rightly or wrongly, to reflect the judge-ment of the ages, that everything later was mediocre or merely imitative and thereforesuperfluous. The fourth-century canonisation of the fifth-century tragedians could betaken, not as a state of social psychology, but a confession of inferiority. But what if thediscourse on ancient theatre had begun with different priorities? What if the Schlegels, in-stead of idolising poetry and particularly Greek tragic poetry as the highest expression ofthe human spirit, had fetishised some other art, or even given equal status to all the arts, orindeed all spheres of human endeavour? Would it not then have been possible, even easy, toestablish the fourth-century theatre as the culminating monument of ancient culture? Al-most all our Classical evidence for actors is fourth-century and even Aristotle can be citedfor the proposition that the actors art achieved perfection in the fourth century. Music too,if one believes our ancient sources, only really became music from rather late in the fifthcentury. Popular enthusiasm for the theatre is best attested by our fourth-century sources,whether texts, artefacts or monuments. It is in the fourth century that at Athens the abilityto attend the theatre begins most clearly to take on the definition of a civic right. From thefourth century comes a vastly greater quantity of information about theatre as an industry,managed by an increasingly complex set of officials, and crafted by an ever greater numberof specialised artists. Though the Schlegels did not guess it (or care), the magnificent stoneTheatre of Dionysus would be recognised already by Drpfeld as a product of the fourthcentury. But most spectacular of all is the spread of drama which certainly began in thefifth but was so rapid in the fourth century that by its end there was a theatre and dramaticfestival in every self-respecting city and town, not only in Greece, but throughout the Hel-lenised East theatre indeed became the main vehicle of Hellenisation14. How given is the

12 Ar. Frogs 72; Arist. Po. 1450a 25. 1456a2532. Aristotle claimed that tragedy had at-tained its proper nature (Po. 1449a 15), but itwas post-Schlegelian poetics that explained itsdecay as a result of denaturing its proper form:see e.g. Gravenhorst who blamed the passage ofthe Bltezeit on Euripides failure to stick withthe traditional forms in denen sein Geist sichnicht naturgem bewegen konnte (1856,94; our emphasis). For the biological model be-hind the Poetics, see esp. Depew 2007.

13 E.g. D. 18, 317319: upsilonaspertilde upsilonlenistilde , upsilonlenistilde [] !upsilonaspertilde 9"upsilonaspertilde,#upsilonlenistilde $ upsilontilde upsilonlenistilde. ! $ ' (; upsilonlenistilde

, A'upsilonlenistilde); $ upsilonlenistilde; ! - upsilontilde ./; $! .$ 1-, )upsilonlenistilde!, 3 4/, 1- 5!1 67, upsilonlenistilde , , ) , $/upsilonlenistilde .

14 Most of this information was, of course, avail-able to most of the scholars who shaped thedecadence theory, but it only served to provetheir point: these were purely material notspiritual developments, and were somehow,even gained at the cost of the spiritual. Haigh(1889, 206f.), for example, writes that it wasnot until the fourth century that the influence ofthe actors became so universal as to inflict dis-tinct injury upon the art of dramatic writing.



Introduction 5

inferiority of fourth-century theatre indeed how given is even the inferiority of fourth-century dramatic poetry?

What emerges from this is that the evidence has been shaped and reshaped for us to suitancient and modern preoccupations and agendas, and the results can certainly be chal-lenged. There is indeed a disturbing fluctuation even about how and where to place thedividing line between the great and the inferior age: Schlegel and many others thoughtEuripides the beginning of the end (but this would put the beginning of decay in about455), or the late Euripides (but this would put the beginning of decay in about 420), or is itthe death of Aristophanes (as late as 380)? Different testimonies can be privileged: despitefourth-century classicism, Aristotle cites both Carcinus and Chaeremon as often as he doesAeschylus, and Theodectes and Astydamas win his positive approval, which Euripides vir-tually never does; the Athenians placed a statue of Astydamas right in the theatron of thenew Lycurgan Theatre of Dionysus more than a decade before the statues of Aeschylus,Sophocles, and Euripides were erected in the parodos. But most of all, evaluations canchange: the Rhesus may never be dubbed a great tragedy, but there is certainly room for avindication of Aristophanes latest plays or Menanders comedies, and a fuller appreci-ation of the fragmentary remains of fourth-century drama.

The Cold War ended in 1989, but this is only a small part of the reason why a very dif-ferent conception of Greek theatre, and indeed the Greek world15, is now emerging. Thecurrent climate of free trade, the internet, and high levels of personal mobility have madescholarship much more ready to look for and accept evidence for a multicultural, intercon-nected and networked Mediterranean, where former generations noticed only cultural andeconomical isolation. We are also equipped with better tools to find evidence of intercon-nection. Cultural studies have become multidisciplinary, more receptive to complex mod-els of cultural interaction, and far more sensitive to the interactivity of political, economicand cultural production. Indeed, the ancient theatre is a paradigmatic locus of both formsof interactivity, between cultures and within them.

It is, we think, no coincidence that it was in the 1990s that scholarship began to take itsfirst serious look at fourth-century theatre. This was thanks to a number of developmentsin many relevant fields: literature, iconography, archaeology, and social history. But it wasthanks, most of all, to interactivity between these fields.

Although Menanders texts and his place within the history of drama have beenwidely studied since the first major discoveries of Menander papyri in the early twentiethcentury, Menander is the great exception. The other playwrights of the fourth centurysuffered a near complete neglect. A crucial development was the gathering and publi-cation of the texts of the fragmentary authors in Poetae Comici Graeci (PCG). It wascomplete (apart from the volume devoted to Menanders plays preserved on papyri)in 1991. Apart from the Studies in Later Greek Comedy (Manchester 1953) by theintrepid pioneer T. B. L. Webster, the first comprehensive study devoted to fourth-century (Middle) comedy, by Nesselrath, appeared as recently as 1990. The first com-mentaries on Middle Comic poets followed in its wake. Richard Hunters commentaryon Eubulus, published in 1983, is an exception, but it was begun as a dissertation underColin Austin, one of the editors of PCG. Arnotts commentary on Alexis followed in1996, Ben Millis Anaxandrides in 2001; 2008 saw the publication of Athena Papachrys-ostomous commentary on six Middle Comic poets; 2009 saw two commentaries on the

15 Morris 2003.



6 Introduction

late fifth-/early fourth-century Strattis by Orth and Miles; the rest will follow: the Frei-burg project Kommentierung der griechischen Komdie promises to generate com-mentaries on all the other fourth-century comic poets in the next few years16. Even Ar-istophanes latest play, Wealth, after a century of neglect, received two commentaries in200117.

