Ruins: Classical Theater and Broken Memory

Citation preview

Page ix →

Abbreviations ARV2 J. D. Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters. CCSL Corpus Christianorum Series Latina (Corpus of Latin Texts) CGF Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (Fragments of Greek Comedies) CIL Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (Corpus of Latin Inscriptions) CTh Theodosian Code FGrH Fragments of Greek Historians IG Inscriptiones Graecae (Greek Inscriptions) KA Colin Kassel or Kassel-Austin, Poetae Comici Graeci (Greek Comic Poets) P.Cair.Masp. Greek Papyri from the Byzantine Era. 1911–16 P.Oxy. Oxyrhinchus Papyrae PMG Poetai Melici Graeci (Greek Melic Poets) RIB Roman Inscriptions of Britain SC Sources Chrétiennes (Christian Sources) TrGF Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (Fragments of Greek Tragedies) West M. L. West, trans., Greek Epic Fragments: From the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries BC

Page x →Page 1 →

Introduction The Size of All That’s Missing Two displays form the centerpiece of the new Acropolis Museum in Athens: the great stone panels of the Parthenon frieze that wrap the interior and, equally potent, the outlined absences of the lost pieces, those blocks destroyed, removed (among them the Elgin Marbles). Actively appropriated or benignly missing, their presence remains marked. It is the marking of the missing that remains for me the most potent component of viewing these charismatic ruins. The parchment patina of the original stone abuts the bare wall or the clean white plaster casts of the reconstituted absent panels, to divide by vivid contrast what remains from what remains missing. The story lives in the gaps, where the panels of the frieze have been damaged or destroyed in previous centuries, or their contested removals, and these too are replicated in the display, until the size of all that’s missing begins to seem almost legible. The material evocation of the not-there, and the ideology by which the gaps remain not there, has been made more present than the broken and reassembled pieces that do remain.1 But it is the absence that commandeers the gaze, outlines the dimensions of longing, quietly indicts, and argues for the restoration of the originals and an undoing of the long dominion of the empire of acquisition that first created the absence. Representing the absented, as the Acropolis Museum does, requires a certain contract of memory to assure us that what is not present is in no way absent, but rather marked as absented, and it is the marking that makes all the difference. Making absence visible—the governing trope of this book—is a uniquely Greek idea, articulated and famously employed in antiquity many times, with subtle genres of absenting and marking the absented with modalities of forgetting and remembering to forget. Here is one: kataskaphД“. When the Athenian orator Antiphon was tried and executed for treason, in 410 BCE, his house that had stood on the streets of Athens was demolished to symbolically erase his forfeited civic status. But the gap in the street, the lot on which the house once stood, was not redeveloped for public use, sold, or rebuilt, but rather it remained a hole in the street, left to the Page 2 →wind and the weeds, a signing gap in the cityscape. It was preserved as a hole, and indeed, a bronze stela was erected to note that this hole was where the house of Antiphon once stood, why it was razed, and why it remained vacant. This practice, called kataskaphД“, had a long history.2 The Assembly of Athens had pronounced the same penalty for Archeptolemus at the same trial, razing his house as well and marking its absence: “Land of Archeptolemus and Antiphon the two traitors.”3 The gap in the row of houses where the traitors once lived publicly marked the civic erasure of the condemned, and so the signed hole remained longer, more legible, more monumental on the landscape than the house itself. Memory is thus mapped onto the emptied topography of space, marked, and the marking overscribes the emptiness, until the “nothing” is made meaningful by the archived absence. There was once another precise and useful word for this formation of archiving the presence of such absence. The Greeks called it amnesty (amnestia): it was the public promise to remember to forget. Amnesty is quite different from its cognate, amnesia. Amnesia is simply forgetting. Amnesty is a memorial contract to remember to forget, complete with anniversaries and monuments designed to remind to forget. Amnesty is a public act, not the private setting aside of grievances. It happened most famously in the wake of the Peloponnesian War, in 403 BCE, after the brutal Tyranny of the Thirty was overthrown and democracy restored, as one by one the citizens of Athens publicly took an oath not to pursue vengeance against the tyrants. MД“ mnД“sikakein (to not recall the wrongs), they promised, one after another. The public oath binding the citizens to set aside their recent memory was itself marked and remembered, even renewed. Sixty years later, the orator Aeschines (Against Timarchus, 39) can still confidently remind his auditors of the old oath. Those who broke their oath, Aristotle tells us (Constitution of the Athenians 39–40) were publicly put to death, to preserve the democracy. They were condemned because they refused to forget, but their deaths remind us that the forgetting was itself not to be forgotten. Amnesty, like kataskaphД“, makes monuments of not-forgetting, and this is a most useful construction for considering how performance itself may also have marked its own erasures. It is one of the governing metaphors of the book that many things behind the preserved body of classical theater remains were absented, and were contractually marked and memorized as moments of amnesty, placeholders of the missing, the excised, the razed, including the very

shape and function of the classical genres of tragedy, satyr play, Old Comedy, later New Comedy, and, later still (in late Christian antiquity), the theater’s vexed relation to paganism itself. Reading Page 3 →these traces of amnesty and the memory of forgetting in its many markers is the project that follows. Absence is a complicated thing. It is never what is not there, but rather the trace of presence that remains to represent the space after its materiality is no longer there or, in the case of ruins, resides midway between the declining material and the enduring memorial; it is the place where something once was and is no more, but the “is no more” remains, lingers with a highly concentrated, postmaterial presence. It is the empty frame where the stolen painting once hung, the stela that marks the gap in the street, the hole in the skyline, the missing panel in the frieze. Some know this as grief: the insistence of the absented to remain present. Loss is imprinted on space and memorialized as such with markers that remain, and the marks are mapped onto memory to rematerialize the loss. Anyone, after long absence, homeward turned and arriving troubled over the holes in the familiar, will recognize the pull of the absent: it is the thing most missed on which the eye alights. Even manufactured desire, like the Parthenon’s curated focus, retrains the eye to seek out the absented and endows it with a greater density than its material counterparts. Absence commandeers the cavity in the ground, the unfaded place on the wall, the gap in the frieze, the haunting silence of Silent Spring, terrible in its absence, until what isn’t there becomes the loudest voice, the densest site. Absence is present longing for what is no longer present. It arrests the vision, the hearing, by occupying space with a greater density, a greater volume, a greater command and concentration of memory than that accorded to the material. Above all, absence leaves placeholders, monuments to its own vanishings that outline its former dimensions and fix it in the memory. It leaves ruins, markers more memorial than material. Occasionally, as one finds in the study of antiquity, whole landscapes are dotted with ruins. If “antiquity” is a period, it is also an aesthetic defined by its very incompleteness, its ability to reside in ruins that remain ever but half material, arrested in their slippage toward erasure. Creating a “classical” past was largely an operation of arresting the absence, marking and endowing material remains or immaterial absence, with an excess of memory. Consider quite a different image that displays in miniature the same process of narrativizing its own erasures: an image of the iconoclasm targeting human figures in the Madaba Map, a sixth-century mosaic of the geography of the Transjordan region.4 The original human images, sailors on the Dead Sea, felt the blow of the prohibition against human representation (Caliph Yazid II in 721) and were Page 4 →chipped out, but not at all entirely. Plenty remains to recognize they were human (fishermen, maybe fishers of men). Their torsos and faces have been replaced with random mosaic stones, but their legs endure, still present to absorb the waves, the hands still man the oars, and with them, their humanness flags its own defacing, signing still their own endurance from beyond the shallow gravesite of chipped-out stones. They are, in this regard, a stone palimpsest of random and purposeful patterns cohabiting the layered text that flags most imperfectly their own disappearance, the ideology that compelled it, and the artisans who resisted it.

This book is about reading the markers of the missing left in and around the broken body of classical theater, Greek and Roman—its scars, shards, and stumpage, its ruins, and the ruins beneath the ruins. Performance in antiquity abounds in all that is not preserved, in absence and the scars of the absented, in the leftover breakage of a past irresistibly present and woefully incomplete. Some of the missing bodies are extraordinarily large (we have the remains of several hundred Roman theaters in the provinces of the empire and next to no textual evidence of what actually was performed Page 5 →in them). Other bodies were disappeared. Very precise formations like Antiphon’s stela were developed to flag the missing: kataskaphД“, amnesty, damnatio memoriae (a sanction on memory), iconoclasm, all contracts of memory designed to keep what was absent present. And then again, so much of the theater of antiquity is already an absence marked by its erasures: missing origins, broken genres, fragments of plays, ruins of architecture, absented gods, remains of older practices imperfectly buried and ghosting through the civic productions that replaced them. Antiquity is a culture whose primary image is the ruin, through which it gestures toward a completeness it can never recover, and never wholly give over. Like the missing bronze inscription of the Maison CarrГ©e in NГ®mes, the letters have been long since removed, but the clamp holes that affixed the letters to the stone still remain, and the pattern of the holes seem to invite the reimagining of the missing inscription.5 This tension between the enduring and the disappearing is, always, part longing and part fabrication, driven by a desire to recover, retain, compile, preserve, invent; is in fact most potently a stela marking above all the imperative to remember. I want to evoke the image of ruins—both material and metaphorical—not as eighteenth-century invitations for the introspective Romantic poets and Greek-obsessed travelers to the sublime, both of whom saw ruins as portals to their own troubled interiors, as classically articulated by Denis Diderot, whom ruins allowed to stand in the awesome presence of eternity and contemplate his own evanescence.6 Nor do I want to evoke the image of ruins with the grand nostalgic desire of artists like Giovanni Piranesi, whose renderings aspired to represent the majesty of a classical (invented) Rome and arrest its deterioration, even as its real ruins were being sold, stone by stone. Rather, I want to return to an older evocation, as stelae of the imagination, of ruins that marked presence, that outlined the absence, the absented, the amputated, like the charred ruins of Athens itself, burned by the Persians, and deliberately left to stand as reminders of the catastrophe, flags of memory around which congealed a certain citizenship of a prior elsewhere, of a history already half mythic.

Topos ArcheologЕЌn Traditionally we work the other way, not by the gaps, but down through the stratigraphy of what has materially survived, and remarkably patient, admirably diligent studies like Frank Sear’s magisterial work on Roman theaters, or Peter Wilson’s study on the choregoi (choral producers), or the Page 6 →many curators who have painstakingly gathered what scanty evidence we have of performance in antiquity (fragments of comedy, fragments of tragedy) and mustered them into very useful reconstructions of lost stages and performance traditions within them.7 Such a study, in one dense site, might look, in brief, like this: In the ruins of a late Roman theater at Aphrodisias (Turkey), scratched on the wall of a small corridor that leads between the backstage rooms and the remains of the stage is a series of inscriptions that still reserve spaces for actors to store their props and costumes (skeuД“), though the scene house of the theater itself long ago crumbled, and a small village grew up over the cavea (the seating section).8 Now exposed again, one inscription, on the wall of Room 3, reads simply topos archeologЕЌn—the place of the archeologi. If ever there was an invitation for a shovel, this is it. “Dig here,” it seems to say. But like much of the past, even its invitations are beguiling. Topos archeologon refers, in this case, to a genre of mimes, the archeologi, who specialized in the “ancient” stories, that is, the Greek tragic myths, already “classic,” and the topos was nothing more than the literal backstage space to store their props and masks. One might render it as “the old mime’s space.” There are other similar backstage inscriptions for the Homerist mimes, who presented combat scenes from Homer and were called mimologoi, a more general appellation. But the topos archeologЕЌn holds a particular fascination for me, serving as it does as a linguistic portmanteau of our own making. I’m willing to take its double meaning at face value as an invitation to begin to dig for the place (literally, the topography) of the ancient stories.

As a repository of memory, the archeologi were old even at the time of late third century CE, when the inscriptions were made. Yet even then the actors of the old stories were still in circulation on the eastern circuit, eight hundred years after their professional ancestors began to perform the tragic myths, and would remain in circulation centuries more. Sometime later (perhaps the fifth century), some of the blocks of the backstage walls were plastered over, and on the plaster were scratched and painted more green-room graffiti. On one of the north walls is still preserved a wish for “victory to the Greens and the mimes of the Greens.” The Blues and Greens were the political factions that so divided Constantinople; they seemed to have spilled over into the provinces as well and somehow swept up even the mimes into partisan warfare. And then the performers of the old stories once more competed to perform for local demagogues. Later (perhaps the seventh century), the backstage walls (scratched and plastered with the activity of the mimes who played there, collapsed when an earthquake unzipped much of them—the same regionwide earthquake that brought down the first dome of Hagia Sophia. The stones lay scattered Page 7 →where they fell, mostly in the orchestra, and the theater was not rebuilt. The functional blocks were carted off for the construction and repair of other buildings, including a defensive wall and a new Christian church. One can imagine—I can at least—a nicely squared backstage stone, etched with an inscription that once reserved a space for the archeologi, plastered over with a hope for the Greens, now fitted as a lintel above a doorway in the new church. There some visiting bishop, like John Chrysostom from Antioch, railed against the theater to a congregation sunburned from standing in the theater all day; that same congregation, to the great agitation of the preacher, applauded him for his performance. Such is the game of few pieces that teases out the slightest traces of performance.9 Even the stories marked on the lintels carried a prior memory into the new space, a memory of classical stories swirling about the Greek East. John Chrysostom himself, visiting Constantinople sometime in the late 390s, could retell from the pulpit a story of “the wife of a certain man [who] fell passionately in love with another, and slew her husband upon his return with the help of her adulterer. Most of you probably know the story. The son of the murdered man killed the adulterer and then sacrificed his mother. Afterward he himself was driven mad and pursued by the furies.”10 That he could recall the tale and count on his auditors’ recollection reminds us that whatever else his congregation knew or didn’t know about the pagan world that was passing, the archeologi and their ancient stories like the Oresteia Aeschylus first staged were still playing somewhere, and were still commonly remembered, and would be for centuries more. Synesius of Cyrene (early fifth century CE) could complain those same citizens didn’t know their own emperor, but “suppose that Agamemnon, the son of Atreus is still king” because “from childhood we have heard the king spoken of by this name and no other.”11 Spoken from where, we ask? A stage? As late a writer as Choricius of Gaza, in the sixth century, could describe performances of Achilles, Hippolytus, and Phaedra, while mosaics from the same period in Constantinople and Antioch retold the same tales visually.12 And when the patristic body of clerics, bishops, and deacons met in Trullo in 691/92 to consolidate doctrinal disputes, prohibitions against theater were (yet again) passed, admonishing the faithful, as Chrysostom had done, and threatening excommunication for still attending the theater. At that late date, the authors of the new legislation could still identify all the major genres of tragedy, comedy, mime, and satyr plays by name as active irritants, if only to (yet again) prohibit clergy from attending them.13 It is tempting to retell the story this way, invoking the rebuilt theater of Sabratha as an example: it is not intact, but reassembled from its own ruins; Page 8 →I am also building back a narrative from scraps, shards, and occasional fragments of the past—from the broken fasti and victor lists to the damaged mosaics of late antiquity—into some kind of stratigraphy of coherency, tracing core samples of performance traditions back to their murky origins in tragic tales, prohibition, plaster, preacher, mimes, mosaics, and myths. But peeling back such a reading may be the limit of narrative in a field that yields just enough evidence to document performance but not enough to concede closure on the most basic understanding. Such marks as those envisioned above of the memory of that Greek phenomenon of theater left a broad and

penetrating swath across the culture of antiquity, leaving behind the occasional, if not fulsome, traces of the potency of the form that began in Athens and far outlasted its originating culture. It is only when we look back over the accumulation of small evidence over a twelve-century sweep of classical theater that the remarkable and unequaled endurance of the tradition emerges, deserving a history that adequately documents that endurance, its persistent presence, with a more ample body of evidence than what remains to us. In the absence of more evidence, I turn instead to the absence itself—the stela on the street, the moments of amnesty—and press its most legible gaps into a narrative whose subject is scars, vanishings, erasures, and silences, all the breakages that constitute the ruins of antiquity. Consider the nineteenth-century archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli, who excavated Pompeii and was puzzled by the many cavities he found in the strata of ash until he was inspired to pour a mixture of plaster of Paris into the holes and discovered the cavities were the casings of people who had asphyxiated when Vesuvius erupted, covering the town with ash. The bodies decomposed, leaving only hardened holes behind. Like Fiorelli, I too am fascinated by the shape of absence, the poignant legibility of the holes of antiquity, the diaries of the disappeared. I’m after the lost-not-wholly-lost, the legislated out, the overmapped that left behind what did survive, just under it, vaguely beyond it, and how what survived also carried with it across the long centuries the ghosting of what had not. I’m tracing the scars of the culture that marked and remembered what had been excised and made a point of remembering what no longer remained. Theater’s opaque origins, fractured into troubled genres, as noted in Aristotle’s vague and problematic phrase of tragedy’s coarser beginnings “in things satiric” (before it arrived at its dignity), were still being recalled in the persistent body-sites of satyrs right through the classical and late classical, to the last documents from the ecclesiastical councils of the seventh century, and into the crepuscular installments of the last Byzantine scholiasts. That enduring archaic body-site is one such scar that remindsPage 9 → us that something ancient persisted, if not wholly remembered, behind what was remembered—how, for example, the surviving tradition of genres carried still the marks of the missing earlier genres. The enormous mobility and influence of New Comedy, for example, that traveled across the Mediterranean and formed the template of Roman comedy, carried with it still the ideological baggage that created it, the state’s power that suppressed the topical, acidic political voice of Old Comedy and circumscribed the form into broad types that traveled light and spoke less. New Comedy proliferated because it had acquired certain survival skills, namely, to keep its mouth shut, and that harmless quality so praised at the triclinium was also an aphasia that in its turn remained, to a degree, legible to generations centuries removed. Platonius certainly understood that what made New Comedy new was best marked by an absence, by what it could no longer do, a stumpage still very legible to Plutarch, who read exactly this when he asked lightly, “Who could possibly object to New Comedy?” The reflection intimates that many had objected to the Old Comedy, and behind the enjoyment of the innocuous Menander lingered in some unspeakable but stillremembered contract everything comedy could no longer do. Plutarch acknowledged that, answering his own question by noting that Old Comedy was “too fiery and intense,” too topical, and far too political.14 Why it had passed as a form was remembered, and that remembering was important to the survival of the New Comedy that replaced it. Similar traces can be seen in old tragedy. Our oldest, most complete description of the impact of a play on an audience (Herodotus 6. 21.2) documents the potency of a topical historical tragedy that took the destruction of a Greek colony for its subject. So devastated was the audience, we are told, by representations too close to home, that they fined the playwright and prohibited the play from ever being produced again. Was it just an early experiment in the “real real” (Baudrillard), or did tragedy default to myth and pathos because unadulterated real grief was too potent? Was the detonation of the real real—real events, real sorrow—too powerful for theater, and so modulated into the more comfortable distance of tragic pathos, mixed with myth, like the wine that was diluted because, if imbibed unmixed, it caused madness? Somewhere the myths that endured carried with them the memory of the history that did not, and though tragedy no longer concerned itself with the real, any more than it concerned itself with its origins, it remembered that it did not. This study lives in just such marks that forgetting left behind. It seeks to track the presence-in-absence of classical theater, to follow the traces of the Page 10 →slow erasure, or abrupt fissures, through material and textual

remains, reading the ruins of a classical past that lingered in the forms of the postclassical landscape. It is the legible erasures, like building a Roman theater over a prior sacred site in Gallia or Roman Judea that never wholly goes away. What follows is, in this regard, an archaeology of memory, particularly where memory recorded its own forgetting. I am using the theater in antiquity as a site for these metaphorical core samples for several reasons. The first is obvious: the endurance of classical theater was unmatched for its longevity and influence. For twelve centuries over a wide swath of Mediterranean geography, the practice that was institutionalized in Athens left a large and surprisingly ubiquitous mark far from the polis of its birth. The stories that Chrysostom objected to at his church in Ephesus were the same that had been in circulation for centuries, throughout the Hellenistic and Roman empires, and the same that ended up as mosaics on the floors of villas like those in Zeugma (located in presentday southeastern Turkey), on the banks of the Euphrates River. Architecturally the theaters of empire, early and late, from Pompey the Great’s first theater in Rome to those in Aphrodisias, Ephesus, Antioch, and Gaza were Roman theaters that carried something of their originating memory of Greek theaters, Greek performance practices, conventions, Greek myths, even their skeuД“, their stuff. But other, less apparent but equally compelling reasons help to explain why theaters functioned as sites of civic memory that we are only beginning to understand. The south wall of the parodos of the theater in Aphrodisias, where the mimes stored their stuff, hosted the official records of the city. Still known as the “Archive Wall,” the south parodos bore the official inscriptions of the Roman town for several centuries.15 Proclamations, edicts, decrees, public letters were read first in the theater and inscribed on the wall of the stage house that faced the audience. As the official repository of public memory, the theater’s archive wall functioned in its monumental capacity far longer than the theater itself. A caveat: what follows is not driven by an impulse to reconstruct or posit speculations toward the reconstruction of the receded original—a patently impossible project—but to trace its disappearances, its resistance, its incomplete vanishings. The trajectory that took classical theater to the edge of oblivion was not a single iconoclastic event, but rather a slow and imperfect erasure. The forgetting was itself stratified, disrupted, and often, quite often, marked by legible trauma. Some of these markings were sudden, juridical, even anecdotal: for example, the fining of Phrynichus, famously documented in Herodotus, that realigned theater from the topical to the mythic; the prohibitions against personal satire that in a stroke ended the Page 11 →liberties of Old Comedy; and late antiquity’s injunctions against all forms of paganism preserved in the Theodosian Code, whose persistent prohibitions finally outlasted the persistence of the theater. But other ruptures left no trace of the disappearance they caused, just a vague numbness, a gradual loss of memory. (Whatever happened to maenads? Why was the theater reconceived as a civic competition? And what was it like before it was reorganized into a state festival? Once it was incorporated into that festival, what did Old Comedy replace?) Why was it fixed as a form, why was that form honored well outside of Athens, and why was there so little innovation? Why is it that no one, even in the classical age of Greek theater, can adequately remember why they did theater quite like they did? Or where, exactly, it came from? Though it was (later) recognized that the Athenian drama of the fifth century “had nothing to do with Dionysus,” could anyone at the time even remember exactly what the connection was between drama and Dionysus that they were missing? Why did satyrs linger so long into late antiquity? And what is being remembered in their anachronistic body-sites and their prepolis desires? That Aristotle, who had access to public lists of the dramatic victors, had to speculate on the origins of tragedy and comedy reveals the extent to which memory had already been superseded, reveals that a practice, as potent as it was and would remain, had thoroughly forgotten its origins. Ruins traces that erasure through the marks of memory and residue left behind: textual, archaeologic, iconographic, tracing the place of the old stories, down through a past that is no more yet never wholly disappeared. This book explores how the aesthetic of ruins offered a model for an ideal that dislodged and ultimately stood in for the historic. How Greek theater, and particularly tragedy, endured, had a great deal to do with the creation of a transhistorical mythic landscape (what would later come to be called “antiquity”), which became embodied in its stories rather than its history, for which tragic pathos stood in for a deeper grief, for which spectatorship became the civic substitute for ecstatic worship. The study is palimpsestic in that it lives in

what lives underneath, underneath forms and genres, in the pre-Roman identities ghosting through Roman slave comedies, like Roman walls resting on pre-Roman cyclopean footings, or Christian churches built on sites of Roman temples, which were themselves built upon pre-Roman shrines, or Syrian Christian sermons written over Menandrian New Comedy. And it lives in the hybridic conversations between the layers, in the porous borders between conquest and assimilation, between authority and evasion, erasures and markers, between memory and forgetting. Each of the case studies that follow speaks to a certain marked critical Page 12 →disappearance, a forgetting, a replacement, a rupture that realigned the shape of theater and whose absence remains somewhat legible. Each represents an absence that refused to entirely recognize its own erasure by reallocating memory, the watermarks of theater’s disappearances. The first chapter treats Dionysus himself as a ruin, a broken practice, charismatic, enduring but elegantly incomplete. It returns to the reorganization of the City Dionysia to consider what it replaced as it incorporated the cult of ecstasy into the new civic celebration. The chapter looks not to the murky origins but rather to some of the larger incongruities and ironies of the City Dionysia: how a cult of ecstatic abandon became so circumscribed by regulations that governed its every aspect that it began to resemble nothing so much as its own ritual practice—sparagmos—a tearing apart and reassembling of the god. The second chapter, “The Fining of Phrynichus,” returns to the oldest moment of performance described in Herodotus, in which a single production based on a recent historic event, The Fall of Miletus, was remembered to have initiated a realignment of a theater from great grief to tragic pity, from the historic and the topical to the mythic. It is an odd moment, perhaps even singular, and I don’t wish to make too much of an isolated production, but its memory was recorded with a certain urgency, and recalled later by writers like Plutarch and Ammianus Marcellinus as critically important to the psyche of Athens. And though, as John Herington put it, “There is not now, and probably never will be, ample and solid enough evidence about the course of tragedy before 472 B.C.,” nonetheless the fining of Phrynichus was one of the first textual records of plays that looks back to the generation between the reorganization of the festival (508) and the first preserved installments on a preserved corpus of plays (470s) to consider what was left out in the great reordering, and what would be the new “mythos and pathos” that would replace tragedy.16 This was the generation that lived through the Persian Wars, saw the first Athenian losses, saw Athens burned, and the final victories over Xerxes. It also likely saw a major realignment in the function of tragedy that included the disappearance or prohibition of historical tragedy and the wholesale adoption of the mythic narrative, the replacement of public grief, lamentation, by tragic pity, which became the enduring characteristic of tragedy. Chapter 3, “Broken Shards and Buried Barbs,” returns to an equally jagged moment, the first refashioning of comedy at its point of civic incorporation in 486 BCE, and considers how the new “comedy of invective” was pressed into service as part of a cultural front in the class warfare of the democratic revolution. Although the prefestival nature of Attic comedy Page 13 →may be hopelessly beyond retrieval, the one conclusive thing we know about the early comedy was the year in which it was formally incorporated into the city festival, with competitions and choregoi, and that moment occurred in the thick of a dense intraelite rivalry that saw, among other radical alignments, the broadening of the Athenian power base and a wholesale assault on the oligarchy. It was, and I do not think coincidentally, exactly the same time that the demos deployed its law on ostracism and in quick succession eliminated the most powerful men in Athens. With its arrival, the new comic competition had retooled in form and function for the decade that incorporated it, and though little of its prior form remains, its repurposing may have represented a weaponizing of the form that outlasted the exigencies of the fervent years that first shaped it. The fourth chapter, “The Serene Face of Menander,” considers comedy’s second rupture, that seismic shift between Aristophanic Old Comedy and the new Hellenic genre of New Comedy as preserved in Menander, and everything left behind the arrival of that innocuous and largely apolitical form. One of the most widely circulated and enduring stories told about classical theater was the apocryphal tale of the suppression of Old Comedy (the dipping of Eupolis by Alcibiades) that resulted in the loss of the liberty of political critique and ultimately in the creation of a new genre, the sedate and inoffensive canon of New Comic playwrights, among whom Menander was the recipient of greatest praise.17 It was also widely remembered that the tale of the dipping

of Eupolis was just an Athenian urban legend, another discredited canard; but why it was remembered, as it was remembered, so persistently and for so long speaks to the need to construct a cogent explanation for a disappearance. The fifth chapter looks to the origins of Roman comedy in the wars of the second century, and how the traumatized memory of those victims—the first comic actors and first comic writers—may still be lodged in their texts. The governing metaphor is the curse tablet, inscribed with quiet rage and buried in the substrata of empire, through which, materially and metaphorically, the angry voices of the colonized remain, including the comic writers for the Roman stage. Chapters 6, 7, and 8, “Mapping Rome” (parts A, B, and C) constitute a triptych that collectively charts the mapping and unmapping of Roman culture and Roman identity through the construction of Roman theaters in the provinces and frontiers of the circum-Mediterranean world. The chapters build on the work of that rich field of “Romanization” scholars—David Mattingly and Greg Woolf primarily—to consider the civilizing force of theater in citizen-making on the edges of empire, particularly for the first Page 14 →generation who survived the wars and were incorporated into the new Roman order. They consider as well the residue of the prior preconquered: the Gallic, the Punic, the pre-Roman/post-Roman identity that consumed the new-template architecture—fora, temples, and theaters—as they were mapped across the expanding empire, leaving hundreds of theaters on sites and for cultures who had no prior experience with them. Finally, these three chapters consider the unmapping as Rome withdrew and the slow erasure or sudden repurposing of theaters. Chapter 9, “Savage Cuisine / The City of Always,” uses Pausanias’s Description of Greece to explore the creation of “antiquity” as a mythic topography. His looking beyond the contemporary Athens to the land of Theseus, Xerxes, and Pericles fixes for the first time a sense of a ghosted site, a doubly occupied topography, within whose borders an uneasy tension lives between the residents of the real present and those of the mythic past. It is his use of the aesthetic of ruins that works best for those studying how the corpus of Greek theater was preserved into the first centuries of Roman culture. The philhellenes of the Antonine era fashioned a concept of Greece that was largely unmoored from the exigencies of history, including its own recent history as a Roman colony. Pausanias’s looking at the monumental Athens is also a looking away, and this double looking is useful in considerations of the continuation of the genre of tragedy. Chapter 10, “Antiquity’s Last Supper,” uses the great repositories of classical memory, the libraries and the unbroken tradition of the scholiasts, to map the size of all that was lost. The philhellenes of the second and early third century—Athenaeus, in particular—betray a deep and fragile obsession with the Greek classical world even as it was passing. Their efforts to gather, to archive, to lunge their burden of memory forward live in the crepuscular dim of a day that would be no more. In the end, their insistence to preserve outlived the material itself. Finally, Chapter 11, “The Damnatio of the Gods,” exhumes the residue of pagan memory after the Christian victories that prohibited so many pagan rituals, and the long resistance of the theater in which the last repository of the classical past endured. With the first decade of the fifth century, paganism in all forms was under an aggressive assault, and yet, though rituals, practices, churches, and rites were all purged, the theater remained as popular as ever. It was paganism’s last stand, and it was a forceful one. Through the centuries of prohibitions that followed the triumph of Christianity, the theater and its popularity survived, even flourished (at least until the eighth century), and lingered longer still in the stones of mosaics. The last chapter traces the final installments on the performance traditions: mimes first, through the iconoclasm that finally even prohibited the body Page 15 →itself from remembering, and its resistance, the last persistence of memory in the mosaic floors, like the stones of Daphne. To be clear, the intention here is not to advance new tautologies of the tragic, nor to intervene in the fulsome discussion of theater’s origins on one end and its disappearance on the other end. Rather, I hope to read the small remains of imperfect forgettings as classical theater passed from one little-known stage to another. If there is any originality in the study of the same few pieces, it is not in the discovery of new inscriptions, new fragments, or

sites, or even in the repositioning of the familiar texts of classical theater; but its value lies in exhuming what is below the record, in reading the markers of excision, the poignant gaps and absences that abound in the interiority of antiquity. Because the study is also concerned with how memory itself worked in antiquity, one of the governing metaphors is the Greek concept of amnesty—the contract to remember to forget, a marking of an erasure. Memory contracts, monuments, memory sanctions like damnatio memoriae all play central roles in the narrative of how antiquity arrived, and tell us a great deal about how practices endured their own suppression. The book dwells with particular attention on “mnemocide,” the willful destruction of memory. The burning of books, the erasing of records, the destruction of public inscriptions, the damnatio memoriae, and iconoclasm of antiquity will inform much of what follows. Struggling to discover a term to summarize the effect of memory sanctions and the magnitude of this extinction, Jan Assmann offered the phrase “cultural repression,” which “might therefore serve as a term for the various forms of annihilating cultural memory.”18 These ruptures that I trace function not so much to annihilate as to preserve a certain memory, even their violent exit, by overlaying some presence on another, older memory. Tragedy, New Comedy, satyr plays, and later the archeologi all preserve a memory over a memory: like early medieval devils built upon the body-site of late classical satyrs, or mimes over tragedy, their very speechlessness preserves something of the injunction that deprived it of its voice—tragedy over what? Terence over Menander, Menander over Eupolis. Parsing out the layers reveals the erasures, ruptures, and retirements as the new forms recycled the stones of the past. Certain moments of contact, however, particularly egregious ones, like the fining of Phrynichus, the suppression of Old Comedy, or the militarized Christianity of Theodosius, may require the more aggressive phrase of “mnemocide.” And these as well left their marks. Let me offer one small moment; larger ones will follow. In 451 CE, the bishops of the Eastern Roman Empire gathered for the Council of Chalcedon to continue the debate over ecclesiastic issues that Page 16 →would, in essence, define the dogma of the Catholic faith. They had previously convened two years earlier in Ephesus, and the first order of business was to, as we would say today, approve the minutes of the last meeting. There the dispute arose over a deliberate erasure of the official records of the council. It was not unusual for contests of memory to erupt—so frequent had they become that the bishops began to bring with them their own clerk for verbatim recording (tachygraphia), a sort of transcription shorthand. The problem began when the records of the Council of Ephesus noted that the assembly had collectively endorsed the last resolutions unanimously. The minutes, as they were read, recorded that the clerk called out: “If anyone reverses [a doctrine], let him be anathema! If anyone overelaborates, let him be anathema! Let us preserve the faith of the Fathers!” The denial of the minutes was immediate: “While this was being read out, the Anatolikoi (Easterners) and the most pious bishops with them shouted out вЂWe did not say these things! Who said these things?’” In the investigation that followed, it was revealed that Dioscorus, bishop of Alexandria, had ordered his notary to interdict the transcriptions of the other bishops: Stephanus, the most pious bishop of Ephesus said, “My notarii, Iulianus, the present bishop of Lebedus, and Crispinus, deacon, were taking a record, and there came the notarii of the most pious bishop Dioscorus and wiped out their tablets and all but broke their fingers in their desire to take their pens. Neither did they take copies of the records, nor do I know what happened.”19 Tablets at the ecumenical councils are wiped clean, and the memory, rebelling at the injustice of the record, finds a record of its rebellion. It was the resistance to erasure that made the story. The historiographical challenge is to catch them in the act of erasure. Such accounts remind us (hard lessons for historians) that memory is a subversive act against the natural status of oblivion. Monuments throw brief redoubts against erasure. Oblivion is the natural order (what Geoffrey Cubitt has called “the mundane coastal erosion”) against which monuments face off. But memory sanctions are a perversity of a different nature.20 The opposite of the archive, they are the antiarchive. The production of memory

was a monumental affair in antiquity: victory tripods, statues, inscriptions, and records. And in Rome, memory was largely an imperial project that involved theaters themselves (Pompey’s theater, for one). But the production of memory sanctions—prohibitions, damnatio, amnesty—wasPage 17 → equally monumental, though its monumentality is more difficult to trace. Their monuments are marked by ruins, by mutilation, and by an absence that left a record of itself. As a study of performance’s remains, Ruins lives in a field that others have worked before me and to whom I am indebted. Among those theater scholars to whom I am most grateful are Peggy Phelan, Rebecca Schneider, Joseph Roach, and my late friend and colleague Herb Blau. Among classicists (in whose field I am but a curious tourist), I am thankful for the work of Greg Woolf, David Mattingly, Susan Alcock, Peter Wilson, Harriot Flower, James Porter, and Nicole Loraux, whose work shares, to various degrees, an interest in exhumations, erasures, and ways in which the memory of performance endured beyond its materiality. And to those diligent curators who have assembled and translated so many fragments toward a closer coherency of performance in the past, I am also deeply indebted. Let me acknowledge a few: Ian Storey, Douglas Olson, Edith Hall, Jeffrey Rusten, Frank Sear, and David Rosenbloom, whose large work made my small work easier. A few personal acknowledgements. This book would never have come to pass without the sustained enthusiasm of LeAnn Fields, who stuck with this from its first essay. I cannot thank her enough for her commitment and her kindness in chaperoning the manuscript into production. Along this book’s ragged road, a few kind readers helped. My late friend, Herb Blau, and my colleague in Classics Jim Clauss were both early readers. One very kind and encouraging anonymous reader nudged the work toward clarity. I thank my colleague in theatre Scott Magelssen for publishing an earlier version of the Buried Rage chapter (вЂUnspeakable Histories’). Kind thanks also to friends and graduate students; Bahar Karldag for her help in Turkey; and Shelby Lunderman, for her contributions in securing permission for the images; and to all those curators who show you the perfect images and then let you take photos, from Vindolanda to Gaziantep. And finally, sadly, to the late Floyd Jones, whose generosity and endowment made the travel possible. And my own absences—the many omissions of fine studies and scholars with whose work I am yet unacquainted, or somehow overlooked—I chalk up to no further malice than my own negligence.

Page 18 →

Prologue The Unmixed Prior For the drinking of unmixed wine results in a state of madness. —Diodorus Siculus, 4.3.2 Unmixed, paralysis of the body. —frag. Alexis[?] I mix up only three bowls of wine for sensible people. —Eubulus fr. 93. Mixing remembers, and here I am speaking of wine (both materially and metaphorically) and Dionysus, the god of disorder—that is, wine and the god through wine.1 Both were much, much safer diluted. Wine first. Everything about mixing the wine was a renewable memory, one hangover at a time. Generation by generation, from King Amphictyon, who personally learned to mix wine from Dionysus himself, down to the drinking parties of New Comedy, each generation of revelers remembered the mixing, documented in a long trajectory of classical sources, comic fragments, sculpture, monumental altars, and symposium chatter all designed to impress upon the memory that one must mix the wine now, but did not always do so.2 A fragment of Philochorus records this social memory in a dense passage of protocols, monuments, and practices all designed to inscribe the memory of mixing. He begins with the altar of the Upright Dionysus in the Sanctuary of the Seasons (orthos, “upright, as opposed to buckled over,” or orthos, “erect, as opposed to incapable”), an architectural feature recalling the benefits of mixing and one still available to Pausanias when he visited Athens centuries later.3 A second altar to the Nymphs, or nurses of Dionysus, was built nearby, also “intend[ed]В .В .В . as a reminder of the power of unmixed wine,” and later in the same passage, Philochorus offers a third memorial to the same end, the toasting to Zeus Savior to flag the memory: “Also in addition to this, the name of Zeus the Saviour to help Page 19 →the recollection and understanding of those who drink, because when they drink this way [mixed] they will survive safely.”4 If wine seems to have arrived in the cultural imagination with an excess of packaging instructions, it was with some caution for the product, and cautionary tales abounded. A cyclops could lose an eye as a result of his encounter with the god, as Euripides parodied the myth, or Icarius, who introduced the wine to shepherds who “quaffed it off copiously without water for the pleasure of it, imagined that they were bewitched and killed him [Icarius].”5 Symposium anecdotes and satyric send-ups retold the lamentable effects of the excess of the unmixed, but even physicians like Galen and Philonides (below) contributed their medical anecdotes to the tradition: After the vine had been brought by Dionysus from the Red Sea into Greece, most men perversely turned to unmeasured enjoyment of it, and drank it unmixed; some, in their insane perversity became delirious, others became like corpses in their stupor. But once upon a time, when some men were drinking at the seashore, a rain-storm fell upon them and broke up the party, but filled up the bowl, which still had a little wine left in it. After the weather cleared they returned to the same place, and tasting the mixture of wine and water they found pleasant and painless enjoyment. For this reasonВ .В .В . they call upon Zeus the Savior, because they assume that he, as the originator of rainstorms, was the author of the painless mixture derived from the mingling of wine and rain.6 Such anecdotes were the stories the ancients told themselves to account for the mixing. Back then, they implied,

people went mad with the unadulterated stuff, and later-day consumers needed to lock in that memory across a range of mnemonic devices: anecdotes, monuments, rituals, medical tracts, and convivial practices. Barbarians might take it straight, but mixing was for the civilized. Satyrs knocked it back—neat, mad, and unmixed creatures that they are—and a few fragments of plays still testify to that memory.7 But in settings that aspired to approximate the god—symposia and civic festivals—they mixed the wine and made monuments to remember to mix the wine. I want to hold this memory of mixing in mind, not just as the materiality of the cult of Dionysus, great god of the grape, but as a functioning metaphor of taking in the god, in whose undiluted state only madness followed. Somewhere in the long past there had come to Greece a potent new force in the form of the fermented grape. It liberated the spirit, brought an Page 20 →ecstatic release to those who took it within, a euphoria, accompanied with a certain volubility, heightened desire, and in undiluted excess, violence, and ultimately madness. It was powerful, the most terrible to man, and the most gentle, as Euripides wrote of it; it must have been a god.8 He came—who knows?—a long time ago, from—who knows?—over there, vaguely waving to the east, from Egypt, or around the Black Sea, somewhere where there were panthers, and leopards, somewhere east (like the incense burned in the orchestras at the festival of Dionysus that produced a “Phrygian” odor), from Asia or maybe India, foreign, like his name, some alien power from some alien place beyond the Mediterranean, where this god had initiated foreign people there to the pleasures and terrors of wine.”9 He was known by many names, and that foreignness was also remembered: Sabazios, Bromios, Bakkhos, Dionysos, and epithets like agrios (wild), and akratЕЌphoros (bearer of unmixed wine).10 The story of his arrival was told in many ways: celebrated in dance and song, on ceramic art, in disciplined rituals and wild abandon, and rehearsed at the pressing of the grapes, the casking and the uncasking, in the city and the wild, prior agrarian beyond.11 His presence attracted a suite of followers (both real and mythic), who congealed around the idea of wild celebrations—the mythical preserved on fragments of pottery—that became, in time, historic matter with annual celebrations, planned and incorporated into the city, the city’s architecture, and the city’s social architecture. Somewhere in time—fortunately I’m tracking memory, not origins—the agrarian, ecstatic festival of taking in the uncontainable god of release, was itself contained. The symbolic replaced the psychic; spectators replaced participants; narrative performance replaced the ecstatic thiasos (group of singers or dancers). The roots of the older practice, what Gernet called “the primitive Dionysus,” however, did not wholly disappear but receded into the fog, where they remained vaguely outlined against their derivatives, traceable just on the horizon of erasure, present but unpracticed.12 Somewhere in time, remembering to mix Dionysus was formally incorporated, and theater became the site of the mixing.13 And, like the mixing of wine, the new practice was riddled with reminders of older practices, and flags remained, like the lurking presence of satyrs, stelae that marked where a wilder something now excised once stood. Occasionally, part of the receded practice remained a literal stela. Still standing in Demosthenes’s day, a stone stela was set up next to the temple of Dionysus of the Marshes. This old and sacred precinct, according to a scholiast on Aristophanes’s Frogs, was where the dramatic contests were held before the building of the first theater.14 As a lieu de memoir, the Page 21 →site was fading even by Demosthenes’s day. Part of the lore of the site was its location, where the first winepress was established; and the whole district became densely associated with Dionysus in ways we still don’t fully understand.15 Here, “in this most ancient and August temple of Dionysus,” writes Demosthenes, the Athenians “inscribed on a stone pillar” the law requiring the wife of the archon Basileus (King Archon) to “perform the secret sacrifices in traditional fashion on the city’s behalf” and [to perform]В .В .В . the customary ritesВ .В .В . with due reverence.” These rites involved a one-night marriage to the god, including the nocturnal obligation that formally incorporated him into the city by symbolically sleeping in the temple, and the memory of these later practices, even discontinued, still carried their traces of even earlier disorders. This coupling ceremonially performed by the ruling wife was acknowledged to be on behalf of those who would no longer perform the rites. Can we see something maenadic in this sedate ritual that ghosts back to a wilder predecessor? Can we see practices remembering older practices? “The actual pillar is still standing,” Demosthenes documents, “even now, with its old Attic alphabet, the inscribed letters now faint.”16 Thus stood a stela, like a dozy honor guard in the dominion of memory, protecting an older practice that, though retired,

was still—but faintly—recalled. The theater of Dionysus was, I think, something like that, remembering a practice behind a practice. The Greek cityscape abounded in such markers—inscriptions, dedicatory stelae, trophies, all of these like the Caryatids, or the houses in Tarentum, described by Athenaeus, which had expiatory columns “as many columns outside the front doors as it harbored members of the band dispatched to Iapygia,” that band having committed a sacrilege against the people there.17 And so they stood, memorials on the streets, marking faded events. But this stela in the marshes was different in that it marked an ancient practice that was long ago retired and only barely remembered in Demosthenes’s day, while the new, civic endeavors that in some degree sought to recalibrate the god utterly replaced the memorials. And yet these memorials still remained behind a stela as a site of evaporated memory, reconstituted elsewhere, in civic practices. Like the god, even the memory of the god was mixed, and the new diluted rituals were quite distant from the thing it recalled. And the most distant of the new practices was the theater, and that is where the problems begin. By the time our oldest records commence, testimonies already puzzled over the distance between the theater and its connection to its own origins in the worship of Dionysus. One of the most persistent memories about the Page 22 →oldest theater was that it had imperfectly forgotten its own origins. It was remembered by later writers, who made a point of asking, “What has this to do with Dionysus?” remembering somehow that it should, that it used to once and did not anymore, for reasons no one could precisely recall, but the writers remembered to ask that. It is the remembering of the forgetting that I pursue here.

Page 23 →

One. Domesticating Dionysus This forgetting of origins we still call civilization. —Nicole Loraux It’s time that bald skull stopped fluttering with ecstasy. —Sophocles, Trackers

Prohibiting Chronic Ecstasy It was the physician Galen who diagnosed the problem as “chronic ecstasy”—that divine mad blast from the god that transports us beyond all reason.1 The disorder makes a poor transliteration in English, something like too much “enthusiasm,” but the Greek entheos, “to be full of the god, to take too much of the god inside,” was a more precise rendering. Those who suffered from chronic ecstasy (like maenads, or the tragic wine-mad and god-punished, possessed poets, and later, frenzied Christians) had taken in too much of the god, neat. Lycurgus certainly did; driven mad by Dionysus, the poor man killed his own son, thinking him a vine of ivy. The enthused shepherds who murdered Icarius, who had introduced them to wine, certainly did. The women of Thebes suffered from the madness of Dionysus, especially poor Agave, as told in Euripides’s Bacchae; and so too did her son, Pentheus, whom she and her fellow possessed maenads tore limb from limb, thinking he was a lion. Cleomenes, king of Sparta, went mad by drinking unmixed wine, that is, by taking in the undiluted god.2 Through such accounts of myths and mortals, those who came after—all those thirsty citizens who imitated and celebrated the ritualized arrival of Dionysus by taking in the god of the grape—recalled the potentially fatal disorder of this most gentle, most terrible god. Indeed, they had good moral and medical reasons to avoid it, and equally potent myths on the deadly hazards of overembracing the god. Such tales of chronic ecstasy were not just the subject of tragedies, or the sport of satyr plays and drinking parties. From the tragedians to the ceramicPage 24 → painters, to Plato (Laws 815b–d) and Aristotle (Politics 8.7.1342) to the later patristic writers, the religious frenzy of Dionysus was acknowledged by serious minds as a dangerous and disturbing possession. Philo in the first century could readily call upon the image of “such as are possessed, and in the guise of Corybantes, thou shall dance and give thyself up to divine transports,”3 as could Clement of Alexandria in the early third century, or Synesius of Cyrene in the fifth, who could still exclaim against a transportive Christian faith like “a Bacchic ecstasy, like the leap of a man frenzied or possessed.”4 For a full millennium, the undiluted power of Dionysus remained a potent and accessible myth in the classical imaginary, retold on stage and rendered in the tondo of the kylix, in stone, clay, and tale: wild maenads ripping apart the fresh flesh of fawns.5 It was all potent stuff, the interiority of the myth, the potency of which, however, was utterly unaccommodated by the domesticated state of his festival practice. From 500 BCE to 500 CE, in spite of Dionysus’s heavy festival evocation, nothing about the celebration of the dominion of Dionysus seems to be remembered quite so vigorously as what was no longer done. As a concept, Dionysus lived largely in the tension between the remembered potency of the myth of madness and his own rationale and diminished presence, pacing the cages of slow erasure, while the charisma of the feral terror prowled freely in the tragic imaginary. The trick is in the catching of its enduring idea by the tail of its own persistent disappearing, and here we are squarely in a familiar zone of trespass best articulated by Derrida’s brilliant Г©tude on the historiographical challenges of Michel Foucault’s History of Madness. The problem articulated in Derrida’s essay, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” traces very precisely the same difficulty of wrapping a rational exercise around a condition and a practice that resists all reason. Madness, and maenadism here, share an abandon that can only be understood by its own betrayal. Derrida’s solution: “Either do not mention a certain silence [madness]В .В .В . or follow the madman down the road of his exile.”6 Here, for the following after the madness, there is no better site that presents itself than the theater, where the

shaped residue of a rational mimetic act was imposed on what was once a dangerous and unregulated consumption of the god—the problematic, receding association the theater retained with the cult of ecstasy. There the civic structure paused the pursuit, and that very disappearing “down the road of his exile” was repeatedly noted. A small warehouse of scholarship has traced the influence of Dionysus on the theater, from the Cambridge ritualists at the start of the twentieth centuryPage 25 → to the neoritualists at the start of the current century; and it is thus not the intention here to wade into that dismal swamp of how much “nothing” or “everything” the theater had to do with Dionysus, but rather to restate the obvious: that the stories of the terror of the experiencing of Dionysus such as the tragedians told were very different from the sedate experience of watching those stories at the god’s civic festival, and that is no small distance.7 Somewhere, quite early on, that dangerous chronic ecstasy that bordered on madness (what Sourvinou-Inwood called “the loss of control”) was domesticated into a very controlled experience, something quite different altogether; the unmixed encounter was mixed, and the mixing was remembered.8 Perhaps the festival was all about an excess of imperfect remembering, of handling sticks instead of snakes. When Euripides has Dionysus declare himself the most terrible to humans and the most gentle (Bacchae 860–61), the festival indulged the gentle display of terror. The real terror lived on in the tragic imaginary, but where the festival was concerned, incorporation displaced much of the prior potency. Sacrifices might be read to stand in for sparagmos, that ripping apart of flesh which abounds in the stories and images of maenads; goats give way to something else—crowns maybe. Ephebes costumed as satyrs enacting a thoroughly rehearsed and choreographed “abandon” replaced the uninvited initiate; active participants became passive spectators watching choruses soberly compete with a host of rules and fines; and Dionysus became a more serviceable but muzzled god, like his image that was formally brought into the city, instead of into the psyche. Residue of the older practices certainly remained, but the “civilizing” of the god altered the experience.9 My focus here is the distance between the representations of the experience of Dionysus and the experience of the civic festival. Even the historic cult of maenadic worship, from what few accounts we have, are mild approximations of the myth that Euripides retold and ceramic painters depicted.10 The wildness, the madness of the euhios daimon (bacchic god) had been somewhere early on cut away, and it had been remembered that it had been cut away (particularly on stage). The god had suffered his own sparagmos, the myth had been torn apart in a second death and rebirth and reassembled in a tamer, more containable practice: theater. But the new practice was built upon a memory of a more dangerous and potent predecessor, and that memory remained.11 Thucydides records a similar “remembering” in which latter-day substitutes may have stood in for the former, undomesticated real: “For the Athenians also have a festival which is called the grand festival of Zeus Meilichios, or Gracious, namely, the Diasia. It is celebrated outside the city, Page 26 →and the whole people sacrifice not real victims but a number of bloodless offerings.”12 Did the offerings to Dionysus become “bloodless” as part of a long erasure that I am calling domestication? If so, no institution honored the diminished god more than the theater, where ephebes, accessorized with stuffed phalluses and tails, danced satyr roles instead of some prior primal act, in plays about others devoted to Dionysus, before spectators who remembered some earlier something, and that this was not it.13 For some reason that I think we need to honor, it was remembered generations afterward, looking back, that the people asked at the time, “What has this to do with Dionysus?”14 What was remembered, later, was that the unmixed god was missed. The civic, competitive dancing of choruses and tragedies of mythic subjects, sponsored by the civic elite though vaguely devoted to Dionysus, and the enactments of tragedy and comedies were remembered to be replacements of some raw engaged practice now behind them, but not yet out of memory. There was, of course, good reason that the god was eviscerated of his chronic ecstasy. The unrestrained celebration of Dionysus proved to be deeply costly to the ordering of the polis. Herodotus offered the cautionary tale of how the inhabitants of Smyrna once lost their city to the Aeolians “when the people of Smyrna were celebrating a festival of Dionysus outside the walls.” The Aeolians took advantage of the unbounded revelry of this predomesticated festival, entered the city, “shut the gates, and got possession of the town.” When the celebrants sobered up, they were required to “surrender all moveable property” and, bereft of their homes, were disbursed among Aeolian towns.15 The same author recounts how deeply suspicious the Scythians were

“of indulging in Dionysiac orgies.” “No Scythian can see sense in imagining a god who induces people to madness.” And when their own king, Scylas, succumbed to the initiation rites (“Your own king, he is under its influence; Dionysus has driven him mad”), his people had the good sense to have their own king beheaded (4.78–80). The fear of giving over too completely to the god was real enough that a fourth-century military tactician, Aeneas Tacticus, offered cautionary advice: when towns celebrate their Dionysia, “Line the streetsВ .В .В . with guards and pickets in force, making it difficult for would-be revolutionaries.”16 Such “enthusiasm” could hardly last as a civic festival, and somewhere, before the first records of the event are preserved, a great reordering had already occurred to dilute the madness—to mix the wine, so to speak. Classical Greek theater may very well represent the final and most visible stage of an institutional and civic displacement of the cult of Dionysus, and thus the earliest records of the stage may look back to a history of “beyond”Page 27 → that marks a scar where the god of chronic ecstasy once lived, once reveled, and was once incorporated into the city’s psyche, but then was cut away, transmogrified into something new and safe. Classical Greek theater (the thing that remained) may be the most visible scar of that excision. The celebration of City Dionysia marked an abduction of the god that arrested and disarmed the terror and the ecstasy. The theater that followed may have had, as Easterling, Goldhill, Winkler, Seaford, and others have suggested, “everything to do with Dionysus,” but it was a far tamer snake they handled. The city had pulled off what Pentheus in Euripides’s Bacchae could not: it had bound and contained the uncontainable, and the site of that extraordinary rendition was the theater. By the time of the first theatrical artifacts that survive (theaters, texts, stone images of masks, ceramic images of satyrs, fasti inscriptions, civic records, and anecdotes), the memory of the associations of theater somehow bound up with an abandoned celebration of the god of ecstasy was already in recession. The glory years of City Dionysia preserved in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were thus both a theater of remembering and a theater of forgetting, a sedate and domesticated replacement of some wild predecessor remembered in myth, but no longer enacted. Whatever its origins—and to be clear, I am skittish to speculate on origin theories—my interest here is not where theater came from or why it had come to replace its origins, or even that it had forgotten them, but rather why people had remembered that they had forgotten. Somewhere in the not-so-distant (still memorable but out-of-record) past, a civic theater emerged and replaced some prior something, something very much to do with Dionysus, or as Aristotle related it in those five vexing words on tragedy, something to do with satyrs (dia to ek saturikЕЌi metabalein).17 The new structure, City Dionysia (the Great Dionysia) celebrated the polis (and all that is implied in its cognates, the polite, the policed, the political) or critiqued it, but though this new structure retained its titular attachment to Dionysus, it had already been profoundly realigned from the ecstasy of the once-agrarian god of disorder. Chronic ecstasy—the kind of dangerous abandon that was so akin to madness it could get a king killed and a town dispossessed—became an anachronism with the introduction of the civic theater, which offered in its place not so much a simulacrum of ecstasy, as a recognition of its dangers. At its most tragic moments, it offered a mimesis of madness, but always with the awareness that a competition was occurring, and that madness was also an adjudicated performance of madness. And that competition was just one part of layers and layers of civic celebration.18 But how that surrogation occurred—that is, why theater became Page 28 →an essential substitution for the new celebration (subjugation?) of Dionysus—was as confusing to fifth-century Athenian audiences as it is to us. Or so it is remembered, and that confusion, “this forgetting of origins,” is where we must begin—not with the origins (hopelessly beyond), but with the nature of the forgetting. And here we are somewhat lucky, as it was a forgetting that was itself widely remembered.

Reorganizing Dionysus (Sparagmos) When Phrynichus and Aeschylus developed tragedy in the direction of plots and suffering, people said, “What has this to do with Dionysus?” —Plutarch, Symposium 1.5, 615a

As a site of memory, the civic festival theater that emerged at the close of the sixth century seemed to live in the zone that accommodated both the remembering and the forgetting of the god.19 Great chunks of the cultic practice were no longer present—the dangerous parts, certainly, but they were not out of reach. The oldest images of the cult of Dionysus, preserved on the black-figure pottery that dates back to the middle of the seventh century BCE, celebrate the potent komos of Dionysus: ithyphallic satyrs stalk ecstatic maenads who seem to dance, flee, and fight all at once. The scenes are supercharged with an ecstasy beyond rational human experience. Here is the world of the god of the wet, the wine-wild, and all the feral forces at play. Surveying the iconography of these scenes of thiasos, Cornelia Isler-KerГ©nyi concluded (with some consensus) that such “are attributed to the wild sphere of the cosmos, the antithesis of the civilized world.”20 That world, the prepolis of the psyche, was the now-imagined residency of the god, furnished with the unmixed encounters that the more sedate society and civic ritual would no longer embrace. The frenzied ecstasy would be the thing that those painted others did in the tondo of the kylix, those god-effused tragic mad ones on the stage, those wild-eyed dancers and devotees of Dionysus caught in their thiasos, their ecstatic celebration of the god.21 Where Dionysus is concerned, the sixth-century vase record is a celebration of chronic ecstasy. That fulsome tradition continued in the visual memory, in the Greek imaginary for centuries, as scores of vases and later mosaics still reveal.22 But this “wild sphere” of the myths and iconography is not at all what the fifth-century theater experience looked like—not remotely, even at a Page 29 →distance. As so many have observed, the great dramatic festival of City Dionysia was circumscribed with an enormous apparatus of civic engagement, rules, regulations, and protocols that mapped out with great detail how this release would occur.23 Despite its devotional core (and I don’t contest the evoked presence of the god), selecting choregoi well in advance (wealthy demesmen, over forty, with a propensity toward self-display), a structured and vetted process for selecting poets and plays, recruiting or impressing choruses, assigning musicians, training and teaching choral members the dance and music, the disciplined and daily rehearsals on schedules that included negotiated release time from other civic duties, indeed, the whole mounting of an extremely competitive five-day arts festival on an annual calendar, planned months in advance, in front of a gathered audience, with assigned and ordered seats, a boulД“ (group) of judges, with displays of tribute money, war orphans, and the whole ordered program that governed a major civic event would, after all, require a degree of sobriety somewhere. It would in addition involve serious skin-in-thegame competition, a bucket of rules that framed who and how the contest played out, and a degree of enforced polite behavior (including fines for offenders). And this distance between the civic structure of the festival and its ecstatic origins was as troubling in the fifth century as it remains today.24 It has long been lamented that by the time we slice into the archive of performance—plays, architecture, iconography, records—the shape of the theatrical experience had been utterly commandeered by the state, had already become traditional and certainly conservative. Like the missing opening columns of the fasti (calendar highlighting sacred days) (IG ii2, 2318), we slice late into the story. Whatever the old sixth-century structures of Thespis, Pratinas, and Choerilus (“king among the satyrs”) were, they had long since given way to plots and pathos of Aeschylus and Phrynichus, just as the temporary orchestra gave way to wooden seats that collapsed and were replaced with a stone theater.25 When the first records begin, the festival was a structured competition whose very elevation of the civic trophy as the ultimate triumph in a competition also records a displacement of the earlier, private celebration of Dionysus well underway. Becoming spectators instead of participants already represents a sizable psychic refashioning; celebrating within the city is another; structuring that celebration in a civic competition with rules and judges is quite another. (Is there anything more unwild than a chorus of cadets, after eleven months of rehearsal, performing a satyr dance?) Whatever ritual elements that remained in the new festival of theater, traced since the days of the Cambridge ritualists, remain incommensurate with the elements erased.26 That Aristotle Page 30 →(fourth century), Plutarch (first century CE), Ovid, Lucian, and Zenobius (second century CE) still had access, could still repeat the ongoing anxiety over its origins, reminds us that the forgetting itself remained in circulation and memorable for centuries. The diminished presence of Dionysus (measured in the distance between the theater of Dionysus and its cultic origins) was a baffling ellipsis that was handed down from generation to generation. The retirement of the god is a subject of lengthy scholarship, rehearsed elsewhere many times, that one need not revisit here; rather, what interests me are the traces of the older

(dis)order that survived into the records and forms of the civic festival that did survive.27 Despite the nearly incomprehensible distance between the festival as recorded and its origin, an ecstatic impulse of the agrarian underclass still celebrated on the vases, this tenuous attachment was still recalled, as well as that very tenuousness. Though urbanized in the theater, sedated, gentrified, certainly gendered, somewhere the abandoned ecstasy of release that bordered on madness had become circumscribed in a festival context with an extensive apparatus of regulations that governed precisely how the uninhibited “release” would happen. Somewhere ecstatic worship was replaced by urban spectatorship. Somewhere the unmixed was mixed and the celebrants sat and watched others enact simulacra of a prior something, and remembered that it was only simulacra. This great and unrecorded reordering left a fault line that ran under the theoric structure, troubled auditors early, and was visible still to Aristotle, Plutarch, and Zenobius later still. When the records begin, the reordering was largely complete. The forms were largely fixed, the rules were firmly in place, and even its function—particularly its function, an almost juridical injunction toward polite behavior—had been overdetermined, and the experience of the “something prior” had receded far enough to be out of sight, but not far enough to be out of mind. And there in the halfway house of memory, between chronic ecstasy and oblivion, between amnД“sia and amnesty, it remained, recalling not so much the wild elsewhere, but that stumpage of its amputation. It belonged to the generations before Aeschylus, the sixth century that saw many of Athens’ festivals falling under a civic reordering. The Panathenaea (Greek Panathenaea) underwent a major reorganization in 566 and again, sometime in the last third of the sixth century, when Hipparchus, as Aristotle relates, further reorganized the rhapsodic competition (“He who first brought the poems of Homer to this land and compelled the Rhapsodes at the Panathenaea to go through them in order, each taking up the cue, as they still do now”).28 The later Panathenaea encouraged the canonization of Homer and the gradual loss of other epics, simultaneously preservingPage 31 → and erasing. A similar reorganization occurred with the City Dionysia in 534, when tragic competitions were formally recognized, that is, when tragedy-as-contests replaced the prior something else. It is the scar of the something else that I am after.29 Later in the study, more precise mechanisms—or at least precise metaphors—for measuring this absence will be evoked (amnesty, damnatio memoriae [memory sanctions], iconoclasm). But for now, I am content to look back into that fog-bound distance with a certain wonder, a vague suspicion of what’s preserved, and a vaguer sense of longing for what wasn’t, for the receded things, the things that were replaced with what remained. Then, mostly, I explore whether they were marked as replacements. One gets some sense of the civic-minded purging of the prior unruly elements from later sources, of the spirit of the changes, if not the mechanics. Plato, advocating for the cleansing of the unruly, distinguishes objectionable dancing from unobjectionable dancing and uses the occasion to single out bacchic revels as not worthy of citizens.30 Did making the early theater “worthy of citizens” also entail cutting away the unrestrained “bacchic revelry” from the festival in lieu of the mimetic? Did the competition of plays stand in for the wildness no longer allowed? And does the relic of the satyr play, that anachronistic but persistent appendage to the tragic trilogy, mark that incision, as Zenobius recalled it? Are the “things satyric” that Aristotle notes of tragedy’s origins, the scar where something was cut out? A further reform after 508 is more traceable. The reorganizing of the festival of Dionysus was part of a sweeping realignment after the expulsion of the tyrants by Cleisthenes, who emerged as one of the rival demagogues. The other, Isagoras, allied himself with the Spartan King Cleomenes, who had rid Athens of the tyrants. “To counter this appeal,” writes Anthony Podlecki, “Cleisthenes turned to a new element in the political game, the people.”31 He “took the people into his political club,” was how Herodotus put it. “The Athenian commons, which had formerly been excluded, he [Cleisthenes] now thoroughly incorporated into his own faction.”32 Among his first reforms was a redistricting of Athens. He gerrymandered the city into new constituencies, breaking up the old tribal alliances and redividing the polis into ten new demes. He reorganized the military to further break up the old tribal regiments. He instituted the “the law concerning ostracism”—that is, the citizens’ right to expel demagogues.33 These represented sweeping changes that remapped the social landscape of Athens. And it was Cleisthenes who reorganized the City Dionysia that allowed the competitive sponsorship by the new demes, and the public forum for cementing the new order.34 In these latter two measures, the new concept of Page 32 →a redistricted Athens, “incorporated” into the populist party of

Cleisthenes, intersected with the theater: choregoi and ostracism. The new structure of ostracism allowed the demos a participation in the oligarchy of government, while the choregoi could now be restructured into that same contest of deme and demagogue. Somewhere, at the close of the sixth century, the genre, like the city, underwent some kind of large-scale reorientation, of which Plutarch later recorded that somewhere in the reshuffle the introduction of “mythos and pathos” replaced some prior practice. Was this restructuring the thing recalled, when those first objectors recoiled, as it was recalled and remembered? “What has this to do with Dionysus?” they allegedly asked, and apparently asked it enough that it became something, if not a generational objection, and certainly an enduring one for later generations. Did tragedy, the myth of others, became the new thing they did instead? And did the discontent at that change make it into the historical register? This is where our literary record commences, at the end of a long domestication that repurposed a prior practice, and that is a broken archive. Where the festival was concerned, the new mechanisms are largely without record, but what is clear is that two profound changes had occurred: somewhere the worship of Dionysus had been subsumed into the theater and the theater had been subsumed into the state.35 When Alexis, comic poet of the Middle Comedy, was remembering back to the early days of the sixth century, he invented a playful exchange between Aesop and Solon that records a similar domestication tellingly involving some state intervention: Aesop: This is something ingenious you have in Athens, Solon, and cleverly conceived. Solon: What specifically? A: You don’t drink unmixed wine at your parties. S: Yes, because it’s not easy to do so; they sell it in the wagons already mixed, not to make a profit, but looking out for the buyers, so they have healthy heads after they drink all night. This, you see is the Greek style of drinking: to use cups of modest size, and have a bit of banter and pleasant conversation with one another. The other style amounts to bathing, not drinking—that is drinking from buckets. A: Actually, it amounts to death!36 Was it like that? Did they somewhere learn to take in the god cut with a civic moderation, like watering wine, and somewhere, consistent with the Page 33 →market regulations that guaranteed that “wine” (and I speak here of the god) was now premixed at point of sale, was some state regulatory apparatus also imposed around the taking in of the god? Such, at least, seems an apt functioning metaphor for the festival itself. The theater of Dionysus became the antidote for chronic ecstasy. By the time the first plays are preserved, the 470s, the theater of mythos and pathos had already been packaged by a new civic exigency of citizen-making that was contained, gendered, urbanized, and mythologized; and the cutaway parts of the original cultic experience had already begun to skin over. The agrarian cult of abandon that the introduction of wine had so effusively promised (and that tondos portrayed) had been appropriated by the polis into a civic festival, which became an ordered simulacrum of the ecstasy and abandon practiced by the original cult outside of Athens. In the language of the cult, the god had been pulled apart, like the ritual sparagmos of his maenadic followers, and reassembled into a civic festival. He played out his own metanarrative of death and rebirth, torn asunder and reassembled, and, like all resurrections, a great deal of the original was lost in the return. Lucian could frankly ask again that old question, “What has your Dionysus to do with Dionysus?” and by asking chart the great distance between myth and practice that is Greek theater.37

In the Tondo of a Kylix As sometimes happens, small moments can speak more gracefully to larger, more cumbersome movements—in this case, that same suppression of ecstasy—and here is one, a moment often employed in arguments about

genres, but it’s the suppression I’m after. Toward the close of the evening recorded in Xenophon’s Symposium, the usual cast of characters are reeling their winey way toward a politer conclusion than one suspects from such hypervirilized settings. The cups had been passed about, the conversation fulsome, the drinking thorough, and the interruptions had begun: a seedy Syracusan pornoboskos had arrived (literally a “whore driver” or “whore pasturer”), pimping a small troupe of flute girls and a boy. More wine was poured, the aulos came out, the near-naked knife dancing began, and all looked as if it might end up like an image from the tondo of a kylix cup, with the flute girls in the laps of the guests, before the girls were “put up to the highest bidder, as is the custom,” as Athenaeus reminds us.38 So it appeared. And if one takes the ceramic record at face value, these drinking parties aspired to what J. R. Page 34 →Green has aptly called “the wished-for world, where everyone joins in the company of Dionysus.”39 They could traffic in the idea of a cultic past that was not yet past. As Eva Keuls has documented, sympotic wine ware—kylix and krater—lived in the intersection of myth and market, where the master myth of dissipation met a marketplace that promised a world of unbridled Eros and the open invitation to briefly join the suite of the sweet god of the grape. Some of the images preserved are downright pornographic in their embrace, with the guests, enthused, behaving like perfect satyrs (“If one looks at what they’re doing,” Green politely puts it, “it is the kind of thing satyrs do”).40 And thus they appeared to be the erotic promise of Xenophon’s Symposium evening, were it not destined for the literary record. But something quite unusual followed. After the titillating tumbling, the Syracusan showman collected his “puppets” and followed with a chamber performance of (what else?) the wedding night of Dionysus and his bride Ariadne. This performance utterly diffused the evening, breaking up the revels and driving the aroused audience (members) home to their wives, of all people. Here was the domestication and suppression played out in miniature: in the literary topoi of the evening, a controlled performance about Dionysus stood in for participation. The Syracusan came in and said: “Gentlemen, Ariadne will enter her and Dionysus’ bedroom, and after that Dionysus will arrive after having had a few drinks with the gods, and will go in to her, and then they will frolic with each other.” Thereupon in came Ariadne, appareled as a bride, and took her seat in the chair. Dionysus being still invisible, there was heard the bacchic music played on a flute. Then it was that the assemblage was filled with admiration of the dancing master. For as soon as Ariadne heard the strain, her action was such that every one might have perceived her joy at the sound; and although she did not go to meet Dionysus, nor even rise, yet it was clear that she kept her composure with difficulty. But when Dionysus caught sight of her, he came dancing toward her and in a most loving manner sat himself on her lap, and putting his arms about her gave her a kiss. Her demeanor was all modesty, and yet she returned his embrace with affection. As the banqueters beheld it, they kept clapping and crying “encore!” Then when Dionysus arose and gave his hand to Ariadne to rise also, there was presented the impersonation of lovers kissing and caressing each other. The onlookers viewed a Dionysus truly handsome, an Ariadne truly fair, Page 35 →not presenting a burlesque but offering genuine kisses with their lips; and they were all raised to a high pitch of enthusiasm as they looked on. For they overheard Dionysus asking her if she loved him, and heard her vowing that she did so earnestly that not only Dionysus but all the bystanders as well would have taken their oaths in confirmation that the youth and the maid surely felt a mutual affection. For theirs was the appearance not of actors who had been taught their poses but of persons now permitted to satisfy their long-cherished desires. At last, the banqueters, seeing them in each other’s embrace and obviously leaving for the bridal couch, those who were unwedded swore that they would take to themselves wives, and those who were already married mounted horse and rode off to their wives that they might enjoy them.В .В .В . So broke up the banquet held that evening.41 We are witnessing the same ingenious sleight-of-hand that the city had pulled off, the moment in which the performance of Dionysus had come to stand in for participation in the revels, in which mimesis domesticated desire, transformed the wellspring of abandon and chronic ecstasy that the wine cups and their imagery promised into the very engine of domestic docility. Through such modes of surrogation, the god and his suite were incorporated, the experience mixed, and the mixing marked.

The Persistence of Satyrs When the poets, having abandoned the writing of dithyrambs, turned to plays with titles like “Ajax” and “Centaurs,” the spectators would jeeringly say, “Nothing to do with Dionysus,” and for this reason they decided later to introduce satyr plays as a prelude in order that they might not seem to be forgetting the god. —Zenobius, Proverbs Still, in the contest between forgetting and resistance, there were always satyrs, and they were squarely on the side of resistance. If there was ever the risk of forgetting the god, satyrs were the memory sticks. Satyrs are sites of remarkably dense and persistent memory, the unruly intruders into tragedy’s ordered and grief-filled house.42 They seemed to have been kept around, this furry retinue of randy, goat-footed placeholders—Zenobius understood them as such—to commemorate some older excision. In this Page 36 →capacity, are we amiss to think of satyrs as a sort of amnesty between the theater and its origins? The contract to remember what they had forgotten? When Ptolemy Philadelphus, son of Ptolemy Soter, mounted a procession in Alexandria in the winter of 275/74 BCE, he chose for his theme the arrival of Dionysus, and in this most magnificent state display of Hellenizing excess, he assembled a hyperbolic collection of all “things relating to Dionysus.” Athenaeus (granted, no model of brevity) generously quoted a description of this bacchic baroque extravaganza, from the scores of sileni who cleared the roads, followed by forty satyrs with torches, 120 ephebes, forty more satyrs, the poet and priest of Dionysus, the artists of the guild of Dionysus, a four-wheeled cart twenty-one feet long, in which stood a statue of Dionysus fifteen feet tall, followed by a host of bacchantes, some with snakes in their hair, a mechanical Nysa, around which sixty more satyrs “sang a vintage song” while pouring from an enormous wine skin (30,000 gallons, stitched of leopard pelts), followed by yet another troop of 120 satyrs with wine cups, a second Dionysus, seated on an elephant (representing his triumph in India), an additional 120 satyrs in retinue, after which “five troops of asses on which [were] mounted Sileni and Satyrs wearing crowns.”43 So it went on, endlessly it must have seemed: satyrs, wine, satyrs, sileni, wine, satyrs, bacchants, and more satyrs, winding through the stadium and streets of Alexandria, as this imported god and his excessive entourage made their formal entrance into the court of Egypt. There is something excessive about satyrs in the Greek imagination. It makes me wonder if the excess of memory lavished on satyrs stands in for an excess of forgetting elsewhere. What is being remembered in the salacious and transmogrified body-site of the satyr? The ungainly, ubiquitous figures with their horse tails, their pug noses, pointed ears, receding hairlines, drooping beards, and perpetually priapic phalli are portrayed on ceramic ware from the late sixth century BCE to the late empire mosaic installments in Zippori (Israel) and Daphne (southern Turkey), and on decorative silver plates (the “Mildenhall Treasure”) in Roman Britain a millennium or more later.44 A rich iconographic tradition persists with remarkable stability from the wonderfully illuminating Pronomos vase (c. 410) to the mosaics and images that Clement of Alexandria fulminated against in circa 200 CE (“Look too, at other of your images, little figures of Pan, naked girls, drunken satyrs, and obscene emblems, plainly exhibited in pictures, and self-condemned by their indecency”).45 The satyr seems to come from somewhere far beyond textual history, carrying the burden of an originating memory for a solid millennium. Their meaning was on the other side of language. Satyrs are a ubiquitous antirational feature of the Page 37 →Greek imagination; they haunt the culture as the unruly other of the civilizing force. Their performative origins are undocumentably beyond our earliest records: satyr plays and their conventions were not only firmly established when the textual evidence begins, but were already an anachronistic holdover from someplace beyond memory.46 It is exactly their persistence that make satyrs “good to think with,” a phrase I wish I had written. They refuse to part with their archaic origins, but lug their genealogy about unabashedly erect, anachronistic, and enduring. And in the end, if we are trying to get back to the murk of things, we need to look at what is being remembered in the body-site of satyrs. Aristotle, whose hyperrational impulses made a Linnaean system of all phenomena (“of unrighteousness there are three kinds,” “of ill-temper there are three kinds”) and with nearly two centuries of plays and monumental civic lists of victors before him, could describe the origins of

tragedy only as something related to satyrs.47 Tragedy, long before Aeschylus, “passed out of its satyric stage” to “assume a tone of dignity,” that is, it cast off the satyrs but didn’t cast them very far. This is exactly what Nicole Loraux had in mind when she wrote, “This forgetting of origins we still call civilization.”48 Satyrs still seem to connote some wild something that used to be, the prepolis, the pretragic, the regressive forgetting of civilization that haunted Plato, the wild, appetitive alterity of all that Athens stood for, its uncontained and uncontainable, its unmixed and lurking subself. Satyrs are, in this regard, prepolitical creatures (prepolis, prepolite, prepolice). They are what was before, citizens of an archaic elsewhere, metaphorically speaking, like the Satyr Islands that Pausanias described but could not locate (“I was particularly keen to establish who satyrs are, and I talked to a great number of people about it”), but there they were, just off the mainland of civil life, out there, somewhere in the sea, where the natives are very noisy, and have tails on their behinds as long as horses. As soon as they noticed a ship, they ran down at it without saying a word and grabbed at the women. In the end the sailors were so frightened they threw out a barbarian woman onto the island, and she was raped by the satyrs not only in the usual place, but all over her body.49 There these archaic and extranaturals (beyond nature) refused to go gently into all that is implied by the stem “polis.” Unlike the Furies, whom Athena translated into civility, satyrs remained just out of reach but present, temporarily inhabitable fictions on stage, resisting both translation and domestication,Page 38 → standing in for all that had once been wild. So thought Alexander, who, according to Plutarch, dreamed one night of a satyr whom he watched at a distance, but when he approached, retreated before him. Alexander’s dream offers a wonderfully evocative image of the satyr just out of reach, but not yet out of sight, haunting the dreamscape with elusive savagery, refusing either to be caught or go away; or, if caught, remaining incomprehensible, as in Plutarch’s Life of Sulla: “[A] satyr, such as statuaries and painters represent, was caught asleep, and brought before Sulla, where he was asked by several interpreters who he was, and after much trouble, at last uttered nothing intelligible.”50 And so they remained, slightly unintelligible but enduring, and very attached to the theater, but for what reasons no one really precisely knew. In the game of such few pieces, satyrs are hugely useful and agile concepts in the classical imaginary. If, as Plutarch suggests, the earliest tragedians Aeschylus and Phrynichus ruptured the genre with an introduction of mythos and pathos (stories and suffering), the satyr play—appended to the tragic cycle from the close of the sixth century well into the fourth century—elides the rupture, glosses the incision, and wrenches the festival back to its unregulated origins in “things satyric.” Satyr plays, those unruly party crashers, temporarily unmixed the wine and point up the moments of elision. Can we think of them as the stelae that marked the place where disorder used to live? They stand in for an older absence, including their female counterparts, maenads, and shape that absence with their persistent presence. The only modulation in this remarkably stable image between the early nontheatrical images and those designed for the stage is in the feet, and that evolution marks its accommodation to the stage.51 The furry-legged and goatfooted figures gave way to the agile dancing feet of the costumed ephebes. And indeed, two famous vases, the Pronomos vase and the Tarporley bell krater, both document exactly that process of accessorizing the ephebe into the satyr: young men donning the horsetails, the identical bald-headed masks, the phalli.52 One remarkable Berlin amphora from the last quarter of the sixth century, depicting a procession of satyrs, captures this intraspecies transformation: goat-footed satyrs share the procession with human-footed mimetic satyrs, as if they are walking out of their own former body-site, stepping out of myth into their own representations.53 Otherwise, satyrs are strikingly similar from mask to mask, figure to figure, painter to painter, across genres and mediums, from century to century. The body-site of the satyr is one of the more stable, recognizable, and enduring images from antiquity, and I would suggest its very stability speaks Page 39 →to the urgency, the memorandum to mark lost origins. As Zenobius suggested, satyrs had to be there because Dionysus was not. Whatever else is being remembered, that ecstatic elsewhere that was the dominion of the god became bound up with the theater’s rendition and, as such, endured long after the originating memory of Dionysus had receded. Horace, at the time of Augustus, could still describe quite precisely how satyr plays functioned (The Art of Poetry

200–220). Two centuries later, the patristic writer Clement of Alexandria remembered satyrs as icons of disorder: “But as for the dramas and the Lenaean poets, who are altogether like drunken men, let us wreathe them, if you like, with ivy, while they are performing the mad revels of the Bacchic rite, and shut them up, satyrs and frenzied rout and all—yes, and the rest of the company of daemons too—in Helicon and Cithaeron now grown old; and let us bring down truth, with wisdom in all her brightness, from heaven above, to the holy mountain of God, and the holy company of prophets.”54 By late antiquity satyrs still stood in for the ecstatic practice, the “frenzy” and “mad revels of the Bacchic rite,” part of which had originally belonged to the maenads. They may have even subsumed their female counterparts, but the madness persisted, as did the form of both satyr and satyr play. Long after, well after one would have any expectation of finding performance evidence of Greek plays, the Council of Trullo that met in 691/92 CE offered a lengthy list of resolutions and prohibitions to the Christian community of the Near East, including this in Canon 62: “Nor shall he assume comic, satyric, or tragic masks; nor may men invoke the name of the execrable Bacchus when they squeeze out the wine in the presses.”55 Twelve hundred years after the formal appearance of satyrs on stage, they reveled late into the new Christian millennium, carrying long beyond their hooves their goat-footed memory of some wild and older disorder, this persistent flash mob of archaic ecstasy—what Hesiod had called “that worthless idle race of satyrs” danced on, evoking still what was always just beyond representation, beyond visibility, a mad and chronic desire made briefly corporeal, unwilling to cease, desist, unwilling to go away.56 It is quite likely that the satyr masks of late antiquity, like the hyperbolic display of satyrs in the Ptolemaic procession, or even the satyr plays of the fifth century BCE, may not have been entirely certain of what they represented, beyond, vaguely, “something to do with Dionysus,” but it is clear that they were important to remember, even if that memory was itself somewhat marred. In this regard, satyrs mark their own forgetting, and that mark was on stage for twelve hundred years. Less visible were their female coworshipers. Here the reform of the Page 40 →worship left them a myth stronger than its practice, and hence the myth dug in.