The interest in fourth-century tragedy is even more recent. The first ever monographdevoted to fourth century tragedy appeared in 1980 (by Xanthakis-Karamanos, a stu-dent of Webster)18. As with comedy, the first re-edition of the relevant fragments innearly a century, Snell and Kannicht in vol. 1 of Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta(TrGF) in 1986, was an important stimulus. Apart from one maverick article on Chaere-mon in 1970, all short studies of fourth-century tragedians and tragedies belong to thelast twenty years: studies of Moschion (possibly third century) in 1996 and 1997; a studyof Chaeremon in 2001; and studies of Rhesus in 2005, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 201219.2012 saw the first ever full commentary in English on the Rhesus, another is in theworks, and the first in any language since 1837 appeared in 200520. We can also date tothe early 1990s the beginning of a change in the way scholarship characterises fourth-century tragedy. Xanthakis-Karamanos was criticised for being too impartial towards it:one reviewer complained that she is oddly reluctant to admit that fourth-century tra-gedy represents a decline21, although in fact the picture she paints is one of light enter-tainments for an audience that could no longer stomach true tragedies22. The first realchallenge to an age-old prejudice against fourth-century tragedy was a short but power-ful article by Pat Easterling in 1993: for sensationalism, triviality, affectation and so onwe ought perhaps to read elegance, sophistication, refinement, clarity, naturalism,polish, professionalism a new kind of cosmopolitan sensibility deeply influenced by,and interacting with, the classical repertoire23. In 1995 Brigitte Le Guen tackled thetheory of theatres decline head on, dispelling all the clichs that sustained it: her article,aimed mainly at rehabilitating Hellenistic theatre was a fortiori valid for the fourth cen-tury as a whole24.

The phenomenal rise of reception studies in the last two decades has also added itsweight and urgency to fourth-century drama or more particularly the much more recentextension of the concept of reception to reception in antiquity. With the possible excep-tion of the Homeric poems25, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Menander offer the ful-lest and most varied body of material for the study of the ancient reception of poetry, butalso performance (which is itself a concept and a perspective with a relatively recent his-tory as we will see below). A major breakthrough in the study of the ancient reception ofdrama and dramatists was made at the end of the last century with pioneering essays by

16 Hunter 1983; Arnott 1996; Millis 2001; Papa-chrysostomou 2008.

17 Sommerstein 2001; Torchio 2001.18 Xanthakis-Karamanos 1980.19 Collard 1970; Stephanopoulos 19951996

and 1997; Morelli 2001; Liapis 2009a; Fries2010; Papadodima 2011; Perris 2012.

20 Liapis 2012. Marco Fantuzzi is working onanother. In German Feickert 2005 is the firstcommentary since 1837.

21 Garvie 1983, 13.

22 Xanthakis-Karamanos 1980, 41; cf. Easterling1993, 562.

23 Easterling 1993, 568f.24 Le Guen 1995; cf. Le Guen 2007c.25 Particularly notable studies of Homeric recep-

tion are: Nagy 1990; Graziosi 2002; Kim2010. One should note also Koning 2010 onHesiod and Kivilo 2010 on Hesiod, Stesicho-rus, Archilochus, Hipponax, Terpander andSappho.



Introduction 7

Easterling, Revermann and Allan26. With the only partial exception of Bruno GentilisTheatrical Performances in the Ancient World, the first books primarily dedicated to theancient reception of tragedy were published in the twenty-first century27. Several chaptersof Gildenhard and Revermanns Beyond the Fifth Century (2010) deal with the ancientreception of tragedy. Sebastiana Nervegnas Menander in Antiquity: the Contexts of Re-ception (2013) is the first monograph dedicated to the ancient reception of a playwright.Vayos Liapis and Antonis Petrides are, as we write, orchestrating a collective volumedevoted to the performance and reception of Greek Tragedy after the Fifth Century. Someof the most important work in ancient reception is focussed on the processes that led to thecreation of the tragic canon in which the fourth century played a crucial role28.

Much of the impetus behind the rediscovery of the fourth century came from the inte-gration of Performance Studies with Classical Literature and Archaeology particularlythe influence of Performance Studies on Oliver Taplin and Richard (J. R.) Green. Perform-ance Studies was in origin broadly interdisciplinary (embracing such fields as theatre, an-thropology, speech-act theory) and both Taplin and Green, starting from very differentpositions, have dedicated much of their scholarship to reconstructing the conditions andexperience of dramatic performance in antiquity. Taplins classic studies Stagecraft of Aes-chylus (1977) and Greek Tragedy in Action (1978) began by extracting clues to stagingfrom the playtexts, but his research turned increasingly towards the material evidence, andin particular towards vase iconography. Comic Angels (1993) persuasively demonstratedthe direct relevance of vases manufactured and painted in South Italy and Sicily to thecomic drama produced in fifth- (and presumably fourth-) century Athens. Pots and Plays(2007) did the same for tragic drama. This spawned a new interest in fourth-century pro-duction and reception precisely because almost all of the relevant West Greek pottery wasmanufactured from ca. 400 to ca. 330.

J. R. Green, by contrast, began with archaeology and iconography. Green developed hisinterest in theatrical performance by working with the archives begun by T. B. L. Webster,producing a revised Monuments Illustrating Old and Middle Comedy (MMC) in 1978and, with Axel Seeberg, a greatly revised Monuments Illustrating New Comedy (MNC) in1995. For most of the twentieth century scholarly interest in theatre-related imagery,mainly in vase-painting, remained marginal to theatre studies and was mainly focussed onextracting information for reconstructing the plots of fragmentary plays29. T. B. L. Webstercontributed greatly to this enterprise, but his wide-ranging interests generated many pio-neering studies on nearly all aspects of theatre production and history. The main burden ofcollecting, classifying and interpreting the theatre-related artefacts was taken up by Green.His most influential work, Theatre in Ancient Greek Society, published in 1994, drewupon these empirical researches to produce what is effectively the first social history of theGreek theatre. Green demonstrated how the artefacts could be used as evidence for thegeographical spread of theatre, the development of masks and costume, popular percep-

26 Easterling 1997c; Revermann 19992000;Allan 2001. The novelty of ancient receptioneven at so recent a date is clear from the re-viewers complaint that Revermann 19992000, a study of the performance of Euripidesin Macedon down to the third century, was notreception at all (Craik 2001, 80). Cf. Gil-denhard Revermann 2010, 3: reception inantiquity has only recently started to receive

sustained attention. Particularly noteworthycontributions are: Roselli 2005; Nervegna2007.

27 Gentili 1984; Battezzato 2003a; Prauscello2006.

28 Wilson 1996; Vox 2006; Hanink 2010a; Ha-nink 2010b.

29 E.g. Schan 1926; Kossatz-Deissmann 1978.



8 Introduction

tions of theatre, and acting styles. For the fourth century Green used not only vase-ico-nography, but artefacts on all other media, including the generally ignored terracotta figu-rines and masks, which probably originated as an Athenian souvenir industry at the closeof the fifth century but rapidly came to be copied and imitated throughout the Greekworld. The material evidence, once exclusively of interest to art history or literary his-tory30, came to be investigated in its social, material and institutional contexts31.

The influence of Webster and then also of Taplin produced some initially isolated workon stagecraft such as Dearden 1976, Seale 1982, Frost 1988, but it was only in the 1990swhen Taplin had become much more of an archaeologist and Green much more of adramatist, that Taplins and Greens approaches more nearly joined to become a main-stream preoccupation in scholarship. Ancient acting and stagecraft are now widely studiedusing a combination of textual and material evidence (e.g. monographs by Wiles 1991;Neiiendam 1992; Rehm 1992; Scullion 1994; Wiles 1997; Wiles 2000; Rehm 2002; Rever-mann 2006; Marshall 2006; Wiles 2007; Piqueux 2009; Hughes 2012). Even ancient ac-tors have suddenly became viable subjects after long, though not total neglect32: two bookson the ancient actors unions, the first in over a century, appeared in 2001 (Le Guen) and2003 (Aneziri); the first ever collective volume on Greek and Roman Actors appeared in2002 (Easterling Hall); these were followed by monographs on the sociology of actors byDuncan (2006) and Csapo (2010). The essentially new field of acting and actors is signifi-cant for the fourth century because, despite the dearth of plays, both the textual and ma-terial evidence for acting and actors is more abundant for the fourth than any other cen-tury in antiquity. Paradoxically, relatively little of the above mentioned scholarship onacting and actors deals with the fourth century (and most of that deals with Menander atthe very end of the century). Most of the observations on pre-Menandrian fourth-centuryacting are to be found in articles by Green and Taplin themselves33.

The discovery of the importance of the iconographic material to theatre engenderedan entirely new branch of theatrical studies, and a branch that is possibly of greatest con-sequence for understanding the theatre in the fourth century: namely the spread of the-atre culture throughout the Greek world. Taplins study of comic vases in West Greeceand Greens more general study of the spread of theatre artefacts around the Mediterra-nean made it clear that what had hitherto been considered Attic drama was not onlyknown but performed elsewhere. Since 1994 a series of studies has mapped the spread ofdrama, not just in the fourth century, but in the fifth34. Athenocentricity is directly chal-lenged by the title and several of the papers of a volume entitled Why Athens? A Re-appraisal of Tragic Politics published in 2010 (Carter). Luigi Todisco is responsible forthe first volume entirely dedicated to a regional Greek theatre outside of Athens (2002);this was soon followed by Kathryn Boshers dissertation on Sicilian theatre (2006).She has recently edited the first collective volume of essays on theatre in Sicily and South

30 And still, oddly, the subjects of territorialsquabbles that use precisely these exclusiveterms of reference: see e.g. Small 2003.

31 Taplin Wyles 2010 is paradigmatic of thesenew directions.

32 OConnor 1908; Garton 1972; Ghiron-Bist-agne 1976, and the hugely important Stephanis1988.

33 Green 1997; Green 2002; Green 2003; Green2006; Green 2012; Taplin 2012.

34 Easterling 1994; Green 1994, 6470; Taplin1999; Dearden 1999; Scodel 2001; Allan2001; Moloney 2003; Zacharia 2003; Csapo2004a; CeccarelliMilanezi 2007; Hall 2007b;Kowalzig 2008; Csapo 2010, 83116. Newstudies challenge not just Athenocentric butalso Hellenocentric assumptions: Carpenter2003; Robinson 2004.



Introduction 9

Italy (2012). It is now obvious that from an early date, drama had many opportunitiesfor reperformance.

An important factor in gauging the spread of theatre throughout the Greek world is thediscovery and excavation of new theatre buildings. The existence of a theatre building doesnot necessarily entail dramatic performance, but it is very likely to do so. The discovery ofseveral demonstrably early theatres contributed to the new interest in study of the dissemi-nation of drama: in particular in Attica, at Thorikos, Euonymon, Halimous, Acharnae,whose results were mainly published in the 1990s and after35, and in locations as wide-spread as Hephaestia in Lemnos (Archontidou 2004), Elea (see Green 2008, nos. 414419),Aegae (infra ch. 8), and Neandria (Trunk 1994).

The architectural history of the theatre has always of course been necessarily focussedon the fourth-century remains, even if a primary agenda was to find evidence in it for re-constructing the fifth-century theatre building. Not until the 1990s, however, did scholarsgenerally begin to take an interest in the diachronic development of theatre buildings andtheir importance for social and theatre history. It was only then that most architectural his-torians first came to terms with the vast difference in shape, scale and construction of thefifth-century theatre and hence also to gain a full sense of the originality and enterprisethat went into the building of the fourth-century theatre36. Critically important for under-standing the history of theatre construction in Greece were a series of surveys: by Green(1989, 1423. 2008, 3075); by Moretti (1991. 1992ab. 1993. 1997. 2001); by Goette(esp. 1995a. 2011); by Lohmann 1998; by Frederiksen 2002; by Junker 2004; and thecomplete multivolume survey of all Greco-Roman theatres by Ciancio Rossetto and PisaniSartorio, Teatri greci e romani alle origini del linguaggio rappresentato (TGR), publishedin 1994. Most important of all has been continued work in the Theatre of Dionysus, al-though accurate information has only become available in the last few years37.

Most interdisciplinary of all is the institutional history of the theatre, by which wemean primarily its organisation and finance, and the manner in which its organisation andfinance were integrated into the political and social structure of the polis or state. ThoughPickard-Cambridges Dramatic Festivals of Athens (21968) was entirely concerned withtheatre organisation, interest in finance and the social infrastructure of theatre are almostentirely absent. The first such institutional history of Classical theatre came only in 2000,with Peter Wilsons The Athenian Institution of the Khoregia. Coming in the train of theNew Historicism it examined the social relations of the men who funded drama, and howtheir motives were constructed and integrated into the broadest framework of Atheniansociety to serve the cultural, economic and political needs of sponsors, choreuts, and thetheatre-going public38. Important advances were made in understanding the importance ofthe Dionysia to the government, finance and social structure of the demes, notably withthe books by Whitehead 1986 and Jones 2004. Richard Seaford has studied the effects of

35 Thorikos: Mussche 1990; Mussche 1998; vanLooy 1994; Palyvou 2001. Euonymon: Tza-chou-Alexandri 1999; Tzachou-Alexandri2007; Halimous: Kaza-Papageorgiou 1993.