Mad Women / Free Women Although a great deal has been written on the lives of women in antiquity, representations of the subject ultimately resist access (the real real).57 It is impossible for most scholars (most of us in the academy anyway) to understand an utterly disenfranchised life, as the act of scholarship (and all the preparation for it) is itself an act of enormous enfranchisement. We are at liberty to imagine it because we are at liberty. We can suppose a kind of secondhand access (through a careful consumption of sources), we pity the condition, we can critique and excoriate the forces that manufactured and sustained it, and even attempt to evoke it with exposés of class- and gender-related attitudes of the culture; but we don’t live it—the weight of the daily persistent duress is not ours (not mine at least), one might add, fortunately. That kind of life found itself so thoroughly enveloped by legislation that even its weeping was regulated—the kind of life that earned the good Roman housewife at her death the epitaph lanam fecit (she made wool) that one finds inscribed on Roman epitaphs.58 Can we really reclaim the psychic incarceration of such a life that is praised at its close with something equivalent to “She did dishes”? This meant, just as nicely, that she stayed indoors and kept her mouth shut. “A stayer-at-home,” praises another epitaph; or “She kept the house and worked in wool.”59 When Aristotle quotes the saying “Silence is a woman’s glory,” he is in full accord with the legislative branch of his culture.60 When the orator Hyperides can offer the commonplace observation, “If a woman ventures outside her house, she should have reached an age that those who meet her will ask not whose wife she is, but whose mother.”61 This sentiment is confirmed by a fragment of a Menander play: “You’re overstepping the married woman’s boundaries, wife, I mean the courtyard door; for the courtyard door is considered the outer limit of the house for a free woman.”62

Without such a reclamation of such a circumscribed life (Xenophon can recommend for exercise that the good wife stand over the loom, supervise the housekeeper, oversee the bakerВ .В .В .), we cannot fully enter into the ecstasy of a release from such a life.63 The heart of the Dionysiac experience was exactly such a steep stepping out and over the threshold of civic (and psychic) control, stepping out and over the silence and the surveillance, Page 41 → and any exegesis of chronic ecstasy must account for those most contained: women and slaves. The men who witnessed it, who wrote about it, who staged it, painted it, performed it, who built the release into a civic structure—five days of plays—were themselves the most removed from the originating experience. The best of them imagined it, or imagined characters who imagined it, as Pentheus does in Euripides’s imagining, as a lascivious orgy of women, possessed in a bacchic frenzy that drove them from the ordered interior world out into the open and dangerous topography of the unrational. Maybe what they really meant was that the women celebrants of Dionysus were happy—utterly, if temporarily, unburdened, free, in the most basic sense of the word. They were free to move out of the house, out of the polis, to move in their bodies, to roam beyond the courtyard door, outside jurisdiction, outside marriage and familial lines, outside the law; to run, to dance, to hunt, to drink, to be drunk, to be ecstatic, and to be wrathful.64 That Pentheus can be seduced to battle the maenads marks exactly this distance between the originating Dionysiac and the civic celebration: maenads had become incomprehensible, asserting a gravitational pull over his imagination because their meaning was beyond his understanding. I’ve always found it telling that there was no formal incorporation of maenads into the civic festivals, no maenad plays (as a genre), no pompД“ or processional revels attached to the presentation of plays, no spectacular civic inclusion of any sort during that five-day festival, nor is there evidence of any attempts at representing that release in a dedicated civic genre.65 Their absence seems a fitting gesture of resistance to the new incorporation. Maenads, as subjects, found the occasional tragic representation as subjects, but no literary structure at all comparable to the satyr plays staged in the many civic festivals contains the purity of their release, their silence, their celebration, or their anger. Yet they were as much a part of the Dionysiac cult as satyrs were, and indeed, in most of the iconography—vases and mosaics—where satyrs are present, so are maenads, and where Dionysus is present, so are maenads. They are dancing, with thyrsi (staffs topped by pinecones or other flora), castanets, and tambourines, exuberant and expressive bodies; or ripping apart animals or fighting off satyrs. But mostly they are dancing, and that experience finds little representation in the new and formal reordering of the City Dionysia. As an inscription myth, maenadism belonged to an extracivic, extratextual elsewhere. Where we do have a few preserved literary accounts of the historic cult of maenadism, they seem to speak as much of the displacement as the living practice. The best account comes from Diodorus Siculus (first century Page 42 →BCE), who, true to form, records both its history and its prehistory (that is, its remembering and its forgetting): The Boeotians and other Greeks and the Thracians, in memory of [Dionysos’s] campaign in India, have established sacrifices every other year to Dionysos and believe that at that time the god reveals himself to humans. Consequently in many Greek cities every other year Bacchic bands of women gather, and it is lawful for the maidens to carry the thyrsus and to join in the frenzied revelry, crying out “Euai!” and honoring the god; while the matrons, forming in groups, offer sacrifices to the god and celebrate his mysteries and in general extol with hymns the presence of Dionysos, in this manner acting the part of the maenads who, as history records, were the old companions of the god.66 Diodorus recalls much of the prior, but accommodates the present of his narrative. The celebrants are now “lawful,” as they were not once, now allowed by their many cities the structure of a biannual release, in which the women followers now “act the part” of maenads and, in their acting, remember the wild rites.67 But Diodorus is careful to note that these women enact being maenads. They sing and sacrifice once a biennium, with permission of the state. What Diodorus records is nothing less than the domestication of the maenadic cult of the god, and as such it safely continued throughout the fourth century at least (Alexander’s mother indulged in such maenadic worship).68 That older practice of wild abandon was itself abandoned; it belonged to a prior elsewhere, the past perhaps, to myth perhaps, to the fantasies of the oppressed, or the fantasies of the oppressors

writing for the oppressed, but it remained an accessible fiction. Poets, novelists, and vase painters still vividly imagined it, and buyers consumed it, and hence it enjoyed a life in the market of the imagination. Heliodorus can describe his heroine’s distress as a study in maenadism, surrendering herself to a bacchic frenzy that had fully recognizable signs, torn garments, and wild hair, writhing in a wild dance to the god.69 Even historians called upon the myth. Appian, describing the assault on the senators of Carthage by the citizens when they returned from a failed parley with Rome, writes: “Then followed a scene of indescribable fury and madness, such as the Maenads are said to enact in Bacchic mysteries. Some fell upon those Senators who advised giving the hostages and tore them in pieces.”70 Plato evoked the idea of maenadism in his discussion of corybantism, as women so under the spell of the god as to be dispossessed of their wits, and “draw Page 43 →milk and honey from the rivers.”71 Perhaps the women who imitated it could still imagine wearing snakes, tearing apart animals and men, drawing up milk and honey. The enacted fantasies of the biannual festival remembered the older unordered and uncontained celebrations, even as their celebrations were ordered and contained. I like to think that the old practices, the real real, still occurred on occasion, when the women broke free of their civic bonds and ran mad and wild again, tore up fawns and drew honey from the earth. God, wine, and women, all unbounded in dance. E. R. Dodds suggested that two practices continued, the biannual, state-sponsored recognition of the bacchants, and the real evening revels in which the real liberation occurred, “when the MaenadsВ .В .В . really became for a few hours or days what their name implies—wild women whose human personality has been temporarily replaced by another.”72 This is not, of course, documentable by nature (that is, after all, the point of release), but the possibility of the latter finds some testimony in the literary record. Plutarch writes of one such event (c. 350): When the tyrants of Phokis seized control of Delphi and the Thebans were fighting them in the socalled Holy War, the women followers of Dionysus, known as Thyiades, while wandering about at night out of their sensesВ .В .В . happened to chance upon Amphissa. Exhausted and not yet in their right minds, they threw themselves down in the public square and fell asleep, lying about here and there. Now the married women of Amphissa feared that the Thyiades would be mistreated, since their city was an ally of Phokis and a great many of the tyrant’s troops were there. So they all rushed out into the square and silently surrounded the sleeping women without coming close to them. When the women awoke, they offered them help in turns and gave them some food. Finally with the consent of their husbands, they accompanied and safely escorted the women to the border.73 Albert Henrichs is frankly suspicious of the literary record, as one given to embellishments, and would rather account for maenadic practice such as Plutarch described in strictly rational terms—exhaustion and pharmacology—but in the end, it’s not the historic practice I’m tracing, but rather the force of the memory of the ecstatic practice behind it.74 The historic practice may have long diminished, but for Plato, Plutarch, Appian, vase painters, mosaic makers, historians, and tragedians, the idea of maenadism remained an inhabitable fiction, characterized still by its uncontainedPage 44 → chronic ecstasy—god, wine, and women, all unbound in dance. If the civic experience of Dionysus, once feral and unmixed, was later circumscribed by laws, protocols, and practices that tamed the unruly, there remained, circulating in the Greek imaginary, the social memory markers and reminders of something of an authentic expression of ecstasy elsewhere: in the tondo of the kylix or on the floor of the triclinium. Mosaics from Antioch, Daphne, and Pompeii, with their images of maenads with thyrsus and tambourine, dance their wild ways centuries after the historical cult, an enduring myth of liberation and ecstasy still circulating in the cultural imagination.

The Desire behind Manumission Perhaps Lucian in his Dionysus had this in mind, considering the rehearsed and calculated acts of learning new music, new dance steps, costuming characters, memorizing lines and the careful preparation and delivery of competitive performances of tragic myths before spectators assembled at the theater, seated by deme, the judging of the judges, or the bribing of the judges, or the boulД“ who kept order, the priests who recalled something of the roots, the state declarations that preceded the performances, and the awarding of prizes afterward. Perhaps Lucian had in mind that the Greek theater had become the rational simulacrum of a former, more unbounded state, an

ecstasy that was now but quietly reproduced; that performance’s body had become the least Dionysiac experience of the festival, when in his Dionysus (5), Lucian asked, not for the last time, “What has your Dionysus to do with Dionysus?” In his account, Dionysus had parted ways with his former self, and the theater had a great deal to do with that severing, marking as it did, like Demosthenes’s stela, a point where some older, nearly erased practice once stood. Still, it is a lucky palimpsest that resists its own erasure, whose subscript remains faintly present, ghosting through the overwrites. Structures of remembering the originating madness of the god were both an ideological and market concern of the festival of City Dionysia: priests, sacrificing, the entrance of the image of the god into the theater, the procession of the phallic dancers, satyrs, and satyr plays—all exude their prior purpose, like the stela in the marsh, whose old Attic script was faint but legible. In spite of all his troubling disappearances, in many mediums the god leached out from under the civic superscript. Though he had been mixed, two to one, three to one, buried at the bottom of a wine cup, a wrinkled old lid lifted, looked up through the dregs and lees and kattobos gunk and winked. Page 45 → One final moment that may speak to this resistance, to that same desire that Zenobius expressed when he recorded how the spectators objected that the festival had strayed too far from remembering the god. (The critical phrase here is “remembering the god”—not practicing the rites, but remembering them.) Somewhere, some part of that desire to release and restore the god remained. That small grumble of rebellion at his disappearance seemed also to be part of the negotiations of the theater: keeping the god present but not too present, evoked but domesticated, domesticated but feral, in memory but not in practice. It is another small moment, but small moments—fragments and scraps are all we really have—expand when once the bound god briefly reappeared to the Athenians, on stage and materially, and was, for his appearance, liberated. Plutarch relates, in his Life of Nicias, how once in the theater “a slave of his appeared in the character of Bacchus, of a beautiful person and noble stature, and with as yet no beard upon his chin; and on the Athenians being pleased with the sight, and applauding a long time, Nicias stood up, and said he could not in piety keep as a slave one whose person had been consecrated to represent a god. And forthwith he set the young man free.”75 Can we see in the manumission, hear in their applause, a certain longing to welcome the god back to the festival? A desire to rematerialize the absented, the banished, but in a new and domesticated state, not the unmixed and wrathful figure of tragedy—madness and excess—but the new citizen, incorporated into all that is derived from polis? I see in the gesture the desire to reclaim the wild into an inhabitable fiction of a festival that had displaced him. And when Nicias set his godly slave free, did the young man politely take his seat in that ordered arena and watch rehearsed actors and musicians perform a competition of plays in his honor, before judges and a polite assembly of spectators? Did he become his own polite policed politic representation? Or did he bolt from the theater, down the road of his exile, and revel in his new freedom?

Page 46 →

Two. The Fining of Phrynichus Shaping Memory and Genre in Athens Sweet to one grieving is a host of mourners, sweet that whole peoples are loud with laments; gentler the sting of grief and tears echoed by a crowd that is likewise weeping. —Seneca, Trojan Women Mē mnēnisikakein—“[I swear] not to recall the misfortunes.” —Oath of Amnesty, 403 BCE

A Small and Jagged Ruin Twenty years older than our oldest preserved text of Greek tragedy, a small and jagged ruin remains visible, all that is left of a genre of tragedy at its earliest known moment; a broken shard whose one exposed edge reveals a very different kind of theater, quite unlike the canon of work that survived; one that was perhaps an experiment, a departure from the nascent mythic tradition suggested by earlier titles. Or it could be the emergence of a new ontology altogether, but one that was emphatically suppressed and replaced by something far less potent but more endurable.1 What makes this fragment so engaging is, first, its edge: it hurt; and, second, it still contains the account of its own demise. The play that was remembered was remembered because it was prohibited, and it was prohibited because it cut too deeply; it was burdened with an excess of memory that shamed and ultimately broke its auditors, and for that reason it was itself broken. The fragment is troubled with an ontological problem that never wholly went away: before theater became what it was, that is, classical tragedy, what was it once capable of doing?2 This is not a question of genre, certainly not a question of origins, but rather a probing of the limit of theater’s function, its capacity to wound, by looking again at what was perhaps beyond that limit. And most revealing, why could it not do what it once could and Page 47 →would no longer? The subjects that came to be the body of classical theater—the mythic and “timeless” that became the arid landscape of tragedy—replaced things prior. One sharp piece of one thing still remains where theater met the limits of representation and broke down. Quite early in the inception of Western theater, before Aeschylus, the Greek tragedian Phrynichus deployed the theater as a staging ground for real atrocity, for remembering deeply, perhaps shamefully, certainly excessively, and that form of theater succeeded so well it paralyzed the audience with remorse. So potent was the grief, the city prohibited the play from any further productions and fined the poet so severely it all but guaranteed that such potency would never be unleashed in the theater again.3 Twenty years before our oldest surviving play, in the spring of 492 BCE, on the occasion of a single production, the very function of what theater could do was legislated, and the enormous weight of the tradition that followed would be permanently shaped (scarred, diminished) by that event.4 Raw mourning may become Electra, but it would not become Athenians, nor, as it turned out, would mourning become tragedy itself. The potency and immediacy of the theater act proved oversuited for singing such sorrow, and the power of that day’s denotation led directly to its own vanishing. Grief’s vanishing and the substitution of tragic pathos are the subjects that follow.

Day of Tears In the spring of 492 BCE, Phrynichus wrote and produced a play called The Fall of Miletus, whose effect was so

disturbing that the play was prohibited and the poet was fined the astronomical sum of one thousand drachmas.5 The play has not been preserved, but the occasion of its suppression helped establish the function of classical theater in two important regards: it legislated out the memorial in favor of the mythic (mythos) and parsed out grief in favor of tragic sympathy (pathos). The subject of the play was the recent and very real destruction of the Ionian city of Miletus at the hands of the Persian army. Athens was deeply ashamed of its own betrayal of the Milesians, and at least one Athenian choragus used the play to remind them of their failure to act and their culpability in the slaughter of the Greeks that followed.6 Miletus had belonged to a union of Greek cities in Ionia that had fallen under Persian rule and were attempting their liberation. Aristagoras of Miletus had traveled to Sparta and then Athens to seek support for their uprising. Darius I, the Persian king, had already crossed the Hellespont once, Page 48 →advancing as far west as Macedonia, and the more prescient of Athenians could see that the incursions of Persia into Hellas would inevitably require a deterrent to maintain Greek independence. Somewhere a line in the sea would be drawn. Initially Aristagoras secured from Athens the promise of a naval component to aid the Ionian revolt, and on the strength of that promise in 494 the Milesians rose up. But when the conflict erupted into open war, Athens reconsidered and withdrew the fleet for fear of Persian retaliation. The Athenian statesman Themistocles urged the Assembly to honor its pledge and come to the promised aid of Ionia. Athens declined, and without the Athenian navy, the revolt collapsed, and the retaliation was brutal. The Persian army was so thorough in its destruction that the city, wrote Herodotus, “was left empty of Milesians.” The violence was profound; the Persians mutilated survivors, castrated the young men, abducted the women, desecrated temples, destroyed the harbor, and, in a final act of obliteration, burned the city to the ground. Herodotus (History 6.32.1) described the slaughter: Then the Persian generals were not false to the threats they had made against the Ionians.В .В .В . When they had gained mastery over the cities, they chose out the most handsome boys and castrated them, making them eunuchs instead of men, and they carried the fairest young women away to the King: they did all this, and they burnt the cities with their temples.7 The Persians wintered at Miletus and launched campaigns the following spring against other Ionian cities on the coast, then the islands Lesbos, Chios, and Tenedos, sweeping them with human dragnets, a chain of men slowly unfolding across the entire terrain, collecting all Greek residents and reducing them to slavery. It was Persia’s inroad into Greece, and, in hindsight, it was too critical a campaign to have stood down. And so, in the spring of 492, the same Themistocles who had advised Athens to assist the Milesians, now archon for the year, sponsored Phrynichus’s play on the topical subject of the fall of Miletus.8 As archon who assigned choregoi for the City Dionysia, and as a choragus himself who chose the plays, Themistocles may have chosen a production designed to remind the city of his own position on the Persian threat, but the play represented the grief so immediately, so potently, that it shamed the city with an excess of raw memory beyond which the form could safely contain. Herodotus recorded both the meltdown and the moment of erasure: Page 49 → The Athenians made clear their deep grief for the taking of Miletus in many ways, but especially in this: when Phrynichus wrote a play entitled “The Fall of Miletus” and produced it, the whole theatre fell to weeping; they fined Phrynichus a thousand drachmas for bringing to mind a calamity that affected them so personally, and forbade the performance of that play forever.9 Whatever else Greek theater would become, or more likely return to what it had been, it would turn back from what had just happened: it had brought to mind too much, and the shame and “their deep grief” was too intense. There would be a limit to representation. Even granted Herington’s sensible pronouncement (“There is not now, and probably never will be, ample and solid enough evidence about the course of tragedy before 472”), twenty years earlier theater’s function had been legislated away from such lamentation (they “forbade the performance”).10 The theater that had strayed would also turn away from the present, from the memorial, and return to the mythic; it would develop and prize itself on the fine art of tragic pathos, that is, the ability to feel for others, but not for oneself.11 Tragedy would become classical, mythic, the genre of others. It

would occur in the past, in the past tense, and in the third person; it would look back, like epic, and consequently it would look away. It would look “to them,” those tragic figures, those pitiable tragic others, Thyestes, Prometheus, Electra, but not to Greek colonists like the Milesians, those close to the “us” of Athens.12 Myth would hereafter stand in for memory. It would recall the heroes of the Trojan War, the fall of Atreus, the fall of Thebes, even the fall of Xerxes (The Persians), but not the fall of Athens. It would retire the first-person plural, the “we Athenians” of theater. It would even confuse the mythic with the historic (in referring to the mythic houses, Aristotle can claim that “tragedy still adheres to the historic names”), but it would not directly confront the contemporary atrocities of failed Athenian policy.13 The “deep grief” that crumbled up the audience in 492 would be cooked down and redistributed on Antigone, on Orestes, on the Trojan women, even the Persian women, but not the slaughtered Greeks, the castrated boys, and sold-off women of Miletus whom the Athenians failed, or even the Athenians themselves when Persians entered Athens and their own city was burned. That tragedy, The Fall of Athens, was never written, after 492 could not be written. In an indirect way, Isocrates, a century or more later, could still bemoan in the Assembly the monopoly of the mythic in the public arenas of memory: “As it is, who would not become discouraged when he sees that Page 50 →those who lived at the time of the Trojan War and earlier are celebrated in song and on the tragic stage, but realizes that he will never be thought to deserve such praises, not even if he should surpass their virtues?”14 It is not that tragedy would belong only to the dead—Evagoras, whom Isocrates was praising, was dead—but tragedy would belong to the mythic dead, not the real dead, not the historic dead. And the grieving of such (“the spectacle of tragedy’s tears”) would be mythic lamentation—the great “sing sorrow sorrow” of tragedy would not be the same as the deep personal, communal grief Herodotus described for the real Milesian dead, or the indictment and shame of Athenian betrayal.15 It would hereafter be that elegant vessel that stood in for what it could no longer share. If we think of the tragic genre (speaking in terms of what Csapo and Miller called “genre’s temporal orientation”) not as mythic or historical, but rather first person or third person, then first-person tragedy as Phrynichus conceived it, tragedy about the “us” of its audience, had disappeared almost at its conception.16 He, and then Aeschylus, would attempt a modified “mythic history” (a mythic “us”) with two treatments of the defeat of the Persians (The Phoenician Women and The Persians), but even such treatments, and everything on record that followed for the next several centuries, would hereafter be about a more distant “them.” That shift occurred with a single known use, maybe even a singular and wildly experimental use, but it had succeeded so well with its suppression that the theater’s function was realigned for the millennium that followed. What remained (and remains still) marks a reorientation that is at once both a looking back at the mythic canon (what will become the “classical repertory”) and a looking away, a glancing off of what theater was now constitutionally, systemically, incapable of remembering. For that Marathon generation in particular, Aeschylus’s generation, the survivors of the long war and the fall of Athens, who lived through so much sorrow, looking at Prometheus, at Agamemnon, was also a looking away from their own charred ruins. For those who had once experienced the deep grief that incapacitated the city, the more domesticated sorrows of Atreus (the mixing of myth with grief) diluted the power of theater and left it with less ability to wound the heart. Those smaller, endurable sorrows of mythic others, the pathos of tragedy, those would not be prohibited and indeed would become hallmarks of good citizens who could feel for others. But they would also come to stand in as a substitute for the deep grief, for their own unendurable sorrow the theater did once and would no longer produce. It is a distinction that Aristotle canvassed thoroughly, that of terror and pity. In his Rhetoric, the first port of call for classical understanding of pity, Aristotle maps out an ideal Page 51 →emotional distance between spectator and the pitiable—close, but not overly close: For this reason Amasis did not weep, they say, at the sight of his son being led to death, but did weep when he saw his friend begging: the latter sight was pitiful, the former terrible, and the terrible is different from the pitiful; it tends to cast out pity, and often helps to produce the opposite of pity.17 For Aristotle, the sweet spot of ideal pity (aptly rendered by David Konstan as “pity begins where love leaves off,” or Norman Sandridge, “vulnerable, but not too vulnerable”), as we know from the Poetics, is a teleological argument: the best tragedies generate pity in their auditors, and pity is defined as that distance best

achieved by the best tragedies.18 And hence the “pity and fear” that arise in discussions from the Poetics, Politics, and Rhetoric are marked out as preferable to terror, a grief too deep, too close to the bone.19 Terror of too much grief would be retired, where the theater was concerned, and the new (or restored) benchmark of excellence would reside in its ability to inspire pathos.20 If, thereafter, tragic poets chose pity over pain, adopted or returned to “muthos” as a more fitting vehicle than their own war experience, and recycled the same myths because they had to, it was because they could only speak to the real indirectly. And, because they became quite good at what they did, they became quite potent in spite of the apparatus and distance, but it was always a secondhand potency, an endurable and refined pathos. They even cultivated a local application by “veiled references and suggestion, by adducing a well-chosen mythical parallel to a contemporary problem,” as Victor Castellani wrote, and good studies have traced out some of these applications.21 But the real power of civic lamentation had been unleashed in the theater only once, and was so thoroughly recontained that the experience was never repeated. Tragedians trafficked instead in a new history; they found their moments to map the myths topically, but theater’s efficacy, its potency, was diminished and remembered as such. Plutarch, when comparing tragedies to the noble works of the Athenian generals (many of whom were also choregoi), found the “compositions of the poetsВ .В .В . to be but a childish pastime”22—a bit harsh, perhaps, but given what it once did, the new orientation of mythos and pathos must have seemed quite beautiful, poignant, but less engaged than the experiment of Phrynichus. This replacement of history with myth certainly caught on. When Pausanias toured Athens, he made the telling complaint in his Description of Page 52 →Greece (1.3.3) that in his day the citizens there knew no history “and so they tell and believe untruths, including whatever they picked up as children from tragedies.” It is an astute observation, that from Aeschylus to Pausanias’s time, theater would stand in as Athenian antihistory. Tragedy had become what Bruce Smith would call under other contexts “an inhabitable fiction, ” a place of both Athens’s amnesia (what it wouldn’t remember) and its amnesty (that is, its contract to forget).23 The plays may have enjoyed their poignant moments when classical myth and local politics intersected powerfully—Medea and the subtraction of rights of foreigners, for example, or Oedipus and ostracism, Oedipus and the plague of 430—but these were only moments, temporary allegories that spoke indirectly—spoke through, but distanced still from the real real by a mythic apparatus that lived always in the past, mythic, othered tense.24 It was this distance that Plutarch described as tragedy’s “deception”: “A myth aims at being a false tale resembling a true one; wherefore it is far removed from actual events.”25 The subsequent success of tragedy (I should say, its enormous success) lay exactly in discovering and inhabiting the perfect distance from pain. The mythos (the story) of the tragedy would remain a fixture of that other Athens, the classical Athens of Theseus, the Trojan warriors, the fury-haunted Orestes, in which the real real could never enter again except as smuggled topicality, and would remain so for the next millennium. Classical theater thus begins with a forgetting, and a uniquely Greek brand of forgetting: a forgetting that flags itself to be remembered. If I seem to linger on this failure, the reason is that I can think of no other play in the long history of Western theater that may have shaped the function of theater quite so decisively as The Fall of Miletus. It was an astonishing moment to have been preserved, not the play but the extraordinary effect of Phrynichus’s play, marking a reception that was so profound it ghosted through its own banishment to alter the very form thereafter. From 492 on, the myths the theater would enact—legends of ancient houses—would carry an enormous gravity of tradition: the stories would be told and retold across the Mediterranean for a thousand years, but they would no longer speak of the exigencies of the Athenian present. Clement of Alexandria, writing circa 200 CE, would marvel at the persistence of what to him was an absurd tradition of legends still in circulation.26 Augustine, bishop of Hippo, as a young man in the third quarter of the fourth century CE, competed in the same traditional roles that Euripides had created 800 years earlier, including Medea. John Chrysostom could recite for his congregation in Antioch the story of the Oresteia, at the close of the fourth century CE, with full expectation he was speaking to an informed audience, Page 53 →while Synesius of Cyrene (early fifth century CE) could complain that those same citizens didn’t know their own emperor but “suppose that Agamemnon, the son of Atreus is still king” because “from childhood we have heard the king spoken of by this name and no other.”27 As late a writer as Choricius of Gaza, in the sixth century, could describe performances of Achilles, Hippolytus, and Phaedra, while mosaics from mid-sixth-century Constantinople and Antioch retold the same tales

visually.28 The gravity of the myths—and all that they enacted and erased—would endure far beyond their originating culture, but the historic events, policies, and exigencies that defined, shaped, shamed, and celebrated that culture would not see the stage again. Where this thousand-year legacy of theater was concerned, myth became Athenian identity and Athenian history and, in this process, served to classicize Athens into a landscape of elsewhere, where deep grief belonged to others.

Dangerous Memories (The Hole in the Street) Matthew Wright’s sensible conclusion on this play is good to recall here: “It seems unlikely that we will ever get to the bottom of the matter.”29 StillВ .В .В . a few things remain measurable. Good to the Athenians’ word, The Fall of Miletus was not produced again, and that absence is telling. It was subsequently erased from the public record so thoroughly that when later scholiasts and commentators from Glaucus of Rhegium to Athenaeus to the Suda to Photius, who compiled lists of the known plays of the Greek dramatic poets, including Phrynichus, the Fall of Miletus was not even among the lost titles. The cause of its absence, however, was certainly known, certainly remembered with some force. Its prohibition was the stuff of literary tradition, and why it was recalled is worth probing. Herodotus recorded it originally, but the disappearing of the play was still available to Callisthenes a century later, and later still Strabo and Plutarch could also both relate the events of its suppression as familiar history.30 As late a figure as Ammianus Marcellinus, living in Antioch in the late fourth century CE, could recount again the banning of the play (Res Gestae 28.1.4). Indeed, the play endured far longer in its disappearance than in its performance, until it begins to look like the work itself suffered, in effect, what has come to be termed a damnatio memoriae, a sanction on memory, discussed below.31 And like other victims of damnatio (discussed below), its erasure was never wholly complete but rather marked to be forgotten, and the marking remained in the public memory when the play itself did not. Page 54 → This erasure has been noted many times above, but I should like to pause here, between purged memory and oblivion (that is, between amnesty and amnesia) to consider the suppression as a critical inceptive moment of a uniquely Greek formation of tragedy that has come to stand in for what it could no longer do, a mythic structure built upon tragic pathos that, from 492 onward, has come to stand in for lamentation, to stand in for exactly the kind of grief-memory it was capable of emitting, the kind Phrynichus excelled at, the kind that was suppressed. I want to call this substitution of pathos for grief after the Greek term amnestia (amnesty), the willful contract to remember to forget. I want to consider this play as an event of such magnitude that it was met, like other events of this scale, with an act of amnesty, a collective, active agreement to forget that it had occurred; the subsequent reformation of tragedy as a vehicle of mythic pathos marks the contract of that forgetting of deep grief. I want to suggest that this event so radically shaped the ontology of Greek theater that it could never again grieve so deeply, so personally, so publicly, and the tragic pathos that subsequently defined the genre became the surrogate of what could no longer happen. Amnesty first. Like Antiphon’s razed house that both memorialized and erased his civic presence, the gap in the street where the house of the condemned once stood remained not so much a hole devoid of meaning, as a monument of political erasure.32 As Nicole Loraux has written so beautifully of this process: “Nothing is more official than an erasing.”33 Such gestures of state erasure, damnatio memoriae, and the markers to remember them (the memoranda) are the critical features. The distinction is one between amnesia (forgetfulness) and amnesty, the contract to remember to forget, as discussed above. This contract is flagged with a marker, the stela on the street, an anniversary, a ruin, that functions to remind the viewer/citizen to forget. Athens had a long history of such sanctions and memoranda that went back to the mythic dispute between Athena and Poseidon, who agreed to set aside their quarrel over divine ownership of Athens. An altar to Lethe (forgetfulness) was dedicated to their amnesty, and lest the amnesty drift into amnesia, one day of the month Boedromion was subtracted each year as an anniversary to remember that the gods had forgotten their quarrel.34 Such was amnesty: a memorandum to forget. It was an active verb reserved for the specific purpose of an oath, mД“ mnД“sikakein, to swear “not to remember the evils.” Such an oath was administered by the Athenians after the overthrow of the Tyranny of the Thirty in 403. In the interest of preventing civil war, a general reconciliation was offered in which the citizens

of Athens, one by one, took the oath and swore “not to remember the evils” of Page 55 →that time. More precisely, it meant not to misuse memory as a political or retaliatory weapon.35 It is best described in Aristotle’s Athenian Constitution as “blotting out the events of the past.” And like most memory sanctions, it was not always upheld. Because memory, like a Shakespearean murder, “will out,” even the oath of amnesty was sometimes broken, and in its breaking threatened a general rupture of re-minding (recalling to mind). Memories of past grievances threatened to erupt out into the city, making visible again the buried contract of rage and erasure. After the amnesty of 403, one unnamed citizen—Aristotle says only “somebody”—“began to stir up grudges against the returned citizens,” and that somebody found himself arraigned before the Assembly, whose members called for his immediate death “if they wish to save the democracy and keep their oaths.”36 So great was the threat of remembering that the oath-breaker was put to death without a trial for refusing to forget. These were dangerous memories, neither to be shared or lost, and as such required a contractual suppression at all costs. The execution of the oath-breaker also reminds us that such memories were buried in shallow graves, well-marked graves, and very accessible; occasionally the memories perforated their containment, broke out, resurfaced. The orators of the fourth century frequently referred to the “forgotten” event in the Assembly, still recalling it years later, because the oath not to abuse memory was not the same as to forget utterly. Aeschines in the 340s can still remind jurors how the city was once saved by those noble words mД“ mnД“sikakein, or again, asking his jurors to overlook the youthful record of the defendant, “Let it be void, like events under the Thirty.”37 But the amnesty does not erase the misfortune; it only intercedes in its public memory with a contract that could only be upheld by an active engagement of remembering to forget. The most visible memoranda were those that marked their own forgetting, the stela in the street, or the anniversary of the oath that marks the unmarking and monumentalized the event like the altar to Lethe (Oblivion) in the Erechtheion, a site that embodied the notion of amnesty as purposeful forgetting.38 By recalling the forgotten, marking the site, the place or anniversary of the forgetting, altars to Lethe, amnesty was never allowed to slide into amnesia. So memorial was the idea of purposeful forgetting—centuries later Plutarch would recall the amnesty of 403 in the same breath with another injunction against memory: the fining of Phrynichus on the occasion of his play The Fall of Miletus. These were, to his mind, the two best examples of amnesty: Page 56 → Indeed there are many acts of the Greeks of former times by recounting which the statesman can mould and correct the characters of our contemporaries, for example, at Athens by calling to mind, not deeds in war, but such things as the decree of amnesty after the downfall of the Thirty Tyrants, the fining of Phrynichus for presenting in a tragedy the capture of Miletus.39 It is an inviting association for its endurance alone. If one traced the genealogy of the amnesty of 403, whatever else Athenians (and subsequent generations like Plutarch) remembered to forget, one would surely be led back, as Plutarch was, to the fining of Phrynichus as a similar crisis of an excess of memory. I know of no other way of concluding but that the production, its fine, and its prohibition guaranteed that tragedy, as a form, would not misuse memory. Like Aristotle’s “oath-breaker” who was put to death, the theater had remembered. This was what Nicole Loraux had in mind when she suggested that “the tragic genre may perhaps be ascribed to this mandatory departure from current events,” with some emphasis on “mandatory.”40 Grief would give over to pity, history to myth, and plays about the “us” of its audience would become about “them, ” the poor tragic residents of elsewhere. Such a genealogy has disturbing implications for the theater. But if we view tragedy through the formation of amnesty as Plutarch did, then the very body of classical tragedy (the form that followed) carried with it a certain contract of forgetting—the mД“ mnД“sikakein that had its origins in amnesty and the earlier abuse of memory,

and each year’s productions were a certain kind of renewal of that contract, an anniversary, if you will, that refreshed the memorandum to forget what theater once could do and would not. Mythic tragedy—the mythos and pathos that baffled so many later writers, the wailings of others, the sorrow-filled classic canon of tragic myths—became the thing the theater did instead because it had, in the end, the right sort of pain: another’s.

The Missing Years It is unlikely, very unlikely, that there was ever a vibrant tradition of staging Athenian history. But the fining and prohibition of The Fall of Miletus guaranteed there would not be. Whatever modulation occurred in the form on that day of tears, the trail has long gone cold. Still, in the game of few pieces, the account of the production of The Fall of Miletus remains our best Page 57 →and last prewar record of theatrical performance in Athens that has survived.41 When tragedy reappeared in the written record nearly two decades later, Athens had passed through fire and water. We have no theatrical account of that gap, nothing on which to map from the stage the turbulence except the displaced genre itself. The first preserved play (our oldest) was the last attempt at history, even then slouching heavily toward the mythic.42 Where the ontology of theater was concerned, something seismic had opened up and closed again, and we hear only the last echo of that slam, in the only surviving example of the now lost genre: Aeschylus’s Persians. We have no other theatrical documentary impulse that corresponds to staging the defining event of the century, the Persian War, nothing else that seeks to represent the long and contentious buildup to the war, nothing of the monumental nature of that Athenian victory at Marathon (490), the defeat at Thermopylae (480), and the retreat of the Athenian fleet under Themistocles; nothing of the Persian march through Greece toward Athens, nothing of the poignant decision to evacuate Athens and take to the ships, where shipboard they watched the burning and the destruction of their city by Xerxes in 480.43 We hear nothing further from the stage of the long war before the final naval victory at Salamis, though some of the major Athenian players at each stage of the conflict, like Themistocles, were the same names who appeared as choregoi for productions at City Dionysia. How, if, or in what ways the theater participated in these events in the critical years after The Fall of Miletus we are at a loss to know.44 When we return to the tragic record in the late 470s, two plays (Phrynichus’s Phoenician Women and Aeschylus’s Persians) take for their theme the final stanza of the war, the Athenian victory of Salamis, and only one of the plays remains. The theater’s role in the critical gap that saw, among other things, the struggles, triumph, and eventual fall of Themistocles is all but mute. The magnitude of this hole is all the more vexing when one considers the trauma of the war years, and the toll it took on Athens and its leadership. The city was abandoned, invaded, burned, and scarred, its temples pillaged, and its democracy stressed. The 480s, for example, were a heyday for ostracism, the device by which the populace voted into banishment unpopular demagogues, who had, through the military crisis, gathered excessive power.45 The law was passed in the late sixth century but not evoked until the 480s, when it was exercised vigorously throughout the war years for party purges. Ostracism campaigns are waged against Hipparchos, Megakles, Kallias, Xanthippus, Themistocles, Miltiades, all major players of the war years, all during these “missing years” of the theatrical record; and the accounts of how each of these threatened demagogues, as choregoi, like Themistocles, may Page 58 →have used the theater to play the city are a history utterly without a record during this gap. All available evidence points toward Themistocles as sponsor of The Fall of Miletus, and he was certainly the victorious choragus for Phoenician Women in 475. It is Themistocles’s naval victory that Aeschylus glosses in his Persians, sponsored by another rising demagogue, Pericles.46 Certainly Themistocles, for one, was deeply involved with the state’s theater, during his rise and his fall, and I think one can fairly assume that his rivals, Cimon and Aristides, whose rise was contingent on his fall, also played the city through its theater.47 When the Persians invaded Phocis, for example, burning and destroying their cities en route to Athens, and the Athenians sent no relief, Themistocles resorted to employing oracles to coerce the city into action, as he had with the theater during the Miletus crisis. Oracles, diplomacy, the Assembly, temples, and the theater were all pressed into emergency service in the bid for power and preservation of the city in the war years. But how the theater was deployed in that decade of crisis, what was staged and what was stageable, how it negotiated recent history, how it learned to deploy myth to the exigencies at hand (the way, for example, Themistocles commandeered oracles), how and if the theater still played at policy, what the contest and who the victors in this great game of state were—all utterly lack a record. It is not likely that the fining of Phrynichus quarantined theater away from the engagement of state, but it did reshape the theater’s strategies of engagement. Plutarch

can state axiomatically that it was Phrynichus and Aeschylus who introduced “mythos and pathos,” but when myth-as-myth replaced myth-as-history and when myth developed the capacity for allegory, if it did, or when allegory came to stand in for history, if it did, or when the codes of reading myth-as-history developed, are all equally without a record. Curiously, that same decade (480s) also saw the introduction of comedy, and the questions why that arrival occurred at that time and how it originally functioned during this tumultuous period remain equally unanswered.48 Did the timely promotion of comedy to a civic festival stand in for and address the need of a topicality that tragedy no longer provided? If the decade cannot be recovered, the cavity nonetheless seems a critical ruin that we might explore for a while. It is, after all, nature that abhoreth vacuums, not scholars. Scholarship adores them. The desire to fill the gap in the corpus, the lacunae in the text (the impulse to restore the broken elbow of the LaocoГ¶n, or Shakespeare’s missing years) is seductive indeed. Tempting as it is, what follows is not an effort to backfill the absence of the 480s, but rather to take the measure of the cavity of great changes that occurred there.49 There at the jagged fragmentPage 59 → that is the broken but legible beginning of theater’s memory at its furthest outpost is both an excess and suppression of memory, and that instance is mightily compelling.50 Something of great consequence had damaged the theater’s very relationship to memory, and when the theater next emerged with the written record of Aeschylus, the realignment (scar) was nearly complete and its very function had changed. What makes this realignment, this disappearance of the prior genre, so appealing, so inviting, is that it was caught in the act of its own vanishing. The Fall of Miletus and the amnesty of that production—that is, what theater once could do with grief and would no longer—that power that remained conceptually visible through at least Plutarch’s day, that stela which marked theater’s hubris, where it went “beyond,” betrayed something, had overremembered. That would remain the last mark of an erasure that retooled the form, still ghosting through our oldest surviving text, Aeschylus’s Persians, a play that documents the final stage of the surrogation of grief. Indeed, the great force of Persians may lie in exactly its curious ability to undo the great grief of that earlier (first-person) experience by staging an excess of (third-person) lamentation. Somewhere in the missing years after 492, grief was relocated.

The Wailing of Persians I beat the dirge like a Persian mourner. —Aeschylus, Libation Bearers 413 Do not cry extravagantly. —Chorus, Sophocles, Electra With so little to work with, it may be but a partner of chance, but when the theatrical record resumes, some twenty years later and after the war, tragedy has become the wailing of others, and that sound is very different than the Greek grief Herodotus described, particularly when the wailing ones are the defeated Persians. What makes this acoustic modulation so abrupt is that, though scores of tragedies were likely composed during those missing years, the first “others” that have survived to be heard on stage were the Persians, at their moment of defeat, and with them lamentation has suffered a sea change. Our oldest preserved text (Aeschylus’s Persians) is a threnody (a wailing play) based on an earlier, lost threnody (Phrynichus’s The Phoenician Women), the final two installments on the failed tragic genre of history that both take Persian misery for their score. Page 60 →There is something so excessive about all the blubbering woe-wailing and robe-rending of Aeschylus’s Persians, one begins to think that the excess itself is the subject of some great undoing (is one memory driving out another?), that the play may rehearse the collapse of Xerxes, but its real function seems to be the shaming of grief, to hyperbolize it and refashion it into something so unappealing, so parodic, so effeminate, that such practices would retire from the Athenian culture-scape. Parodic is certainly how Aristophanes recalled the play, so much hand-wringing and bawling (says Dionysus to Aeschylus in The Frogs: “I loved that bit

when the chorus went like this with their hands and cried вЂwah wah,’” 1027–28). Cut into the play anywhere, and the sound is the same: “Xerxes wailed aloud as he saw the depth of the disaster.В .В .В . He tore his robes and shrilly screamed,” relates the messenger, and when Xerxes, the defeated Persian king, arrives at his palace, ragged and broken from the complete destruction of his great army, he enters wailing his woes: “Io! Wretched me, I have suffered a loathsome and unexpected fate!”51 “Behold me, oioi, I am lamentable!” he cries out, demanding a chorus to echo his misfortune. “Raise high your voice in wailingВ .В .В . beat your breast, and cry out the Mysian lamentВ .В .В . ravage for me the white hair of your beardВ .В .В . scream sharply.В .В .В . Tear the robe of your breast with your finger-nailsВ .В .В . pluck your hair and pity the army.В .В .В . Let tears fall from your eyes.В .В .В . Wail as you proceed to the palace” (1050–68). So sang Aeschylus of the fall of Xerxes, but is it likely that many Greeks in the house wept with him, felt sympathetic to his great misfortune, or enjoyed the quiet delight at the catastrophe of the man who burned Athens? Bawl as he may, Xerxes’s grief is not Athenian grief at all, ameliorated as it is with the cold, sweet, pleasurable taste of revenge. “I groan as I remember Athens,” says he, and rightly might he groan. Helene Foley, Edith Hall, Nicole Loraux, and other scholars have suggested such excess as traditionally associated with women’s lamentation.52 Hall astutely checks off a small list of the “effeminisation of Persia” in the Persians, including the costumes, voices, and particularly the excess of thrД“nos: all that woe-wailing.53 Helene Foley deftly argues that funerary legislation introduced at this time also sought to proscribe public lament, particularly the ostentatious and uncontrolled weeping as practiced by women.54 Foley briefly (25–26) and Alan Shapiro more thoroughly trace the suppression of public grieving in the iconography of the period as well, documenting the transition from “wild archaic abandon” (to give oneself over to grief) to the more sedate and private swallowing of pain one sees on funeral stelae. In this domestication of archaic abandon, the new threnodic Page 61 →tragedy that followed The Fall of Miletus, such as Persians, would alter the terrain of grief, mixed with a certain salacious delight. Excessive grief, all this hair-tearing and rending of clothes, would be something Persians did, not Athenians. Was the fining of Phrynichus associated with a want of masculinity? Are we looking at a state incursion into man-making? As Edith Hall suggests, ban weeping and build soldiers?55 When, early in the next decade Aeschylus asks in Agamemnon, “O my kingВ .В .В . how to mourn you?” (1518), is he as much asking the dramaturgical question that will shape the tragedy of the century? How indeed does one mourn when mourning itself has been so estranged? When the form of tragedy is modulated toward pity for others, can we hear in that key change the private swallowing of one own pain? Well does the scholiast on Electra intervene when he notes, “The actor must, together with the exclamation, look up to the sky and raise his hands, which the chorus prevents вЂdo not cry out extravagantly.’”56 Can we see tragedy domesticating grief? The sorrows of us, giving way to the pathos of them?

A System for Forgetting When Themistocles first heard of a system of memory created by the poet Simonides (he called it mnemonics), Themistocles, who had had enough of memory, told the poet what was needed was not a system for remembering, but a system for forgetting.57 Forgetting was ever more difficult than remembering. Attilio Favorini has used the “fact-driven Persians” as the “first surviving example of the documentary impulse in Western theater, and as such it initiates the argument of how theater remembers history that persists to the present.”58 I think instead that Aeschylus’s Persians marks as much the final erasure of the documentary impulse that generated the form. If it documents anything, it is the aphasia that disappeared history into the mythmaking that followed. The theater was, after 492, just that: a system for imperfect forgetting (amnesty), and tragedy allowed the distance to feel for others but not bring to mind one’s own griefs. The Fall of Miletus was not restaged; it disappeared as a text, not through the benign neglect that disappeared the other plays of the 490s, but through a state-sponsored disappearance, and the deep grief it ignited remained a memorably singular event. Indeed, the tragic pathos that followed became the prophylactic that protected against real grief, the surrogate for too much sorrow, and the great canon endured and excelled in exactly this capacity.

As no one has written about memory with greater precision (or with Page 62 →more painful pleasure) than Marcel Proust, I want to evoke a passage that describes exactly this trajectory from the old tragedy of Phrynichus to the mythos of Aeschylus: Ideas come to us as the substitutes for griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure our heart.59 The mythos of the new tragedy lost some of its power to injure the heart, and that modulation from the first person to the third (from “us” to “them”) ensured tragedy’s survival. We hear no more of Athenian audiences buckled up in communal grief over plays about Athenians. We hear instead the ridicule of excessive grief; certainly when Aristophanes treated his audience to memories of Persians, it was shaming grief he recalled, all the hand-wringing and all the “wah wah” wailing of Darius (Frogs 1027–28). We hear instead of the compassion of pathos, the ability to feel for others; we hear instead of their silent fortitude in the face of personal tragedy. We hear stories like the news of the disastrous Sicilian expedition (413) that saw the Athenian defeat by sea and by land—that sorrowful messenger delivered his mournful tale to the Athenians gathered in the theater. Tens of thousands of Athenians were lost at sea, or pinned down at the Assinarus River (“the cruelest and most immoderate slaughter,” wrote Plutarch), or captured as prisoners and sent to the stone quarries, where they shortly perished by disease and bad diet. A few hundred survived from a force of forty thousand.60 It was a complete and catastrophic loss, “the most signal conflict ever waged by Greeks against Greeks,” in Plutarch’s assessment. When the news of the disaster reached Athens, the people were again assembled in the theater. According to Athenaeus, Hegemon, the comic poet, was reciting his Battle of the Giants, when the great grief intruded, but this time the Athenians swallowed their sorrow on that evil day when reports came to them in the theatre of the disasters in Sicily. No one left the theatre, therefore, although practically all of them had lost relatives. They therefore wept in secret, and did not leave, in order that the spectators from other cities might not see that they were disturbed by the calamity; and they remained to listen to the end, although Hegemon himself, when he heard the news, had decided to stop the recitation.61 Page 63 → “Secret weeping” is what the play of Phrynichus had taught them. They swallowed their grief and listened to the myth of the Battle of the Giants, which was, by late century, ironically, a thin and distant allegory of a prior Athenian victory (the Greeks being the Olympians, the Persians the Giants). The theater would tell tales and history would happen elsewhere.

Page 64 →

Three. Broken Shards and Buried Barbs Ostracism and Weaponized Comedy Jokes, like barbed arrows, are more biting and remain stuck in longer. —Plutarch, Moralia 2.1.630 Alas, I am struck deep with a mortal blow. —Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1343

Aside: It’s dangerous business speculating on early comedy. The ancient sources are few and vexingly unstable. The titles and surviving fragments from the oldest Old Comedy hardly yield definitive conclusions about its function, origins, or politics (because animal names seem to abound in early titles, does it follow they have no politics?), while the most complete classical commentaries about the pre-Aristophanic comic poets are largely centuries removed from their subjects or, in the case of Aristotle, frankly concede that these predecessors are a mystery.1 Classics scholars have done a remarkable job in cautiously assessing and assembling possibilities from the scraps of clues, teasing out shared DNA with older practices (abuse from the wagons, padded dancers), their relationship to the ceramic record; debating the degrees of political engagement, residue of older rituals, older festivals, etc. Comedy’s origins are less a “game of few pieces” than a game of broken pieces in which definitive statements give way to polite hunches at best.2 So what follows is frankly that, a polite hunch grounded in the three firm things we know about Old Comedy: when it was officially incorporated, that it was officially incorporated in the midst of the first wave of ostracism, and that it had a long reputation for personal abuse. I want to return in particular to an observation occasionally noted but seldom seriously advanced, about the shared arrival and function of Old Comedy and ostracism—that processPage 65 → by which the demes of Athens voted to expel unpopular leaders.3 Ostraca—the broken shards on which the demes voted—and the barbs of what remains of Old Comedy share an agenda for abuse of unpopular figures. Old Comedy and ostracism came in together, as civic institutions and civic competitions, and both carried a deadly payload of barbs built to smart hard and hurt deep, and they were both introduced in the thick of what Sara Forsdyke has termed the “intra-elite warfare” that became the democratic revolution.4 Considering the two new institutions as a popular front in the democratic revolution may shed some light on the repurposing of comedy, on the ways in which it was shaped and influenced at the moment of its civic incorporation by that other popular mechanism of abuse, ostracism. I want to consider ostraca as political texts with Old Comedy in mind, and Old Comedy as political texts with ostraca in mind; that is, to return to Aristotle’s idea of the comedy of invective, in what looks to be the golden age of invective. There is, of course, precious little to work with from the comic theater of the 480s, and hence little to support this association directly; Ian Storey offered the grim reminder that “for the early comic poets, the testimonia outweigh the actual remains of both titles and fragments.”5 Indirectly, however, those testimonia remain very useful. Everything that was recalled about Old Comedy confirms the idea of a form of abuse, that it entered the archive when it brought its abuse to the state stage, and that that occurred in the thick of intense civic contests for popular leadership that left thousands of small ceramic documents of abuse, ostraca. That precise intention of weaponizing laughter remained the most telling feature of Old Comedy, as it was remembered. Such, at least, is the hunch that follows.

Repurposing Comedy

At the ragged close of the imagined all-nighter that is Plato’s Symposium, three men are still awake and only one of them is sober. Socrates is insisting to Agathon the tragedian and Aristophanes the comic poet that genius was no respecter of genre, and poets of tragedy should also be poets of comedy.6 And in the ragged close of a boozy night, both writers groggily agreed to a theory neither practiced before Agathon dozed off, and Socrates continued with his sole auditor, a comic poet who had caricatured him on the state stage years earlier.7 The final effect of lecturing on the art of comedy to a comic poet was that Aristophanes fell asleep, which should remind us from the beginning that even in the best of hands talkingPage 66 → about comedy is really boring. It should also remind us that comedy was serious business (of equal genius to tragedy, was Socrates’s point)—this from a man who carried the barb of caricature to his death. Were he awake and sober, Aristophanes would likely agree. “To say much that is humorous, and much that is serious and win the prize” is the manifesto of Frogs.8 How exactly comedy came to be “serious” we cannot say—it arrived that way (officially speaking). Aristotle at least dismissed the earlier comedy precisely because it all came before comedy began to take itself seriously, and he then chronicled that dismissal: “Its early stages passed unnoticed, because it was not as yet taken up in a serious way” (Poetics 5.1449b). When comedy was taken up seriously, that is, officially incorporated into the state festival of City Dionysia in 487/86, it was then wrapped in an apparatus of new rules of engagement; it became competitive at a time when the stakes of civic competitions ran very high, with winners and losers and choregoi with real skin in the game. That new festival apparatus had replaced something prior, some unchronicled life of charivari and padded phalli, wagons and wine; and with the new and now-noticeable civic form (the thing Aristotle called “the comedy of invective”), comedy entered the archive of public memory.9 Its “history” (formal, textual, officially documented) began when the early comedy was refashioned into a state-sponsored competition, and that happened at exactly the moment when “the state” was also being aggressively redefined.10 Its prior, unhistoried life receded, leaving us only a string of unanswerable questions the field has puzzled over for decades. Was the new incorporation another kind of domestication, a taming of some unruly prior practice? Was the raunchy, paunchy precivic celebration scrubbed up for the parlor of the city and its guests? Was this newcomer, comedy, made polite, or was it made political? Did it have anything at all to do with the kind of comedy that has survived from later in the century? It would be famous for its personal satire, but did it arrive that way? Once granted a public stage, did that stage limit the satire or amplify it? When Alan Sommerstein notes that comedy was probably political from the beginning, did that “beginning” extend beyond its official arrival, or begin with its incorporation?11 When comedy “hit the bigs,” was its invective toned down or ratcheted up? Or was a raucous but harmless fertility festival of rough music and social shaming pressed into the service of the state? Was the new comic competition a more dangerous civic engagement than its ithyphallic precursor of the sixth-century vase record? Was comedy brought onto the city’s stage, in the thick of what has been called “the democratic revolution,” issued clubs instead of erections, and sent to beat up the oligarchs? A small mound of studies have explored the genealogy of Old Comedy Page 67 →back to its various origins—through textual fragments, ritual studies, genre, and iconography—and the debate will likely continue as to what, where, and how much was derived from this early practice or that.12 But at the core of the problem of origins lies a deeply shared suspicion that whatever the nature of its prior performance, in the early 480s comedy was repurposed when it was incorporated. Like the wayward heroes of those eighteenth-century novels—those foundlings of obscure origins whose winding misadventures deliver them ultimately to the parlor of gentility—did archaic comedy bury its past and begin again with its own erasure? Somewhere comedy refashioned itself to look much like other forms—tragedy, dithyrambs—with appointed choruses, dedicated and regulated civic calendars, wealthy and ambitious choregoi competing through plays for social visibility (what Hans Goette has called “large-scale status”), even structurally (Parodos-Proagon-Agon), and the official genre that has survived had replaced something that has not.13 That refashioning was so successful that its prior ludic traditions, what Hugh Denard has called “the mockery genres,” its prior forms and functions, were lost or recycled into something new and maybe still rude, but even the memory of them had faded into a plethora of speculations by Aristotle’s day. He gathered them up in a text on the missing origins (the famous second book of the Poetics), and that text is also missing.14 Absence squared.15 But if the “what” and the “why” of this replacement have receded hopelessly beyond retrieval, we

are on far firmer footing with the “when” of comedy’s refashioning.

Back When Comedy was officially incorporated into the city’s festival calendar in the spring of 487/ 86 BCE, a moment that occurred in the thick of a tumultuous realignment of power between demagogues and the demos, a movement often referred to as the democratic revolution.16 It was also in 487/86, for example, that Athens formally eliminated the traditional appointment of archons (city leaders) from the aristocratic class in favor of an annual lottery that guaranteed that a new crop of political players would emerge from a broader field (Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution 22.5); and we know that these new and populist players fought aggressively to maintain that power base because, also exactly at this time, the city first deployed its law on ostracism to purge power from the oligarchs.17 Between the two major campaigns of the Persian War (490 and 480/79, that is, between Marathon and Salamis) that formed the polarizing events of the decade was a Page 68 →turbulent contest for civic leadership that was thoroughly uncharted territory in the new political landscape.18 It was, as Sara Forsdyke politely understated the 480s, “a particularly difficult time in the polis’s history.”19 Vicious political campaigns for leadership saw the promotion and collapse of one statesman after another. The careers of several key players of the decade ably illustrate the rivalry and polarization of the emerging democracy. Miltiades could return to Athens a military hero, only to be tried for tyranny, acquitted, and reappointed general, whose strategies famously delivered the victory at Marathon and returned him to the status of military hero. Yet within a year he was tried again, this time for treason, this time indicted, and shortly afterward he died in prison. The man who successfully prosecuted Miltiades, Xanthippus (father of Pericles), would himself suffer ostracism under the campaign of Themistocles, and was exiled from Athens as a “friend of tyrants,” only to be dramatically recalled with the second Persian invasion. Themistocles, who had orchestrated the ostracism of Xanthippus, emerged as the general who saved Athens by taking to the ships; but he, in turn, would also suffer ostracism and end his days an exile from the city he saved.20 These were such tempestuous times, when one year’s hero was the next year’s traitor. They were times of fierce political rivalries, in which the state and its stages were arenas of personal competition—some became lifelong rivalries. Plutarch captures something of one great contest between two statesmen, Aristides and Themistocles: “Aristides was fond of saying that вЂunless they [the Assembly] sent Themistocles and himself to the barathum [the pit behind the Acropolis where criminals were thrown] there could be no safety for Athens.’”21 Those two competed in many arenas, and that lifelong contest between them for the leadership of the city ended, as it only could, with one winner and the other disastrously defeated. “And so he [Themistocles] grew in power,” wrote Plutarch, “and pleased the common folk, and finally headed a successful faction and got Aristides removed by ostracism.”22 “Pleasing the common folk” meant playing the city in all its spectacular venues. And in 486 a new venue was created. Into such teething times entered Old Comedy, and from all that was written about it later, it seemed to be very much a child of its times.

What Was Recalled of Back When If those early texts have not survived, their reputation certainly has. Here the portfolio of testimony is remarkably consistent over the centuries that Page 69 →followed: what was remembered of the first “serious” comedy was that the targets of abuse were the leading men of Athens.23 From Pseudo-Xenophon (the Old Oligarch), atop his aristocratic vantage point, for whom Old Comedy was a tool of the demos to assault the elite: “Generally the man who is caricatured is not one of the commons [demos] or the crowd but someone rich, well-born, or influential.”24 Diomedes the Grammarian succinctly described Old Comedy’s function as “castigating the faults of their leaders.” Plutarch singles out Old Comedy as unsuitable for polite gatherings precisely because it was too political; the requisite parabasis was too outspoken, too fiery and intense, and, above all, too politically topical for the symposium setting. One would need, joked he, a private scholar standing by, like a personal waiter, just to gloss the local figures satirized by the older poets.25 To Dionysius of Halicarnassus it was axiomatic that “the comedy of those like Cratinus, Aristophanes, and Eupolis is politicsВ .В .В . who can dispute?”26 The anonymous writer of On Comedy certainly didn’t; he claimed that Cratinus’s great contribution was adding abuse and punishing “evil-doers” with comedy, “as a public whipping.”27

Dio Chrysostom as well could retell the same tale: that Athenians went to theater to hear abuse, and victory belonged to the poet who abused the best.28 Even as late as Julian (fourth century CE), abusing philosophers and politicians was still recalled of the Old Comedy.29 The lean corpus of surviving fragments of the oldest comedies, as Olson documents, does not confirm this, and hence it is tempting and reasonable to think of the political Old Comedy as having begun in the mid-fifth century. 30 But then again, it would be difficult indeed to describe the plays of the earliest comic writers like Euxenides or Myllus, who produced the first entries in the 480s, and of whose work nothing remains.31 Additionally, even with fragments (as Plutarch grumbled, who needed a grammarian to explicate the allusions), we may not always recognize if or when we are in a moment of localized allegory. The oldest comic hypothesis (plot summary), for example, described Cratinus’s Dionysalexandros as an open and sustained attack on Pericles for beginning the war with Sparta and retreating from it, not a reading that would be immediately apparent from the surviving lines without the prompt. Yet the governing image of the summary (Pericles/Dionysus transformed to a ram), as Alan Hughes suggests, was legible enough to its consumers of the day to find an afterlife in the vase record well into the next century.32 If abuse, direct or allegorical, was part of the lexicon of comic playwrights from midcentury down, which seems to be widely accepted, why would it not have a history back to the early and abusive years of the 480s?33 Why would statesmen/choregoi like Themistocles, who played the city, not play Page 70 →the comic stage if there were political advantages to be found there? The only early Athenian comic poet Aristotle noted was Crates (440s), whose great innovation lay in (allegedly) retiring the personal invective (Poetics 1449b) and framing stories of a more generalized nature. From what has been remembered of the careers of the oldest comic poets, the barbs were sharp or the poet, like poor Magnes, was retired (Knights 524–25). If—and “if” is all we get—if that was the nature of the refashioning, the tactical weaponizing of comedy in the first fervent years of the democracy, then indeed comedy did become serious, as Aristotle suggested, when its abuse was put in the hands of the demos. And what better occasion was there than the same aggressive civic contest for power that first crossed the brink and deployed the ostracism option?

Ostraca As a political tool, ostracism too had a prior life. It lived first as a theory, designed as a check-and-balance tool but left stowed away deep in the arsenal of state. Its potency lay as the ultimate threat long before it emerged as a practice. It had been on the books since 508, created by Cleisthenes as part of his large reorganization of Athens (its demes, festivals, military and civic appointments), but lay dormant for two decades. It was only in 487 that the threat was first executed and, once used, was used excessively for five fervent years, 487–482.34 Once the demos evoked ostracism, it emptied the clip in quick succession to purge from the city almost every major political figure associated with the Alkameonides deme as “friends of tyrants.”35 Hipparchus was expelled in 487; Megacles, in 486; Callias, in 485; Xanthippus, father of Pericles, in 484; and Aristides, in 482—one after the other.36 In the decades that followed, a second generation of movers and shakers, Megacles, Themistocles, Cimon, and others, would all find themselves tossed from power and exiled from their own city, and by the close of the fifth century (417), in the hands of Alcibiades, under his own threat, ostracism had become so grossly manipulated that the practice was finally retired.37 But when it was first introduced in the 480s, ostracism quickly became a serious and fearful weapon in the party warfare and intraelite rivalry of Athenian statesmen, masterfully employed to remove political rivals.38 Was it just one of those coincidences of history that at exactly this time, in the thick of the first waves of ostracism wars, comedy was added to a state festival that now also pitted statesmen against statesmen as choregoi of the City Dionysia?39 Somehow, I think not. When Robin Osborne writes, “Ostracism tells us who the losers were, but the greater threat to democracy Page 71 →may have been the winners,” what is elided is the porous zone between: the great contest in which one year’s winner was the next year’s loser.40 For statesmen like Themistocles, choragus of tragedians, patron of poets (Simonides, Phrynichus), orchestrator and target of ostracism, the campaign to remove a political rival was a multiyear operation, building disfavor with the demos, in which names like Aristides, Xanthippus, and Themistocles return again and again, sometimes for years before they finally secure the needed number of votes, legally or otherwise. How these smear campaigns were run is not recoverable in their backroom details, but they certainly played out on many of the state’s stages. Plutarch records many of these spectacular displays: of the Olympic competition, the Pythian Games, victories and trophies for City Dionysia, the returning of the bones of Theseus

“with great pomp and show,” and the oracles—each an occasion for spectacular politics.41 “He courted them [the demos],” wrote Plutarch of Nicias, “with dramatic exhibitions, gymnastic games, and other public shows,” a strategy employed by others as well.42 In the deep play of the city in which Themistocles, Cimon, Aristides, Nicias, and Pericles would all compete within the dense game of state and as choregoi on the state’s theater, was comedy also folded into the warfare early on, deployed to engage in the contests of power for the intraelite to damage the intraelite? Ostracism, as a mechanism, required a certain courtship of the voting demos, and to this end, impressive civic displays. The pomp and trophies such as City Dionysia might afford, through which the mighty competed as choregoi or figured as targets of another’s satire and abuse, just might be very potent and spectacular weapons in elevating or dismantling another’s reputation.43 For Sara Forsdyke, ostracism functioned as a mnemonic device designed to recall to the minds of the demos the faults of the elite, and that assessment sounds remarkably like Old Comedy.44 Stefan Brenne notes many similarities between the two institutions as competitions through which the demos abused its leaders, or more precisely, competitions through which the leaders through the demos abused other leaders. They are both, in Brenne’s phrase, “platforms of defamation”; they can even share a comic vocabulary.45 They gather up gossip and scratch it into the aesthetic of abuse. We might say that Old Comedy and ostracism have the same laugh.

Day of Wrath, Day of Shards Considering a couplet damning Pericles’s father written on an ostracon in 484, Jennifer Wise playfully noted in passing that “the writing of plays and Page 72 →the writing of ostraca begin to seem surprisingly similar.”46 And indeed, some of the couplets and images roughly scratched on potsherds seem to share the same coded comic aesthetic. I’m thinking in particular of the ostracon against Callias Cratiou on whose reverse is a cartoon image of a Persian archer, the innuendo being that Callias was accused of medism.47 Other insults preserve the same flare for personal slander: one ostracon calls Themistocles “a buggerer”; another accuses Megacles of being an adulterer; another, with an insider’s chuckle, implies an incestuous relation with his sister.48 They are brief, but in tone and intention the shared playful and angry barbs of abuse of these two arenas of rough justice seem worth pursuing and, if pursued, begin to align in more ways than their bitter tongues. I’m curious, for example, about the relationship of a complete vase adorned with an image derived from a play by Eupolis found among a cache of ostraca in the year of the last successful ostracism. The figures on the image are marked as Dionysus and Phormion, referring directly to the two comic figures from Eupolis’s play The Officers, which parodies Hyperbolus (whom Plutarch described as “the general butt for the mockery of all the comic writers”), the last victim of ostracism.49 But why is the unbroken vase that depicts the same parodied figure from a play in a pile of ostraca with his name on them? Did the image of Phormion from the stage stand in for Hyperbolus on a vase that became an ostracon? These kinds of teasing alignments might be no more than shared rubbish, or they might suggest that the barbs from the stage were understood and traveled outside the theater. For two days a year (or likely more if one considers the Lenaea), on at least two conjoined occasions, in January and then again in early spring, the demes of Athens and its environs would gather to publicly exercise their discontents with the ruling elite: the first day was the comic competitions of the Lenaea and City Dionysia, when Pericles, Cleon, or Alcibiades could be abused mightily on the comic stage. There was a clubbing, enough to result in lawsuits, threats, failed attempts at legislation, even claims of drowning playwrights in retaliation for the public assault from the stage.50 Though Aristophanic comedy reveals the wide swipes of its targets, from judges to generals, there was nothing playful about this satire. Consider the effect it ultimately had on Socrates. His sendup in The Clouds had thrown such deep barbs that many years later at his trial the moment still refused to wholly retire and needed to be officially recalled and confronted. There, Socrates bemoaned the effects of that day’s delight, slandered from the stage back when his current accusers were young and so impressionable that years later that image from the stage still lodged in the juror’s minds. Page 73 →This was dangerous laughter, with serious retaliation and with a yield of case studies from the 430s and 420s.51 Hints of earlier legislation suggests that this brand of invective had been present long before the scripts began to survive. Right down to the close of

Old Comedy (The Frogs), poets are handing out nooses for politicians to go hang themselves. In its own goodhumored way, what made comedy serious was its anger, an anger cohabiting with laughter, but anger nonetheless. The second day of wrath was even more direct, the ostrakophoria, when that same class of demagogues could be expelled from Athens to end their days as exiles. These two days fell within weeks of each other, and that, too, should suggest a shared cultural front. These shards of broken pottery, on which, with which, the demos cast their vote to exile any overreaching demagogue, appealed to a wide range of constituents, some of whom could not even write the names of the leaders they would expel. For the illiterate, third-party scribes were available. Some hands wrote in the archaic styles, retrograde, right to left (i.e., backward) or, older still, “boustrophic” (as the ox plows: left to right, then right to left); some accepted prefabricated votes, made in advance and distributed in bulk; and others could barely write at all, revealing a wide and diverse population who must all be courted, all be counted, for one day all are now voices in the great new game of state.52 A description of the (ideal) process comes to us from Philochorus (late fourth century): “The agora is fenced off with wooden planks, and ten entrances are left open, through which they enter by tribes and deposit the ostraca, turning down the inscription as they do so. The nine archons and the boule are in charge of the voting [counting].”53 If sufficient votes were cast against a single individual, he had but ten days to settle his affairs and leave the city for a duration of ten years. There was no criminal charge attached to ostracism; their property remained their own, and the ostracized continued to enjoy their Athenian revenues, but were compelled to live outside the geographic boundaries and were consequently politically muted by the expulsion. It was, in effect, game over. In all but two cases, across the fifth century, the ten-year absence of the ostracized was a career-ending blow, and the fallen died in exile. Even worse, like any game of state, the process was rarely fair. The abuses accumulated over the century, but evidence of voter fraud was apparent right from the start. In 1937, a team of American archaeologists excavating on the north slope of the Acropolis discovered in a deep well-shaft 190 pottery fragments on whose unvarnished interiors were scratched a single name, the Page 74 →same name: Themistocles.54 The name of the condemned and the curse “Go,” confirm the intention of the shards as ostraca. The first curious feature of the north slope find: most of the shards are not broken, but rather the neatly fashioned bases of drinking cups (kylixes), made for the occasion. The second curious feature: all 190 votes against Themistocles were written by the same hands. Such a large quantity of prefabricated votes would seem to suggest voter fraud at the very least and, at worst, an orchestrated campaign, with prepackaged votes, available in bulk, hand-painted with Themistocles’s name in advance. Somebody came prepared to see Themistocles go. That no other names were found intermixed in the cache led the archaeologist Oscar Broneer to conclude that the votes were prepared for mass distribution and then dumped, either after or before the actual voting took place.55 A similar cache, unearthed in 1995, also seems to have been prepared in advance, this year targeting Callixenus, again all in similar hands.56 These were dirty and orchestrated campaigns, (Texas style) prefabricated voting fraud, waged by and between the interelite against the interelite, and ultimately consequential.57 After many years with his name on and off the ballot, Themistocles, the man who saved the Athenians, was finally ostracized from Athens, never to return. Fig. 2. Themistocles ostraca from 482 BCE recovered in Athens. Courtesy of Collection Ancient Agora Museum, Athens. Photo by Sharon Mollerus. Since the first north slope find, thousands of ostraca have come to light.58 These broken fragments of ceramic ware and roof tiles with their scrawled and twice-spelled curses ought to be more properly considered as Page 75 →political documents. Though Plutarch may find the process a gentle discouragement of envy, ostraca are angry texts.59 Even as broken shards, their last words are invectives against the state. “Out with the bums!” they spit their last bitter breath and, cursing, are discarded down a well. With one name, they call for the condemnation of the elite, and given the conditions of the north slope find, this condemnation could just as likely be engineered

by a rival elite. The uniformity of the cache documents is a ventriloquism of hatred, using the hands of the demos to throw a voice against a political rival, a campaign to commandeer the populist vote. As political texts, ostraca enjoyed a half-life shorter than flies: spawned, hatched, and dead in one brief, intense morning; decisive and brutal, they uttered one word and brought down the mighty before, emptied of voice and venom, they were discarded as roadfill or landfill or were thrown into garbage pits and heard from no more. But for that one day, once a year, somewhere in early spring, sometime just after City Dionysia, these shattered invectives were big chips in the great game of state.60 The proximity of ostracism day and the Dionysia is an alignment too tempting to ignore. According to Aristotle, the first question of whether or not an ostracism should be held each year occurred in the ecclesia of the sixth prytany, in midwinter (roughly January). Here the names of possible candidates were first introduced and discussed. If an unfortunate candidate garnered too much attention, and a motion was made that such a candidate be advanced to a vote, the actual gathering of the demes in the agora for ostracism day occurred two long months later, in the eighth prytany, that is, sometime in late March to late April.61 The interim, as Stefan Brenne has observed, belonged to propaganda, including the city’s largest forum, City Dionysia, which traditionally fell in the ninth lunar month (Elaphebolion), sometime in mid to late March.62 Later in the century (with the January Lenaea festival), a playwright like Aristophanes could intersect with the voting process more directly, as indeed several passages suggest.63 But earlier in the century, if a choragus’s name, like Themistocles or Nicias, were on the ballot to be considered for ostracism, it would be known weeks ahead of the competition of plays. So what might a well-timed victory accomplish? Or a defeat signal? Peter Wilson has admirably detailed the turnaround career of Socrates of Anagyrous, general of the Samian war, who was another candidate for ostracism but saved himself with a timely dramatic victory, after which he was reappointed to state service and his name fell off the ballot.64 One suspects that this kind of deep play was far more frequent than the scanty records of victor lists and tripods preserve. It was almost certainly the case of Themistocles. Page 76 → In the thousands of recovered ostraca, no name appears more frequently than that of Themistocles, the most popular candidate for ostracism throughout the 480s and 470s, netting more than a statistical third of all the preserved votes. This was true in 1937 and confirmed by more recent finds.65 In 1996/97, a large cache of ostraca was unearthed in the Agora. Of the 109 legible names, Themistocles gathered 61 votes, Xanthippus 47, and Aristides 1. In 2000, the third-largest cache of ostraca was excavated from the Agora, 150 in number, all against Themistocles or Xanthippus.66 Given the frequency of his name as a candidate for ostracism, when Themistocles won the tragic contest with Phrynichus’s play The Phoenician Women, in 476, it is very likely that a great deal more than a contest of plays was at stake. A brilliant victory might just dump the ostraca right down the wells unused, for that year at least. And for those unfortunate figures hard-targeted by comedy in the thick of such dirty wars? Like Cleon, who took such offense at Aristophanes’ treatment of him he took the poet to court, or Alcibiades, who allegedly took even greater offense at the comic poet Eupolis? Or the playwrights’ pay would be withheld, as Aristophanes suggests was done by politicians who were sent up on stage.67 And of reckonings of a more serious nature? What of those men clubbed by Old Comedy just weeks away from the day of reckoning and the angry ostraca? Were comic epithets like “Themistocles buggerer,” Xanthippus “Mede,” or “squill-headed,” which first branded Pericles on stage, then scratched on shards weeks later? Did they hear from the great stage of the city, behind the aulos and the applause, the sharpening of knives, the scratching of their own names on ceramic shards?

The Shelf Life of Satire Jokes, like barbed arrows, are more biting and remain stuck in longer. —Plutarch, Table Talk The imagined occasion of Plato’s Symposium was a dramatic victory for the tragedian Agathon, so I would

like to return to the epinikian moment of celebration and its excess, gloating.68 If that imagined evening shared anything with the celebration day of other tragic victors, it would be such a memorable day indeed. It subsumed receiving the crown in the theater, as coveted by Demosthenes later; basking in the great concentration of kleos (glory) in the eyes of the city—being awarded the prize, the celebrity party, Page 77 →with the town in holiday spirits. Then there were enjoying the enduring moments of fame, and receiving the victory tripod and the trophies (later temples) erected by the victorious choregoi to guarantee that victories of such a day would endure longer than the plays themselves.69 Choregoi monuments (in Wilson’s phrase, the “machine of kleos”) cluttered the road out of the Theater of Dionysus and down the hill, as tripods gave way to monuments, giving way to bigger monuments, then small temples topped with trophies, each overshadowing the last.70 Indeed, so thick were the installations of prize monuments on the Tripodes, the road of trophies, that over time houses were moved to accommodate the new structures. Trophies grew in size, became monuments, then architecture. Like the so-called lantern of Diogenes, at ten meters high, they pushed and shouldered at each other, vying for visibility, like the choregoi who sponsored the festivals, competing for kleos across time and space to extend the shelf life of their victory.71 But what is the opposite of the trophy? I speak here not of the envy of another’s victory, such as Themistocles fretted over, or the indignity of the defeated choragus, such as Demosthenes described when he was clobbered by Meidias (Against Meidias 21.4–5, 21.18) or, as Plutarch wrote, “To the defeated belonged shame.”72 But my focus is rather on the largesse of ridicule lavished on the satirized, the parodied, the victims of comic abuse impaled on nasty caricatures. If victory and kleos could find an afterlife in architecture, what was the monument of comic shaming? Less material certainly, but equally enduring were the antitrophies, comedy’s buried barbs, the critiques, the caricatures, the calling up and shaming down of the city’s singled-out that was at the core of Old Comedy. These quills, as Plutarch noted, could lie deep in the skin, buried and toxic and every bit as enduring as trophies, could indeed outlast a lifetime. This was certainly the case of Socrates, target of at least four comic poets, one of which, though a failure on stage, proved deadly at his trial.73 The trial of Socrates is one of those overfished classical sites about which little new can be said, hence the near continual spate of scholarship produced.74 Fortunately I have no new contribution to that historic moment. Rather, it is the weight of the accumulated confirmation that I am after, that chorus of testimonia, classical and contemporary, that all uniformly acknowledge the damage exacted by his “first accusers” (18a–19c), which opens the famous defense speech that is the Apology. Consensus is usually suspicious, but in this case sources and scholars seem to concur: more threatening than the current indictment from those prosecutors in the courtroom were all those “invisible bullets” of the prior slanderers, those Page 78 →mudslingers from years past, who got hold of the jurors when they were young and impressionable, those of whom it was “impossible to know their names, except when one of them happened to be a writer of comedies” (18d). That one he knew, and later in the passage Socrates would name that name: Aristophanes. It was he who first introduced to the juror’s imaginations that other “Socrates,” the one they knew from the play, the one who investigated things under the earth and in the heavens and made the weaker argument appear the stronger (still claims the real Socrates could recite in court two decades after the performance); so well was it made, that other Socrates of Aristophanes’s fashioning, like a Senecan ghost, that he came back to haunt the courtroom, twenty years after his first appearance. Scores, maybe hundreds, of comedies had played the stages of Athens since then, but that play and that image were still remembered, and remembered so deeply that the character of Socrates on trial was haunted (and to a degree, condemned) by the ghost of the Socrates on stage. The original production, the circulated text, the probable second production, the mask created for one or both productions, the testimony at the trial (as rendered in Apology 18b–19c), even the character Alcibiades—all quote from the play during the imagined evening of the Symposium, all seem to document a certain endurance of that other “Socrates” in the cultural memory. Can we speak of tripods of ridicule? Did the shelf life of satire endure like monuments in the hall of shame, not on the road of trophies, but barbs lodged indelibly in the minds of future jurors and the gathered demesmen funneled into the agora at the ostrakophoria? Was that what Aristotle had in mind when he spoke of comedy becoming serious and when he praised Crates for abandoning the invective?

Socrates lamented he had then no chance to answer the indictment of the first accusers, but only, we are told anecdotally, to stand up in the theater and display the likeness of his face to his mask.75 In doing so, did he participate in cementing the likeness of character as well? Was he impaled upon his own likeness? And here, of course, his physiognomy was against him, resembling nothing so much as a comic mask—a Silenus, or a satyr, or even Marsyas himself. (“Now I don’t think even you, Socrates, will have the face to deny that you even look like them,” says Alcibiades in the Symposium evening, “but the resemblance goes deeper than that.”)76 He seduced like a satyr, argued Alcibiades, going so far as to give him the name of Marsyas. By inhabiting that image, did Socrates cohabit with Socrates? That (double) ghosted image from the comic stage had done enough damage that nearly a quarter of a century later it lodged still in the jurors’ Page 79 →minds. In the end, Alcibiades was right: it did go deeper than a resemblance. Socrates “never recovered from the damage The Clouds had inflicted upon his reputation,” as one recent scholar framed the blow.77 Landing career-ending blows may have been what comedy was trained to do. As a child of its times, it may have been part of the weaponized form that came in with the ostracism wars of the 480s and was likely retained as part of Old Comedy’s peculiar features and, if not consistently deployed, certainly available for deployment. Such barbs were perhaps more fitting for generals than gadflies, for demagogues like Pericles, or Aristides and Themistocles a generation earlier, a ridicule of the elite.78 It seems only fitting, knowing what we do about the reputation of Old Comedy, that the stage was among the platforms for courting the demos and conducting an assault. Later, with comedy as with ostracism, perhaps leveling such bare-knuckled assaults against gadflies, sophists, or rival playwrights wielded far more firepower than the subject deserved. Like the ostracism wasted on so slight a figure as Hyperbolus such that the practice was retired, such attacks on civilian targets in comedy may have belonged to the earlier, more benign amusement, the archaic genre, that older form of abuse that was replaced.79 (I wonder if the ontology of Old Comedy was itself haunted—dare I say with a wince, “hauntology”?—by the earlier and perhaps more harmless intentionality of comedy, comedy before it was weaponized?) The payload of the Old Comedy was certainly and excessively discharged on a figure like Socrates, and it lodged in the skin and remained active ordnance two decades later. Old Comedy and ostracism had come in together, and at the close of the fifth century, had they both outlived their primary targets?

Page 80 →

Four. The Serene Face of Menander; or, “The Dipper Dipped” I really cannot understand what ails the writers who exalt Menander as they do all over the Greek world. My reason is that the leading Greeks are simply beside themselves in their zeal for this writer of comedy. —Phrynichus, Epitome 418 The law was enacted; the chorus, losing its power to harm, disgracefully lapsed into silence. —Horace, The Art of Poetry 283–84.

Clubbing Aristocrats: Argos Looking back at the “glories of the Athenians,” Plutarch wrote that one of the more praiseworthy events that he recalled of former times was the Athenian expiation of the bloodguilt of the Argives, who in 370 rose up in a violent mob, took to the streets, and clubbed to death fifteen hundred aristocrats. It was class warfare of the most brutal sort—a petite reign of terror that in one brief spasm of violence purged the polis of an entire strata of its demagogues, its propertied elite, its moneyed class (its 1%); and then (like the later Reign of Terror) its final victims were the architects of the revolt itself. The magnitude of the atrocity was not lost on Plutarch, who described it as a “slaughter of a greater number than is recorded ever to have occurred anywhere in Greece.”1 That the event happened in Argos and not Athens was an enviable reflection, but that the Assembly of Athens—that same strata of “outstanding citizens of property and reputation”—not only refused to condemn the massacre but indeed forgave the bloody act and as a body expiated the offenders, reveals a certain troubled attitude toward their own class tensions.2 That the expiation of such a slaughter (itself an act of amnesty) was comprehensible, even advisable, to the Athenian Assembly is worth puzzling over, both at Page 81 →the time it occurred and later, when Plutarch, a Romanized Greek, could still find the amnesty laudable. The expiation of Argive bloodguilt is particularly inviting, as it intersects with the curtailing of political liberties and restrictions in Athens in the decades following the Peloponnesian War, including the restrictions on the liberties of Old Comedy that took for its single most defining feature the symbolic pummeling of demagogues on stage. Somewhere, somehow, by the 370s, the freedom of Old Comedy to club aristocrats—to critique and burlesque the leaders of the polis that had been its founding attraction—had been entirely given over, now a thing of the past, and whatever early-fourth-century proscriptions on that vicious voice that thereafter indemnified the demagogues from public abuse have not survived. The comic poets had somewhere surrendered their clubs, but in doing so, they also left a hole in what public comedy could perform, an acoustic hole, an aphasia: the absence of critique. As Fefu famously phrased it in Marie Irene Fornes’s play, pointing her rifle at her husband: “If I didn’t shoot him with blanks, I might shoot him for real” (act 1, scene 1). And somewhere prior to the 370s, “blanks” were banned. Plutarch employs the example of the expiation as a model of Athenian citizenship that is based on amnesty and not militancy; and that distinction is critical to an Athens in Plutarch’s day—that is, under Roman rule—but is also very useful for understanding postwar Athens, including its theater. “By emulating acts like these,” wrote Plutarch of the various acts of amnesty, “it is even now possible to resemble our ancestors; but Marathon, the Eurymedon, Platea, and all the other examples which make the common folk vainly to swell with pride and kick up their heels, should be left to the schools of the sophists.”3 In praising such acts, Plutarch is attempting to remap the Athenian notion of the heroic, privileging moments of amnesty rather than resistance, that is, forgetting over remembering. “There are many acts of the Greeks of former times by recounting which the statesman can mold and correct the characters of our contemporaries, for example, at Athens by calling to mind, not deeds in war, but such things as the decree of amnesty after the downfall of the Thirty Tyrants, the fining of Phrynichus for presenting in a tragedy the capture of Miletus.”4 It is the voice of forgetting I evoke here, this voice of acquiescence that Athens embraced and Plutarch praised, to consider how the function of comedy in postwar Athens lost its resistance, surrendered its clubs, and refashioned itself into a model of amnesty,

that is, of amiable forgetting. That symbolic lashing that Athenian playwrights could wield would be long over by 370 when the Argives rose up, and how and why it was over—that is, how comedy began to forget Page 82 →its prior function—would be persistently remembered, but very imperfectly remembered, and it is with this broken memory that I want to begin.