36 Crucial in addition to the publications of thetheatres at Thorikos and Euonymon, wereGebhard 1974; Phlmann 1981; Goette1995a; Moretti 2001, 121136; Goette, in:Csapo 2007.

37 Esp. Papastamati-von Moock 2007. 2012.

38 For major contributions to what we call insti-tutional history relating to fourth-centurytheatre, see: Makres 1994; Chaniotis 1997;Slater 1997; Scholl 2002; Vierneisel Scholl2002; Csapo 2003; Latini 2003; Summa2003; Csapo 2004; Milanezi 2004; Chaniotis2007; Wilson 2008; Agelidis 2009; Wilson2010; Ceccarelli 2010; Paga 2010; Moretti2010; Wilson 2011b; Slater 2011; Wilson Csapo 2012.



10 Introduction

monetisation upon theatre and especially tragedy in several far-reaching studies (2003.2004a. 2004b. 2012). Zachary Biles Aristophanes and the Poetics of Competition (2011)studies the full impact of the competitive festival setting upon the form and contents of OldComedy. In the same year (2011) David Roselli wrote the first monograph dedicated to thetheatre audience. In addition to the ancient authors, the archaeology and the iconography,the institutional history of the theatre relies heavily on epigraphic material, and here again,the bulk of the surviving evidence favours the fourth century. Very recent advances in theediting and reconstruction of the epigraphic material, such as Stephen Lamberts new edi-tion of the decrees from 353321 in IG II3 1, fascicle 2 (2012) with a series of relatedstudies39, and Ben Millis and Douglas Olsons Inscriptional Records for the Dramatic Fes-tivals in Athens (2010), will make this material much more accessible for future studies.

The present volume, Greek Theatre in the Fourth Century B. C., collects new studiesby the leading experts in fourth-century theatre. It differs from all other studies in offeringa complete overview of all aspects of the fourth-century theatre: the new locations, the newbuildings, the new dramas, the new attitudes to theatre, the new uses for theatre and thenew ways of organising, funding and memorialising theatrical production. Some of thetopics are old, but even these contain new evidence and new perspectives. Above all thisvolume offers the multidisciplinary approach that we think indispensible for the study offourth-century theatre.

The first section (A) deals with theatre venues and theatre buildings, one of the fewareas of indisputable expansion and creativity within the fourth-century theatre industry.In Chapter 1, Christina Papastamati von-Moock makes public for the first time new andoften unexpected discoveries brought to light over the last sixteen years of excavation,study and reconstruction in the Theatre of Dionysus at Athens in which she played a majorrole. In Chapter 2, Hans R. Goette, a foremost expert on Attic topography, studies the evi-dence for theatre at the Rural Dionysia in Attica and asks new questions about its organi-sation and in particular about the sharing of resources between demes. In Chapter 3, Jean-Charles Moretti, the leading expert on Greek theatre architecture, looks at developmentsbeyond Attica to offer a magisterial survey of the spread of theatre buildings and their de-velopment into a monumental form in the fourth century, identifying regional variationsand regional contributions to the common architectural vernacular.

Section B examines fourth-century drama. Oliver Taplin, in Chapter 4, asks the reck-lessly unorthodox and intelligent question might fourth-century tragedy have been cre-ative, innovative and even great drama? and then from an examination of largely ne-glected papyrus texts and fourth-century vase paintings skilfully demonstrates that theanswer may, contrary to all the most cherished assumptions of the last two hundred yearsof theatre history, be yes. Sebastiana Nervegna, Chapter 5, for the first time, examines allthe available evidence for the early canonisation of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides,uncovering its causes and variations, such as the anomalously different reception of Aes-chylus and Sophocles in the Greek East and West. Far from being proof of the inferiorityof fourth-century tragedy, the canonisation of the fifth-century tragedians appears toemerge from the vitality, diversity and expansiveness of theatre in the fourth-century andEarly Hellenistic period. Johanna Hanink, Chapter 6, similarly views the classicism of thefourth century as an index of the vitality of fourth-century tragedy. Classicism and thecanonisation of the three fifth-century tragedians is a sign of the growing independence of

39 Lambert 1997. 2000. 2005. 2006. 2008. 2010.2011. 2012.



Introduction 11

theatre as an institution, of the growing centrality of tragedy in social discourse, and of theinternational success of the theatre industry. Finally, Andrew Hartwig in Chapter 7,focuses on fourth-century comedy, taking issue with the general view that it is a period ofdecline, and gathers the evidence to show that it was a fertile and innovative period that setthe comic agenda for centuries to come. What are usually identified as symptoms of col-lapse are more convincingly interpreted as a product of the comic theatres expansion,growing internationalisation and pan-Hellenic values.

Section C explores aspects of theatres expansion throughout the Greek world and in-deed beyond. There has been much fruitful discussion in the past two decades about fifth-and fourth-century theatre in the Greek West40. We turn our attention instead to six largelyunexplored areas of fourth-century expansion. Indeed the performance of Greek theatre innon-Greek realms has scarcely been studied as a phenomenon, and yet one non-Greeknation arguably had as great an impact upon fourth-century theatre history as Athensitself. Macedonian theatre can no longer be viewed as cultural transfer from an activeAthenian centre to a passive semi-barbarian periphery. Eoghan Moloney in Chapter 8 ex-plores the way that Archelaus and Philip II reconfigured theatre to suit their need to orga-nise and maintain power in the Macedonian state; and many of these transformationschanged Greek theatre even sooner than Macedonian power could change the general con-figuration of the Greek world. Brigitte Le Guen, in Chapter 9, explores the crucial roleplayed by Alexander in spreading theatre to other non-Greek cities throughout the MiddleEast, West Asia and Egypt. This was doubtless the most significant event in fourth-centurytheatre history, as it made theatre the main vehicle for linguistic and cultural Hellenisation(and hence a core element within the cultural education of the administrative and rulingclasses of the Hellenistic kingdoms), with the result that the demand for theatre, in theyears following Alexander, increased possibly a hundredfold by the end of the century.And yet, contrary to the long-standing bias of decay theorists that fourth-century theatrehad become secularised (and Hellenistic theatre still more so), Le Guen shows that Alex-ander maintained theatres traditional religious and festival structures. Vayos LiapisChapter 10 studies the peculiarities of the one surviving fourth-century tragedy, the Rhe-sus, a tragedy that has long stood as a proof of the inferiority of post-Euripidean tragicproduction. He makes a case for supposing the Rhesus atypical of mainstream fourth-cent-ury production, and argues that it may have been composed with a Macedonian audiencein mind.

In Chapter 11, Zachary Biles and Jed Thorn take a close look at the reception oftheatre-iconography among the non-Greek communities of Southern Italy, especially theItalic people who inhabited the region of Peucetia. They were the main consumers of theApulian-made red-figured pottery that is so rich in theatrical motifs, and also importers ofmuch of the finest theatre-related Attic pottery to survive till the present. Theirs is the firstfully contextual study of the theatre-related pottery in native Italy and their observationsindicate that the funerary symbolism of Dionysian iconography was a more important fac-tor in its reception than the theatrical subjects. Even if the non-Greek populations of SouthItaly were primarily attracted to the funerary symbolism of what we have come to think ofas theatre-related vase-paintings, Edward G. D. Robinson in Chapter 12 gives strong ar-guments for concluding that the theatrical motifs on West Greek pottery were appreciated

40 See esp. Taplin 1993; Bosher 2006; Taplin2006; Wilson 2007d; Kowalzig 2008; Bosher2012.



12 Introduction

for more than just generic Dionysian content. Robinson challenges the presupposition thatthe native populations in the hinterland of Taras were necessarily alien to Greek cultureand ignorant of theatre. We have, after all, incontrovertible evidence that non-Greek in-habitants of the Italian peninsula were watching (and even adapting and performing)Greek drama in the third century, and that non-Greek populations elsewhere (especiallyMacedon) were avid consumers of Greek theatre already in the fifth century. Robinsonoffers the very first serious attempt to throw light upon the spread of theatre culturethrough non-Greek Italy in the century and a half before history can verify that Greekdrama reached Rome.

J. Richard Green, in Chapter 13, takes a first look at what the iconographic evidencecan tell us about Greek regional theatre. This has been well studied for Sicily, particularlyin Bosher 2012, but Greens is the very first consideration of regional styles in Boeotia, Co-rinth, and Cyprus. Another first is Chapter 14 by Edith Hall and David Braund. From theBlack Sea comes one of our most startling early testimonia for the spread of literary cul-ture. On the very eve of the fourth century (400) Xenophon tells us that among the wreck-age of ships on the Thracian Pontus he saw couches, boxes, written books (An. 7, 5, 14).It has long been supposed that drama was one of the staples of the early book trade and ithas startled many scholars to think that it was one of the cargoes traded in the Black Sea.To date no scholar has researched the question of the fourth-century reception of theatreand theatre culture in this area. This is partly due to the difficulty of accessing informationabout the material remains, both because they are published in eastern European or Asianlanguages, and because much of the research was done in former East Block countries withpoor communication with outside scholarship. Hall and Braund offer the first general sur-vey of theatre around the Black Sea.

Section D contains two contributions to the institutional history of the theatre. InChapter 15 Eric Csapo and Peter Wilson study the financial innovations of Eubulus andLycurgus in the third quarter of the fourth century, to show how versatile, subtle, but alsotheatrocentric they were. In Chapter 16 Benjamin Millis studies the different charactersand functions of the enormously important series of inscribed public records for the Athe-nian dramatic contests: the Fasti, Didascaliae and Victors Lists. Although some of thesewere created in the third century, the first, the Fasti, and with it the very idea of a publiccommemoration of civic victors, is a product of the Eubulan era.

The Greek Theatre in the Fourth Century B. C. brings together the various strands ofcontemporary scholarship that permit, for the first time, a holistic image of the Greek the-atre in the age of its greatest growth and maturity. It attempts to regard fourth-century the-atre in its own light, not overshadowed by the grandeur of the fifth-century theatre. Indeedit could be said with some justice that fourth-century theatre was the parent of its parent. Itselected, shaped and cultivated fifth-century theatre precisely to serve as the greatest cul-tural bloom of the Classical era, and so we have received it. That it could do so is testimonyto the immense power and importance of theatre in the fourth century. The way it didso is testimony to the ideals and values of fourth-century theatre, for fifth-century theatreis in an important sense, an artefact of the fourth century and cannot properly be under-stood unless we moderns acknowledge that, at least from our perspective, the shadow fallsthe other way.



The Theatre of Dionysus Eleuthereus in Athens 15

The Theatre of Dionysus Eleuthereus in Athens:New Data and Observations on its Lycurgan Phase*

Christina Papastamati-von Moock

Despite the one and a half centuries that have passed since the discovery of Athens the-atre in 18621 and despite the large number of studies that deal, either directly or indi-

* My warmest thanks are due to the President ofthe Scientific Committee and former Directorof the Acropolis Ephorate, Dr A. Mantis, for hissupport and trust over the years, and the Hon-orary Ephor P. Kalligas, the President of theCommittee until 2002, as well as to the Direc-torate of the A' Ephorate of Prehistoric andClassical Antiquities for the relevant study andpublication permits. I would, furthermore, liketo express my warm thanks and gratitude toProf. M. Korres of the Faculty of Architecture(NTUA) who, as a member of the Committee,always generously gave his time and shared hisvaluable knowledge concerning new investi-gations and observations. I also owe warmthanks to A. Samara, the architect responsiblefor the restoration programme of the theatresretaining walls, and the draftsman D. Kouliadisfor our long-standing and constructive cooper-ation and friendship; similarly to N. Kourelis,the head of the team of stonemasons. I owespecial thanks to the architect G. Antoniou forthe reconstruction drawings and for all his valu-able help, to Prof. S. Rotroff, Dr C. Schauer andDr N. Vogeikoff-Brogan for discussing mattersrelated to the pottery finds with me, to theformer Director of the Numismatic Museum DrD. Evgenidou, the numismatists E. Apostolouand E. Ralli, and the conservator E. Kontou forthe conservation and identification of the exca-vation coins, as well as to the photographer ofthe Ministry of Culture and Tourism, S. Ge-saphidis, for the aerial photographs. I owethanks and gratitude to Profs. P. Wilson,E. Csapo and J. R. Green, for the invitation toparticipate in the conference, as well as for con-structive conversations and their warm hospi-tality in Sydney. Furthermore, for all their help Imust express my gratitude to the Director of theAustralian Archaeological Institute at Athens,

Prof. A. Cambitoglou, as well as to the DeputyDirector Dr St. Paspalas, who also kindly trans-lated my text into English. The editors have alsohelped improving my text. Finally, I warmlythank the Sydney Friends of the Australian In-stitute and their President, Mr A. Hatsatouris,for their support and warm hospitality, as wellas Dr W. Mullen for his expert organisation.I had presented preliminary thoughts and con-clusions on the Classical phases of the theatre ina lecture I delivered at the NTUA in 2004 at theinvitation of Prof. M. Korres. These thoughtsand conclusions are continually being supple-mented by the results of new investigations andobservations over recent years. While this paperwas being written, excavations were in progressin the theatron by the author as part of the res-toration programme; these excavations providesupplementary details both for the Lycurgan aswell as for the Classical wooden theatre. Withinthe framework of a paper such as this it has notbeen possible to examine, or even touch upon,all the issues that pertain to the Theatres Ly-curgan phase.