Clubbing Aristocrats: Athens Athenians had themselves once engaged in a similar purge—more precisely, they expelled seven hundred families during the housecleaning after Hippias, but that was a century back.5 By and large, once comedy was added to the state festival, throughout most of the fifth century, Athenians didn’t need to club their aristocrats: they could assault them openly on the stage every spring and winter.6 Of this brutal capacity of Old Comedy, all surviving commentary agrees: the dominant feature of the genre was its unbridled personal satirical attacks on the powerful. Cleon, Alcibiades, Archedemus, Nicias, Pericles, under the pens of Eupolis, Cratinus, and Aristophanes, suffered a public cudgeling. By way of recreational exegesis, the physician Galen once assembled five volumes on the figures satirized by Eupolis alone.7 Some sense of this assault is preserved in the surviving work of Aristophanes, but by all accounts his earlier contemporaries swung the bigger sticks. But their clubs were abandoned somewhere, and the distinctions between Old and New Comedy, even Second (or Middle) Comedy, were distinctions acknowledged at the time by the absence of malice, but the actual mechanism that initiated the rupture of form and caused that distinction—the legislation, the alteration of the rules of engagement—was not preserved. As Horace summarized the progress of theater (The Art of Poetry 86–284), he remembered of Old Comedy that “law interceded and wrongly the chorus was silenced, its right to offend shackled,” but we do not precisely know what happened, nor do we have a reliable source who speaks of the exact legislation with any authority that made personal satire unacceptable somewhere between the closing years of the fifth century and the opening decades of the fourth.8 By whom, when, occasioned by what, and why the right to free speech was shackled, is not decisively recorded.9 Indeed, our only credible commentary concerns the repeal of temporary decrees that sought to muzzle the free invective of Old Comedy. In a passing gloss, two lateclassical commentators on Aristophanes (Acharnians 67 and Birds 1297) refer to Euthymenes as “the archon under whom was annulled the decree passed in Morychides’ term of office placing restrictions on comedy, ” and later, one Syracosius, “[the one] who carried a decree that nobody should be attacked in comedy by name.” Alan Sommerstein, who Page 83 →canvassed the problem of free speech and the comic stage, concluded that this last attempt was manifestly a failure, as ongoing jibes aimed at Syracosius from the stage testify.10 It is clear that more than one unenforceable attempt to restrict the stage was floated, dismissed, or repealed before something more final took hold. What, exactly, brought about that decisive final measure remains a ruin. Something happened, and the resulting gap between the political seriousness of Old Comedy (still very popular in 405) and the benign effervescence of New (or Second) Comedy, represents a crisis of genre that has left no satisfactory account of itself.11 Ancient testimonia described the distinctions with some detail (as Plutarch, Ovid, or Platonius all do; that is, the comic poets abandoned choruses, likewise gave up personally recognizable masks, gave up the parabasis, advising the city, criticizing “generals, incompetent jurors, and profiteers,” and took up parody of tragic writers), but they do not account for the “why” of the changes.12 Instead, this gap left a lie—a lie, like all good lies, persistently retold because it carried some truth in it, but a lie nonetheless, and that lie stood in for something that had been excised. Why this lie remained the story that later generations told themselves has a great deal to do with exactly that refashioning of Athenian identity that Plutarch spoke of: from independence to acquiescence, from free speech to polite subjugation. Somewhere comedy lost its militancy, that is, it ceased to be the engaged and political forum. In so doing, it learned to forget and, by forgetting, it was retooled and grew and expanded across the Greek Mediterranean. But like most occasions of amnesty, the forgetting was marred by an excess of its own memory. Poets (playwrights) were called didaskoloi, teachers. “As the schoolboy needs his master, so does the city need its poets,” so at least claimed Aristophanes, who staged this function as the governing idea of The Frogs. His character Dionysus poses a civic problem to both underworld poets: how to save the city. On the strength of

Aeschylus’s answer, that tragedian is chosen; and on the strength of Aristophanes’s parabasis (his own advice to the city), Aeschylus wins the contest and is awarded the unique honor of a second production.13 Listening to poets instruct the city is what that play is all about. This function of advising the city marks the most pronounced distinction between Old Comedy and everything that came after it. Rhetors (orators) as well were judged by their advice, to a degree, but their forum was not nearly so spectacular and, on the strength of sound advice, a reputation could be earned.14 Advising the city was a hallmark of a free polis, but it could be dangerous business, particularly in times of war—and recall for most of Aristophanes’s writing career this comedian was a wartime Page 84 →poet. But—and at least one early fragment concedes that it was essential to the function of Old Comedy—“Let the winner be the one who says what’s best for the city,” spoke Cratinus.15 It could be sound or vicious, it could be personal, it could win or lose the competition. Aristophanes certainly had his share of trouble with it. Nine of the eleven extant plays of Aristophanes contain real, contemporary characters; and when he attacked one of them, Cleon, in the now-lost play The Babylonians (c. 426), a lawsuit resulted.16 But his trouble was nothing like the travails of his contemporary, the hard-hitting comic Eupolis. “Everyone knows Eupolis,” Macrobius once wrote, but of his plays only fragments, titles, and a vicious reputation remain.17 Yet the times when he lived were a mudslinger’s heaven, the best of times for potty-mouth playwrights. He, Cratinus, and Aristophanes had a holiday with their satires, when political satire had few restrictions. Platonius writes of the period: In the days of Aristophanes, Cratinus, and Eupolis, democracy was paramount at Athens; the people held all authority, being absolute masters of public policy. Freedom of speech was the right of every man, and thus the Comic poets could attack anyone with assured impunity, were he a general, an unjust juror, or a private citizen known for a miser or an evil-liver. For the people, as I have said, gave the Comic writers carte blanche, listening to the slander of such persons with relish.18 It all sounds so heavenly for a good satirist. Old Comedy exercised its liberty (parrisia, its “duty to speak freely”) with tongues that ran with loose, floppy reins.19 The burlesque treatment of sophists, jurors, philosophers, generals, demagogues, orators, and effeminates were all fair game, and if done with a sharpened point, could smack a political career right into early retirement. Even the judges of the plays were targets.20 Personal caricature, above the belt, below the belt, through the belt, seemed to be freely licensed, and a liberty in which the poets clearly overindulged. “First of all,” speaks a fragment of Eupolis (from a parabasis?), “everyone ought to have had an equal right of free speech.”21 From the fragments that remain, carte blanche seemed to be the standard of the day.22 Aristophanes, Eupolis, and Plato Comicus all railed against the policies of Cleon, Nicias, and Alcibiades. Aristophanes accused Pericles of starting the Peloponnesian War to avoid indictment for embezzling (Peace 605ff.), as noted above, wrote a whole play with the singular subject of Cleon (Clouds), took repeated deep swipes at Euripides, broad hits at sophists as a profession, ridiculed the effeminacyPage 85 → of Agathon and Philoxenos, and beat up broad topics, like war-mongering or the Athenian juridical system, with great agility. Fragments and later accounts confirm that his contemporaries were equally vocal with political demagogues of the day.23 Satire—and I mean fanged, bruising, name-calling, libelous, slanderous, potty-mouth clubbing—was at the core of Old Comedy. But all of that changed when Eupolis went too far, or so goes the story that was so excessively remembered by later writers. Tzetzes, the Byzantine grammarian, one of nine or more sources on the crux, retold it this way: “In the first Comedy [Old Comedy] the ridicule was free and unconcealed, a state of things which persisted till the time of Eupolis; but when this poet made a joke against the general Alcibiades by openly trouncing his lispВ .В .В .”24 The lisp is what got the poet killed; so recalled a tradition of scholiasts.25 The play was called The Dipper (Baptai, the play that made Lucian blush).26 Little of the text remains, but it was remembered for centuries as the play that went too far in its treatment of the lisping statesman. By several late antiquity accounts, Alcibiades sent his soldiers to arrest Eupolis and took him to sea when Alcibiades and his navy were embarking for Sicily (putting the event suspiciously too early at c. 415). According to Tzetzes (On Comedy), Alcibiades then tied Eupolis to a rope and drew him in and out of the water, while the general stood by on deck and said, “Dip me on the stage and I’ll drown you in the briny.”27 The lesson was deadly; Eupolis, so goes the story, was

drowned, and Alcibiades had a law passed that stage caricature could no longer target personal figures, only symbolic ones. Critiques of politicians were now illegal, and that about did it. Such was the account that was still in circulation in the twelfth century CE, and had been rigidly repeated for a millennium. This story is at the core of a sizable body of classical and late-classical testimonia on the death of Eupolis and the demise of Old Comedy (the earliest preserved written by Cicero, who refers to a prior, unpreserved list; the last, by Tzetzes), and at least two earlier accounts are quoted, widely known, but have not survived, all of which agree in the main: Eupolis satirized Alcibiades on stage, Alcibiades dipped Eupolis and passed a law restricting personal satire, and that occasion is used to mark the transition to a new genre, Second Comedy.28 I ask here not whether it happened or not—of course it didn’t—but rather, as a trope of memory, why had the “Dipper dipped” been so rigorously remembered this way? What had that memory accomplished that it was so persistently retained? “Did not Alcibiades son of Klenias, an elected general in fact, bear a grudge against Eupolis the comic poet because of his Baptai?” asks Themistius.Page 86 → “We know Eupolis, after producing his Baptai, was drowned in the sea by the man against whom he had written the play,” repeated Platinius. “Having been made fun of by Eupolis,” echoed Aristides, “he hurled the poet into the sea while he was serving with him on the Sicilian campaign, with the words, вЂYou dyed me in the theatre, but by plunging you in the waves of the sea, I’ll make you die in stinging waters.’” “Some say they drowned him in the sea, but others that they raised and lowered him into the sea tethered on a rope but did not kill him, while Alkibiades declaimed: вЂDye me in the theatre, but I will drench you in the salty waters.’ Whether Eupolis perished in the waves or whether he survived, Alkibiades passed a law that comedy should not attack openly but only indirectly.В .В .В . [T]his is known as Second Comedy.”29 Why the great accretion of narrative weight that congealed around one transgressive poet and the demagogue who legislated the genre out of existence may tell us a great deal about how late-classical memory refashioned its notion of parrisia (free speech), reversing the flow of power into a narrative of state over stage. The endurance of the narrative is all the more curious because the story each of these writers passed on was acknowledged as unreliable at its first telling. The preserved record begins with Cicero, but the story was already old, well circulated, and thoroughly debunked at the time he reminded his readers that the account was troubled. According to Cicero: Everyone says that Eupolis the poet of Old Comedy was thrown into the sea by Alkibiades while on his way to Sicily. Eratosthenes has refuted the story, by adducing plays that Eupolis produced after that time. But we don’t laugh at Duris of Samos, do we, a thoroughly competent historian, because he made the same mistake as many others?30 Acknowledging that the popular canard carried little credibility, Cicero noted nonetheless that it was the tale widely told, and why it was told is central to understanding how this rupture was marked. What we may hear behind the anecdote is that some large radical realignment had happened, something that reshaped the very function of comedy and that required a sizable account for the change. Cicero’s account, even discredited, stood in for or approximated the real event with vim enough to ensure its survival. Whether this rupture was legislated (Aristotle, writing c. 330, does not note it, and no record of legislation has survived) or self-regulated, a public corrective or a private pummeling (one thinks of John Dryden’s Rose Alley Page 87 →ambuscade, when the poet was clubbed for his satire), or driven by the competition itself is a moot question, but the anecdote stands like the stela with faded letters that very imperfectly marks where the memory has been damaged. The anecdote is a scar that signs the place where comedy lost its voice, lost its activism, its citizenship, and its clubs; and this excision, this loss, however it happened, was certainly felt, marked, and remembered.31 What the anecdote preserves is that the actual way in which the realignment happened was less material than the urgency to account for its loss. The dipping of Eupolis served, from Eratosthenes to Cicero to Tzetzes, as the incision that separated the vastly accessible and amiable comedy of the fourth century from the dangerous, clubbing comedy of the fifth.

The realignment, of course, could not have been as absolute as recorded by later writers—after all, Aristophanes is still very engaged in biting personal satire down to Frogs in 405 (long after the alleged dipping), and we have no surviving plays of Aristophanes for the critical decade that followed. A few extant Middle Comedy fragments, from Timocles, for example, seem to recall something of the former sharpness, what Ian Storey has called a “spiritual link with Old Comedy,” but the occasional fit of bile seems the exception, not the genre.32 Clearly something had happened somewhere at the close of the fifth century and the opening decade of the fourth, and that rupture carried with it an enduring impulse to understand it. That the transition was seen to be abrupt, even violent, to later writers, who had a great deal more access to the plays than we do, is worth crediting. One fragment, undated from Nicostratus, the youngest son of Aristophanes, seems to imply that the poets themselves were implicated in the abdication of their right of parrisia (freedom of speech). To be fair, it is only a three-line fragment, but in it one speaker claims with some passion a phrase of great precision and legal distinction where slander was concerned: “Don’t you realize that the right of free speech is poverty’s armor? If a man loses it, he’s abandoned the shield that guards his life.”33 To claim that someone abandoned his shield, as MacDowell has documented, was a precise legal example of slander, subject to a sizable fine (five hundred drachmas, up from the three of Solon’s day), unless one could substantiate the claim.34 In the governing metaphor of the lines, the freedom for free citizens to speak publicly on public matters was thrown down, abandoned as a hoplite’s heavy shield in a retreat, and the language chosen, in this small fragment, was quite precise, according to the son of Aristophanes.35 However the new genre (Second Comedy) emerged, and however fluid its borders of genres were, political engagement, personal satire, and the parabasis were all lost, as were the discrete chorus; personal, recognizable Page 88 →masks; and the very function of the poet as didaskolos (teacher). Later scholars marked the loss by the hole that the new restrictions left in the form.36 What it could no longer do after the proverbial gag order was markedly remembered, as Horace remembered it. Old Comedy, as a genre, was created (historically speaking) by its own loss. Before that, it had just simply been comedy. Plutarch, when he asks what objection any could have to New Comedy, by the very act of naming it “New” acknowledges what was excised and what was objectionable.37 What happened, happened (almost) without record, but the memory that something had happened persisted, if precise legislation did not. Stephen Halliwell, reviewing the various Hellenistic accounts of this change, concludes that few of them carry much credibility (his language describing the claims runs from “fictive,” “intrinsically dubious,” to “hopelessly fanciful”), and his more measured conclusion is worth repeating, in that it was repeated by many of the sources that perpetuated it.38 Writes Halliwell (56), “Belief in legal restraints on comic satire had become a well-established feature of Hellenistic literary-historical reconstructions of the genre’s development in Athens.” Under all the various and dubious retellings of this provisional hypothesis, however, we may read a persistent need to account for the fundamental change in tone, form, and intent of comic satire. Somewhere in the opening decades of the fourth century, political comedy, as it was known, was over completely, and the sound of that silence required some explanation. Old Comedy became a liberty of the past, even to those who composed it (like Aristophanes, who foraged about for new topics and found that his time had passed); it broadened, flattened, and even to writers working in the period, a new genre was necessitated. Middle Comedy, the missing genre, left few records of itself, mostly from Athenaeus:39 titles, fragments, names of poets, but little material that interacts with the great events of its own day.40 Of the final treaty with Sparta at the close of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian capitulation to Thebes, the bloody revolt of the Argives, the Social War of the mid-350s, and, later, the protracted conflict with Macedonia, against Philip, Alexander, and Antipater, of this entire troubled century (Rusten called it a period of “exceptional political upheaval”) we have next to no theatrical reference, nothing equivalent in the least to the war commentary that is the signature of Aristophanic comedy.41 The amnesty of the Athenian Assembly in 370 (the period of Middle Comedy) may not have been entirely an act of sympathy. It may represent a certain consolidation of power, a sealing off, a closing of ranks of an oligarchical power base that found itself increasingly threatened. Once the Page 89 →city could no longer laugh at aristocrats like Alcibiades, maybe clubbing was the only thing left. And then again, maybe the amnesty of the Argive slaughter was an acknowledgment that the aristocrats were not without blame. At least one classical source

suggests the clubbing was in retaliation for a planned offensive, “an attempt of the wealthy against the demos.”42 The planned assault was betrayed and the citizens rose up preemptively, and the “mass mocktrials” that followed quickly escalated to frontier justice. We will not understand entirely what political repressions led to the uprising in Argos, or why Athens condoned it, but that Athens responded sympathetically in the Assembly may register some degree of fear. There is certainly a degree of fear in the theater—or rather of the theater, and the curtailing of its liberties by the oligarchy is a mark too legible to overlook. When one gazes beyond the old genre, what the theater does not do becomes suddenly very pronounced, very loud and, indeed, what the theater no longer does becomes the most remembered part of the transition out of Old Comedy. When texts emerge again—and lamentably I am speaking of Menander here, and not his uncle, Alexis of Thurii, who left a wide canon of plays with intriguing titles for the 370s and 360s, now all but fragments lost—when we emerge, what astonishes the most between the function of Old and New Comedy is the complete lack of topical, political engagement.43 It is not just that the IQ has dropped (as Plutarch implies, New Comedy is perfect when you’re drunk), but now comedy, the last theatrical repository of a local space, surrendered its citizenship, its topicality, its history, its memory; comedy surrendered its club. In Flickinger’s phrase, it “renounced its political themes.”44 Choricius could defend the work of Menander as the apex of harmless drama, and its topicality did not seem to have just worn off by the sixth century.45 The characters are broadly typed, broadly classed residents of nearly nowhere (“a country deme outside of Athens”), flat, pan-Hellenic, innocuous, and eating. Later scholiasts cataloged them by their type, for example, Maeson the Cook and Tettinx the Servant. Apuleius, writing on Philemon and Middle Comedy, lists the “perjured pimp and fervid lover and clever little slave,” and the types, as well as their masks, endured for centuries.46 And so they were remembered still by Plutarch and employed by Roman comic writers. Nothing offended: the slaves are threatened but never beaten, power was never seriously challenged; there was no staged resistance, no clubbing of demagogues; even the rapes concluded in marriage, an act that seemed to connote a peaceable resolution in spite of their violent inception. Fragments, always fragments, are tantalizingly few and dangerous to Page 90 →use. One title of a commentary (lost), by Antiochus of Alexandria, On the Poets Ridiculed in Middle Comedy, might suggest that the poets turned on each other instead, a condition certainly already present in the Old Comedy. Another fragment, from Philippides, seems to be a scrap of a larger defense of the comic stage through its list of corrupting actions of demagogues and its conclusion that “these things ruin a people, not comedy.”47 What is clear is that comedy ceased to be the activist of the polis. It ceased to be the civic, citizen-shaping endeavor that had been its democratic hallmark. When the record resumes, we enter the world of Menander, a country deme somewhere comfortably outside of Athens, where poets no longer have either the authority or, frankly, the ambition to advise the city. The world of Menander is a grumbler’s world. Slaves, freemen, field-workers, and abducted girls alike mutter into their sleeves and grind their teeth on their injustices and simmering misfortunes, but they do not pick up their cudgels and club aristocrats. They do not take their leaders to task. They curse each other. Country slave curses city slave, master curses cook, cook curses master; their grievances are petite and domestic. The new genre precluded “Philippics” on the part of the playwrights—the parabasis in which the poet took the town to task, and on the strength of which the victory lay, had been retired, renounced, like an oath of amnesty. Even personal masks had been so modulated “to avoid any chance of resemblance” to the powerful, or any risk of a poet “guilty of deliberate mockery.”48 Instead, the cooks and servants, the sycophants and the playboys seem residents of the fish market, looking for some choice piece of flesh. It is a facile conclusion, given the paucity of New Comedy preserved, but one to which all the available evidence invites us: comedy itself retired to a country deme and tended its vines, while Antipater demanded the deaths of the orators and placed a garrison of Macedonians on the harbor Acropolis, while Demosthenes argued, and “all Greece was in arms” (Plutarch, Life of Demosthenes) to preserve its independence. To Aristophanes’s generation, Athens could not choose a general without a rash of plays mediating the decision, but now, throughout the intensely fierce civic debates over the Athenian surrender or resistance to Macedonia—debates that ultimately cost Demosthenes his life—his near contemporary Menander and the enormous celebrated tradition of the Athenian theater, from what is left us, seems to have quietly retired to the country and eaten fish.49 If we approach New Comedy from the engagement

and activism of Old Comedy, the genre can only look resigned and somewhat frivolous. Given what we have to work with, that is, mostly fragments, this conclusion seems to be what we are left with.50 What troubles the mind attuned to the voice of activismPage 91 → is not the retirement of the new genre so much, or even the contentment that accompanies that retirement, but its troubling resemblance to an act of amnesty. It begins to look as if somewhere it had promised (mД“ mnД“nisiskakein) not to misuse memory.

The Face of Menander In the cellars of the Vatican, as narrow and winding as catacombs, there is a strange enormous graveyard. It is of ancient statues, thrown on the ground in a rough classification, feet in one heap, then knees, then whole legs, and so on. There is something particularly poignant about the fingers and elbows. There are also parts of dogs and wild boars, and once the head of a Parthenon horse was found there. —Eleanor Clark, Rome and a Villa Menander has come to us like a boneyard of broken plays: Heaps of cooks in one pile, scraps of bachelor-farmers in another; over here, young men in love with harp girls, and here, the remains of harp girls, some pregnant, all broken; here a small pile of country slaves, ever threatened, ever reprieved; and these, in parts and pieces, are the orphaned babies, the fruit of festival-rape, left for exposure with their birth tokens that will save them at the hands of shepherds and redeem them to their proper class. And like the Vatican piles, after a while all the pieces start to look the same. The fragment of the old curmudgeon from The Farmer who gashes himself with his own mattock and learns compassion is another Knemon from the Dyskolos, chipped from the same block, with the same mattock. Gorgias is Gorgias, from play to play; Davus and Geta, Davus and Geta; Pamphilla is Pamphilla is Pamphillia. So interchangeable they seem that one prankish curator might assemble all the composite Menander fragments into a single mega-Menander cycle-play, with ten acts, four lost girls, several merchant fathers, and innumerable redeemed babies, and all with little damage to his reputation. It would, no doubt, be called The Cook.51 It seems a fair use of all the scraps. But this is not at all how Menander was remembered in the classical world, whom very intelligent writers ranked among the great poets and pieced him into floor mosaics with Homer and Virgil.52 He was praised (sometimes effusively) by such discerning writers as Plutarch, Quintilian, Dio Chrysostom, Ovid, Julius Caesar, and Aulus Gelius, who knew and Page 92 →read his work unmutilated, back when a more complete canon was in wide circulation. The ancient testimonies almost uniformly exalt his work (“with brilliant language, too intelligent for his city”).53 He was praised for his elegant and graceful character drawing, where only repetitive types have survived; for his realism (“so perfect is his reflexion of life, so fertile is his invention and so masterly his style”) and, according to Aristophanes the Grammarian, “Life and Menander, which are we to call / the copy, pray, and which the original?”), where only improbable plots have survived.54 Pliny the Elder notes that “weighty testimony was given to Menander’s achievements in comedy by the kings of Egypt and Macedon, who sent respectively a navel squadron and an embassy by way of invitation,” while Pliny the Younger, writing of the genius of Vergilius Romanus in the early second century CE, can praise him for writing comedies in imitation of Menander.55 Plutarch lathers it up with a heavy trowel: “For what other reason in truth should a man of parts and erudition be at the pains to frequent the Theatre, but for the sake of Menander only?”56 Horace chides himself for dragging Menander out to the countryside where he retreated to write, and squandering his time instead with Menander’s plays.57 Menander’s “classical” status served as the gold standard for Aulus Gelius, against which Roman imitators invariably paled and, as late as the sixth century (CE), Choricius of Gaza could evoke Menander as a well-known model of harmless comedy.58 And so historically we have consoled ourselves with the notion that perhaps what is preserved of Menander’s corpus is simply, well, not the best, or even representative work of this author, and that some collusion of the sands of Egypt have somehow only returned the mediocre selections of this great writer, the most expendable, while the good bits were preserved in some safer elsewhere that has not (yet, we hope) been recovered. We hope that what we have is something akin to “early work,” like Love’s Labor’s Lost and Two

Gentlemen of Verona, a conclusion every new fragment only continues to uphold. But each new fragment discovered (and the latest find of some four hundred lines belongs to our current century) is frankly as disappointing as the last bit coughed up from Cairo. We must thus pause and ask the impolite and embarrassing Emperor’s Attire question: What if this really is representative of his work? And if yes, then what on earth did they see in Menander that we don’t? In the company of Homer and Sophocles? As this is a rude question, let me begin by crashing into his popularity—I should say, his enormous popularity in the classical world—as bequeathedPage 93 → to us through an exceptionally rich collection of classical sources, texts, and images. Face first. There are more preserved images of Menander than any other classical writer, more than seventy images, in sculpture, painting, medallions, and mosaics.59 The face of Menander has been found across the Mediterranean in panels, frescos, tesserae, and sculpture, few of them contemporary but rather created in the centuries after his own pleasant life expired while he was bathing in the harbor.60 From the outskirts of Antioch (Daphne), the lovely labeled mosaic of Menander, Glycera, and “komedia” (a muse?) adorns a villa built in the last third of the third century CE—a poetic love triangle wonderfully preserved still: the poet, his muse, and his mistress.61 Mosaics of Menander adorn houses in Pompeii and Mytilene and, as discovered recently (2007), four more panels near Daphne (Harbiye, on the Turkish-Syrian border) depicting four scenes from four Menander plays.62 Most recently, a discovered new mosaic, on the remote Roman frontier city of Zeugma, on the Euphrates River in southern Turkey, reveals a beautiful scene of characters from a Menander play, Synaristosae (The Banqueting Ladies). Three ladies sit dining, while two young girls serve. Above them, the name of the once-famous (or at least recognizable) play is broken across the figures. One of the few extant lines from the lost play shares something of the gustatory nature of this pleasant setting. Says one of the ladies, “If someone will give me something more to drink,” while another laments, “That barbarian maid went and carried off from us the wine along with the food trays.”63 Another scene from a Menander play, painted in fresco, is also found at Ephesus, and others are in Mytilene.64 Menander’s famous face on stone busts and tile are found from Athens to Alexandria. A literary mosaic in Trier, Germany, depicts Menander in the lofty company of Homer, Hesiod, and Virgil; a villa in Thuburbo Majus, North Africa, is decorated with two literary figures, Virgil and Menander. Across the panHellenic Mediterranean world, the ubiquitous face of Menander stares out across a familiar dominion. For years, a controversy raged (such as classicists “rage”) over a Roman bust of Menander found in Tarentum, claimed by one camp to be the face of Virgil and contested by the other camp as the face of Menander. Johan Crome, a Virgilian, complied an impressive list of some thirty-eight classical replicas of this (Virgilian) face, while the Menander school scooped up those same thirty-eight replicas by claiming that the bust was copied from the original statue of the comic poet that stood in the theater in Athens.65 Page 94 →Behind the contest, of course, is the unstated notion that the fame (and face) of Menander was on a par with the fame of Virgil and imitated profusely. Aristophanes of Byzantium ranked Menander second only to Homer, while a double herm found outside Rome combines the heads of Menander and Homer in a single monument.66 Fig. 3. Banqueting Ladies mosaic, Zeugma. Source: Zeugmaweb.com. Ephesus, Antioch, and Daphne, in southern Anatolia; Zeugma, in Eastern Anatolia; Mytilene, Pompeii, Tarentum: we are a long way from Athens, geographically and five centuries or more chronologically; and still his name, face, and works are preserved, read, reproduced, and replicated (the triclinium mosaic of the dining ladies was apparently a pattern). One could order an eating scene from Menander for one’s townhouse or country villa dining room on the Euphrates from a mosaic pattern book in the second and third century of the Common Era, and then read the Menander play about eating while eating and see Menander’s image below one’s feet. There are more than twice as many images of Menander extant as of any other classical writer—from a wider variety of media, busts, herms, mosaic, panels, cameos, medallions. His face endured longer than the images of most Roman emperors.67

Likewise his work. He was read in the Roman schools, from early to late, and pirated wholesale for the Roman stage.68 He was sought after, copied, bought, borrowed, pilfered, and consequently preserved well into late antiquity.69 Terence, according to Philostratus, died en route to Athens, seeking more plays of Menander. When Dio Chrysostom set up a curriculum of reading for himself, he chose three poets: Homer, Euripides, and Menander.70 Quintilian thought him a model of elegance, as did Julius Caesar, himself a model of elegance. The first of the two major manuscripts Page 95 →from which the bulk of Menander’s plays are known (the Cario Codex) was collected as late as the fifth century CE. The second, the Bodmer papyrus, the so-called Maxims of Menander (Monostichia), culled from the plays, dates from the third century CE and was still in the schools in the Greek East in the fourth century CE.71 Aelian (third century) thought Menander’s lines could be “taken by the handful.” As late as the fifth century (CE), Johannes Stobaeus, from the Roman province of Stobi (Macedonia Secunda), could still assemble a rich anthology of Menander and Philemon for the instruction of his son, all of which testifies to the lingering availability of Menander in late antiquity.72 My favorite testimony comes from Philostratus, “Love Letters” (c. 200 CE). Trying to guess the nationality of a woman, the would-be lover in the letter easily pegs her as a non-Greek because she does not know the plays of Menander.73 Two contemporaries of Pausanias, Alciphron and Aelian, composed a series of fictitious letters, many of which are derived from the structure, themes, and subjects of New Comedy. Writing in the second Christian century, they, too, were looking back to a world that was modulated out of history. Characters from Menander’s plays, like Knemon from Dyskolos, appear speaking again, translated into the epistolary voice of the misanthropic country farmer, bilious as ever, still hurling clods of earth at trespassers. The cooks, parasites, hetaerae all migrate out of their original context and return in their private correspondence, sharing the imaginary banquets, festivals, and misfortunes that accompanied their imagined world five centuries earlier. Alciphron, in a fit of historical imagination, even penned letters from Menander to Glycera, his famous paramour, and from Glycera to Menander, anxiously discussing the poet’s invitation to carry his plays to Egypt at the request of Ptolemy Soter. It is a bizarre supposition, even for a literary genre (“forged without intent to deceive,” as one editor puts it), not to compose fictive biographical letters for historical figures centuries dead, but to compose letters of the fictive characters of those figures.74 It also reveals to what extent the command of Menander had become part of the Antonine imagination, untethered from history.75 One might argue that Menander’s great appeal—as evidenced by his own preservation in mosaics, statutes, and that greatest of honors, quotation—is itself an index of his great availability in the postclassical world.76 That is, his plays survived in such quantities (“by the handful”) that they could be thrown away, repurposed as mummy wrap, or washed off and written over as Syriac sermons. There were that many of them. So, on the one hand we have his impressive classical stature (“For what reason in fact is it truly worthwhile for an educated man to go to the theatre Page 96 →except to enjoy Menander?”); on the other, the albeit unimpressive fragments of plays, prompting some to conclude it was a great disappointment that the plays were recovered at all.77 Menander’s reputation certainly suffered first by the sizable fragments (Samian recovered between 1897 and 1907), and then the recovery of the first “complete” play (Dyskolos, 1958, still without choruses). “Is that all?” was the unutterable question. Apologists were quick to point out that the comedies were no more repetitious than tragedy, or epic, treating and re-treating their fixed and finite body of myths. Still, comedy, at least complained Antiphanes, “had to invent everything” and so one might expect a little more invention.78 Beginning, as we did, with the enormous reputation that Menander enjoyed in the classical world, the plays were destined to disappoint. But few were prepared for the depth of the disappointment. So we must ask, what did the classical world see in Menander that his fragments do not seem to reveal to us? Why are his plays in these fragments, over the hundreds of other known writers whose hundreds of plays have not survived even in fragments? I find myself here in perfect sympathy with Phrynichus (the grammarian, not the tragedian) when he shook his head and sighed, “I really cannot understand what ails the writers who exalt Menander as they do all over the Greek world.”79 Style aside, what is it about repetitive treatments of cooks, food, slaves, brothel girls of dubious parentage, lost sons, and frugal fathers, that impressed readers like Plutarch, Pliny, and Caesar with such high literary merit? Where is the delicacy of character, the elegance of thought that was praised so enthusiastically by later scholiasts? Or rather one might ask, Why did they praise style and not content?

Or perhaps we should ask the larger question: If comedy’s repurposing was so over-remembered in antiquity, how did the writers of New Comedy remember it? Was the recognition of what they could no longer do part of what they now did? To what extent was Menander aware he was working in a new form, New Comedy (their own distinction), and was that awareness marked by visible excisions of what was no longer possible? That is, was the new genre an act of amnesia or amnesty? Had it forgotten its former role, or remembered to forget? Certainly as Plutarch understood him (Precepts of Statecraft / Aristophanes and Menander), Menander does not raise rebels, nor does he engage in the great game of state. Menander does not practice that ancient Athenian right of parrisia, but is he (and his many colleagues) not-saying with intention? Was the not-saying legible, in the way it was, for example, for his contemporary Euboeus of Paros, famous for his subtle parodies?80 Was he saying through not-saying, or not-saying through saying like his contemporary Page 97 →Aeneas Tacticus, who composed several chapters on secret passwords, signs, and letters for clandestine communication?81 Or like Demosthenes speaking in the 340s of the Theoric Fund? A civic fund had been established sometime in the 350s that provided for each Athenian citizen to attend the theater. This Theoric Fund quickly became a sacred cow of the Assembly and one could, anecdotally, lose one’s life for suggesting that Athens repurpose this money. With the Macedonian threat at the door, Demosthenes argued that “certain monies” must be found to fund the military. “вЂWhat is this?’ someone may say, вЂDo you propose that this money be transferred to the military fund?’ вЂNo by God, I do not propose that. But I do believe that soldiers must be provided, and that there should be a military fund.В .В .В . Whereas you think that somehow you should receive this money for attending festivals.”82 Is Menander speaking like that? Speaking around what everyone knows and no one can say? Does his enduring literary merit reside in everything he cannot say?

Speaking with Food Anyone who picks up a collection of fragments of fourth-century comedy is likely to be struck immediately by the large number of references to the consumption of fish. —James Davidson, Courtesans and Fishcakes Davidson is quite right in his playful observation: our most consistent referent for the theater of the fourth century is about eating (and frankly it doesn’t help to expand the depth of New Comedy that the single most concentrated anthology of preserved fragments comes from a cookbook). The distance between Old Comedy’s clubbing of demagogues and the buffets of red mullet, tuna, and fig sauce is very large. It is one of those gaps in which antiquity abounds, not gaps of barren landscapes and the desolation of flat, unbroken horizons of absent records so much as an abrupt wilderness between two fairly mapped topographies (the late fifth century and the late fourth), each terrain peopled with a certain coherency, but the bordered zone between them utterly incomprehensible, jungled up, where anacondas drip from vines draped over ruins, a little-known land where democracies fell, of which frightening tales were told. Playwrights were cudgeled there (as Dionysius the tyrant did), comic poets were dipped in the sea and drowned, harsh laws were enacted, free speech punished, civic engagement abandoned. Somewhere circa 390–350 BCE there were dragons. Page 98 → If, on the one side, Aristophanes wanted a poet to save the city, across this viney divide Menander seems to want only a cook for his conger eel. It’s the wilderness between that troubles and fascinates. Somewhere the forgetting, the thing that is no longer there, remains for me very present, as it did for so many classical historians who looked back and wrote of Greek theater at this time. What they are no longer saying, by the insistent repetition of not saying, remains for me quite loud. I think it is what Herb Blau had in mind when he wrote, “It is what the text doesn’t say that reveals the deepest scars.”83 What is preserved of New Comedy, of Menander and his contemporaries? Does it represent a swallowing of another sort? Are we asked to read something into the compulsion of food? We look again: it smells fishy. What does all this fish stand in for? Jeffrey Rusten chose for his epigram in his monumental collection of comic

fragments lines from Nicholas Udall that suggest that the looking delivers something: “The wise Poets long time heretofore / Under merry Comedies secrets did declare.”84 And so we look for Menander’s secrets. And look again. In Aristophanes’s Frogs, Dionysus describes his obsessive love for Euripides as an unquenchable craving for food, particularly pea soup. “It’s like that,” he tells Heracles. Is it “like that” for the generation that could not speak without the distance of analogy? Is the compulsion for food a case of digito compesce labellum? The behest to “put one’s fingers to one’s lips”? As Plutarch and Aulus Gellius remind us, Menander was read around the dinner table (we would say), a symposium read, about characters eating, in villas with mosaics on the dining room floor of characters from Menander eating.85 Was all this talk about dining speaking elsewhere? “No one ever escaped after the unjust treatment of a cook,” claims a cook in a fragment of The Peevish Man. Have cooks become the culture’s demagogues, stand-ins for the state’s central figure? Has appetite become the central action, the aphasia of an epicurean citizenry who eat because they cannot speak? I think not. Despite the Lacanian lure to see “what one wishes to see,” I think rather that the surrender was so complete even analogy was abandoned, as I must, and concede that food was just food. “All Greece” may be in arms, but dinner is served, and the fish is heavenly tonight. Whatever prior land lay beyond New Comedy, it was now a terrain of some other past tribe, those earlier people, some older map whose geography was the same but whose culture was utterly distant but vaguely recalled, and on the Menander side of which remained not the coded text that aspired to reclamation of its former voice but, alas, only the quiet acquiescence that theater would stand down from the business of the state, would move into Page 99 →the kitchen, become the stylized and pleasant digestif for the symposium and, in so doing, proliferate into a pan-Hellenic, and later Greco-Roman, export commodity in an entertainment industry that lived on in the schools, the private triclinium, and the public festivals. In the long and troubled misalliance with Macedonia, through Philip, Alexander, and Antipater, when ambassadors—including actors—are shuttling back and forth to define the relationship (combatants, allies, vassals), what little we see of the stage reveals only the enormous distance between stagecraft and statecraft. Actors may be ambassadors for the state, but the theater of Menander seems to have been retired from the great affairs that so characterized the work of Old Comedy. As Demosthenes advised the Athenians if they would not raise an army: “Lower your ambitions and be content to mind your own affairs.”86 In the end, Menander’s is the voice of forgetting: a quiet and retiring voice, standing down from its former service, enjoying the convivial side table of symposium settings, wit and wine; and in forgetting, Menander became the docile and much-admired subject(ed) voice, so praised by Plutarch. Still, my eye continues to look for the winking and the talking through food, and hopes the next fragment winks louder than the last. Reluctant to concede amnesia, I listen still for the voice of amnesty, the voice that remembers what it had forgotten. Menander’s very docility is so unsettling it must surely promise somewhere to recall the clubbing a more weaponized comedy once undertook, or even to recall what it can no longer do: commemorate somehow its own prohibition. Of course, it is unfair to expect a fifth-century subtext from a fourthcentury writer, but still one would hate to leave it so. And so the hope looms always that perhaps new fragments will deliver the longed-for literature for which Menander was so celebrated, the coded, the clever, and the eviscerated invective of his fifth-century predecessors sparkling on.

New Fragments, 2003 Alas, not. Each new fragment delivers only another grumbling, benign cook until the very domesticity begins to strike the reader as a deeply repressed landscape, filled with those who do not, cannot speak. Most recently, from the Vatican library came a palimpsest of a Syriac text from 886 CE, written over the prototext, parts of two plays of Menander. Even his plays, it seems, were parted out, like stones in a theater Page 100 →reused for a church. After five hundred years, a fourth-century Menander text (the scriptio inferior, “inferior content”) was washed off to record Christian sermons in the Syriac language. In 2003, looking for Greek

palimpsests in the Vatican library, Francesco D’Aiuto, from the University of Rome, recognized half of the four hundred subscripto lines as those from a play we already had, The Dyskolos. Of the 108 plays of Menander, we get a duplicate of the only one that is already complete. The other lines came from sides of a new play, now identified as Tithe (The Wet Nurse). The Dyskolos lines confirm the accuracy of the existing text, while the second, whose text has inexplicably yet to be published, only described, revealed a landscape, alas, already familiar.87 Who should we find under Syriac ink but another slave girl with another baby (“perhaps the fruit of an act of violence” is how the child is described by the researcher who brought the story to light).88 The new discovery seemed to arrive as old news—the familiar, benign world of Menander’s Athens, Plutarch’s Athens, everyman’s Athens—exported and embraced all across the Mediterranean, and consequently no man’s Athens. It is a striking feature of a comic world so politically unengaged that one could not, for example, date a play of Menander by any internal textual evidence, so devoid are they of any topicality. The odd references to a festival (The Farmer, The Phantom, The Shield, The Girl from Samos) only evoke a vague milieu of the pan-Hellenic ludic without actually locating it in time and space. It is precisely this imprecision that made the plays so itinerant, so popular, and so irrelevant. The problem here is not that comedy became popular culture and spread across the Mediterranean as part of the template of Hellenistic culture (along with exported theaters, actors, craft guilds, texts, and festivals)—that is its great success—but rather that behind its great success as popular culture comedy was so persistently remembered to be what it no longer was. That it was silenced, that Eupolis was dipped, that the state intervened, remained a vanishing point that never wholly vanished. Its prior political function remained part of its persistently recalled legacy, from Erastothenes and Themistius, to Cicero to Plutarch to Ovid to Aristophanes of Byzantium, Platonius, Aelius Aristides, Photius, Tzetzes, and, though no longer practiced, its former self was not allowed to go quietly into that last good laugh. Neither excised nor exercised, Old Comedy’s clubs were like phantom limbs, ghosting through their amputations, neither present nor wholly absent, unwieldy in both presence and absence. When the Augustan historian Pompeius Trogus turned his attention (indirectly) to the stage of Athens, it was to indict it for this same midcentury modulation. His account testifies to the great attraction of the repurposingPage 101 → of theater, but equally pronounced is his critique that the repurposing seemed to utterly command the attention of the polis (the famous “bread and circus” prognosis to which Juvenal attributed Rome’s diseased descent), and to utterly disengage its citizenry from the political exigencies at hand. The new Theoric Fund (that state subsidy created in the 350s providing for each citizen to attend the theater) was symptomatic of a larger dissipation. According to Trogus, the dissent began after the death of Epaminondas (362): Valor perished among the Athenians. Having lost the man they had learned to imitate, they fell into indolence and sloth. Now the state revenues they had once spent on the army and the fleet were devoted instead to holidays and festivals, and they mingled eagerly with celebrated actors and poets in the theatre, preferring the stage to the military camp and praising those who made verses more highly than those who made policy.89 How the looking away is attributed (Trogus sourced it to the death of Epaminondas) is of less relevance than the looking away that was remembered. The story told of midcentury Athens is not just that the theater was dead as the site of political engagement, but also that its replacement was sloth and indolence, the downfall of Athens, so recalled a first-century historian and his third-century redactor (Justin). And this is the theater that Menander seems to confirm, a pleasant and disengaged stage that depleted the military revenues and sedated its democracy. To the mind of Trogus, just fifty years from the outspoken generation of Aristophanes and Eupolis, the theater of midcentury was remembered as an abettor in the subjugation of Greece. Indeed, in a reference letter from Isocrates to Antipater (dated roughly 340), the elder orator is recommending one Diodotus and his son to the Macedonian court precisely because Diodotus was too outspoken for Athens. “You will find him,” recommended Isocrates, “thoroughly out-spoken.” Isocrates then builds the case that “princes of large mind” should “honor such frankness.” Macedonia might, but Athens wanted nothing to do with Diodotus, where he lost his privilege of citizenship because of his vexing insistence on free speech.90 Critics of the state might be recommended elsewhere, but those who remained celebrated actors over arms, verses over

policy. And so the theater stood down, and it was through this new function that it engineered its great success. Once the critic was expelled from the stage, Greek theaters flourished, and with the expansion of Hellenism underPage 102 → the campaigns of Alexander, theaters became part of the cultural template that proliferated across the Greek East.91 And so flourished Menander, floating gently across the Aegean, across the Mediterranean, to the Lycian coast, the Ionian islands, and inland Anatolia, a long way from Athens. And with him spread his subject matter: the docile voice in the wake of conquest, with its cooks and parasites, country farmers and lost children. But comedy’s originating impulse as didaskalos to the city was retired utterly and remained a thing of the Athenian past. It all must have seemed so distant to the long-lived graybeards like Isocrates looking back from midcentury to the days of Eupolis, Aristophanes, and their unbridled lashings. Playing the gaps here (the missing theatrical record of the fourth century) is indeed a “game of few pieces.” But the impression left behind is a great reorientation, from looking to looking away, from clubs to cocktails, from activism to amnesty. One is always tempted to refuse to accept such reticence from a form inaugurated as a deeply political medium. One thinks of comic writers in great periods—even totalitarian periods—whose laughter found a way to negotiate authority and speak back to power, to inventively preserve its subversion, even smuggle in its critiques in the most dangerous of times (one thinks of the mimes under Nero, for example). Comedy has always excelled at such negotiations. And so we look again (one last time) at Menander, under the rugs, sifting for allegory in the food scraps, the farmer’s mattock, “the salt in the meat”; but look as we may, there does not seem to be much of a subversive presence in Menander, nothing bold or offending, no trace of the old edgy activism, even covert or coded, hardly even an identifiable name to be found. Food, we lamentably (re)conclude, is sadly only about food.92 They eat and fuss, threaten slaves, swindle masters, sort out the free-born girls of unknown parentage, and all marry in the end, with that benign smile in the face of a Greek world ravaged by the campaigns of Alexander: by an army that subjugated the Middle East, carried Greek culture (and actors) to the ends of the earth, and set up Greek colonies in Asia Minor, where it built theaters, suppressed the Lycian language, and no sooner inaugurated Greek festivals than retreated again, unfolding its victories in its aftermath. Menander came of age in a world witnessing massive social and political realignments, but if we are looking to Menander to tell us something of that post-Alexandrine world, we are looking at silence, and silence stares back and eats. So perhaps we are to take these stories at face value and consider their subjects as residents of a real postconflict world, dispossessed, threatened, abused, a world where young women are raped at festivals (The Arbitrants, Page 103 →The Hero, Tithe), become pregnant, and expose the children for shepherds to find—a world of misplaced identities, abducted and adrift, of travelers on a dangerous sea that throws up strangers in strange lands, washed up, slaved up, citizens of some prior circum-Mediterranean elsewhere, vaguely beyond, now brothel slaves who mutter and make do with their lot because that is all that is left to them. The resignation of so many slaves to a life of servitude, the daily indignities, the present threat of bodily injury, the reprieve and occasional manumission—maybe this is the world of 310 BCE, where on a good day one escaped whipping and got something to eat. We will see much the same in Terence, but in Terence the characters (and actors for that matter) really are misplaced slaves from foreign wars, including Terence himself, whose authenticity ghosts through the laughter. In Menander they are Athenians or country demesmen, wherever the comedy is set, but Athenians without a polis, in a place without a past, who move through their trials as if they were inhabitants of some classical elsewhere. They seem to have no memory, certainly no civic memory, and nothing “beyond” them. Certainly if we describe a trajectory from the earliest known tragedy, The Fall of Miletus, with its dangerous excess of memory, to the last preserved comedy, Menander’s Dyskolos, the journey is toward dementia, from amnesty toward perfect amnesia. In the end, it may be that New Comedy is itself a monument of cultural dementia, certainly a monument without willing memory. The plays of Menander do not glance back to Cratinus, Eupolis, and Aristophanes, any more than they recall the glories of an independent Athens and the theater’s former role in it. They share a form (somewhat), but not a genealogy of memory, in the same way they remember, say, tragedy. Characters in

Menandrian fragments may carry on in a tragic vein, and be aware of it; they can recall tragic moments, parody tragic figures (like Auge, in the Arbritrants), even inhabit them temporarily. But they do not reinhabit Old Comedy, nor recall it, and I find this curious when so many later commentators remember exactly this about it.93 Somewhere firewalls went up, and writers of Menander’s generation honored them, made do with the new terms, said nothing offensive, and smiled.94 Tempting as it is to produce a contra punto moment of smuggled subversion (“And yet, and yetВ .В .В .”), there is no new direction to the old narrative of Menander’s peace and success in repurposing and disarming the state’s theater. That serene face may be the face of amnesty, and the great success of the man who stood down and smiled all across the Mediterranean may be the story. What shall we call his face, his plays, his memory, his statues, his celebrity—the cult of Menander? In bas-reliefs and busts, in fictitious Page 104 →letters, the broadcloth world of Menander’s plays that penetrated so deeply into the Mediterranean imagination well into the late-classical world speaks to the great repurposing of theater that occurred somewhere at the opening of the fourth century and continued in that function through the Roman reclamation of the form. The theater and festival circuit expanded, actors and artists on this circuit enjoyed the protection of a guild, the Artists of Dionysus that had at least three headquarters: one in Athens, one in Alexandria, and one in Pergamum. Greek comedy became the most pan-Mediterranean experience in the whole Mediterranean. Its very success lay in honoring the amnesty, in really forgetting, as Plutarch recalled, not the resistance that could get a poet dipped, as later writers fancifully recalled, but the acts of amnesty sloughing toward amnesia. In the end, the most memorable thing about Menander and his brand of New Comedy is his capacity to live so comfortably with the forgetting.

Page 105 →

Five. Unspeakable Histories Terror, Spectacle, and Genocidal Memory on the Roman Stage Let Romans ask, if they want to ask, why I walk in Rome and refuse to think what Romans think.В .В .В . My answer (like the cautious fox refusing a lion’s invitation): “All these footprints frighten me. All go into your den, None come back.” —Horace, Epistles 1.1 Who could endure this monstrous city, and not swallow his wrath? —Juvenal, Satire 1 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his preface to The Gulag Archipelago, described the discovery, in Siberia, of a small school of prehistoric fish frozen in a glaciated subterranean stream. The fish were thought to be tens of thousands of years old, perfectly preserved from the last ice age. The importance of the find was recognized immediately, but while a team of Soviet scientists were quarreling over the direction of the discovery, the prison laborers from the gulag who found the site broke open the ice, thawed the ancient fish, roasted them, and ate them on the spot. Solzhenitsyn, of all people, understood and sympathized with the need to devour history.1 This study lives in exactly such moments: of survivors who endure by swallowing their history, by eating their own memory. It is, in this regard, an excavation of the already consumed. The kinds of atrocities that Solzhenitsyn documented became the bloody signature of the twentieth century, but I want to turn to an earlier, equally brutal period—indeed, one of the earliest recorded genocidal periods of Western history, Rome in the second century (BCE), between the fall of Greece and the fall of Carthage. This was ironically the golden age of Page 106 →Roman comedy, to begin an excavation of genocidal memory buried in a bleak landscape and scarred body-sites of the unhistoried who left few memorials. The historiographical problem is one best posed by Derrida when he succinctly asked: “Is there a history of silence?”2

Genocide: North Africa Even before the walls had fallen and soldiers poured through the city, the invading generals and their priests had already prayed to the gods of the earth and the sky and the underworld to abandon the city and to “fill with fear and terror” those within the walls.3 “Those within the walls,” the North Africans, were unequipped to defend themselves against such a force, and the soldiers—experienced, disciplined, better weaponed, and better fed—broke down the walls and poured through the streets. Their orders were concise: kill everyone, spare no one; and so they slaughtered, indiscriminately, pausing only to loot along the way. Fatalities were never accurately counted. It was once a city of seven hundred thousand. When the soldiers left, it was emptied and razed to the ground. Atrocities were committed as privileges of the victors: rapes, mutilations, cultural desecrations; temples were plundered for their precious metals, priests were murdered for their ornaments.4 Even the earth itself

was assaulted: fields were set ablaze, the structures leveled and systematically burned block by block, for seventeen days. It is the kind of destruction implied in the Greek word holocaust, a total burning. When the ashes cooled, Roman soldiers plowed up the ruins and sowed salt into the earth with the curse that neither crops nor houses would ever rise again. So complete was the destruction of Carthage that it was erased from the map of Africa and left behind no mark of memory but a scarred landscape. The survivors—the prisoners of war, on the brink of starvation—who filed out of the wreckage were shackled and marched off as slaves. Many of these were then redisplayed, first in a triumph to the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus Africanus who executed the destruction, and later in the theater of state as they, the noxii (condemned), ritualistically completed their own eradication as gladiators in the Roman arena.5 The victory games that marked the third and final Punic War lasted for three festive days, during which, for a good laugh, Plautus’s comedy The Carthaginian was remounted, its central characters all displaced Carthaginians, including two young girls stolen and sold into a brothel.6 Just across the strait of Gibraltar in Iberia (Spain), an identical fate befell the northern colony of Carthage, Nova Carthago, at the hands of the same Page 107 →Roman family. Polybius recounted the extermination that had become a standard Roman practice: When Scipio [Africanus] thought the number of those who had entered the city adequate, he dispatched the majority of the troops against those in the city, according to the Roman custom, instructing them to kill anyone they met and to spare no-one, and not to start plundering before the signal was given. The purpose of this Roman custom seems to me to be to instill terror; for one can often see in cities taken by the Romans not only the bodies of human beings, but dogs cut in half and the severed limbs of other animals. On this occasion indeed there was much of this kind to be seen because of the [great] number of people in the city.7 Roman historians, with their themes of pacification, never deployed terms like genocide, even though they considered the Carthaginians an alien race (or people, gens, as they did the Greeks, the Gauls, the Celti-Iberians) and slaughtered and dismembered soldiers and civilians (even women and children) indiscriminately as a routine tactical approach to domination.8 But even to the modern reader, accustomed as we are to the excesses of twentieth-century atrocities, the numbers of casualties accumulated by Roman campaigns during this devastating period remain staggering. Though Donald Kyle has reminded us that where body counts are concerned, classical writers tend to cite numbers symbolically rather than statistically, some numbers are available.9 During one lifetime of Roman expansion (roughly between the destruction of Macedonia in 220 to the destruction of Carthage and Corinth in 146), we have historic records of over 2.5 million casualties, and those counted but a rough estimate of the actual figures. A few examples: when Rome invaded southern Italy to complete its subjugation of the peninsula, in one year Roman forces killed over 100,000 Samnites and marched another 40,000 back, naked, as slaves for public sale. In the Second Punic War, there were 300,000 casualties when Carthage fell at the close of the third war. Less than 50,000 marched out of the destruction into a life of captivity, the only survivors of a city of 700,000. When Corinth fell the same year, all the males were slaughtered, all the women and children were sold into slavery, and the entire city was burned to the ground.10 In Sardinia, in 177, 80,000 were captured or killed in one battle; in Epirus a decade later, 150,000.11 One could extend the death toll in a grisly index from the Iberian Peninsula in the west, where village by village tribal armies who resisted Rome were starved or slaughtered into submission Page 108 →(Appian, Wars of the Romans in Iberia 18–27), to the eastern borders of Spain, where in one campaign all males of military age were killed (Appian [ibid.] 52); to the Rhone Valley, Transalpine Gaul, where in two battles 90,000 Gauls were killed and 10,000 taken prisoner (Polybius, Histories 2.31–33); or the battle at Metaurus, where 56,000 Carthaginians died and 10,000 prisoners were taken (Livy, History of Rome 27.51). And so it went across the Italian peninsula, into Greece, Macedonia, Aetolia, the Aegean, the Greek east (Pergamum), and down to Numidia. Indeed, one could circumscribe the Mediterranean, mapping Roman carnage in a grim census of the dead, the defeated, and the displaced, until one reads the casual in comments like Strabo’s of the city of Delminium, “once a great city, but the Roman commander reduced it to a village and made the plain round about into sheep pasture, because of the unruliness of its inhabitants.”12 Roman historians (Polybius, Suetonius, Livy, Strabo) who knew where their bread was buttered, have preferred to characterize the wars of the second century as retaliations against the unruly, or delivery from tribal tyrannies.13

Nonetheless, it is a chilling fact that within seven decades Rome became the military master of the Mediterranean—statistically speaking, it had subjugated as much as a fifth of the world’s population in one lifetime—and even the Roman historians recognized it was not accomplished through diplomacy.14 What causes the shudder in the recitation of the death toll is not the scope of the brutality so much as the grim regularity of it all. For nearly a century, “Almost every year legions went out and did massive violence to someone, and this regularity gives the phenomenon a pathological character.”15 This road to empire was littered with carnage and held by terror. Here is Diodorus’s casual summation: Once [Rome] held sway over virtually the whole inhabited world, they confirmed their power by terrorism and by the destruction of the most eminent cities. Corinth they razed to the ground, the Macedonians (Perseus for example) they rooted out, they razed Carthage and the Celtibernia city of Numantia, and there were many whom they cowed by terror.16 If terrorism was the harsh voice of empire, equally disturbing was the silence of the vanquished, the survivors whose unhistoried voices were left mute in the wake of conquest; and given the scope of the conquest, Rome’s unhistoried subjects represent a sizable silence—most of it so utterly consumed as to be permanently unrecoverable. Consider the case of the Numantines, pinioned by Scipio and starved out, who resorted to cannibalism, before finally surrendering, Page 109 → an appalling spectacle and looking altogether inhuman, with their bodies unwashed and just as stinking. To their enemies they seemed pitiable because of this; but their faces made them seem terrifying, for they looked at the Romans, in a way which expressed their pride and grief, what they had endured and the consciousness of their cannibalism.17 “Scipio,” Appian continues, “chose fifty of them for his triumph, sold the remainder and destroyed the city.” The remainder. The displaced, the defeated, the enslaved, carried that war memory back to Rome, and their numbers were legion. Slaves were, in Carlin Barton’s apt and ugly phrase, “the refuse of Rome’s wars.”18 They were the thrown-away portion of the empire, the genocidal survivors, the amputated, the castrated, displaced, and expurgated, and they were plentiful—we forget just how plentiful. It was “Rome’s wars of the second century [BCE] which provided slaves in almost unlimited numbers,” writes Michael Crawford.19 Period historians like Strabo describe the practice in fish market terms: “Slaves were easily caught and there was a large and wealthy market not at all far away, Delos, which could receive and dispatch tens of thousands of slaves on the same day”;20 or, in free market terms, slaves exported from Britain would fetch no more than an amphora of wine across the channel in Gallia. One slave for life was worth twentyfive liters of wine.21 Again, a sample of the body count: Scipio’s father, Aemilius Paullus, in his subjugation of Greece, orchestrated a systematic assault on seventy cities in Illyria, and at the close of one efficient campaign, 150,000 people were gathered into slavery, “a maneuver so devastatingly complete that over one hundred years later Strabo could comment that the once-populated land was now a desert.”22 Mummius sold the entire population of Corinth—men, women, and children. Another 50,000 were captured from Carthage; yet another 150,000 captured at Epirus in 167.23 The fortunate of the tribal armies of Spain, who one by one were subjugated to Roman rule, escaped with their lives and ended their days on the Roman auction block. Colenda was one, whom Titus Didius besieged and captured, and after its surrender, he sold the entire city into slavery—men, women, and children. The same Didius, in a fit of bad temper, could just as likely betray the terms of surrender, as he did with the survivors of Lusitania, when he invited them into the garrison to lay down their weapons and then systematically killed every resident of the town.24 If the inventories of misfortune weary the ear, that is exactly the point. When Mattingly, citing Livy and Plutarch,

notes that Caesar’s conquest of Page 110 →Gaul produced over a million Gallic slaves, a million, how are we to pause and fully ingest that figure?25 I’m reminded of Solzhenitsyn’s tired eyes confronting the ledgers of the dead in his own century: “thousands at first, then hundreds of thousands. We divide, we multiply, we sigh, we curse. But still and all, these are just numbers. They overwhelm the mind and then are easily forgotten. And if someday the relatives of those who had been shot were to send one publisher photographs of their executed kin, and an album of those photographs were to be published in several volumes, then just by leafing through them and looking into the extinguished eyes we would learn much that would be valuable for the rest of our lives. Such reading, almost without words, would leave a deep mark on our hearts for all eternity.”26 Fig. 4. Detail from the Column of Marcus Aurelius, Rome. Courtesy Barosaurus Lentus. And in the absence of such albums, what do we have but numbers? Lists of the dead, the displaced, the enslaved, genocide victims and genocide survivors who left no memorials, wrote no histories, carried their scarred selves to the mines of Rome, to the arenas, and disappeared, largely irrecoverably. Rightly does Mattingly ask, “What do we really know of their lives?”27 Among the unhistoried of the defeated, however, was one occupation that might, might have left something behind. Occasionally, the displaced Page 111 →found their way into the theater. For four hundred years, the Roman acting profession was occupied almost exclusively by slaves, and during the expansive centuries, these slaves were largely prisoners of war. The same is true for many of those who wrote for the stage. Every history of Roman theater notes this, but I’m not sure we pause between discussions of architecture, texts, and the degree of Hellenistic influence to feel it, deeply, or how that felt recognition might shape our emotional understanding of Roman theater.28 Not to be impolite, but to note that Terence was a slave, as Margaret Bieber did, between discussions of the facial expressions and gestures of actors, seems ornamental; or, as Manuwald notes of Terence, “He is said to have worked as a slave,” which implies that it was a bad professional choice.29 Most treatments approach the problem by acknowledging his misfortune, but fortunately his intelligence and literary gifts soon won him manumission—not to dwell per se on the unseemly. But if we did dwell on it a moment, I know of no other performance tradition in the long history of performance that would not find the slave status of the profession an uninviting point of entry. When, for example, we note that Livius Andronicus was a Greek slave from Tarentum, a casualty to Roman expansion into Magna Graecia, was he among those who resisted Rome first and made peace later? When we note that first productions were celebrations for the anniversary of the defeat of Carthage in the First Punic War (240 BCE), does his own status matter? He had himself already seen it firsthand, been among the defeated in Tarentum. So what is that celebration like for him? To not know is somehow not the same as to not ask. Plautus was another victim of the same campaign to control the Italian peninsula. Caecilius Statius (ca. 219–168), the comic playwright who first encouraged Terence, was another captured slave from Insubrian Gallia, near Milan. Publius Terentius Afer (Terence) came to Rome as a slave from Carthage.30 And this is where the problem begins. Why the victims of Roman atrocities, when they wrote, when they spoke, speak nothing of their past may share a transhistorical problem of traumatized people anywhere, but I am most interested in the ontological applications of the problem of trauma theory for the theater, as both spectacle of genocide and the burial ground of such horrific memories. Though the texts themselves are compositionally incapable of speaking to such things—these are comedies, after all, performed on state holidays—there are moments of profoundly legible silence that might speak, cavities that betray the trauma behind the text and the horrific histories beneath it. Slice into any Roman comedy of the second century and you find them, behind the running slaves and the senex (old man), behind the inherited masks of Page 112 →Greek New Comedy, the mutae personae (voiceless characters), staring back at us from the shadows of the stage with their unspeakable histories, terrified—I will argue—traumatized. Violent and violated victims, young girls, young men, slaves, kidnapped, castrated, sold to brothels, raped, beaten, stolen again from their owners, silently staring out from the peripheries of the plots of Roman comedy that were staged on the occasions of Roman military victories. The slave, as Winkelmann wrote of the LaocoГ¶n, does not scream, but silently absorbs the pain. But rage, as Seneca reminds us, cannot be hidden.31 One slave, Syncerastus, in Plautus’s Carthaginian bites his tongue in the thick of a curse:

They [the gods] won’t hurt me. But I could make ’em curse him If I had a mind to. Yes. Indeed. I’d blast that blessed miser all to blazes, if I . . . if I . . . if . . . (1062–65)32 It’s the biting of the tongue I’m after here, the swallowed curse of suppressed rage, and the whole history of the speechless whose only mark was their aphasia: the ellipsis that flags an unstoried history of silence.

Mutae Personae Under conditions that tend to annihilate the imagination, a few witnesses survived the atrocities of the century to bear the burden of the memory of the defeated and the dispossessed back as trophies of the victor.33 The silage of their lives, their stories, and voices were ventriloquized to the imperial market of the comic stage (“we victims are victors,” Plautus can claim in a fit of comic revenge in his Casina 1.510). Though the form of Roman comedy was itself circumscribed (by Greek originals, by regulations of content, by the ludic nature of performance), it was nonetheless still composed of victims of the wars of Roman territorial expansion, occasionally very direct victims. In this regard, I think one can fairly ask about the extent to which Roman comedy can be read as documents of repressed terror, as sites of memory of unhistoried and ruined peoples? And in the case of one playwright in particular, Terence, one can delve into his opus for buried memories of the North African genocide. “How can I express the great anger that burns in my fevered liver?” asked Juvenal, who suffered no worse than poverty and exile to Egypt.34 How indeed does one express great anger for a race that is no more? What does one do with such a burden? How does one forget what the survivors had lived through: starvation and cannibalism,Page 113 → the slaughter of cities, surrender, dismemberment, rape, infanticide, suicide, or slavery, year after year, nation after nation, race by raceВ .В .В . What does Rome do with it all? Where is the burial ground of genocidal memory? Fig. 5. Curse tablet, Carthage. University of Colorado, University of Georgia, University of Michigan Excavations in the Circus at Carthage. Photo by S. Carl. As I am speaking of unspeakable things, of buried ira (rage), I want to evoke a Roman model that metaphorically and materially, articulates both burial and rage: curse tablets. Greco-Roman curse tablets have been found by the hundreds, written secretly, venomously, by slaves on lead tablets, or written for them, nailed shut (hence their names, defixiones), and buried because they speak of what cannot be spoken.35 Like voodoo pins of hatred, the tablets call down the wrath of the gods to curse and bind the slave’s master, enemies, sometimes Page 114 →rival lovers; and because they were buried, many have survived.36 They are, in this regard, the antiarchive, surviving because they were never intended to. Here is one, from a slave who inventoried his body that was not even his own to curse and bind his master’s health and wealth: Malcius, belonging to Nicona: [his] eyes, hands, fingers, arms, nails, hair, head, feet, thigh, belly, buttocks, navel, chest, nipples, neck, mouth, cheeks, teeth, lips, chin, eyes, forehead, eyebrows, shoulder blades, shoulders, sinews, bones, merilas[?], belly, penis, shin: in these tablets I bind his income, profit, and health.37 The burial of the slave’s curse seems a uniquely Roman mode of expression for the rage of mutae personae, and an enormously widespread practice, leaving tablets buried in the Roman earth from Bath to Carthage, and developed enough to have its own protocols of cursing and burying, even its own brokers, haruspices who specialized in recording the curses for the illiterate.38 How legible the practice was is unclear, but I suspect more than recorded. There is, for example, a subtly subversive moment in Plautus’s Carthaginian 458–60, in which the slave Milphio recites a similar inventory of his own body as a courtship address to his master’s mistress: “my life, my lips, my eyes, my ears, nose, throat, my bosomВ .В .В .” One wonders if the slave is not rehearsing the familiar trope of a binding curse as well, “signifyin(g),” as it has come to be called, speaking exclusively to the knowing.39 His master seems to acknowledge as much and beats him for it

(490–92). I am fascinated by the image of a thin but enduring subterranean strata of anger running below the texts and triumphal arches, the temporary theaters, and the coliseums of Rome. Buried in the silage of the defeated, an articulate subsoil is littered still with the silent and irrepressible rage of its victims. If excavating for such repressed voices is a kind of historiographical stratigraphy, the first layer removed is the acoustic score of the overvoiced: the annals of the conquerors; the emperors; the sycophants, epitomized by Appian, Plutarch, and Tacitus; or the later Augustan installment, Edward Gibbon’s colonial encomium, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which begins with an overture of accord and unity that is still startling: In the second century of the Christian era the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth and the most civilized portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. The gentle but powerful Page 115 →influences of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence.40 Fig. 6. Actors from the House of the Tragic Poet mosaic, Naples National Archaeological Museum. Photo by Marie Lan-Nguyen. If Gibbon speaks of a unified, dominated, but contented circum-Mediterranean homotopia in his classic treatment of imperial Rome, I look rather to the jagged ruptures, the simmering discontents, the dislocations that encompassed it, supported it; I listen for the broken voices from the dystopia of Rome, the railing Juvenals and Lucians, the slaves of Plautus and Petronius who bite their tongues and swallow their rage, or figures like the dark-complexioned slave dressing the actors in the Herculaneum mosaic (raciallyPage 116 → African, working in Italy), or the African actors working in Mytiline, all those who stand and serve and do not speak of their own displaced histories. We are not likely to know what misfortune brought them to the stages of Rome, or the Roman provincial circuit. They remain historically mute, but that is not the same as being absent. The residue of their displacement can occasionally be heard still in the plots of the plays they serviced. Consider the mutae personae of Terentian comedy like the character of the young Pamphila, in The Eunuch, a free Athenian girl, sixteen, kidnaped by slavers, sold to a brothel, and briefly displayed before buyers and audience alike en route to her new life: “What’s your impression of this little item, fresh from the market?” asks the auctioneer, salaciously. One act later she would be raped by a young patrician, her clothes torn off, her hair ripped out, and then married off to the same rapist, and she never speaks a line.41 But she is not offstage, she is not invisible. Pamphila cries. And it is a deeply poignant, scarred, and ghosting moment. It’s also a moment that Terence replicated in the same tragic sequence in three of his six plays, in which mutae personae, all young women, all stolen into slavery, all raped, all scream in childbirth just offstage, becoming for one moment unmuted, storied, by a pain that rips through the text and lives always just beyond, promising a history it cannot wholly deliver but refuses entirely to deny. In this capacity, Terence may represent the most complex and nuanced voice of the captive and reclaimed.42 Publius Terentius Afer (c. 185–160) was a Carthaginian, born into that brief Pax Romana between the defeat of Hannibal and the final destruction of Carthage, but early in life he became another victim of Rome and was brought to the capital as a slave. Displaced and displayed (“What’s your impression of this little item? ”), the young man was purchased by a Roman senator, Terentius Lacanus; his African identity was erased and Romanized after his new master, Terence. Only his surname and his dark complexion remained to mark with some distant memory his place of origin, Afer.43 He was one of the lucky ones; on the strengths of his merits and talents and, as Suetonius remarks, his good features, Terence earned his manumission and gained an education and a degree of social polish that allowed him to seek patronage in the Scipionic circle—that same wealthy family of generals who had subjugated Greece and Spain to Roman rule, and who would exterminate the Carthaginians.44 Somewhere in the literary society of Scipio Minor, Terence learned to write plays—comic tales of clever slaves borrowed from Greek originals (Menander, Diphilus), plays that had themselves arrived in Rome as part of the war booty from Scipio’s father’s conquest of Macedonia. When rival Page 117 →playwrights accused

Terence of plagiarizing his plots, or that Scipio had ghostwritten the plays, the real irony was that the Greek originals had already been stolen from the Macedonian library. Terence’s literary record offers little information about his own Roman life and nothing of that African life that preceded his conquest. Though Cicero may have claimed in the law court that Roman comedy can function as a “carefully fashioned image of our daily life,” that was the life of the postvanquished. Whatever life preceded it, whatever Carthaginian identity Terence (Afer) might have had, he gave no voice to it on the Roman stage.45 He and his profession were mutae personae and bore no memory of their displacement. Their theater seemed to be constitutionally incapable of remembering its origins in defeats like those of Carthage, Macedonia, Numidia, Gaul.46 Where his voice is most authentic, in the prologues, Terence speaks only of his new profession—the testy, lowlevel poetomachia between rival playwrights who would sabotage his career. It is what Terence and his class do not write that interests me most—the acoustic absence, the silence of North Africa that never finds expression in the canon of his work and never wholly retreats. In this regard Terence reads like a palimpsest, a text that has been erased and overwritten.47 If there is a repressed terror to Roman comedy, it lies in its aphasia, in its inability to speak the horrors, in the trauma of the text that is deeply scarred. The image of the palimpsest here is an apt one: the slaves of Roman comedy are characters without a past, and the playwrights are slaves without a memory; both strive to elide the atrocity that brought them to that ludic moment in Rome.48 Both rewrite themselves; both swallow their own history. They are, for the most part, completely successful at it. Still, occasionally one finds moments even in palimpsests when the original voice leaks through, when the tongue of the text seems to struggle against the mouth of it and betrays a reflexive rasp of old pain, a brief, nearly inaudible eruption of casual cruelty and buried ira that lived just outside the world of the play, just beyond. Occasionally one can find cavities of trauma that seem to hemorrhage and startle the reader with a sound of something brutal, just out of reach. One such moment is preserved in Terence’s play The Eunuch, when Parmeno, a slave, to secure his master’s love interest, plays an auctioneer selling other slaves, including his own master, Chaerea, who dresses as a eunuch. A small but complicated moment of display follows when two “slaves” are trotted out for the “buyer”—a military man—Thraso and his parasite. It is, in essence, both a representation and a parody of a slave market in which prisoners and victims of some foreign war stand on the block for the perusal of the soldier: Page 118 → Parmeno: Send that pair. Out on the double. You first, right this way.—Direct from darkest Ethiopia! Thraso: Three minae. Gnatho: At most. Pure schlock. Parmeno: Hey Dorus! Where are you? [Chaerea appears dressed as a Eunuch] Over here. Now there, I submit, is a eunuch! Kindly note the thoroughbred features, the flawless freshnessВ .В .В . Thraso: Damnation, Handsome beast. Parmeno: Well, Gnatho, any observations? No faults to pick at? Thraso? How about you?—The ultimate accolade: Silence. Inspect him, please. Examine his literature. Music. Athletics. Guaranteed Performance in all the pursuits deemed fit and proper for a well-brought up young gentleman.

Thraso: Know a pursuit I wouldn’t mind trying with him. If forced, of course. Or even sober.49 These are slaves, victims of war, made unhuman (“handsome beast”), like Terence, who stood himself as a young boy on such a display where his “literature” was examined before he was purchased and learned to write of slaves who inspired parodies of Roman soldiers (milites) to fantasies of buggery. The boy on display is another parody, thought to be a eunuch, which reminds us that castration was so common that the eunuch had its own stage costume, but was actually a freeman playing at slavery. Indeed, the comic energy, as well as devices of the play are parodies of the same castration, rape, and captivity that was the lived experience of the actors and writers of such remarkable documents.50 The laughter—where there is laughter—requires the erasure of war memory, for actor, writer, troupe and audience alike. The past conquest is elided to elicit the present laughter, except for the Ethiopian girl, who stands on the block for the entirety of the scene, mute. She and her history are quickly dismissed at “three minae.” Yet she remains onstage, on the block, reminding those who look that she and those like her are so legion that they have left her without worth.51 Chaerea (the eunuch) is only playing at slavery, nor is he a eunuch, as he later violently demonstrates. His body bears no scarred memory of the vanquished. Yet it is he, not the Ethiopian, from whom, in an imagined voice, the buried ira erupts in a vendetta of the victimized: “Place me inside [the brothel],” he tells his slave, “to pay them back, to victimize them as they do us.” Us? Chaerea is a young and privileged free-born Athenian playboy, slumming at slavery to get sex, who rages as if he were the castratedPage 119 → slave who cannot, or the Ethiopian girl who does not. Us? One finds this kind of displacement in Terence, where the venom is authentic, but the voicing is not. When Chaerea does succeed in entering the brothel, his first act is to victimize, to violently rape Pamphila (the Greek juridical term hubris). He later shares his “conquest” with his friend: Chaerea: Meantime, the girl fell asleep. I sneaked a sideways peek, through the fan, like this. I took a careful look around. The coast was clear. I locked the door. Antipho: Then what? Chaerea: Then what, you moron? Antipho: That’s me. Chaerea: A chance like this, no matter how short—do you think I’d miss it? Temptation, aspiration, surprise, and passion all mixed in one? Just what do you think I am, a eunuch? It is the maid at the brothel, another slave, who discloses the real brutality of the assault: Pythias: When he’d had his fun with the girl, did he stop? Oh, no—atrocity wasn’t enough for him. He shredded her dress and ripped out her hair in handfuls! .В .В .В Phaedria: What do you mean? Pythias: What do I mean? .В .В .В Your eunuch raped our virgin! Where does this anger come from, this eruption beyond lust, to violate, victimize, tear dresses, and rip out hair? Where does that anger come from? From the character of the free-born and privileged playboy? Or the manumitted Carthaginian slave Terence? Everything we know about patterns of abuse suggests the latter. It is as if a text behind the text suddenly, briefly betrays the repressed rage of captivity, the memory of atrocity, and the rage erupts to victimize another victim. Even Chaerea seems to be at a loss to account for it. When confronted with the rape, Chaerea can only answer lamely: Thais: What have you done? Chaerea: It’s nothing really.

Pythias: Nothing really? That’s too much! You raped a freeborn Athenian virgin—you call that nothing really? Chaerea: I thought she was one of us slaves.52 Page 120 → It would remind us of Cicero’s casual comment that the rape of an actress was hardly a crime at all, in that she was a slave, were it not that neither of the two are really slaves, but both were created by one who really was, and played by two who really were, and such eruptions momentarily expose the extent of the damage. In a final parody of violence, Chaerea is threatened with the penalty of his crime: castration. “Ugly, disgusting business,” says Pythias. And though he has a nervous hour, in the end Chaerea is exonerated of his assault; he is scared but unscarred, and his only punishment is to marry Pamphila. Her thoughts on the arrangement remain mute. The Punic family is reconvened at the close of the play: father, daughters, nephew, slaves, and all going back to Carthage, except it had just been razed to the charred and salted ground and there was no Carthage to return to. It’s a chilling insight into Roman humor, but the play on that occasion was such a hit that Suetonius tells us that it “was even acted twice in the same day [a unique honor], and earned more money than any previous comedy of any writer, namely eight thousand sesterces.”53 I am not suggesting that these moments are compositional (borrowed from Menander or invented originally). I’m suggesting that it isn’t even part of Terence’s plan for the comedy, coded or otherwise, but rather that they represent a rage that lived beyond a text too barren for vengeance, a kind of curse tablet, buried and leaching into the text, hemorrhaging out in unaccountable moments from the other side. Many of Terence’s plays seem to have such small perforations, holes that leak out pain and betray the memory of some traumatized past. They are, in this regard, deeply scarred documents. Act 2 of Adelphoe (The Brothers) opens with an assault on a slave dealer by a slave so his master can steal a girl from him. Pamphila is also the girl’s name, another muta persona, stolen into captivity. She stands watching the assault, which begins as a diversion but quickly gets out of hand, and becomes, even in the text, a brutal beating that shocks the muta persona into involuntary cries. When the bloodied, pummeled slaver himself cries out for help, Aeschinus speaks to the girl: “Be calm; stand right there for a minute. What are you looking back for?” (155). What, indeed, is she looking back at? Except that she has seen this moment before. She is being dragged out of one house and into another, stolen from a man who stole her, moved from one captivity to the next. And there she stands, mute, immobile, petrified, paralyzed, looking elsewhere, while the slaver is beaten, as if she is weighing which captivity to prefer. Productions might go a long way to recover this trauma, but they do so at the utter demise of the comedic. To recognize the unsettling moments Page 121 →that erupt terrified voices from mutae personae is to evaporate the humor from the canon of Roman comedy. But to ignore it is to consign away the violent history that preceded those ludic occasions. And this is the heart of the problem: how to exhume a history that is largely unacknowledged by the survivors on a stage constitutionally incapable of remembering it. Against the tomes of Livy, of Tacitus, against the annals of the emperors, the rise of Rome, can we offer only the countertext of buried curses, repressed rage, and nearly inaudible offstage cries of slaves? Is that the best that playwrights can offer to recover anything of what Mattingly aptly called “the lost social memories of subjected peoples?”54 What kind of history is that? A vital one.

History’s Disappearances When Clifford Geertz noted that in Balinese society, the owner of the victorious fighting cock eats the remains of the loser (Interpretation of Cultures, 7), the event represented the old historiographic problem of history’s disappearances. The Romans were no different in this regard; they consumed their victims, one way or another. The erasure of the vanquished was a Roman preoccupation into which even the vanquished were drawn. Occasionally one can glimpse something of the poignancy and the agency of the subjugated. But theirs was a

history of a prior elsewhere, and like that of Timagenes, the Roman historian who refused to praise the exploits of Caesar and had his works consigned to flames, history’s elsewhere is too often the ashbin.55 Driven by a impossible desire to reconcile the atrocities of the past, victors and vanquished, we try to make all these disappearances—what de Certeau called “all these zones of silence”—more audible, more legible, less opaque, by looking below, beyond, beneath, running fingers over the rough edges, prying open the ellipses and perforations, listening for the offstage voices crying with a pain that finds no text, looking for the ruptures that betray an opening into the unstoried histories of silence. Timagenes and Terence and memories of Carthage are irrecoverable, but the exigencies that guaranteed their disappearance are not. Their marks have remained. We recognize the process elsewhere: at so many checkpoints at so many border crossings (more zones of silence), there was always the exchange of official documents—the password, the passport, the papers—but quite often what in fact allowed the transaction was the folded hundred-franc note slipped in the passport, and what passed was buried in the papers. Recognizing that much of history transpires through the unofficial, clandestine, Page 122 →buried, and undocumentable channels prepares us to begin to look for such. The challenge then becomes less of an interrogation of known sources than an excavation of the unsourced. Herodotus reminds us of the importance of the sub rosa (the message written below the text) in his account of the exiled Spartan Demaratus, who caught wind of the plan for a Persian invasion of Sparta and tried to alert his city: As the danger of discovery was great, there was only one way in which he could contrive to get the message through: this was by scraping the wax off a pair of wooden folding tablets, writing on the wood underneath what Xerxes intended to do [invade], and then covering the messages over with wax again. In this way the tablets, being apparently blank, would cause no trouble with the guards along the road.56 The fourth century (BCE) military writer Aeneas Tacticus catalogs no less than thirty-one classical methods for concealing messages and smuggling secrets across lines.57 I find myself looking for the tablets that are apparently blank, in the hopes that beneath them, behind them, just beyond them, is written the imperative missive. Of the two, it is the words beneath the wax that are the more indelible and infinitely more urgent. “I continue to be troubled,” wrote Paul Ricoeur, “by the unsettling spectacle offered by an excess of memory here, and an excess of forgetting elsewhere.”58 I consider the idea of a more just allotment of memory a historiographical mandate of the highest order.

Page 123 →

Six. Mapping Rome Becoming Togati The whole landscape a manuscript We had lost the skill to read, A part of our past disinherited; But fumbled like a blind man Along the fingertips of instinct. In Cabin and field, they still Speak the old tongue. You may greet no one. To grow a second tongue, as harsh a humiliation as twice to be born.1 So wrote the Irish-American poet John Montague of the familiar loss of culture under Great Britain’s empire, where language and landscape fell waste to a violent overmapping of identity, whose poignant erasure was itself richly preserved in plays, poems, and songs. Nothing in Celtic history is remembered quite so vigorously as its own disappearance. I want to evoke an earlier erasure that left no archive but a lost and illegible landscape, to consider the theater’s role in the forgetting and refashioning of identity (this grafted tongue) in the wake of the Roman conquest. Not to the dying Gaul did this new order appeal, whose images of self-slaughter ennobled his extirpation, but to all those who survived—the surrendered, the widowed, the conquered—who limped into the new, imperial future and carried with them what they could of the old ways. The long reorientation that followed—once called “civilizing” but now variously assigned, troubled, and reassigned as “Romanizing”—has become something of a cottage industry in Roman studies across a host of fields, with a growing corpus of nuanced readings of the piecemeal (rather than wholesale) negotiated adoption of Roman culture and the laminated identities that both Page 124 →assimilated and resisted.2 The theater’s role in this grafting of second tongues (becoming Roman) has yet to be fully probed, largely because most fieldwork is based in the materiality of culture, and performance evidence in the provinces is slight indeed. But its absence is not utterly illegible. Remains abide. Beyond the well-mapped and documented ruinous bodies of Roman theaters, there is the nature of its presence—one I would call a prescribed presence, a desired presence, and often in places one would not expect theater, arriving as it did, early and purposefully, which compels me to think the Roman provincial theater was not an innocent piece of architecture in the new imperial grid.3 Indeed, in many cases, where theaters were erected over prior sanctuaries, shrines, or synagogues and accessorized with a new Roman temple, within a decade of the conquest, with monumental trophies of the defeated on display, content aside, I think we can speak of such spaces as “weaponized” architecture. A small but familiar example comes to mind.

It isn’t there anymore, but kneeling next to the emperor, or perhaps just under the emperor’s raised left foot on the famous statue in the scaenae frons (back wall of the stage) of the Roman theater in Orange (Aurasio), modern-day France, was once the companion statue of a subjugated Gaul, disarmed and surrendered, the abject image of defeat ten meters above the stage floor for all who gathered in that theater to see, a trophy of Rome’s triumph over the last Gallic revolt, and that defeated Gaul was likely carved by (defeated) Gallic stonemasons, as were similar images on the triumphal arch of that town. That figure, now gone, was described by the first modern archaeologist who excavated the site of the cavea, Jules FormigГ©: “Above the cornice of the principal order was a dedication of the theater, surmounted by the colossal statue of Augustus, in a niche, with a captive on bended knee at his feet.”4 I think we are safe to assume the captive was a Gaul because the figures from two nearby triumphal arches, the triple arch just north of the theater at Orange and its companion arch at Carpentras, both generously document the original defeat of the Gauls and their subsequent suppression following the last rebellion. The arches and the emperor’s statue in the theater remind us that the defeated lived for generations among the monumental trophies of their own defeat, gradually assimilating, drifting to Romanness, accommodating their new hybridic identities as Gallo-Romans, channeling a traditional warrior culture into the ranks or support service of a Roman legion that had eradicated their way of life; at best, they elided the rupture, perhaps even thriving, but were always marked as the defeated.5 Did the survivors of the Gallic wars, if they ever gathered at a new Roman theater like Orange, or any of the other 117 Roman theaters in Gallia, watch Page 125 →their own subjugation playing out and, like the masons who carved the images, participate in staging that narrative? Or is the missing Gaul in the theater the perfect metaphor of the subjugated who resisted representation, or one that was thoroughly erased? Fig. 7. Detail from arch, “Emperor” at Orange. Photo by the author.