1 Rhousopoulos 1862, 37f. 64. 94102.114120. 128147. 154184. 209220. 224.278294; Julius 1878 (with drawings by E. Zil-ler, who was responsible for the first, and indis-pensable, plan of the remains revealed in the1862 excavations of the Theatre of Dionysus).Until recently researchers had believed that thefirst unsuccessful attempts to locate the The-atre were conducted at the end of 1840, see Ne-roulos 1840, 6668; Ragkavis 1841, 120122.New and important data on the Theatre ofDionysus, the choregic monuments of Thrasyl-los and Lysikrates, as well as other monumentsof the Acropolis have come to light thanks toL. Gallos recently published important studyof the architectural drawings and other docu-



16 Christina Papastamati-von Moock

rectly2, with the theatre, many crucial issues remain unresolved. Consequently, many di-vergent views hinder our efforts to understand the monument as an active component inthe history of dramatic production in Athens. This situation is attributable in large partto the fragmentary preservation of the theatres remains (fig. 1.1; pl. 1), a result of thenumerous changes to its architectural design over the millennium or so of its use; to cata-strophic invasions during antiquity3; and to the extensive dismantling the theatre under-went owing to the changes in its use from the Early Christian period onwards4. To allthis one must add the fact that study of the monument, even by distinguished re-searchers, was not always accompanied by the kind of systematic excavations or careful

ments in the Elgin Collection housed in the Brit-ish Museum, specifically those of SebastianoIttar dating to 18001801 (see Gallo 2009). Ona map of Athens with the plan of the Acropolismonuments (Gallo 2009, 69 fig. 64) the site ofthe Theatre of Dionysus (Theatre of Bacchus) iscorrectly marked, where it had originally beenidentified by R. Chandler (1765) (Drpfeld Reisch 1896, 1); the site of the theatre is alsocorrectly given on a plan of the city of Athens ofthe end of the eighteenth century by Fauvel:Meletopoulos 1979, pl. 53. In contrast Stuart Revett 1762, II, p. V [2008, 2327] placed thetheatre at the site of the Odeion of Herodes At-ticus, but did not reproduce correctly the layoutof the Theatre. Indeed, we are informed byBalestras notes (Gallo 2009, 60. 67. 292) thatan excavation conducted over a few days wasundertaken at the Theatre of Dionysus, amongother monuments, in the period from Novem-ber 1, 1800 to March 16, 1801, with sixworkers, in order to ascertain the originallayout of the monument through inspection ofits foundations. On a plan of the theatre (Gallo2009, 115 fig. 115) are presented sections of itsouter retaining walls, the Monument of Thra-syllos (for other important drawings of thismonument: Gallo 2009, 46 fig. 35; 113fig. 111; 114 fig. 113), the two choregic col-umns above it, for the first time the foundationcutting for the krepidoma of a third column,and in construction the stepped cuttings infront of Thrasyllos monument and those to thewest of it; the latter seem more hypotheticaland they cannot be verified on the monument.Represented on this plan also is a long exca-vation trench which cuts the Epitheatron alonga N-S axis from the area in front of the Monu-ment of Thrasyllos down to the Peripatos.These documents were clearly not known to theArchaeological Society at Athens in 1840 (seesupra) when it undertook its first trial exca-vations which also started at the Epitheatron.

2 Basic bibliography: Rhousopoulos 1862; Julius1878; Drpfeld Reisch 1896; Haigh 1898;

Drpfeld 1925; Bulle 1928; Fensterbusch1930; Fiechter 1935; Fiechter 1936; Schleif1937; Pickard-Cambridge 1946; Anti 1947;Fiechter 1950; Dinsmoor 19511953; Pickard-Cambridge 1953; Bieber 1939, 99126.133146; Bieber 1961, 5471. 7479. 123f.213216; Travlos 1971, 537552; Maass 1972;Taplin 1977, 434459; Wurster 1979; Korres1980; Korres 1982; Winter 1983; Tsakos 1985;Townsend 1986; Makri et al. 1987/1988; Papa-thanasopoulos 1987; Polacco 1990; Wurster1993; Isler 1994, 87107; Csapo Slater 1994,79; Scullion 1994; Goette 1995a, 2235pls. 58. 13; Goette 2011, 474484; Bees 1995;Wiles 1997, 2362; Lohmann 1998; Gogos1998, 84105; Knell 2000, 126147; Moretti2000; Froning 2002, 3153; Isler 2002; Gogos2005; Valavanis 2007; Valavanis 2009;Beacham 2007; Lambert 2008; Bressan 2009, I102118. II 401407 plans IVII; Green 1989;Green 1995a; Green 2008 where, very valuably,the relevant bibliography is collected and com-mented upon as well as related matters. Forthe results of recent research see: Samara Pap-astamati-von Moock 2006; Papastamati-vonMoock 2007; Papastamati-von Moock 2012;Papastamati-von Moock forthcoming a andforthcoming b. For the restoration programmes,see: Korres 1980, 1982; Makri 1987; Samara2004; Committee Theater of Dionysus 2006,220. 3336; Aslanidis Boletis 2006; Samara Papastamati-von Moock 2006; Boletis 2006;Mantis 2006, 100106 figs. 115; 2007.

3 Two invasions were definitive for the courseof Athenian history, that of the Roman gen-eral Sulla in 86 (Hoff 1997; Burden 1999,816; most recently Mango 2010, 119124)and that of the Herulians of A. D. 267 (Thomp-son 1956; Frantz 1988; Millar et. al. 2004,292f.). Many effects of these invasions maybe identified in the remains of the theatre; fornew observations see Samara-Papastamati-vonMoock 2006, 6. 15; Papastamati-von Moock2012, 136 n. 36. Generally see infra.

4 Travlos 1951; Travlos 1953/1954.




stratigraphic observations that would have contributed to the chronological documen-tation of the theatres construction phases5. W. Drpfeld was the first to address the issueof the monuments various phases. He dated the rebuilding of the theatre in stone to thethird quarter of the fourth century, and on the basis of the written sources linked itscompletion with Lycurgus6, the administrator of financial matters during the period3363247. A crucial topic in the consideration of the Classical phases of the theatre hasbeen the dating of the first use of conglomerate stone (breccia) in the hidden parts of the

5 For some general stratigraphic observationsfrom Drpfelds 1889 excavation of the the-atron, Drpfeld Reisch 1896, 30f. fig. 7 pl. 1.The results of this important excavation werenever fully published. Only preliminary reportsby A. Schneider appeared in which some pot-tery finds are discussed and the first chro-nological indications for the fill of the theatronare given: Schneider 1889, 329348; cf. Bulle1928, 72. For some references to the potteryfinds and stratigraphic observations from theinvestigations of the stage-building and thewestern parodos: Bulle 1928, 15. 2024. 49f.5355. 57. 65f. 72. 76 pl. 4. For those fromsome localised sondages by E. Fiechter in the

area of the stage-building, the orchestra andthe lower rows of the theatron, Fiechter 1935,9; Fiechter 1936, 4349 (the commentary onthe pottery by K. Kbler). For the 1985 archae-ological documentation prior to the com-mencement of the restoration programme ofthe eastern parodos retaining wall, see the pre-liminary presentation (mainly with results per-taining to the Medieval remains): Tsakos 1985,911 pls. 5 #-; 68; Makri et al. 1987/1988.

6 Drpfeld Reisch 1896, 3640.7 On the dating of the Lycurgan period to ca.

336324 rather than 338326: Lewis 1997,212229.

Fig. 1.1. Athens, Theatre and Sanctuary of Dionysus Eleuthereus:General view from N, early twentieth century.




structure. Excavations conducted by H. Bulle in the area of the stage-building in 1923indicated use from the fifth century probably its second half8 and led a number ofscholars at that time, Drpfeld among them, to attribute to the fifth century the innerwestern retaining wall of the seating area along with the back wall of the stage-buildingor even its entire foundations9 (figs. 1.23). Despite the lack of evidence, some scholarsdated the stage-buildings rear wall to the late sixth century10, a wall which also served asthe back wall of the sanctuarys stoa and at the same time defined the architecturalboundary between the theatrical and cultic area. Recent research, which has sought de-finitive evidence for the dating of the phases of the Classical theatre, and used as a start-ing point P. Kalligas problematic dating of the conglomerate foundation of the NewTemple of Dionysus to the Lycurgan period11, revisited Drpfelds old view and adoptedthe Lycurgan date for all the stone rebuilding of the theatre12. The attribution of the NewTemple of Dionysus to the Lycurgan period does not, however, correspond with the in-formation provided by the written sources that attribute the chryselephantine cult statueto Alkamenes (i. e. late fifth century)13, and it is difficult to believe that a cult statue, andindeed one of such delicate technique, could, as Kalligas suggested, have been placedelsewhere and only transferred to the new temple when it was built sixty years later14.The lack of a permanent stage-building to provide the technical infrastructure for the

8 Bulle 1928, 5355. 73. 79f.9 For Drpfelds initial view regarding the date

of the first use of conglomerate stone at Athensin the fourth century: Drpfeld Reisch 1896,12. 21. 36f. For its use already in the secondhalf or late fifth century, but with differentviews for the dating of the structural parts ofthe theatre and the sanctuary of Dionysus which cannot be discussed here in detail seeFurtwngler 1901, 411416; Puchstein, 1901,137139; Drpfeld 1925; Bulle 1928 (supran. 8); Fiechter 1936, 6974; Pickard-Cam-bridge 1946, 17; Dinsmoor 19511953, 317f.;with a discussion of all the earlier opinions;Wurster 1993, 2527 fig. 8; Scullion 1994,1113; Bees 1995, 7380. The issue of the dat-ing of the first use of conglomerate stone is dis-cussed in greater detail in Papastamati-vonMoock forthcoming b. For the dating and in-terpretation of the much-discussed aA foun-dation: infra, after n. 148.

10 Fiechter 1936, 47. 68f. pl. 17 figs. 30f.; Anti1947, 6572 and Polacco 1990, 160166fig. 39 suggest, though without any specific ar-chaeological evidence, a date in the first half ofthe fifth century for the stoa and the rear wallof the stage-building.

11 Kalligas 1963, 14f.; Dontas 1960, 53 n. 1 fig. 3.A final publication of the excavation with strati-graphic information has not appeared.

12 Travlos 1971, 537; Froning 2002, 50f.; fordoubts on these preliminary results and for thedating of the theatres remains, see Newiger1976, 88f.; cf. Green 1989, 19f. For the ac-

ceptance of this dating, see Korres 1980, 18;Townsend 1986, 423 n. 5; Goette 1995a, 22n. 5354. 27; Hintzen-Bohlen 1997, 2128;Moretti 1999/2000, 381; Moretti 2000,284286 figs. 1011; Moretti 2011, 122127;Knell 2000, 128. 133. figs. 92. 100 (does nottake into consideration recent research on theexistence of only one passage [diazoma] in thetheatron, cf. Korres 1980, 12 Drawing 1);Junker 2004, 11; Gogos 2003, 108113;Goette 2007a, 118; Goette 2011, 483; Korres2009, 7880 figs. 4.3 (19851987 model) withthe old view that the orchestra of the first the-atrical installation was circular, though in a re-cent sketch (Korres 2009, fig. 4.5) he followsthe trend apparent in more recent scholarshipwhich argues that the wooden theatron had aP-shaped plan. Cf. Papastamati-von Moockforthcoming b.

13 Paus. 1, 20, 3. Cf. Reisch 1893, 123; Imhoof-Blumer Gardner 1964, 142 pls. 201205;Ridgway 1981, 174.

14 Kalligas 1963, 14f. The same view is followedby: Hurwit 1999, 256; Gogos 2005, 112.Gogos view that the statue had probably beenerected temporarily in the old Temple ofDionysus until the new temple was built,approximately sixty years later, cannot standbecause of, among other points, the great sizeof this chryselephantine statue as evidenced bythe very impressive dimensions of its basesfoundations (5 m 5 m), see Reisch 1893;Drpfeld Reisch 1896, 1319 fig. 1 (oldertemple), 1923 figs. 45 (later temple).




Fig. 1.2. Remains of the stage building from NE. Rear wall H-H, foundation T.

Fig. 1.3. Outer and inner western retaining walls from SW.




staging of drama from the second half of the fifth century (theatrical mechane, etc.)15,implicit in these recent studies, is solved by positing the existence of a simple woodenstage without stone foundations to the south of the terrace of the old orchestra16.

As part of a project of the Scientific Committee, Research Consolidation, Restorationand Enhancement of the Monuments on the Acropolis South Slope of Athens, it was pos-sible to open some small trenches during the restoration of the outer retaining walls of thetheatron. The results of the investigation, together with new observations on the theatresremains, provide information on critical matters and a better understanding of the monu-ments various phases, including the Lycurgan phase. This information is constantlybeing supplemented with new data17.

One of the trial trenches dug in the inner south-western corner of the theatron pro-vided our first certain evidence of the existence of the much-discussed ikria of the woodenClassical theatre known from the written sources (fig. 1.4)18. The trenches also provided

15 Drpfeld Reisch 1896, 219234; Arnott1962, 7278; Newiger 1976; and infra, aftern. 204.

16 Goette 1995a, pl. 13,1; Goette 2007a, 117fig. 1 no. 11; Moretti 2000, 296f. figs. 1011;Froning 2002, 27 fig. 22; 41. 46 figs. 4445. 50.