The Map of Scars If the postconquest landscape was indeed for the survivors an estranged text, there are few guides less useful than maps for reading it. Maps of the growth of the Roman Empire are frequently evoked to measure the scale of the imperial project. Some, like the sequence of stone maps of Roman expansion that line the Via dei Fori Imperiali in Rome are themselves monumental blueprints of more than one imperial ambition. The narrative of such maps, the century-by-century crawling cancerous consumption of the Mediterranean that marks Rome’s expansion, can account for the geography of the world, but never the world of the world, as legion by legion this appetite called Rome swelled out and over, blanketing their dominion over the circum-Mediterranean collective of prior peoples to become a nation the size of forty nations. Like Jules FormigГ© at Orange, such maps hoist Page 126 →only the emperor into visibility. I want a different sort of map. I want a map I have never seen. I’m not sure it has ever been made. It is certainly not the maps in figure 8. Rather, it is a map of what is below those maps, the sub rosa of transhistorical geography. I want a map with scars, because that is the only way to read a traumatized landscape. How could one, for example, walk the streets of the refounded Carthage—built over the necropolis of the prior destroyed site, or Xanthos, in Lycia, whose population burned their own acropolis and committed mass suicide rather than surrender their city—and not see that blooded history somehow on a map?6 How can maps archive the prior lives of land, scribing and legibly overscribing the pre- and postimperial narratives of their troubled space? Fig. 8. Mussolini’s maps, Via dei Fori Imperiali. Courtesy Dan Kamminga. Landscape, too, must wear its pain; cities have tales to tell, and some of them are bloody. And to be fair, sites like Carthage, Xanthos, or for that matter Gallic tribal lands are layered with successive destructions and reconstructions, to which Rome was a latecomer to the long history of Iron Age carnage. Still, Rome’s overmapping was deeper, far more enduring Page 127 →than, say, that of the Persians who destroyed Miletus, or of the Iceni who dismantled Camulodinum and Londinium (modern-day Colchester and London, respectively), scattering the stones, unbuilding without rebuilding.7 On a map of scars, Rome’s presence was more monumental than others, in the scope of its destruction first, then in the scale of its building up, even in the endurance of the buildings and then the ruins of the buildings. Conceptually, for the three installments on this triptych on Rome, I will be working with a map of three layers: the pre-Roman, the Roman, and the post-Roman,

stacked somewhat transparently, so that we can look through the layered landscape to its prior footprint, the way that old Roman roads are still sometimes visible from the air, slicing across rural farmland in England and elsewhere, or the way that Roman dig sites are exposed and glassed-over beneath the pavement of modern Vienna.8 It’s the looking through that I’m after. The middle tier of such a map would be the most familiar. It is the map of the Roman Empire inhaling: all the cities, coloniae (settlements), municipia (towns), cantonal capitals, forts, and permanent camps of Rome at the height of its occupied geography; two hundred thousand miles of Roman roads connecting stone cities, ports, harbors, waterways, and aqueducts remodeling the landscape, ordering (and claiming) the land and coast, in civic sites and between sites, as Romans understood it.9 There are close to fifteen hundred sites on this map, maybe hundreds more: some no more than supply depots for armies on the march, others settled oppida (tribal centers), municipia, hubs of regional administration and, of these, perhaps a quarter were large enough to host Roman theaters, and I suspect many more hosted performances without theaters. Most of the theaters were erected within a single century, perhaps one hundred or more within the reign of Augustus. The ruins of more than three hundred of these Roman theaters remain, but many more are lost to their subsequent overmappings (the third layer) that recycled good stones into defensive walls, abbeys, and churches in the generations after Rome evacuated and the now un-Romaned, the sub-Roman, set aside his toga and Latin and stepped back into his prior generational identity.10 Below this middle layer, an earlier map would display the prior topography of a pre-Roman world, before conquest and centuriation, with its tribal centers, what Julius Caesar called oppida, towns, forts, trading ports, villages, fields marked by territorial divisions, and all the contested border zones, as the geography was understood prior to the conquest. Such a map might note the regional identities, languages, and the genus of the peoples as they called themselves prior to their Romanization. It might note the Page 128 →major trading centers and the regions that produced the goods of these economies, meeting places, sacred places, shrines, burial sites, common places, border zones, private zones, memorial zones, and migratory patterns in, through, and between these zones. It would be closer to what the inhabitants saw of their land.11 The conversation between the maps would display the disruptions, the reclamations, the rough overmapping of culture on culture, the gentle seepages, the jagged appropriations in which, through which geography is repurposed: temples built over sacred sites, marble baths built over springs, theaters over synagogues. In refounded Carthage, the new veteran’s theater and odeon were built on top of the old Punic necropolis, singing and laughing on the very graves of the dead Carthaginians. Herod, in a fit of Romanization, converted a synagogue into a small theater at Caesarea, a town that was itself renamed after the Jewish Wars defeated the resistance.12 One of the oddities of Roman Gaul that I’m not sure we’ve fully unpacked was the practice of locating theaters and Roman theater-temples over rural shrines.13 I’m reminded of Mary Pratt’s notion of how early modern colonialism worked: that universals have a history, and that history involves early on “the destruction of competing systems of significance and values.”14 Were theaters over shrines not a quiet transfer of the sacred, but a pleasant deception for destroying prior culture? One particularly violent example was the extirpation of the Druids on Mona Island (off the Isle of Anglesey), of which Tacitus writes: “The religious groves dedicated to superstition and barbarous rites, were leveled to the ground, and a garrison established to retain it in subjection.”15 A map of scars would show us the spaces where memory was buried, and the overmapping would carry still the ghosts of the prior space, like the laminated identities of those who moved in them. The third layer of the map is the post-Roman, marking the new settlements that emerged on, over, or against the Roman past, reclaiming a prior landscape or, in a wave of post-Roman vandals, replacing one conquest with another. On this map can be seen the repurposing of Roman architecture: temples pulled down, theaters dismantled, like the stones from the theater of Verulamium, carted up the hill to build the abbey tower of the new church of St. Albans, in the new town, or the new Christian church in Aphrodisias built over the Roman temple of the namesake goddess whose name was retired. On this level of the map, many of the theater sites are now quarries, whose squared-off seats and column drums now are pushed longways into defensive walls, their orchestras become livestock pens, even landfills. Looking at the three tiers of a troubled and unstable landscape, I’m reminded of Franco Moretti’s question about maps: What exactlyPage 129 → do maps do that

cannot be done with words?16 Collectively, such a map would be a legible palimpsest of displacements, in which the Roman world is viewed through the pre- and postiterations of the landscape; that is to say, Rome as a process through which imperial ideology and the topographies of power are enacted, disenacted, and rendered visible. I am most fascinated by the dialogue between the layers where the friction resides, where the chatter is most audible, the palimpsest moments when the script and the subscript create a sort of weirdly coherent bilingual exchange, where remappings remain incomplete because of the persistent presence of the legible prior, briefly and unpeaceably cohabiting a shared landscape. The purpose-built new “Roman model city,” the Colonia Italica erected by Hadrian just to the north of the earlier city, in part replaced the prior but did not erase it. Rather, the new installment on empire created a flyway between zones of identities, like the refounded Carthage over the prior site, and such zones should make for chatty maps. One poignant passage in the text of that long colonial moment is particularly vexing: it is not the moment of first contact, per se, the intertribal/inter-Roman trader in their first exchange, or even the conflict that followed, but rather afterward, when Roman victors on expanding border campaigns met the prior landscape-as-holdings, the prior peoples-as-subjects, and overwrote them with an imperial grid, reordering landscape and identity, and all that was transacted in the radical realignment that followed, that moment of surprise when the prior population found themselves suddenly “Roman.” This realignment may have played out over many decades, or in the slave chain in the aftermath of a single defeat, but the greatest changes to both landscape and their residents belonged to the first generation of contact, those preRoman others who met, resisted, battled, lost, survived, and, to the degree that facilitated survival, assimilated, and it is here that we see Roman theaters in the provinces at their own most alien position, their most prolific, and their most potent. It is both the potent and the alien nature of the theater as a staging depot of Romanizing, for refashioning the pre-Roman, and the grafting over the prior identity that I turn to next.

Weaponizing Theater In his novella The Hunters of Euboea, Dio Chrysostom describes exactly this moment that must have been a very familiar terror in its day: a resident of the precontact past met for the first time the immensity, the authority (dare I say, the “shock and awe”?) of the Roman Empire. Somewhere, anywhere, Page 130 →over a thousandmile circum-Mediterranean geography, a provincial, native-born but newly colonized resident on some frontier of the empire encountered the ordered and severe face of Roman architecture for the first time, and with it the force of the monumental shaping idea of Rome as a distant imperial center to which they now belonged. Somewhere, in that first colonial moment, some displaced trader, hunter, villager, POW, slave, Bedouin, some pre-Roman, first met the monumentality of “Rome,” either in the capital itself or in the ordered simulacrum of a provincial hub. Greg Woolf, documenting the cultural changes in Gaul after the conquest, very usefully imagines a young Gaul growing up in an “Iron-age farmstead,” “built of posts, wattle and daub,” with little contact with even basic Roman manufactured goods, encountering and perhaps surviving the wars. If he lived into his maturity, he would have seen the foundation and construction of the Roman provincial hub of Augustodonum and innumerable other newly founded Roman cities with mixed populations of Romanized veterans and the surviving natives.17 It is, I think, exactly the image to account for the generational rupture that I want to hold in mind. As the empire expanded, military outposts and staging depots became permanent settlements. With dizzying speed (in some cases within a single lifetime), auxiliary forts became walled garrisons became chartered Roman towns; towns became regional hubs, Roman governors connected the hubs with Roman supply roads, watered them with Roman aqueducts, and imposed upon these frontier coloniae the template architecture that would come to stand for this thing called “Rome,” laid out on the familiar grid of empire: barracks, forum, temples, baths, theaters, villas.18 The uniform geometry of a Roman camp overscribed the prior landscape in the wake of conquest—with its parallel drove-roads, waterways, intersecting street grids—the way that agriculture remaps the hunter’s terrain, ordering the wild, the forested, the fields in the new and symmetrical domestication. This could be an overmapping of cities over living cities, or cities over former cities (Carthage over Carthage)—new Roman divisions and new Roman roads breaking up old “tribal confederations.” In extreme cases, like Narbonne, Gaul, Roman engineers utterly transformed the landscape itself, refashioning a swampy Rhone-side trading station into a deep-water port, draining and dredging the marsh, diverting the Aude River several miles to the south, and emptying it into new artificial lagoons by the new harbor of this new Roman depot.19

In many cases, traditional territorial boundaries were comprehensively rewritten; civic and social divisions grafted over indigenous topographies erased and remapped with a scale that is still difficult to comprehend. In Page 131 →some cases, even the introduction of urbanism was a radical realignment. Caesar’s familiar opening (“Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres”) is as much a reference to the new organizational overprint of empire on topography, what Potter and Johns have (ironically?) termed “landscape management,” even as it describes the cultures to be replaced.20 But it gestures as well to the border zones of the new hybridic identities that followed the conquest of three distinct cultures (in language, customs, and laws).21 Trajan’s column documents many moments of this overmapping, including a small image of Trajan leading Dacians to a Roman sacrifice in front of a new stone theater somewhere up on the Danube.22 Though the cultural and commercial interactions between Rome and the larger world were gradual as a point of contact, at the point of conquest it was one generation that saw the full weight of the “Romanizing” force that would indelibly mark the separation between past practices and present assimilation. Among the accomplishments of Augustus recorded on his cursus is the profoundly understated line that accounts for a massive cultural shift in Gaul and Iberia (that is, half of western Europe): “I successfully organized these provinces.”23 This process of folding into empire, from first conquest under Julius Caesar to the organized Roman territories under Augustus, was a dizzying realignment of identity that occurred largely within a single lifetime.24 Tacitus, who may have been himself a Gaul, documents this process in Britain in which the sociogeography was radically remodeled: “That part of Britain nearest to us was gradually shaped into a province and was given a colonia of veterans as well. Certain states were granted to Cogidumnus (Togodumnus) as king: he remained most loyal up to the time I can myself remember.”25 The new borders, new boundaries, Roman urbanism and, with great alacrity, Roman architecture utterly remapped the circum-Mediterranean, then the European world, into a Roman culture-scape—if not uniform, certainly recognizable from Alexandria to Arlete. As Roman towns were often mapped over villages, forts, fields, or sanctuaries of the conquered, the originals were both retained and replaced by a rigid but thinly laminated Roman layer. How much of that original was smudged into illegibility? What remained legible a generation out, what prior culture ghosted on?26 In the aftermath of that first contact moment, mixed populations of Romans (themselves ethnically diverse recruits from a prior elsewhere) and colonized natives moved through two spaces, the newly familiar and the newly estranged. And although debates ought to continue on what exactly constitutes “Romanizing” where identity is concerned, Roman conquest certainly differed from intertribal conquests by its sheer scale and endurance.27Page 132 → Land by the thousands of hectares was appropriated; conquered cities were renamed (Jerusalem became Aelia Capitolina) and refounded, oppida (towns) became coloniae (cities), sharing sites and mongrel identities, a hybridity of old and new cohabiting (uneasily?) in the stacked sites of past and present.28 This process has been traced in myriad ways (epigraphical, inscriptional; in material culture, market culture, literary culture, and religious rituals) from North Africa to Roman Britain; but beyond the slow accretion of the new culture (what Woolf has summarized as “joining the insiders”), or the long assimilation (cultural diglossia becoming bilingual), at the core it remains one generation in the intersection who had known both, who had known the landscape prior to the Conquista and the Romanizing overmapping.29 This is exactly the moment that the first-century writer Dio Chrysostom described, this somewhat terrifying and disorienting moment, when an indigenous stranger, a man from the woods who had nothing “but his long hair and a hut of very strong timbers” (when “hut,” Vitruvius reminds us, connoted “primitive”), was discovered by chance and arrested for not paying his taxes to an imperial power of which he was blithely unaware. He was carried to the new Roman outpost and displayed as a criminal before magistrates and populace who had gathered at a structure he had never seen before: a theater. He described his horrifying first experience in the city: This is what I saw. It is a great crowd of people shut into the same place and a frightening roar and shouting; I thought they were all fighting with one another. Well, this man brought me before certain magistrates and said with a laugh, “This is the fellow you sent me for. He has nothing but his long hair and a hut of very strong timbers.” The magistrates strode to the theatre, and I with them. The theatre is a sort of hollow valley, not, however, straight up and down, but half round. It is not a natural formation, but built of stones. You are probably laughing at me for explaining what you know

perfectly well. At first the crowd spent a long time attending to other business. They kept shouting, sometimes amiably and with good temper, when they wished to applaud, but sometimes angrily and in bad temper. Their angry fits were awful. The people they shouted at were terrified; some of them ran around begging mercy and others flung their cloaks off for fear. Once I myself was almost knocked Page 133 →over by the shouting: it was as if a tidal wave or clap of thunder had broken over me. There, in that noisy, unnatural space, the stranger in deerskin told his rural tale, won the sympathies of the crowd, and accepted the verdict of the Assembly: a gift of a new tunic and cloak, also displayed before the people gathered there in the theater.30 Such experiences must have played out numerous times, in many regions. In the gentle fiction of Dio Chrysostom, citizenship is conferred with the tunic and cloak, and apart from the disorienting culture shock of a sudden intense immersion into Roman urbanity, the stranger is absorbed into empire with relatively minimal discomfort. The wild and unordered body-site of the deer hunter is overscribed with Roman dress and remapped, and that mapping occurred as a public act, before spectators in the theater that consumed its unmarked. Citizenship was made spectacular by the hollow valley of the theater. The deer hunter may have been released and even rewarded, but he was marked nonetheless, and his landscape was, from that moment on, indelibly altered, indelibly another’s. In other historical accounts, the encounter of the conquered and the theater is first a terrifying unmapping, a stripping of prior culture, and a violent display of the naked un-Romanized. Josephus recounts just such episodes against the Jews in Roman Judea who resisted the unmarking and remarking of citizenship, and these, too, occurred in the theater: “Time and time again ere now the sight has been witnessed of prisoners enduring tortures and death in every form in the theatre, rather than utter[ing] a single word against their laws.”31 In one such event, in Alexandria, thirty-eight members of the Jewish council were marched into the theater, put upon the stage, forced to participate in an interlude of music, then flogged before the crowds while captured Jewish women were made to eat pork.32 Herod, the client king who built the theaters in Judea, may be praised for introducing “large scale public spectacles and competitions into the Roman East, revolutionizing the recreational habits of the indigenous populations,” as Zeev Weiss recently put it, but I think it is fair to speak of such harsh stagings of an assimilationist agenda as a weaponization of theater, in which, through which, spectacles of torture reshape its spectators.33 One large part of the potency of the theater-weapon was its very introduction, being the most incomprehensible of all Roman buildings. Bicultural townships in sites like Gaul were not unique to Rome, but building theaters there was. Unlike, say, Roman baths built over springs, or a Roman market forum, which are relatively comprehensible structures as Page 134 →larger architectural extensions of current practices, theaters are learned spaces. As the deer hunter fumbled to describe it, Chrysostom reminds us how alien these half-round hollow valleys were. For most of the imperial map—excepting Greece and parts of the Greek East—on the extensive western, northern, and southern frontier circuit of the empire, theaters had no prior presence, no cultural precedent. They must have seemed the most unnatural of structures, and the practices within perfectly incomprehensible to those who first encountered them in Euboea (modern-day Greece), Gaul, Roman Britain, Hispania, Germania, Judea, North Africa, and so many elsewheres. The period of the most aggressive territorial expansion—roughly from the last third of the first century BCE to the close of the first century CE—saw hundreds of provincial theaters built on the frontiers of the Roman Empire. Gallia Comata (“Long-Haired Gaul,” the region of Gaul excluding Narbonensis) alone saw the construction of 115 theaters in the wake of conquest—a figure that should alert the wary that something beyond entertaining the troops was happening. Ninety-five theaters were built in the narrow strip of North Africa. One hundred nineteen theaters have been identified in the Roman provinces of what is now Anatolia (Caria, Pamphylia, Lycia, and Lydia). Eight or more theaters were left in the lean and spotty settlements of rural Roman Britain, including the recently excavated site at Faversham, Kent, and the yet to be located site at Londinium; at

least twenty-three have been excavated in Spain, and likely many more, referred to in inscriptions but yet to be recovered.34 In Spain, the clustering of their arrival (within a single generation of conquest) is particularly concentrated.35 A dozen or so were built in the Balkans, and scores of theaters were built in the Roman towns of the Levantine region of Judea, Palestine, and Syria, in great concentration. An accurate count cannot be assembled, but remains of somewhere between three hundred and four hundred theaters still survive. What did these pre-Romans, these deer hunters, make of this new building? In Judea, during the campaign to subdue and then Romanize the Jews, Josephus records the great offense taken by the opening of Herod’s new theater, as a thing very “opposite to the Jewish customs, for we have no such shows delivered down to us.”36 Games, shows, competitions, naked athletes, even nonnative animals imported for the venationes (animal games) were all so forcibly foreign. So alien were the practices within that theater that even the trophies awarded to the victorious actors and athletes were offensive, “for they imagined them to be images,” and Herod, at one point, gathered the leaders of the Jewish community and deconstructed the Page 135 →trophies for them, that they might seem less strange.37 Of greater offense was the theater at Caesarea, Judea, which Malalas reports was rebuilt after the Jewish revolt upon the very site of the synagogue.38 The overmapping of a Roman theater on a Jewish synagogue monumentally enacts the same spatial image of domination found on triumphal arches: the Roman conqueror standing over the prostrated vanquished. At least three theaters built by Herod (at Caesarea, Jerusalem, Jericho, and possibly a fourth at Sepphroris) were part of a campaign of intense Roman urbanization in the wake of the conquest.39 Judaic culture and landscape was violently overmapped by a Roman grid, and the Roman theater was a particularly offensive part of that template.40 One could trace the circumMediterranean frontier and map the Romanizing of the landscape in many ways, but temples and theaters erected over prior sacred sites offer the most concentrated points of contact/contest, as they were the most alien of Roman spaces, the most learned of spaces, and consequently, the most assimilated and resisted of spaces. When Tacitus writes of pacifying war-loving tribes to by making them “accustomed to peace and quiet by the provision of amenities,” he is referring to the pacifying qualities of theaters.41 Building theaters over or within sacred sites and religious centers has also been traced in the Three Gauls, in sites like Gisacum, Mediolanum Aulercorum, Champallement, Cassinomagus, Catiriacum, Derventum, Thaumiers, ThenГЎc, and Augine, where both temples and stone theaters were erected on pre-Roman sanctuaries.42 The practice appears to be altogether too frequent to be the coincidence of an advantageously sloped hill. Sear repeatedly describes theaters sited within or over a “large religious center,” “in a cult sanctuary of the Aedui,” “in a spring sanctuary of the Ruteni,” and “in rural sanctuary of the Lemovices.”43 Reconsecrating a sanctuary into a Roman temple to host a Roman god or imperial cult is one kind of displacement in the broader Romanizing process, but repurposing a sanctuary to host a theater is quite another realignment entirely. What did that mean to graft onto prior religious ground a new practice that involved, among other offerings, Roman mimes performing parodies of Greek culture? Again, of the nature of the performances in such spaces we know next to nothing beyond the presence of mimes, fragments of masks, and the ruins of architecture; but we know that were such spaces in abundance, built early in the conquest and often. And those who are curious about many of them that were superimposed on prior tribal sanctuaries should really be troubled.44 Whatever else Roman theaters meant on the new landscape, they represented a weaponization of culture that was foreign to the conquered. For Page 136 →the provincial Roman administrators like Herod, the client king in Roman Palestine; Pliny and Agrippa in Roman Spain; Agricola in Roman Britain; or Annabal in Lepcis, North Africa, such theaters were useful in integrating and assimilating, in constructing Romanness and suppressing resistance on conquered lands stripped of ancestral possessions and customs and overmapped with the new grammar of power. But that conversion was gradual, and the construction of theaters was not. Archaeologic evidence in Britain, for example, suggests that conquest was not as singular as Claudius’s triumph staged back in Rome might indicate, nor quite the accomplishment of a single decisive campaign that led to the surrender of eleven British kings. Rather, this conversion represented the first wave of a gradual and uneasy reclamation, with organized resistance and open revolt continuing sporadically for decades into the postconquest period.45 Camulodunum (modern-day Colchester) might have fallen in 43 CE and the Romanizing may have occupied the decades that followed, but a theater was already in place, erected early and destroyed in Queen Boudicca’s

revolt (60–61 CE). In the Roman retaliation that followed, the town was rebuilt, with a second, larger, more permanent theater. Somehow, thinking of theaters as “places of entertainment” doesn’t quite contain their potency.46 Theaters, like temples, were certainly among the covert institutions that displaced prior culture and inculcated Romanness, and though much of the imperial ideology of architecture—Rome’s grammar of power—has been vigorously interrogated, Roman theaters seem to escape such treatment.47 They were never part of the overt military frontier offensive, but never far removed from it; they were not part of the original fort template, but rather, as in the case of Camulodunum, the theater and the temple were the first dedicated nonmilitary buildings, the first architecture established outside the original defensive walls, when the fort and its presence became stable enough to host buildings outside the camp. And indeed, “Once the forum has been laid out, then a site should be selected for a theatre,” advises Vitruvius.48 What Michael Lewis has written of Roman temples (“the spread of temples went hand in hand with the spread of Romanization”) should be said of theaters with equal application.49 Their early arrival in the new cityscape should signal to us that theaters were bound up with Romanization, reprinting culture in ways we do not fully understand. They were, for example, linked with the imperial cult to a degree that, as Hanson, MacMullen, Sear, and others have noted, temples and theaters often architecturally cohabited a shared complex in dozens of early constructions, as in NГ®mes, Arles, Orange, Saint RГ©my, Antigny, Vendeuvre-du-Poitous, Naves, Germanicomagus, Leptis Magna, Camulodinum,Page 137 → Caria, Dura, Gerasa, Gabii, and Rome itself.50 The association of temples and theaters is not an obvious one; and their shared architectural sites, from Hellenistic sanctuaries to the cults of late antiquity, may have been as incomprehensible to those who first encountered them as they are to later-day scholars.51 The great concentration of ideology represented by the theater-temple seems too imposing to ignore. And then again, one great threat of a new theater or theater-temple was in the marking of a permanent material and ideological occupation, of acknowledging quiescence and a new and imposing footprint of the permanent foreign power. With the theater, that is, the nonmilitary monumental architecture, the new imperial presence signaled its most frightening sign: this foreign culture was no longer a military occupation, with functional but practical buildings, but now imposed itself on the landscape with a certain monumentality and some commitment to remain there.52 Perhaps the presence of a theater meant, in this regard, that the mental landscape had also changed, that the precarious residency of a Roman fort or trading depot was being refashioned into a Roman city. Roman raids had become Roman residency, consigning the surviving prior population to a life of permanent occupation and enforced assimilation, and that moment (when one first recognized, “They’re here to stay”) must have been quietly terrifying.53 Undoing that moment was part of Boudicca’s revolt against Rome, toppling the buildings and all they represented. As Camulodunum expanded into its cessation of open hostilities (Pax Romana was never quite peace, never quite as elegant as the common pronouncement that “the war was over”), the great realignment of identities began and the theater was part of the first transition from defensive fort to colony; indeed, it appears to be one of the first buildings over the wall—even the temple followed.54 The fort was laid out somewhere between 43 and 48 CE, the colony officially established in 49, and the expansion began in the decade that followed.55 The nondefensive architecture, including the theater, was the product of the 50s building boom and the events that Tacitus described: the attack by Boudicca and the people of the town huddled in the theater. Within a decade of its founding, this northern frontier town had a theater. What did it mean for these veterans of Roman wars? What did Boudicca make of that building? Her troops made a point of destroying it. And after her defeat, the Romans made a point of rebuilding it. When the theater was rebuilt, the exterior wall of the second theater was exceptionally wide (3.5 meters across) and now designed as part of the fortress outer wall. The theater was now literally a defensive structure that suggests Boudicca was not the last of the discontented Britons.56 Page 138 → None of this, of course, has anything to do with speculations about the dramatic content in these spaces, but rather speaks to their function as socializing, politicizing arenas of identity and its contests. In this capacity Paul Connerton would recognize these frontier theaters as “sites of forgetting,” designed to estrange their consumers from their own past.57 In the considerations of the performance of power, more direct questions such

as why theaters were built as they were built, where they were built, when they were built, and how they functioned all seem so much more than elemental. Why, for example, was the Roman frontier theater never built as part of the forum, the administrative and market center of the town? Why a dedicated public space that was more aligned with the temple, sacred site, or imperial cult, than the market?58 At Arausio (Orange), Nemausus (NГ®mes), Naves, Aventicum, Camulodunum (Colchester), Side (Pamphylia), Leptis Magna, Tipasa (Algeria), Guelma, Dugga, Caesarea, Verulamium, Gosbecks, Gabii, Praeneste, Caria, Gerasa, among those sites we know, the temple and the theater were part of the same complex, sometimes even sharing structural walls, both bound up with temples to Roman gods or the imperial cult.59 How would one come to understand that association? Or those new temple-theaters like the one at Camulodunum, for example, that were built over a prior sacred site of the Trinobantes, a pre-Roman tribe who supported and joined the Boudiccan revolt, or at Lyons-la-ForГЄt, whose theater was built within the religious center of the Veliocassi.60 Gilbert Picard’s study of rural Gaul documents the presence of theater complexes established over woodland shrines and sanctuaries miles from towns, preserving or importing the charisma of the prior space, but utterly repurposing it with Roman architecture, Roman functions.61 How the theater came to be part of the cult of the emperor, or came to overmap prior sacred sites, neither one our usual association with theaters, is hence not an obvious question. What is obvious is that these were very charged sites for people who had once gathered there and would retain something of that charge well into the conquest generation. Occasionally it is recognized. Later writers like Strabo still used an older word to describe the theaters at Rome as anathemasi, which was understood as “structures” but still contained both its earlier association of “divine or votive offerings” and also something cursed (anathД“ma).62 Philologically, theaters were still something somewhat alien, somewhat anathД“ma, even for the people who built them. That they still occupied some vague connection to religion remained in the recollection, its ancestry recalled, at some linguistic and memorial level, while that charisma (and anathema) was transferred directly to the imperial cult. That transfer, that placement, the content, language, Page 139 →architecture, indeed, theater as a cultural practice, would have been as alien to the native Britons as it was to the Jewish population in Roman Palestine or the Phoenicians in Roman Carthage. But erecting this new temple—a theater complex over a prior sanctuary—would have been an abundantly clear gesture. In Camulodunum it was a site of “great offense”: “ever before their eyes, a citadel, as it seemed, of perpetual tyranny” is Tacitus’s description of the indigenous response.63 Such a weaponization was played out in theaters across the empire. In Roman Palestine we know of twelve or thirteen theaters; east of the Jordan, eighteen more.64 Many were erected in a single lifetime in the wake of the three major revolts in Roman Judea—the first Jewish Revolt (66–73 CE), the Kitos war (115–17 CE), and the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–35 CE)—a period that coincided with the suppression of the revolt and an aggressive Romanizing building campaign in the same region.65 At the close of the last revolt, if Sepphoris is a reliable case study, the Jews were disenfranchised from the local administration (the boulД“) and the city was renamed Diocaesarea (“Zeus and Caesar”). Sear suggests that the wave of theater building was part of this new Roman reorientation, an ideological and architectural overlay of the victor on the vanquished. Ehud Netzer and Zeev Weiss, who conducted the excavation at Sepphoris, concurred about this motivation at this site and others in the region.66 Arthur Segal, who cautiously avoided dating the theater at Sepphoris, nonetheless conceded that the theater there and others in the region were “erected with an obvious political intent, i.e. to have Judea share in the spirit of the times and turn the kingdom into an equal among equals in the new world order.”67 The new world order was, of course, Roman order, and theaters were a large part of this imperial imposition. All across the empire, the theater’s role in remaking prior culture, laminating prior peoples away from rebellion toward Roman status; this installment on citizen-making, this forgetting and refashioning that made tribes togati (“toga wearers,” an emblem of identity with Rome) was no small one, though evidence of the process and products of these ubiquitous spaces remains opaque.68 Despite their scant knowledge about the content of the new theaters in the provinces, for those first-contact generations, theaters’ presence remains the most potent function among those who grew into Romanness from a prior identity, and whose complicity allowed the assimilation of others. We know of some of these makeover Romans. Gaius Julius Zoilos was one, whose name revealed the hybridity of his generation. Originally from Aphrodisias,

he arrived in Rome (somehow, in the buried histories of the vanquished) as a slave to Julius Caesar, whose name he was given, and sometime after the assassination he was manumittedPage 140 → by Caesar’s heir, Octavian (soon to become Augustus) and returned to his home in Anatolia, now Roman Caria, with a gift of money and much gratitude toward the future Augustus. Zoilos was instrumental in ensuring that his home city Aphrodisias sided with Octavian against Mark Antony during the civil wars, and for the support, the town was granted an exemption from all Roman taxes. In the economic boom that followed, Zoilos prospered, became something of the town benefactor, certainly the town’s liaison to Rome, and donated back to his city a magnificent theater. An inscription records the gift in fine Greek letters across the architrave of the proscД“nion, and a series of images, on the frieze, relate his social journey. One panel represents Zoilos at his homecoming, not as a slave but rather as the traveler returning home, in his round hat (petasus) and short cloak over a tunic; in the second panel he is being crowned by Polis (the city), narrating his social ascent; and in the third, this “traveler” is now portrayed as a fine Roman orator, wearing a smartly wrapped toga. The goddess TimД“ (Honor) offers Zoilos a crown and cornucopia.69 Assimilation, demonstratively, had its rewards, and Zoilos’s great gift back to the city, the theater, both accelerated and documented that assimilation. As with Zoilos in Aphrodisias, Cogidumnus in Britain, the client king Juba of Numidia, Herod in Judea, and countless other conduits of its culture, Rome’s great success lay in brokering aliens into Romans. The theater’s role in this assimilation was large.

Learning Theaters, Fashioning Romans An actor of tragedy, who was one of those who had not ventured to contend for the prize against Nero, was on a strolling tour round the cities of the west, and by his histrionic talent he had won no small fame among the less barbarous of the populations for two reasons: first because he found himself among people who had never before heard a tragedy, and second because he pretended exactly to reproduce the melodies of Nero. But when he appeared at Ipola, they showed some fear of him before he even opened his lips upon stage and they shrank in dismay at his appearance when they saw him striding across the stage, with his mouth all agape, mounted on buskins extra high, and clad in the most wonderful garments, but when he lifted up his voice and bellowed out loud, most of them took to their heels, as if they had a daemon yelling at them. Such and old-fashioned are the manners of the barbarians of that country.70 Page 141 → Roman theater took some getting used to. For those “barbarians” at Ipola, Dio Chrysostom’s deer hunter, the uninitiated at Aphrodisias, the Jews at “Caesaria,” the new Roman-Britons, Gallo-Romans, and so many frontier others, the theater was not a natural experience; it was, as Michel de Certeau would say, a “practiced” space. One learned a theater, particularly a Roman theater. How on earth did they make sense of Latin mimes doing parodies of Greek tragedies to newly Romanized Britons in Chilcester? Or the young African girl dancing pantomimes in the Roman Balkans?71 Eunapius of Sardis (fourth century CE) relates a similar account of the by-then proverbial Roman tragedian in Nero’s time who was forced onto a provincial tour, where he performed to an “untrained audience” that was “unable to respond to most of the features of tragedy.” He was obliged to take aside some of the local elite, explain the conventions, and hope their approval would spread to the lower orders.72 All across the frontiers of empire, the pre-Romans learned how to read this most unnatural of spaces, and the learning was largely or in part about becoming Roman and at least partially integrating into the new social and political order. That contract required a certain participation on the part of both parties; certainly the willing noticed that advancement was possible in the new order, with concessions. The role of theater in Romanizing the provinces may not have been as pronounced as the emperor’s image glowering down from the niche in the scaenae frons at Orange might suggest, but the colonizing impulse to fashion Romans out of “barbarians” using Roman culture and Roman architecture was central to the products of the theater. It may have been violent, coercive, benign, or ultimately beneficial, but this refashioning found one very public forum in the provincial Roman theater. Inscriptional and epigraphic evidence suggests that in the provinces Roman nationalization was a

multigenerational process, embraced enthusiastically by Juba or Zoilos, or at times offering no more than a veneer of hybridity. Underneath the emperor’s image in Arausio (Orange) we find epigrams of Greek, Latin, and Gallic names; the dedication inscription to the theater in Leptis Magna, North Africa, is chiseled in both Latin and Punic.73 Alison Cooley has used the uniquely preserved site of Pompeii to document the bilingualism of Oscan and Latin cultures for decades after the colonization of Pompeii.74 Shared military lives that had brought recruits from the frontiers of elsewhere guaranteed that even the “Romans” were of mixed ethnicity, and much of the identity of their prior lives (prior languages, rituals, cultural practices) ran very deep and persisted for generations after their contact.75 In some sites veterans of Roman wars, themselves from elsewhere, became the first Romanized settlers in the colonies, Page 142 →married there, as Sara Phang has documented, and adopted as many native ways as they displaced, refashioning postconquest identities in odd and hybridized expressions.76 Particularly in the aggressive early years of expansion, from Julius Caesar through Augustus to Trajan, founding veteran colonies was a strategic way to keep discharged and unemployed soldiers out of Rome. Arausio was granted to the Second Legion of Julius Caesar, the Sixth Legion was given Arles, the Tenth Legion got Narbonne, while the victors of Actium were given Nemausus (NГ®mes). Some sites still carry the archaeologic and epigraphic evidence that betrays the uneasiness of mixed populations of victors and vanquished cohabiting shared sites: in Conimbriga (modern-day Condeixa, Spain), the previous town center was leveled to erect a temple “dedicated to the worship of Augustus,” while in Corduba (Cordoba), Spain, an east-west wall appears to have separated the Roman centers from the indigenous neighborhoods.77 Generational divides are recorded in epigraphs in Spain or Arausio, where Iberian or Gallic sons adopted Latin forenames (Gaius Julius), or in the hyphenated Punic-Roman names in Spain, Sardinia, and North Africa.78 But for every account like Strabo’s of the Turdetanians (Andalusia, Spain), “[who] have completely changed over to the Roman mode of life, not even remembering their own language anymore,” there are those who resisted their new identities, with a variety of methods, and that uneasiness lingered long after the original conquest.79 Though Augustus could declare victory over Spain in 25 BCE, major revolts are recorded for 24, 22, 19, and 16 BCE, with the last one threatening enough to warrant the dispatch of Marcus Agrippa.80 As late as 21 CE, in Arausio, the site where the statue of Augustus stood in the theater with the surrendered Gaul, another Gallic nobleman with a half-Romanized name, Julius Sacrovir, led a revolt of forty thousand strong against the Roman governor of the province, with Roman-trained Gallic-born gladiators at the head.81 What might Julius Sacrovir have made of that space? These partially assimilated had met the unassimilated first on the battlefield, and later the survivors met within the architecture of the dominant power and shared the sites. With some obviously lingering discontents and layers of prior, persistent identities, they adopted and rejected the new culture. When Martin Millett, writing of the Roman Britain colonies, asks of this mixed population: “Did they eat differently? Did they use coins and pottery differently? Were they buried differently?”—all answered in the affirmative—we must add, “Did they watch differently?”82 What did they see and hear at Roman theaters like Camulodunum and Verulamium, in Roman Britain, where actors from a Gallic circuit strayed across the channelPage 143 → during that first generation of domination and performed—what? Mediterranean myths in what was once a local shrine? And for those who remembered its prior reverence, how did their experience differ from that of the more Romanized producers and consumers of imperial culture who did not? Ramsay MacMullen notes briefly that even the images on coins—the emperor’s detached head—didn’t cross the Celtic culture very clearly at all, for which the severed head was not the victor but a trophy of the victor.83 Other cultural practices—the writing down of religious lore, for example—would have been utter anathema to the prior Druid culture, as would writing at all in pre-Roman Britain.84 Theater would have been among the more foreign cultural practices, and accommodating it would have represented a realignment of some magnitude. There are mimes and there are theaters all over the Roman West, early and abundant. Did they function as camp followers of the new imperialism, like Latin, to “civilize the elite” and make togati of the natives? Did they serve largely the already-Romanized military population, the insiders? Or were they more colloquial, more bicultural in negotiating through representation the new hybridic identities? Did they inscribe the new Latin culture, or function like graffiti over it? How did these many peoples watch performances? If we consider performance like other mechanisms of measuring identity, we would do well to recall that for every Roman edict on official weights and measures there was a real-world marketplace that still preserved the old weights and portions.85

How much of the prior identities, the old stock, the root stock, remained we will never wholly know. As long as memory, I guess. Linguistic studies across the empire suggest that Romanness never wholly eradicated prior culture. When we read a Byzantine historian like Zosimus writing in Greek circa 500 CE, narrating how the Britons a century earlier “revolted from Roman rule and lived by themselves, no longer obeying Roman laws. The Britons took up arms, and fighting for themselves, freed the cities from the barbarian pressure,” we are reminded that even four centuries after the invasion, they were, as subjects, never wholly Roman. Clear across the Roman world, they could still identify as Britons, and Romans as barbarians.86 Writing over, even with something as monumental as a theater, was always just that, a lamination of Romanness. In Dio Chrysostom’s novella, the deer hunter not only went back to his hut in the woods, but the tale concludes with a celebration of a bucolic life utterly free of Roman influence. That rural world lived on blissfully without Rome. But that genre of imagining a place beyond the state could not likely be staged in the state’s theater, the novel’s Romanizing space, where life was never that far “beyond Page 144 →Rome.” Still, as we know in Rome, where mimes enjoyed a very troubled relationship with power, the state’s theater was not always the best spokesman for the state.

Graffiti Performance One of the astonishing small finds in Roman Gaul are the numerous bilingual texts that employed Roman script to write Celtic languages.87 I am fascinated by this older example of what John Montague called the grafting of a second tongue as a kind of incomplete forgetting, a cohabiting of thought, script, and languages, cutting across and beneath the imperial culture, and all the implications for performance it might offer. In the absence of more abundant performance records, I look to the theater’s presence itself and the multiple cultures of hybridic identities they would have contained. Something is happening in all these purpose-built spaces, and if that something is akin to the something that was happening elsewhere in the culture, like bilingual literacy culture, or bicultural ceramic ware, one of the theater’s attractions may also have been its bicultural appeal, not in not rendering Romanness to the provinces, but in writing over Romanness with a vernacular layer of meaning.88 This is the grammar of graffiti. Consider, for example, that in a Latin-driven civic structure, mime, dance, and pantomime, all forms constitutionally capable of bypassing language entirely, might already be subversive by genre. Part of the attraction of possessing no scripts from the provinces is the freedom to ask afresh what performance might have accomplished, instead of assuming the same tired tropes of a Roman literary culture mapped outward, or that every cavea was purposely built for gladiatorial blood-sports. It is easy to speculate on the intention of Romanizing through performance in a theater with the emperor’s foot on a subjugated Gaul, or Caesar’s victories inscribed within Herod’s theater, or Zoilos bringing tax-exempt status to Aprodisias and celebrating that civic victory with or in a new theater. How the state’s theater may have served the state is an imaginable narrative. Less clear but equally inviting is how the various theaters in the provinces accommodated the embedded biculturality of the new not-wholly Roman. If, as Laurence, Cleary, and Sears suggest, “Elements from a вЂbarbarian’ past could be embedded within the construction of sacred space,” could such prior culture be embedded in performance as well?89 Or like the Gallic stonemasons who carved the images of their own defeat in the triumphal arches, did the mimes and actors simply serve, or did they or could Page 145 →they say something else there in the new stone theater over the old sacred space, something beyond their own abject humiliation? I suggested earlier that comic playwrights in Rome, like Terence, exploited this slippage, spoke through the texts, “signifyin(g)” to an underclass, quietly cursing, to those who knew, those who didn’t. Was there a mixed population of “those who knew” in the provinces as well? Of course there was: they were there first. T. P. Wiseman’s work on the orality of Roman culture, like parodic songs and oral histories, invites us to consider the nonliterary modes that have always been present and, beyond acknowledging these hyphenated cultures, begins to look for the residue of the erased or overwritten within the preserved culture. When Mullen writes, “Archaeologists are just starting to experiment with code-switching,” he extends a wide invitation.90 Even certain material remains from ceramic ware might be useful to think of as bicultural sites, and texts of resistance.91 One tantalizing Gallo-Roman image is a shard of pottery from La Graufesenque, the prolific Condatomagus ceramic site, which clearly both quotes and parodies the founding myth of Rome, with a crude

image of the famous she-wolf suckling—not the famous twins but a scrawny rabbit, a cartoonish image that MacMullen finds “mischievous” and I find perfectly expresses the ludic aesthetic of mime.92 Who was saying what to whom with this image? The she-wolf’s identity is clear, but who is this rabbit sucking at the tit of Rome? What is graffiti but crowding a second meaning, a second identity onto a hosting site? We may need to extend our sense of what sites might host such a bicultural gesture. When Livy discusses what most Roman historians don’t, that Roman mythographers enjoy the privilege of inventing founding myths and that “the rest of the nations of the world may put up with that too, as readily as they put up with our imperial rule,” we are looking at another kind of history, one that not only didn’t put up with the mythmaking but also exposed it.93 I don’t think this is a case of provincial potters just getting it wrong, but rather deftly deploying founding myths in a deliberately antimonumental way, with the same private pastiche that graffiti use or, I would suggest, fully within the capabilities of the mimes. We have become familiar with vernacular traditions that both deploy and subvert the dominant orders, visual and rhetorical strategies that cleverly manipulate and cohabit forms to “signify” their duplicity. If monuments, temples, arches, theaters, and arenas celebrate conquest, antimonuments, like graffiti, seek to eviscerate that authority. And if such antimonuments circulated in the provincial marketplace, I’m intrigued by the possibility of graffiti performance as well, performance that functioned like the shard to embrace and Page 146 →parody Roman master myths. We know it occurred in the capital (mimes and actors were routinely censored for it, occasionally killed, usually banished to the provinces), some of them for egregiously indelicate turns on the private lives of public figures, but can we rightly expect it in the theaters of the provinces as well?94 And from whom? Mimes by the hundreds have been cataloged in Rome and the Roman West; some were banished from Rome and others, like the freeman dancer Theocritus whose chops were not sufficient for the capital, strolled to Roman Gaul instead.95 Of the many performers who dotted the provinces, and of whom we know little, I’ll choose one from the northernmost border. Verecunda was a mime/actress who worked in a northern province of Roman Britain, Ratae Corieltauvorum (modern Leicester) sometime in the latter half of the first century. We know very little of her life, and most of it from her name scratched on a shard, but from that haiku of an epigraph, we can surmise a few things. The shard itself was found in Leicester incised with two names: Verecunda and her career, ludia (actress), and Lucius, a gladiator—not much to go on, two names on a clay fragment marking her in an acting profession in a town with no known theater.96 But the terra cotta that formed the original bowl was not local to Roman Britain, nor even from across the channel in Gaul; the pot was fired in Italy with Italian clay. Tony Wilmott has argued that the couple, like the clay, originated in Italy. Perhaps. Or, more likely they came by imported Italian ceramic ware somewhere in Britain and scratched their names on it. The names were not fired into the clay, not a dedicated design, but scratched onto it later. Wherever their origins, Lucius and Verecunda were both in slaves’ professions (mimes and gladiators), so they were likely foreign, transported to Britain in one or separate traveling companies, probably camp followers of the troops. Their names may both be stage names (verecunda = “modest”) adopted or assigned with the profession, or their Roman given names, or hers a cognomen (we have a Julius Verecundus stationed in Vindolanda).97 Somewhere the pair came together—a professional or romantic partnership? a marriage? Somewhere they acquired an imported bowl, or a shard of bowl, and etched their two names on it in a crude but enduring testimonial of some alliance (love? property?), and it was carried with them. Perhaps it was whole once, but somewhere in their travels the bowl broke, and someone thought that the two names were worth more than a bowl and kept the shard as a memento, a broken document. They might then, to preserve the fragment, have bored a hole in it, worn it, or hung it up. Somehow Verecunda and Lucius (or Verecunda remembering Lucius?) ended up in Ratae (Leicester), an actress without a theater, where it was not likely that Page 147 →either or both lived to enjoy a comfortable retirement.98 She was known as a mime; can we imply in that some kind of performance in a temporary or occasional theater? Or that she carried her vocational association beyond architecture? If she was freed to travel, why did she retain the former profession or its name? Or did she remain a mime, even without performance? Fig. 9. Verecunda ceramic shard. Photo by the author. More speculation: a second inscriptional reference to Verecunda, also dated to the late first century (c. 90), also in

northern England, may confirm Wilmott’s claim that she was not native to Britain. From the Vindolanda tablets (number 650) a non-Roman soldier or ex-soldier, Ascanius, greets Verecunda by name: “Greet Verecunda and SanctusВ .В .В . Capito, and all my fellow countrymen and friends.” In Elizabeth Greene’s reading of the phrase “omnes cives et amecos [sic],” the sender, Ascanius, “is not of Italian origin, but of some other ethnic group” but, like Capito and Sanctus, overscribed with a Roman name. Greene suggests that Ascanius was writing to members of the same non-Roman community, perhaps one of the cohort of the Batavians or Tungrians that Anthony Birley documented, who were living or serving at the northern Roman fort at Vindolanda. Ascanius greets a foreign community in Latin, both marking and unmarking the bicultural border line, and Verecunda was first among them and was well known.99 Was she the same Verecunda, attached somehow to the military incursion into Scotland in the late first century, or part of the entertainment of the military, and did she find a small community of repatriated Latin-reading non-Romans in the north of Roman Britain?100 Where did they come from, these countrymen and she? What was their mother tongue? And if she still engaged in performance, what would performance look like to such a mixed community, from such a mixed community, there on the northern borders of empire? With answers only remotely possible, the questions Page 148 →must still be asked, even if no more is accomplished than puzzling over the possibilities. Finally, there is one last scrap of Verecunda’s life (her death): her gravestone was found and is now preserved in the Hunterian Museum, Roman Collection. The stone was discovered at Bar Hill, the high fort near the Antonine Wall, the Roman settlement that expanded over and beyond what would be Hadrian’s Wall, the farthest northern border of the Romans in Britain. A single name on a stone well north of Glasgow marks the close of her storied life, there at the edge of empire.101 The intent is not to claim anything further of this mime on the edge of the imperial world (I’ve claimed far too much already), but what makes Verecunda fun to think with is that she inhabits a place beyond maps, beyond architecture, almost beyond the archive. She requires the acknowledgment of a profession in places where we have no materiality for it; she requires the acknowledgment that foreign mimes (as the figurines of the comic old men found in the “child’s grave” in Camulodinum remind us) are engaged in performance for a diverse, bi-, and multicultural population, beyond purpose-built theaters, most of whom would not be native Romans but were, like Verecunda and Ascanius, “fellow countrymen” from some other country now participating to some degree (or not) in the “Romanizing” of their auditors at the very extremities of the empire, in places that were only temporarily Roman. To think of them as actors in a static Roman (capital) tradition playing literary plays of Roman playwrights belies everything we know about how performance culture works. The kind of mime performance that earned a reputation in Rome was already a kind of graffiti enacted over an imperial script. That we have no “scripts” should not diminish the status of performers like Verecunda. If the figures are distant, the process is not. How did these newly never-wholly-Romanized foreign mimes like Verecunda or foreign auditors now legionnaires use their theaters? Was learning the theater part of a larger conversion, in Strabo’s phrase “becoming more tame,” to gather the feral of the more-than-native but not-wholly Roman to the cult of Rome, the cult of the emperor, as Zoilos, Juba, and Herod did, like those theaters built in Roman Britain that were attached or connected to an adjoining temple that reminded them, as Strabo writes, of their servitude?102 How did it become the turbulent arena of public justice that the deer hunter and the Jews found it to be? or the auditorium of civic proclamations, lectures, oratorical displays, or even the reading of plays? or a place of assembly or a festival resort for provincial Roman entertainment?103 Were the buildings themselves, with statues of the emperor and the subjugated, already arenas of Page 149 →defeat? How could they not be aware of the “triumph status” of a building, like Herod’s theater, with Caesar’s victories “and trophies of those nations which he had conquered in his wars, and all made of the purest gold and silver, [which] encompassed the theatre itself.”104 Did they learn that theaters were also places of assignation, as their contemporary Ovid had described them in Rome (“Above all, do your hunting in the round theatres; in such places your hopes are amply met”)?105 Tacitus found this a point of praise in the tribes of Germany, whose women lived with their chastity protected, not corrupted by theaters, but the expectation of corruption was built into the installed space prior to its installation, and one population expected it and another resisted.106 Did they learn to appreciate the irony of mime and Atellan farce, with their local allusions and dangerous,

impenetrable puns? Did they ever make sense of the tragedians with their macabre whitened masks that frightened even Roman children, as Juvenal relates? The convention certainly required a learning curve in Hispalis (modernday Seville, Spain), where an actor introduced Greek tragedy and so terrified his audience, most of whom, relates Philostratus, took flight from the theater.107 Did they learn the art of the claque that mobilized audiences in Rome and the Greek East in deeply partisan contests—did that travel to the western provinces as well?108 Suppose some Gaul, as Woolf imaged, from an Iron Age farmstead, or such a one as Dio Chrysostom’s deer hunter, first walked the new urban complex as a newly initiated precontact other and asked of one of those hundreds of new Augustan theaters built into the new urban centers of freshly established Julian and Augustan colonies: “And that building? What goes on in that building?” Such a one might have it pointed out thinking, “Ah,” while a pause of complex associations assembled. That building was different. That building is where the new edicts are read, where the claques fight it out, where the Jews are sported, where Roman festivals are held, where strangers are tried, that’s where games are staged, and the Roman plays, and the playing with Roman plays, with actors in funny boots, and distorted masks, yelling like demons, or mimes conversant enough with it all to send it up, that’s where the emperor’s statues are, and his birthday celebrated—for what that’s worth—that’s where the defeated acknowledge him, where the magistrates throw presents (missilibus) to the populace, it is where the archives are kept, where the frightened gather, where the discontented whisper mutinies, where the wealthy show off, where the rabbits who suck at the tit of Rome get their names inscribed, where the town is ordered by seats, it is where the captives are displayed, Page 150 →and, if the mood takes you, that’s where you find a quick shag: that building is where Romans are made. It’s a complicated building, that one.109

Butts in Seats Even something as simple as seating (sorting oneself) was a reordering of identity under the new regime, which overwrote older social structures refusing to go quietly into that new night. Tacitus observed of the pre-Roman Britons that they were so factious that it made conquering easier. “It is seldom that two or three states unite to repel a common threat. Hence each fights on its own, and all are conquered.”110 These old alliances, old divisions that kept tribes hierarchical within, independent, and suspicious of each other, would not have entirely been broken down by a common conquest any more than they were entirely set aside for a common combat. It is one of the arguments of Leonard Curchin that in Roman Spain these older affiliations largely accounted for the “failure of romanisation to penetrate the roots of provincial society.”111 Old animosities and alliances would have been radically redrawn by a Roman architecture that never even acknowledged them, and nowhere was this process more pronounced than in the theater, a building compulsive about ordering its spectators along severely Roman lines. Who sat where in the theater was one of Rome’s minor obsessions, particularly the coveted first fourteen rows. This anxiety occupied Senate debates, no end of legal actions, and several decades of legislation. Senators, knights, equestrians, praetorian soldiers, veterans, envoys, all jostled for the distinction of privilege and exclusivity in Roman theaters, and evidence suggests that obsession extended to the provinces as well.112 From the Roscian laws of 67 BCE through the reign of Augustus (31 BCE to 14 CE), a codifying series of theatrical laws were drawn up and adopted that regulated exactly who sat precisely where, creating of the theater a highly concentrated forum of what Boyle called “social segregation.” Of this ordering, writes Richard Beacham, “under the Lex Juliae Theatralis [Julian Theatrical Laws], he [Augustus] consolidated and extended earlier regulations, to determine far more precisely how the different social groupings were arranged so that the auditorium came to resemble a microcosm of society itself.”113 Within the cavea of the theater, civilians were separated from soldiers, boys from their tutors, men from women, senators from equestrians, plebeians from slaves, vestrals, priests, and matrons; and there were even subdivisions within the equestrian rows.114 Woe befall the man Page 151 →who mistook his seat, like the soldier Appian described, who “not finding his own seat, went and took one in the place reserved for the knights.” Octavian had the man removed, and it was widely assumed by his fellow soldiers that he would be dead before the play was over.115 If Augustus imagined the new homotopia as a microcosm of Roman society inside the theater, it involved a

similar ordering of classes, with their own discrete vomitoriae (passages for entering and exiting), and that model was also exported, like the idea of a uniform theater whose very size, shape, and design of the Vitruvian theater buildings would furnish the frontier with a uniform Roman style.116 Indeed, Tacitus goes so far as to claim that the establishment of public class distinctions was modeled from the theater: “A distinction had been made in the assessments of Senators and Knights, not because they differed naturally, but that the superiority of the one class in places in the theatre in rank and in honor, might be maintained in everything else.”117 Roman identity—or at least sorting oneself along new Roman definitions—may have come about as (un)simply as bums on benches, that is, which bum goes on which bench in this new space of this new order, but that overmapping cut sharply against the grain of the indigenous ordering, and that stock was far older.118 Local genus (family) identification, as documented in inscriptional evidence across the provinces, neighborhood affiliation, language affiliation, tribal affiliation may all have cohabited with the new Roman that paused the spectator in a brief interrogation of self. As it turns out, we are fortunate to have a thumbnail sketch of just such a tutorial, albeit in Rome: two envoys from the tribes of Germany, Verritus and Malorix (“the kings of the tribe, as far as Germans are under kings”) arrive in Rome circa 58 CE, to settle a land dispute. Here they played tourists: While they waited for Nero, who was intent on other engagements, among the sights shown to the barbarians they were admitted into Pompey’s theatre, where they might behold the vastness of the Roman people. There at their leisure (for in the entertainment, ignorant as they were, they found no amusement) they asked questions about the crowd on the benches, about the distinctions of classes, who were the knights, where was the Senate, till they observed some persons in a foreign dress on the seats of the senators. Having asked who they were, when they were told that this honour was granted to envoys from those nations which were distinguished for their bravery and their friendship to Rome, they exclaimed that no men on earth surpassed the Germans in arms or in loyalty. Then they went Page 152 →down and took their seat among the senators. The spectators hailed the act good-naturedly, as due to the impulsiveness of a primitive people, and to an honourable rivalry.119 Roman distinctions were learned quickly, exported freely, and in any geography, from Spain to Sepphoris, friends of Rome got better seats.120 Inscriptional evidence also suggests that reorganizing by the new trade unions, the conventi, cut across the older tribal affiliations as well, and these would not be discrete wedges, but would rather overlap in the new formation of identity. From Bosra, inscriptions reserving seats for various trades are extant—the wineskin makers, the jewelers, and copper-beaters—while tribal names are inscribed on the lower seats in Gerasa South, as they were in Neapolis.121 Recycled stones from theater seating at Contiomagus were found with names inscribed in a foundation wall as well. More confusing still, in Hierapolis in Phrygia, inscriptions still visible on the seats divide the spectators according to their new deme or civic tribe, an ordering that did not likely follow the same prior indigenous lines, but rather sliced across old identities.122 Rough inscriptions on the top rows of the theater of Aphrodisias, like those found in the city’s stadium, confirm that trade guilds, natives, and foreigners all reserved seats.123 So where to sit and with whom in the new order became something of an identity crisis in a postconquest world, where layers of new Roman and older indigenous status were at odds. That the amusement of the German envoys was diminished by their ignorance of the language reminds us that learning the Roman tongue was also among the early installments of fashioning neo-Roman identity. Tacitus records that Agricola, once he subdued the Britons, introduced them to the liberal arts and astutely summarized the effect: “The result was that those who just lately had been rejecting the Roman tongue now conceived a desire for eloquence. Thus even our style of dress came into favour and the toga was everywhere to be seen.В .В .В . [T]he Britons, who had had no experience of this, called it вЂcivilization,’ although it was a part of their enslavement.”124 Becoming togati, that is, good Romans, earned the Celtiberians of the Ebro valley the praise of Augustus: “[They] are already called togati, that is to say, peaceful; and being garbed in the toga, they are now converting to the Italian lifestyle.”125

Conversion, assimilation, civilizing, Romanizing, making the Celt, the Gaul, the Icini togati: as the largest public arena in the colonies, the theater’s role in this gentle enslavement was critical. Among all its functions—civic, military, social, and spatial—it was the arena of acquiescence, of unfashioningPage 153 → resistance, for the display of state, of learning to re-sort one’s identity, to adopt and appreciate togas and all their distinctions, to adopt Roman customs of class and privilege, to learn Latin and to write it, as a knowledge of the grafted tongue was a requirement for the awarding not just of citizenship, but for advancement under the new order. The Latin tongue shaped even the recognition of identity when Pomponius Mela, in his description of the world, offhandedly acknowledged he freely overlooked those tribes whose “names cannot be couched in our language.”126 Though older practices lingered, it fell to the first generation to learn the essential transition to a standard Roman currency, to give over barter and to value silver and gold, to accept money, even to mint coins (Mela describes the pre-Roman tribes of Britain as uncivilized and “ignorant of wealth” because they traded in sheep instead of coins).127 Tacitus’s description of the conquest of Germany, “They have been taught to accept money as well—by us,” reminds us that to adopt Roman standards of currency, or weights and measures, to use Roman measurements (the Roman foot, the Roman mile), Roman toponyms, trading crockery for silverware, Roman fashion, Roman food and wine, even the notion of living in cities itself required a major cultural realignment.128 Cultural immigrants adopted new ways and perhaps found rewards for it; or resisted and perhaps found no rewards for it. And once the veneer of Romanness was in place, the togas adjusted around new Latin names, open shrines closed into Roman temples, and stone replaced wood, did they learn that theaters were also the place to gather and protest that order? Did they learn that citizenship also conferred the privilege of small anger, but not armed resistance (those days had passed)? They were allowed a containable rage, and the theater was the proper forum for that containment as well (“During the same consulship a high price of corn almost brought on an insurrection. For several days there were many clamorous demands made in the theatre with an unusual freedom of language toward the emperor”).129 Even membership in the loose alliances of merchants (conventus) would have decided market advantages for anyone dealing with the sale or transport of Roman goods, but to join a conventus (originally an unofficial consortium of traders in foreign ports, then Roman citizens in a foreign land, then a circuit court) was ultimately also to acknowledge Roman legal systems, Roman courts, Roman administrators of courts, and consequently Roman tariffs, Roman suits, laws, Latin, and we find the names of collegia as new organizing social units inscribed in the theaters at Nemausus (NГ®mes) and Lugdunum (Lyon)В .В .В . and so went the web of assimilation.130 We have no ample firsthand narrative account of such a process, only Page 154 →the accretion of many small testimonials. Occasionally we see something of a pre-Roman sketch, like that of the long-haired deer hunter, related with a certain in-house chuckle at the naivetГ© of the not-yet-Romanized provincials. For example, many provincial towns first learned of Roman theaters during Nero’s tours, when legitimate actors were displaced, for the very real fear of competing with the emperor. Celebrations of Nero’s artistic triumphs were echoed far from Rome and Athens, and for many, it was their first contact with the notion of theater. Philostratus recalls one moment: The Gaderans understood what the Victory meant and that there was a celebrated competition in Arcadia, since as I said, they were eager for Greek culture. But the neighboring cities to Gadera had no idea what the Olympics were, or even what a competition or a game was, or why they were sacrificing. They formed ridiculous ideas, supposing that this was a victory in war, or that Nero had captured some people called Olympians. In fact they had never seen a tragedy, or a lyre concert either.131 Becoming Roman enough to make sense of Roman theater took some learning, and rewards might await those who undertook the project, like Zoilos, with his toga and cornucopia; the two German kings, Verritus and Malorix; and Juba of Numidia, who learned theater in Rome and built them in North Africa. As Leonard Curchin concluded from his work on Roman Spain, “Social mobility [was] closely linked to the level of romanisation, ” a formation that seems to hold up across the empire.132 But for the other choice, resistance? Perhaps we might consider one who sat looking at the surrendered Gaul under the emperor’s foot in the niche of the

scaenae frons of the new theater of Arausio (Colchester). The Gallic nobleman Julius Sacrovir was among those who chose not to “toga up.” He and forty thousand others got fed up with the new identity they had adopted, rose up to expel the colonizer, and died in the uprising.133 The theater—whether the statue of the emperor and the prostrate Gaul was erected before or after the revolt—was the one place that reminded the residents of the stark contrast of choices. Maybe those who adopted Roman ways were just rabbits sucking at the imperial tit, but they were rabbits with rewards, and that makes the theater the arena of acquiescence. Between the newly assimilated and the fiercely resistant, however, was the large swath of mixed populations, elite and nonelite, adopting what practices were needed and neglecting others. Pre-Roman religions and cultic worship, for example, often persisted generations into the new order, Page 155 →and the survival of such practices should alert us to other forms of hybridity that quietly endured because they remained a currency of former identities that had not wholly been laid aside.134 I suspect the actors on the western circuit, like Verecunda and thousands of others, spoke (or not) to them as well. In the end, under this long moment of assimilation and the theater’s role in it, under the promotion of theater to what is now called a technology of power, lay a prior assimilation. As it turns out, the theater that became such a template of the Roman grid of empire was itself a latecomer to Rome. It remains for the second part of this diptych to consider how the theater reshaped Romans before Roman theaters reshaped others. It was, after all, also a learned space for Romans. Long before Roman architectural adjustments retooled the Hellenistic theater—deepening the orchestra to accommodate venationes (the hunting and killing of animals) and gladiatorial contests; removing the lower rows of seating to install a protective barrier (conistra), sometimes water trenches; dredging out subscaenae (entrances) for the condemned, or freestanding caveas (seating areas), multitiered scene houses, vomitoriae, fornices (arched walls at the end of the caveas); and so on—the new Roman presence in Greece and the Greek East required first building the locals’ own Roman relationship to this foreign practice. The architectural adjustments that followed were largely minor in comparison to accommodating the idea itself. The major problem, and far less visible, was how the prior theater experience reshaped the Roman experience. Before Roman theater was part of the colonizing project across the empire, a sizable reorientation of the very ontology of theater had to occur within Rome, a repurposing of the idea of theater from a foreign (Greek) site of decadence and idleness to a vital part of Roman imperial ideology. Before theater was folded into the civilizing process of the empire, it required a folding into the civilizing process in Rome. Simply put, before Roman theaters could proliferate in the provinces, theater itself had to be thoroughly Romanized.

Page 156 →

Seven. Mapping Rome Shitting on Romans

Censors and Censorship When C. Cassius Longinus and Manius Valerius Messalla, the elected censors for the year 155/54 BCE, undertook the construction of a permanent theater in Rome, the Senate intervened (can we say “censored”? ), slapped an injunction on the project, and then had the building not just halted but dismantled. What was under the unbuilding? What troubled the Senate about theaters? It was not the first time that it resisted the incorporation of this foreign practice, and it would not be the last.1 Before Pompey the Great solved the problem with some aplomb in 55 BCE, Rome’s vexed relationship to theater saw many promising occasions (in 179 BCE, 174 BCE, 154 BCE, and again in 107 BCE) when large and impressively ornamented stone theaters went up in the heart of Rome, some resplendent multistory affairs, and all them were demolished to prevent the formal incorporation of theater into the cityscape.2 One could slice into this contest anywhere over a century or more and find the same narrative of populist desire and state opposition, any episode of which would expose Rome’s troubled relationship to theater. In the instance of 155/54 BCE project, so Livy informs us, the theater of Longinus and Messalla “was demolished by order of the Senate as being useless and harmful to the public character.”3 The decision to initiate an expensive building project like a permanent theater by two men whose primary elected function was to supervise public morality, and the Senate’s severe condemnation of it as harmful to its citizenry and subsequent unbuilding reveals the depth of the ambivalence of Republican Roman attitudes beneath the institution of theater.4 And though a single figure, Scipio, may have had a large hand in this particular instance, three points nonetheless emerge: (1) clearly there was a great desire for theater to inspire building campaigns by benefactors who thought they just might get away with it; (2) clearly there were among the senatorial class plenty of harsh critics of something that theater represented; and (3) clearly, by the Page 157 →time the theater was allowed a century later, and then proliferated in the provinces as part of the great civilizing force of empire and as an essential component in the topography of power, those objections had been substantially revised. How those attitudes changed, that is, excavating the stratigraphy of what Bourdieu has called “habits of mind, ” is an archaeology of its own kind. Though buildings came and went, and festivals grew in scope and scale, refashioning the ontological position theater occupied in the Republican imagination—its ontology of attitudes and objections—is a large and largely undocumentable history, which makes it, of course, all the more inviting. It remains a startling contrast that before theater arrived as a Romanizing force in the provinces, before Vitruvius canonized its role in the essential civic architecture of the imperial grid, before it was allied to the cult of the emperor or inscribed as triumphal architecture and spread as an essential Roman feature from North African to northern Britain, the very idea of theater that was anathema to Republican Rome had to be utterly refashioned in the capital from something initially and repeatedly described as a foreign, effeminate luxury and altogether too Greek for Republic values. Where the distrust (infamia) originated, how it came to be lodged in the theater as a foreign and decadent space, and how that refashioning of attitudes occurred are the subjects that follow. Under the idea of the Roman theater is a vast realignment that shifted the early distaste and infamia of theater from the spectators to the actors, and that adjustment allowed first its incorporation into the city, and then its proliferation elsewhere.

Shitting on Romans A large part of creating the idea of Rome—as a site of identity, as well as a state—involved subsuming many diverse multiethnic practices, rituals, festivals, values, as well as Hellenizing Roman religion and refashioning founding myths into something that would emerge centuries later, congealed around a formation uniquely “Roman”—thus a long process of folding in foreignness until it became uneasily naturalized.5 Theater was one such foreign practice that became Roman, slowly, maybe even repeatedly.

There were many, many moments early in the Republic in which Rome herself was the indigenous deer hunter meeting “theater” for the first time, standing frightened in some alien space of someone else’s “hollow valley.” Livy’s account of the exotic reception of the imported Etruscan dancers propitiating the angry gods during the plague of 363 BCE must have been Page 158 →an odd and novel spectacle.6 Or, for those like Polybius, who had encountered theater elsewhere, the militarized flute competition that Lucius Anicius staged in 167 BCE was clearly such a misuse of the arena that even the Greek performers were at loss what to do.7 But among the many moments of distrustful encounter, the most legible point of contact that may have shaped Republican attitudes toward the theater was one particularly potent moment that occurred early in the third century, perhaps 282 BCE. An envoy from Rome, one Postumius, was dispatched to Tarentum, a Greek colony in Magna Graecia, and arrived when the whole city was drunk celebrating its Dionysus festival. Poor Postumius was famously shat upon in the theater and pledged bloody retaliation. And though Tarentum was only one of many Greek cities in which Rome encountered Greek theater and its culture (and beyond that the other early performance traditions: the Doric mime, the Oscan Atellana, the Fescennia, and all the loose satirical strands of southern Italian laughter), Tarentum’s decadent indulgence in its theater was proverbial among Greeks, and it was in Tarentum that the stain of the encounter left a two-century stink. The Tarentines had cultivated a reputation as first among Greeks for hedonism, and their festivals were excessive even by Greek standards. It was of this colony that Plato wrote succinctly: “In Tarentum, among our own colonists, .В .В .В I have seen the whole town drunk during the festival of Dionysus.”8 And lest we dismiss that aside as Platonic moralism, Theopompus, a generation later, confirmed that these Tarentines were people “always busy with parties and drinking bouts” and claimed (facetiously) that the number of their festival days exceeded the calendar days of the year.9 Aelian’s brief sketch of the town seems to contain the best of it: “At Tarentum the custom was to drink from dawn and to reach a drunken state by the time the market was active.”10 Such was the city’s reputation that when Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, sent an ambassador to Tarentum, he chose a famous hedonist, Polyarchus, a man nicknamed the High Liver (“a man entirely devoted to physical pleasures”) so that he might seem less foreign.11 Such was Tarentum’s reputation among the Greeks, hedonists of the first order, off stage and on—noticeably on.12 The Tarentines even developed their own distinctive genre of comedy, Phylakes, and the surviving pictorial evidence (vases) still remind us how frankly coarse their local brand of stage satire was.13 This was seriously vulgar comedy—body-sites grossly distorted, monstrously exaggerated phalloi dangling like the necks of geese between huge, drooping buttocks and paunches. The caricature of the Phylakes is excessive, hyperbolic, even beyond that of the satyr play. Even the tragedies are parodies, and it is Page 159 →perhaps not coincidental that Rhinthon, the first known writer of mimes (hilarotragoediae), practiced his art in Tarentum.14 From the broader visual record, the iconography from southern Italy in general and Tarentum specifically represented a preference for the caricature over the more sedate tragic function of theater (“a striking contrast with the Attic norm,” was Oliver Taplin’s conclusion)—perhaps suggesting that the development of their theater differed sharply from that of the civic and political platforms of their Athenian counterparts.15 When Taplin nudges the conversation of iconography toward what subjects were welcomed in the marketplace, he rightly supposes a local desire recorded in the local marketplace, and that desire speaks to a larger habit of mind, Bourdieu’s “habitus,” a governing structure of Tarentine experience and imagination that purposed their theater to the parodic and the bawdy. Comic masks and vases “seem to have been manufactured primarily in Tarentum,” concluded Manuwald, “where a particular Tarentine style was developed.”16 That particular style, that market, that local desire, whether it is traditionally known as Phylake or Rhinthon’s hilarotragoediae, speaks to all that is beneath it—its boisterous, parodic appeal—which may suggest that the theater at Tarentum was simply conceptually different from its counterpart in Athens.17 In the anecdote that follows, it may be that the Roman encounter with Greek theater did not shape Republican attitudes as much as the Tarentine brand of Phylakes did, an issue that touched off the dispute that led to Tarentum’s involvement in the Pyrrhic War. As Rome expanded down the peninsula, in the opening decades of the third century BCE, both the theater in Tarentum and, more important, the Tarentines’ conception of theater proved to be a critical staging ground for several decisive encounters in the narrative of their downfall.18 Here is the first moment, from Dio Cassius:

Lucius [Valerius] was dispatched by the Romans to Tarentum. Now the Tarentines were celebrating the Dionysia, and sitting gorged with wine in the theatre one afternoon, they suspected that he [Lucius Valerius] was sailing against them. Immediately, in a passion and partly under the influence of intoxication, they set sail in turn; and thus, without any show of force on his part or the slightest suspicion of any hostile act, they attacked and sent to the bottom both him and many others.19 In the Roman telling of the conflict, it was a critical detail of the opening of hostilities that the Tarentines were drunk in the theater at the festival of Page 160 →Dionysus when somebody had the irresponsible idea to attack Roman ships in the gulf. “Gorged with wine,” they set off and the sunk the Roman ships. But, Rome being Rome, the conflict didn’t end there. Dio Cassius continues with the next drunken episode, also in the theater: When the Romans heard of this, they naturally were angry, but did not choose to take the field against Tarentum at once. However, they dispatched envoys, in order not to appear to have passed over the affair in silence and in that way render them more arrogant. But the Tarentines, so far from receiving them decently or even sending them back with an answer in any way suitable, at once, before so much as granting them an audience, made sport of their dress and general appearance. It was the city garb, which was in use in the Forum; and this the envoys had put on, either for the sake of dignity or else by way of precaution, thinking that this at least would cause the foreigners to respect their position. Bands of revelers accordingly jeered at them—they were also celebrating a festival, which, though they were at no time noted for temperate behavior, rendered them still more wanton—and finally a man planted himself in the way of Postumius [the embassy], and stooping over, relieved his bowels and soiled the envoy’s clothing. At this an uproar arose from all the rest, who praised the fellow as if he had performed some remarkable deed, and they sang many scurrilous verses against the Romans, accompanied by applause and capering steps. But Postumius cried: “Laugh, laugh while you may! For long will be the period of your weeping, when you shall wash this garment clean with your blood.20 Shitting on the togam praetextam of the Roman ambassador (the purple-bordered state dress of officials) may have been a perfectly acceptable comic gesture for the Phylakes stage, but as a result of the indignity, Postumius mustered his army.21 When the Tarentines sobered up and realized the repercussions of their scato-farcical stunt, they hastily sought the help of Pyrrhus, king of Epirus. Pyrrhus agreed to render aid, on two conditions: that the Tarentines prohibit all festivals and drinking parties and that they close up the theater that they might take the war effort seriously.22 When a war with Rome can begin with a drunken plan in the theater, when it escalates with another drunken prank in the theater, when Phylakes become foreign policy, the Tarentines, Dionysius, Pyrrhus, and the Roman embassy are all acknowledging a potent and prior notion of theater as a Page 161 →staging ground for political action. Great decisions of state were made in ludic moments because the Tarentine conception of theater encouraged it. Even in a rare fit of sober and urgent deliberation in the run-up to the war, the Tarentine war council was interrupted by a performance that broke up their deliberations. Once they had gathered away from the theater, it still intruded into their deliberations. When an assemblyman, Meton, “failing to persuade the Tarentines not to engage in war with the Romans, retired unobserved from the assembly, put garlands on his head and returned along with some fellow-revelers and a flute girl. At the sight of him singing and dancing the Cordax, they gave up the business in hand to accompany [him].”23 This was the story Rome told of Tarentum, so seduced by revels they could not hold a war council. “Revel now,” was Meton’s message, “but if Tarentum went to war with Rome, slavery will follow,” as it did. The Romans were good to their word. At the close of the Pyrrhic War (280–275 BCE), Tarentum capitulated, thirty thousand of its residents were enslaved, its defensive walls were demolished, a Roman garrison was established, and the city was subjugated to Rome. The Tarentines would later rebel, allying themselves with Hannibal in the Second Punic War, and would again suffer for defying Rome with the destruction of their city. The theater would figure infamously in that engagement as well, as the site of great deceit, when Philimenus, having gained the city by stealth, set up buglers in the theater and called the Roman soldiers thither, where they were massacred.24 Perhaps it is expectable that no theater in Tarentum has since been found, though ample literary evidence documents its former presence.25 When Strabo toured the city, while noting many other architectural features still standing, as well as those carried off or

destroyed, he made no mention of a theater.26 Their purposing of the space, that is, theater as a site of utter indulgence in the Dionysiac abandon, that irresponsible holiday into which the Tarentines so excessively threw themselves which Pyrrhus (temporarily) and the Romans (permanently) curtailed, that abandon which had been the raucous signature and ultimate downfall of Tarentum, that purposing would not be embraced by the thirdcentury Roman conquest of the city. An excess of theater had led to the Tarentines’ enslavement, and whether or not the morality of that lesson was imprinted on the psyche of the Roman Senate is not recorded, but it was certainly remembered excessively. Apart from the narratives of the war that began in the theater, the Tarentine reputation (“shameless Tarentum, drunk and garlanded,” according to Juvenal centuries later) was also excessively remembered.27 Their luxury, their hedonism, their effeminacy would be a hallmark of their reputation (“The peoplePage 162 → of TarentumВ .В .В . had progressed to such a point of luxury as to have the skin of their entire bodies made smooth.В .В .В . All the men wore a transparent cloak with purple borders—garments which today are a refinement of women’s fashions” is the genus description of the Tarentines left by Clearchus, originally, and quoted into Athenaeus’s day).28 I belabor the Tarentine conception of theater because it remains an uncomfortable fact that for the next two hundred years the Roman Senate would guarantee that the theater would have no permanent place in Rome exactly because of its associations with decadence and indolence, and that deep suspicion came from somewhere—not from the Athenian civic model, but from somewhere else. Something deeply disturbing about the idea of theater prevented its early embrace in Republican Rome. Where theater did occur in Rome, it was thoroughly contained, allowed only within the temporary space of occasional ludi (holidays), indeed, legislated with greater rigidity than were the flimsy stages erected and dismantled. For two hundred years, Roman theater would not become that monumental civil architecture that would proliferate across the empire, but would remain conceptually a place marked by idleness, debauchery, effeminacy, and foreign decadence. That is to say, it would be a Tarentine space.

Colonizing Rome One of the thirty thousand Greek slaves who grew up in Tarentum during the first resistance and was marched up to Rome and sold was a young man who would be renamed Livius Andronicus (c. 290–204 BCE), the first recognized Latin (Romanized Greek) playwright.29 After the subjugation to Rome, he was sold to Livius Salinator, whose name he was assigned. The young man became a tutor, then a translator, and somewhere in his studies he became a writer and actor, and embarked on the long tutorial in training Romans to appreciate Greek things, including the genres of classical theater. Cicero dated Roman dramatic literature from a performance of Andronicus’s plays in 240.30 Little of that work remains, and consequently the accomplishments of Andronicus have yet to be fully appreciated (in the way, say, that Seneca’s canon has), but it was Andronicus who first introduced the Greek epic and translated The Odyssey. He moreover introduced the Homeric hymns and then translated them and composed his own hymns. He translated Greek tragedies by Sophocles and Euripides and Greek New Comedy. He founded a writer’s guild (a collegium) for the cultivation of Latin literature, and the project attracted enough high-level attentionPage 163 → that the state endorsed it with dedicated temple space.31 He accomplished all of this in addition to his theater career, as an actor first and then writer. Titles and fragments of nine tragedies survive, as well as three comedies.32 The first performance of Latin tragedy is traditionally dated from Andronicus’s presentation at the victory games celebrating the close of the First Punic War, and that introduction may have been as foreign to the Romans as those accounts of Roman theater in the provinces. Translating Greek genres into vernacular Latin, with the assimilation of the required Roman tastes, was a minor colonizing project of a former Greek from Tarentum, and a project best described by Horace, who wrote famously (with nearly impenetrable density), “Greece in its capture then captured its rough-mannered conqueror, thereby bringing the arts into countrified Latium.”33 More precisely put, one likely route for the introduction of the comic genre may grow directly from the comic traditions of Magna Graecia, and Andronicus’s native Tarentum.34 Recapturing its captors with Greek plays is a far cry from the political autonomy that Magna Graecia once enjoyed. Introducing revenge tragedy is a poor revenge for a life of Roman captivity and aspiring to literature in a nonnative tongue. Still, Tarentines like Andronicus fared better than most whom Rome swallowed on its long

expansion across the peninsula and beyond, whose prior cultures went down the maw of Rome intact and left not a burp behind. Some Tarentine DNA might yet have infected the firm Republican values through the theater, an institution the Republic held in deep suspicion—a suspicion reflected in its long-standing legal prohibition against permanent theaters.35 As Tacitus recalled it, from the time of Andronicus stages were temporary, “And the people stood to witness them, that they might not, by having the chance of sitting down, spend a succession of entire days in idleness.”36 Of course Tacitus doesn’t write idleness like the Tarentines’, but the phrases used to describe the early stages of Roman theater (idleness, foreign decadence, degeneracy) were not Republican values and were so strongly opposed that the Senate prevented, resisted, and legislated against attempts to erect a theater in Rome for two hundred years. Before theaters could be promoted in the provinces as functions of state, they required a serious makeover in the capital itself.37 One scrap, a fragment of a line from one of Andronicus’s comedies, seems to speak back to that infamous Tarentine proclivity to pleasure that alienated Rome in the first place: “adfatim edi bibi lusi” (I have eaten well, drunk well, and played my limit).38 I don’t want to make too much of four words, but the scrap does seem to be a particularly Tarentine desideratum to bequeath to Rome, certainly reminiscent of Pyrrhus’s objection to the Page 164 →Tarentines who would content themselves with feasting and reveling while Pyrrhus saved their city.39 Among all the serious cargo of introducing literature to the Latins, did Andronicus also pass onto Rome a Tarentine conception of theater as a site of excess, of ludic indulgence? Did some memory of its Tarentine roots give the early Roman theater its decadent character, an association noted by Tacitus as a place of idleness, degeneracy, and foreignness? “Adfatim lusi” (pleasure enough) does seem a fitting motto for the comedies to come, structured as they were around the apparatus of ludi, game days, that seem perfectly Tarentine. Funeral games, victory games, and ludi were the first occasions of Roman theater, holiday theater, and though there may have been a religious contract to the games, it was certainly not the competitive deep-play of invested generals and demagogues of the Athenian model, but the vocation of aliens and slaves. That fact should reveal to us that a new governing apparatus was in place, one that demanded an inevitable dismantling and realignment before theater would be of use to the state—a realignment that might need some explanation. Consider the problem this way: among the many curiosities about Roman theater is the fact that permanent purpose-built theaters arrived with an ease (even an expectation) in the provinces that was denied to them in Rome itself. In the provinces, no city was a proper city without a theater, but the capital adamantly resisted building theaters, instead enduring temporary, “hastily erected tiers of benches” and tolerated only unofficial stages, some even quite elaborate, but nonetheless thrown up and pulled down for nearly two centuries.40 Roman theater in Rome was an institution without architecture right from its inception.41 Its prior alien position denied it permanent architecture (and with it a certain residency), and its uncertain and unofficial status remained a longstanding and divisive question in the Republic. Finally Pompey the Great shouldered his way through the problem in 55 BCE when he dedicated a new temple complex to his personal deity Venus Victrix in the celebration of his other triumphs and attached to it a theatrical auditorium.42 Up to that point, permanent theaters had been repeatedly prohibited as foreign decadence.43 Attempts had been made to allow a dedicated, purpose-built permanent theater in Rome as early as 179 BCE, but were thwarted by the Senate. A second attempt was floated five years later in 174, and again in 151 BCE, all squashed by the Senate. Indeed, in 151 the distrust of a permanent building was so pronounced that the Senate ordered the dismantling of the theater, already under construction near the Lupernal, and demanded that the materials be sold off.44 Such a building was a precedent that the Republic was unwilling to concede, in spite of the rickety and occasionally fatal risk of collapse that Page 165 →temporary theaters annually posed.45 Yet the practice of theater continued, year after year, season after season, ludum by ludum, with temporary wooden structures, in their illicit and carnival way. Some were dangerous, some of enormous ingenuity, but all continued to be thrown up and pulled down for another century.46 Theater, as it was known, was simply not a Republican virtue, certainly not one to be accorded architectural status and embraced by the state to which permanence could be somehow “official.” Writing a generation after Pompey, Vitruvius could still describe Pompey’s theater as “the stone theater,” as if stone for such structures was still an oddity in the capital.47 Cicero, looking back to the days of Scipio Aemilianus (129 BCE), could note Rome’s disapproval of the stage as so thoroughly disgraceful that any of this genus hominum (race of humans) who appeared there should be deprived of their civic standing.48

That infamia would remain indelibly a part of the actor’s profession for centuries to come, but it would be purged from the architecture of theater when Pompey the Great, newly reelected consul, the brilliant general who had faced down Sulla and the Senate, erected a theater/temple complex as part of his (third) lavish triumph, and there was little that senators like Cicero could say against it. The twin associations of temple and triumph successfully overmapped the prior, alien nature of theater that had kept it on the peripheries of Roman culture, and that realignment may have finally, metaphorically speaking, made the theater togatum (properly Roman), literally in-corporating theater into the body of the Romanized cityscape. How this theater was finally allowed, that is, folded into the myth of empire in ways the older Republican values would not tolerate, may have contributed both to its status in Rome and certainly to its reputation in the provinces.49 Once allowed, theaters proliferated with great agility and, as we have seen, quickly became a thoroughly Roman institution. We would do well to inquire what ultimately allowed the theater, as architecture, in Rome, and if the theater’s new, adjusted position in the urban text traveled with theaters outside the capital. Something clearly altered in the urban attitude toward the structure and its position, and I suspect it was bound up with the same self-aggrandizing triumph ideology that ultimately transformed the Republic into the empire. Certainly it was bound with the diminished power of the Senate and the increased potency of the competing generals and commanders of the large campaigns that overrode the Senate’s authority and ultimately led to the civil wars: Pompey the Great and Gaius Julius Caesar. Dio Cassius and Suetonius are both keen to remind readers that Caesar’s theater was designed to compete with Pompey’s—larger, with a bigger temple, just as his triumphs were designed to be more lavish.50 Page 166 → In the last years of the Republic, such deep play of the great forced Rome to refashion its fundamental attitude toward theater, and that move was a trump of military triumph over the Senate.51 Tacitus, in a long passage in his life of Nero, records that even the great Pompey was “censured by the older men of the day for having set up a fixed and permanent theatre” for promoting idleness and the degeneracy of foreign taste.52 But once built, it would not be unbuilt. Pompey’s theater thus represents a large ontological project, shifting the idea of theater from the locus of foreign luxury and idleness to an institution of state ideology, constructed as triumphs and exportable as temples.

A Belated Opening Night To be fair, Pompey’s last triumph was not so much an event as a half-decade self-promotional festival. The triumph had formally begun back in 61, after Pompey returned to Rome from a successful campaign in Asia Minor, bringing the former Greek colonies under Roman rule. Among the gifts, games, dinners, and pomp on that occasion, including representatives of fourteen conquered states, Pompey promised the plebs a new theater. It took many years to build, as it was part of a complex of buildings that incorporated existing temples, open spaces, gardens, a curia (the “court” that proved fatal to Julius Caesar) and, most notably, a new temple to Venus Victrix. It was, as Frank Sear noted, “a new type of civic building.”53 The project no doubt encountered its share of grumbling, the temple seen as a ploy to smuggle in a theater as “steps” to the temple, but construction proceeded apace until Pompey’s theater was officially dedicated on 12 August of 55, to coincide with the dedication of the Temple of Heracles.54 When opening night finally arrived, as if to acknowledge its own belatedness, the dedication performance featured the oldest living actor on record in the classical world. She was 104 at the time she stepped onto the new stage, the first stage of her long career that would not be dismantled at the close of the ludi. For a veteran who had begun her stage career nine decades earlier and had survived to witness the theater’s eventual arrival and the fulfillment of a much-deferred civic desire, the day must have seemed unreal.55 Perhaps the appearance of the old trouper was designed as a gesture of continuity. The new theater would seem to do as theater had been doing since the old days of Andronicus, but, in point of fact, the new stone building, as part of a temple complex, as part of a permanent triumph (with its fourteen conquered states now as statues in the theater), was a very new and monumental thing, and though its content may have been reprised, its function was Page 167 →thoroughly reoriented. Like those self-fashioned figures in eighteenth-century novels, with their buried pasts and titled makeovers, Pompey had succeeded in creating a new genealogy of theater, and, with it, Roman theater as a state

idea, a site of conquest, had arrived, thoroughly refashioned, as a state display case of the conquered.56 Where the vulgarity of the playspace remained was quarantined to the acting profession. The building was a dignified space, attached to a temple, a museum, and a senatorial curia, and its auditors could sit without shame. It was also quite noticeably not a gift of the “Senatus Populusque Romanus,” but Pompey’s theater, built as part of his own personal and civic celebration (an attached museum was stocked with his own personal art collection), and part of his bid for claiming the plebs of the city as a power base. Julius Caesar responded by building a Forum, so that two men were waging a low-voltage monumental architectural campaign. On opening night, Pompey’s new theater must have seemed like a refounded city, a brand-new place with the same name, but official, Romanized. Theater had triumphed, ontologically speaking, by becoming triumphal architecture. And with that adjustment, theaters went viral. The inauguration of Pompey’s theater was a singular event, and like all really singular events, copied quickly: ground for Caesar’s theater was soon cleared for the construction of what would be the Theater Marcellus, and Herod returned from Rome to build the theater at Caesarea Maritima within a few years. Theaters were built widely within a generation of the acceptance of the first ones into Rome’s own capital space. For example, at the time Pompey’s theater was opened, Roman Vienna was a ramshackle supply post for the Gallic wars. Twenty-five years later (when Vitruvius was writing), it boasted the first of its three theaters. The same generation saw the first Roman theaters erected in dozens of frontier towns from Aphrodisias, in Roman Caria, to Arles, Acinipo, Augusta Emerita (Merida, Spain), Cordoba, Arausio (Orange). Augusta Raurica, and four under the sponsorship of Herod in Roman Judea. Many of them were accompanied by the temples of the new imperial cult. Conceptually, the dedication of Pompey’s “temple” formally recalibrated the function of an institution well on its way to permanence already, but accelerated by subsuming theaters into triumph architecture complexes—the concept spread easily and eagerly to the many victorious sites of the wars of Roman expansion.

Deep Purple I don’t think an image of Tarentum ever lurked within the niches of Pompey’s theater or was displayed the way that allegories of Gaul, Britain, and Page 168 →Armenia were, as trophies of the conquered.57 But Tarentum was no less consumed. A few decades after the opening of Pompey’s theater, the poet Horace could look back at how that alien practice had (finally) become Roman by consuming its exotic origins. There is a small moment in Horace’s famous poem that treats of theater’s storied past, in which Tarentum makes a second appearance, this time in Rome itself. The moment is nearly a parody of the assimilation that brought it this far, but it, too, speaks of the Tarentine (re)conquest. Now the same howling chorus of (Roman) voices in the theater that frightened the deer hunter is raised in acclamation of nothing more serious than the color of that prized Tarentine dye, a brilliant deep purple extracted from a mollusk on the Tarentine gulf: Have there ever been voices of human Beings to cope with our theatre’s uproar? You think you are hearing Howling of winds through the woods of Garganus or over the Tuscan Sea. Amid that kind of racket our plays are performed—with their gorgeous Loads of exotic apparel. The actor has only to step on Stage in such trappings and right hands begin to clap left hands in frenzy: “Has he said anything yet?’”—“Not a word.”—“Then what are they applauding?” “Costumes the color of violets, woolens of Tarentine purple.”58 Tarentum’s lovely purple (was it the purple of the praetexta toga that was so ridiculous to the Greek

Tarentines?) had now become Tarentum’s second most popular export commodity, recognized by the fulsome applause that sent the theater in Rome (Tarentum’s first exotic export) into uproars of delight. That lovely Tyrian purple had become the color of conquest when Virgil imagined Augustus Caesar wearing it, as he rode in triumph with his “hundred four horse chariots . . . All Greece for me.”59 The foreign origins of the theater that would become Rome’s arena of forgetting would not wholly be forgotten, but would be ingested and repurposed, thoroughly Romanized. The colonizing that Horace called the Greek conquest would itself need to be overmapped to Romanize the Roman theater until it became part of the exportable template of empire, a template that involved a thorough naturalizing of an appropriated memory.

Page 169 →

Eight. Mapping Rome Rules for Borrowing Memory The approved way of building them . . . —Vitruvius, On Architecture 5.9 Once the forum has been laid out, then a site should be selected for a theatre. —Vitruvius, 5.3.1

Rules for Borrowing Memory If Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture are about anything, they are about rules, and nothing functions to naturalize a foreign practice quite like rules. The proper proportions, the width of columns, columniation, size, structure, and function were all folded into the “approved methods” and “correct principles of symmetry” that represented a great civilizing or colonizing force, and marked it with a remarkably fixed aesthetic. “Rome” had a look, wherever it roamed—grids, streets, walls, baths, temples, Forum—and theaters, to their great success, had become part of that look. Within just a few decades of Rome’s first permanent theater, they had become a vital component of the template architecture of building “Rome” across the empire. The uniformity of that Roman look was part of its appeal. The various activities of thought that went into Romanizing were based on templates, forms that allowed what MacMullen called “the replication” of Roman values.1 Indeed, Vitruvius, a designer of one of those templates, opens the second book of his work on architecture with an anecdote of a failed model of local, idiosyncratic building. Dinocrates, a stunningly attractive young architect in search of work, once presented himself to Alexander the Great dressed (or rather undressed) like the god Heracles. Having gained access through this charade, he made his pitch to the general: a plan for carving a great city out of a Mount Athos. The mountain itself would look like AlexanderPage 170 → holding the city in his carved hands. It was a bold, silly sycophant’s gesture, to which Alexander immediately objected, not for the excessive flattery, but because the planned city had no practical food source, elevated as it was far above its own fields. Vitruvius prefaced his Ten Books on Architecture with this anecdote to contrast it with the careful planning of the proper Roman city, whose imperial agenda was equally present, just less pronounced. The aesthetic advanced in Vitruvius’s ten volumes documents a compulsion not only to order the newly acquired landscape uniformly, but to commandeer architecture itself as a decidedly Roman and more enduring enterprise than those barbarian huts or Dacian stilt-buildings.2 Unlike the plaything of Dinocrates, Roman architecture would have rules that shaped social spaces, and theaters would be an integral part of that. Architecture (like freestanding theaters) would be planned, not grow by accretion on whatever lots or hill-slopes were available; it would be laid out on a familiar grid, purpose-built of stone (not those wood huts that the deer hunter and Iron Age Gaul had jerry-built), and ordered on the crosshairs of the Deuco Maximus and the Cardus Maximus: temples, forum, baths, theater. Architecture would not be just anything that kept the rain off, but a principled ideal of ordered social spaces, public buildings for public containment that provided the culture of citizen-shaping, an ideal best realized in the best of Roman models. It would be, in Edmund Thomas’s definition of monumental, “visionary.”3 It would envision its own endurance. How uniformly (or even precisely) Vitruvius’s notions were applied, or to what extent they were even his to claim, is of course troubled, but that is beside the point. His conceptions are what count. His prescriptions for building, for which he remains the most articulate spokesman, represented a pronounced coercion that was certainly in place, even in sites where the geography was not. And his prescriptions about the function of architecture to create the notion of an investment in Roman identity a long way from Rome,

and to use architecture to commandeer memory, are quite clear. And unlike, say, the later geographers who mapped their descriptive geographies from without, Vitruvius was a man of the trenches who built for an expanding Rome he knew firsthand. Vitruvius represented a rare moment in Rome: his talents actually intersected the demand for just such a writer. His treatise on the need for proper architecture was composed in the thick of the most expansive growth cycle in Rome’s long tenure, the Julio-Claudian dynasty, and the practical application of his ideas could be seen from Spain to Syria. Vitruvius was himself a military engineer commissioned first in the Gallic campaigns under Page 171 →Julius Caesar and likely to have seen action on the Iberian Peninsula and in North Africa as well. Later he served under Augustus, to whom he dedicated his ten-volume work De achitectura and may have participated in the British campaign. Though his cursus (his list of campaigns) is unclear and still debated, Vitruvius was clearly not a theoretician designing ideal cities back in the comfort (or squalor) of Rome. As a military engineer, he built for camps first, and after the conquest he built for coloniae: new Roman veteran cities remapped on conquered landscapes. The creation of the new urban complex of Roman building must have struck any traveled individual as remarkably (even comfortably) familiar from town to town.4 In this regard, the grid of empire offered an orienting aesthetic, a familiar redistribution of space, uniformly, even precisely built—walls, fora, temples, theaters, baths, and every inch of it ideological. That theaters were imprinted into this grid is worth italicizing. When Vitruvius wrote of this as the “authority of public buildings” in his preface, it is an authority that was performed, enacted in architecture and the culture within it. The authority, the uniformity, the monumentality of Roman design meant that one could orient oneself inside the Roman urban complex immaterial to the exigencies of the cultural geography upon which such buildings sat, and this orientation was as much internal, was itself part of a larger assimilation project. Today we call this uniformity “globalization,” including all the locality that homotopia erases. The trick is hiding the disappearing. But to those with an eye for such things, like Vitruvius, it was very clear that Roman monumental architecture was, by force, built upon a certain displacement of memory, including a memory of a prior landscape. A large part of the project of Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture was to create a uniform aesthetic that erased the prior and recalled another place, “Rome,” the military epicenter of the Mediterranean world, evoked and imposed upon a landscape it had consumed and displaced, and to do this without acknowledging the displacement. Laying out townships with proper proportions, proscribing buildings and building methods (“the correct principles of symmetry”) guaranteed that the whole familiar grid of empire was driven by a compulsion to recall a distant Rome; a compulsion not only to order the newly acquired topography along familiar lines, but to commandeer architecture as a decidedly new and Roman enterprise. In this project, buildings are asked to remember, not the landscape’s past, not the tribal lands, the huts and oppida (towns) of the pre-Roman, but another space of their own making. Their very uniformity is a kind of designed familiarity that asked them to stand in for an original elsewhere. Provincial temples harkened back to Roman temples, baths to baths, provincial miniatures Page 172 →that function both to sever the new from the prior, and to recall their more monumental (Roman) originals. When Tacitus writes, “Who the first inhabitants of Britannia were, whether natives or immigrants, remains obscure, as is usual with barbarians,” he is reminding us that for most Roman historians, history began with Romans.5 Prior identities belonged to an unstoried past, or a past that Rome over-storied with architecture. It built over, and in building, buried or commandeered memory. It is precisely because buildings carry the capacity to commandeer memory that Vitruvius, quite early in his text, insisted that architects must know their history; yet his insistence on history is itself troubled by that peculiar Roman amnesia that assumes history is Roman history. In his imperative that architecture remember, Vitruvius offered (without irony) the apt illustration of the Greek Caryatids, a lesson in forgetting that seems to speak quite precisely to how Rome used its borrowed memory of another’s origins to first displace the prior, and then to reclaim and refashion its own identity. The Caryatids are the supporting columns (still standing in the Acropolis museum) carved like women, originally designed for the Erechtheion in Athens. As sites of memory, the originals marked the betrayal of Caryae, who had sided with the Persians against Athens in the Persian War and had lost. After the defeat of Persia, the Athenians turned their ire back to Caryae: the men were slaughtered, and the noble born of the women were carried into captivity. But they were not allowed to assimilate and become Athenians;

they were required to wear the stolae (robes) still. “This was done,” wrote Vitruvius: so that they should not simply be exhibited in a single triumphal procession, but should instead be weighted down forever by a burden of shame, forced to pay the price for such grave disloyalty on behalf of their city. To this end, the architects active at the time incorporated images of these women in public buildings as weight-bearing structures; thus, in addition, the notorious punishment of the Caryate women would be recalled to future generations.6 Thus, for Vitruvius, his example of monumental Roman memory was another’s memory—in this case, Greek memory—pressed into service at the heart of Rome, and indeed architects there employed exactly this model. Caryatids lined the Forum of Augustus, another population of them stood in the Roman Pantheon, more on the Via Appia, and later they supported Hadrian’s Villa at Trivoli. Caryatids decorated a portico on the Temple of Diana, in the heart of Emerita (Merida, Spain), and Juba II, client-King of Page 173 →Augustus, had copies of caryatids in Iol Caesarea (North Africa).7 But why caryatids in Rome, or Roman Spain, or North Africa? Why the appropriation of another’s conquest memory as a theoretic and then realized example of Rome’s own memorial architecture? Caryatids, even recycled caryatids (like those at the Forum), are at the root of what monumental architecture aspires to, literally monumental’s root monere (a warning), but the warning of another’s appropriated experience.8 I ask because I suspect that the answer is not as simple as the axiom that “Rome borrowed culture.” Rather, Rome, we might say, trafficked in a black market of memory, brokering another’s history as its own goods.9 I suspect that the way in which Rome naturalized and then embraced the Greek Caryatids, the defeated Persians, for a model of Roman architectural memory had a great deal to do with its process of naturalizing Hellenistic theaters, overmapping identities by consuming and refashioning them. I do not think that the captive women who lined the Forum were quotations of a Greek past, knowingly evoking an off-site original and the artifice of their own knock-offs any more than theaters were; but rather caryatids, like theaters, had become a Roman colonized memory, appropriated signs of some pre-Roman other. Triumphed back to Rome as thoroughly monumentalized Roman history, they now stood for all the urbis orbis (the city) to see, not as the unassimilated early fifth-century residents of Greek Caryae, but refashioned into open ciphers of Roman conquest. Once erected in the Forum, the caryatids, I suspect, were no longer a Greek memory of Caryae at all, but had become the ruins of memory, the disappeared Gauls, Dacians, Bessians, Britons, in stoa—which remained, and their remains became Romanized “others.” They became the defeated (what Michael Vickers has called “a permanent picture of slavery”), and Vitruvius’s imperative to remember through architecture is thus, at its core, also an imperative to forget.10 It is a colonizing act of appropriating another’s conquest memory so thoroughly it ceases to be another’s. This dislocation of memory, this conscription and consumption of another’s history, I suspect, was how Roman theaters came to function as well, not just for the spectacles within (like the deer hunter’s experience) but ontologically—the very idea of a foreign practice refashioned into a state theater that became central to state expansion. Memory itself was colonized. Somewhere, someone had argued and won the point that theaters pacified, if not Romanized, a conquered (“barbarian”) people, making them togati, and though that original argument has not been preserved, the evidence of it was all across the empire. Theaters arrived early and with an authority that far exceeded their presence in Rome itself; they arrived in the first wave of public buildings, and often at the expense of other civic (and Page 174 →frankly more practical) needs.11 Towns that had no medical centers or academies, or even aqueducts, had theaters. Towns too small to support much else nonetheless boasted a theater because they had become essential to the function of provincial Roman towns. And towns that had no theater were hardly towns at all. Pausanias, in a rare moment of contemporality, described one such town, Panopeus in Phocis: “If you can call it a city at all when it has no state buildings, no training-ground, no theaters, and no market-square.”12 Pliny complained to Trajan that the new theater in Nicea was so poorly built in its haste to acquire one that it was not likely to stand till its own completion. Trajan suggested a reliable water source instead, advice that went unheeded. The town sorely needed an aqueduct but built a theater and a gymnasium instead.13

Unmapping

And so they spread, by the hundreds, while garrisons became coloniae (settlements), coloniae towns, and towns capitals, connected in dense webs of culture, authority, and material supply chains. By the late third century of the Common Era, the Roman Empire contained some twelve hundred to fifteen hundred provincial cities, some little more than depots for armies on the move; others, major hubs of regional administration. Most of the larger ones had many of the same features: a forum for conducting business, temples, a theater, baths. Most would be laid out with a major north-south road intersecting the city center with a major east-west road. If large enough, there would be, in addition, a stadium or amphitheater, like those at Arles, NГ®mes, Antioch, Caesarea Maritima, or Perge, or a second theater, an odeon. It all must have seemed so enduring, these vast piles of stone, serving the administrative and military epicenter of the circum-Mediterranean world. Rome’s expansion, if tracked one lifetime at a time, in a sequence of stills, might resemble nothing so much as the advanced stages of some cancer. This is what the third layer of this map of scars might also show: the unmapping of that gigantic complex, the hasty retreat from the perimeters, the contractions and implosions at the edges, the reversions. This map would reveal the displacements of the population, the deurbanizing, the unmaking, the pulling down of stones and repurposing of architecture into hasty fortification walls, that is, the destruction, the sudden unzipping, and slow decay of empire. There is something particularly poignant in the irony of stones from a triumphal arch repurposed to become a defensive wall. Page 175 →And in the aftermath of the many incursions—by the Vandals, the Suebi, the Alani, Goths, Visigoths; their names are legion—that prompted the retreat from the edges of an overstrained grid, can the map record the desertion? The ideal city of Italica that Hadrian built was abandoned after the Roman period, leaving a ghost city largely intact. I think a map might register somehow the eeriness and somewhat forlorn state of cities bereft of citizens. In the narrative of the contracting edges, north and west, quietly catastrophic, only the details of the geography substantially differ. Large studies and small document the retreat, as legions were called in from the borders, frontier communities were left vulnerable, and economies shrunk.14 With the military retreat, the support industry that served the administration of the army collapsed: all those merchants, shippers, and suppliers whose primary contracts were Roman outposts, Roman payrolls, but also those who regulated such exchanges, like those shiptraders with their barrels of wine and fish-paste still visible on Trajan’s column. Engineers (and I’m speaking metaphorically of all who built and serviced the infrastructure) and all the workers who maintained the machinery of empire, and all contract merchants and small traders and adventurers in all the goods and services that might thrive with some security, also fell into disuse and retreated inward. A collapse of infrastructure followed and, with it, structure. Roads broke down, became unsafe, the domain of brigands; sewers ceased to drain, aqueducts leaked, ports silted up. The repair of basic goods and services—roofs, shoes, pots, teeth—went to the handy, but not the professional. A reversion to local power and security may have been equally amateur; amenities disappeared, along with booksellers, vendors of Tarentinepurple wools, scriveners, spice dealers, silversmiths, ceramicists, actors, amphorae of Chian wine, olive oil, beef dealers, or basic fish paste—all became the things of lore. Grass overtook the theater, column drums were recycled into foundations, statues of emperors became stuff to fill a wall, baths fell into disrepair, as did the law courts. The walled Roman town of London was completely abandoned.15 All of this meant that the great exchanges of the world diminished rapidly. Some of the collapse was quite literal. Robin Cormack traces whole streets in Aphrodisias where monumental buildings collapsed and the streets were retired “for lack of engineering skill and manpower” to remove the marble.16 However it may be measured, it was certainly a collapse of some magnitude, and this collapse could be traced a dozen ways: the loss of goods and textiles, the change of diet, demographic shift out of urban centers, the loss of Roman law, the loss of protective troops, supply lines, supplies, and the range of goods. Everything that Pliny the Elder had Page 176 →marveled at (“the perpetual interchange going on between all parts of the earth”) diminished; many endeavors ceased, as did the safety of travel, which compromised the importing of raw goods and the exporting of finished goods. Thus markets decayed, further devaluing currencies, and, with that, economies diminished. With the withdrawal of so much manpower, even the geography reverted.17 Without drains and their servicing, towns flooded and water resumed its ancient ways; bridges, channels, breakwaters (like those Herod had erected at Caesarea Maritima) fell apart. Without routine dredging, Roman harbors silted up, like Narbonne on the Rhone, or

the harbor that once fronted the lovely theater at Miletus, leaving the towns cut off from their maritime commercial links, further diminishing their markets, their connection to the larger world, their world itself. This is the threefold unfolding envisioned in the Anglo-Saxon poem Ruins: the disappearance of the order, the destruction, and the decay. Gone are the masons, laments the poem, “skilled in round-building,” when “slaughter spread, pestilence arose.” It is a bleak portrait of collapse: Their bulwarks are broken, their halls laid waste the cities crumbled, those who would repair it laid in the earth. And so these halls are empty and the curved arch sheds its tiles, torn from the roof, decay has brought it down, broken it to rubble.18 Like the baths (likely Roman baths) lamented in the poem, now a memory of some wondrous luxury of some past greatness, so too did the theaters fall into disuse, as did the games, the festivals, the mimes, and everything in that “bright city of broad rule” that went with them.19 For structures that had arrived so quickly, with such order, and endured so long, theaters were retired and repurposed with astonishing alacrity. Alexandra Retzleff has noted succinctly that “few theatres were built anywhere in the Empire after c. 300.”20 The large theater in Orange was closed by 391, largely intact, and most in southern Gaul seem to have fallen out of use by the end of the fourth century.21 Some suffered a more inglorious fates than repurposing stones into defensive walls. Verulamium’s theater was dilapidated by mid-fourth century and by late century had become the de facto rubbish dump for the town. A similar repurposing befell the theaters at Merida and Chersonese. Seats from Herod’s theater in Jerusalem were found repurposed some distance from the theater, cuneus (divisions between seats) marks intact.22 Enduring as the theaters were, when the borders were threatened, Page 177 →defensive walls were a far better use of block. In Contiomegus (Gaul), more than two hundred stone seats, many with inscribed names reserving seats for the Gallo-Romans, were reused in a foundation wall.23 In Sermium (Serbia), stones purposely quarried to rebuild the theater were instead redirected into defensive walls. “At the approach of barbarian Quadri and Sarmatians, praetorian prefect Probus rebuilt the walls of Sirmium using material which had been collected to build the theatre.”24 That was 374, and with the approach of the barbarians, walls were frankly worth more. Even the Theater of Marcellus in Rome was parted out by 370. The same repurposing is evidenced for the theaters at Arlete, Barcino (Barcelona), Echternach (Luxembourg), Somme, Mediolanum Santorum, Camulodunum, the odeon at Cyrene, and others.25 Even when saved, many sites were utterly refashioned. The massive amphitheater at Arles is particularly poignant, as the town moved inside the enclosure and remained there as the shrunken city for centuries.26 Without the will to repair or the manpower, the occasional natural disasters became permanent civic remodels, like the earthquakes that rattled Asia Minor once a century. Earthquakes that had previously initiated repairs, reconstructions, rededication (Carthage) and, more important, the large imperial remunerations to assist with such, now closed the theaters permanently.27 Theaters, like those at Antipatras, Philadelphia, Diocaesarea, Sagalassos, Aphrodisias, and Butrint (Albania), all sloughed off their scaenae frontes (back walls of the stages) in a single earthquake of 363, sealing off the lower seating of the theater, burying the statues, ornaments, and archives; they were not rebuilt.28 After that event, the upper stories were robbed out. Eventually a church was built over the rubble in Butrint, and a village emerged over the orchestra in Aphrodisias.29 Perhaps the best way to ingest the monumental nature of the collapse is through the small and most revealing moments. One haiku of collapse: as the fourth century rolled on in what was (once) Roman Britain, abandonment from many of the major works in the small Roman-built town of Verulamium began, including the great Park Street Villa, which was unoccupied by 370, as was nearby Boxmoor Villa.30 The leadership left first, and the last

of the Roman field army withdrew from Britain in 407. The decay followed quickly, though Roman influence lived on for some generations. Buildings and customs like theater utterly atrophied. Large evidences and small attest to the dismantling (for example, crockery repaired with rivets found in numerous sites seems to suggest that new ceramic ware was no longer available).31 At the close of the fourth century, the theater in Verulamium that had ceased to function as a theater ceased to function as a civic Page 178 →gathering space; and in a gesture of disuse, disrespect, or just plain practicality, the site that once held two thousand spectators became the town’s garbage dump.32 Layers of post-Roman civic refuse begin to fill the cavea from the early fifth century—so much so that it has been suggested the site was the repository of more than just those living nearby.33 More revealing, the adjoining temple that had originally opened onto the theater was converted to a Christian church, given a new door, now opening away from the theater, and apparently the stink. Later, at least suggests the first archaeologist on the site, the blocks of the theater were recycled into the building of the abbey church and monastery up the hill, in the founding of the new town.34 Then, too, theaters must have been easy to disassemble with combatants at the gate. The stone seating and backing of the cavea, row by row, tier by tier, the steps, the paving, the flooring of the orchestra are some of the most portable stones in all of Roman architecture. Practically speaking, the majority of blocks used to build a Roman theater, particularly those resting directly on the hillside, are not even load-bearing. There are no roofs to dismantle, relatively little suspended weight, few locked joints (beyond the arches), and even the arching is frequently a single story. Most of the cavea would be free for the lifting. Row by row, seats, steps, and backs could be readily robbed out when the need for defensive blocks was greater elsewhere. The remarkable thing is not that so many were dismantled but that so many remain. We have ample evidence of their destructions: the stones recycled into walls and fortifications, later into abbeys and churches all across the (former) western empire. But we have no accounts of the retiring of the cities in the way that their founding is recorded, no Vitruvian manuals for demolition, no guidebooks for the unbuilding of Rome. Public buildings had public dedications, restorations had rededications, but their abandonment and slow collapse went unacknowledged, unrecorded. They settled into their quiet afterlife as ruins without a narrative of that decay. The introduction of tragedy by that banished actor in Nero’s day (or earlier, or later) was an urban legend told and told again, made memorable in the telling, but that last actor who crossed the channel, that last Verecunda playing the last Andromeda, the last wailings in the theater, before the craft retreated and the seats became a wall to keep out (and in) the new barbarians—that moment is utterly unrecorded, and that silence seems somewhat poignant. There were greater stories elsewhere, greater needs, and whatever happened in spaces like theaters, or was done to spaces like theaters, was undone without ceremony. Page 179 →A final moment, one that might be most revealing on this map of scars it that of the site of Carthage—founded, destroyed, refounded, and destroyed again. Sometime in the early fifth century (Victor Vintensis puts it in October 439), after the sack of Rome itself, the Vandals entered the colony of Roman Carthage, nearly unimpeded.35 In the surrender that followed, we hear of only three buildings that were destroyed completely; all else was left standing and reoccupied. Why these three buildings were targeted is not recorded, but of all the standing architecture the Vandals found offensive enough to take the trouble to raze, they destroyed only the odeon, the theater, and the Temple of Memory.36 Smashed inscriptions, broken statues, a thick layer of ash and debris all testify to the violent end these buildings alone faced. I am fascinated by the notion of Vandals undoing temples of Roman memory that were built over the site of the old Punic necropolis, built upon another’s undoing, and designed, as they were, to displace prior memories. Was the ground reclaimed by their erasure? Was it left vacant as a flagged stela to Rome’s eradication? Or were the dense sites overbuilt yet again to a new memory of a new imperial Vandalism?

Page 180 →

Nine. Savage Cuisine / The City of Always Time stands still for those who admire. —Diderot

The Grass-Grown Theater Early in the second century CE, the Roman satirist Juvenal, contrasting the fashion of the countryside to that of Rome, offered an oblique but revealing observation on the decayed conditions of provincial theaters and their moribund traditions: Throughout most of Italy— We might as well admit it—no one is seen in a toga Till the day he dies. Even on public holidays, When the same old shows as last year are cheerfully staged In the grassgrown theatre, when peasant children, sitting On their mothers’ laps, shrink back in terror at the sight Of those gaping, whitened masks, you will still find the whole Audience—top row to bottom—dressed exactly alike; Even the magistrates need no better badge of status Than a plain, while tunic. (3.174–83)1 Casual wear aside, by Juvenal’s time the Greek tragic tradition (now the Roman tragic tradition) seemed to be on the cusp of oblivion. Even the space itself was forgetting. Grass had begun its inexorable reclamation, as it had for Apuleius’s ass, who stood munching on the green before his stage entrance.2 The performance conventions could have been on their last generation, were it not that by Juvenal’s time, particularly for those living outside of Rome, every generation had been their last generation. For several centuries, provincial parents who had learned to become accustomed to the monstrously distorted masks, costumes, meter, voicing, and conventions of tragic performance had to teach familiar usage to the children who, Page 181 →unaccustomed to the artifice, rightly shrank back from the strangeness of it all. For all the rigidity of the tradition, there is nothing natural about classical tragedy: it disfigures the human body, alienates the human voice, and distorts human experience into monstrous acts of cannibalism, infanticide, incest, madness, and self-annihilation. That this foreign artifice, with all its rigid and unnatural conventions, tones, and costumes, was adopted for urban Roman usage, then exported to the provinces and circulated as part of the cultural value of “Romanness” for several centuries, may be the most monstrous aspect of it. Several portraits, anecdotal and iconographic, survive to testify to the truly alien nature of tragic performance. Here are three, or rather, the same anecdote narrated by three authors, modulated over several centuries, whose persistent retellings only confirm the incomprehensible nature of its subject. Lucian (c. 125–180 CE) begins his short essay How to Write History with an account of a provincial infatuation and a village-wide fever that was brought on by a single visiting tragedian. Provincials became stagestruck, an inviting metaphor of a larger distemper, the impulse to consume the culture of the capital (the kind of

provincialism upon which eighteenth-century English comedies are built), but the epidemic was thoroughly biological—composed of fever, vomit, blood, and diarrhea—which make the terms of the contamination all the more poignant. The story, set in Abdera (on the coast of Thrace) at the time of King Lysimachus (c. 300 BCE), was already a shaggy-dog tale when Lucian recorded the details (“There is a story of a curious epidemic at AbderaВ .В .В .”). It begins when Archelaus the tragedian introduced a great fever that followed his performance of Euripides’s Andromeda. A week after the tragedy, the sickness had taken hold of most of the town, certainly those who had gathered at the theater. In their fever and delirium, the infected ranted and cried out in their pain, of all things, lines from the play: “They were all stage-struck, mouthing blank verse and ranting at the top of their voices. Their favorite recitation was the Andromeda of Euripides; one after another would go through the great speech of Perseus; the whole place was full of pale ghosts, who were our seventh-day tragedians vociferating.” It was a town of the mad and the infected, and the pathogen and the madness took the form of tragedy, publicly ingesting and disgorging tragic voices full of tragic suffering from their wasted tragic bodies. This sickness continued, writes Lucian, “till the coming of winter put an end to their madness with a sharp frost.” It is a pitiable image, albeit amusing at a distance: provincial townsfolk distraught with this new metaphoric and biological fever, delirious, becoming translated in their suffering, intoning Page 182 →Andromeda’s lines, haunted by a tragic stage they had only just learned. The viral Perseus with his Gorgon head in hand was coming for them, wailing away in this new, strange, and pain-taught medium.3 It is a strange image from any perspective, and it gets stranger still. When Eunapius of Sardis (fourth century) retold the tale, this time locating it in an “unnamed city” in the provinces, he estranged it further by including a great deal about the very introduction of tragedy itself. In his account, an unnamed tragedian in the time of Nero was touring the provinces (to avoid rivalry with the emperor-actor, we are told), among “halfbarbarian audiences” somewhere who had a theater but had apparently not entertained actors in living memory. Into this grass-grown space, the exiled tragedian was obliged to reintroduce his art first to the magistrates of the town in a private performance and to explain the conventions, the strange vocality of it, the costumes, the masks, tragic boots, even the plot, before attempting a public role. But in spite of his best preparations, This untrained audience was unable to respond to most of the features of tragedy: the majesty and grandeur of the language and style, the charm of the metre, the clarity of the character-drawing, most finely and compellingly designed to move the hearer, and in addition they were unfamiliar with the plot, but even stripped of all these advantages he enthralled them with the beauty of his enunciation and his singing.4 It seems to be a feature of the anecdote to use the theater as the mark of Romanness, whose untrained, provincial audiences were slow to accommodate the urbane charm of tragedy. They did not share the citizenship of tragedy. Its beauty, conventions, even its plots were unfamiliar, and this is the estranged at its strangest. And so, of course, it was exactly then at the theater among the stage initiates that the plague hit. Eunapius also relates how the town fell into convulsions of fever and could do nothing to cure it. It spread quickly, and in their misery they, too, began to pitiably sing, as well as they could, in the style they had just learned, the lines they had only just heard for the first time, wailing out their new grief in the new and foreign language of woe.5 A third telling of this Roman urban legend is recorded in Philostratus from the early third century CE. He, too, acknowledges that the story was already in circulation, even if his source is problematic (“Damis indeed speaks of the singular effect which a tragic actor produced”). Philostratus sets the tale, stripped of its pathology, as part of his large tirade against Page 183 →Nero, and his many perversions, including his acting. This time an anonymous actor, displaced by the emperor, was on a strolling tour “round the cities of the west.” When he appeared at Ipola, Baetica (southwestern Spain), his would-be auditors again shrank back at his appearance “when they saw him striding across the stage, with his mouth all agape, mounted on buskins extra high, and clad in the most wonderful garments; but when he lifted up his voice and bellowed out loud, most of them took to their heels, as if they had a demon yelling at them.”6

This alien nature of tragic performance is one of its most overly remembered features. Tragedy, it seemed, took some getting used to. We have nothing that adequately preserves the terrifying sound of this form, certainly as it was described above, evacuating the theater in a sort of acoustic horror. But images of the tragic actor, like those from Herculaneum, evoke the ferocity of the faces: the mouths frozen in a scream, the startled, blackened eyes, the monstrously elongated forehead (the onkos). If we try to look at them as if we have never seen them before, as if we were one of those provincials on the newly mapped Roman frontier, these monstrous faces alone could empty a theater. Lucian remarks, “What a repulsive and at the same time frightful spectacle is a man tricked out to disproportionate stature, mounted upon high clogs, wearing a mask that reaches up above his head, with a mouth that is set in a vast yawn as if he meant to swallow up the spectators!”7 Even held in hand, the out-of-service mask does little to disarm its terror, appearing like a severed Gorgon head. The point in all three tellings is not just the vivid strangeness of it all, or even the attraction of the strangeness—that is, the willingness to consume this tortured and overproduced form as a portal to citizenship far from its originating culture. But this grotesqueness was most rigidly preserved as essential to the performance tradition from Euripides in Athens down to Philostratus’s time in the far western and eastern provinces of the empire, well into late antiquity. Ruth Webb describes (and reproduces) an ivory diptych that celebrates the consular games of Anastasius in 517 CE, revealing the same three tragic actors, in the same exaggerated masks and chothurni as could be recognizably found on stages nearly a thousand years earlier.8 Libanius, in the fourth century in Antioch, can still describe the same tragic boots, the same elongated masks, images of which are found as far north as Roman Britain.9 Equally alien was the rigid convention of the sound of tragedy. Cassiodorus, a sixth-century Ostrogoth administrator, can still describe tragedy, with its fortified masks, as producing “such a sound that you would hardly think it issued from a human being.”10 Tragedy made no effort whatsoever to mollify its strangeness, Page 184 →and why, exactly, it remained so rigid, so unnatural, even far from the Greek capital, then the Roman capital, then provincial capitals—far from Greeks, then, finally, far from Romans—we have not been told. Like the children in Juvenal’s satire, or the provincials above, no one has taken us aside and explained why the conventions that frightened children and sent the uninitiated bolting off in terror (and occasionally fever) were preserved that way. Why did this look of tragedy persist, why this sound of Page 185 →it, why these same stories still, half a millennium away, half a Mediterranean away; why this hyperbole, this monstrosity, why the insistence on these exaggerated subjects, in this exaggerated manner? Why produce tragedy this way? “What can be as unreal as verse, as the stage, as plays?” asked Cicero, and where were they most unreal but in the provinces among those who had never seen them before?11 Fig. 10. Melpomene holding tragic mask, Louvre Museum. Photo by Eric Gaba. Somehow the shrug of “tradition” does not seem to fully account for the archival persistence of Latin tragedy.12 Like all good ruins, it resisted disappearance. In this, I confess, I feel perfectly akin to those peasants and provincials, taken aback by the very incomprehensibility of the enormous Greek gaping masks in a Roman grass-grown theater in western Spain, Roman Britain, or Aspendos, Turkey. How on earth did they make sense of this? And how do we make sense of their comprehensions and reactions? As we have seen, a functional theater was a sine qua non of any Roman provincial city, and tragedy, even in some abbreviated form, remained at the highest end of the menu of offerings. What they saw, and how they saw it, might offer some understanding of why the tradition endured in the way it endured as a persistent anachronism for as long as it did, and what they insisted on consuming with it. Start with one of the stranger stories (apropos of consuming); consider the persistent endurance of Thyestes.

Thyestes, the Unending Feast Horace thought that the feasting on the flesh of Thyestes’s children was an unfit subject for the stage, but such scruples didn’t stop a host of Roman tragedians from whetting the knives and spitting the little limbs. The butchering, boiling, baking, and dining on the dear ones was a touchstone subject for every Roman tragedian of whom we have fragments and for many literati for whom we do not. When Seneca began his Agamemnon with the ghost of Thyestes, back again from the underworld (a bed hardly slept in) to stand once more on the “ancient threshold of the House of Pelops,” the poor ghost had been out of his crypt more than in it for the last several centuries, so frequently had he been summoned up to haunt the stones of Roman stages and the boards

of provincial reading rooms. Seneca later returned to the theme with another three-course tragedy on Thyestes, and by that time (circa 65 CE) one could trace a direct line of postclassical treatments on the kitchen of Pelops back three hundred years. When Juvenal wanted a ready example of the poverty of poets, of course it is to Thyestes’s tragic house that his subject must be laboring: “Can we expect a Page 186 →modern playwright to match / The ancient tragedians, when, in order to finish his Atreus / he must hock his coats, and the dishes?”13 “Stick to tradition,” quoth Horace; “pour over Greek models night and day,” proffering his advice on tragedy. And indeed, so calcified was the tradition of Latin tragedy that one can only wonder at what was being preserved in the form. One justifies the rigidity—the poets themselves justified it—but if we pause to consider the severity of a tradition that recycled Greek tragic myths as their Roman own for centuries, from Athens to Rome and Rome out to the provinces, one wonders, like the children of Juvenal’s satire, what on earth compelled these annual installments on a borrowed antiquity? Right from the start, Livius Andronicus, who established the form of Latin tragedy by borrowing and translating from the “classic” Greek texts, had produced an Aegisthus, the child survivor of the fatal feast. His successor, Ennius, produced a host of Euripidean imitations, including a Thyestes, the year of his death.14 His nephew Pacuvius continued the profession of Romanizing Greek tragedy with a host of Sophoclean translations, including at least two on the House of Atreus. Upon his retirement, so at least relates Aulus Gelius, he was visited by a young writer, Lucius Accius, who read to the grand old man his first play, another treatment of Atreus.15 Of course one begins writing with Atreus, the mother of all tragedies. Accius went on to compose more than forty Latin tragedies, returning frequently to the sad House of Pelops: Pelops, Aegisthus, Agamemnon, Atreus, Clytemnestra, and, of course, Thyestes were all subjects.16 Horace used the same story in his remarks on the propriety of tragedy some sixty years later, but the cottage industry was unstoppable.17 Julius Caesar Strabo was admitted to the Roman Collegium Poetum on the merits of his Greek-inspired tragedies, while his nephew, Julius Caesar, tried his hand at composing an Oedipus.18 One of Caesar’s assassins, Cassius, authored three tragedies, two of which from the same miserable house: Orestes and Thyestes. Caesar’s adopted heir, the future Augustus, chose Ajax for his essay into Greek tragedy, but unsatisfied, Ajax fell upon his sponge.19 Varius Rufus, in the close circle of Virgil and Horace, produced a single tragedy, and that topic was of course also Thyestes, commissioned and staged on the occasion of Augustus’s victory at Actium, and was paid handsomely for it, a million sesterces.20 Commentators on the play acknowledge it was finely written, and still read and praised it a century after its performance.21 In its wake followed another Thyestes, by Sempronius Graccus.22 And naturally when the tragic actor Aesop, deeply invested in his role, struck and killed another actor, it was while playing Atreus and contemplating in his passion “how he might be revenged of his brother Thyestes.”23 Ovid produced a Medea, Page 187 →Publius Pomponius Secundus another Atreus, both into the first century of the Common Era. Then came the tragedies of Seneca, eight surviving texts, a quarter of which take the same sad House of Pelops for their theme, Agamemnon and Thyestes, while Octavia (attributed to Seneca) has been called (and re-called) “our earliest commentary on Thyestes.”24 “These plays, mighty Rome learns by heart,” wrote Horace of the tragedians Ennius, Naevius, Pacuvius, and Accius.25 And apparently they did. The same narrow range of Greek tragic stories held the stage for centuries and served as models for each generation’s literati: the same tragic houses, the same Medeas, Aegisthuses, Thyestes, over and over again, murdering and cannibalizing their way across the centuries, across the expanding geography of overmapped Roman culture. When Lucian, well into the late second century CE, proffered his advice on the range of works any competent mime should know, the myths of Greek tragedy were still the core curriculum of their education.26 Lucian even makes a finer distinction in the precision of cannibalism required, advising the mimes that the rendition of Thyestes dining on his children should be quite distinct from, say, Cronus swallowing his children.27 So, the questions remain. Why did the shape and content endure so rigidly? Why this enormous appetite for consuming another’s grief? Why this accretion of tradition around the same complex of stories that were not their own? How was their consumption of another’s mytho-sphere different from, say, their consumption of Hellenistic theaters? Why was the genre so calcified in such monstrous shapes that it required explication every generation? Why did the distorted body-site, masks, boots, subjects, score, and dress persist down to the long-

antiquated three-actor rule that Horace could still honor? Why a five-act, three-actor Andromeda, with flute and chorus and boots and mask in western Spain? Why the great weight of Athenian authority? Why all the beyondness of tragedy? What is being so rigidly remembered? Even bereft of its performance conventions and reduced to the more sedate experience of the read or recited text, still, with the singular exception of Octavia, the Roman fabula palliata tragedies that have survived (Senecan tragedies), seem somehow outlandish documents for the same unsettling reasons as the anecdotes preserved of performance above, with their secondhand and antiquated myths, whose very familiarity seems somehow incomprehensible for a product of a Roman imagination of the first century.28 They may be in solid reverence to, and consequently little different from, the three-hundred-year tradition of Roman imitations of Greek tragedies that preceded them (and quite likely they are), but it is Seneca Page 188 →who has survived, not Ennius, Accius, or Livius Andronicus, and so it is the antiquated and alien Greekishness of Senecan plays that must be in some way confronted. And I should note from the onset that the canon of tragedy was consumed in ways quite different from those of the provincial theater traced above. There was little Romanizing about these myths. This eating was a different feast entirely. Encountered afresh, Senecan tragedy remains an odd and uncomfortable thing, retro without pastiche, whose forms and narratives aspire not so much to quote the Greeks as to become them, “to pass” among them, mingling with an antiquity to which they are not entirely credentialed. They feel altogether too cozy with their subjects, like Libanius composing without irony defense speeches for Orestes, or very accomplished museum forgeries: their very overfamiliarity makes them suspect.29 There is something that frankly always seems like a slightly embarrassing borrowed accent about the idea of Seneca’s tragedies, like a polished but patently adopted brogue of a Midwest American, technically correct but transparently an etude at the authentic, too polished to be a parody, clearly an adopted genealogy, passing and winking at its passing. How are we to read the retreading of another Thyestes, Oedipus, Medea, Phaedra, from somebody else’s (already exhausted) culture that was at the time five hundred years old? As Marcus Aurelius observed of Rome in a fit of ennui: “The same theatre, the same boredom.”30 For all its literary merit—and that is not insignificant—the wholesale appropriation of the Greek tragic genre, including the masks, myths, music, three-actor compositions, choruses, and all, still seems more than a little parochial, like an academic exercise on an assigned theme or, to collapse metaphors, as Longinus wrote, silly as an oversized tragic mask on a child.31 So seemed Roman tragedy until I read Pausanias’s Description of Greece for more than a travel guide. These were odd bedfellows, I know, but somehow the traveler and the tragedian (Seneca and Pausanias separated by less than a century) seemed to share a conceptual space about Greece and its mythic reservoir that might in the end prove helpful in what is otherwise a largely inaccessible genre, particularly to provincial Romans. Pausanias may be useful to provide us an address for tragedy, a topos in which this hand-me-down form might breathe a little more naturally, living, as it does, in a rigidly inauthentic world already removed from the exigencies of history. Both traveler and tragedian seem to be citizens of the same Grecian elsewhere; they seem to stare off and out, to look back with that same glazed-over gaze to someplace vaguely “away,” removed, enduring, but utterly outside of time, someplace we shall call “antiquity.” Because PausaniasPage 189 → (the more reliable guide of the two) seems to map this landscape in such familiar terms as something already seen, I want to begin with him, to use his eye to consider the creation of this rigid land called “antiquity,” the theater’s role in the formation of it, and the tragic subjects that were its most proper and popular inhabitants.

Monuments without Memory Below the city [Orchomenos] there are some separate cairns of stones heaped together for the war dead. There are no inscriptions on the graves to say what Peloponnesian people the war was fought against, or whether it was against other Arkadians, and the Orchomenians have no records about it. —Pausanias, Description of Greece 8.13.3 A grave not far from the gates has a soldier on it standing beside his horse; I am not certain who he is, but the

soldier and horse are both by Praxiteles. —Pausanias, 1.2.3 Not far from the market-place is a theatre, and beside it are pedestals of bronze statues, but the statues are no longer there. —Pausanias, 8.49.11. If Pausanias’s travelogue has a conceptual center, it lies in the intersection of memory and forgetting, in exactly such moments of poignant but unfinished encounters with monuments whose memories have long since leached out, leaving only stones heaped on the landscape with a certain urgency, purposefully monumental but marking something nobody wholly recalls. Empty pedestals, soldiers without names from an unknown war still people the land with their broken memories and broken marbles, commanding attention with an insistent presence that is poignant for the way it clutches at what is lost. Of all his geography, Pausanias’s tour of Athens is particularly richly marked as a landscape with dementia, urgently cherishing its mementos with no comprehensible associations beyond them. Indeed, it holds its mementos longer than its memory, like so many standing pedestals that have lost their statues, poignant in their pain to recall what is now gone. Pausanias participates in this dementia: his eye travels with great alacrity to such intersections of presence and absence: Page 190 →statues of “men and women whose stories are glorious” but whose names he cannot recall (1.2.4), famous monuments to the famous forgotten, like Praxiteles’s horse and solider (“I’m not certain who he is”), ruins of temples to an unknown god, gravesites whose dead are without names, eroded, illegible inscriptions traced still, ruins that yet remain on the landscape, marking something important, something poignant and memorable for those who can no longer remember. It is the nature of ruins that they live in the half-life of memory, emitting a certain grave imperative (like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, rasping inaudibly, “Remember me”), but their stories have become hoarse with age, beyond their own mute and gesturing urgency. I am fascinated by precisely such Pausanian moments, by an eye that rests so comfortably in the last light where memory and forgetting walk abreast into a dimming horizon. It seems somehow familiar, the eye of Pausanias, familiar like the theater’s role in the formation of the aesthetic of antiquity: both ruins, both scarred repositories of an imperfect memory; ruins that stand as placeholders of a past that is neither entirely past nor ever the past (here the theater is peculiarly guilty). But also, especially in Athens, ruins form the cityscape of the new classicized Greece, a mythic Greece removed from the exigencies of the temporal Roman world, a locus whose ruins become the topography of the new eternal ideal called antiquity: the final and defining residence of tragedy, whose gaze, like that of Pausanias, is a looking past. The conception of antiquity, mapped in Pausanias, provides a locus for understanding the beyond-ness of tragedy that is so troubling. Given the disappearance of the topical forms, what endured on the stage was the transhistorical corpus of mythic figures (like Thyestes, traced above) that lived well into the “Roman now” by stepping outside of time and place, a sort of postmemory of an imagined past. Metaphorically speaking, they had been folded into a now-familiar topos, part aesthetic, part artifact of the place-without-time. Tragedy had come to resemble ruins, no longer functional architecture, but grave in the evocations of a prior, vast, and enduring elsewhere, whose forms outlived the memory it marked. Like ruins, tragedy’s beauty lived in its estranged relationship with time. Pausanias is a crepuscular figure, traveling in the third quarter of the second century CE, through a world already in the afterglow of its “golden ages,” among contemporaries in a Roman world—the Second Sophistic, that extraordinary generation of Hellenophiles who were first beginning to recognize the value of Greek accomplishments, even as they were pilfered, destroyed, depopulated. It was the compulsion of this generation that sought to elevate them, to mark out the cultural achievements with the application of “classical.” James Porter has tackled this problem with some Page 191 →sensitivity, writing astutely and evocatively of this generation (particularly Pausanias and Longinus) as for the first time, not just having adopted language like “classical,” but absorbed in a deeply useful concept that they had “come to be inhabited by.”32 Perhaps, I would add, even haunted by it. Aelius Aristides, the Greek orator living in Rome (117–81 CE), could

dream of Sophocles visiting him one night. “I was delighted to see him,” wrote he of his dream. “I rose, welcomed him, and asked, вЂwhere is your brother?’ And he said вЂDo I have a brother?’ вЂThe famous Aeschylus,’” was the dreamer’s reply. Sophocles had no response to a fraternity he was himself unaware of. Sophocles may live still in the temporal world, but to Aristides the two poets had been classicized.33 The coherency of the dream lay exactly in his ability to recognize that he was deporting subjects who were themselves somewhat baffled by the transportation. Aristides can recognize his own estrangement, not just for himself the dreamer who lives in the past and present simultaneously, but to acknowledge that he is trafficking his golden-age subjects across the border, and they are understandably somewhat disoriented by the journey. Like many of his contemporaries of the Atticistic revival—Lucian, Heliodorus, Athenaeus, Alciphron, Aelius Aristides, Philostratus, Apuleius—Pausanias feels both the potency and poignancy of the Greek world around him even as it receded beyond his reach, and indeed, its potent leaving, its recessional, is the primary source of its power. Unmooring “antiquity” from history was a complicated process, well underway when Aeschylus first started crafting “mythos” for tragic subjects, solidly confirmed by the time of Seneca, and mapped by Pausanias. But of all the classical writers, Pausanias seems most preoccupied with some deeper collapse, an anxiety that draws him toward the ruins of a receding place he can neither arrest nor wholly access. In this regard, he offers a poignant entry to one aspect of antiquity that compels me the most: the aesthetic of the ruin. His eye moves to the unpresent, and in this regard his attraction is more than a simple “antiquarian predilection,” as it is sometimes rendered. Pausanias was among the first to note the seduction of the fragment of buildings, statues, and monuments, because in its damage it preserves a memory of a past world not yet wholly lost, but beyond recovery as a whole and, as a ruin, somehow removed from a historic moment.34 Because “antiquity,” a conception more than a topography, lived in a perpetual past, it had/has no present, and such a vantage point is exactly where we must stand to view tragedy, now “classical” tragedy. It was Pausanias who shaped the governing notion of ruins: that memory is more potent than materiality. The ruin is a structure translated from its materiality. It is no longer expected to be Page 192 →habitable; indeed, ruins seem to preclude roofs. It has moved beyond architecture entirely to stand in for the pastness of the past. The crumbled columns, the broken torsos, the fragment, and, I would add, tragedy all seem to live in their ability to evoke a world they cannot hold and cannot release. At no place in his long travelogue is this more apparent than in Pausanias’s encounter with Athens: the city of always. The ruins of Athens haunt the Description of Greece and map a mythic landscape that is at first encounter already familiar and overly remembered. Pausanias documents for the first time this sensation of having already experienced the topography; his descriptions seem heavily informed by some prior experience. He notes the mountain that resembles Niobe and recognizes the mourning figure because he knows of it already and situates himself at exactly the position to be admitted to it. It is that sense of confirmation that would characterize later encounters with Greece when it was opened to Western travelers again in the eighteenth century, with Pausanias in right hand, Homer in the left. They, too, seem to have returned for the first time to the enduring place where they had already been. But stranger than the nostalgia is the odd sensation that time itself is being arrested. One senses that Pausanias is not so much returning to the familiar, as reseeing what he never wholly left. Pausanias steps the present into pastness, and the reader watches as our guide recedes before our eyes, translated into another topography; we watch the sensation that Diderot noted: “Time stands still for those who admire.” “For the historian,” writes Braudel, “everything begins and ends with time.”35 But “time” ceases to be a feature in Pausanias; for Pausanias history seems to have “happened” without a chronology. Mythic and material cohabit Athens across the centuries. The site where Theseus threw an ox over the roof of the temple of the Olympian Zeus was the same site as Hadrian’s gymnasium.36 The dedication to the General Olympiodorus (early fourth century BCE) shares a sentence with Themistocles, nearly two centuries earlier. The mythic Hippolytus and the demagogue Hippias share a site because they share a citizenship of an Athens outside of time. Here myth, memories, and monuments crowd each other, like a Victorian drawing room, each elbowing for visibility across a city cluttered with memorials dedicating a past that is without a past, without decades or centuries (“next to the temple is a monument whereВ .В .В .”); “Near the statue of Demosthenes is a

sanctuary of Ares, where are placed two images of Aphrodite, one of Ares, made by Alcamenes, and one of Athena made by a Parian of the name of Locrus. There is also an image of Enyo, made by the sons of Praxiteles.”37 Pausanias’s map is a driven by a compulsion of memorialPage 193 → excess, and Pausanias is a memory junkie. Consequently, for Pausanias and those who followed in his tradition, Greece would be as much a mythic landscape as a topography of memory.38 Indeed, William Hutton, in his recent work on the Description of Greece, comments on Pausanias’s treatment of Corinth as the “unusual step” of describing the Roman, refounded city only because “archaia, remnants of antiquity, are in short supply.”39 The eye only defaulted to what is in the absence of what once was. The temporal Roman Corinth would not be like Athens, the city of always, whose ruins became the architecture of the eternal. Writing, as he does, in the midsecond century CE, of an Athens centuries removed, his Athens is the Athens of a compacted, transhistorical site, a space of Hadrian, Sulla, Demosthenes, Pericles, Persians, Themistocles, and Theseus, all at once in a kind of horizontal cross-section of legibly present stratigraphy. It is exactly his compulsion to remember antiquity that compels him to map it across time, and thus to archive it in a deeper longitude than a Roman colony under the Antonines. But in doing so he makes few references to the living city through which he moved, its current residents, its troubled Roman colonial identity, and its scars. All evaporate into a pure, unmitigated encounter with its “pastness.” It has been noted before, but perverse enough to bear repeating, that Pausanias sees nothing, notes nothing, describes nothing after the middle of the second century BCE, that is, nothing newer than three hundred years old. Pausanias differs in this regard from other classical geographers—Strabo, for instance, Ptolemy’s Geography, Heraclides Criticus, Pomponius Mela, or Pliny—who moved synchronically across a toe-stubbingly real geography. Mela makes little effort to mythologize the landscape: “Corinth, a city once famous for its wealth, better known later for its destruction, and now a Roman colony. Corinth has a view of both seas from the peak of the acropolis they call Acrocorinth.”40 The very practical Strabo may travel to Athens to dispel the inaccurate measurements of Eratosthenes, but it is the Athens of his own generation, not that of Sophocles and Theseus as well; nor is Strabo conceptualizing memory as Pausanias does. He tells you what he sees, in measured stadia, no more, no less, and what others before him have already written about.41 Strabo aborts his descriptions out of “fear that I should go too far,” but such reservations do not impede Pausanias in the least. He indulges in the too-far, he flings himself down the rabbit-hole of myth and memory until he himself becomes a citizen of his own elsewhere. The Athens of Pausanias is more akin to Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. His subjects are present simultaneously on every stair-tread: Theseus, Pericles, and himself all descending the same Page 194 →timeless topography, peopled with heroes who seem to the reader to be both opaque and enduring. Trapped in the distant gaze of memory, the stare begins to film over; he sees the father in the son, ancestors in the living, the olive tree of the Persian War; he looks on and through and, by looking through, remakes the storied, transhistorical sites of monuments. His gaze is one of the first attempts to “classicize” Greece into an anti-topos. In such a space-without-space, the ruin is the first of two proper citizens, living, as it does, as both a present fragment and a once-whole in the ever-elsewhere of antiquity. It is this formation that can be remarkably useful for considering the long tradition of Roman tragedy, the second citizen of that country called “antiquity.” The eye of Pausanias offers, I think, the perfect vantage point for viewing the tragedy that traveled far from Athens, which had itself become a naturalized resident of this elsewhere “antiquity.” And indeed, Pausanias half expects to find Creon or Thyestes and at times comes close: “In my country there are still signs that Pelops and Tantalus dwelt in it.”42 But in a study of what isn’t there, “antiquity,” the antispace, unmakes as much as it makes. The idea of classicizing Athens as a repository for the storage of the best products of the Greek past, including tragedy, became the vessel of admiration that collected the gaze from glancing away at the temporal, the historical, and the real. The excising of the prosaic present left a monumental stela erected in its place. Like the Parthenon today, the charismatic presence of “antiquity” marked what was no longer there so attractively that it almost replaces the austerity of the present.

City of Memory, City of Scars

There are some ancient images of Athena, not at all worn away, but blackened and too weak to stand a knock. They were in the fire, when the Athenians took to their ships and the Persian king caught the city deserted by its youth. There is also a boar-hunt. —Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.27.7 A rare mention of the damage yet apparent on the cityscape reminds us of the traumatized landscape that was also once Athens, the once-ubiquitous presence of the blackened marbles that marked the Persian destruction of the city and prompted its reconception championed in the Periclean age. Of these charred buildings, Diodorus Siculus had written that those who had evacuated their city and stood together at the Isthmus at the time of the war Page 195 →took a vow that if they defeated the Persians, they would not “rebuild any of the burnt and demolished temples, butВ .В .В . leave them untouched, as a memorial to future generations of the impiety of the barbarians.”43 And so they didn’t rebuild. Unfinished stone drums from the columns of a temple under construction at the time of the sacking were left unfinished and rolled into place at the north wall of the Acropolis, visible above the agora: squat, round reminders of the desecration. Through such gestures the city architecturally preserved its own destruction in time (summer 480 BCE), and in many ways the vitality of the new city lived in exactly its position to its own scars. By the time of Pausanias, the city wore more recent scars. It is a curious feature of Pausanias that his gaze is unattentive to the most visible disasters of war, even the more recent destruction of the city by the Roman General Sulla. He notes the war and its causes (briefly), but he does not see it in the way he sees more ancient memorials, nor does he compel his readers to see it. There are no monuments to the destruction of Athens during Sulla’s campaign, the burning of the Piraeus, the blood that flowed through the Ceramicus, nor any impulse to remember or monumentalize it, as with the Persian War. Pausanias marks the rebuilding after Sulla almost without noting the devastation that preceded it. The charred marbles tell another story, and that is not displayed in the archiving of Athens, and its absence is also part of the mythmaking of the landscape. This stigma in his vision is central, I think, to his conception of Athens, noted in his one laconic reference to its destruction at the hands of Sulla (87/86 BCE), in which he segues so quickly to the theater without a reflective pause or ellipsis that even the notice is but a brief distraction on the dash back to the past: Athens was badly hurt by Rome, but flowered again in the reign of Hadrian. In the theatre the Athenians have portraits of the poets of tragedy and comedy, mostly the more obscure poets. Except for Menander there are none of the famous comic poets. In tragedy there are Euripides and Sophocles who are well known.44 Badly hurt indeed, and worth hardly a note. Contrast this with Plutarch’s description of the campaign: When they had thrown down the wall, and made all level betwixt the Piraic and Sacred Gate, about midnight Sulla entered the breach, with all the terrors of trumpets and cornets sounding, with the triumphant shout and cry of an army let loose to spoil and slaughter, and scouring Page 196 →the streets with swords drawn. There was no numbering the slain; the amount is to this conjectured only from the space of ground overflowed with blood. For without mentioning the execution done in other quarters of the city, the blood that was shed about the market-place spread over the whole Keramicus within the Double-gate, and, according to most writers, passed through the gate and overflowed the suburb.45 But for Pausanias, tragic poets stand in for the city’s tragedy because, perhaps, they are classical and Sulla was not. It is almost as if the devastation of Athens (literally decimated, as Sulla herded the men into the Keramicus and by lot executed one-tenth of the male population) was too topical a matter to dwell on. Other Roman sources put the figure of the Athenian rebellion far higher, in casualties and slaves.46 But instead of memorializing the Roman campaign of the real real, Pausanias turns instead to the theater, to the monuments of Sophocles and Menander, and to not see (“Athens was badly hurt.В .В .В . In the theatreВ .В .В .”). His gaze avoids history, ricochets, skips off the edgy surfaces of the painful, the charred stones and blackened statues,

the every tenth man chosen and slaughtered; skips off the two hundred thousand conquered, sold, or executed; and alights instead on the enduring monuments of mythic memory of the other Athens, that cold and classical locus. Like the case of Phrynichus and the Fall of Miletus, myth replaces memory until myth itself is the thing that remains. His looking is thus a looking away. He is, in this regard, quite the opposite of Sulla himself, who, when he entered Athens, was met by ambassadors who tried to dissuade him from his destruction by reciting the famous city’s famous history. “I was sent to Athens by the Romans not to learn history but to destroy rebels,” was his reply, and by refusing to participate in the mythmaking of antiquity, Sulla slaughtered the past.47 But Pausanias is all about the telling of stories that stand in place of the (brutal) Roman present. The theater he looks to is not that of his near-contemporary Dio Chrysostom, who also traveled to Athens and described in his own day the Roman gladiators that fought in the Theater of Dionysus, where “often a fighter is slaughtered among the very seats in which the Heirophant and the other priests must sit.”48 Pausanias looks back at the (now) classic theater of Euripides and Sophocles, not to the Roman blood-sports of his own day, and in that looking back shares a vision with the tragedians, who looked back and away. Pausanias may have looked at the charred figure of Athena, but he described instead the nearby panel of a boar hunt, which reminded him, of course, of the Caledonian boar and the legend of Heracles, which leads him to the long account of the first meeting Page 197 →of Theseus and Heracles, which recalled of course, the Minotaur and “another deed of Theseus.”49 And so history elides smoothly over the local horrors, quietly cascading toward the familiar channels of myth. It is in such labyrinthine animadversions that his great gift of looking at monuments is also revealed to be a careful and quietly coercive looking away, an evasive not-looking, and as he maps it, his memory-making is also a quiet burial. In a dissociative way, the mythic comes to stand in for and to replace the real real, like the statues in the theater of the tragic writers that reclaimed the gaze, arrested a time that had threatened to slip into forward motion, and restored it to its proper, stilled contemplation. A small but revealing moment of that displacement is when, among the monuments on the Acropolis, Pausanias notes also a single olive tree that was placed in the Erechtheum to mark the dispute between Poseidon and Athena. “Legend also says that when the Persians fired Athens the olive was burnt down, but on the very day it was burnt it grew again to the height of two cubits.”50 What, exactly, is he looking at here that prompts the retelling of this legend from Herodotus? Is it a looking at the tree that once was and is no more? Or is it a stela of a tree still in place, a tree to mark a tree? Or the tree? The venerable seven-hundred-year-old olive tree, the very tree that was burned and grew back all on the day of the Persian assault, here before him, still growing in 180 of the Common Era? Or a tour guide telling amusing and improbable tales about ordinary trees? Is he even present in the present tense of his world, or is he staring at where the tree once was, the used-to-be commandeering his gaze? Is he, with that filmed-over eye, describing an absence pregnant with another culture’s memory until it becomes nearly material? In such moments, Pausanias reconstructs the landscape, injecting it with a memory that lives far outside the temporal trauma that the city itself marked: a classicized Athens, the city of always, where even (absent?) trees are translated into everlasting monuments, no longer biology at all, but have also become ruins in a landscape of mythic memory.51 This is the looking that most closely approaches the aesthetics of tragedy, which makes tragedy, like antiquity, an elegant looking-away.

The Creation of Antiquity Other classical writers noted the great concentration of talent packed into Athens in one brief(ish) period, but Pausanias, more than any writer of the Atticistic revival, mapped the conceptual land of antiquity as the shared site in which the historic and the mythic inhabited the same (non)space at Page 198 →the same (non)time.52 Untethered from topical intersections of Antonine space and time—indeed, looking quite away from its own local topos—Athens became the land of its own past, the land of Theseus, of Marathon, Praxiteles, and Pericles, whose monuments ceased to speak to a political present, that is, a Roman colonial present, or even an Athenian present practice of inhabiting its own past. It became instead the city of always, in which tragedy was its first and most enduring resident, assuming its proper place among the monumental and memorial. Booted and masked, the shrill-sung anti-topos gave antiquity its voice; tragedy was the sound of ruins. The narratives that became “antiquity” began as a forgetting, and it is in just such a conception of space that we must return to consider tragedy, which lived on, beyond its time into the out-of-time that had become its place of residency when Seneca

worked the genre. Why Roman tragic writers, in generational installments, conceived of tragedy in static Greek mythic terms seemed to have great deal to do with how Athens itself had been reconceived. Tragedy would live on as a ruin lived on, as a relic, a repository of memory over materiality, an imagined pastness over presentness because it could inhabit just such a world outside of time. This, in the end, seems to me the gaze that Seneca delivers, for whom tragedy is a broken, enduring, and unchanging monument that looks always off, just past the world, standing beyond, somewhere out of time. Even when applied locally, the much-troubled genre of the fabulae praetextae (tales of historic figures) lived in its evocation of that same ghosted elsewhere, promoting and relocating the contemporary to residency in the tragicbeyond. When Tacitus reminds us that even as Rome burned Nero sang of the destruction of Troy, in his tragedian’s costume, everyone understood the gesture as the madness of a man who had consumed too much tragedy. The lines of Attilius’s Electra that were performed at the funeral of Julius Caesar, which Suetonius mentions, served to lubricate the entry of mighty (soon to be deified) Caesar out of history and to the mythic that makes divinity possible.53 Tragedy is the fitting score for such a passage. “Comparing present misfortunes with the calamities of antiquity,” or conceiving events and figures in tragic terms, requires, after all, a certain fluency with the cultural habitus of tragedy, not to mention more than a little courage on the part of the author and actor.54 Conversely, if one were not inclined to the tragic, as Tacitus reminds us, just such applications could be perilous. When Mamercus Scaurus was impeached, it was on his own words, culled from a tragedy: “Macro’s information was grounded on the subject of a tragedy written by Scaurus, from which he cited some verses which might be twisted into allusions to Tiberius.” Scaurus, to avoid indictment, in a tragic gesture took his own life.55 Page 199 →The most problematic attempts to annex the local into antiquity were the occasional experiments in historical tragedy, the praetextae, tragedies in Roman dress, like Octavia, Ennius’s Brutus, or, better still, the piece of Balbus that Pollio described in such vain and fraudulent terms to Cicero: “In the course of the games he staged a вЂpraetextum’ all about his own expedition to tamper with the loyalty of the proconsul L. Lentulus, and would you believe it, he was so much affected by the representation of his own adventures that he burst into tears.”56 Horace may praise the courage of poets who undertook “to leave Greek paths” (that is, myth), but by and large it appears that such rambles were overgrown for want of use, and the odd historical jaunt was occasional and panegyric. I suspect, rather, because the terrain of tragedy was so precisely defined, few historic events or figures could approximate it with any credentials. It was only with great historical heft that events could aspire to the out-of-time of the tragic, and few moments arrived. From the titles that survive, the overwhelming majority of Roman tragedians recycled Greek tragic myths, and we have no real satisfactory explanation for this insistence, beyond the Horatian precept, “stick to tradition.”57 Even the roles of Nero were drawn from the canon of now-classic Greek myths: Niobe, Orestes, Oedipus, Heracles, “tragedies sung in a mask.”58 And of course, the enormous skill and consumption of the mime and pantomime absolutely required a working knowledge of the Greek tragic arsenal, a knowledge that remained in circulation for centuries, even at the most plebeian of levels. Lampoons, graffiti, and rumors could live and circulate in the symposium, the forum, and on the walls, grounded in a certain assurance that their constituents were conversant with the tragic habitus. Suetonius reprints several of the lampoons that popularly indicted Nero in such familiarly tragic terms: Alcmaeon, Orestes, and Nero are brothers, Why? Because all of them murdered their mothers.59 That mythic figures should be the proper company into which the emperor-matricide was elevated is itself a product of a system of thought we can conceptualize as the Roman imaginary, which was itself a borrowed memory, and access to this imaginary kept the borders of the tragic porous. When Horace complains of his old tutor, the cane-wielding Orbilius, dictating Livius Andronicus to him, we have some sense of how the schools participated in the instillation of these habits of mind.60 Taste, laments Horace, was disciplined into place, “learned in their unbearded youth” (on the knuckles) and retained lifelong, from which the witty

pasquinades might thereafter freely draw. In the archaeology of the Roman imaginary, this Page 200 →tragic stratum was a thick and ubiquitous layer, accessible, expected, and enormously useful when events precipitated toward tragedy. The career of Nero offered many such moments. From his recitals as a tragic actor, sweetly shouldering the fire of Rome toward an epic antecedent, his spectacular plotted debacle of a matricide, to his own death—his life and reign a prolonged enactment of the tragic, propped with dramatists, dramaturges of state, and narrated as a tale of portents, of comets and lightening, divinations and two-headed cows. Like his murder of the tragic actor who competed with him (smashed his throat in with tablets, on stage) or the news of his own death (“But what is this ship which has been approaching while we have been talking? It seems to bring good news, for they have garlands on their head like a chorus that has good tidings to tell.В .В .В . He is shouting, unless my ears deceive me, that Nero is dead”), Nero in life and death is imagined into the tragic.61 He seemed to desire nothing so much as that admission. “There was rumor,” writes Tacitus of the plot to assassinate Nero, which sounds itself straight off the tragic stage, certainly cast with a cry of tragedians, and suggested by both its players and its subject as arriving already familiar from the stage: There was a rumor that Sabrius Flavus had held a secret consultation with the centurions, and had planned, not without Seneca’s knowledge, that when Nero had been slain by Piso’s instrumentality, Piso also was to be murdered, and the Empire handed over to Seneca, as a man singled out for his splendid virtues by all persons of integrity. Even a saying of Flavus was popularly current, that it mattered not as to the disgrace if a harp-player were removed and a tragic actor succeeded him. For as Nero used to sing to the harp, so did Piso in the dress of a tragedian.62 Seneca, who crafted the tragedies, was to inherit the empire on the strength of a good plot and two dead tragic actors. It was only a rumor, but it helps to map the density of the tragic imaginary of the culture, to reveal to what extent the consumption of tragedy shaped the imagining of large events, became the familiar form of the alreadyenacted into which the topical could be fitted. The lightning, the prodigies that Tacitus describes were after the fact ornaments of an already-tragic conception. Great grief sounded like tragedy; great deeds and monstrous figures resembled tragedy, executed by (and in the end executed) tragic figures. So it should not surprise us that Nero’s enactments of the tragic should himself become the subject of a praetexta tragedy, Octavia, in which Octavia’s grief is inscribed in the tradition of Electra, Page 201 →Nero assumes the dimensions of a tyrant, and the House of Claudius becomes the newest constellation in the tragic mytho-sphere. When Piso’s “plot” failed, Seneca took his own life in a gesture so thoroughly staged that his dying seemed a tableau of his life, his prolonged expiration so completely redacted his career into his own unending death narrative that the image of the dying Seneca endured in precisely the way tragedies endured, folded into the frozen, perpetual present of the tragic departure. 63 James Ker traces the wide iconographic, literary, and epistolary tradition of Seneca’s dying from antiquity through the Renaissance to the early modern, exposing the attraction of “la mort de Seneque,” eternally opening and closing his veins, expiring again and again in his bath, as the Promethean figure that he had become. From thirteenth-century manuscript illuminations to the brushwork of Rubens, the operatic scores, and tragic plays, Seneca the tragedian begins to resemble nothing so much as his own tragic subject, frozen out of time, his perpetual dying continuously enacted because it was through his death, not his authorship, that Seneca had penetrated the tragic.64 James Romm sees in Seneca’s death not just a tragic enactment, but a reenactment from Seneca’s own tragedy—what else?—Thyestes.65 When Sabrius Flavus confessed under Nero’s questioning, among his motives he offered for his hatred of Nero was that Nero had committed monstrous crimes in murdering his own wife and his own mother, and he had been an actor. Had the stage made him monstrous? Or was it the proper dominion of such as Nero, who had made himself tragic and by inhabiting the role ought to, by the demands of genre, die as such? Flavus, Nero, Piso, and Seneca—had they all eaten of the tragic fruit, tasted its children, centuries old and simmering still, and were in the end consumed by it?

Coda: Wailings in the Theater

To return to the chapter’s opening anecdote: When misfortune hit the proverbial provincial town and the townsfolk began their wailing like Andromeda, they had learned a new sound, the sound of tragedy. It was that voice, the one that Lucian described as the strangest aspect of tragedy,66 and that Cassiodorus had called “inhuman,” that lubricated the passage into the beyond. Misfortune now had a new and transporting voice; their lamentations carved out a new acoustic space, elevating their pain out of the realm of the domestic and into the new sphere of the tragic, and carried them with it. When Tacitus described the revolt of Boudicca and the veteransPage 202 → and residents of Camulodunum panicked—“women excited to frenzy,” packing themselves into the theater and “their theatre resounded with wailings”—was this, too, the newly acquired sound of tragedy?67 Did they, too, gather to wail where they heard such wailing first? Had tragedy taught them to enter the new space of “antiquity” in their misfortunes, a place Foucault would call “outside of all places”? 68 Consuming tragedy could provide a residence for great sorrow. The provincials who thought winning the Olympics was a victory over a people—the Olympians, who must live in a place somewhere, vaguely over the mountains, or the sea, waving off to elsewhere—conceived similarly of antiquity. It was a serene and exclusive place, quite far away, not for everyone, but tragedy could take you there. One could consume tragedy, one could learn to wail in that beautiful agony that removed one from time, that estranged sound which in turn gave voice to elevated sorrow and carried it into the realm of the ruin. One could inhabit this place called antiquity by singing such sorrows. Antiquity was, in the end, not just a place outside of time, but an enacted space.

Page 203 →

Ten. Antiquity’s Last Supper Athenaeus (bless him) . . . —David Konstan “It’s nothing, a sort of game I play. To see how many paintings I can recall.” “You are building a memory palace?” —Debra Dean, The Madonnas of Leningrad In Debra Dean’s novel The Madonnas of Leningrad, two curators of the Hermitage charge themselves with meticulously remembering everything they can about the contents of the famous museum even as the German army lays siege to Leningrad and the great works of art are removed from their frames, crated up, hidden, maybe never to be seen again. The curators move through the emptied museum, room by room, memorizing what had once hung in the bare frames—this room Velázquez, that room Giorgione—fixing in their minds the absent portraitures and still-lifes with an urgent and meticulous detail: the quietly absorbed afternoon light falling lightly and soaking into the fine hand-sewn table linen of the Velázquez, the shimmer of ripe, ox-blood-red Utrecht grapes. The docents, now curators of memory, speak lovingly to no one of paintings that are no longer present. They are building what one character calls a memory palace. It is what they do, as they slowly starve through the bitter and rationless Russian winter under siege; they crate up the art and tell each other, “Someone must remember, or it all disappears without a trace.”

Caretakers of Memory Somewhere between the years 180 and 200 CE, an antiquarian named Athenaeus, born in Egypt, educated at Alexandria, living in Rome, built a memory palace of the classical world. It took the form of a fantastical accountPage 204 → of a symposium dinner hosted by a wealthy Roman named Larensis and attended by twentythree gifted grammarians, all armed to the teeth with bundles of books rolled up in their bedding and an impressively precise knowledge of their contents.1 It was the last recorded symposium of the classical age, antiquity’s last supper. The account of this wonder-filled dinner he called Deipnosophistae, or Banquet of the Learned, and though he modeled his symposium “in imitation of Plato,” the polite consensus is that it fell a little bit short of its aspirations. Indeed, in the genre of symposium literature that stretches from Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle to Plutarch and Lucian, Athenaeus’s final installment may read like a mound of scraps on the dining room floor of antiquity. The Banquet of the Learned is a fictional memoir of a series of elongated dinners (hence the bedding), eruditely attended and fondly recalled, compressed into a single, interminable, and endlessly interrupted feast of food and pedantry. For the late classical world, at the close of the Atticistic revival, this gathering of scholars was to be the last last supper, and they ate and drank, recalled their memories and the memories of redactors, quoted their plays by heart, and talked and talked and talked, as if it would never end. Less than literature, more tedious than an index, The Banquet of the Learned is a singular and bizarre work, a rambling encyclopedia of Hellenistic pedantry variously referred to as “a well-stuffed ragbag,” “a massive and indigestible work,” and “a dialogue of monstrous dimensions.”2 Monstrous indeed, at fifteen books and seventeen hundred pages in its abridged form (the complete text has not survived), this cluttered tome is the textual equivalent of a Renaissance wonder cabinet, governed less by wonder than a neurotic compulsion to accumulate.3 (So driving is the compiler’s mania to hoard that Athenaeus occasionally catalogs whole catalogs.) What emerges is nothing less than a probate record of all the known holdings of the classical world. In the pursuit of this obsession, few subjects are left uninventoried. Their dinner discussion that followed occupied fifteen books’ worth of windy disquisitions on anything and

everything vaguely related to the institution of symposiums: food, wine, fish, figs, fruit, sauces, wine, chickpeas, conger eels, pig brains, asparagus, wine, servants, actors, parasites, famous gluttons, wine, one entire book devoted to cataloging wine vessels, drinking games, flute music, harp music, pipe music, the forms of dance, flute girls, famous courtesans, comic poets, tragic poets, the philosophers, the festivals, the use of words, wine, “and other matters so numerous that I could not easily mention them all, for the day would fail me if I undertook to enumerate them kind by kind.”4 Truer words were never spoken, for Page 205 →rarely is the gift of verbosity so drearily unleashed. Indeed, for pure prolixity Athenaeus would be unmatched in the Western world until the indefatigable William Prynne would pummel his readers with Histriomastix. And for this reason, The Banquet of the Learned has attracted few scholars and sent many bolting, or at best struggling for a reason not to ignore the author outright. Even Charles Gulick, who, right up until the present (Olson’s welcomed new edition) was last to translate the text into an English-language edition (a fourteen-year project from 1927 to 1941), found the merit of the work primarily as a cookbook.5 With few exceptions, then, for much of the last century The Banquet of the Learned has been virtually ignored and has received little critical treatment, beyond the odd philological note. One recent and ambitious symposium at Exeter resulted in the “Athenaeus Project,” a montage of forty-one essays, assembled by their own admission into “as shapeless a book as the Deipnosphistae itself.” Athenaeus and His World opens with a concise statement of the problem of the original text and any monogram on the author: “Few modern scholars admire Athenaeus. But then few would claim even to have read him.”6 John Wilkins agrees, calling it “a massive book” and “difficult to read.”7 Athenaeus himself rates only a brief paragraph in the largest and most comprehensive histories of Greek literature.8 We have, in essence, every reason to ignore him, including Athenaeus’s own incentive, poached from Callimachus: “A big book is a big nuisance.”9 The sheer tonnage of the bric-a-brac compulsively amassed by Athenaeus is surpassed only by his prodigious capacity to authorize the evening with classical quotations. Some ten thousand lines of quoted verse are offered to evidence the finer points of erudition. The good news is, most of these ten thousand lines are culled from Greek plays, tragedies, satyrs, comedies—Old, New, and especially Middle Comedy, from which he quotes excerpts from four hundred plays and refers to hundreds more. He and his fellow sophists banter liberally and discuss with great familiarity the characters and contents of more than twelve hundred plays, and scores of critical works about the plays. The bad news is, with very few exceptions, none of the plays have survived. Still, if one wanted to trace the outline of an absent corpus—in this case, the body of classical theater—to build a memory palace to measure a canon of work and a cultural presence that had endured for more than half a millennium, no docent is more useful than Athenaeus for exactly his compulsive-obsessive qualities and his enormous appetite for quotation. He is a most loquacious guide, charming, inebriated, whose animated digressionsPage 206 → will exhaust the most patient auditor, but in his pursuit of his passion he leaves no shelf or wall unstoried, and no story untortured. The work, in this respect, is the most ruinous of ruins, as it is itself—a large standing fragment that samples fragments no longer extant, a broken text composed of lost texts, but lost texts perfectly recalled, which thus poignantly promise the most and deliver the least. Still, with some imagination, the landscape that one can evoke through such broken mementos is far, far larger than that offered by any other single classical source. Through his dense chain of casual, oblique references to twelve hundred plays and a seven-hundred-year-old culture of production, readership, and scholarship that sustained them, one can begin to sense with Athenaeus, as with no other classical author, something of the enormity of the field of theater culture, including theater scholarship—all of it shortly afterward crated up and lost—and the enormous magnitude of the loss. It is in this sad office that Athenaeus is most useful and most vexing. He is like the French waiter who sensually describes each dish to the hungry diner but, alas, adds that they are all out of that dish. Athenaeus holds out to us, the hungry, the savory tokens of some lovely passage he has saved of a text he has not, each quotation the joyed promise and pained loss, followed by another promise and another loss, followed by yet another, for seventeen hundred pages, all wrapped in the most insouciant veneer of figs, fish, sauces, and tantalizing excerpts of plays and theater histories we will never, ever see again.