17 For these new conclusions, see also Papasta-mati-von Moock forthcoming b.

18 On the famous ikria and the wooden theatre,see Drpfeld Reisch 1896, 2832; Bulle1928, 6163; Pickard-Cambridge 1946,1014; Anti 1947, 5572; Gebhard 1974;Kolb 1981, 561; Polacco 1990, 2332. 160.164174; Scullion 1994, 5265; Goette 1995a,40; Moretti 2000, 284298; Froning 2002, 33.38f. 4143 figs. 22. 4447. 5052.; Junker

Fig. 1.4. SW corner of the auditorium, north of the remains of the medieval wall of the Acropolis(Rizokastro) and east of the lateral inner wall. Trench with the negative imprints of two ikria of the

Classical wooden theatron.




stratigraphical evidence for the first use of conglomerate stone. This material, togetherwith corresponding evidence from the lateral eastern retaining wall (also of conglomerate)provides the first chronological evidence for the construction of the lateral inner walls, andby extension, evidence for the initial use of conglomerate for the theatre in the Pericleanphase19. This evidence clearly suggests that the renewal and redesign of the religious andcultural area of the South Slope was a part of the major Periclean building programme, in-cluding the construction of the Odeion20, and the remodelling of the sanctuary and the oldwooden theatre in stone. This rebuilding began with the lateral inner retaining walls21and evidently, in the light of the overall results of Bulles exploration of the rear wall ofthe stage-building22 the new southern boundary between the theatre and the sanctuary.This half-finished execution of the Periclean programme saw only the remodelling of thewooden theatres prohedria with aligned and inscribed stone seats. It proved impossibleto complete due, as some earlier scholars suggested, to the financial demands of the Pelo-ponnesian War24. If, as seems likely, the western inner retaining wall with its curved north-ern section (fig. 1.3) belongs to the same scheme25, then there are good grounds to suggestthat architectural conception of the semicircular theatron belongs to the Periclean period,characterised as it was by such exceptional historical circumstances as the unprecedented

2004, 1317. 2832; Csapo 2007, 96108.For comments on the sources and the views ex-pressed by scholars on the wooden Theatre ofDionysus Eleuthereus based on recent researchPapastamati-von Moock forthcoming b.

19 On the basis of a preliminary study of the pot-tery that was found in sections of the foun-dation trench of the lateral inner retainingwalls of the theatron, excavated in small trialtrenches opened for the purpose of document-ing and compiling the restoration proposal forthe retaining wall of the western parodos andthe eastern lateral retaining wall: Papastamati-von Moock forthcoming b.

20 For the date of the Odeion: Meinel 1980, 150;Robkin 1976; Miller 1997, 218242 with dis-cussion of earlier research.

21 For the older opinions that attributed the west-ern inner retaining wall to, in all probability, thePericlean phase, see Drpfeld 1925. In contrastthe views hitherto expressed on the chronologyof the eastern lateral retaining wall, whether tothe Periclean or Lycurgan phase, have createdgreater confusion and led to odd reconstruc-tions of the Classical theatres layout, specifi-cally: Furtwngler 1901, 415f.; Pickard-Cam-bridge 1946, 16f. fig. 7; Dinsmoor 19511953,323 fig. 2; Korres 1980, 18; Robkin 1976, 65f.fig. 1; Polacco 1990, 164167. 169f. fig. 40;Wurster 1993, 23 figs. 89; Bees 1995, 79fig. 14 with discussion of earlier opinions. Thediscussion regarding the date of the retainingwalls of the theatron has generally been linkedwith the interpretation and dating of the aAfoundation in the western parodos. For issuesregarding aA: infra, after n. 148. For new ob-

servations and data regarding the lateral retain-ing walls of the theatron: Papastamati-vonMoock forthcoming b.

22 Bulle 1928, 5355. 73. 79f.23 Bulle 1928, 55f. 60 (W. Wrede) 6163 (K. Leh-

mann-Hartleben); Anti 1947; Anti Polacco1969; Gebhard 1974; Phlmann 1981; Phl-mann 1995b.

24 Because of the link between the cult statue ofthe new Temple of Dionysus and Alkamenes(Paus. 1, 20, 3; see Reisch 1893; and most re-cently Ridgway 2009, 113), many earlierscholars dated the first use of conglomeratestone in the theatre to the time of Nikias(421415): Furtwngler 1901, 412f.; Fiechter1914, 11; Dinsmoor 19511953, 317 with adiscussion of previous views. Drpfeld 1925,3032 believed that this renovation pro-gramme of the theatre and the sanctuary ofDionysus must have already started underPericles. For the new data and observations re-garding the wooden theatre and the possiblechanges to the theatre and the sanctuary ofDionysus: Papastamati-von Moock forthcom-ing b.

25 This retaining wall consists of a southernstraight section and a northern curved one (seethe plan Drpfeld Reisch 1896, pl. 1). Themanner in which these sections bond arguesthat the two are a unitary construction. Bycontrast the outer retaining wall of limestoneblocks with breccia in its foundations bonds atthe corner with the Late-Classical retainingwall of the parodos. Differences in the way thatthe stones have been worked may indicate thatit is slightly later than that of the parodos.




circulation of ideas, creative dynamism, and unique architectural achievements26. As a re-sult of the economic difficulties that followed, the remodelling plan remained largely un-finished, with the result that the wooden theatron was retained27 until the necessary fundswere secured by the reorganisation of Athens public finances in the mid-fourth century,when the complete stone remodelling of the theatre was undertaken28.

On the basis of this new evidence it appears that the tripartite spatial organisation ofthe Late-Classical theatre generally followed that of the fifth century which, in its turn,was determined by the functional requirements and development of the sanctuary and thefirst theatrical installation directly linked to it, and secondly by the situation of the sanc-tuary and theatre within the pre-existing road network on this side of the Acropolis29. Dur-ing the expansion of the Late-Classical stone theatre towards the rock of the Acropolis,this road network determined not only the western boundary of the theatron and the in-clusion of the Peripatos as the sole wide diazoma30, but also the irregular layout of the the-atron to the east (fig. 1.43). The apparent intrusion of the Odeion into the eastern sectionof the theatron was primarily a result, in my opinion, of the need to preserve the age-oldroad ascending immediately to the east of the Odeion31. This resulted in the two monu-ments being placed so close together, and apparently in the alignment of the Odeion withthe straight eastern side of the wooden theatre which was in all probability P-shaped inplan32. This conclusion is based not only on the irregular line of the eastern retaining wall,

26 Pollitt 1972, 6470, pas