For any scholar of ancient Greek theater, all of the above makes The Banquet of the Learned one of the most depressing books ever written, a broken-into and pilfered mausoleum of lost plays and playwrights, remembered by the twenty-three diners with fingertip familiarity, and to the rest of us, irretrievably gone. But the beauty of ruins is partly their pain. Hardly a page goes by in the fifteen books without the familiar reference of a play gracing the conversation about cooking fish with a few authorizing fragments of opinions (sententiae), bon mots, and synaptic references that simultaneously reward and puzzle the reader (“In the field of tragic emotion I think that Euripides is in no wise superior to Sophocles; but when it comes to figs, the Attic stand out far ahead of all others”).10 Equally tantalizing are the quotations from scores of critical works on theater, drama, music, and festivals, and from those huge and comprehensive histories, preserved only in the odd and tattered line or two, until the cumulative effect is almost brutal: of all these works, none of the commentary, none of the histories survives. In so many cases, our only access to the primary sources of antiquity has come to us through the fragmentary quotations Page 207 →Athenaeus preserved, as if to infuriate us by the magnitude of the absence it incessantly flags. It is a troubled and disturbing text to work with, but as soon as Athenaeus begins to read like a cluttered Victorian drawing room (too full of curiosities and no place to sit), as soon as the clutter becomes oppressive, we would do well to pause and to look more closely at his collectibles: they are not found anywhere else. Consider a few of the more important cameos Athenaeus cites in passing, no longer extant, which are discussed below. One of the familiar sources mentioned frequently as an authority on a variety of subjects, Juba II, king of Mauritania (Roman Numidia), authored a multivolume comprehensive History of the Stage in the opening years of the first century CE. Juba’s work was quoted with great respect as common scholastic knowledge at the time of Athenaeus. Nor was it an isolated undertaking, but part of a long scholastic tradition of performance studies, like the later Rufus’s History of the Theatre that Sopatros uses extensively, and Aristotle’s earlier didaskalia (teachings).11 Juba was well equipped to produce such a work, having sponsored the construction of several theaters in North Africa. As a young man educated with Roman expectations, he was a tragic poet and an actor as well, certainly a self-declared critic of performance. He was the son of the King Juba who had allied with Scipio and Cato in the civil wars of the first triumvirate and was defeated by Julius Caesar in North Africa. After the battle of Thapsus, Juba Senior fulfilled a suicide pact and so expired in his native land. But his son, the young prince Juba II, was brought back to Rome as part of Caesar’s triumph (Plutarch’s only line of biography on young Juba was to call him “the happiest captive who ever was”) and raised there in the household of Octavian (later Augustus), where he was educated in both Latin and Greek.12 As a young man, Juba knew the best Roman writers of the golden age, including Ovid and Virgil. Once grown, the Romanized young prince was restored as a client king on his ancestral throne. He married well—to no one less than Cleopatra’s daughter by Mark Antony—and enjoyed a regal career Romanizing North Africa, building cities, roads, aqueducts, and theaters. He also devoted himself to a substantial career as a writer, historian, and scholar, producing works on such diverse subjects as a history of painting, music, theater, natural history, a history of Rome, History of Libya: The Wanderings of Hanno (a fifth-century BCE cartographer), something vaguely about athletics, and a popular guide to Arabia. He was also, we learn from Athenaeus, an imperial actor. Of this colorful and influential life of Juba, the African-Romanized-Hellenist client-king-scholar-artist, we glimpse only one snapshot from Athenaeus, quoting (secondhand) another lost work on the theater,Page 208 → Amarantus’s On the Theatre, in which he tells us that among the slaves Juba kept was one he trained as a tragic actor, one Leonteus.13 Later Leonteus was manumitted and practiced his tragic craft at Argos. Sometime earlier in his career, on the occasion of watching Leonteus’s performance of Hypsipyle, Juba composed an epigram that Athenaeus records, as an indirect testimony to lovers of good fish: Another fish-lover was Leonteus, the tragedian of Argos, a pupil of Athenion. He had formerly been a slave of Juba, King of the Mauretanians, according to Amaranthus in his work, On the Theatre. He says that Juba wrote the following epigram on the occasion of Leonteus’s poor performance of Hypsipyle: “Seek not, when gazing on me, Leonteus, echo of an artichoke-eating tragedian, to look into the poor heart of Hypsipyle. For I was once a friend of Bacchus nor did he ever admire any voice so much as mine, as he listened with golden-lobbed ears.” But today trivets and jars and dry frying pans have bereft me of voice because I indulged my belly.14

And bereft of voice Juba remains. Such is the wonder cabinet that is the Banquet of the Learned. It is the density of such moments that renders the text so poignant. The small cameo that Athenaeus preserves functions like a memento of a large life, no little part of which involved the theater as an artist, actor, poet, singer, architect, and scholar. So little of it remains, reminding us that here were actors raised as slaves in Africa, of course, and in the household of one who knew the stage well, manumitted, whom we assume, on the promise of a certain talent, enjoyed a certain fame outside of Athens. Here were historians of the early theater (now lost) referring to other historians of the early theater (also lost), one of which was himself an accomplished actor and builder of theaters. We do not know if this North African Nero performed in the theaters he built in his Romanized new capital, Caesarea, or if he referred to himself as a young man in a private setting in Rome, but we do know that he was a lifelong friend of Bacchus, an actor and a scholar, and his works were known, used, and quoted by Plutarch and Strabo, with the largest repository here in Athenaeus.15 It is so curious that we find in the cluttered gallery of Athenaeus, and through just such indirect but lasting ways, the ruined remains of poets, actors, and scholars long dead, alive still in a memorial present of the symposium guests, where the quotation functioned to vivify the larger (now absent) corpus. It is in this function of evocation that Athenaeus excels. He doesn’t introduce his authors, which would be unnecessary in such familiarPage 209 → company. The Banquet of the Learned is not even an act of recollection—the slow retrieval from Augustine’s famous “storehouse of memory”—but rather his sources are very present company. Alexis, Cratinus, and Menander are five-hundred-year-old fingertip companions at the dinner, and that familiarity is itself legible. He is not quoting some distant classical past, but rather he is still living in it. Writing of a regional dance, Athenaeus can cite offhand from several comic poets: “Then there is the apokinos, as it is called, which is mentioned by Cratinus in Nemesis, Cephisodorus in Amazons, Aristophanes in The Centaur, and several other writers, and which was later called maktrismos.”16 He pricks the ready memory of his readership, who are themselves fully conversant with the citation. His merit lives in his ability to inhabit the already-present of the past, in the nodding familiarity that ghosts are always in the room, that are for us now extinguished. There is something so durable and familiar about his relationship to what are for us the broken scraps of the classical past. It makes us want to inhabit that same familiar space of well-thumbed plays and comfortable guests. They seem like mementos of Athenaeus’s own ancestors. We do this elsewhere. From small relics of past family we reconstruct our own pasts, from mementos of relatives long gone we hang onto what little is left of them to us, and with them our genealogies, preserving in the few artifacts left behind the storied lives that brought us, and our displaced roots, by ship or prairie schooner to such distant lands: the pocket watch or family ring, the quilt, the old photograph, from which, out of which, we extend ourselves backward, to belong again to an older belonging. We make a porous border of the past to briefly repeople the gone presence, and allow those before us to stand in again through such brief artifacts. It is that kind of contract of memory I want to evoke. Can we read his quotations as mementos? And mementos, we know, can only live in the waters of personal memory; take them out, and they are just somebody’s old junk—just old clutter in someone else’s attic somewhere, someone’s old box of medals, someone’s old ring, until the curator who keeps the memory returns, submerges them, and endows them once again with presence. What makes The Banquet of the Learned so poignant is that Athenaeus, this unlikely gourmand, was the last preserved keeper of memory of classical theater and theater culture that stretched back seven hundred years; that is, he remains our last preserved curator who owned the memory that allowed the artifacts to ghost into presence with a presence we will not know again. There is nothing nostalgic about Athenaeus, nothing belated in his collection. He knew their stories as we do not. With his passing, the works of that long tradition became antiques, became someone else’s clutter.Page 210 → Scholiasts would follow, anthologies would still be preserved, catalogs endured, and classical theater would still roll on for centuries, along with its grammarians and historians, but we have no further access to scholiasts with the same relationship to the material over which they presided. Later scholars, like Photius or the compilers of the Suda, may quote them, but they do not remember them. It would not be their house, but that of another’s ancestors. They were late-antiquity compilers, but no longer residents in the dominion of that memory; the chain of caretakers had been broken, and for those that followed after the great breakage, the artifacts ceased to have the same immediate appeal. What we experience with Athenaeus, in reflection, is that he was the last curator, and his long dinner, the last exhibition before the plays and

their scholars were all boxed up, stored in some post-Attic attic, never to be found again.

An Exhibition of Ancestors P. E. Easterling, writing of the extraordinary emergence of tragedy as a popular civic institution and how very little we actually know about the development of the professions that supported it, laments the fragmentary scraps of period evidence and the distortions of later writers. Though she doesn’t mention Athenaeus by name, she certainly implied that he is one of those dubious later writers. Easterling’s critique is cogent and her summary of the problem is worth quoting in full: On the one side there are thirty-two well-known plays transmitted from antiquity through the medieval tradition, plays that have exerted a profound, even immeasurable, influence on Western culture, while on the other there are fragmentary scraps of evidence, often enough distorted by the preconceptions of later times, from which scholars try to reconstruct a whole history of an institution. How Dionysiac festivals were organized, what the earliest theatres, masks and costumes looked like, how the music sounded, what sort of performance-styles and dramatic conventions developed, how far the surviving plays are typical of the hundreds, or thousands, that must have been composed during the period, and what tragedy meant for the contemporary Athenian—and nonAthenian—audiences that watched it: these are the questions that need answers. What is lacking is systematic documentation, surviving from the fifth century itself, of this new and extremely successful artistic and Page 211 →civic phenomenon, and there is no prospect that anything of the kind will ever be recovered.17 As Easterling (and many others) have rightly and repeatedly pointed out, Athenaeus, five hundred or six hundred years from many of his subjects, does not supply the much-needed documentation directly from the fifth century. But it should also be remembered that he is nonetheless eighteen hundred years closer to them than we are, and that “systematic documentation” of theatrical activity was very available to him and his guests, and so he may be worth a closer look. He was, after all, working from and participating in exactly that body of scholarship which sought to systematically document every aspect of theater culture and, equally to his credit, he was part of that late Hellenistic-Alexandrian literary culture that still trafficked in the ancient authors, for whom Greece was not a dead culture. Moreover, Athenaeus belonged to a long genealogy of Alexandrian scholarship that could be traced with remarkable clarity directly back to Aristotle. The family tree would go something like this: Among Aristotle’s missing works was his Didaskaliae, a list and commentary on the poets, available to generations long after him, and certainly to his pupil, Chamaeleon of Heracleia, who left critical work on several early poets, including On Aeschylus, On Thespis, as well as a sixvolume treatise Old Comedy. All three of these works were available to Callimachus (c. 320–240 BCE), the poet and scholar who authored the Chronological Register of the Athenian Dramatic Poets, a catalog of plays and their plots compiled at Alexandria, a work that carried the didaskalia (teachings) scholarship from the theater at Athens to the library in Egypt. The study of theater there was part and parcel of the same appetite that led to the acquisition of the official “copies” of the plays themselves under the hands of Callimachus’s contemporary, King Ptolemy II (reigned 282–246 BCE). The plays arrived, were organized by Lycophron, cataloged by Callimachus, and copied; and the copies, we are told, were returned to Athens. With the acquisition of the texts, the serious work on the theater of Athens began. Lycophron wrote the first Alexandrian commentaries, a magisterial nine-volume study On Comedy. One of his pupils, Eratosthenes (c. 275–c. 194 BCE), the geographer who first calculated the circumference of the earth, and who would in turn become the head of the Library and tutor to the Ptolemy IV, also turned his attention to theater and composed an even more voluminous commentary (at least eleven books) on the production of Attic comedy.18 This work, On the Ancient Comedy, was in turn used by his contemporary and successor at the Library, the grammarian AristophanesPage 212 → of Byzantium (c. 257–c. 180 BCE), whose hypotheses (introductions) to both his comedic namesake and the tragedians were based on prior works, including Aristotle’s Didaskaliae. Aristophanes also composed a catalog of the surviving plays, another standard reference that endured for

centuries.19 Another contemporary, Antiochus of Alexandria (c. third century BCE), also composed a commentary on Middle Comedy. The lineage continued through Aristarchus (c. 217–c. 145 BCE), whose lost work included commentaries on Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Aristophanes, to the prolific grammarian Didymus of Alexandria (63 BCE–10 CE), who, still working with the Register of Callimachus, composed tracts on both tragic and comic writers, as well as compiling (editing, redacting) a compendium on all the scholarship of his predecessors—what Douglass Olson has called “comprehensive running commentaries” on the best work down to his date.20 Theater scholarship, always a cottage industry in Alexandria, became with Didymus a self-generating field of study, with a sizable accretion of work built up around the plays. Of the legacy of Didymus, Ron Vince has written: “As a transmitter of knowledge he is responsible for much of the material in extant scholia and lexicons. In particular, much of the oldest scholia on Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes derive from Didymus.”21 Didymus’s pupil Apion, in turn, continued the transmission into the first century CE, as did Pamphilus (both were from the Alexandrian school, and both were known and quoted by Athenaeus). Another North African, Juba II (c. 10 BCE–23 CE; see above for a detailed account of his life) produced his voluminous History of the Theatre that found its way to Alexandria, where it was quoted by Amarathus, who composed his own work, a companion tract, On the Theatre, sometime in the first century CE. The latter was still known and quoted by Athenaeus, who lived and studied in Alexandria circa 160–80 (CE), where he himself added a small contribution: a critical treatise on Archippus’s play The Fishes. A supplemental line could also be constructed from the Attalid library at Pergamum, with whose catalogs and commentaries Athenaeus was also familiar.22 Thus, the rich field of theatrical discourse and scholarship formed a largely unbroken academic conversation, transmitted from Aristotle in Athens, through the millhouse of Alexandria, to Athenaeus’s dinner table in Rome five centuries later.23 It took ancestors, centuries deep; it took a village of scholars and a library of work to carry on that conversation at Athenaeus’s symposium with some authority, and that is worth listening to. On this wall of the archive where scholarship once stood, a few placeholders remain, frames without pictures but recalled. Page 213 → Here Duris of Samos (third century BCE) left a treatise on Sophocles and Euripides, still in circulation in Athenaeus’s time, though now lost. Next to that, Amaranthus of Alexandria left a useful work On the Theatre. Beside him, Theophrastus left several companion volumes on the same subject; and here was Nestor’s Theatrical Commentaries. The rhetorician Aristophanes of Byzantium wrote an index of songs from plays as well as a treatise On Masks. Carysitius of Pergamum wrote a tract On Dramatic Performances, and Asclepiades compiled Stories from Tragedies (a sort of early Mary Lamb?). Juba II’s general History of the Theatre would sit here on a large shelf with dozens of other similar studies, like that of Amaranthus, and Duris, On Tragedy; Artemon of Cassandreia, who wrote a history On the Artists of Dionysus, the guild of actors and musicians; and Apollodorus of Athens, who left a multivolume work, Commentary on Sophron, the writer of mimes; and Didymus, the grammarian from Alexandria who left explanatory notes on works of various playwrights. Here were the works written on the poets, singularly and collectively, by genre: On Comedy, On Persons Mentioned in Comedy, On Poets Ridiculed in Middle Comedy, on Menander, on Antiphanes, on the Greek comic festivals, the Egyptian festivals, the festivals at Rhodes, on masks, on music, dozens of tracts on music and instrumentation of all sorts, and on choruses. To recover the list of the lost, even to read the roster of scholarship, is to begin to feel something of the scope of its presence again, to blink afresh at the magnitude of the field of study of classical theater centuries after its innovation, which was carried, largely intact, to the dinner table of Athenaeus in 220 CE. And there it largely ended. The line of fresh inquiry ceased and what we see in its place is quotation. The great dinner redacted in his Banquet of the Learned is like a ruin of a great library now broken: shards of torn scrolls underfoot, books with broken spines and scattered pages, scraps of texts littering the floor of wet rubble—whole works now utterly beyond possible reassembly. If this tradition of caretakers of memory continued—as it

certainly did, as the libraries did—we have no further substantive record of it. Scholiasts persisted, now only fragments; performance persisted, less than fragments; theaters continued; mimes carried on the ancient stories; and Christian zealots objected; but we have no comprehensive later installment on the tradition of theater scholarship for the centuries that followed. The next extant commentators on the corpus of Attic drama were the later Byzantine lexicographers—the compiler of the Suda Lexicon, Photius, Zonaras—compilers who no longer carried any living memory of their subject matter.24 They were more like us, curious outsiders, learned amateurs, and excavators in the rubble of another’s culture, performance archaeologists Page 214 →looking back to the surviving bits of another era. There were more bits to work with, but they didn’t participate in the same unbroken tradition of theater scholarship and performance. They were more like John Milton’s daughters, taught the phonetics to read Greek aloud to their blind father, but not to understand it really, not to enter it as citizens of that gone world.

Listening for Lost Pipes Lamentation is never the intention of such assessments of loss, nor is recovery; rather, to use the ruins as a memory site is to measure the size of the loss. What Athenaeus ultimately offers is a firsthand inventory of the arts of Greece, an item-by-item probate record of the theatrical holdings of the classical world, handed down from generation to generation, scholar to scholar, for seven hundred years. To read him is to participate in the act of another’s recollection. This house of memory that they had kept up for so long, had many rooms, for dance, dining, and theater. This room is for music. That Athenaeus and his guests still enjoyed their sources, could recall, recite, and record so much about the highly codified traditions of performed music reveals how widely available this dense and complex acoustic score was to Hellenophile culture in antiquity. Their ears were attuned to a soundtrack we do not even hear, much less study.25 What was the sound of tragedy? What was the dulcet expectation (can we say “classical”?)? What was innovative? What might twelve or fifty choral voices do? How was the sound remembered across generations? We date generations now by our musical tastes, but was that true for these antiquarians as well? What would be proper music for plays and what would be their function, exactly? Consider again just one of the dozen or more musical scholars quoted in Athenaeus: Juba II. Gourmandizing aside, Juba wrote a great deal about music in the theater—the instruments played and the occasions, with an array of orchestration and nuance that explodes the rough traditional understanding of the ubiquitous and all-purpose aulos player. He recorded, for example, the intense, deeply defended, and nuanced debate between those who argued for and those against the superiority of reeds over strings to accompany the chorus; the genres; who played what, when, and who composed the music, including (we are told) the painstakingly detailed records of particularly accomplished musicians. All of these topics would have shed invaluable light on the actual productions of festival and civic theater, both in Greece in the Hellenistic period and in Athenaeus’s own Romanized North Africa. From what survives Page 215 →through the citations of the dinner sophists, Juba II appears to have written at considerable length on the instrumentation of theatrical performance, on pipes and their occasions: single pipes and reed pipes, finger pipes, staff pipes, half-holed pipes, two-holed pipes that played in octaves (“who hath directed his desire toward lovely youth, and dances to the strains of tender half-holed pipes?”), lotus pipes, “tender pipes” (with softer sound, for symposia settings), tragic pipes, and even Lysian pipes “used by women impersonating men.” Pipes made of ivory, pipes made of wood, and pipes made of the bone of fawn legs each had their sounds, their moods, and their associations. This was clearly a highly codified and developed field of acoustic conventions, with their innovators, their artists, and their historians, not a sound of which remains. Similarly, Juba is to have written about harps and psalters with ten strings or eleven strings, their players and innovators, flutes, drums, and whistles—all studied, all evoked, all recalled in Athenaeus. And there were so many other similar experts. Aristoxenus of Tarentum, the student of Aristotle, was also revered by the dinner guests and frequently cited as a great authority on the ancient music, particularly the instrumentation and dance of the festivals. Euphranor the Pythagorean left a frequently quoted tract, On Pipes; Alexis of Thurii, the playwright (Menander’s uncle), also composed a work On Pipes, which may alert us to their value on the stage; and there was another with the same title by Archytas. There were as well half a dozen works on flutes and

flute playing for the stage. Indeed, there was once an entire compendium of comprehensive discussions and commentaries on the various authors who have written on music and instrumentation.26 Aristoxenus as well wrote a great deal about the various instruments, tones, purposes, dances, and much about the great musical debates of the fifth and fourth centuries (“the flute must be second in the dance”), argued for the supremacy of reeds over strings, how many strings are proper to the lyre, how many to the cithara, the proper and improper genres of flute music (“comus, pastoral, gingras, tetracomus, epiphallus, choir-dance, triumph song, battle song, gentle comus, Satyrs’ whirl, door-knock, tickle-tune, Helot-lad”).27 What he illuminates is what we have known without knowing: how critically important music was to performance, how complex the culture of music was, and how precise the functions of music were. He records what songs and instruments were appropriate for drinking parties, and those not; which forms and instruments were used for celebrating, for mourning, for the many expressions on the stage of many genres, for the symposium, the dithyramb, or the phallic dance. They all had their established protocols, their conventionsPage 216 → and traditions, their virtuosi and innovators, their tasteless indiscretions, and impolite transgressions; and he and his compositors all carried their memories undiminished right down to 220 CE. Among the offhand discussions around the triclinium was a reprise of the ancient quarrel on the priority of aulete or singer on the tragic stage, and this conversation gathered up a very old debate that went back to the very shaping of the tragic experience—before, indeed, Aeschylus added that proverbial second actor. In support of the primacy of the singer, one dinner guest quoted a lengthy fragment from Phrynichus that proves, incidentally, to be our oldest extant piece of written theater in the Western world. It is a core sample of the shaping of theater nearly at its institutional inception, circa 500 BCE, and the sound of the flute was already there; seven hundred years later that debate was still current to the historians of ancient performance. Little of this musical culture finds any material remains. In the Archaeological Museum in the Piraeus, Athens, is a small (one tomb) collection of the remains of several ancient musical instruments all found in a single grave: the notched tortoise shell that formed the sounding body of a lyre, is the best-preserved piece, but also the frame of a small harp can still be traced, as well as the dissolving hollow of an aulos (flute), whose last finger hole can still be made out. With the instruments are the four last wooden pages of a once-bound book of music, a bronze pen and ink bowl, and a wax scraper. Here was buried a musician and poet, a singer of songs and, lest we overelevate the profession, this rhapsode was also a tradesman who carried a small handsaw to his grave for mending his instruments. The very fragility of the items seems to recede even as they are viewed. They would not stand up to handling. In the absence of such materiality, we have only the evocations of curators like Athenaeus.

The Galley of Lost Poets And finally this room, this large and somber room, is the gallery of lost poets. The centerpiece is the memorial wall covered with names, scrolls of the missing. We will come back to that, last of all. This room tells us a great deal. We could, for example, see that plays in the Hellenistic period were produced in numbers that far exceeded those presented at the annual festivals, and that there was also a thriving critical discourse of dramatic commentary on those plays. Multiple editions of plays were printed, circulated, read, recited, emended, cataloged, and carriedPage 217 → to such symposiums; commentaries were written on plays and playwrights, revisions and corrections were completed by both playwrights and editors for follow-up editions, perhaps follow-up performances.28 We begin to sense something of the rivalry of playwrights—sometimes keenly reminiscent of those mentioned in Terentian prologues, as well as their borrowings. Common titles abound: four playwrights produced The Centaur, six produced versions of The Soldier, six The Brothers—including Menander—four Brothers in Love with Sisters, four treated Sappho, and four Flute-Girls. All remind us that it was, after all, a competition, replete with winners, losers, imitations, and quite noticeably theft of material. Wrote Athenaeus, “From a comparison of these iambics it is plain that Epicrates borrowed the lines from Antiphanes.”29 We see something of the vast field of the tragic and comic poets, whose works have survived only in fragments. Among the lost tragedies, we learn of a trilogy by Aeschylus that dealt with the adoption of the Dionysiac

religion. Reading with the scope of the Oresteia in mind, we are left to lament what Aeschylus might have told us about the incorporation of the worship of Dionysus into a civic structure of Athenian society. Among the dozens of lost plays of Aristophanes also quoted is one inestimable metatheatrical resource entitled The Dress Rehearsal. Says one (backstage?) actor in the play: “Why haven’t you ordered the cups to be passed around?”30 What might a text from such a supreme comic playwright as Aristophanes have told us about the process of play production during the frantic period of the great festivals? It would surely be the ur-text of a genre that MoliГЁre, Buckingham, Sheridan, and others would assay. Other metatheatrical plays quoted include Antiphanes’s The Third-Rate Actor, a phrase Demosthenes used of Aeschines, the orator. And of Aristophanes’s other lost plays, Athenaeus quotes nearly fifty, including Masters of the Frying Pan, Women Who Get the Best Places, as well as revised and reproduced versions of Thesmophoriazusae, Aeolosicon, and Plutus, and a rewritten Clouds that remained unproduced (did Aristophanes meet a legislated limit on satire? or was it rewritten after the trial of Socrates? did it attempt to mollify his own part in the condemnation of the popular philosopher?). We learn that plays were routinely rewritten and reprinted, and occasionally reentered and reproduced into competitions, and this very repetition ensured that a familiarity endured beyond the originating production. Of the predecessors of Aristophanes, we see Cantharus, Crates, the influential Callias of Athens, or Pherecrates, who won his first victory in 437; we have only titles and a few lines. And of his contemporaries who competed with Aristophanes, Athenaeus quotes scores of names like Alcaeus of Page 218 →Athens, who competed with Aristophanes in 388, as well as Ameipsias, Apollophanes, Cratinus, Epicharmus, Eupolis (of whom we know a little), Nicophon, Phrynichus, Plato the comic, Strattis, and Theopompus. Athenaeus’s near contemporaries included Amphis, Anaxandrides of Cameirus, who won in 376, and Anaxilas, all of whom belonged to a generation crafting a new genre of comedy. There were, in addition, two favorites of the symposium guests, Alexis of Thurii (Menander’s uncle) and Antiphanes, who excelled at comedy, with more than one hundred plays each. Here were Amphis, Clearchus of Athens, Dionysius of Sinope who wrote the famous play Hit by a Javelin, Ophelion who wrote The Ugly Fair, and Eubulus, who won in 370. Menander we know—50 of his 108 plays are quoted; but Philemon was regarded as Menander’s better by some, and here’s Philetaerus, who also won a victory in 370, Philippides of Athens, Poseidippus, Theophilus, Timocles, of whom we know little beyond their names, play titles, and an occasional quoted fragment—all writers of Middle or New Comedy whose plays have not survived. Although we have few examples, we know that there existed a continuous and stable tradition of satyr plays, including a resurgence of interest in the form in the third century BCE, from fragments quoted in Athenaeus. “Lycophron of ChalcisВ .В .В . wrote a satyr play Menedemus, in which Silenus says to the satyrsВ .В .В .”31 That Silenus and his satyrs were as recognizable in Lycophron’s day (c. 280) as they were to the audiences of Aeschylus’s Proteus evidences the endurance of a tradition whose texts have not survived. We learn of the nonfestival plays, the mimes, the southern Phylakes, and the popular one-act comedies, written without choruses, which lived beyond their performances and their geography. The mimes of Sophron of Syracuse (fifth century) were printed and anthologized, and commentaries were written about them, as were those of his son Xenarchus and later Sopater, who, we are told, lived out his prolific career during the reign of Alexander. They were as familiar to scholars in 200 CE as they were to Aristotle five hundred years earlier. What might they have told us of the commodity of doing theater outside the big festivals in the fourth and fifth century BCE? What might they have told us of the status of the actor or the actress? In what other venues did they play? How extensive was the “secular,” or nonfestival, theater? Most important, we learn from the sheer numbers of plays and fragments quoted the enormity of our loss. We have not a single surviving text, but Athenaeus quotes from more than four hundred plays from Middle Comedy alone and tells us that he has read more than eight hundred plays of that missing genre.32 One simply cannot account for that many plays in Page 219 →the known festival contexts, and this is where Athenaeus’s lost lists are most useful. If these numbers hold true for the other genres, we are dealing with literally thousands and thousands of plays, from the fifth to the third centuries BCE: an enormous outpouring of dramatic literature that cannot be contained within the known dramatic-festival structure. There were simply far, far more plays than

festivals. Well, it was all once a very fertile field of which, as Easterling reminds us, we know very little—a wide and thriving marketplace of producers and consumers of theater and theater culture, poets and scholars and musicians, in Athens and the Greek East, in festivals, libraries, symposia settings, and some enormous free market elsewhere. All endured for centuries, right down to the table of Athenaeus’s last supper.33 The list of lost plays runs to eleven pages. But that room will appear last.

Niches in the Passage Along this wall are an odd assortment of cameos and few famous actors, like Maison from Megara, who “invented the role of the servant as well as that of the cook” (14.659b); or Cleon, the mime-actor “who was the best actor of Italian mimes” (10.452f); or Cephisocles, whom the tragedian Sosiphanes reviled for his lechery (10.453a). There was also the actress Myrtion, “one of the most notorious variety-actresses before the public” (13.576f).34 And this one was a theatrical producer whose name we don’t know, only that he was the father of Chrysogonus, who would furnish the plays, while his other son furnished the flute, and that he “enjoyed the possession of every theatrical appurtenance in his own house”—except, we are reminded, an audience (8.350e). This one we know next to nothing about, except that he enjoyed great popularity in his day; he was Potheinus the marionette player, whom “the Athenians yielded to the very stage on which Euripides and his contemporaries performed their inspired plays” (1.19e). Tragic puppets?

Room of Lost Books Ah. This hall is empty now. But once there was no room to sit. Athenaeus says that he owned so many ancient Greek books that he “surpassed all who have been celebrated for their large libraries” (1.3a). And there were still plays he couldn’t lay his hands on. Page 220 →If memory has a house, it is the library. And in the third century (CE) the libraries of the Mediterranean were the last addresses of antiquity. We know something of the great libraries in Rome, Pergamum, and Alexandria, but Athenaeus reminds us of the wealth of the well-stocked private libraries like his own.35 These holdings are almost without a history, except the precarious tales like that of Aristotle’s private library, where they were pilfered. But Athenaeus’s fictitious guests at this fictitious dinner all arrive with very real books, and these books came from somewhere. What Athenaeus was attempting, what Aristophanes of Byzantium was attempting, what the great Library of Alexandria was attempting, was to make an enduring monument to memory by preserving the entirety of the classical literary world, and by doing so to keep the fifth century alive to the second century, where Athenaeus should have, by rights, met the next caretaker of memory and passed it off. But the centuries that followed were not kind to classical memory and pagan culture. The grammarians, pedants, scholars, and poets who made up that last symposium all saw their libraries obliterated, and nothing original remains. It was, one by one, as Yun Lee Too has written, “a bibliophiles’ horror story.”36 Like the great library of Alexandria where Athenaeus was educated, with its two million scrolls (also gone), his symposium was among the last repositories of the classical world, and it is a table from which the guests are loath to leave, a sort of last pagan supper the guests would will to be unending while there are books still to quote, prolonging it by the gourmandizing of words. The Banquet of the Learned is a poignant work, if read in the twilight of antiquity. The meal is elongated; courses are stretched, interrupted, and deferred; food is reheated (8.354d) and grows cold again untouched; conversation pours forth more liberally than wine; and entertainment is logos itself: the consumption of anecdotes, derivations, and discourse. The table is scattered with books, until the consumption of words replaces the consumption of food, winding its windy way while memory still serves, before the last and final farewell.

Dancers in the Passage

This was Andron, the flute player from Catana. He was the first among the ancients, we are told, “to add rhythmical motions of the body to the playing of the flute,” that is, to accompany himself in the dance (1.21c). This is Telestes; he danced in Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes and danced so finely that “he made the action clear simply by dancing” (1.22.a). And here is Bathyllus of Alexandria, who introduced tragic dancing. He was a dance Page 221 →scholar as well and once wrote a tract on his craft (1.20d). And Phrynichus, whom we met earlier, was also a dancer who was greatly praised, an artist in his own body, who trained his own choruses and “taught dancing to all who wanted instruction” (1.22a). Have we underestimated dance in our theories of the tragic? And all the inventors of all the lovely and ludicrous dances, the comic fling called the “cordax, ” the tragic dance called “emmeleia,” the satyr dance called “sicinnistae,” “the inventor of which was a barbarian named Sicinnus” (1.20e). And no less famous among the dancers was Sophocles, who after the victory of Salamis danced naked to his own lyre around the trophy. And there are other halls, with niches where images once stood of artists without histories: famous mimes, jesters, acrobats, jugglers, legerdemain experts, magicians, and fire throwers (“Cratisthenes of Phlius, who could make fire burn spontaneously and invented many other magical tricks to confound men’s understanding” ([1.19e])В .В .В . all gone now. Memory itself fades until the ruins are rubbed back into stone.

The Wall of Lost Plays The Deipnosophistae is, in the end, a moving and neurotic feast, driven by an exhausting compulsion to preserve everything, to remember everything, to quote and record and hold the entirety of the Greek past: the poets and the figs, the wine cups and the dances, the music and the plays. It beats itself up, like Hamlet’s fists to his skull: remember, remember, remember. And here this enormous and occasionally tedious tome is, I think, at its most poignant. It preserves, like no other document, the magnitude of all that was lost and the great desire to hold it all. To get some sense of the size of this grief, I should like to close with a list of the plays and playwrights quoted in Athenaeus, a Memorial Wall of Lost Plays, if you will, for the silent and reverent nod to all that is lost; and there are pages and pages of them. In aggregate they read like other memorial walls, as a silent roll call of the dead, names of departed plays scratched on an antique wall in remembrance of their disappearance. And like the names of the dead, each is important, so I’ll not abbreviate them or delegate them to an appendix somewhere, but list them, if only to arrest the looking a moment more.37 These were works in the public memory of readers for seven hundred years, quoted, studied, and recited down to the close of the second century CE. They must have seemed so enduring, so imperishable when Athenaeus hosted the last symposium. Almost without exception, the works are no longer extant. Page 222 → Fig. 11. Theater historian looking respectfully at a wall of names. Photo by Barry Witham. Page 223 → Poets of Old Comedy Alcaeus of Athens Ameipsias Apollophanes Archippus Aristagoras Aristomenes Aristonymus

Callisto, Ganymede, Palaestra, Sacred Marriage, Sisters Seduced, The Wrestling School Connus, The Devourer, Playing at Cottabos, The Sling The Bride, The Cretans Amphitryo, The Fishes, Heracles, Heracles Takes a Wife, Rhinon The Blockhead Dionysus, Quacks Shivering Helios, Theseus

Aeolosicon, Acharnians, Amphiaraus, Anagyrus, Babylonians, The Birds, The Centaur, The Clouds, Cocalus, Daedalus, The Danaids, Ecclesiazusae, The Farmers, The Frogs, Gerytades, Heroes, The Knights, The Lemnian Women, Lysistrata, Masters of the Frying Pan, The Men of Aristophanes Dinnerville, The Merchantmen, Niobus (1)*, Niobus (2)*, Old Age, Peace, Phoenician Women, Plutus 1, Plutus 2, The Rehearsal, The Seasons, The Storks, The Telmessians, Thesmophoriazusae (1), Thesmophoriazusae (2, lost), Triple-Phales, The Wasps, The Woman of Delos, Women Who Get the Best Places (and eleven with unknown titles)38 Calliades (Old Comedy; first appeared in 446) Callias (possibly Calliades?) Callias of Athens Cantharus

The Grammarians’ Tragedy (or The Alphabetic Tragedy), The Cyclops, Shackled Tereus

Cephisodorus Amazons, The Pig, Trophonius of Athens Chionides Beggars (?) Crates of Deeds of Daring, Games of Childhood, Lamia, Neighbors, The Samians, Wild Animals Athens The Achilochuses, Cleobulinas, The Cheirons, Dionysus-Alexander, The Flask, The Herdsmen, Cratinus The Laws, Mollycoddles, Nemesis, The Odysseuses, The Plutuses, Runaway Girls, The Sons of Euneus, Satirists, The Seasons, Theramenes, Trophonius, The Wine-Flask, The Women of Delos Demetrius Sicily Diocles The Bees, Thalatta Ecphantides The Satyrs Alcyon, The Atalantas, The Bacchants, Busiris, Cheiron, Cyclops, The Dionysi, Earth and Sea, Page 224 Envoys, Holiday, Hope, Lord and Lady Logos, Islands, The Marriage of Hebe, The Muses, →Epicharmus Odysseus the Runaway, Orya, Periallus, Philoctetes, The Pilgrims, Pyrrha and Prometheus, of Syracuse Revelers, The Rustic, The Shipwrecked Odysseus, The Sirens, The Sphinx, The Woman from Megara Eunicus Anteia Autolycus, The Bathers, The Captains at Sea, The Demes, The Dyers, The Flatterers, The Friends, Eupolis The Goats, The Golden Age, The Helots, The Island Towns, Maricas, Out of the Service, The Prospaltians, The Taxiarchs Hegemon Battle of the Giants, Philinna The Bread Sellers, Cercopes, Demesmen, The Fates, The Gods, Iambics, The Porters, The Hermippus Soldiers Leucon Lysippus Magnes Metagenes Myrtilus Nicochares Nicophon Pherecrates Philonides Philyllius

The Clansman The Bacchants Dionysus (?), The Lydians The Blockhead (or Breezes), Fond of Sacrifices, The Thurio-Persians (never produced) (quoted, but no titles offered) Amymone, Heracles the Choregus, Laconians, The Lemnian Women Hand to Mouth Toilers, Pandora, The Sirens (never produced) Ant Men, The Broad, Cheiron (?), Corianno, The Deserters, The Forgetful Man, Frills, The Goodfor-Nothings, The Miners, Nice People, Old Women, The Oven (or the Vigil), The Persians, The Savages, The Sham Heracles, The Slave-Teacher, Tyranny The Buskins Auge, Heracles, Island Towns (?), The Well-Digger

Phrynichus Plato Polyzelus Strattis

(comic poet, debuted in 429) Cronus, Ephialtes, The Incubus, The Recluse, The Revelers, Satyrs, The Tragedians, The Weeders Adonis, The Alliance, The Baby, Cleophon, Envoys, Europa, Goods and Chattels, The Griffins, Holidays (After the Holidays?), Io, The Laconians, Laius, The Long Night, Menelaus, Peisander, Phaon, The Poets, Scum of the Earth, The Sophists, Very Sad, Zeus Outraged Birth of the Muses Atalanta, Callippides, Chrysippus, Cinesias, Keeping Cool, Lemnomeda, The Macedonians (or Pausanias), The Man-Handler, Medea, The Men of Riverside, Nice People, Philoctetes, Phoenician Women, Troilus

Telecleides

The Amphictyons, Hard-Boiled, The Hesiods, The Prytanes Admetus, Althaea, Aphrodite, Callaeschrus, Delighting in Luxury, Hedychares, The Mede, Theopompus Militant Females, Nemea, Odysseus, Pamphila, The Peace, Penelope, Phineus, The Sirens, Theseus Page 225 → Poets of Middle Comedy Aesop, Agonis (or The Scarf), The Anointer(?), Archilocus, Asclepiocleides, Atthis, Banished, The Bareback Rider, The Brothers, The Cauldron, Cleobuline, The Coffers, Crateias (or, The Apothecary), The Cup Maker, Cut Loose, The Dancing-Girl, The Deceiver, Demetrius, The Dicers, Dorcis (or The Woman Who Smacks), Dropides, Dying Together, Epidaurus, The Eretrian, Fair Measure, The Falsifier, The Fire-Lighter, The Foster Brothers, Galateia, The Girl Who Is in Love, God Inspired, Government by Women, The Hairdresser, Helen, The Heiress, Hesione, The Horseman, Into the Well, Krateia (or The Apothecary), The Lady Devotee of Pythagoras, Lovelorn Lass, Leucadi (or the Run-aways), Leuce, Linus, The Locrians, Lyciscus, The Man from Cyprus, The Man from Pontus, A Man of Taste (or The Nymphs), The Man with a Cataract, The Alexis of Men of Tarentum, The Meeting at Pylae, The Melting Pot, Midon, Milcon, The Milesians, Minos, Thurii The New Tenant, The Nurse, Odysseus at the Loom, The Olynthians, Opora, Orestes, Pamphila, The Pancration-Fighter, The Parasite, Phaedrus, Philiscus, The Phrygian, The Pilot, The Plasterer, The Poets, Polycleia, The Premier Danseur, The Refugee, The Ring, Ripe Fruit, Running-Mates, The Scarf, Sciron, The Service Lady, The Seven at Thebes, She Was Like That, Sleep, The Soldier, The Soothsayers, The Suitors, Supposititious, The Swan, The Teacher of Profligacy, The Thebans, The Thesprotians, Thrason, Toilers, The Torch, Trophonius, The Trustee, Twice a Mourner, The Twins, Tyndareus, The Usurer (or The Falsifier), The Vigil (or Toilers), The Woman from Bruttium, The Woman from Greece, The Woman of Miletus, The Woman Who Drank Belladonna, The Women of Cnidus, The Wounded Man Athamas, The Bath, Brothers in Love with Their Sisters, Dithyrambus, Government by Women, Amphis Lamentation, Leucas, Odysseus, The Seven at Thebes, The Sky, The Tirewoman, The Toilers, A True Friend, The Wail from Asia, The Wandering Juggler, Woman-Madness Anchises, Anteros, The Cup-Bearer, The Drill-Sergeant, The Drug-Prophet, The Farmers, Heracles, Hunters, Island Towns, The Lady from Samos, Lycurgus, Melilot, Nereus, The Nereids, Anaxandrides Odysseus, Old Men’s Madness, Pandarus, Protesilaus, Satyrias, The Tail, Tereus, The Treasure, The Ugly Duckling, Violence Calypso, The Caterers, The Chick, Circe, The Flute-Player, The Gold-Smith, The Graces, The Anaxilas Harp-Maker, Hyacinthus the Pimp, Manliness, Nereus, Poultry-Keepers, The Recluse, Rich Men The Abolition of Money (Epigenes?), Adulterers, Aelous, Alcestis, Amorous, Ancestors, The Page 226 Anointer (?), Anteia, The Arcadian, Archestrata, Asclepius, The Bacchants, Bag, The Begging →Antiphanes Priest, The Birth of Aphrodite, The Boeotian Women, The Brave Lads, The Bumblebee, Caeneus, (c. The Carians, The Chick, Chrysis, Cocalus, Cyclops, Deucalion, Dodona, The Etruscan, 407–333?) Euthydicus, The Farmer (or Butalion), The Flute Girl (or Twin Sisters), Fond of His Father, Fond of His Mother, Ganymede, The Gardener, Gorgythus, The Hairdresser, Hard to Sell, The Harp

Singer, Hit by a Javelin, The Horsemen, The Immigrant, In Love with Himself, Just Alike, Kidnapped, The Knave-Hater, Lampon, The Lemnian Women, Leonides, Little Leptines, Lycon, The Lydian, The Magistrate, The Man from Cnoethe (or Potbelly), The Man from Pontus, The Man from Zante, Melanion, Memorials, Mystis, Nuptials, Oenomaus (or Pelops), Omphale, OwnBrothers, The Paederast, The Parasite, Philotis, The Physician, Poesy, The Pro-Theban, The Restorer of Runaways, Rich Men, The Riddle, Sappho, The Scythian, The Seamstress, She Goes AFishing, The Sheep-Owner, Sleep, The Soldier (or Tychon), Thamyras, The Third-Rate Actor, Timon, The Torch, A True Friend, Twice as Much, The Twins, Tychon, Unhappy Lovers, The Villager from Phrearrus, The Villagers of Thoricus (or Digging Through), The Water Jug, The Women of Corinth, The Women of Tough-Town, The Wounded Man, Wrongly Wed Araros Aristophon

Adonis, The Birth of Pan, The Hunchback, The Wedding Hymn Callionides, The Doctor, Peirithous, Philonides, Plato, The Pythagorean Disciple

Axionicus Clearchus Cratinus the Younger Dionysius of Sinope Dromon

Aping the Chalcidians, The Chalcidian, The Etruscan, The Lover of Euripides, Philinna The Corinthians, The Harp Singer, Pandrosus

Ephippus Epicrates of Ambracia Epigenes Eriphus Eubulides

Page 227 →Eubulus

Cheiron, The Giants, The Plutuses (The Satirists), The Titans Hit by a Javelin, The Law-giver, Namesakes, The Woman Who Saved The Harp Girl Artemis, Circe, Cydon, Geryones, Merchandise, The Obeliaphoroi, The Peltast, Philyra, The Recruits, Sappho, Shipwrecked The Amazons, Anti-Lais, Hard to Sell, The Merchant, The Trident (or Huckster) The Bacchae, The Glorified Woman, The Reveler, The Souvenir Aeolus, Meliboea, The Peltast The Revelers Amaltheia, Ancylion, Antiope, Attachment (or The Swan), Auge, Bellerophon, The Brothel-Keeper, Cercopes, The Chick, Chrysilla, Clepsydra, Daedalus, The Defectives, Deucalion, The Dicers, Dolon, Echo, Europa, The Flatterers, Ganymede, Glued Together, Graces, The Happy Woman, The Harp-Girl, The Hunchback, Ion, Ixion, The Laconians (or Leda), The Maid of the Mill, Medea, Mysians, Nanion (or by Philip), Nausicaa, The Nurses, Odysseus (or the All-Seeing Ones), Oedipus, Oenomaus (or Pelops), Orthannes, The Pimp, Procris, Safe Home, Semele (or Dionysus), Sphinx-Cario, The Titans, The Vigil, The Wreath-Sellers

Heracleides Mnesimachus Busiris, The Dyskolos (The Peevish Man), The Horse Breeder, Philip Nausicrates Nicostratus Ophelion Philetaerus Sotades Timocles

The Skippers, The Woman from Persia Antyllus, The Cook, The Couch, Driven Out, Fellow-Countrymen, Hecate, Hesiod, The High Priest, Kings, The Money-Lender, Pandrosus, The Pet, Plutus, Rival in Love, The Sham Scoundrel, The Slanderer, The Syrian The Ugly Fair, The Wail from the East Achilles, Asclepius, The Flute-Lover, The Huntress, Oenopion, Playing the Corinthian, Tereus, The Torch-Bearers Locked Up, Ransomed The Boxer, The Busybody, The Caunians, The Centaur, Conisalus, Delos, Dionysus, Dracontium, The Egyptians, Fond of the Bench, Forgetfulness, Heroes, The Icarians (Icarian Satyrs?), The Letters, The Marathonians, Neaera, Orestautocleides, The Purple Shell(?), The Ring, Sappho, Satyrs of the People, The Sham-Robbers, The Spiteful Man, Women at the Dionysia

Poets of New Comedy Alexander of Athens Anaxippus

Antigone (or Alexander), The Drinking Bout, Tragic Poet Behind the Veil, The Harp-Singer, The Thunderbolt, The Well

Antidotus The Faultfinder, The Premier Danseur Apollodorus Apollodorus of The Girl Who Was Sacrificed, The Modiste’s Dowry, The Priestess, The Tablet-Maker Carystus Apollodorus of Brothers in Love with Sister (or Starving to Death), The Woman Who Left Her Husband Gela Archedicus Athenion Page 228 →Baton Calliades Callicrates Charicleides Crito(n) Crobylus Damoxenus Demetrius Demonicus Diodorus of Sinope Dioxippus Diphilus of Sinope Epinicus Euangelus Eumedes Euphron Hipparchus Lynceus of Samos Machon of Sicyon

The Man Who Went Wrong, The Treasure The Samothracians The Benefactors, The Fellow Cheater, The Murderer A Mistake (Diphilus?) Moschion The Chain The Busybody The False Substitute, The Suicide, The Woman Who Left Her Husband The Foster Brothers, Mourning His Own Demise The Areopagite Achelous The Flute Girl, Heiress A Foe to Pimps, The Historian, The Miser The Bath, The Boeotian Woman, Brothers, The Busybody, Daughters of Pelias, Greedy, Hecate, Heracles, The Hero, The Lemnian Women, Marriage, The Merchant, A Mistake, The Mistaken Lady, The Olive Orchard, Paederasts, The Painter, The Parasite, The Rampart-Taker (revised and retitled The Eunuch), Sappho, The Soldier, The Souvenir, Synoris, Telesias, Theseus, Tithraustes, The Woman Who Left Her Husband, The Worshipers of the Dead Child-Foisting Wives, Mnesiptolemus The Unveiling of the Bride Murdered Brothers, Comrades, The Muses, The Pilgrims, She Gave It Back, The Surrendered Girl, The Ugly Duckling Safe Home, Thais, The Vigil The Centaur The Letter, The Mistake [Ignorance], Bright Sayings (a collection, not a comedy)

Arbitrates, The Artisan, Brothers, The Carian-Woman, The Carouse, The Carthaginian, The Concubine, The Cousins, The Dagger, The Deposit, The Door-Tender, The Ephesian, The Menander (c. Fishermen, The Flatterer, For Sale, The Girl from Perinthus, The Girl Twins, The Grouch 343–292 (presented in 316), The Ghost, The Harper, The Head Dress, The Heiress, The Hermaphrodite, BCE) The Hero, Hymenis, In the Flames, The Inspired Woman, Ladies at Luncheon, The Law-Giver, The Man from Ephesus, The Peplos-Bearer (or the Flute-Girl), Phanium, Philadelphi (Brothers

in Love with Sisters), The Priest of Mene, The Ring, The Self-Tormentor, Sham-Heracles, She Who Got Slapped, She Who Set Herself on Fire, The Skipper, The Slave, Supposititious, The Swashbuckler, Temperament (Anger, won in 316/5), Thais, Tinkers’ Holiday, Trophonius, The Water Jar, The Woman Hater Page 229 Cheiron (?)Eileithyia →Nicomachus Nicon Philemon

The Harp-Singer Beggar Woman (or the Woman from Rhodes), Brothers, Butting In, The Doctor, Dying Together, The Fancy Man, The Ghost, Kidnapped, The Man of Babylon, The Murderer, Neaera, The Pursuer (or Soupy), The Rustic, The Sicilian, She Who Renewed Her Youth, The Soldier, The Treasure, The Widow, The Woman of Corinth

Philemon the Younger Philippides The Abolition of Money, The Flutes, The Fountain of Youth, The Miser, Women in a Boat Philostephanus The Man from Delos Phoenicides The Colonel of Horse, Hated Woman Poliochus The Corinthiast The Converted Philosopher, The Dancing Girls, Foster Brothers, Locked Out, Locrian Women, Poseidippus The Pimp, Recovering His Sight, The Slave, The Woman from Ephesus Sophilus Androcles, The Colonel of Horse, The Dagger, The Deposit, Philarchus, Running-Mates Sosicrates Brothers in Love with Sisters, Successions Sosipater The False Accuser Stephanus The Pro-Laconian Straton Phoenicides Theocritus of Girls Practicing Witchcraft Syracuse Theognetus The Ghost (or Miser), He Liked His Master The Boeotian Women, The Daughters of Proteus, Epidaurus, The Harp-Singer, He Liked to Play Theophilus the Flute, Neoptolemus, Pancration-Fighter, The Physician Comic Poets of Unidentified Genre Aeschylus of Alexandria Antagoras Demophon (tragedian?) Dexicrates (Middle or New Comedy) Epilycus Page 230 →Euthycles Hegesippus Heniochus Heracleitus Herondas Philip Philitas Philoxenus Phormus

Amphitryo

Self-Deceivers Coraliscus (Middle Comedy?) The Wastrel (or The Letter) Brothers, True Friends The Busybody, Polyeuctus, Trochilus The Host Women Who Work Together (quoted but no titles) The Unruly (dithyrambic and tragic poet) The Banquet, Cyclops Atalanta Girls

Sannyrion

Io, Laughter

Timotheus

The Birth-Pangs of Semele, Cyclops, Niobe, The Puppy, The Sailor

Tragic Poets Acestor Achaeus of Eretria

Aeschylus

Agathon of Athens Alexander of Aetolia Antiphon Aristarchus Aristias of Philius Astydamas Athenion Carcinus Chaeremon Cleanetus Page 231 →Cleomachus Diogenes of Athens

Aetheon (satyr), Alcmeon (satyr), Cycnus, The Fates, The Games, Hephaestus (satyr), Iris (satyr), Linus (satyr), Omphale Agamemnon, Amymone, Athamas, The Bone Collectors, The Cabeiri, The Cretan Women, Danaids, The Daughters of the Sun, The Edonians, The Envoys, Ixion, Lycurgus, The Myrmidons, Persians, Phineus, The Phrygians, Philoctetes, The Phorcides, Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, Proteus (satyr), Sea Glaucus, Seven against Thebes, The Sphinx, Women of Perrhaebia, The Younger Generation Telephus, Thyestes Antigone (however, the author could be the comic poet Alexander), Circe, The Fishermen (or lyric poem?) Meleager, The Statesman

Spirits of Doom Hermes, Heracles (satyr) The Samothracians Semele, Achilles Alphesiboea, The Centaur, Dionysus, Io, The Minyae, Odysseus, Oeneus, Thyestes

Semele

Euripides

Aeolus, Andromache, Andromeda, Antigone, Antiope, Auge, Autolycus (a satyr), Bacchae, Cretan Women, Cyclops (a satyr), Danae, Eurysteus, Heracles, Hippolytus, Ion, Iphigenia in Aulis, Medea, Melanippe Bound, Oedipus, Oeneus, Orestes, Peirithous (or Critias?), Phaethon, Phoenician Women, Phrixus, Pleisthenes, Sciron, Stheneboea, Suppliants, Telephus, Theseus, Trojan Women

Ion of Chios

Agamemnon, Laertes (play?), Omphale, The Phoenician (or Caeneus), The Sons of Eurytus, Sojournings (tragedy?)

Leonteus of Argos Lycophron of Menedemus (satyr) Chalcis Melanthius Meletus of Athens Nothippus Philiscus of Corcyra Philocles

Phrynichus Pratinas Python of Catana

Sophocles

The Phoenician Women

Agen (satyr; of disputed authorship) The Achaean’s Dinner-Guests, Aegeus, Aethiopians, Ajax the Lash-Wielder, Amphiaraus (satyr), Amycus, Andromeda, Antigone, The Camicians, Cedalion, The Colchian Women, The Epitanarians, Eris, Ichneutae, Inachus, Insolence, Iphigenia, The Judgment, Lovers of Achilles, The Marriage of Helen, The Men of Larisa, The Mysians, Nausicaa, Niobe, Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus, Oenomaus, Pandora, Philoctetes, Phineus, The Phoenix, Salmoneus, The Scythians, The Shepherds, The Sons of Antenor, The Syndeipnon (Companions at Dinner), The Tambourine Players, Thamyras, The Trachinian Women, The Trackers, Triptolemus, Thamyras, Tyro

Sosiphanes of Syracuse Sositheus of Daphnis (or Lityeras) Alexandria Sthenelus Theodectas Oedipus Page 232 → Writers on Theater Amaranthus of Alexandria Antiochus of Alexandria Apollodorus of Athens Archestratus Aristocles Aristophanes of Byzantium Aristotle Aristoxenus Artemon Asclepiades Athenaeus Bathyllus of Alexandria Baton of Sinope Carysitius of Pergamum Chamaeleon of Heracleia (Pontus) Demetrius of Byzantium

On the Theatre On the Poets Ridiculed in Middle Comedy Commentary on Sophron On Flute-Players On Choruses, On Music Attic Glossary (indexes songs and their occasions), On Masks, On Poets On Music, Drinking Miscellany, Brief Notes, On Flute Players, On Flutes and Musical Instruments On the Dionysiac Guild Stories from Tragedy About the Drama of Thrattae Based on the Fish: A Treatise by Archippus On Tragic Dancing On Ion the Poet On Dramatic Performances On Aeschylus, On the Old Comedy (at least six books long) On Poetry

Didymus Dorotheus of Ascalon Duris Duris of Samos Eratosthenes Euphranor

Commentary on Ion Concerning Antiphanes On Tragedy On Sophocles and Euripides (same as above?) On Comedy (at least 11 books long) On Flute-Players

Gorgon On the Rhodian Festivals Hegesander Commentaries Page 233 →Heracleides On Music of Pontus Herodicus Persons Mentioned in Comedy Hieronymus Historical Notes, On the Poets King Juba II History of the Theatre (at least seventeen books long) Lycophron On Comedy (at least nine books long) Lynceus On Menander, Reminiscences Menaechmus On Artists Nestor Theatrical Commentaries Nicomachus On Egyptian Festivals Phaenias the On Poets Peripatetic Phillis of On Flute-Players Delos Philomnestus On the Sminthian Festival at Rhodes Pyrrander On Flute-Players Sotion of On Timon’s Satires Alexandria Theophrastus On Comedy, On Drunkenness, On the Ridiculous Tryphon On the Use of Terms (Pipes and Instruments) Writers of Phylakes / Mimes Herondas Women at Work Together of Cos Rhinthon of Amphitryon Tarentum Sciras (poet of Meleager Italian Comedy) Bacchis, The Bookworms, The Celts, Eubulus the God-Man, The Gates, Hippolytus, Lentil Soup, The Sopater Man of Science, The Marriage of Bacchis (or The Suiters of Bacchis), Orestes, The Portal, The Slavery of Mystacus, Spirit-Raising, The Women of Cnidus

Sophron Busied with the Bride, Fisherman and Farmer, Mimes, Mimes of Men, Mimes of Women, The Motherof in-Law, Puffing Passion, The Rustic, The Tunny-Catcher, Women Who Say They Will Expel the Syracuse Goddess Xenarchus (son of Bucolion, The Pentathlum, Priapus, The Purple Shell, The Scythians, Sleep, The Soldier, The Twins Sophron)

Page 234 →

Eleven. The Damnatio of the Gods Theater and Resistance in the Pagan Holocaust Is there a history of silence? —Derrida

Damnatio Memoriae: Memory, Mutilation, Memory Something in the middle of both interior panels of the Arch of the Argentarii in Rome has clearly been erased. Figures who once stood next to the emperor Caracalla (reigned 211–17 CE) have been chiseled out. What remains is not the ruins of decay—the soft weathering of millennial faces slouching toward oblivion—but rather a scar on the body of stone, an abrupt amputation, a political excision of those who fell from imperial favor and suffered the banishment of their images from public monuments. In this case, the removed figures were family of the emperor and victims of his fratricidal rise to the throne. The scar of their erasure is as much a part of the portrait of power as that of the preserved image of the emperor.1 On the western interior panel, the stone figure of Caracalla standing against the left frame is all that remains of a once-imperial family portrait. The two missing figures, who formerly occupied the voided center and right of the panel, belonged to Plautilla, Caracalla’s wife, and her father Plautianus, but have been razed clean—“blotted out” in the imperial language—and the void of their excision is the most compelling aspect of the panel of memory, mutilation, and memory. Plautianus was accused by Caracalla of plotting a murder against himself and his father Septimius Severus, for which he was executed and his daughter was exiled. Their removal from the imperial family was symbolically registered in their excision from public statuary. In the text of official Roman memory, they had become lacunae. Directly across the arch, the eastern interior panel reveals a similar excision from the same imperial family. In this case Caracalla’s parents, SeptimiusPage 235 → Severus and Julia Domina, remain but their younger son Geta, who was murdered by his brother Caracalla in a dispute for succession, was subsequently removed from the family panel. It was a Roman custom when someone of stature fell from imperial grace to enact upon their memory such a public erasure. The act, evoked at the beginning of this study, has come to be called damnatio memoriae.2 An interdiction of silence was passed on the fallen, their names blotted out from official records, their images destroyed; recalling the victims, even in private mourning, was prohibited. In the case of those figures whose statues were ubiquitous (like Geta, for example, or fallen emperors like Julian), the erasure was, in Stewart’s phrase, “deputized” and performed across the grid of empire.3 The damnatio of Eutropius in 399 was quite precise in this officious demolition: “We have decreed that all his statues, all his images, should be banished from all the cities and towns, in private places as well as public ones, whether they are bronze or marble, or paintings, or any other material that can be crafted.”4 So consummate was the process of damnatio that even the names of the victims became contraband. Eugenius, briefly emperor in the West, who led the failed revolt in 394, was afterward officially referred to as only “the tyrant,” while “Geta,” Caracalla’s erased brother, had a name formerly popular with the playwrights as a slave character since at least Menander’s Dyskolos (c. 320 BCE). But after the damnatio, his own contemporaries noted that the five-hundred-year-old name suddenly disappeared from the stage.5 Like the Greek custom of amnesty, the erasures of damnatio memoriae were never an absolute forgetting, but rather an injunction against remembering—thus never complete erasure, but often, as in the case of the Argentarii arch, they left marks of its own defacing. The same excision can be seen in the inscriptions in which the familial names were removed—in the inscription dedicated by Antoninus to the safe return of Severus and his

family, preserved in the British Museum, the name of “Geta” has been visibly erased.6 The same is true of the damnatio passed on Julian the Apostate (the last pagan emperor) after his death in 363. His statues, like the one whose base is preserved in Aphrodisias, were destroyed, but the bases with their inscriptions remained in place, marking where the fallen had once stood and was removed, archiving his absence with a scarred presence. His memory was less destroyed than mutilated, and the public memorials stood on as scarred ruins serving as memoranda for forgetting. Later, at the close of the century, a statue of the Christian emperor Theodosius was inserted onto the pedestal of Julian, further archiving both the erasure and the subjugation of a defeated (pagan) whose absence was now doubly marked.7 Page 236 →Occasionally, one who suffered a damnatio found a restoration of memory. The interdiction of silence was lifted, and that, too, was marked by a memorandum of a past erasure that now became equally, presently unspoken. Standing in the Forum of Trajan in Rome is the base of a statue whose inscription bears the cursus (the civic career) of the consulate in Rome (effectively governor of the city of Rome), Virius Nicomachus Flavianus, who died in 394 CE. The statue from which the base still survives was not erected during his lifetime as chief administrator of the city of Rome, but rather some forty years later by his son, to restore his father’s reputation to public memory, and with good reason. Flavianus was one of the chief instigators in the failed war of succession in 394, led by Eugenius. Eugenius was installed as emperor of the West in 392, a professor of rhetoric, whom Theodosius, emperor in the East, considered a usurper. Eugenius led a revolt against Theodosius in September of 394 that would be, as Augustine, Ambrose, and other Christian historiographers have noted, “the last stand of paganism.” Upon his defeat, Eugenius was executed, Flavianus fell on his sword, and a damnatio was passed on the memory of both. The official records of both were destroyed, the earlier public inscriptions and monuments were mutilated, mourning the death of the men was prohibited, and even to recall the name was criminalized. We know something of the erasure of Flavianus in particular because forty years later his family, now converted and back in the graces of the Christian emperor, had the act repealed, and the erasure was itself erased with the installation of a new monument, the base of which has survived.8 But through each point of inscription and erasure of memory—the erected monument, the damnatio, the repeal of the damnatio, and the rededication of the monument to Flavianus—traces of its previous subject remained. Indeed, the overinscription reminds us that the point of damnatio was never oblivion, but rather to make the act of erasure public. Like amnesty, it was a present reminder (a memorandum) to forget. The inscription of the civic career returned the figure to a certain visibility, but did so with the conspicuous omission of any announced involvement (even exoneration) in the pagan revolt that led to his death and damnatio. The silence in such cases becomes audible and speaks to the great anxiety of the age, what Charles Hedrick Jr. titled a chapter in his rich study of Flavianus, “unspeakable paganism,” an unspoken omission of a suppressed culture that continued beneath the new Christian state. It is a notion others have embraced in studying the triumph of Christianity in late antiquity. Ramsay MacMullen famously concluded his provocative work on the subject with a protracted employment of the same metaphor: “Silencing, burning, and destruction Page 237 →were all forms of theological demonstration; and when the lesson was over, monks and bishops, generals and emperors, had driven the enemy from our field of vision. What we can no longer see, we cannot report. Here, then, my book ends.”9 In a wistful tone, MacMullen had looked across the horizon of the century to come and saw nothing but an acoustic absence (“It remains for another book to explore further just what noise and silence might mean in the way of life of both pagans and Christians of the fourth and later Roman centuries”), but it remained an unfulfilled longing, a hunch of low-decibel signals emitted just beneath the audible frequencies. What follows is a sojourn into that quiet and pregnant acoustic landscape, an excavation of the silenced paganism in the wake of Eugenius’s revolt in one of the most persistently pagan forums that endured: the theater of late antiquity. As is often the case, as is the case of Flavianus and the pagan revolt, the Aphrodisias Julian, or the Argentarii panels, the silence of damnatio was never an absence, the pure silence of perfect erasure, but rather a designedly poor palimpsest with simultaneous texts revealing the celebration, degradation, and (occasionally) the later restoration of a disgraced figure whose damnation was preserved by both what the inscription does and does not say. It is less what is not there, than a missing of what is not there. What the base of Flavianus, the Aphrodisias

Julian, or the panels on the Argentarii arch remind us is that silence is less a product of decay than something manufactured in the political present. It is, in this regard, a legible absence, and most legible, like the razed figures of the imperial family, when the silence leaves scars of its own manufacturing. The scarred figures of damnatio all across late antiquity betray both a cancellation and resistance of memory that will not go gently into that good night and offer a canon of scarred texts. I want to evoke this late Roman model of forgetting-remembering-resisting and its monuments of damnatio to consider another erasure and resistance, on another front on that same “last stand of paganism”: the campaign against the theater undertaken in the same decade as the revolt of Eugenius against paganism and the triumph of Theodosius and Christianity, where we find, in the history of silence, “unspeakable paganism” making its loudest noise.

The Year of Years, 394 It was Augustine who recorded the pagan oracle circulating around the empire at the time (late fourth century) when, after a Year of Years—that is, Page 238 →one year for each year, or 365 years, Christianity would come to an end.10 It was a pagan fantasy, perhaps, but one bred of a very real fear of the growing consolidation of a Christian power over the empire. If one dated this magnus annus (great year), as Augustine did, from the crucifixion of 29 CE, 394 was the year that would usher in the return to paganism. 394 was indeed a portentous year. It saw the war of succession, the revolt led by Eugenius in the West against Theodosius the Great in the East that promised to become, in Charles Hedrick’s phrase, “the beginning of the pagan millennium” (Hedrick, 44). In the tradition of Christian historiographers, the war was a contest of ideologies: the pagans led by Eugenius and Flavianus were marshaled under the statues of Jupiter and the banners of Heracles, while Theodosius bore the chi-rho (the first Christian cross) of Constantine.11 The two forces met at the River Fridigia, south of Milan. Day one went to the pagans. Ambrose, bishop of Milan at the time, left the city while the troops mustered, intimating that a victory by Eugenius would mean a total persecution of the Christians.12 But after sustaining heavy losses on the first day of the battle, Theodosius prayed and Providence interceded in the form of a severe dust storm that blew up the hill; advantage then shifted to the Christian forces. Here is Rufinus’s account: It may perhaps be hard for the pagans to believe what happened; for it was discovered that, after the prayer that the Emperor poured out to God, such a fierce wind arose as to turn the weapons of the enemy back on those who hurled them. When the wind persisted with great force and every missile launched by the enemy was foiled, their spirit gave way, or rather it was shattered by the divine power.13 Some twenty thousand fell in the battle. The leaders of the revolt were executed (Eugenius) or self-impaled (Flavianus), and the victorious Theodosius ensured their erasure by declaring a damnatio on both the ones who revolted, named only as “the tyrant,” and the revolt itself, marked as a time that “shall be considered as though it had not been.”14 Christian writers, like Rufinus, Augustine, and Ambrose, refer to the revolt as a pagan assault on Christianity, a conception that found favor with a sizable bibliography of modern scholarship as well, who characterize it variously as “the last stand of paganism” (Bloch), or “the last days of paganism” (Geffcken).15 With its failure, Theodosius pressed hard for the conversion of the surviving pagan elite—including the senatorial class—and Prudentius described the mass conversions that did indeed follow (Against Symmachus 1.506–607). Subsidies to pagan priests and temples Page 239 →were withdrawn, and the decade that followed, the close of the fourth century and the opening of the fifth, saw the complete political triumph of Christianity at the full governmental level.16 In the wake of that administrative consolidation also followed a wave of destruction targeting (silencing) pagan culture, a process that had been intermittent conflict for decades now galvanized into an abrupt offensive. Ritual by ritual, region by region, bishops, judges, prefects, monks, and mobs were deployed on a search-and-destroy mission. Temples were razed, public and then private worship prohibited, as were funeral rites, sacrificing, soothsaying, oracles, festivals, convivial gatherings on festal days, and even the names of pagan

gods were erased from monuments.17 Statutes were toppled, altars dismantled, and temples pulled down and reconsecrated. The wholesale destruction of pagan culture is recorded in many forms: hagiographers serve up the destruction as a dish of some pride, like the account of Zacharias of Mytilene, whose narrative of the life of Severus is a running serial of burned books, smashed idols, and demolished temples; or Porphyrius’s singular dedication to the destruction of eight temples in Gaza over a two-week period in May of 402.18 But there are other narratives, the litany of antilegislation in the Theodosian Code or, most poignant: the mutilated remains of statues, toppled, defaced, and buried tell a violent and troubled story. Their vital organs (eyes, nose, mouth, genitals) were chipped off in a bid to remove their power. Maimed, they were left to stand as impotent images of a defeated past.19 In Alexandria, after the purge of the pagan temples and the bonfires of the idols there (“Their gods have no surgeons!” shouted the mob as they broke the limbs of the statues), one image alone was displayed, pulled from its sanctuary and left standing in the marketplace, as an image of public ridicule. The others ended up in landfill or were used as building material.20 Heads were severed, thrown down wells, in hypocausts, or in rivers. The gilded bronze head of Minerva was found in a sewer in Roman Bath; another head of an imperial pagan was found in the river Avon. The head of a colossal statue of Hadrian was found in the Thames. It is difficult to evoke the scale of the destruction. Orders were given, and zealous philoponoi (the diligent) demolished altars, idols, temples, and statuary. Some of the destruction finds voicing, but little of the terror of a scorched-earth policy that could allow the brace of Emperors Honorius and Theodosius to claim so completely of the pagans in 423, “We believe there no longer are any.”21 The triumphal accounts of Christian hagiographers, like Theodoretus, frame the fall as a deafening event, and the busy hands of Providence were everywhere at work in the demolition of the pagan world: Page 240 → Marcellus, a most excellent bishop, was the first who carried this law into execution, by destroying the temples in his own city; for he had greater confidence in God than in the multitude of men. As the incident is worthy of being remembered, I shall here relate it.В .В .В . Upon the death of John, Bishop of Apamea, .В .В .В Marcellus, a man zealous in spirit according to the apostolic injunction was ordained in his stead. The prefect of the East went to Apamea, taking with him two military commanders and some soldiers. The people remained quiet from fear of the soldiery. The prefect undertook to demolish the temple of Jupiter, which was of spacious dimensions and richly ornamented. But when he perceived the firmness and solidity of the structure, he thought that no human strength could disjoin the stones; for they were of large size and soldered together with iron and lead. The holy Marcellus observed the fears of the prefect, and sent him to execute the mandate in some other city; while he prayed to God to reveal the means of destroying the edifice. The next day at dawn a man came to him who was neither a builder, a stone cutter, nor an adept in any kindred art, but who was merely accustomed to carry stones and wood on his shoulder, yet he offered to demolish the temple; for which service he asked the payment awarded to two workmen. The holy bishop having agreed to pay the stipulated sum, the man proceeded to work in the following manner. The temple was built on elevated ground, and had a portico on each on the four sides. There were also columns which were equal in height to the temple, and of which each was sixteen cubits in circumference. The stone was of so hard a nature that it would scarcely yield to the tools. The labourer dug deeply around the foundations of these columns; and after removing the earth, substituted wood of an oleaginous nature, to which he then set fire. But a black demon appeared, who with-held the power of the flames, and prevented the combustible matter from being consumed, according to the physical laws. After this had occurred several time[s], the workman, perceiving that all his labour was useless, went to acquaint the bishop, who was then taking his mid-day repose. The bishop ran directly to the church, and called for water; when it was brought, he placed it upon the holy altar. He then threw himself

upon his face on the ground, and supplicated the Lord to manifest the weakness of the demon Page 241 →and His own power, in order that unbelievers might not have a pretext for continuing in their unbelief. And having uttered these and other supplications, he made the sign of the cross upon the water, and desired Equitius, a deacon who was full of faith and zeal, to take the water and to sprinkle it on the wood, and then to set fire to it anew. After the deacon had followed these instructions, the demon was not able to resist the power of the water. Although water is the antagonistical power to fire, yet, on this occasion, it acted as oil in forwarding the combustion, and in a moment the wood was consumed. The fall of three columns immediately followed, and, in their fall, they dragged with them twelve others: the side of the temple, which was supported by them, fell down at the same time. The noise of the fall resounded throughout the whole city and the people ran to witness the spectacle. When they were informed of the flight of the inimical demon, they sang praises to the God of all. In the same way did the holy bishop destroy other temples.22

The destruction began in utter silence: a stumped cleric confronted with massively heavy stone, and the silence of fear, as people (pagans?) gathered under a police presence. It was a very complete silence. But as the demolition proceeded, singing commenced, the singing of one population, but what of the silence of the fearful? That, too, remained present, underneath. And when the temple crashed, the noise itself “resounded throughout the city” and the population ran to witness. They heard it first, saw it later. And following the crash, when the dust had settled, the smoke was extinguished, the rubble removed, the silence of the event itself remained, that shared gaze of disbelief, of anxiety, of bewilderment, of joy, that all must have followed the erasing of something so monumental. Can silence echo? For the pagans and Christians alike, the landscape, the soundscape of the East had been utterly altered by an acoustic event.

Pogrom, by Code Less poignant, but equally revealing, one may find in the Theodosian Code—the new canon that overhauled the legal corpus of Rome—the succinct authorizing of the violence that began early in the decade and continued with increasing aggression against the culture that looked to be the last pagan generation: Page 242 → February 391: prohibited public sacrifice, visiting or entering temples, and “revering images” November 392: prohibited private worship, adorning images, sacrificing December 396: abolished privileges to priests of the “sacred mysteries” July 399: “If there should be any temples in the country districts, they shall be torn down without disturbance or tumult.” August 399: disallowing “sacrifice or any accursed superstition”23 It was Honorius, son and successor to Theodosius, who issued the definitive decree in 407: If any images stand even now in the temples and shrines, and if they have received, or do now receive, the worship of pagans anywhere, they shall be torn from their foundations.В .В .В . The buildings themselves of the temples which are situated in cities or towns shall be vindicated to public use. Altars shall be destroyed in all places.24 So it was written, so it was done. Augustine, in the diocese of Carthage, notes how in the spring of 399 “officers of the Emperor Honorius destroyed the temple of the false gods and smashed their statues” in the city first and then spread to the smaller towns in the countryside.25 In the aftermath of the war, all across the Mediterranean, the Near East, and North Africa, pagan culture, with full legislative support, was under erasure.

Temples, shrines, funerary practices, and public and private worship were outlawed; temple properties were confiscated (CTh 16.10.20), ecclesiastic courts were established to prosecute recusant pagans, astrologers and haruspices (soothsayers and diviners of entrails) were condemned, and their books were burned (CTh 9.16.12), including the Sibylline books by Stilicho.26 Then came the disenfranchisement: pagans were prevented from serving in the judiciary, the administration, and the palace; barred from the legal profession, and from teaching; and even the military was converted and pagans were prohibited from serving.27 Christians were threatened with excommunication for having any social intercourse with pagans, while pagans themselves were prevented from owning property, or goods of any kinds, or providing services: “Stripped of everything, they will be reduced to penury” (CTh 1.11.10) Even when relaxed, as Pierre Chuvin has traced, the death penalty for practicing pagans would be comprehensively reinvoked three times in the years that followed.28 We have little in the way of Page 243 →authentic narrative description that adequately documents the magnitude of the eradication of paganism, or the horrific nature of it, but the archaeologic evidence is abundantly clear: broken buildings, burned-out foundations, defaced statues, and hastily buried icons preserve a charred strata of catastrophic proportions. Clandestine resistance continued for some time, particularly in the countryside—and even in the liberal professions, like rhetoric—but the battle had been lost, the pockets of resistance would be rooted out, and the entire apparatus of the state would be brought to bear in the conquest.29 The heated academic debates of the first half of the century (Against Pagans) after the revolt of Eugenius gave way to the sort of wholesale eradication that we would call today “cultural genocide.” A few brief descriptions must suffice to evoke the degree of the destruction in the decades that followed the triumph of Christianity: in Gaza, circa 402, the great temple of Zeus Marnas was burned and pulled down, its remains scattered, its site excavated and purged (“the ashes had been dug out and all the abominations removed”), and reconsecrated; and a Christian church was erected upon the ground.30 At the same time, Augustine’s exhortations to his congregation in Carthage to obliterate, with their own hands, the works of the pagans met with an unexpectedly vigorous reception. “All superstitions of pagans and heathens,” he rallied, “should be annihilated is what God wants, God commands, God proclaims!” He lathered up a mob that left sixty dead in the riots that followed.31 John Chrysostom, bishop of Constantinople, armed monks and sent them to Phoenicia to pull down the “sanctuaries of idols.”32 In Alexandria, the archbishop, Cyril, appropriated the temple of Dionysus to a Christian church and later destroyed the temple of Serapis. The country shrines were ordered scattered—“When they are overthrown and obliterated, the material foundations for all superstition have been done away with.”33 And after that, the great Library of Alexandria, with its collection of classical (now pagan) texts was targeted in the hysteria, and with it, its last librarian.34 The pogrom unleashed in the wake of Eugenius’s revolt was tantamount to a pagan holocaust. Many have written of the pogrom on this catastrophic generation (the modern tradition may begin with the Roman archaeologist Rudolpho Lanciani in 1888), but it seldom carries the gravity, the somber moment of reflective silence which the horrible scale of the destruction warrants.35 Peter Brown is representative when he prosaically describes the devastation as “a wave of religious violence [that] swept town and countryside.”36 But to feel the loss of a thousand-year-old tradition that once shaped the mental habitus of the Mediterranean in rubble, in smoke, requires, I think, a more Page 244 →extreme language, and that is seldom evoked. Decapitated statues by the thousands, massive temples uprooted across the East, libraries—the holdings of the classical past—burned in Antioch and Alexandria, as well as untold private libraries, mutilated works and images in Aphrodisias, of the philosophers Aristotle, Apollonius, Pythagoras. Many headless trunks who can no longer be identified, beyond their pagan condemnation, stand (totter) as reminders of the violence against pagan thought.37 Surveying the surviving statues in Roman Palestine, where so many were defaced, broken, and thrown down wells and into the abandoned hypocausts, Yoram Tsafrir concluded that those found free of scars “had likely been out of use, or concealed from the public view.”38 There were even protocols in place for the desecration of statues: the chipping off of organs, noses, ears, genitals.39 Worse than the defacements was the wholesale destruction. In Mytilene, the ancient statues were publicly burned. In Caesarea, statues were found in landfills, dumps, or used as building fill.40 Pagan images found buried in wells in private residences in Athens testify to the intolerance of the Christianized empire.41 At Ephesus, the iconoclast erected a monument to his act. The Demeas inscription marks the erasure: “After tearing down the beguiling image of the daemon Artemis, Demeas set up this marker of truth in honor of God, the expeller of idols, and the cross, the deathless victory-bearing symbol of Christ.”42 It

is a gruesome exhibition—the mutilations, the chipped off noses, gouged-out eyes, crosses carved on Aphrodite’s forehead. The violence marked on the stones reminds us of the terrifying assault on paganism underway in the wake of the Year of Years. Later authors (Gregory the Great, John of Ephesus, Zacharias of Mytilene) would describe the forced conversions that continued (“If however you find them unwilling to change their ways, we desire you to arrest them with a fervent zeal. If they are slaves, chastise them with blows and torments to bring about their correction. But if they are free men, let them be led to penitence by strict confinementВ .В .В . by bodily torments be brought back to the desired sanity of mind”).43 And occasionally, the clever pagan continued under various subterfuges, but in the end, torture, death, or conversion were the only options. John of Ephesus relates the final humiliation of a recusant pagan, the governor and proprefectus of Edessa (southern Turkey): As for Anatolius, having set up in his house a picture of our Lord, in the hope of making people erroneously suppose that he was a Christian, he invited a number of persons to come and see it. But as he was shewing it, the picture turned hindside foremost with its face to Page 245 →the wall, so that astonishment fell upon all who witnessed it. Anatolius, however, turned it back again, and put it right; but suddenly, a second time, it turned round; and again a third time. And upon this they examined it closely, and found skillfully introduced into the back a likeness of Apollo, so carefully done as not to be visible without looking closely at it. Horrified at the sight, the archers threw him on the ground, and kicked him, and dragged him by the hair to the Praetorium, where they declared all that had happened: and, as was said, finding escape impossible, he also made a full deposition of everything.44 The subsequent fate of Anatolius, whose hidden Apollo had betrayed him, was fatal: “He was first tortured, and then cast to the wild beasts, and after being cruelly lacerated by them, he was torn from their claws, and fixed to a cross.” His body was Christianized by crucifixion, in which imitation the pagan governor expired and was thrown on the garbage heap.45 The pagan holocaust was a cataclysmic century, unmatched perhaps until the Spanish Conquista of Mexico eleven hundred years later. It was also an empire-wide damnatio memoriae and left its mark as a memorial to the cancellation of a culture, the blotting out of pagan memory on the landscape. The silencing, suppression, destruction, and the inscriptions of that destruction, were carried out exactly like a damnatio, not only to obliterate paganism but to flag its obliteration. Like the broken torso of the Venus by the church of St. Matthias left standing for stone-throwers to assault, the obliteration of the pagan past was marked as a present spectacle.46 In Gaza, the new Christian church was built on the site of the former pagan temple. In Aphrodisias, the statue of Julian, pulled down back in 364, was replaced in 394 with that of Theodosius, installed on the same base. The new head, the new church, marks as much the absence as the presence. The founding temple of Aphrodisias, the temple to Aphrodite, was converted to a Christian church, and the cult statue was buried in the north wall.47 All across the Eastern Empire, where temples were not destroyed, they were confiscated, “vindicated to public use,” which usually meant converted to Christian churches, as Theodosius converted the Parthenon itself, that epicenter of paganism. The reconstruction tore out pagan panels to accommodate the new resident god. A new law in the Theodosian Code ordered the stones of pagan temples to be put to public use, primarily for roads and bridges (CTh 15.1.36). And so the new order walked on the spolia of pagan idols. “For many Christians,” writes Amelia Robertson Brown, “the use of pagan spolia symbolized the triumph of Christianity, as well as the defeat and Page 246 →disgrace of pagan buildings and hence in 402 Bishop Porphyry deliberately used blocks from the old temple to pave the atrium in front of the new church, вЂso that they would be trodden on not only by men, but also by women, and dogs and pigs and other animals. This pained the idolaters more than the burning of the temple.’”48 Bishop Iovianus boasted as well of consecrating his new basilica at Palaiopolis “after sacking the altars and temple precincts of the Hellenes.”49 The process Porphyry and Iovianus gloated over is a much more precise enactment of damnatio passed on pagan shrines. The erasure, itself a form of ideological colonization, has been made publicly visible in the triumphant atrium in front of the church. Fig. 12. Bust of Euripides, Asclepion of Pergamon. Pergamon Museum, Bergama, Turkey. Photo by the author.

The temples reconsecrated to churches, the altars buried in the walls, the recycled stones remind us that the “crypto-Christians” of the early fourth century had become the plenipotentiaries of the early fifth and paganism was being buried alive.50 The retaliations were wide, deep, and just repetitive enough to suggest resistance. The destruction of pagan temples Page 247 →that Augustine witnessed in North Africa in 395, for example, or inspired in 400, in Gaza, Aphrodisias, Antioch, Phoenicia, and Alexandria, found legislative reiterations in 407 and again, more forcefully in 435. Magistrates were ordered to destroy all remaining pagan shrines, “if even now any remain entire” and replace them with “the sign of the venerable Christian religion.”51 The same formation has been traced with pagan practices like sacrificing and funeral rites. If we are accustomed to think of the conversion of the Roman Empire in late antiquity as a gradual affair (“slow and haphazard,” writes Cameron), from the clandestine Christians to Constantine, through the apostasy of Julian, to the militancy of Theodosius and his successors who legislated Christianity into an empirewide homotopia—like most gradual change, the tipping point was abrupt. It was also violent because its sudden arrival carried such a heavy momentum of hostility. In one generation, after 394, the slow accretion of centuries of antagonism suddenly coalesced into a paroxysm of Christian militancy that can be seen across the culture of late antiquity. With legislative aplomb, pronouncements and enforcements against “superstitio” took on the broadest of applications (heretics, pagan rites, doctrinal divisions, schismatics, all prohibited, all targeted for erasure) with the utmost force. Even the Olympic Games saw their thousand-year tradition come to a close in the 390s.52 So inclusively were they summarized in the sweeping law drafted in 425: “We prosecute all heresies and perfidies, all schism and superstitions of the pagans, all false doctrines inimical to the Catholic faith.”53 To the campaigns against the temples and worship, sacrifice, funeral rites, and soothsaying, we can add libraries as pagan strongholds situated (at least at an administrative level) in an intensely antipagan generation that would all but guarantee their eradication. As mentioned above, the greatest of the libraries of late antiquity, at Alexandria, fell in 415, under a pagan purge initiated by the city’s patriarch, Cyril. Its destruction and the brutal murder of its last curator, Hypatia, has been told many times, but not always in the context of a terrorist generation of the Theodosian age consolidating a wide and sweeping pogrom against a classical and pagan past.54 If we are, to some degree, attempting to measure loss, to read the magnitude of the cavity, we must also look to what is no longer present. Education had consisted of training in classical literature, classical disciplines, and the so-called liberal professions. These, in turn, had thrived under a classical tradition, as had schools, like the NeoPlatonist school in Athens. But all of that utterly changed. The notion of accumulative knowledge, generationally transmitted through academies, libraries, traditions of Page 248 →scholarship, and the genealogies of grammarians (like Athenaeus or Aristophanes of Byzantium), whose works preserved classical knowledge, found little currency in the new Christian order that had little use for a learning that had become pagan. “We have no need for curiosity after Jesus Christ,” wrote Tertullian, succinctly dismissing half a millennia of inquiry.55 It was a sentiment shared by one who was classically educated, Augustine, who wrote after his conversion: “There is still another temptation, one more fraught with danger.В .В .В . This is the disease of curiosity.В .В .В . It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.”56 Learning, as the classical world had known it, all but ceased. The last astronomical observations of the classical world were compiled in 475; it would not be until Copernicus in the fifteenth century that another astronomer emerged to reconsider the heavens as anything but a theological geography. Stars moved, eclipses happened, comets crashed into the panic of the uncharted year, and terrified eyes looked up at a puzzle of light and looked away. That absence as well seems somehow worth measuring. If I have labored at this huge crater that is the pagan holocaust, my purpose is to engineer a quiet surprise at the sight, that among so much massive destruction of all things pagan, pagan theaters are still standing, indeed still flourishing. And I find that astonishing.

The Sound in the Cavea It is in the catastrophic aftermath of this Year of Years and the loss of classical culture that we must (finally) consider the theater as well, among the great repositories of pagan antiquity, which fell squarely in the thick of

pagan culture to many of the most vocal Christians of the same generation. Christian polemics against the stage had a long history of invective. The central arguments of Tertullian and Novatian were constructed on the association of the stage and paganism (pompa diabolica, “diabolical pageant”) and, accordingly, no Christian should resort to the theaters.57 Augustine, leaning on Varro for classical support, stated axiomatically that he and Varro both “found stage plays a part of the pagan religious rites,” a conclusion John Chrysostom’s career was spent in prosecuting.58 Contrasting Christians and pagans, Augustine sums it simply: “They [the pagans] run to the theatre; you [the Christians] to the church.”59 Cyril of Jerusalem went so far as to describe the conversion to Christianity as a public renunciation Page 249 →of theater. For him, the initiates preparing for baptism were to look to the west and declaim: I renounce you Satan, and all your worksВ .В .В . and all his pomp. These are the Devil’s pomps: a passion for the theatre, horse-races, hunting, and all other vain pursuits.В .В .В . [D]o not indulge in the passion for the theatre, where actors put on indecent spectacles full of every kind of shameless obscenity, and effeminate men perform wild dances.60 Even defenders of the theater, including Libanius, conceded that the mimes looked altogether too pagan with their long tunics and longer hair, “since dancers don’t cut their hair except in honor of Dionysus, the patron god of the theatre.”61 Given the association with paganism, from Dionysus on down, it should therefore not surprise us that the theater would also be hard-targeted for erasure under the same sweeping antipagan campaign that characterized the Theodosian age and was so aggressively hoped for by the most vocal writers of that generation. Conversion to Christianity was also, to a great degree, a repudiation of the classical past, certainly classical culture, and that included its most persistent and public representation in the theaters. Mimes telling still the ancient stories would have been keenly aware that even while they danced their Dionysus, their Heracles and Aphrodite, defaced statues and broken torsos of those same subjects—now criminalized—were landfill in the new postclassical world. There is every reason to assume the theaters would also be the quarry of paving stones for the new Christian order.62 But that is not what happened, not at all. The damnatio levied against pagan culture, for all its damage to temples, libraries, rites, iconography, and festivals, met with enormous resistance in the theater; indeed, the theater seemed to be exempt from the purging of pagan memory for reasons that baffled the most strident voices of the age. Though the new initiates renounced it when they converted, and though Christian preachers and writers condemned it for centuries, the theater resisted the spiritual colonization, unaffected by the pogrom on paganism. And so it continued, a classical holdover (documentably) for at least three more centuries, and quite likely longer still.63 Rather than being silenced, the theater of late antiquity seemed to be the one place where pagan memory would not suffer erasure, where the “noise” of unspeakable paganism was inextinguishable. A year after the Year of Years, in 395, Symmachus, former prefect of Page 250 →Rome, wrote to the emperor Theodosius to promise to send the theater troupes from Syria to Rome that they should not miss their games. As prefect a decade earlier, Symmachus summarized the public attitude toward the theater in Rome, a frenzy undiminished by the recent disturbances: “Every day messengers are awaited to confirm that these promised shows will soon arrive at the city; reports on charioteers and on horses are being collected, every conveyance, every ship is rumoured to have brought in theatrical artists.”64 And when they arrived, so delighted was the citizenry, they voted in the theater to erect a statue to the emperor.65 And so the “noise” continued. In 416, even after the city had been sacked by Alaric and the Goths, Rutilius Namatianus, prefect of Rome in 414, departed the city to sail home to Gaul. His last acoustic image of the capital, even as he sat in the harbor waiting for the wind, was “a blaze of cheers proclaiming the crowded theater, familiar shouts are sent back by the echoing air.”66 Even as he sailed from Rome, his final memory of the city was of a noisy, crowded theater. In Ptolemais, North Africa, where Synesius of Cyrene resided, the theatricals were twice commanded to resume after the Eugenius disruption—in 396, and again most emphatically in 399: “We permit the theatrical arts to be practiced, lest, by excessive restriction thereof, sadness may be produced.”67 Ptolemais, in Cyrenaica, was

an average Roman North African town, but it boasted two theaters and an odeon whose popularity continued right through the troubles. Farther west, the theater of Mandaurs, far from retired, was restored at sizable expense in the years 399/400.68 In Carthage, in spite of Augustine’s assault, the theater and circus were so excessively patronized that little preparation against the Vandal assault was made. There were vast crowds gathered in the theaters the day before the Vandals entered the city.69 Across the empire, the theater of late antiquity not only survived the pagan purge, but flourished for several hundred years, in spite of its dense association with paganism, in spite of the most vocal antagonists of the age. In Rome, the contorniates (medallions) evidence the popularity of the mimes; in Constantinople, John Chrysostom was frustratingly powerless in his campaign against them. Julian satirized Antioch as having “more mimes than citizens” (Misopogon 342b). Syria exported the actors, against whom Bishop Jacob of Sarugh was still composing sermons in the year 500. In Gaza, two theaters are preserved well into the mid-sixth century Madaba Map (in modern-day Jordan) (in spite of its conversion by Porphyrus), and Choricius, in his Apologia Mimorum, is still defended the mimes in the early sixth century. The last prohibitions against tragic, comic, and satyr plays were imposed in 692. In the sixth century, Page 251 →Joshua the Stylite could still object to the pantomime as an occasion when “heathen tales are sung”—a sentiment shared by his contemporary, Jacob of Serugh.70 It is not the intention here to trace all the evidence of theater in late antiquity—inscriptional, architectural, and textual—but rather to consider how and why it survived in this most critical period, the generation after the Year of Years, which saw the eradication of so much pagan culture. How also, throughout this period, did the sub-Christian, pagan culture persist? For that, I turn to the most vocal objector of the age, the preacher John Chrysostom.

Clapping in Church Visiting Constantinople sometime in the late 390s, the bishop from Antioch related an anecdote that John Chrysostom retold from the pulpit the following story: The wife of a certain man fell passionately in love with another, and slew her husband upon his return with the help of her adulterer. Most of you probably know the story. The son of the murdered man killed the adulterer and then sacrificed his mother. Afterwards, he himself was driven mad and pursued by the furies. This madman himself then went off and slew another man, and took his wife.71 His contemporary Augustine had said the same thing of Dido in his home pulpit of Carthage: “Almost all of you know this storyВ .В .В . but few from books, most from the theatre.”72 Whatever else the congregations knew or did not know about the pagan world that was passing, the ancient stories were still being played out in theaters 860 years after the first known staging by Aeschylus and his peers. At the highest literary levels, the old stories circulated in epitomes, but for most of the population, tragedy lived on in the theaters.73 And this practice was the unpleasant subject of Chrysostom’s weekly and vigorous admonitions. He railed against the theater—no voice of his generation railed louder—yet in spite of his threats of excommunication to actors and audience alike, the memory of the old stories persisted. Since Jonas Barish cataloged the infamous antitheatricalists, we in theater studies have been accustomed to the roll call of the detractors: the William Prynnes and Stephen Gosons who campaigned so fiercely for the theater’s demise.74 But no voice was raised higher, louder, or longer than John Chrysostom’s in that decisive decade after Eugenius’s revolt. His campaign Page 252 →against the stage forms a large canon of homilies, attacking the institution from many fronts. Hardly a sermon (homily) goes by without the now-familiar sneer against the theater gracing page and pulpit. His loathing for the corrupting influence of the place was matched only by his anguish over his own impotence against it, of the lust it incited, of the absenteeism it promoted, of the rude behavior it cultivated (for example, congregations whistling ditties from the theater during divine service), undoing all his good work (“To the theatres we owe it that the most of you so refuse to be curbed by us, and to be reformed. What we built up here is thrown down there”).75 It wasn’t a rhetorical trope of the black-robed Puritan; the theaters really were to blame for preserving pagan behavior, and Chrysostom catalogs the damage: they inflamed the soul toward illicit passion, they inspired fornication and adultery, they provided the training to execute such unlawful desires, they provided the best models of immoral behavior; they even, he laments, inspired beggars to make better performances of their poverty. And somehow, to

Chrysostom’s mind, what happened in the theaters was remembered and retained far more deeply than any instruction delivered in church.76 But rail as he would, to the theaters his congregation went week after week.77 He “tears himself apart” daily, crying, “Stay away from the theatres!” Every Sunday his congregation listened dutifully, maybe even sympathetically, and by Saturday returned to the theaters. Though his parishioners complained of churchgoing—they were faint with heat, had tired feet, no time, too poor, the excuses were legion— neither inconveniences nor inclemency of weather deterred his flock from cramming the theaters. On festival days, when the shows were at their height, he couldn’t find a congregation, or if they attended church, it was “without fervour, just to discharge an obligation,” after which they bolted to the theater “with haste, at a run, and with real enthusiasm.”78 And opportunities abounded. By the middle of the fourth century, the Roman calendar devoted 177 days to ludi, public holidays, games, and theatricals. The Calendar of Pilocalus (354 CE) notes that 101 of these days were dedicated to theatricals.79 Nearly one day in three was spent in the theater; only one in seven in church. Some cities were more devoted to the theater than others: Antioch was particularly theater-mad. (Julian wrote of it, “There are more mimes than citizens”).80 Huge and adorned, the theater of Antioch was an architectural landmark and the rightful center of the city. Even Chrysostom had to acknowledge that Antioch boasted a “larger Assembly and a more famous theatre” than did Constantinople.81 The theater’s intense pull on his parishioners was so strong that in the end Chrysostom denied the sacramentPage 253 → to any member of his congregation who attended the theater, denied baptism to actors, and denied mass to audiences, shouting (his own verb) at his congregation in 399: I’m telling you in advance and shouting loudly that if anyone deserts to the lawless corruption of the theatres after this exhortation and teaching, I won’t receive him within these precincts, I won’t administer the mysteries to him, I won’t permit him to touch the holy table. Just as shepherds ward off the mangy sheep from the healthy ones so as not to give the disease to the rest, so I’ll do too.82 In a vindictive inversion of the good shepherd parable, Chrysostom casts off the mangy sheep of his flock who carry the infection of the theater into the congregation. Literalizing the damnatio, he would “blot out” the corrupted. Or so he tried. “Lo! Each day I rend myself with crying out, вЂDepart from the theatres,’ and many laugh at us.”83 The following week, the preacher lamented again that half his parish were sunburned from standing all day in the pit of the theater.84 He despaired of his impotence to arrest their passion. But more despairing was the contamination that occurred when his congregation began to mark him with signs from the theater. His sermons began to be interrupted by bouts of applause, and “bursts of merriment”; ditties from the theater were heard in church. “Is it a theatrical amusement what is done here?” he objected. “Aye, but I think it is the theatres that do this.”85 Any other orator would have found great praise in the applause (Libanius certainly would have), but Chrysostom found it deeply troubling: “When I return home, I understand that those who applauded benefitted not at all: for if there were any beneficial thing it was demolished by applause and praise. Then I suffer and groan and shed tears.” In his despair to curb his parishioners of their infection of the stage, Chrysostom finally responded with a ban on clapping during service because his “sermons were not comedies, and he was not an actor.” He enjoined his parishioners to treat the sermons with quiet reverence and to forbear clapping. The congregation signaled its approbation of the new no-applause rule with immediate applause.86 In that sound, the noise of the congregation clapping, lies the speaking back of paganism. Importing theatrical conventions into the church was a making visible, making audible, the theater’s resistance to annihilation, marking it acoustically, as a pre-Christian sound subverting a post-Christian world. Chrysostom’s campaign against the theater is often construed as a Page 254 →moral campaign, and the loose morality of the stage accounts for a great deal of his distaste. The theater was for him, as it was for Augustine, a school of impiety.87 But that theaters were also decidedly and irrepressibly pagan Chrysostom makes quite clear, and pagan institutions, in the aftermath of Eugenius’s revolt, were under assault everywhere.88 The theater, like the temples, shrines, rites, and haruspices, was another kind of pagan idolatry, and, to the new zealots, only

when it had been disbanded would the church be purified.89 But that was not happening, even among his own community. Palladius’s hagiography of Chrysostom, Dialogue on the Life of St. John Chrysostom, recounts the shameful behavior of bishops, Chrysostom’s own contemporaries, who squandered their reputations over dinner parties with actors. One fifth-century bishop supported the theater out of his own episcopal revenues, while another, Victor, bishop of Ephesus, caused a small stir when, in a supreme moment of irony, he attended one such dinner party dressed as the god Dionysus.90 It is a point of some admiration that while legislation prohibiting pagan rites continued aggressively well into the fifth century, the theater’s popularity was undiminished, and it also adjusted very little to the new cosmology. Toward the end of his career, Chrysostom was still complaining: “The theatre is full, and all the people, sitting right up to the top, present a brilliant spectacle composed of so many faces that even the roof and the undergirding rafters are largely obscured by bodies. Neither roof tiles nor stone seats are visible, but as far as the eye can see, human faces and bodies.”91 Mimes were still a requisite component of the dedication of imperial statues, for example, and were certainly a major spectacle at the dedication of the statue of Eudoxia in Constantinople in 403, in spite of Chrysostom’s objections.92 The theater, it seemed, was as popular in the first decade of the fifth century as it was for Novatian, writing a century earlier: “Everyone still frequents the theatre. Indecorum, commonly encountered, evidently delights to know and to learn of vice. There is a general rush to that despicable brothel of public shame, to the teaching of obscenity.”93 A century after Chrysostom, others stood in the pulpits and railed still against the theater. Jacob of Serugh (451–521) fulminated against his congregation with equal wrath: “I have shown youВ .В .В . without wronging truth that Satan wishes to set up paganism by means of the play.” “It’s a game,” they replied, “not paganism. What will you lose if I laugh? ” So his congregation defended themselves and continued to attend the theater.94 The congregation may claim innocent diversion in the theaters, but there is some persistent evidence that among the hilarity of the mimes were parodies of Christian rites, as they had performed parodies of Jewish rites. Page 255 →When Gregory of Nazianzus lamented from Constantinople: “We have already—I can hardly speak of it without tears—been represented on the stage amid the laughter of the most licentious. And the most popular of all dialogues and scenes is the caricature of the Christian.”95 Mimes certainly had some sport with the Arian doctrinal disputes of the 320s, as Eusepius complained: “Divine teachings were now enduring the vilest mockery in the very theaters of the unbelievers”).96 That the mimes often parodied Christian rites shouldn’t have surprised the bishop: they had been parodying the gods of the pagans for a centuries. The oldest satyr plays are parodies. Indeed, even Augustine notes the parody of pagan gods: “The same gods who are adored in the temples are derided on the stage.”97 But the laughter endured by pagans was unendurable by Christians. As the polemicists so insistently noted, the theater of late antiquity really was the final public repository of pagan resistance. Because unlike temples, rites, worship, and libraries, the theaters of late antiquity survived the initial pagan purge of the Theodosian age, survived for a remarkably long time, survived in fact in ways that other pagan practices did not, even to the degree of incorporating what were once formerly shrine rituals, like the burning of incense, into a feature of performance.98 For nearly three centuries beyond the great war, the archeologi traveled with their stuff, telling still the ancient stories of Greek (now paganized) myths to the new-but-not-wholly Christianized auditors. The theater in Aphrodisias where the mimes left their inscriptions was operational well into the seventh century.99 Our best documentation of the theater’s survival traditionally comes from the many antitheatrical prohibitions that continue right through the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries. For example, Anastasius, in 502, after two high-fatality riots in the theater, banished all the pantomimes from all the cities of the empire, an act so clearly ineffective that Justin I was obliged to expel them from the empire again in 525. His nephew, Justinian, would find his future wife, Theodora, a mime actress on the stage, in a vastly stocked profession from Pelagia (“the foremost actress of Antioch”) to Helladia.100 Even in the West one finds reiterations of legislation circumscribing the social mobility of actors. The Council of Arles, in Gaul in the late fifth century, reconfirmed the excommunication of actors verbatim from an early fourth-century edict.101 This uneasy and oft-repeated tradition of expulsion, repeal, and re-expulsion seemed to have continued until at least 691/2, when we find our last recorded prohibition.102

But we need not look exclusively to the prohibitions to document the vitality of theater in the face of the antipagan campaigns. We find official support for the theater legislated into the very codes that prohibited so Page 256 →many other pagan practices. The Theodosian Code is quite clear about maintaining a healthy supply of actors rather than the suppression of the theater. It is also clear that the legal framework sought to contain the profession, but in no way to either eradicate it entirely or even to Christianize it. An example is this order from 415: We order that female mimes who have been freed by various rulings should immediately be recalled to their proper function, so that there should be no adornment lacking to the pleasures of the people and the days of festivities.103 Nor was this an attempt for conversion through performance—that would happen in later centuries. The mimes could never advocate for conversion, as they themselves, everyone knew, could never be integrated into Christian culture. Indeed, the conversion of mimes was legally impossible—hence the deception of converts like Pellagia, who lived out her Christian life disguised as a man. Among the laws regulating the profession was an allowance for actors to take the sacrament only at the point of death, and only after their medical condition was certified terminal by a state-appointed physician. If by some unsought chance actors recovered, they were not allowed to return to the stage as a convert or relapse into their former pagan ways. Mimes were thus pagan by profession. They represented a legislated repository of classical memory, a living space in which “the old stories” would continue to be told, performed, and preserved, for centuries after the new order fixed them as permanent residents of a pagan past. Even their images were largely unassaulted. Statues of the more celebrated mimes were in public display, but under Theodosius edicts were passed not to destroy the images but to relocate them. They were not mutilated, or made into landfill, or foundation rubble, nor were they treated with the same sanctions as others criminalized after the Year of Years (“We should know that statues of those who have been banished or exiled by reason of treason should be taken down,” Modestinus, Digest 48.19.24). Instead, they were moved into the theater.104 Like the mimes who found their lives regulated but not eliminated, even their images were contained. The statues of the actors, howsoever contemptible in the postpagan regime, occupied a vital space in the public imagination and, in their heyday, had been elevated to share the civic space with emperors, the front of the stage. This exempted position that theater occupied is very clearly confirmed in another underemployed source. In his letters, Cassiodorus, magister officiorum (head of the civil service) under Theodoric, writing for the emperor Page 257 →to a patrician of Rome, Symmarchus, praised him for the vast sums he had expended in repairing the Theater of Pompeii in Rome. This was at the close of the first decade of the sixth century, and the letter offers a long remembrance of the origins of theater, from Athenian tragedy to Pompeii’s munera (gladiatorial games), to the mimes of his own times, an unbroken tradition that stood currently in need of repair.105 The retrospective Cassiodorus offers is one of the more thorough articulations of the continuity of classical theater, including its benefit to patricians like Symmarchus, and his argument for its preservation remains one of the strongest assessments of its endurance, even to the Goths assimilating into Rome. If, in spite of the conversion of the empire and the sack of Rome, theater begins to sound like an unassailable late Roman obsession, it was. A generation before the great war on paganism, Ammianus was documenting the extreme extent of the theater fetish in Rome. Sometime circa 360 he lamented that Rome, in its worst food shortage, drove foreigners from its midst and expelled the teachers of liberal arts, but even “the attendants upon actresses of the mimes, or those who pretended to be, were kept with us, while three thousand dancing girls, without even being questioned, remained here with their choruses.”106 Libanius, in the same generation, can state axiomatically: “Is there anyone who doesn’t know that we spend whole days in the theatres?”107 A generation later Symmarchus would relate to the emperor how anxious Rome was for the games and actors. Whole days were still spent in the diocese of Chrysostom, in Antioch and later Constantinople, where the applause of the theater would drown out the singing of psalms.108 If the theater endured (flourished?), perhaps it was in the same contexts Augustine spoke of when he described the clandestine and recusant pagans of his time and “the false gods which pagans then worshiped in the open, and now worship under cover.”109 Like the Apollo faintly painted on the back of a picture of Christ, the theaters served the recusant, sub-Christian strata of the Christianized empire, speaking still of a pagan past, even without speaking.

Unspeaking Paganism With a furious storm of feet, using gestures for speech, his hand instead of his mouth, his fingers for voiceВ .В .В . —Nonnus, Dionysiaca 7.19.21. As this project has sought in some way to listen for the sound of absent voices, I cannot pass out of late antiquity without staring awhile at the rich Page 258 →landscape of the most articulate silence of the dancers who carried the stories to the end of classical culture, to the last aphasia of emptied voices; then, bereft of voice and body, their images endured a little beyond. “When the tragic poets were extinguished,” wrote Libanius of the mimes, “one of the gods took pity on the lack of education of the populace and introduced instead the dance as a form of instruction for the masses in the deeds of the ancients. And now a goldsmith will converse not badly with someone from the schools about the houses of Priam and Laius.”110 Somewhere, perhaps in the late third or early fourth century, tragedy as a performance genre had largely disappeared, but the tragic stories continued in other genres, with and without words. Mimes had been dominant since Nero’s day, and pantomimes danced what they could no longer recite, leaving their thousand-year-old stories as household tales all across the Greek East. Claudian, circa 400, attests to the great applause a fine Hecuba or Niobe could still rouse, while Sidonius Apollinaris described the appeal of the popular fifth-century mimes Caramallus and Phabaton.111 Choricus of Gaza does the same in the sixth century, for performances of Achilles, Hippolytus, and Phaedra; and of course the young Theodora practiced a craft without words in the theaters at Constantinople.112 We are enormously fortunate in knowing what the mimes knew (or ought to know) earlier in late antiquity, at least at the time of Lucian, who left an inventory of the roles of the reputable pantomime. It is a very comprehensive range, from the creation of the world to Cleopatra of Egypt: “To sum up, [the pantomime] will not be ignorant of anything that is told by Homer and Hesiod and the best poets, and above all by tragedy.”113 That is, the comprehensive sweep of classical theater was their trade, and that trade is evidenced until the close of the seventh century. Moreover, the theater survived in ways other genres did not. That is, the theater remained in the present, when other genres became part of the classical past. For Macrobius, whose Saturnalia, almost certainly dated to the same generation (early fifth century), the pagan past was a past, not a dream of a revival. Alan Cameron has written of the work as governed by a certain nostalgia, an imitation, already a thing of a prior generation, as the classical exercises in Byzantine schools would be.114 They looked back with the same nostalgia that could describe the tone of Nonnos’s Dionysiaca (early fifth century). But there is nothing nostalgic about the theater. It lived still in the “now” of Antioch, Emessa, Ephessus, Gaza, and its many topical elsewheres; and for writers like Augustine, Chrysostom, Cassiodorus, and Choricius, the theater remained very much a pagan present. How many other practices of the pagan past were still in circulation afterPage 259 → the Year of Years we will never know. Survival of quasi-pagan, now-secular practices in certain capitals like Antioch and Constantinople lingered for decades—maybe a century or more in curtailed, clandestine, or circumscribed forms. In Antioch, for example, the old festivals continued, unabated by sermons and legislation. Palladius, in his biography of John Chrysostom, documents something of the same pagan resistance, when the whole city moves out to the suburbsВ .В .В . in one of the notable pagan festivals called вЂOlympic’ every fourth year, celebrated in honor of Heracles’ labors; and in this women by the herds (so to speak) rush out with the crowds to Daphne to see the contests.”115 And of course, the more private rituals remained private. The point of such secret practices that Augustine speaks of is that they were secret. Purges against recusant pagans were still public news in 546, when a group of “illustrious and noble men, as well as a large group of grammarians, sophists, teachers and doctors” were denounced, tortured, and executed in Constantinople. Pope Gregory is still urging vigilance against pagans in 599, a practice particularly prevalent in the countryside.116 But still the theater continued

openly. Theodora certainly debuted in the sixth century with her notorious performances, and the theaters were still crowded at that point. Leontius of Naples, in his Life of St. Symeon Salos, composed in the middle of the seventh century, contains an anecdote in which Symeon confronts some mimes performing in the theater in Emesa, Cyprus.117 The last preserved record of performance comes to us from 691/92, at the Council of Trullo, where prohibitions against celebrating Dionysus, against mimes using tragic, comic, and satyr masks, are still being legislated, and those words are severe in their finality: CANON LXII. THE so-called Calends, and what are called Bota and Brumalia [Bromios?], and the full assembly which takes place on the first of March, we wish to be abolished from the life of the faithful. And also the public dances of women, which may do much harm and mischief. Moreover we drive away from the life of Christians the dances given in the names of those falsely called gods by the Greeks whether of men or women, and which are performed after an ancient and un-Christian fashion; decreeing that no man from this time forth shall be dressed as a woman, nor any woman in the garb suitable to men. Nor shall he assume comic, satyric, or tragic masks; nor may men invoke the name of the execrable Bacchus when they squeeze out the wine in the presses; nor when pouring out wine into jars, practicing Page 260 →in ignorance and vanity the things which proceed from the deceit of insanity. Therefore those who in the future attempt any of these things which are written, having obtained a knowledge of them, if they be clerics we order them to be deposed, and if laymen to be cut off.118 And that was finally that. At least officially. The three canons of Trullo were the last official reference to the ancient practice of theater. There at the close, the celebrants of Dionysus were still taking on the old masks in the same three ancient genres that Horace described, for which Vitruvius prescribed designs, and that the Athenians judged twelve hundred years earlier, still dancing to the pressing of the wine in honor of a god long prohibited.119 Under all the enforcements and prohibitions, the pogroms, purges, and demolitions, the memory of the cultic origins of theater were still intact at the last suppression. The traveling archeologi who left their inscriptions at Aphrodisias may have lingered in circulation a while longer—criminalized, itinerant, cut off from the church and from the community that made the laws they lived by—but they may still have danced the old stories a while longer. I like to think so.

Page 261 →

Epilogue The Lacuna in the Text

The Stones of Daphne Outside of Antioch, Chrysostom’s home pulpit, in the suburb of Daphne (modern-day Hatay, southern Turkey), rich finds of the remains of second-century Roman villas are still decorated with mosaics of the same Greek myths that the mimes told, including several narratives of Dionysus and his history, which remained on display in the new Christian world well into the sixth century.1 On borders and mosaics (emblemata) one still finds comic, tragic, and satyric masks inset into the pavement. The same mythic tales of Phaedra and Hippolytus, Aphrodite and Adonis, still adorn the floors in Madaba, in present-day Jordan, where they were installed in the middle of the sixth century. Many of the tales told in stone seem to be derived directly from the stage: Iphigenia at Aulis; the myth of Dionysus and Ariadne; several scenes from Phaedra and Hippolytus; and the old stories told in tesserae, like the stones of Daphne, preserved still the old mimes dancing the old tales, escaping the destruction of the century. And with them, perhaps, were preserved the memory of the dance, and the myths behind them, gracing the floor as a memento of a practice perhaps no longer practiced, bereft of voices, bereft of bodies. Thus the stories found a final repository in the very stones themselves. Writing of Beth Shean in Roman Palestine, Yorum Tsafrir observes a tendency that played out across the East: in the sixth century, after the theater at Beth Shean was in ruins, “The defenders of the classical heritage took refuge in a promising new artistic medium, mosaic depictions.”2 And so we see the tradition legible still on villas that date from the third to the sixth century, and the old stories spoke from the floors in Daphne as well. Blake Leyerle has suggested that the large fifth-century mosaic of Megalopsychia, found in a home in Daphne, spoke to the contest against unbridled passions. The mosaic depicts a central allegorical figure of Megalopsychia (Great Soul) surrounded by figures engaged in fighting off wild beats. The contest is thus read as part of a familiar trope in the Christian tradition Page 262 →in which the soul of Everyman battles against the beasts of earthly passions; it represents, in this interpretation, a sort of morality play, an Ephesian Pilgrim’s Progress. The psychomachia (battle of spirits or soul) provides a very cogent lens for Chrysostom’s homilies: the theater assails the senses. But its lexicon of pictorial language is decidedly classical, and the narrative of the mosaic is equally indebted to the old stories of the stage. The six figures who stand in for unruly passion in the hunting scenes of the psychomachia are all classical mythic figures whose stories have been circulated and recalled from the stage. The figures are identified as Hippolytus, Acteon, Tiresias, Meleager, Narcissus, and Adonis. That Hippolytus, Acteon, and Tiresias should stand in for the Christian warrior at some level reveals the extent to which paganism has infused Christian thought or, put another way, it reveals the extent to which Christianity absorbed and refashioned what it could not entirely suppress. The Megalopsychia mosaic is just one of dozens of mosaics preserved from the suburbs of Antioch, including the more famous Menander and Glycera panel, directly recalling the ancient theater. On the ground, the stones on which the war of the Amazons was depicted, next to Odysseus and the Sirens, Dionysus and Heracles, Phaedra and Hippolytus, Dionysus and satyrs, all dated from the first half of the sixth century.3 In Beth Shean, in the Sigma, a semicircular plaza built early in the sixth century, we find represented on the mosaic floor allusions to Dionysus, the Muses, the Graces, and Aphrodite.4 And then the stones themselves suffered an erasure and endured through it. The edict of Yazid II, the Muslim caliph, prohibited the representation of human forms in 722/23, and the mosaics were in turn defaced (literally unfaced). The efforts were never designed to utterly destroy, but to mark the erasure of the human figure.5 The iconoclasm was, in essence, the familiar formation of a Roman damnatio, never wholly displacing the subjects; rather, they marked the act of erasing. Legible still are both the subject and the displeasure of the state, cohabiting the same site.

The Lacuna in the Text I began this study in the new Acropolis Museum in Athens with an image of erasure: the damnatio that seeks to mark with memory the subject it disappears, and have traced the slow removal of pagan theater from visibility, and its marks of resistance. I want to close with two more images of presence-in-absence. In the archaeology of memory, as in any excavation, Page 263 →one works around the holes, the gaps, the recycled, and the repurposed. Usually they are utterly irrecoverable, but occasionally, like the Vitriol scrolls that left the outlines on the parchment they consumed, the holes themselves can be legible. Photius, the ninth-century patriarch of Byzantium, participated in the Byzantine education system, but beyond that, little can be accurately said of his life and times. He belonged to the tradition of Greek scholars who ruggedly persisted in Byzantium throughout the centuries that saw the drifting separation between Christian and classical cultures. His work the Bibliotheca (Reviews of Ten Thousand Books, the alternate title) is a collection of annotations on classical and Byzantine writers, reviewing and redacting some 280 works from the fifth century BCE to his own century. His notes run to a fulsome sixteen hundred pages, among which are his commentaries on ancient theater. Like Athenaeus, Photius was a compiler of archaeo-culture. Many of his favorite and most recommended works are also compilers of Attic culture: Sopatros’s Miscellaneous Extracts, a collection gathered from such diverse sources as Juba’s History of the Theatre, Rufus’s History of Music, Artemon’s Exploits of Women, and the anonymous Collection of Marvels. Photius’s Bibliotheca was thus a book of memories built on other books, a distillation, a memorial now to the original compilations that were longer extant. He was not watching theater but reading it, and reading about it from a genealogy of commentators that dated back to people who did watch it. Sopatros was an obscure fourth-century compiler. His original text is no longer extant. As close as we can get is the commentary on it from Photius. This is his summary of book 5: “Book Five derives from Books 1–3 of Rufus’ History of Music. In it you will find various stories about tragedians and comic writers, also the authors of dithyramb, flautists (auletes), players of the cithara, an account of epithalamia, marriage-songs and the hypochema, stories of dancers and other performers in Greek theaters, the origin and career of those among them who achieved great distinction, both men and those whose lot made them female; which of them were recognized as the inventors of various practices, which of them were friends or lovers of tyrants or kings, also which were the contests, and their origins, in which each of them displayed their artistry. He deals with the public festivals at Athens. All these topics, and others related to them you will learn about as you read Book 5.”6 If we but could. Photius does not, curiously, offer entries for the most canonical of Attic dramas, and no tragedian is listed. But the omission was not without its Page 264 →flag; rather, he left his own explanation for the absence—an explanation that speaks, in an indirect way, to the persistence of antiquity, even in its disappearance. Tragedies were omitted because they were already a stable of Byzantine education, such as they still existed. It was unnecessary to recall them, as they were already present and in use in the classroom.7 The Attic tragedians were still a part of the Byzantine curriculum in the ninth century, and indeed, as Przemyslaw Marciniak has counted, more than three hundred quotations from the Greek tragedians adorn the Bibliotheca,8 but only the texts of four playwrights, the same who survived into the Renaissance: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes (Photius, “Phrynichus” 101b [one of the chapters in his Bibliotheca]). Not even the ubiquitous Menander remained. Those few had come to stand in for all those writers, all that work, that did not survive. At some point in his career as patriarch, Photius was commissioned for an embassy mission to the Abbasid court in Baghdad, and his list of books may have been the briefs of a library he could not carry with him, functioning as well as a kind of portable memorial of what did not remain. But Photius was not traveling outside the sphere of learning. During the Arabic Enlightenment of the ninth century, Arabic scholars traveled to the Greek capitals to acquire

access to the Greek texts, and when surviving classical texts traveled to Baghdad through visitors like Photius, they passed through the hands of Arabic scholars. Prominent among them was his contemporary, Hunayn ibn Ishaq (810–873). Hunayn was one of those scholars who had traveled “to the land of the Greeks” and commenced a career translating the important Greek texts.9 But he sought primarily practical texts, not literary ones. Paul Lemerle, writing on the distinctions between Byzantine humanism and the Arabic Enlightenment, notes, “While the renaissance in Hellenism in Byzantium extended progressively and more or less rapidly to all spheres of ancient literature including poetry, theater, rhetoric, history, etc., Islam took an interest only in the sciences on the one hand, and philosophy on the other.”10 Surveying the impressive list of Hunayn’s Greek translations (Hunayn is credited with hundreds of titles), they comprise, almost exclusively, the applied sciences: medicine, astronomy, geography, and mathematics. Hunayn translated some 129 medical tracts of Galen (and recorded them in his own account, the Risala). In one of his Galenic tracts, On Medical Names, he made a very revealing omission. Galen at one point quoted Aristophanes the Attic playwright, and Hunayn, as he confessed in his commentary, was not at home with comic playwrights and so omitted the quotation entirely. But he flagged the omission in the text with an apology: “I am not familiar with Page 265 →the language of Aristophanes, nor am I accustomed to it” and consequently left it out.11 Over the vast list of titles that Hunayn translated, not one work of theater is found. He read of them and noted that even he was no longer at home with their satiric voices. And with reason. Hunayn, as a Muslim in the ninth century, saw no theater. The Christian legislation against theater and the Islamic prohibition against representing humans guaranteed for a subject like Hunayn that the idea itself would be out of reach. Though much of antiquity was preserved through the Islamic translations (Aristotle’s Poetics, for example), the theater of antiquity had all but disappeared, a few tragedians lingering only in the Byzantine classroom. Aristophanes, the last of the surviving comic writers, had now become illegible, untranslatable to the best of the Arabic translators, who marked the absence where the house of laughter once stood, a stela on the street of oblivion. When what remained of antiquity was stored in the Arabic memory, the classical theater was not among its legacies. But in Byzantium, in the last academy, the poets of the classical theater might still find their last strongbox of memory, and a few remarkable scholars kept the Greek theater culture alive, if only via a scholiast’s tradition. I think of the young student to whom his teacher wrote in a letter: “What sort of grammarian do we now have among us, and of what style?”—words from an eleventh-century scholar to an impressive new student. “Is he Sophoclean? Or by now Aristophanic?”12 The last bit of memory still flickered.

Coda The last work of Byzantine lexicography, a large encyclopedia of ancient literature known now as Suda, enjoyed a collection of Greek texts into the century by its compilers. Their references, readily accessible, included some of the oldest tracts composed about classical theater, including “On Thespis” and “On Satyr Plays” by Chamaileon, a fourth-century writer. Among the entries in the Suda is a heading for the most persistent memory of Greek theater. Under the phrase “Nothing to do with Dionysus,” there was an explanation recalling again that now-ancient recollection: “Formerly, when writing in honor of Dionysus they competed with these pieces which were satyric. But later, having changed over to the writing of tragedies, they gradually turned to mythical and historical subjects and no longer made any mention of Dionysus. Hence they also exclaimed this [nothing to do with Dionysus]. And Chamaileon reports very much the same Page 266 →thing in his work вЂOn Thespis.’”13 There at the end was a remembering of the beginning, and the beginning before the beginning, the erasure and restoration of the marks of the elusive god, his retinue of satyrs, their irrepressible play, still present in all its complications, a persistent and incomprehensible ruin.

Page 267 →

Notes Introduction 1. Even the museum design itself was as much about absence as presence: “Unlike the ancient ruins, the building itself was designed to be вЂnon-visible’ .В .В . to reveal itself through its contents” (Leontis 1995, 57). 2. This practice is chronicled by Connor (1985, 79–102), who cites no less than eleven classical sources. For the Roman installation of the same practice, see Roller 2010, 117–80. For the later political career of Antiphon, see M. Edwards 2004, 75–86. 3. [pseudo-]Plutarch, Lives of Ten Orators 834, quoted and discussed by Kagan 1987, 210. 4. The map, its making, and its preservation are discussed in Donner 1992. 5. The many playful interpretations of the inscription are covered by Anderson 2001. 6. Several of Diderot’s meditations embrace this notion, in particular, “The Salon of 1767: Mediation 105” in Goodman 1995, vol. 2. For the larger subject of the romantic travelers to Greece and their attractions to ruins, see Leontis 1995, particularly chapter 2, “Heterotopia, Visitors to the Classical Ruins.” 7. Sear 2006; P. Wilson 2000. 8. The excavations at Aphrodisias were the long-term project of Kenan Erim, New York University, under whose care the theater was unearthed in the late 1970s. The inscriptions from the third century AD (so posits Charlotte RouechГ© on internal evidence) on postscaenium rooms are cataloged in RouechГ© 1993, vol. 1, no. 1.3: 17–19), and more comprehensively in Reynolds, RouechГ©, and Bodard 2007, http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007, and Reynolds 1982. The genres of mimes, including “homeriste mimes,” are in RouechГ© 1993. For the excavation at Aphrodisias, see Erim 2012. For their skeuД“, or equipment, see Plutarch, On the Glory of the Athenians 348d: “Let them bring with them their equipment, their masks and altars, their stage machinery, their revolving changes of scenes, and the tripods that commemorate their victories” (trans. Babbitt et al. 1936, vol. 4, 489–527). 9. The phrase is from the novelist Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good: “There are certain areas of scholarship, early Greek history is one, and Roman law is another, where the scantiness of evidence sets a special challenge to the disciplined mind. It is a game with very few pieces, where the skill of the player lies in complicating the rules” (Murdoch 1968, 171). notes to pages 7–20 Page 268 → 10. Chrysostom, Homilies on the Epistle to Titus 5.4, quoted in Easterling and Miles 1999, 99. 11. Synesius, Letter 148, “To Olympius,” in Fitzgerald 1926, 247. 12. Bowersock 2006, 59. 13. See Canons 51, 62, and 71, Council of Trullo, minutes extracted in The Seven Ecumenical Councils of the Undivided Church, trans H. R. Percival, in Schaff and Wace 1955, 388–439, particularly canons against theater and playgoing, Canon 51, 388; Canon 62, 393; Canon 71, 397. 14. Plutarch, Table Talk (Quaestiones Conviviales) 7.8.712, passage translated and discussed by Rosen 2016, 144. 15. Reynolds 1982, xv. 16. Herington 1985, 138. What I term tragedy’s “turn to the mythic,” Herington would call the “Homeric.” 17. On the dipping of Eupolis, see Halliwell 1991, 54–66; Storey 2003; and Storey 2010, 203–4. 18. Assmann 1995, 365–76; quoted in Flower 2006, xx. 19. “Verbatim Reports of the Proceedings from the Reign of Theodosius II,” in Millar 2007, 252–53. 20. Cubitt 2007, 76.

Prologue 1. Quoted in Olson 2007, 457–58. Eubulus’s sentiment is restated many times, viz., Apuleius,

Florida 20.1: “The first glass quenches thirst, the second makes merry, the third kindles desire, the fourth, madness.” 2. A lengthy classical discussion on the ratios for mixing occupies Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 10.426a–427c. For a modern overview of the process, see Robertson 1993, 197–250, while less formally Davidson (1997, 44–48) gathers up a variety of anecdotes about unmixed debacles. 3. Pausanias 1.2.5, who retells the story of Amphictyon. For a discussion of “upright”—in this context, “more likely to mean вЂerect,’” see Harding 2008, 211. 4. Philochorus FGrH 328F5b = Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 2.7.38c–d, 11.464f–465a. 5. Apollodorus, The Library (Bibliotheca) 3.14.7, in Frazer 1921. 6. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 15.675a–c, trans. Gulick 1993. 7. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 10.427c, quotes a fragment of Aethon: “It isn’t lawful for our race even so much as to lick at it [mixed wine]).” Trans. Gulick 1993. 8. ОґОµО№ОЅПЊП„О±П„ОїП‚, бјЂОЅОёПЃПЋПЂОїО№ПѓО№ ОґбѕЅбј ПЂО№ПЋП„О±П„ОїП‚ (deinЕЌtatos, anthrЕЌpoisi d’ēpiotatos), Euripides, Bacchae 860–61 (in Dodds 1960). 9. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 14.626f, quoting Agias, a lost writer on music, notes the foreign smell of this gum storax. Trans. Gullick 1993. 10. The later epithet is recorded by Pausanias, Periegesis (hereafter referred to as Description of Greece) 8.39.6. 11. It is clear that early dithyrambs contained the memory of Dionysus in his urban transition. PickardCambridge 1962 is still the largest study in Page 269 →scope, though the subject was substantially refreshed by the recent edited collection by Csapo and Miller 2007. One fragment of Melanippides was addressed to this god (fr. 762 PMG), and a second (fr. 120 West) from Archilochus addressed the god, his song, and a mind “blasted with wine” (Csapo and Miller 2007, 11); while Timotheus’s Semele may represent a continuing installment on this patron deity. See Holdern 2002, 17–21. Athenaeus (i.30.b) notes that one epithet of Dionysus was Dithyrambus, and see Plato, Laws 700b. Eratosthenes suggests that the performance origins were bound up with dancing to celebrate the demise of the goat that ate the first leaves that Icarius planted (Eratosthenes, Erigone, fr. [only six lines of the poem have been identified as definitely part of it]; see Rosokoki 1995, 140. For that discussion, see Merkelbach and West 1964. notes to pages 20–24 12. As Louis Gernet wrote of the dithyramb, “Behind its standardized form, which has been shaped and assimilated by a Greek aesthetic norm, one can detect several elements, memories that the word itself evokes, echoes of the pathetic, and above all, the depiction of a very primitive Dionysus” (Gernet 1981, 50). 13. There is an ample body of work around the festival incorporation of Dionysus, beginning with PickardCambridge 1988. A brief list: Goldhill 1990; Winkler 1990; Carpenter and Faraone 1993; Easterling 1997c; Kowalzig 2007. 14. Pickard 1893, 64–65 in particular, for the first serious attempt at untangling the site and its association with Dionysus. Subsequently replaced by Pickard-Cambridge 1988, and most recently canvassed by Robertson 1993. 15. Noel Robertson has suggested that the О»ОЇОјОЅО±О№П‚ (limnais) were not “marshes” per se, but rather pools, that is, springs of water for mixing the wine (Robertson 1993, 242). 16. Both quoted passages from Demosthenes, Against Neaera 59.76, trans. Bers 2003. For the practice of the Archon’s wife sleeping with Dionysus, see Aristotle, Athenian Constitution 3.5. 17. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 12.522f, trans. Gullick 1993.

Chapter One 1. For this “divine madness,” see the early R. M. Inge, vol. 2, 2–3; for midcentury, see Dodds 1951 and Otto 1965. Stock (1989) surveys the Dionysiac in literary culture. Thomas Carpenter (1986) and Cornelia Isler-Kenényi (2007a) study the Dionysiac in ceramic culture. Carpenter and Faraone (1993) assembled a fine collection of explorations of, largely, what Seaford has called “the Dionysiac metaphor,” in its various applications on performance and literary culture of antiquity. For a late

antiquity Christian application, see Russell 1981, vol. 8, 25–26. For divine madness in tragedy, see VersГ©nyi 1962. Cf. Padel 1995, whose focus is psychic, not divine madness. 2. Herodotus, History 9.34, 5.42; Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 10.427b; Dodds 1951. 3. Philo’s many exhortations against Dionysus and bacchant ecstasy are traced in H. Chadwick’s chapter on Philo, in Armstrong 1970, 151, derived Page 270 →mostly pointedly from Philo, De plantatione (On Noah’s Work as a Planter) 148; and Eusebius, Life of Constantine 85. notes to pages 24–28 4. Clement, Exhortations to the Greeks 1.3, trans. W. Wilson 2016; The Letters of Synesius of Cyrene, in Fitzgerald 1926, 57. 5. Friedrich 1996, 257. 6. Derrida 1978, 35–36. 7. The something-nothing-everything discussion, large enough to generate the title of a book of essays, Winkler and Zeitlin 1990, has been summarized many times—particularly well by Easterling (1997c, 36–53); Friedrich (1996, 257–83); and the response by Seaford (1996). For the civic component, see Goldhill 1990, 97–130, and, for a reconstruction of its many elements, see Sourvinou-Inwood 2003, 69–100. 8. Sourvinou-Inwood 1994, 274. 9. For the residue and continuation of Dionysiac practices within the civic festival, see Goldhill 1990; Schlesier 1993, 89–114; Easterling 1997c, 36–53; Kowalzig 2007, 221–50; and especially Sourvinou-Inwood 1994. 10. See, for example, the famous account of the Thyiades in Amphissa that Plutarch records in his Bravery of Women 13 (Moralia 249e–f). 11. For a concise survey of what has come to be called “the new ritualism,” see the general introduction to Csapo and Miller 2007. 12. Thucydides, History 1.126.6, text in Strassler 1996. 13. Obbink 1993, 65–86, esp. 68–72. For “bloodless offerings,” see Sourvinou-Inwood 1994, 270. The notion of ephebes as chorus is, of course, the sensible suggestion of Winkler (1990, 20–62). 14. For the classical sources of the proverb, Pickard-Cambridge 1962, 166–68; and Friedrich 1996, n. 10. Shaw (2014, chapter 4), treats the memories of the phrase as recorded in the Suda and Zenobius; Kowalzig (2007, 222) summarizes the paradox that “the plays themselves do not make an obvious connection,” following Taplin 1978, 162: “There is nothing intrinsically Dionysiac about Greek tragedy,” a point further canvased by Friedrich and Seaford, in Silk 1996. 15. Herodotus, History 1.150, in Strassler 2007. 16. Aeneas Tacticus 17.5 (“Precautions during Festivals”), in Hunter and Handford 1927. 17. Shaw (2014, 119) recently rendered the line as growing out of “something satyr-drama-like.” 18. The celebration of the state is at the core of Goldhill 1990, 97–129; and of Sourvinou-Inwood 2003. 19. What makes Plutarch’s phrase particularly enduring is its ancient pedigree. When Plutarch recorded it, it had been in circulation for centuries. Chamaeleon, TrGF 1.1, Thespis T18, p. 64. At the close of antiquity, the Suda Lexicon records an entry for the phrase, discussed in the epilogue to the present work. See also the late discussions in Photius, Lexicon 35.5 and Apostolius, Proverbs 13.42. 20. Such was the conclusion of the large survey of the early iconography of sixth-century Dionysus conducted by Isler-KerГ©nyi (2007a) and Carpenter (1986). 21. Isler-KerГ©nyi 2007a, 110. notes to pages 28–33 Page 271 → 22. For vases, see Carpenter 1986 and T. J. Smith 2007. Some of the better-preserved mosaics are still to be found in Antakya (Antioch), whose images have been gathered by Simok (2000, 125–35). 23. Representatively articulated by Goldhill (1990, 97–129). 24. This organized structure has led a host of scholars—Louis Gernet among them—to tease out the ritual prehistories of the civic festivals: Gernet 2001, 324–33. See W. Slater 2007, 21–47, for a forceful read on the organizing of the larger Greek festival culture. 25. According to the Suda Lexicon, s.vv. “Pratinas” and “Choerilus”; see Sourvinou-Inwood 2003, 91. 26. The tradition is admirably summarized in the general introduction of Csapo and Miller 2007. 27. Possible origins are largely the subject of Pickard-Cambridge 1962, a comprehensive treatment of various twentieth-century approaches to the tangled crux of origins; see also Vince 1984, 3–23; and

Storm 1998, introduction. Regarding the reconstruction of early tragic practices, see Sourvinou-Inwood 2003. 28. Aristotle, The Constitution of Athens 18.1, quoted in Shapiro 1998. For Hipparchus’s role in reshaping the event, see Shapiro 1998, 92–107. The dating for Hipparchus, c. 520, is Shapiro’s note 43, p. 106. 29. For the reorganization of festivals, see Osborne 1993, 410–11; and Sourvinou-Inwood 1994, 275–76. 30. Plato, Laws 815b–d. 31. Podlecki 1975, 4. 32. Herodotus, History 5.69; Podlecki 1975, 4. See also Aristotle, Athenian Constitution 20.1. This partnership of demos and Cleisthenes has been troubled by Ober (2004, 215–32). For a summation of the dating of Cleisthenes’s reforms, see Ephraim 1986, 113. 33. Aristotle, Athenian Constitution 22.1. 34. Cleisthenes also reordered the festival of Dionysus at Sicyon, removing its secular stories, performed in honor of Adrastus, and “transferring the choruses to Dionysus” (Herodotus, History 5.67.5). For an insightful discussion of the effects of this transfer, see Kowalzig 2007. 35. Flickinger (1936, 24) claims a further reorganization in 501, when the festival allegedly retired the practice of awarding goats as prizes and added satyr plays. 36. Alexis, fr. 9, from Aesop, trans. Olson 2007, 456. 37. Lucian, Dionysus 5, trans. Harmon 1947. 38. Deipnosophistae 5.275, trans. Gulick 1993. Elsewhere Athenaeus writes frankly of flute girls purchased as necessary “tools for a drinking party” (4.471). Athenaeus opens book 4 of the Deipnosophistae with a long quotation from a series of letters that passed between Hippolochus the Macedonian and Lynceus the playwright, who had agreed to exchange descriptions of any lavish banquet either might attend. Accordingly, a sort of epistolary one-upmanship of symposium decadence followed. After describing one particularly gluttonous nuptial banquet, Hippolochus proceeds to recount the entertainment: “When we had at last pleasantly taken leave of all sobriety, there entered flute girls and Page 272 →singers and some Rhodian sambuca-players. To me these girls looked quite naked, but some said that they had on tunics.В .В .В . After them entered ithyphallic dancers, clowns, and some naked female jugglers who performed tumbling acts among swords, and blew fire from their mouths” (Deipnosophistae 4.129a, trans. Gulick 1993). From the ceramic record, the Hydria of Polygnotos in Naples depicts just such a symposium revel. Contorted on a small table, the young girl (korД“) bends backward over a kylix, a handheld wine cup, and the telltale trace of a symposium. Two similar images, both near-naked tumblers performing in a private setting, are reproduced in Dearden 1995, 81–86. Another tondo of a red-figure kylix in the Stoddard Collection at Yale University (1913.163) reveals a young symposium guest fondling a naked flute girl. For the Syracusan as pornoboskoi, see Davidson 1997, 95. notes to pages 34–37 39. Green 1995, 111. According to Isler-KerГ©nyi (2007a, 222): “To be a satyr, then, meant to be happy. The most suitable setting for happiness was the symposium.” Keuls (1993), with an eye toward the pornographic, has gathered many images of the promise of the evening graphically fulfilled. 40. Green 1995, 103. 41. Xenophon, Symposium 9.3–7, trans. O. J. Todd 1922. This moment is canvassed for its visual attention to the erotic performance by Dearden (1995, 81–86), and Denard (2007, 151–53). 42. And easily missed, many have noted. Niall Slater (2005, 84), with C. W. Marshall in mind, wrote of their absence in Euripides’s Alcestis quite evocatively: “The satyrs who were not there startled somebody.” 43. Deipnosophistae 5.197e–202a, trans. Gulick 1993. The procession has been discussed in singular detail by Rice (1983). Green (1995, 116–17) suggests that much of the imagery of the pageant can also be found in the iconography of vases. 44. The Great Dish (British Museum 1946.1007.1) from the Mildenhall Treasure, depicting Bacchus and his train of satyrs and maenads reveling with Heracles. Two fine articles depict the imagery of satyrs: Lissarrague 1993 and Carpenter 1993. 45. The Pronomos vase is kept at the National Archaeological Museum of Naples and identified as ARV2, 1336,1. Clement of Alexandria quotation from Exhortations to the Greeks, in Butterworth 1919, 139.

Emperor Julian [the Apostate], in the mid-fourth century CE, could still list the satyr play as among the known genres of theater (Orations 7.210–11). 46. Podlecki (2005) admirably summarizes the current state of study on the iconography and textual traces of satyrs. Sutton (1980, 5–6) summarizes it in terms of the inclusion of satyrs in the reorganization of City Dionysia; Lissarrague (1990, 228–36) and Carpenter (2005, 219–36) do the same, focusing on the representations on stage and on vases. 47. Aristotle, Poetics 1449a 20. As Gerald Else reminded us a long time ago, “The five words вЂОґО№бЅ° П„бЅё бјђОє ПѓО±П„П…ПЃО№ОєОїпѓ ОјОµП„О±ОІО±О»ОµОЅвЂ™ [dia to ek satyrikГґi metabalein] in Aristotle’s sketch of the development of tragedy have left a bloodier trail of debate, dissension, and misunderstanding behind them than almost any comparable phrase in the Poetics”; see Else 1939, 139–57, esp. 139; and Sutton 1980, 1–4. notes to pages 37–42 Page 273 → 48. Loraux 1998, 43. 49. Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.23.6–7, trans. P. Levi 1979. There is a curious insistence on satyrs as a biologic species. [Claudius] Ptolemy (Geography 7.2.30) located the islands in India. Pomponius Mela, in his Description of the World (Chorographia) 1.23, 3.9, places satyrs on Africa’s outer coast, as does Pliny (Natural History 5.6–7), while Aelian (On the Characteristics of Animals 16.21) locates them on mainland India, all as a living species. A similar account of a terrorizing satyr comes from Philostratus, Life of Apollonius 6.27. 50. Plutarch, Life of Sulla 27.2, trans. Dryden. 51. This evolution is traced by Flickinger (1936, 24–26, with illustrations on 25); and Lissarrague (1993, 207–20 with an illustration on 209). 52. I am again invoking Winkler (1990, 20–62) and his reasoning that the chorus represented what was largely, or in part, performed by ephebes. 53. See Lissarrague 1993, 29, for a discussion of this image. For Horace (Odes 2:19), they had returned to their wild and goat-footed forms. 54. Clement, Exhortation to the Greeks 1.3, trans. W. Wilson 2016. 55. From Schaff and Wace 1955, 356–408, esp. 389. 56. Hesiod, fr. 129, quoted in Harrison 1908–9, 308–38, esp. 310. 57. There are several useful sources on the social roles of women in classical Greece: Schaps 1979; S. Lewis 2002; BrulГ© 2003; and Lefkowitz and Fant 2005. For the mythic images, see Lefkowitz 1986. Peradotto and Sullivan (1984) print a full and annotated bibliography of sources. 58. For some insight into this expectation, see Xenophon, On Household Management 7.4–8.1. 59. Quoted in Lefkowitz and Fant 2005, 16, 17. For earlier epitaphs (fourth century BCE), see Stehle 2001, 179–201. 60. Aristotle, Politics 1.13, quoting the old saw, spoken as an old saw in Sophocles’s Ajax, 294. 61. Hyperides, fr. 205, quoted in Worthington, Cooper, and Harris 2001, 150. Editor’s note 43: “This fragment has been assigned to вЂAgainst Aristagora for failing to obtain a sponsor,” frs. 13–24, preserved largely in Suda. 62. Menander fr. 815 PCG, trans. Olson 2007, 460. 63. Xenophon, On Household Management 10.9. 64. I am reminded of lines from Marcel Detienne 1979, 25: “The hunter’s terrain is not simply the negation of the farmer’s fields and of the enclosed space of the home. It also constitutes a space outside of marriage that welcomes deviant forms of secularity or those that are simply considered strange by the city state.” 65. Pickard-Cambridge (1962, 25–30, esp. 29) has canvassed the argument of shared roots, with classical testimonia. For the rules that allowed maenadic ritual, see Lefkowitz and Fant 2005, 273–74. For maenads as a bacchic metaphor, see Schlesier 1993, 89–114. 66. Diodoros Siculus, The Library of History 4.3, 3–4, trans. Oldfather 1935. 67. One such contract between initiates and the city of Miletus is reprinted in Lefkowitz and Fant 2005, 273–74. 68. Plutarch, Life of Alexander; for maenadism into the early Republic, see Livy, History of Rome (Ab urbe condita) 39.8. notes to pages 42–48 Page 274 → 69. Heliodorus, An Ethiopian Romance, book 6, trans. Hadas 1957, 149.

70. Appian, Roman History, vol. 4: The Civil Wars 13.92, trans. White 1913. 71. Plato, Laws 7.790d–791a; Ion 534a. 72. Dodds 1960, xiv. 73. Plutarch, “On the Virtues of Women,” Moralia 3.249e–f, trans. Babbitt 1931. See also Plutarch, Moralia 953d (The Principle of Cold) for an account of the rescue of women celebrants from a storm on Mt. Parnassus. 74. Henrichs 1978, 121–60. 75. Plutarch, Life of Nicias 3.3, trans. Dryden.

Chapter Two 1. I’m thinking of the list and discussion of fifth-century innovations in forms and genres traced out in such detail in Csapo and Miller 1998, 112–15 and illustration 10; the authors argue that such “innovationism marks the moment of Greek democracy.” Tracing this innovation was the subject of their subsequent editorial partnership, 2007. 2. For the earlier titles, including those of Phrynichus, see Pickard-Cambridge 1962, 90–93 (revised 1988) and, most recently, M. Wright 2016. 3.M. Wright (2016, 26), looking for a violated law, asks of this production: “What had Phyrnichus done wrong?” 4. The play and its effect have been treated singly by Rosenbloom (1993, 159–96), with particular attention to the relationship between the Athenian auditors and the Greek colonists as subjects. For Themistocles’s role in the production and politics of the play, see Podlecki 1975, 5–7. For the play in the larger context of the development of early tragedy, see Else 1964, 74–75; for its influence on Aeschylus’s Persians, see Hall 1996; Harrison 2000; and Rosenbloom 2006. For its place as “submerged literature,” see M. Wright 2016, 2–27. 5. When a skilled worker might make one drachma a day, the price of a flute girl was fixed at two drachmas (Aristotle, Constitution of Athens 50.2); a fine for slander from the stage, three drachmas; and the cost of a seat at the theater, two obols, was equivalent to a third of a drachma. The thousand-drachma penalty was a burden beyond recovery of even a successful poet, according to MacDowell (1978, 126–27). That Phrynichus recovered from the fine seems to suggest that the poet was connected to at least one deep-pocket patron, and Themistocles was not alone in his sympathy for Athens’s allies. Conversely, two financial accounts from late in the fifth century BCE (Lysias, frag. 8.295, Lysias, Oration 22.1) both claim that two thousand drachmas could be spent on a single chorus. This may suggest that the fine was directed toward the financial considerations of the choragus, rather than the poet, and hence the fine may have targeted the producer as much as the poet. Cf. Cartledge (1997, 24), who assigns the fine solely to the poet. 6. Podlecki 1975, 6–7. The complications of dating the archonship of Themistocles is canvassed with great care in Rosenbloom 1993, 159 n. 2. 7. Trans. Godley 1920. notes to pages 48–52 Page 275 → 8. For a chronology of the political career of Themistocles, see Podlecki 1975. 9. Herodotus, History 6.21, trans. Godley 1920; cf. Strabo, Geography 14.1.7 (635). 10. Herington 1985, 138. 11. This is Oliver Taplin’s point (1986, 187): The offense of the play was that it was “not the function of tragedy.” 12. For the sympathies of Athenians for the Milesians, Rosenbloom (1993, 162) argues persuasively that the “reminding of the evils” of Persian terror was not as a shared “we” (Athenians and colonists) but rather as “we are next.” That is, Athenians saw in the fall of Miletus their own impending doom. 13. Poetics 9:15; Thucydides, History 1.9. 14. Isocrates, Evagoras 6, trans. Mirhady and Too 2000, and see also Walbank 1985, 233 n. 21; the author alludes to the mythic suffering of this otherwise historic figure in his discussion of myth and history. 15. “The spectacle of tragedy’s tears,” Simon Goldhill’s choice phrase (2003, 165). 16. Csapo and Miller 1998, 113. We have no records for any prior or subsequent attempts at historical tragedy. From the fifth century there were three known examples of historic tragedy, two by Phrynichus

(both lost) and one extant play, Aeschylus’s Persians (see below). Aristotle (Poetics 9.20) noted a play of Agathon’s “in which names and the happenings were made up,” but it appears to be both a work of fiction, not history, and an anomaly. Hall (1996) cites several fragments of possible historical subjects but of undetermined genres. 17. Rhetoric 2.8.20 (1385.11), trans. W. R. Roberts 1941. I am leaning here on Konstan (2006) for his treatment of pity in classical theater. 18. Konstan 2006, 59; Sandridge 2008, 433–48. 19. Politics 7.7 (1342a). This distinction is more expertly canvased by Rosenbloom (1993), who uses it to keen effect in his discussion of pity and the self and others as an aesthetic theory. “Pain blurs the distance between self and kin,” he writes on p. 165. 20. This is the conclusion of Rosenbloom (2006, 22), who wrote succinctly, “Henceforth the subjects of tragedy were mythical figures remote in time and place.” 21. Castellani 1986, 1–16, esp. 6. Castellani posits several reasons why there is no historical drama, and offers the genre of history, as Herodotus and Xenophon conceived it, as recompense. Osborne (1993, 410–11) calls this treatment of history the “implicit political claims” that lie behind tragedy, singling out Phrynichus’s The Fall of Miletus 218. 22. Plutarch, On the Fame of the Athenians 350b, trans. Babbitt. 23. B. Smith 1988, 116. The phrase refers to the Renaissance imagination of earlier periods as a locus for new work. 24. More recently, Michael Vickers (2008) has done some fine work on local readings in Sophocles. His opening articulates the anxiety over a discipline unaccustomed to local reading. Stretching myth into allegory, Honig (2009, 5–43) sees in Antigone a contest of lamentation styles. For a solid overview of the recentPage 276 → trend to shift in Greek drama from literature to locality, see Rhodes 2003, 104–19. notes to pages 52–57 25. Plutarch, On the Glory of the Athenians 348b, trans. Babbitt 1927. 26. Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation to the Greeks 1.7. 27. Synesius, Letter 148, “To Olympius,” in Fitzgerald 1926, 247. 28. Bowersock 2006, 59. 29.M. Wright 2016, 27. 30. Strabo, Geography 14.17; Plutarch, Principles of Statecraft 814b–c. 31. Discussed more fully in chapter 10, below. 32. The text of the stela is reprinted in Plutarch’s Lives of the Ten Orators, in Goodwin and Barcroft 1870, vol. 5, 834: “Archeptolemus son of Hippodamus, the Agrylian, and Antiphon son of Sophilus, the Rhamnusian, being both present in court, are condemned of treason. And this was to be their punishment: that they should be delivered to the eleven executioners, their goods confiscated, the tenth part of them being first consecrated to Athene; their houses to be levelled with the ground, and in the places where they stood this inscription to be engraved on brass, вЂ[The houses] of Archeptolemus and Antiphon, traitors.’ That Archeptolemus and Antiphon should neither of them be buried in Athens, nor anywhere else under that government. And besides all this, that their posterity should be accounted infamous, bastards as well as their lawful descendants; and he too should be held infamous who should adopt any one of their descendants for his son. And that all this should be engraved on a brass tablet, and that tablet should be placed where that stands on which is engraved the decree concerning Phrynichus.” 33. Loraux 1998, 89. 34. There was further a spring and an olive tree inside the temple of Erechtheus that, according to Herodotus (History 8.55), “Poseidon and Athena placedВ .В .В . as witnesses to their dispute.” 35. This sense of holding the grudge is evoked by Herodotus of the Thebans, History 8.29; Demosthenes 18.96. For an overview of Athenian applications of memory sanctions, see Flower 2006, 23–25. 36. Aristotle, Constitution of Athens 40.2. See also Lysias, Speech 34 (“Preserving the Athenian Constitution”). 37. Aeschines, Against Timarchus 39, trans. Carey 2000. See also On the Embassy 176; Against Ctesiphon 208; and Isocrates, Against Callimachus 46. 38. Plutarch, Table Talk (Quaestiones Conviviales) 9.6. 39. Plutarch, Precepts of Statecraft (Praecepta) 814b–c, trans. Fowler 1992.

40. Loraux 1998, 86. 41. The opening columns of the inscriptional list known as fasti are unfortunately missing, and their records commence in 472. Pickard-Cambridge 1968, 71–72 and appendix 101ff. (revised in Pickard-Cambridge 1988), and has now been thoroughly refreshed by the new Olson and Millis 2012. For a discussion of the fasti as public records, see Sickinger 1999, 41–47. 42. A point made briefly by Burian (1997, 186). The play’s larger relationship to history has been treated many times; see, for example, Broadhead 1960; Hall 1996; and Harrison 2000; and for the problems recanvassed in three recent introductions to the play, Hall 1996, 9–10; Rosenbloom 2006; and Collard 2008, xii. notes to pages 57–64 Page 277 → 43. Thompson (1981, 343–55) chronicles the destruction of Athens from the archaeologic record. 44. Osborne (1996, 309) briefly notes about that decade that state decisions were “scrutinized on stage, ” encouraging politics but not indictments. 45. Ostracism is discussed at more length below. For an introduction, see Vanderpool 1970, 17–29. 46. Hall 1996, 59; Aeschylus, Persai 355. 47. For further speculations on this rise and fall, see Podlecki 1975, 34–35. 48. According to the Suda lexicon, comedy was introduced in 487/86, around which scholars have now reached a certain consensus (Suda [21], 318). Its introduction is the subject of the next chapter. 49. As Hugh Lloyd-Jones (1990, vol. 3, 11) succinctly put it: “No chapter in the history of Greek literature is more obscure than the origins of tragedy.” 50. It has “undeniable implications for our understanding of the development of Attic tragedy and the genre’s relation to Athenian history,” in Rosenbloom’s (1993, 161) assessment. 51. Aeschylus, Persians 465, 468, 909–10, in Hall 1996. 52. This effeminization of grief is a point Hall (1999, 100; 2006, 277) has returned to repeatedly; cf. Foley 2001, 29; and Loraux 1988, 9–28. For a discussion on the legislation of lamentation, see Seaford 1994, chap. 3. 53. Hall 1996, 13. 54. Foley 2001 27. 55. Hall 1996, 13. 56. NГјnlist 2009, 352. 57. Cicero, De finibus 2.32.104. 58. Favorini 2003, 99–111. 59. Proust 2000, 268. 60. Diodorus Siculus, Library of World History 13.21; Plutarch, Life of Nicias 28.2–4; Thucydides, History 7.44. 61. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 9.407b, trans. Gullick 1993. Of Hegemon, we are told he was “the first to enter the contests on the stage” with parodies, “winning victories at Athens with other parodies, but especially with that on The Battle of the Giants” (Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 15.699a). Xenophon offers a similar account, Hellenica 4.17, when tragic news interrupted the men’s chorus: “The ephors heard the mournful tidings not without grief and pain, as needs they must, I take it; but for all that they did not dismiss the chorus, but allowed the contest to run out its natural course. What they did was to deliver the names of those who had fallen to their friends and families, with a word of warning to the women not to make any loud lamentations but to bear their sorrow in silence.”

Chapter Three 1. For recent and accessible anthologies of comic fragments, see Olson 2007 and Storey 2011. For the twenty or so vases with animal choruses, Storey 2010 briefly, 182–83; and J. R. Green 1995, 93–122. For a solid summation of the current debate on the politics of Old Comedy, see Olson 2010 and Sommerstein Page 278 →2014, 291–305. For the possible politics in early titles, see Edwards 2002, 35–37. I concur with the more concise statement of Eric Csapo: “Personal invective is the hallmark of Old Comedy” (2012, 29). notes to pages 64–67

2. Rusten’s (2011, 17) reminder is helpful here: “So the search for comedy’s вЂsole’ origin, as Aristotle hinted, remains a speculative or perhaps even a vain one.” Nonetheless, the “search” has produced a hefty bibliography, but briefly summarized here. For a concise treatment of various comic traditions, see Denard 2007, 139–62. For earlier forms, see Seeberg 1995, 1–12, and three choice articles assembled in Csapo and Miller 2007. All engage the padded dancers (Tyler Jo Smith, Isler-KerГ©nyi, and J. R. Green), bookended by Carpenter’s discussion. For “Parade Abuse,” see Csapo 2012. On ritual origins, see Pickard-Cambridge 1962; Goldhill 1990, 97–130; Kowalzig 2007, 221–51; and Storey’s (2010, 179–226) generous overview. For southern Italian connections, see Bosher 2012 and 2014, 79–94. 3. Brenne (1994, 13–24) opens his largely descriptive essay with a small heading, “Ostraka and Comedy,” in which he notes the textual similarities of the two forms. Wise (1998), in a passing comment, briefly wondered at the association as well, discussed below. Storey (2010, 179–226) introduces the idea but is uneasy with “too much political motive at the start of comedy.” 4. I am indebted to Forsdyke (2005) here for her term “intraelite” as a conceptual premise for the political struggles of that messy decade of the 480s. 5. Storey 2011, vol. 2, 338. 6. Symposium 223d. For a discussion of Plato, Socrates, and the interplay of genres, see Shaw 2014, 15–16. 7. The dialogue was composed sometime after 385, but set back on the occasion of Agathon’s first victory, 416. The Clouds dates to 423. For a discussion of this moment and the isolation (in Taplin’s phrase, “their reluctance to overlap”) and porous borders of genres, Taplin 1986, 163–74 and Konstan 2014, 28–29. 8. Aristophanes, Frogs 389–92, quoted in Henderson 1990, 271. 9. One of the likely bits of residue from its prior life was the so-called parade abuse, as Csapo (2012) traces it. 10. “Comedy of Invective” is Aristotle’s phrase for the first Old Comedy, Poetics 5.1449b.7; for Aristotle on earlier phallic comedy, see Poetics 5.1449a10–13. On the stability of its form, see PickardCambridge 1962, 292–310, a point recently reiterated by Konstan (2014, 27–28). 11. Sommerstein (2014, 292) is quick to separate the larger “political” as a product of the polis, from the more particular agent of engagement, from which the quotation is intended. 12. For the iconographic evidence, Csapo 2014; for the ritual origins, Csapo and Miller 2007 and Revermann 2014, 275–89. For structural elements of ritual in early comedy, see Adrado 1975. 13. On the possible forms of precivic or archaic comedy, see Shaw 2014, 26–55; Rusten 2011, 16–18, particularly the graphic on possible strains, 18; and Rothwell 2007. On choregoi competing, see Goette 2007, 125, discussed below, and Goldhill 1997, 56–57. For structure, see Pickard-Cambridge 1962, appendix A. 14. Aristotle initially elides its “unnoticed early stages” before advancing Page 279 →several separate theories, attributing it once to the leaders of the phallic processions (Poetics 4.1449a2–14), and separately to the costumed drinking songs of the Megarians; again, he suggested lampooning gave way to plots that came from Sicily (Poetics 5.1449b5–9), and indirectly comedy, like tragedy, carried its long associations with the wine press and “things satiric.” The Parian marbles, a third-century Athenian archive of civic memory, credits Old Comedy’s origins to a single innovator, Susarion the Icarian, while the Suda Lexicon (book 5 [Оµ] 2766) cites Epicharmus as its originator. Apart from Rusten’s (2011) enormously useful compilation of texts and documents is his larger canvassing of the origins problem, including the vase record, which was published in an article-length study (2006, 37–66). For an earlier, and now somewhat quaint, survey of origin theories, see Cornford 1914, 3–7, whose ritual theories are critiqued by Pickard-Cambridge (1962, 346–49) and Csapo and Miller (2007); see also Denard 2007, 140. notes to pages 67–69 15. The status of the reconstructed “second book,” though vigorously defended, remains suspect; see Watson 2012. 16. The date is by now pretty firmly fixed: Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 82; Capps 1903, 25–29, Sickinger 1999, 43; Olson 2007, 16; and Revermann 2014, 277. For a summary of the evidence, see Rusten 2006, 37 n. 3. For the “Democratic Revolution” of the 480s, see Osborne 1996, 330ff. and Henderson 1990,

278–80. 17. Sommerstein 2014, 292; Rusten 2006, 19. On the delay between initiation and first deployment, see Forsdyke 2005, 150 n. 23. 18. Osborne 1996, 328. 19. Forsdyke 2005, 175. 20. Aristotle, Athenian Constitution 22.8; Podlecki 1975, 10–12. 21. Plutarch, Life of Aristides 3.2, trans. Dryden. Harrison (2000) offers a chapter (9) on this rivalry and how Aeschylus treated their war service in The Persians. 22. Plutarch, Life of Themistocles 5.5, trans. Dryden. 23. I am indebted here to Jeffrey Rusten (2011, 732–41) for the collection of testimonia. See also Storey 2011. 24. “The Old Oligarch” (pseudo-Xenophon), On the Constitution of the Athenians, 2.18, trans. Fetch 1900. Henderson (1990) relies heavily on the source, while Olson (2010, 38) considers him an unreliable guide. 25. Plutarch, Table Talk 7.8.712. On the slight impact of Old Comedy on Roman forms, see Fontaine 2014. 26. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Rhetoric 8.11, quoted in Rusten 2011, 737. 27. On Comedy, cited in Rusten 2011, 177. 28. Dio Chrysostom, Oration 16.[33]9. 29. Julian, Misopogon 353b, trans. W. C. Wright 1913. 30. Olson (2010, 61) considers Old Comedy’s political engagement to be a product of primarily the last quarter of the fifth century. Henderson (1990, 271–72) has them politically engaged at least midcentury; Sommerstein (2014, 292) considers comedy political from the beginning, while Storey (2010, 184) writes that “this seems to attribute too much political motive at the start of comedy” and cautiously concludes with political themes “entering the genre in the 440s.” notes to pages 69–72 Page 280 → 31. The only reference is preserved in the Suda lexicon 5 [Оµ] 2766, quoted and translated in Storey 2011, vol. 2, 268–69, and discussed in Storey 2010, 191–92. 32. “Pericles is made fun of quite persuasively in the play via innuendo for having brought war on the Athenians.” Trans. Olson 2007, 424–25. Hughes (2012, 22) discusses the vase record of the Dionysus /Pericles myth from the stage, as does Revermann (1997), revisited in Revermann 2006, 301. Bakola (2010, 81–101) offers the most thorough treatment of the textual fragment. 33. Henderson 1990 and Storey 2010, 221; Sommerstein 2014, 292; cf. Olson (2010), for whom the political stage is largely the domain of Aristophanes and his generation. 34. Osborne 1996, 331–32. 35. Aristotle, Athenian Constitution 22.3–7. Androtion (FGrH 324.F6) dates the law from 488/7, but this likely refers to its first employment. For a brief summary of the two sources, see Dover 1963, 256–57. 36. In the following decade, Megacles would enjoy the unique honor of hosting a second ostracism in 471, having been once recalled to Athens, while the next year Themistocles, whose name had been on and off the contest for years, would join the ranks of the banished heroes, statesmen, and demagogues. Then followed Cimon in 461, Alcibiades the Elder (grandfather of Alcibiades) in 460, and Thucydides (the general, not the historian) in 442. Other names of the ostracized are cited by classical sources whose dates cannot be confirmed. Plutarch, Life of Aristides 1.8, cites Damon. Menon is named by Hesychius, Chronological History 28. Andocides 4.34 (Against Alcibiades) would claim that Megacles and Alcibiades Sr., maternal and paternal grandfather of Alcibiades, were both ostracized twice. For a discussion on the ostracism of each figure, see Forsdyke 2005, 165–81. 37. And that retirement, as well, became the subject of a comedy. A fragment of Plato Comicus (fr. 203, from Plutarch, Life of Nicias 11.6) attests to the abuse of ostracism, translated in Olson 2007, 444 and discussed at 217–18. Rhodes (1994) offers the extended context, as does, briefly, Connor (1992, 82). 38. The suggestion is Podlecki’s (1975, 188); see also Hignett 1958, 188–89; and Forsdyke 2005, 151. 39. The “Deep Play” of choragic competition is the subject of P. Wilson 2000, an admirable study. 40. Osborne 1996, 332. 41. Plutarch, Life of Alcibiades 11.1; Life of Aristides 1.1; Life of Cimon 8.6–7. 42. Plutarch, Nicias 3.2, trans. Dryden.

43. This is certainly Peter Wilson’s (2000, 21) conclusion: the new selection process was “a sign of how seriously the city regarded comedy’s function.” 44. Forsdyke, 151: “The law of ostracismВ .В .В . recalled the events by which non-elites established their control over decisions of exile.” 45. Brenne 1994, 13–14. For the aesthetic of abuse, see also Forsdyke 2005, 152–53. 46. Wise 1998, 203. The couplet is printed in Vanderpool 1970, 9. 47. The image is reprinted in Osborne 1996, 333 and discussed in Forsdyke 2005, 154. 48. Many of the slanders are gathered up in Gottesman 2014, 15–16. notes to pages 72–75 Page 281 → 49. Plutarch, Life of Alcibiades 13.3. The vase is noted in Storey 2011, vol. 2, 211. 50. The case of Eupolis is discussed below. 51. The major and minor cases of the vexed intersection of comedy and free speech are carefully treated in Sommerstein 1986 and 2004; Henderson 1990 and 1998; and Olson 2010. 52. The (il)literacy levels of the voters have been noted in many archaeological reports: by Vanderpool, Mabel Lang, and John McK. Camp, discussed below. The anecdote of the illiterate voter is from Plutarch, Life of Aristides, which D. L. Cairns (2003, 244) considers invented precisely to illustrate the fickle nature of the demos, a conclusion with which Forsdyke (2005, 148) concurs. For the scribes, see Brenne 1994, 16–18. 53. Philochorus, fr. 30, FGrH 328 F30, quoted in Podlecki 1975, 186. Philochorus suggests that a majority of six thousand ostraca were required to secure an individual’s exile, while Plutarch says a quorum of six thousand was all that was needed. For a brief overview of the practice, see Vanderpool 1970 and Osborne 1996, 331–32; for a more extensive treatment, see Forsdyke 2005. 54. The findings were reported in Hesperia 7 (1938): 230. 55. Podlecki 1975, 191; Vanderpool 1970, 11–12. 56. Camp 1996, esp. 234 n. 5. A sample of the ostraca is on display in the Agora Museum, Athens. 57. For the ostracism of Themistocles, see Forsdyke 2005, 155–57. 58. Forsdyke (2005, 148 n. 13) offers, I think, the most current summation of the archaeological evidence of the major ostraca finds for the English-language reader, largely concentrated in the Agora and the Ceramicus. For the more ambitious scholar, a 550-page archaeological survey of all known ostraca (eleven thousand of them) is provided in Seiwert 2002. 59. П†ОёПЊОЅОїП… ПЂО±ПЃО±ОјП…ОёОЇО± П†О№О»О¬ОЅОёПЃП‰ПЂОїП‚ (phthonou paramythia philanthrЕЌpos), Plutarch, Life of Aristides 7.2. 60. The Attic calendar is a complex concept. Essentially there were two incompatible reckonings, the lunar calendar of twelve months of roughly twenty-nine days, and the political calendar of ten civic months (prytanies) of thirty-six and thirty-seven days, both commencing from the first crescent moon after the summer solstice. Tying the start of the new year to the new moon allowed the recalibration of the calendars every year. The Dionysia fell in the ninth lunar month (Elaphebolion), roughly late March; ostracism was traditionally held in the eighth prytany, late March to late April. The irregularities were of course apparent to Athenians and ridiculed by Aristophanes (Clouds 615–26). For a study on the various calendars, see Mikalson 1975; for the fixing of the occasion in the political calendar, Forsdyke 2005, 146–48; for reconstruction of the calendar for the ostracism of Hyperbolus, Rhodes 1994; for the festival calendar, see Osborne 1993 (reprised with an attention to the competitive festivals in Rhodes 2004) and, more recently, Hall 2014. 61. Vanderpool 1970, 4. 62. Brenne 1994, 13. 63. Forsdyke 2005, 147. 64. P. Wilson 2000, 132–35. notes to pages 76–80 Page 282 → 65. Shear 1936, 1–42, esp. 39. 66. For 1995, see Camp 1999, 255–83, esp. 268; for 2000, see Blackman 2001, 1–144, esp. 4. 67. Frogs 367–68. 68. Peter Wilson discusses the practice (2000, 102–3) with some sensitivity. 69. Goette 2007, 125. Goette is concerned primarily with choregoi for the dithyrambic competition, but the monumental nature of victory belongs as well to tragedy and comedy. 70. The trophies’ aspirations to architecture is certainly the point of Ulmholtz (2002, 261–93, esp.

262 n. 4). Goette (2007, 128–29) confirms the remarkable height of the trophies “already architectural in nature” (as Pausanias 1.20.1 describes the tripods). “The khoregic monument has indeed been an effective machine of kleos,” according to P. Wilson (2000, 198). 71. Goette 2007, 136–37; P. Wilson 2000, 206, 213, and 283. I am indebted here to Peter Wilson (2000, 208–9) for the notion that the trophies are in historical competition as well. 72. For the force of envy, see the collection edited by Konstan and Rutter (2003). 73. Guilhamet 1985, 3–12, esp. 3. 74. Consequently, a dozen recent studies offer their voices. Representative studies: Stone 1988; R. Green 2001; Hughes 2010; E. Wilson 2007; and Colaiaco 2001. Leibowitz (2010) begins his introduction with the same exasperating question: Why another study? 75. Aelian, Historical Miscellany 2.13. 76. Plato, Symposium 215b, trans. Joyce 1935. 77. Colaiaco 2001, 39. 78. Plutarch, Life of Aristides 3.2. For this “ridicule of the elite,” see Henderson 1998, 262–64. 79. Of Hyperbolus it was written: “His fate was too good for him. . . . For ostracism was not invented for men such as he” (Forsdyke 2005, 152–53).

Chapter Four 1. Plutarch, Precepts of Statecraft 814b. Diodorus, Library of World History 15.57.3–58.4, describes the event: “For because of the magnitude of the calamity the demagogues were afraid that some unforeseen turn of fortune might overtake them and therefore desisted from their accusation, whereas the mob, now thinking that they had been left in the lurch by them, were angry at this and put to death all the demagogues. So these men received the punishment which fitted their crimes as if some divinity were visiting its just resentment upon them, and the people, eased of their mad rage, were restored to their senses.” Trans. Oldfather 1935. 2. Diodorus, Library of World History 15.58.3; for a modern study of the revolt that properly situates the uprising in a series of revolts that followed the defeat of Sparta at Leuctra, see Buckley 1996, 451–52. David (1986, 343–49) suggests that the uprising was a retaliation for a planned attack on the demos. See also Tomlinson 1972, 193; and Lintott 1982, 224–27. notes to pages 81–84 Page 283 → 3. Plutarch, Precepts of Statecraft 814c, trans. Fowler 1992. 4. Plutarch, Precepts of Statecraft 814b, trans. Fowler 1992. 5. Herodotus, History 5.64.2–5.65.2; for the purge, see Arnush 1995 and Holliday 1977, 40–56. 6. Suda lexicon, s.v. “Chionides”; Aristotle, Poetics 1448.33–34; Henderson 1990, 293–307. 7. Galen, On His Own Books 17; Edmonds 1961, vol. 3, 317, now largely replaced by Storey 2011, vol. 2. 8. Horace, Epistle 2.3; but see also Epistle 2.1.145–55, describing a similar restraint placed upon Fescennine verses: “A penalty-bearing law had indeed to be passed, which forbade composition of hateful songs about persons or parties, on threat of death under cudgels. Poets were forced to be civil and even to be entertaining.” Trans. Passage 1983. See also Denard 2007, 142–43 for Horace’s treatment of the censorship. 9. And like anything not recorded, speculations abound. Representative figures in this debate are Sommerstein (2004), Halliwell (1991), Henderson (1998), and Trevet (2000), discussed below. 10. Both commentaries are covered in Sommerstein 2004, 205–22, esp. 208–9. Cf. Trevet 2000. Halliwell (1991) concurs, while Atkinson (1992) is more inclined to locate some of the scholiast’s claims on legislation, particularly Syracosius’s decree, to a package of reforms initiated after the mutilation of the herms, but only broadly applied. 11. The troubling of these Hellenistic genres is a subject of much discussion; see, for example, Csapo 2000; Henderson 1990, 293ff.; and Nervegna 2013, 25–27 and n. 62. 12. Platonius, On the Distinctions Among Comedies 1.3–6, trans. Edmonds 1961. 13. The play was still in public memory a century and a half later, as it seems to be the piece referred to by Diogenes Laertius in his Life of Cleanthes 7.173. Cleanthes took no offense when he was insulted on stage, remarking that “when Dionysus and Heracles were ridiculed by the poets without getting angry, it would

be absurd for him to be annoyed at casual abuse.” Trans. Hicks 1972. 14. Aeschines, Against Timarchus 31. 15. Cratinus, Dionysoi fr. 52, quoted in Henderson 1990, 293; Storey 2011. 16. Scholia on Aristophanes, Acharnians 378, quoted in Rusten 2011, 289. 17. Eupolis is the subject of a monograph, Storey 2003, that gathers up about all there is left on this lost writer. Some testament of his popularity may be read into a recent find in central Athens, where in 2005 a herm with the bust of Eupolis was excavated. See also Whitley 2005, 6–7 and Sidwell 2000, 137, who notes that more fragments survived of Eupolis than any other fifth-century writer, except only Aristophanes. 18. Platonius, On the Classification of Comedies 1.2–5, trans. Edmonds 1961. 19. For a discussion of the various distinctions and limits of free speech, see Raaflaub 2004, 46–49. For limits of speech in comedy, see Sommerstein 2004. 20. See Pherecrates fr. 102. (in Olson 2007); for comic targets in the context of festive ridicule, see Henderson 1990. 21. Eupolis fr. 316 (from The Golden Race), in Olson 2007, 442–43. notes to pages 84–88 Page 284 → 22. See, for example, the large fragment of Eupolis’s Demes (J. and G. Maspero, P.Cair.Masp., 3 vols.; here vol. 1 [probably] 43227), reprinted in Rusten 2011, 233–37. 23. Olson 2007, 442–43; Storey 2005, 201–18, esp. 201. 24. Tzetzes, On Comedy, quoted in Edmonds, vol. 3, 313. 25. The scholiast on Juvenal (2.92) notes that baptae were effeminates and hence, more than the lisp was under attack: “Eupolis wrote a comedy with this title [Baptae], because of which he was killed by Alcibiades,” Storey 2003, appendix 1. 26. Lucian, Attack on an Uneducated Book Collector, 27–28. Storey (2011, 2) argues for the name of “Dyers.” 27. Quoted in Edmonds, vol. 3, 313. 28. I am indebted here for the classical accounts of Eupolis and Baptai, anthologized in Storey 2003, 378–81, and Nervegna 2013, 25–26. Fragments and testimonia on Eupolis—his life, plays, and his death—have also been gathered by Rusten (2011, 221–72). The accounts from Eratosthenes (285–194 BCE [approximately—accounts vary]) and Duris of Samos have not survived. 29. Themistius 8.110; Platonius, On the Distinctions among Comedies 1.21–23; Aelius Aristides, Oration 3.8; Anonymous, quoted in Storey 2003, 380–81; all sources translated in Storey 2003, 37–81. It should also be noted that Pausanias describes the grave site of Eupolis, on land, in Sicyon, 2.7.3; while the Suda lexicon, s.v. “Eupolis,” has him dead by shipwreck in the Hellespont. 30. Cicero, Letter to Atticus 6.1.18, trans. Storey 2003, 379. 31. Aristotle, On Funding, fr. 630, reprinted in Rusten 2011, 391. 32. Storey 2005, 206–7. 33. Nicostratus Comicus, fr. 30, trans. Olson 2007, 440. For Olson’s illuminating discussion of the lines, see 195. 34. MacDowell 1978, 128–29. 35. There is no evidence that the kind of free speech that Demosthenes specified as the duty of the citizen was extended to the stage. See Demosthenes, Orations 13.15, 60.25–26, and fr. 21. See also Isocrates, On the Peace 8:14; and Stobaeus, Concerning Free Speech 3.13.226. 36. For a brief discussion of the dissolving borders, see the introduction to Marshal and Kovacs 2012, viii–ix. 37. Plutarch, Table Talk 7.8, 7.12. For a discussion on the distinctions of genre between Old and New Comedy, see Rosen 1995, 119–37; Olson 2007, 22–26; Horace, The Art of Poetry 283–84; and Velleius Paterculus, Compendium of Roman History 1.16.3, in Shipley 1967. 38. The review of the various theories of legislation, each problematic, is the subject of Halliwell 1991, particularly 55–56; Sommerstein 2004, 159–66; and briefly, Olson 2007, 205. 39. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae; but see also the moving account of the death of Philemon, the poet of Middle Comedy, in the midst of reading a new play at a very crowded theater, related by Apuleius, Florida 16.2. 40. Rusten 2011 is an enormously useful anthology of the fragments and commentary that have survived of this middle genre. Ian Storey argues, convincingly, for Timocles as a rare exception to the genre, something

of a throwback,Page 285 → as many of his fragments contain personal references. See Storey 2005, 205–6. notes to pages 88–93 41. Rusten 2011, 33. 42. Ephraim 343, quoting Aeneas Tacticus, How to Survive under Siege 11.7. 43. The claims of Menander’s relationship to Alexis of Thurii is surveyed in Arnott 1996a, 11–13. 44. Flickinger 1936, 39. 45. Choricius, On the Mimes, briefly discussed in Easterling 1995, 157–58. 46. Apuleius, Anthology 16, quoted in Rusten 2011, 602; Pollux, Thesaurus 4.143–54. Pollux’s summary is handily canvassed in Rusten 2011, 585–89, and with more discussion in Wiles 2004, 74ff. 47. Philippides fr. 25, in Olson 2007, 445. 48. Platonius, On the Distinctions among Comedies, quoted in Rusten 2011, 425. 49. For the generals, see Eupolis frs. 219 (“We now have [for] generals men you previously wouldn’t have chosen to be wine-inspectors”) and 384 (“we’ve selected scum as generals”); quoted from Olson 2007, 440. Nervegna (2013, 11–13) reviews what little biographic evidence survives of Menander’s early career, but includes the suggestion (11 n. 2) that Menander’s father was an associate of Demosthenes. 50. Nervegna (2013, 28–31) offers a few fragments of potential political engagement, some from Menander’s generation, but I can’t concur with the conclusion that “comedy was still a pressing concern for politicians and politics for comic poets” (30), at least not in the work of Menander. 51. A whimsical idea, but one with some iconographic support. J. R. Green (1995, 93–122) assembles the many images of cooks in New Comedy. 52. Menander’s name and figure are identified along with those of Hesiod, Virgil, Livy, Cicero, and Ennius, in the Monus mosaic preserved in Trier, Germany. His praise by other classical writers is summarized in Easterling 1995. A very useful survey of the images of Menander has been gathered up in Nervegna’s recent study (2013). 53. Manilius, On Astronomy 5.470–76, as quoted in Rusten 2011, 632. 54. Quintillian, Principles of Oratory; Aristophanes the Grammarian, quoted in Edmonds 1961, vol. 3b, 545. Pliny the Elder is also quoted in Edmonds 1961, vol. 3b, 535. 55. Pliny, Letters 6.21 (to Caninius Rufus), quoted in Rusten 2011, 729. 56. Plutarch, Comparison between Aristophanes and Menander; and for a discussion of Plutarch’s praise, see Dobrov 1995, 51–57. 57. Horace, Satires 2.3. 58. Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, 2.23.5–2.23.14; see also 17.21.42 for the three models Euripides, Sophocles, and Menander. See also Choricius of Gaza, On the Mimes. 59. Most recently documented by Guido Petruccioli, in an unpublished essay, “Portraits of Menander” (2007). 60. For studies on the image of Menander, see Bassett 2008, 201–25. For the new floor mosaic, see Gutzwiller and Г‡elik 2012, 573–623. 61. For dating the mosaics, see D. Levi 1947, 127–36. Csapo (2010, 144, 146) has discussed this mosaic, puzzled by the presence of Komodia, while Marshall Page 286 →(2012, 187–94, esp. 189) makes the surprising claim that the whole scene belongs more properly to another poet, Cratinus, in spite of the labels. notes to pages 93–100 62. Gutzwiller and Г‡elik 2012, 573–623. 63. Synaristosae, fragment identified by inscription. The excavation is being carried out by a consortium of interests: the Turkish Ministry of Culture, the South-Eastern Anatolian Project, and the Packard Humanities Institute. 64. The new visual evidence of Menander’s plays is best surveyed in Gutzwiller and Г‡elik 2012 and Blanchart 2014. 65. The controversy is summarized in Carpenter 1951, 34–50. 66. Nervegna 2013, 63. 67. See Basset 2008, 201–25. 68. “There are many poets of the New Comedy too, a famous one being Menander, вЂwho is star of the New Comedy,’ as we learn in school.” Scholiast on Dionysius of Thrace, in CGF 15. Plutarch

concurs: “But Menander has with his charms shown himself every way sufficient for satisfaction, being the sole lecture, argument, and dispute at theatres, schools and at table.” Plutarch, Comparison between Aristophanes and Menander. For his presence in the Roman education system, see Cribiore 2001. 69. Easterling 1995, 153–60, esp. 156. 70. Dio Chrysostom, Orationes 18.7. 71. Edmonds 1961, vol. 3b, 903. 72. Olson 2007, 31–32. 73. Philostratus, Love Letters 47: “Nor from Attica, for in that case you never would have failed to know the night festivals and the holidays and Menander’s plays.” Trans. Fobes and Benner 1949. 74. Fobes and Benner 1949. 75. The indebtedness of Alciphron’s letters to Menander (recreating his world) is the subject of Melissa Funke’s engaging new study (2016). 76. The latest find of Menandrian fragments (2003) reproduced the work in such small text that the entire play could fit on twelve sides (pages), leading some to conclude it was part of a collection, or complete works, manufactured in small portable editions, like octavos. 77. Plutarch, “Aristophanes and Menander,” Moralia 854.3. 78. Antiphanes, fr. 189 (KA), from Poetry. 79. Quoted in Edmonds 1961, vol. 3b, 539. 80. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 15.698c, quoting Polemon, who praises the great ingenuity of his wit. 81. Aeneas Tacticus, How to Survive under Siege 24, 25, 31. 82. Demosthenes, Oration 1.19–20, trans. Trevett 2011. 83. Blau 1982, 184–85. 84. Rusten 2011, v, lines from Nicholas Udall, Ralph Roister Doister. 85. Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 2.23.5; Plutarch, Table Talk 7.8.712. 86. Demosthenes, On Organization 13.34, trans. Trevett 2011. 87. The text was inadvertently leaked during a conference on the find, but has yet to see print. For a more thorough discussion and the recovery and reconstruction of new fragments, see Blanchard 2014. 88. The find belongs to Franceso D’Aiuto, working on Greek palimpsests in Page 287 →the Vatican Library and reported on Roger Pearse’s blogsite for antiquities, who heads an EU project on palimpsest research at Roger-Pearse.com. Blanchard 2014, 248. notes to pages 101–7 89. The work of Trogus is no longer extant, but is preserved in Justin’s epitome of the third century (CE), Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus, and quoted in Roberts 1994, 108. 90. Isocrates, Epistle 4, “To Antipater,” quoted in Papillon 2004, 261. 91. The expansion of Hellenistic theater is the subject of Dearden 1999 and Taplin’s (1992) very useful treatment of the plays outside of Athens. 92. Wilkins (2000) never considers food in any other context. 93. The tragic evocation in Menadrian comedy is the subject of Gutzwiller 2000, 102–37. 94. In the extant canon of Menander, there is only one small and isolated reference to a single topical figure, one Callimedon, a condemned partisan, lightly slurred in Methe. We know little else of this play, but the passage seems to take to task less than lavish offerings: “If I were God, I would never have allowed anyone to put the loin on the altar unless along with it, he were dedicating the eel in order to have secured the death of Callimedon, one of his kinsmen.” Rusten 2011, 643–44, from Athenaeus 8.364 D.

Chapter Five 1. From Solzhenitsyn 1973, xv. 2. Derrida 1978, 35. 3. Macrobius (Saturnalia 3.9.7) records the curse to call forth the gods of a besieged city and that curse as well used to dedicate a city to destruction. Both were used in the sack of Carthage. Text trans. Davies 1969, 218–19. 4. Polybius, Histories 10.18 and 19.3–5, describes the rampage as standard Roman practice. 5. The two classical descriptions of the final destruction of Carthage are Polybius, Histories, trans. Scott-

Kilvert 1979; and Appian, Wars of the Romans in Iberia, trans. Richardson 2000. 6. The play concerns a Carthaginian father looking for his daughters, who have been kidnapped and sold to a brothel somewhere, many of which the father is obliged to visit. The Roman joke—such as it was—is that the father, on his brothel tour, may very well end up sleeping with his own daughters. 7. Polybius, Histories 10.15.4–6, trans. Scott-Kilvert 1979. 8. For a more thorough discussion of the Roman conception of race, see Isaac 2004. Pliny succinctly puts it thus: “The Greeks are a most wicked and intractable race (“nequissimum et indocile genus”) (Natural History 10.14, quoted in Crawford 1978, 85). D. Mattingly 2011 is an important recent treatment of Roman foreign policy. 9. Kyle 1998, 76. Consider, for example, the imprecise but categorical tone to Plutarch’s description of Sulla’s conquest of Athens: “There was no numbering the slain; the amount is to this day conjectured only from the space of ground overflowed with blood. For without mentioning the execution done in Page 288 →other quarters of the city, the blood that was shed about the market place spread over the whole Ceramicus within the Double-gate, and according to most writers, passed through the gate and overflowed the suburb” (Plutarch, Life of Sulla, trans. Dryden) A more comprehensive catalog of the dead can be gleaned from Harris 1979, 263–64. notes to pages 107–12 10. Appian, Wars of the Romans in Iberia 8.134; Richardson 2000; Plutarch, Table Talk 9.1.737. 11. The figures from Sardinia are from Livy, History of Rome 41.28. Valerius Maximus (Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings 2.8) records the law forbidding generals to exaggerate the number of the enemy killed by swearing an oath on the truth of their report. 12. Strabo, Geography 7.5.5, trans. H. Jones 1949. The full, bloody narrative of the wars of the period is chronicled in Faulkner 2008, esp. 46–176. 13. See, for example, Polybius, Histories 31.23. For Polybius’s complex relationship to the Aemilius Paullus family, see Histories 18.46 and 10.40.2. For pacification attitudes, see D. Mattingly 2011, 17–19. 14. Keith Hopkins’s (1983, 1) phrase: “By the close of the 2nd century Rome had conquered perhaps one fifth or one sixth of the world’s then population.” 15. W. V. Harris 1979, 52. 16. Diodorus, Library of World History 32.4.5, trans. Walton 1957. 17. Appian, Wars of the Romans in Iberia 97, trans. Richardson 2000. 18. Barton 1993, 13. 19. Crawford 1978, 106. 20. Strabo, Geography 14.5.2. 21. Diodorus Siculus, Library of World History 5.26.3. 22. Reiter 1988, 139. 23. Crawford 1978, 106. 24. Appian, Wars of the Romans in Iberia 105. See also Sallust, The Jugurthine War 91. 25.D. Mattingly 2011, 25, citing Livy, History of Rome 45.34.4–6; and Plutarch, Life of Caesar 15.5. 26. Solzhenitsyn 1973, 1.442. 27.D. Mattingly 2011, 27. 28. See, for example, the summary of the infamia status of actors in Boyle 2008, xxvi–xxvii, and more thoroughly treated by Catharine Edwards, 1997. Manuwald provides the very thorough bibliography on the life, work, and classical sources for Terence (2012, 244–55 nn. 136–38). 29. Bieber 1961, 161; Manuwald 2012, 244. 30. For the brief biography of this brief life, see Duckworth 1971; Beare 1964; Beacham 1991; Boyle 2006; and Manuwald 2012. 31. Seneca, On Anger 1.1.5. 32. Plautus, The Carthaginian, 2.864–65, trans. Nixon 1932. 33. Beyond the campaigns themselves, a second and no less profound expression of Roman genocide played out in the gladiatorial arena. Inside that forum of war memory and mythmaking, the survivors of Carthage, Corinth, and Nova Carthago recreated their own destruction in the ultimate display of Page 289 →the subjected: by slaughtering each other. These contexts were not yet on the scale of the early empire two centuries later, when the games could offer as many as ten thousand pairs of gladiators over a five-day period, a feat sponsored by Augustus and Trajan both (Brunt and Moore 1967, 29; Dio Cassius, History of

Rome 68.15). But we recall that it was the excess of the civic celebrations of the Punic Wars of the second century BCE that established the senatorial limits on the numbers slaughtered (Dio Cassius, History of Rome 54.2). Much has been written about the games and their values to Rome. See, for example, Barton 1993; Hopkins 1983, vol. 2, 1–30. notes to pages 112–17 34. Juvenal, Satire I, trans. P. Green 1974. 35. David Jordan has published many surveys and descriptions of defixiones found in sites around the Mediterranean. See, for example, Jordan 1985a and 1985b. Tomlin 2002 summarizes the finds of nearly 250 curse tablets in Roman Britain. 36. The image of the voodoo pin is literal here, as images pierced with pins were often employed. Cf. Ovid: “Has some Thessalian poison bewitched my body, is it some spell or drug that has brought this misery upon me[?] Has some sorceress written my name on crimson wax, and stuck a pin in my liver[?]” Book of Love 3.7. 27–30, quoted in Gager 1992, 250–51. 37. Undated, from Nomentum, near Rome. Quoted in W. V. Harris 2001, 13. 38. E.g., Augustine, while still a young actor, was approached by a haruspex with the promise of victory if he purchased a charm (Confessions 4.2, quoted in Gager 1992, 43). 39. Nixon 1932; the term “signifyin(g)” has been widely employed, most popularly by Gates 1983, 685–723. 40. Gibbon 1993, 27. 41. The tragic sequence is replicated in Terence’s Adelphoe (The Brothers) 3.315, with the additional consequence of a child born from the rape. The victim’s name is also Pamphila, and the only line attributed to her is a cry of the pain of childbirth, offstage. Similarly, in his Hecyra (The Mother-in-Law), the unseen Philumena is only heard offstage crying while delivering another child of a rape. 42. Terence was among the Latin poets whom Horace spoke of as “the men whom mighty Rome commits to memory” (Horace, Epistle 2.1.60). 43. “The Roman master who visited the slave-market to buy a new slave had little difficulty in solving the important questions of nationality. He could read the label attached to each man, on which name and origin were recorded, or listed to the crier who announced the nationality of every slave in turn, as the law required” (Gordon 1960, 151). 44. Suetonius, De Poetis, Vita Terenti 1. 45. For a larger discussion of “Rome in the mirror,” see Leigh 2004, 7–8. 46. Finley (1980, 185) concurs, speaking specifically of Terence and Epictetus: “Even the few writers who had a personal background of enslavement show no influence of that experience, emotional or intellectual, in their surviving works, nothing to distinguish them from writers who lacked that peculiar background.” notes to pages 117–24 Page 290 → 47. One may of course read a critique of power into the machinations of the comic slave, but a moment of carnivalesque inversion against the paterfamilias is hardly compensation for genocide. 48. See Leigh 2004, 57. Finley (1980, 75–77) traces the Roman strategy of breaking family bonds of the prisoners and slaves. 49. The Eunuch 3.2.471–81, in D. Parker 1974. A fragment of Menander’s The Ephesian envisions a similar display, briefly: “I already seem to see myself, I swear, put through my paces by the auctioneer in the Circles, naked” (Edmonds 1961, vol. 3b, 622–23). Terence’s own experience made borrowing the Menandrian image unnecessary. 50. In the remains of a Roman theater in Thubursicu, Numidia (Algeria), there is still a keystone decorated with the mask of a eunuch, labeled as such, eunucu (Sear 2006, 287). 51. A relief of a tombstone from the late first century BCE depicts a naked slave standing on an auction block (Museo Campano, Capua). 52. Terence, Eunuch 5.2.854–58, trans. D. Parker 1974. 53. Suetonius, On Poets 2. 54.D. Mattingly 2011, xxii. 55. Seneca, On Anger 3. 56. Herodotus, History 7.239, trans. SГ©lincourt 1954. 57. Aeneas Tacticus, How to Survive under Siege 32.2–33. 58. Ricoeur 2004, xv.

Chapter Six 1. John Montague, “A Lost Tradition” and “The Grafted Tongue,” respectively, from Montague 1995. 2. “Romanizing,” “Romanization,” and the useful term “Creolization” have, of course, been much troubled of late in their particulars, yet still function as useful general terms in the way that “westernizing” or “globalization” remain useful. A discussion of the terms can be found in Woolf 1997, or more succinctly put elsewhere: “Romanization is a convenient shorthand for the series of cultural changes that created an imperial civilization, within which both differences and similarities came to form a coherent pattern” (Woolf 1998, 7). Cf. J. Webster 2001 for “Creolizing” and MacMullen 2000 for the cultural “push and pull” toward becoming Roman. 3. It is a curious feature that even major studies of Romanizing in the provinces (Woolf 1998; D. Mattingly 2011; MacMullen 2000; Potter and Johns 1992; Keay 1988; and Thomas 2007) offer but brief reflections on the theater, mostly the archaeologic descriptions. For the consideration of the premise of theaters as temples, see Hanson 1959 and, more recently, Laurence, Cleary, and Sears 2011. For the recent catalog of the surviving architecture, see Sear 2006, below. 4. The archaeological excavation at Orange was undertaken by Jules FormigГ©, who restored the image of Augustus, missing its head, and was summarized by Lantier 1946, 76–90, esp. 81. For it and the similar statue, also of Augustus, found at the theater at Arles, see Rivet 1988, 194. notes to pages 124–31 Page 291 → 5. Drinkwater (1983, 19) has noted that “after the civil wars had ended the future lay not with dispirited civitas-elders, but with the young Gallic cavalry leaders whoВ .В .В . had accepted service with Rome as a means of giving vent to their native military enthusiasms.В .В .В . [I]f they survived, these would return home wealthy, travelled, partially Romanised and with a positive inclination to change their own way of life and that of their communities, in which they would exercise considerable influence.” 6. Herodotus, History 1.176. 7. A point made by P. Wells 1999, 129. 8. Potter and Johns 1992, 95–97 (photograph, 97). 9. For the geography of the empire, and the various stages of infrastructure required, see Adams and Laurence 2001. The Stanford Orbis Project allows an interactive geospatial map for modeling travel between destinations in ancient Rome. 10. I am, as indeed the field is, deeply indebted to the recent work of Frank Sear, who cataloged and described three hundred Roman theaters in his magisterial Roman Theatres: An Architectural Study (2006). Over much of the twentieth century, a multinational map of imperial Rome was under way, the Tabula Imperii Romani, but due to frequent interruptions the project never achieved its envisioned results (Gardiner 1973, 107–11). 11. For a summary of the practice of considering the landscape “from the point of view of its inhabitants,” see Petts 1998, 83–85. 12. Sear 2006, 302. 13. Several examples of this practice are documented in Hanson 1959, 97–99. 14. Pratt 2004, 452. 15. Tacitus, Annals 14.30, trans. Church 2007. 16. Moretti 2005, 35. 17. Woolf 1998, 7–8. 18. This grid has been parsed out, building by building, in the recent work of Laurence, Cleary, and Sears (2011). 19. For the incursions of roads, see Keay 1988, 49; for landscape management, see MacMullen 2000, 100–101; also, for the case of Salpia, see Vitruvius, On Architecture 1.4. 20. Potter and Johns 1992, 95. 21. Caesar, Gallic War 1.1. 22. For the architecture of Trajan’s Column, see Hill 2010, 27–43, esp. 36. 23. Res Gestae Divi Augusti, “The Achievements of the Divine Augustus,” 31; see also Strabo, Geography 7.11: “In fact, only recently, when Augustus Caesar sent an expedition against them, the number of parts into which the empire had been divided was five, though at the time of the insurrection it

had been four. Such divisions, to be sure, are only temporary and vary with the times.” Trans. H. Jones 1949. 24. Hence MacMullen 2000. 25. Tacitus, The Life of Gnaeus Julius Agricola 14, trans. Birley 2009. On the possibility that Tacitus was himself from Gaul, see Woolf 1998, 73. 26. Precisely the questions that propel the collection of essays edited by Cooley (2002b). notes to pages 132–35 Page 292 → 27. As Stek (2010, 2 n. 1) has noted, “The bibliography of the debate [on Romanization] in a provincial context is immense.” Pitts 2007 surveys the current approaches to the problem, but see also Mattingly 2004; Woolf 1998, 5–7; and MacMullen 2000. Webster (2001, 209–25) has suggested “Creolizing” as a term that more closely approximates the assimilation practices in the provinces. 28. For the reappropriation of land, see D. Mattingly 2011, 141–43. For the discussion on diglossia or bilingualism and their various configurations, see Cooley 2002a. 29. Woolf 1998, 11. 30. Dio Chrysostom, The Hunters of Euboea (Euboean Oration), trans. Hadas 1953. The experience of the hunter was shared by the apostle Paul in Ephesus when the silversmiths there saw in the apostle a threat to their business in shrine-making. They gathered fellow craftsmen in the theater and for the space of two hours shouted down Paul and his new god (Acts 19:23–41). For the theater as an Assembly, see also Chariton below; Apuleius (Metamorphosis 3.2ff.) has a similar account of a trial in the theater that proves to be an elaborate joke for all but the accused. 31. Josephus, Against Apion 1.42–44, in W. Whiston 1998. 32. Grant 1973, 124, relying on Philo (Against Flaccus, 72.84–85), who offers a long descriptive passage on all of the anti-Jewish assaults that happened in late summer of CE 38. For the theater as a site of parodying Jewish religious culture, see Weiss 2010, 634–35. 33. Weiss 2014, 13. 34. Wilmott 2007. Allason-Jones (2011, 227) traces six theaters in Roman Britain, but more sites are assembled in Sear 2006, 196–98. The Kent excavation was first announced in The Guardian, January 2013. For the amphitheater in London, see Bateman 2000. For Spain, see Sear 2006, 260–70; and Curchin 1991. 35. Laurence, Cleary, and Sears 2011, 239; Sear 2006, 260–70. 36. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 15.8.1, trans. Whiston 1998. 37. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 15.8.1, trans. Whiston 1998. 38. Malalas, Chronicle 261; Sear 2006, 302. 39. Josephus notes three theaters build by Herod; the construction of Sepphoris has been argued to the work of either Herod or his son, Herod Antipas (A. Segal 1995, 5). For similar projects in the Roman Near East, see Retzleff 2003. 40. For the Jewish response to the theater, see Weiss 2004, 31 and n. 36. 41. Tacitus, The Life of Gnaeus Julius Agricola 1.21, trans. Birley 2009. 42. Laurence, Cleary, and Sears 2011, 24–43. 43. This overmapping on sacred sites, spring sanctuaries, or religious spaces is a practice particularly acute in the Three Gauls. See Sear 2006, 200–236, passim. 44. This paucity has given rise to some wild conjectures about the nature of some performances on the basis of fragments of masks found in various sites in Roman Gaul and Roman Britain. G. D. Marsh concedes from three masks found in London that “it is more likely that they were worn in semi-religious performances and processions” (1979, 265); while Sear (2006, 208) claims that “the discovery of grimacing and burlesque masks suggests this was a mystery theatre where initiates participated in scenic and cult games; performances intendedPage 293 → both to please gods and ward off evil spirits; probably only for initiates; high walls ensured privacy.” notes to pages 136–39 45. Sharples 1991, 125ff. 46. I won’t cite individual references here, but the phrase (and its troubling assumptions) does show up among classicists and archaeologists often. 47. Even MacMullen (2000, 103), who goes farther than most, can concede that ideology was part of the theater structure where it adjoined the temple to Augustus; but he concludes, “Just what else went on in

these places of entertainment is nowhere indicated.” 48. Vitruvius, On Architecture 5.3.1. 49. M. Lewis 1966, 10. 50. This is the thesis of John Arthur Hanson (1959, 3); Laurence, Cleary, and Sears (2011, chap. 9); and Manuwald (2012, 57). See discussion below. 51. MacMullen (1981, 18–21) traces the antecedents of the theater/sanctuary in Greece, in Rome itself, and the later installations in the Roman East. Laurence, Cleary, and Sears (2011) cover the Roman West. For theater as simply “entertainment,” Wilmott 2007 is representative; Rogers (2011, 89–91) puzzles over the function of “spectacle buildings”: “unclear to what extent theatres and amphitheatres were used.” 52. Tacitus notes as much of the temple to Claudius, that its presence “consigned the Britons to slavery” (Annals 14.31). 53. Zeev Weiss’s (2014, 57) point, indirectly, when he considers what such monumental buildings might have meant in Roman Palestine. 54. The conclusions are those of Philip Crummy (1992, 323), who undertook the excavations of Roman Colchester from 1971 to 1985. The findings are published in twelve volumes. A brief of the report on the theater can be found in Crummy 1982. The theater was discovered not to be the original theater, but a second one built over the remains of a prior theater. 55. Crummy 1982, 125–34, esp. 126. 56. Crummy 1982a, for the archaeological illustration, 126; Crummy 1982b, for the discussion, 301–2. 57. Connerton (2009, 40–44) writes of commercial sites that separate modes of production from consumption and are thus constituted by a loss of memory of the process of production. I am applying the term here as a cultural rather than economic transformer. 58. “On the continent, theatres were not infrequently attached to temples” was M. Lewis’s (1966, 130) assessment. 59. Hanson 1959, 59, 97; M. Lewis 1966, 130; MacMullen 1981, 19; Sear 2006, 44–45. 60. Sear 2006, 196, 238; Potter and Johns 1992, 33. 61. Picard 1970. Also Hanson 1959, 97. 62. Strabo, Geography 5.3.8. 63. Tacitus, Annals 14.31, trans. Church 2007. 64. Weiss (2014, 58) lists thirteen; earlier (2010) he claims twenty-three sites in Roman Palestine, which may reflect contested geography(?). 65. For a list of sites and a review of the archaeologic literature, see A. Segal 1995, who generously appends a fulsome collection of photographs of the sites Page 294 →and remains in Roman Palestine. The specific Sear reference is from the 2006 volume, p. 108. notes to pages 139–42 66. Netzer and Weiss 1994, 17. 67. A. Segal 1995, 5. 68. The process is described by Laurence, Cleary, and Sears (2011, 257) as “universal urban identity—an identity which necessarily replaced the вЂbarbarian’ identity associated with what was unique to each particular place.” 69. The Zoilos Frieze, Aphrodisias Archeological Museum, Geyre, Turkey; images reproduced in Erim 2012, 80–81; his cursus and freeze are discussed in Reynolds 1982, 156–59, appendix 5. 70. Philostratus, Life of Apollonius 5.9, trans. Conybeare 1927. 71. An inscription (CIL 3.4910) at Virunum (Austria) mentions a twelve-year-old African dancing girl (cataloged in Sear 2006, 258). Catalogs of known mimes have been assembled by Charles Garton (largely Rome), and a more encyclopedic edition by Hartmut Leppin (1992) for the western provinces, cataloged pp. 189–313. 72. The anecdote is frankly better told in Easterling and Miles 1999, 101. 73. An image of the inscription is reproduced in Di Vita, Di Vita-Evrard, and Bacchielli 1998, 68, with discussion. Other bilingual inscriptions are on p. 61. 74. Cooley 2002a, 77–80, including graffiti. 75. The Bordeaux Itinerary, 333 CE, for example, notes that Gallic dialects were still in use in the West, as were other holdouts, like Gallic leagues, as opposed to Roman miles (cited by T. B. Jones 1978, 24–25;

see also the bibliography for Bordeaux Itinerary 1965). 76. In Carteria, Spain, for example, four thousand sons of Roman soldiers and Iberian wives were granted citizenship by an act of the Senate (Livy, History of Rome 43.3). For marriage practices, see Phang 2001, particularly 190ff. 77. Keay 1988, 55; Curchin 1991, 110; Strabo, Geography 3.2.1. 78. E.g., “Granius Silo, son of Elaesus,” recorded in Curchin 1991, 79. See also Van Dommelen 1998. MacMullen 2000, 98–99, traces four generations of Latinization from the Gallic sire Epotsorovidus to his great-grandson C. Julius Rufus, who dedicated the triumphal arch in Lyon that marked the conquest. Cooley 2002a, 80–81, suggests two distinct citizenries in Pompeii at the time of the Catilinarian conspiracy. 79. Strabo, Geography 3.2.15, quoted in Keay 1988, 59. Measuring “identity” in the Roman world has become something of a small industry, whose various approaches (as researched by Roymans, Mattingly, Woolf, Webster, and Van Dommelen) are nicely summarized in Pitts 2007, 695. 80. The resistance in Spain is documented by Dio Cassius, History of Rome 53.29.1–2, 54.5.1–3, 54.11.2–5, and 54.20.3; see also Appian, Wars of the Romans in Iberia 101. 81. The classical sources for the revolt of 21 CE are Tacitus (Annals 3.41), Dio Cassius (History of Rome 57.20.1–57.22.4), and Jullian 1927, 153–60. 82. Millett 1999, 196. Van Der Veen, Livarda, and Hill (2007) have documented the introduction of more than fifty new foods into the Roman Britain after the conquest, not including the luxury goods out of reach for most. Across the Channel, one of the features that persistently marked the Gauls as barbarianPage 295 → was their insistence on drinking wine “neat,” without diluting it as the Romans did, which, if combined with a festival, already makes their consumption of theater quite a different experience. notes to pages 143–49 83. MacMullen 2000, 88. 84. Hanson and Conolly 2002, 151–64, esp. 152. 85. On this point, see Cooley 2002a, 82. 86. Zosimus, New History 6.5.3, trans. Thompson 1977. The passage has raised questions in chronology, but the historian’s certitude of a prior identity is what I am pursuing here, not the timeline. See M. Jones 1998, 249 n. 19 for a survey of the crux. 87. Woolf 1996, 95–96. 88. For bilingual inscriptions, see HГ¤ussler 1998, 13; and Cooley 2002a. Bilingual culture, code-switching, and hybridic identity is the subject of Alex Mullen’s substantial study on Roman Gaul (2013). 89. Laurence, Cleary, and Sears 2011, 257. 90. Mullen 2013, 17. 91. Wiseman 2008, 22–33. 92. MacMullen 2000, 121–22. 93. Livy, preface to his History of Rome 7, quoted and discussed in Wiseman 2008, 243. 94. Beacham (1991) 131–33; Suetonius Lives of the Caesars, 2.45, 6.39. When Cicero (Epistle to Atticus 14.3.2) writes for the latest witticisms of the mimes, it is not innocent humor he’s after. One of the more egregious moments was the murder of an actor onstage, recorded in Diodorus Siculus (fr. 37.12.3) Walton. A second actor stepped onstage just after the murder, one who was described as dangerous for his satire, and narrowly escaped his own murder by pandering to the audience. He was threatening because he could “excite laughter not only by his words, but even when he was silent, by the different poses of his body.” 95. Dio Cassius, History of Rome 17.21.2, quoted in Hall and Wyles 2008, 19. 96. The shard is preserved in the Leicester City Museum. 97. Birley 2001, 250, notes several “Verecundi” stationed at the Vindolanda garrison and notes additionally that the name was Latinized but Celtic in origin. This Verecunda was dated by archaeologists to Phase III, c. 90s CE. Bowman and Thomas (2003, 110), who published many of the Vindolanda tablets, speculate that this Verecunda was the wife of the addressee of the “greetings.” 98. Wilmott 2007, 161–62. 99. Greene 2013, 375. 100. The compendious register of inscriptions RIB (Roman Inscriptions of Britain) lists only two instances

of the name, both funerary inscriptions, the second at the northern Roman outpost of Auchendavy. 101. Divine 2013, 114. 102. Wacher 1995, 56; Strabo, Geography 4.1.5. 103. All three functions are described by Apuleius, Metamorphoses 3.2–11 and Florida 16.3ff. 104. Josephus, Antiquities 15.8.1, trans. Whiston 1998. 105. Ovid, The Art of Love 1.89–90, quoted in Beacham 1991, 249. notes to pages 149–52 Page 296 → 106. Tacitus, Germany and Its Tribes 19. 107. Philostratus, Life of Apollonius 5.8–5.9; and see chapter 7 below. 108. For the dynamics of claques in the theaters, see Morstein-Marx 2004, 134. 109. Chariton, first to second century CE novelist in Aphrodisias, describes an impromptu gathering of the citizens in times of crisis, and the theater’s use as an assembly for high-profile trials (Chaereas and Callirhoe 1.1.11, 3.4.17, 7.3.10). The ecclesiastic historian Socrates Scholasticus, in Ecclesiastical History 7.13, describes a similar gathering in the theater of Alexandria in 415. On this occasion the prefect announced public ordinances. For similar experiences, see also Livy, History of Rome 33.28; Eunapius, Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists, 6.21.9; and Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History 5.9. For the political threat of theaters, see Zonaras, Extracts of History 8.2. For edicts and municipal decrees, see Sherk 1970 and Slater (1996b, 85–89), who discusses at length “where one sat.” And finally, the discontented: it was in the portico of Pompey’s theater that Brutus and Cassius stood waiting for Julius Caesar on the Ides of March (Appian, Civil Wars 2.16.116). 110. Tacitus, [The Life of Cnaeus Cassius] Agricola 12, trans. Birley 2009. 111. Curchin 1991, 180–81. See his subsequent discussion on “cultural resistance” for other examples. 112. Speaking of Balbus, Pollio wrote to Cicero from Cordoba, Spain, in June of 43 BCE: “He presented the actor Herennius Gallus with a gold ring, and conducted him to a seat in the fourteen rows—for that was the number of rows he had assigned to the equestrian rank” (Cicero, Epistles to Friends 10.32.2). The same front-row privileges were reserved for senators in the theaters in the realm of Polemon, king of Pontus (Dio Cassius, History of Rome 53.25.1), and the Equine mark, reserving the third row for knights, is still visible at Orange. For penalties for seating in the wrong seat, see Suetonius, Life of Augustus 14; Slater 1996b, 855–89. 113. Beacham 1991, 167. For the importance of seating in the Roman theater, see Tacitus, Annals 2.33, 6.33, and 15.32. For social roles and political rank, see Alfoldy 1985, 102ff. As late as 396, the Theodosian Code (15.13.1) is still sorting out the matter of seating in theaters. 114. Boyle 2006, 165–66; Tacitus, Annals 2.83. 115. Appian, Civil Wars 15, trans. White 1972. The soldier is produced alive after a threat from Octavius. 116. The plan of the uniform Vitruvian design is, of course, not borne out by the archaeologic evidence (Sear 2006, 28; A. Segal 1995, 21), but Vitruvius’s concept of the basic features, function, and style of building theaters remains remarkably similar from North Africa to Gaul, though size and proportion may vary from site to site. 117. Tacitus, Annals 2.33, trans. Church 1942. 118. Curchin 1991, 181. 119. Tacitus, Annals 13.54, trans. Church 1942. 120. Even the snitches, like the freedman who accused Publius Gallus and was rewarded with “a seat in the theatre, among the tribune’s officers” (Tacitus, Annals 16.12). 121. Sear 2002, 308–9, 305. 122. RouechГ© 1991, 99–108, esp. 102. notes to pages 152–58 Page 297 → 123. In the stadium at Aphrodisias, for example, two rows were reserved for visiting Ephesians. 124. Tacitus, [The Life of Gnaeus Julius] Agricola 21, trans. Birley 2009. 125. Strabo, Geography 3.4.20. 126. Pomponius Mela, Description of the World 3.14, trans. Romer 1998. Pliny also declined to name the barbarians for fear of “trying his reader’s patience” (Curchin 1991). 127. Mela, Description of the World 3.51, trans. Romer 1998. 128. Tacitus, Germany and Its Tribes 5.2, 15.2; Curchin 1991, 183; for the new minting of non-Roman

coins, see Potter and Johns 1992, 30–32. 129. Tacitus, Annals 6.13, trans. Church; or see Pliny, Natural History 34.19, for the agitation over a statue stolen from the public baths. 130. For collegia and other urban associations, see Edmondson 1996, 101. 131. Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana 5.8–9, trans. C. Jones 2005. 132. Curchin 1991, 79, echoing a point forcefully made by MacMullen 2000. Millet 1990 recognized that the investment in Roman culture represented an enhancement of provincial life for elite and nonelite alike—one directly, the other secondhand, a position troubled by J. Webster 2001. 133. The uprising was 21 CE. The theater in Arausio dates as well from the early first century. No causality between the new theater and the revolt is suggested, but just considered. 134. J. Webster 2001, 220–21, cites the pairing of Celtic and Roman gods in Gaul.

Chapter Seven 1. The early theaters and the resistance to permanent theater in Rome are treated briefly by Beacham (1991, 66–67); Boyle (2006, 21–22); and Sear (2006, 54–56); and more thoroughly by Manuwald 2012, 57–63. 2. Manuwald 2012, 59. Boyle 2008, xxvii, suggests that the real grievance behind the official complaint of morality was a distrust of popular power. 3. Epitome of Livy 48, trans. Roberts. This sentiment finds repeated iterations among several classical sources, from the broad distrust of all things Greek (Pliny, Natural History 19.14), to the particular objections to theater. Tacitus considered sitting to watch a play another decadent Greek habit (Annals 14.20). See also Appian, Civil Wars 1.4; and Tertullian, On Spectacles, 10. 4. Beacham 1991, 66. 5. Some of this murky and immaterial prehistory has found evocative exploration in Wiseman 2008. For the early Oscan traditions, see Denard 2007. 6. Livy, History of Rome 7.2; Tacitus, Annals 14.21; on the introduction of satyr plays, see Beacham 1991, 11–12. 7. Polybius, Histories 30, quoted in Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 14.615. 8. Plato, Laws 63a, recalled still in Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 4.156., trans. Gulick 1993. 9. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 4.166f.; I am reminded that Plautus begins his Brothers Menaechmus with a child stolen at Tarentum during a festival. 10. Aelian, Various Histories 12.30, trans. N. G. Wilson 1997. notes to pages 158–63 Page 298 → 11. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 12.545, trans. Gulick 1993. 12. Tarentum’s reputation for being “theater mad” is nicely summarized in Beacham 1991, 17. 13. For the Phylakes vase evidence, see Bieber 1961, 129–46; Trendall 1991; Taplin 1992; and Green 1995. 14. Wiseman 2008, 195–96; Manuwald 2012, 27–28; Beacham 1991, 9. 15. Taplin 1997, 88. For the vases as evidence of an “attitude different from that in classical Athens,” see Manuwald 2012, 27. 16. Manuwald 2012, 27. 17. Manuwald 2012, 27–28, argues that Rhinthon’s genre was closer to Greek Middle Comedy, and provides an ampler discussion on Rhinthon. See also Wiseman 2008, 195–96. 18. Dio Cassius, History of Rome 9.5, in Carey and Foster 1914. The Tarentine conflict with Rome is canvassed by several classical sources: Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus; Livy, History of Rome 8.27; Appian, Samnite History 1; Valerius Maximus, Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings 2.2.5; Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.12; Dio Cassius, History of Rome, quoted at length below and redacted by Zonaras, Extracts of History 8.2. 19. Dio Cassius History of Rome, 9.5, trans. Carey and Foster 1914. 20. Dio Cassius, History of Rome 9.39.5–40.5, trans. Carey and Foster 1914. Dio Cassius was at least the fourth historian to retell this particular anecdote. This account is narrated in Valerius Maximus, Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings; the fragments of Appian, Samnite History; and earlier, by Dionysius of

Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 19.5.1–5. 21. A defense of the Tarentines against Roman imperialism is undertaken by Rowland 1983, 761. 22. Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus 16.2. 23. Dio Cassius, History of Rome 9.39.10, trans. Carey and Foster 1914. 24. Polybius, Histories 8.32. 25. Sear 2006, 144. 26. Strabo, Geography 6.3.1. 27. Juvenal, Satire 6.297, trans. P. Green 1974. 28. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 12.522, trans. Gulick 1993. 29. For the rough date of his birth and biographical sketch, I rely here on Boyle (2006, 27–29), who summarizes the crux, ancient and modern, as well as his early career, and on Manuwald 2012, 188–90. Both canvas the classical sources. 30. Cicero, in Brutus 72, also noting that Andronicus was taken prisoner at Tarentum. Livy, History of Rome 7.2, offers a brief sketch of the Roman origins of drama. The dates of Andronicus, as indeed much of his early life and the murky origins of Latin literature, are questioned by Beare (1940b, 11–19), and the debate canvassed by Jory (1970). 31. For the collegium, see Jory 1970. 32. For the literary career of Andronicus, see Boyle 2006, 27–36, and Erasmo 2004, 9–14. 33. Horace, Epistles 2.1.156–57, trans. Passage 1983. 34. This is certainly the suggestion of Beacham 1991, 18–19. Erasmo 2004, 155 Page 299 →n. 1, notes the Roman reticence to acknowledge its Greek origins, a feature Boyle (2006, 27) writes off to “Augustan discomfort.” notes to pages 163–67 35. The various prohibitions are surveyed in Boyle 2006, 22; the author also notes (245 n. 78) that the bulk of the Greek population in Rome at the time were predominantly slaves, an association that ought to be borne in mind. 36. Tacitus, Annals 14.20, trans. Church, but for sitting, see Bieber 1961, 167–68, and Sear 2006, 57. Manuwald (2012, 55–56) confirms the Republican suspicions. 37. Tacitus, Annals 14.21, imagining a defense of the new permanent theater, contrasts the mirth of the present audiences to the “debauchery” and “lawless conduct” of the former. 38. Beacham 1991, 18. 39. Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus 16. 40. Beiber 1961, 168. 41. Tacitus, Annals 14.20. 42. Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 10.1.6–9. Pompey himself described his theater as “a temple, under which we have placed steps for spectacles,” according to Tertullian, The Shows 10.5. For early attempts at constructing theaters, see Bieber 1961, 167–68, more recently covered by Boyle (2006, 109–12). 43. Beacham 1991, 65. 44. Duckworth 1971, 80, who suggests it was part of the hostility to Greek culture in general. 45. Plautus describes the collapsed scaffolding of a wooden theater in The Forgery 5.2. 46. Appian, Civil Wars 4.28. 47. Vitruvius, On Architecture 3.3.2. 48. Cicero, On the Republic 1.9. This discussion of what would come to be called infamia is surveyed by Jory (1995, 143–45). 49. For the theater as tribute to Pompey’s status, see Velleius Paterculus, Compendium of Roman History 2.48.2, 2.40.4; Yardley 2011. 50. Suetonius, Life of Caesar 44.1; Dio Cassius, History of Rome 43, 49.2; for the triumphs in competition, see Deutsch 1926. 51. Beacham (1991, 246 n. 13) suggests that images of the fourteen conquered nations from Pompey’s triumph were subsequently mounted in his theater. These may be the statues described by Pliny (Natural History 36.24), and the template for other theaters like Herod’s, or the ones in Orange or Arles. 52. Tacitus, Annals 14.20. 53. Sear 2006, 57. 54. Santangelo 2007, 228, who links the dedication to the opening of the theater. Temples had been

incorporated into Greek theaters at this time, and Sear (2006, 57) suggests that they may have been part of prior temporary theaters in Rome. For the objections, see Tacitus, Annals 14.20, and on its reputation, Tertullian, On Spectacles 10. 55. Pliny, Natural History 7.49. 56. Displaying statues within the theater had been a feature of even the temporary theaters, according to Pliny (Natural History 34.17). notes to pages 168–76 Page 300 → 57. These nations, all represented as subjugated women, trod on by Nero (Armenia) and Claudius (Britain), are now located at the Aphrodisias museum. 58. Horace, Epistle 2.1.200–207, trans. Passage 1983. 59. Virgil, Georgics 3.23–25, trans. Rhoades 1881.

Chapter Eight 1. MacMullen 2000. This idea of replicated forms is the center of his closing chapter. 2. For the Roman ridicule of Dacian architecture, see E. W. Hill 2010, 36. 3. Thomas 2007, 3. 4. For a detailed analysis of Roman theater designs and Vitruvius, see Sear 1990, 249–58; also summarized in Sear 2006, 27–36. 5. Tacitus, The Life of Gnaeus Julius Agricola 11, trans. H. Mattingly 2009. 6. Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture 1.1.5, trans. Rowland and Howe 1999. See also Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 12.522f.: “Even to this day each of the houses in Tarentum has as many columns outside the front doors as it harbored members of the band dispatched to Iapygia. At these columns, on the anniversary of their destructionВ .В .В . the people sacrifice to Zeus the Thunderer.” Trans. Gulick 1993. 7. For Spain, Curchin 1991, 108; North Africa, Walker 2000, 65–66. For a recent and engaging treatment of Roman cultural memory, see Galinsky and Lapatin 2015. 8. This is the point of Thomas’s (2007, 2) discussion of the nature of monumental architecture, a monument left “as a warning to posterity.” 9. Vitruvius (On Architecture 1.1.6) offers a second example of the borrowed memory in architecture, the Spartan defeat of Persians (“images of Persian captives, decked out in their ornate barbarian dress, holding up the roof, their pride punished with well-deserved outrage”) and notes of them the edifying value of such triumphal images as architecture (“by this means enemies might shrink back, terror stricken at the results of Spartan courage”). Trans. Rowland and Howe 1999. 10. Vickers 1985, 3–28, esp. 4. 11. Small 1983, 63. NГ®mes, for example, built its amphitheater before its aqueduct (Rivet 1988, 195). 12. Pausanias, Description of Greece 10.4.1, trans. P. Levi 1979. 13. Pliny, Epistles 10.38, 10.39. 14. Large studies might be represented by Michael Grant’s (1999) engaging work, or Michael Jones’s (1998); two fine examples of microhistories of the collapse are the archaeo-botanical study of the loss of luxury foods after the collapse (Bakels and Jacomet 2003) and L. West 1932. 15.D. Mattingly (2006, 533) traces the deurbanizing of Roman Britain, 529–539. 16. Cormack 1981, 116. 17. Pliny, Natural History 27.1.3, trans. Bostock 1893; L. West 1932, 97–98. 18. “The Ruin,” from The Exeter Book, Exeter Cathedral Library, ms. 3501, online translation (http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/sechard/oeruin.htm). notes to pages 176–83 Page 301 → 19. Simon Cleary (2013, 118–19) parses the decay further, as shift from theaters to amphitheaters, with the later enduring a century or so later. The suggestion is that theaters were too closely allied with imperial religion. 20. Retzleff 1988, 116. 21. Cleary 2013, 119–21. 22. Patrich 2002, 231–39, esp. 231. 23. Sear 2006, 209; Reich and Billig 2000. 24. Ammianus Marcellinus, History [Res Gestae] 29.6.11, quoted in Sear 2006, 258.

25. Sear 2006, 266, 209, 210, 212, 196, 206, 292. 26. Dixon 1994, 145–69, esp. 147. On the amphitheater at Arles as a fortified town, see Rivet 1988, 194–95; similarly at Cirencester in Roman Britain, see Dixon 1994, 147. 27. Ros 1996, 482. Both MacMullen (1959, 209) and Mitchell (1987, 351) document the largesse of the emperors toward rebuilding after natural disasters. 28. For Aphrodisias, see Erim 2012; for Butrino, see Gilkes 2003; for Sagalasos, see Waelkens 1995. For Philadelphia, Diocaesarea, and Antipatras, see Retzleff, 122 n. 34. 29. Gilkes 2003, 177–78. For the spoiling and reuse of the theater, see Hansen and Hodges 2007, 12. 30. Nivlett 2001, 130. 31. Mattingly 2006, 533; Dixon 1992; Potter and Johns 1992, 210. For the continuation of Late Roman culture, see Rogers 2011. 32. For details on the buildings’ growth and development, see Sear 2006, 196–98. Reece (1992, 139) additionally notes that “a thriving business, street or town keeps itself free of rubbish.” It builds up, the argument runs, in times of general disorder or decay. 33. Nivlett 2001, 135. Lowe (1848, 16) found the fill nine feet deep. 34. Lowe 1848, 16. 35. Ros 1996, 482 n. 154. 36. Quoted in Chuvin 1990, 164–65 n. 4.

Chapter Nine 1. Trans. Green 1974. When Juvenal writes of the “same old shows” restaged, the antiquity of the shows is confirmed reliably by Cicero who, a century earlier, had documented performances of more than twenty plays from early Roman tragedians (Ennius, Pacuvius, Naevius), still annually performed in the late Republic (Boyle 2006, 145). Martial as well notes the frightening nature of the masks (Epigram 14.176.) 2. Apuleius, The Golden Ass 10.29. 3. Lucian, How to Write History 1, trans. Fowler and Fowler 1905. 4. Quoted in Easterling 1997b, 223; Eunapius, fr. 54. 5. Blockley 1981. For the account of Eunapius, see Easterling 1995, 95–111, esp. 101; and again, Easterling 1997b, 211–27, esp. 223. 6. Philostratus, Life of Apollonius 5.9, trans. Conybeare 1927. 7. Lucian, The Dance 27, trans. Harmon 1947. The passage describes the disproportionatePage 302 → modifications to the body as well as the head—padding and paunches—and what is oddest to Lucian is the unnatural voice (“the height of unseemliness”). notes to pages 183–88 8. A print of both images, the ivory diptych celebrating the consular games of Anastasius in 517, and a detail can be found in Webb 2008, 94ff., illustrations 2 and 3 (Paris, BibliothГЁque Nationale de France, Monnaies, MГ©dailles de Antiques, inv. 55 296 bis). 9. Libanius, On the Dancers 98, in Molloy 1996, 143. A life-size tragic mask was found in Baldock, near St. Albans; another, in ivory, from the amphitheater in Caerleon, Wales (Laing 1997, 129; and Allason-Jones 2011, 227). 10. Barnash 1992, quoted in Hall and Wyles 2008, 403. 11. Cicero, On the Orator 2.193, trans. Boyle, quoted in Boyle 2006, 146. 12. For this legacy, see Easterling 1997b. 13.Juvenal, Satire 7.72–74, trans. P. Green 1974; the quotation from Horace that follows is from Art of Poetry, line 119, 270 14. Cicero, Brutus 20.79. For the work of Ennius, fragments and commentary, see Jocelyn 1967 and Wiseman 2008, 39–51. 15. Aulus Gelius, Attic Nights 13.2. 16. The history of early Roman tragedy is admirably summarized by Beacham (1991, 117–27), while Boyle (2006) provides translations and commentary on the fragments of the Republican tragedians. 17. Horace, Epistles 2.3 (The Art of Poetry 90); see also Odes 1.16.17. 18. Cicero thought Caesar’s oratorical style remained suggestive of the stage: “Whoever beside

Caesar has handled tragic themes in a manner almost proper to comedy, gloomy topics lightheartedly, severe ones cheerfully, and the business of the courts with a charm suggestive of the stage?” (On the Orator 3.8.30, trans. Rackham 1960). 19. Suetonius, Life of Augustus 83. 20. Jocelyn 1967, 48. 21. Quintillian (Institutes of Oratory 10.1.98) thought it comparable to any Greek tragedy. 22. Boyle 2006, 161–62, and here also is a brief discussion on why this Thyestes was written on the occasion of Augustus’s triumph, an occasion Boyle concludes “was a huge risk for the prospective emperor.” 23. Plutarch, Life of Cicero. 24. Boyle 2008, lxvii, quoting Calder 1983. 25. Horace, Epistle to Augustus, 2.1.50–61; he included comic playwrights as well: Terence, Plautus, Afranius, and Caecilius. 26. Lucian, The Dance 39–61, esp. 43. 27. Lucian, The Dance 80. 28. For the rise and fall of the fabula palliata, see Beare 1940a; and for a detailed discussion of Octavia, see Wiseman 2008, chap. 12; Boyle 2008. 29. See D. A. Russell 1996. 30. Amy Richlin, Marcus Aurelius in Love, Letter 25, 103. 31. Longinus, On the Sublime 30.2. According to Porter 2001, 85–86, in his very useful discussion on the sublime, Dio Chrysostom presses the same line into service describing the bathos of “a tumbledown village on the Black Sea” Page 303 →still quoting and revering their Homer. Dio Chrysostom, Orations 31.159–60, in Porter, 85. notes to pages 191–98 32. Porter 2006 and Porter 2001, 63–92. For an uninfatuated reassessment of the period, see Vout 2006, 96–123, esp. 96. 33. Aelius Aristides, Orations 50.60ff.; G. Anderson 1993, 103. See also Cicero’s dialogue (On the Ends of Good and Evil [De finibus] 5.1.1–2.4), in which “a group of young Romans in Athens recall the great philosophers of the past so vividly that they ended up imagining they could see them” (as summarized in Most 2006, 385). 34. For a more practical albeit conservative treatment of Pausanias’s attraction to Greece, see Hutton 2005. 35. Braudel 1980, 78. 36. Description of Greece 1.19.1. This tendency to intermix the mythic and the historic is a point made by Bowie (1996, 213–16). 37. Description of Greece 1.8.5, trans. P. Levi 1979. 38. Ada Cohen has noted that Pausanias routinely “ignored those spaces touched by imperial power and populated the land with imaginary superhuman beings.” I think we are speaking of the same classicizing notion. See Cohen 2001, 93–126, esp. 95. 39. Hutton 2005, 15–16. 40. Romer 1998, 2.48. 41. Strabo on Athens: “The city itself is a rock situated in a plain and surrounded by dwellings. On the rock is the sacred precinct of Athena, comprising both the old temple of Athena Polias, in which is the lamp that is never quenched, and the Parthenon built by Ictinus, in which is the work in ivory by Pheidias, the Athena. However, if I once began to describe the multitude of things in this city that are lauded and proclaimed far and wide, I fear that I should go too far” (Geography 4.9.1.16, trans. H. Jones 1949). 42. Description of Greece 5.13.7, trans. P. Levi 1979. 43. Diodorus Siculus, Library of World History 11.29.3, trans. P. Green. For the archaeological report on the destruction, see Thompson 1981, 343–55. 44. Description of Greece 1.21.1, trans. P. Levi 1979. 45. Plutarch, Life of Sulla 14.4, trans. Dryden. 46. “[Sulla] recovered Athens, and, after surmounting many difficulties in overcoming the manifold fortifications of Peraeus, slew more than two hundred thousand of the enemy and made prisoners of as many more.” Velleius Paterculus, History of Rome 2.23.4, trans. Shipley 1967.

47. Plutarch, Life of Sulla 13.2, trans. Dryden. 48. Dio Chrysostom, Orations 31.122, trans. Cohoon and Crosby 1940. 49. Description of Greece 1.27.6–9, trans. P. Levi 1979. 50. Description of Greece 1.27.2, trans. P. Levi 1979. 51. In the eighteenth century, the French architect Julien-David Le Roy, visiting Athens, retold the same memory of the olive tree burned by the Medes when they took Athens and sprouted up again, presumably staring at the same empty place (Le Roy 2004, 1.1.252). 52. See, for example, the astonished assessment of Athens by Velleius Paterculus, History of Rome 1.16.3–4. notes to pages 198–205 Page 304 → 53. Suetonius, Life of Julius Caesar 84. 54. Habitus, for Bourdieu (1971), meant a “governing structure of experience and imagination.” For Nero and the fire, Tacitus, Annals 15.39. 55. Tacitus, Annals 6.29, trans. Church. 56. Pollio to Cicero, Letters to Friends 10.32.:3, quoted in Csapo and Slater 1994, 278; for a discussion of the scanty evidence of this thin tradition, see Flower 1995; Ferri 2003; Boyle 2008; and Wiseman 2008, chap. 12, “Phantom Genre.” 57. The Art of Poetry 285–88, 119. 58. Suetonius, Life of Nero 21. For discussions of these masks, see W. Slater 1996a and, more thoroughly, Bartsch 1994. 59. The lampoon was derived from the Pythian oracle who had classed Nero in such company, according to Lucian, Nero 10. Flower 2006, 204–5, reminds us that the masks of Nero were likely recycled back onto the stage by actors playing Nero. 60. Horace, Epistle 2.1.70–73. 61. Lucian, Nero 11, trans. Macleod 1947. 62. Tacitus, Annals 15.65, trans. Church. 63. The most recent monograph on Seneca, Ker 2009, 11, reconciles the political man of action and the philosophical tragedian most by locating him most properly in his own death narrative. For a popular history of Seneca at the court of Nero, see also Romm 2014. 64. Ker 2009, 178–244. 65. Romm 2014, 173–75. 66. Lucian, The Dance 27. 67. Tacitus, Annals 14.32, “consonuisse ululatibus theatrum.” Tacitus uses the noun ululatibus (wailings) on only one other occasion in the Annals (4.62), that is, to describe the wailings of the victims in the theater at Fidena, which collapsed and buried hundreds of spectators. 68. Foucault 1986, 24. This conversation is canvassed in Leonits 1995, 43.

Chapter Ten 1. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 1.4.b. For the many problems associated with securely dating this figure, see Baldwin 1976, 24. 2. Hadas 1950, 268; Flaceliere 1964, 370; Dihle 1994. 3. Originally it may have been as large as thirty books. The oldest manuscript is divided into fifteen books; this includes many epitomes. The first two books and the beginning of the third are excerpts, and lacunae throughout suggest a far larger text. For a more complete discussion of the textual history, see Gulick 1993, xvii–xviii. Olson has a lovely new edition of the works, but I’ve retained an odd fondness for Gulick’s edition. 4. Deipnosophistae 1.1.b, trans. Gulick 1993. 5. “The Deipnosophistae is the oldest cookery book that has come down to us” (Gulick 1993, viii). A Loeb reissue is currently edited by S. D. Olson, and has already begun to rekindle interest. 6. Braund and Wilkins 2000, 1 and preface. notes to pages 205–17 Page 305 → 7. Wilkins 2000, 38–39. 8. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (Howatson 2013). Dihle 1994 offers a one-paragraph

entry in his solid Greek and Latin Literature of the Roman Empire. Bowersock 1985 is slightly more generous. 9. Callimachus had dismissed the epic Argonautica of rival poet Apollonius of Rhodes: “A big book is a big evil” (P.Oxy. 10.1241); Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 3.72a. 10. Deipnosophistae 14.652c, trans. Gulick 1993. 11. Rufus’s History of the Theatre is no longer extant. It resides only as a memory preserved through Photius, Bibliotheca (reviews of Ten Thousand Books, the alternate title), 103b. Tempting as it is to isolate Juba II as “the inventor of theatre history,” an argument recently advanced by Schoch 2012, Juba was clearly working in a dense tradition of scholarship, charted by many, rehearsed below. 12. Plutarch, Life of Caesar 55.1. 13. A second, an actress named Ecloga, belonged to the household of Juba in Rome. Her death, at eighteen, was recorded in an inscription, and her story is the subject of HГ¶schele 2013. 14. Deipnosophistae 8:343f., trans. Gulick 1993. 15. Suda lexicon, s.v. “Juba.” I do not think we can rely on the information that Juba was captured by Augustus and flogged, but had his life spared on account of his learning (see above). 16. Deipnosophistae 14.629d, trans. Gulick 1993. 17. Easterling 1997a, 151. 18. The biographical and bibliographical career of Eratosthenes is summarized in Merkelbach and West 1964, 175–90. 19. Deipnosophistae 8.336b. 20. Olson 2007, 28. For a more comprehensive treatment of the Alexandrian scholastic tradition, see Blum 1991. 21. Vince 1984, 57. 22. Deipnosophistae 8.336e. 23. A further summary of the scholastic tradition can be found in Vince 1984, 56–58. 24. An extensive and enormously useful bibliography of scholia has been assembled by Dickey (2007). 25. A few recent studies have added greatly to the underrepresented field of ancient Greek music, most notably M. L. West 1992 and 2001, and W. D. Anderson 1994. 26. For one of many solid discussions of music, see Deipnosophistae 14.636–37. 27. Deipnosophistae 14.618. 28. See Deipnosophistae 3.113, 3.341, 4.67, 4.167, and 4.185; on playwright’s revision, see 4.23, 4.447, and 6.27. See also 4.123; 4.447; and 6.27. The scholiast on Hephaestion writes: “There were a first and second Aeoloscion of Aristophanes just as there were a first and second Plutus” (Edmonds 1961, vol. 1, 573), to which list we might also add The Clouds, Thesmophoriazusae, and Niobus. 29. Deipnosophistae 6.262d. Cf. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 5.92. 30. Deipnosophistae 9.380e, trans. Gullick 1993. notes to pages 218–35 Page 306 → 31. Deipnosophistae 10.420b, trans. Gulick 1993. 32. Deipnosophistae 8.336d. 33. Ashby (1999, 2) approximates something of the size of the field in his opening discussion of the plays. Though his claim that “by the middle of the fourth century, Athens and possibly all Greece must have been awash with playscripts” seems hyperbolic, there was certainly a rich literary tradition that must have far exceeded the festival calendar. 34. Cf. Polybius, Histories 14.11.4. 35. For a brief overview of the major libraries, see Too 2000, 113–15 and Jacob 2000, 87–90. 36. Too 2000, 111. 37. The temptation to append is, I think, characteristic of Athenaeus’s legacy as a postclassical afterthought. Sidwell 2000 includes an appendix that far outweighs the text of the article. 38. Tradition assigns forty-four plays to Aristophanes. Asterisks (*) indicate disputed authorship. The problem of authorship is compounded with multiple editions of single titles: Plutus 1, 2; Thesmophoria 1, 2; Clouds 1, 2 (second unproduced). The Niobus plays have also been attributed to Archippus.

Chapter Eleven

1. This chapter’s treatment of memory sanctions is deeply indebted to the work of Flower (2006), Hedrick (2000), Varner (2004), and Ricoeur (2004). 2. As Peter Stewart (1999, 159–89, esp. 161) has reminded, the term was first employed by Christoph Scheiter and J. H. Gerlack as a dissertation title in 1689. The ancient term memoria damnata has found less circulation. The term is also discussed in Hedrick 2000, xi–xiv; Varner 2004, 1–2; and Stewart 2003, 268–83. 3. Stewart 1999, 163. See, for example, Procopius on the damnatio of Domitian (Secret History 8.4). Some sense of how prolific monumental statuary was comes from the sixth-century chronicler Zachariah of Mitylene, who inventoried 3,785 bronze statues in Rome alone. He didn’t count the marble. He missed the head of Sejanus, melted down under his own damnatio and turned into “frying pans and chamber pots” (Juvenal, Satire 10.58ff.). According to Tacitus (Annales 11.38): “The Senate assisted his [Claudius’s] forgetfulness by decreeing that her [Messalina’s] name and her statues should be removed from all places, public or private.” Trans. Church, 2007. T. P. Wiseman (2007, 421–28, esp. 423) has assembled an impressive list of defaced funerary altars from a single family’s burial chamber, of which he concluded, “The names that had to be publicly forgotten could be privately remembered.” 4. Theodosian Code 9.40.17, trans. Pharr 1952; quoted in Stewart 1999, 161. 5. Papyric inscriptions of the same subject’s damnatio in Stewart 1999, 163. Flower 2006, 10–12, traces more epigraphical and inscriptional evidence of damnatio, while, more recently, Kristensen 2013 traces the Christian “iconophobia” of classical images. On the erasure of the victim’s name, see Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 9.2.11. 6. Townley Collection, GR 1805,0703.210. notes to pages 235–43 Page 307 → 7. RouechГ© 2006, 235–53, esp. 245. The practice was common enough to be described by Jerome (On the Prophet Habakkuk 2.3.14ff.): “When a tyrant is cut down, his portraits and statues are also deposed; then only the face is changed and the head removed, and the face of the victor is placed on top, so that the body remains, and another head is substituted for those that have been removed” (quoted in Stewart 1999, 159). 8. The damnatio of Flavianus is the subject of Hedrick 2000. 9. MacMullen 1984, 119, 85. The position has since been challenged, most recently by Salzman (2006, 265–86). 10. Augustine, City of God 18.53–54. I am following here the argument of Hedrick (2000, 44). 11. For the foundation of this pagan-Christian agon, see Augustine, City of God 5.26; and Ambrose, On the Death of Theodosius 10. 12. Ambrose, Epistles 57.1. 13. Rufinus, Ecclesiastical History 11. 33, quoted in A. Cameron 1993, 76. Other ancient accounts concur or retell the basic narrative: Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History 5.25; and Theodoretus, Ecclesiastical History 5.24. 14. Theodosian Code, 15.14.9, trans. Pharr 1952. 15. See, for example, Momigliano 1964; Chuvin 1990; Bloch 1963, and Geffcken 1978. To trouble the ideological borders, see Hunt 1993 143–58, esp. 143; the author lucidly begins the problem by stating, “Papers and books about Christianising the Roman Empire ought not to be encouraged.” 16. Cameron 1993, 76. For a summary of the complexities of this process, see MacMullen 1984. 17. See Stewart 1999, 159–89; and RouechГ© 2006, 235–53, esp. 247. 18. The Life of Severus by Zachariah of Mytilene, trans. AmbjГ¶rn 2008; and Marcus the Deacon, Life of Porphyrius 63–70, trans. G. F. Hill 1913. 19. This is the subject of Kristensen’s rich study on the many forms of destruction (2013). 20. For the landfill and building material, see Tsafrir 2008, 117–41, esp. 132–34. For the destruction of Alexandria, see Zacharias, Life of Severus 32–35; for the contemporary archaeology of the destruction, Kristensen 2013. Stewart (1999, 174–77) discusses a graffito that captures the moment of toppling a pagan statue. 21. CTh 16.10.22, trans. Pharr 1944–46; Chuvin 1990, 78–79. 22. Theodoretus, Ecclesiastical History 1843, 5.21, na. Libanius, Speech 30.8–11, rails against the practice.

23. Theodosian Code (hereafter CTh) 16.10.10; 16.10.12; 16.10.14; 16.10.16, 16.10.17. The suppression of pagan practices occupies its own section of the codex, 16.10.1–25, trans. Pharr 1944–46. 24. CTh 16.10.9, trans. Pharr 1944–46. The code also notes that this was not the first piece of legislation to this effect. 25. City of God 18.54, trans. Walsh et al. 1958. 26. MacMullen 1984, 101 n. 49. 27. CTh 16.10.21, December CE 416. 28. Chuvin 1990, 92. 29. When Porphyry, the bishop of Gaza, tried to reenter the city in the first Page 308 →wave after the Christian triumph of 395, he was met with sizable resistance. “This is the reason for our annoyance. All along the road, not far from Gaza, we reached some villages where they still worship idols. There, by a prearranged signal, the villagers covered the entire road with brambles and logs, entirely blocking our passage. They also scattered filth on the road, a burning mixture of foul matter. With their unhealthy odor the fumes nearly suffocated us and practically prevented us from seeing. We escaped with great difficulty and arrived in the city in the third hour of the night” (Life of Porphyry, Bishop of Gaza, in Maas 2000, 189). For a moving description of the rooting out of one late pocket, see John of Ephesus’s account of the torture in Baalbek: “He arrested many of themВ .В .В . humiliated them, crucified them, and killed them” (John of Ephesus, Ecclesiastical History 3.3.27–34, quoted in Chuvin 1990, 143–47). notes to pages 243–45 30. Mark the Deacon, “Life of Porphyry,” 75–76, 78, in Mango 1972, 30–32. Those, however, who assaulted Christian churches were prosecuted as having committed a capital offense (CTh 16.2.31, 398 CE). Ramsay MacMullen (1984, 86–89) troubles the credibility of “the Life,” but concedes the validity of the general narrative (“the historical aptness”) of the destruction of the temples and the purging of pagan practices from the city. 31. Augustine, Sermons 24.6, trans. E. Hill 1990. The date falls somewhere between 399 (Brown 1971, 208) and 401 (Lambot 1961, 39), rehearsed in E. Hill 1990, 78 n. 1. See also Libanius, Orations 30.3, and 48; Zosimus, New History 4.37.4. 32. John Chrysostom, Epistles 123, 126. 33. CTh 16.10.16, for the year 399; trans. Pharr 1944–46. 34. The death of Hypatia is related in context with the antipagan campaign in Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History 7.15; as well as fragments of Damacius, Life of Isidorus, preserved in Photius’s reviews of Ten Thousand Books. For modern treatments, see T. B. Jones 1978, 102–4; Chuvin 1990, 85–90; and Dzielska 1995. 35. According to Lanciani 1888, 162: “The second half of the fourth century of our era was one of the most exciting periods in Roman history, on account of the stupendous fight between the Christian majority and the minority of those who still clung to polytheism in its decrepitude. Both parties were determined to put an end to a state of things which had become intolerable to each; both were determined to strike the final blow.” 36. P. Brown 1971, 104. 37. See R. R. R. Smith 1991, 144–58. For private libraries, Ammanius Marcellinus, Roman Antiquities, 29.1.41. 38. Tsafrir 2008, 129–30, esp. 136. 39. Trombley 2008, 156–57. 40. Tsafrir 2008, 132. P. Stewart (1999, 172–77) discusses a graffito that illustrates both the destruction (by stones) and then the toppling of a pagan statue. 41. Bowersock 2006, 33. 42. Trombley 2008, 155. See also Stewart 1999, 159–89.

Page 313 →

Bibliography Adams, Colin, and Laurence, Ray, eds. 2001. Travel and Geography in the Roman Empire. New York: Routledge. Adrados, Francisco R. 1975. Festival, Comedy, and Tragedy: the Greek Origins of Theatre. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Alcock, Susan. 1996. “Landscapes of Memory and the Authority of Pausanias.” In Pausanias Historien, edited by Jean Bingen, 241–67. Geneva: Fondation Hardt. Alcock, Susan, John Cherry, and Jas Elsner, eds. 2003. Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alfoldy, Geze. 1985. The Social History of Rome. Translated by David Braund and Frank Pollock. London: Croom Helm. Allason-Jones Lindsay, ed. 2011. Artefacts in Roman Britain, Their Purpose and Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Allinson, Francis Greenleaf, trans. 1930. Menander: The Principal Fragments with an English Translation. London: Heinemann. AmbjГ¶rn, Lena, trans. 2008. The Life of Severus by Zachariah of Mytilene. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press. Anderson, Graham. 1993. The Second Sophistic: A Cultural Phenomenon in the Roman Empire. New York: Routledge. Anderson, W. D. 1994. Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Armstrong, A. H., ed. 1970. The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arnott, W. Geoffrey. 1979. Menander I. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Arnott, W. Geoffrey. 1996a. Alexis: The Fragments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arnott, W. Geoffrey. 1996b. Menander II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Arnush, Michael F. 1995. “The Career of Peisistratos, Son of Hippias.” Hesperia 64.2: 135–62. Ashby, Clifford. 1999. Classical Greek Theatre: New Views of an Old Subject. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Assmann, J. 1995. “Ancient Egyptian Antijudaism: A Case of Distorted Memory.” In Memory Distortions: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct Their Past, edited by D. Schacter, 365–76. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Page 314 →Atkinson, J. E. 1992. “Curbing the Comedians: Cleon vs. Aristophanes and Syracosius’ Decree.” Classical Quarterly 42: 56–64. Babbitt, Frank Cole, et al., eds. 1927–2004. Plutarch: Moralia. 17 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann. Badian, E. 2000. “The Road to Prominence.” In Demosthenes, Statesman and Orator, edited by Ian Worthington, 9–44. New York: Routledge.

Bailey, D. R. Shackleton, ed. 1965. Cicero’s Letters to Atticus. 6 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bakels, Corrie, and Stefanie Jacomet. 2003. “Access to Luxury Foods in Central Europe during the Roman Period: The Archaeobotanical Evidence.” World Archaeology 34.3: 542–57. Bakola, Emmanuela. 2010. Cratinus and the Art of Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baldwin, Barry. 1976. “Athenaeus and His Work.” Acta Classica 19.2: 21–42. Balme, Maurice. 2001, trans. Menander: The Plays and Fragments. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barish, Jonas. 1981. The Anti-theatrical Prejudice. Berkeley: University of California Press. Barnash, S. J. B., trans. 1992. Cassiodorus: Variae. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Barrow, R. H. 1974. Prefect and Emperor. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Barton, Carlin. 1993. The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bartsch, Shadi. 1994. Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak, from Nero to Hadrian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bassett, Sarah. 2008. “The Late Antique Image of Menander.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 48: 201–25. Bateman, Nick. 2000. Gladiators at the Guildhall. London: Museum of London Archaeology Service. Bayburtluoglu, Cevdet. 2004. Lycia. Translated by Yaprak Georgescu. Antalya, Turkey: Suna and Inan Kirac Research Institute on Mediterranean Civilizations. Beacham, Richard. 1991. The Roman Theatre and Its Audience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Beacham, Richard. 1999. Spectacle Entertainments of Early Imperial Rome. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Beard, Mary. 2007. The Roman Triumph. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Beare, William. 1940a. “The Fabula Togata.” Hermathena 30.55: 35–55. Beare, William. 1940b. “When Did Livius Andronicus Come to Rome?” Classical Quarterly 34.1: 11–19. Beare, William. 1964. The Roman Stage: A Short History of Latin Drama in the Time of the Republic. London: Methuen. BГ©doyГЁre, Guy de la. 2013. Roman Britain: A New History. London: Thames and Hudson. Bell, Andrew. 2004. Spectacular Power in the Greek and Roman City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Page 315 →Bers, Victor, trans. 2003. Demosthenes, Speeches 50–59. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bieber, Margarete. 1961. The History of the Greek and Roman Theatre. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Billings, Joshua. 2014. Genealogy of the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Bingen, Jean, ed. 1996. Pausanias Historien. Geneva: Fondation Hardt. Birley, A. R. 2001. “The Names of the Batavians and Tungrians in the Tabulae Vindolandenses.” In Germania Inferior: Besiedlung, Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft an der Grenze der rГ¶misch-germanischen Welt, edited by T. GrГјnewald and H.-J. Schalles, 241–60. ErgГ¤nzungsbГ¤nde zum Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde 28. Berlin: De Gruyter. Birley, A. R. 2009. Tacitus: The Life of Agricola, Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bitton-Ashkelony, Brouria, and Aryeh Kofsky, eds. 2004. Christian Gaza in Late Antiquity. Boston: E. J. Brill. Blackman, David. 2001. “Archaeology in Greece.” Archaeological Reports 47: 1–144. Blanchard, Alain. 2014. “Reconstructing Menander.” In The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy, edited by Michael Fontaine and Adele Scafuro, 239–56. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blau, Herbert. 1982. Take Up the Bodies. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Bloch, H. 1963. “The Pagan Revival in the West at the end of the Fourth Century.” In The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, edited by A. Momigliano, 193-218. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blockley, R. C. 1981. The Fragmentary Classicizing Historians of the Later Roman Empire. Liverpool: F. Cairns. Blum, Rudolf. 1991. Kallimachos: The Alexandrian Library and the Origins of Bibliography. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Boardman, John. 1989. Athenian Red Figure Vases: The Classical Period. London: Thames and Hudson. Boedeker, Deborah, and Kurt Raaflaub, eds. 1998. Democracy, Empire, and the Arts in Fifth-Century Athens. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bosher, Kathryn. 2012. Theatre outside Athens: Drama in Greek Sicily and South Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bosher, Kathryn. 2014. “Epicharmus and Early Sicilian Comedy.” In The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy, edited by Martin Revermann, 79–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bostock, John. 1893. The Natural History of Pliny. London: George Bell and Sons. Bowersock, G. W. 1985. “Athenaeus.” In The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, vol. 1, edited by P. E. Easterling and B. M. W. Knox, 682–83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowersock, G. W. 2006. Mosaics as History: The Near East from Late Antiquity to Islam. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Bowie, E. L. 1974. “Greeks and Their Past in the Second Sophistic.” In Studies in Ancient Society, edited by Moses Finley, 166–209. New York: Routledge. Bowie, E. L. 1996. “Past and Present in Pausanias.” In Pausanias Historien, edited by Jean Bingen, Geneva: Fondation Hardt. Page 316 →Bowman, Alan, and J. David Thomas. 2003. The Vindolanda Writing Tablets. Vol. 3. London: British Museum Press. Bowman, Alan, and Greg Woolf, eds. 1996. Literacy and Power in the Ancient World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Boyle, A. J., ed. 1997. Tragic Seneca: An Essay in the Theatrical Tradition. New York: Routledge. Boyle, A. J. 2006. Roman Tragedy. New York: Routledge. Boyle, A. J. 2008. Octavia, Attributed to Seneca. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boyle, A. J., and W. J. Dominik, eds. 2003. Flavian Rome: Culture, Image, Text. Boston: E. J. Brill. Bradbury, Scott. 2004. Selected Letters of Libanius: From the Age of Constantius and Julian. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Bradley, K. 1994. Slavery and Society at Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Braudel, Fernand. 1980. On History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Braund, David, and John Wilkins, eds. 2000. Athenaeus and His World: Reading Greek Culture in the Roman Empire. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press. Brenk, Frederick. 1975. “The Dreams of Plutarch’s Lives.” Latomos 34: 336–49. Brenne, Stefan. 1994. “Ostraka and the Process of Ostrakophoria.” In The Archeology of Athens and Attica under the Democracy, edited by W. D. E. Coulson, 13–24. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Broadhead, Henry D. 1960. Persae. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Amelia Robertson. 2006. “Hellenic Heritage and Christian Challenge: Conflict over Panhellenic Sanctuaries in Late Antiquity.” In Violence in Late Antiquity, edited by H. A. Drake, 309–20. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Brown, Peter. 1971. The World of Late Antiquity: From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad. London: Thames and Hudson. BrulГ©, Pierre. 2003. Women in Ancient Greece. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Brunt, P. A., and J. M. Moore, eds. 1967. Res Gestae Divi Augusti: The Achievements of the Divine Augustus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Buckley, Terry. 1996. Aspects of Greek History, 750–323 BC: A Source-Based Approach. New York: Routledge. Burian, Peter. 1997. “Myth into Muthos: The Shaping of Tragic Plots.” In The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, edited by P. E. Easterling, 178–210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butterworth, G. W. 1919. Clement of Alexandria. London: Heinemann. Cairns, D. L. 2003. “The Politics of Envy: Envy and Equality in Ancient Greece.” In Envy, Spite and Jealousy: The Rivalrous Emotions in Ancient Greece, edited by David Konstan and N. Keith Rutter, 235–52. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cairns, D. L., and R. A. Knox, eds. 2004. Law, Rhetoric, and Comedy in Classical Athens. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales. Calder, W. M. 1983. “Secreti loquimur: An Interpretation of Seneca’s Thyestes.” In Seneca Tragicus: Ramus Essays on Senecan Drama, edited by A. J. Boyle, 184–98. Berwick, Australia: Aureal. Page 317 →Cameron, Alan. 1976. Circus Factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Cameron, Alan. 1984. “The Latin Revival of the Fourth Century.” In Renaissances before the Renaissance: Cultural Revivals of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, edited by W. Treadgold, 42–58. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cameron, Averil. 1993. The Later Roman Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Camp, John McK. 1996. “Excavations in the Agora in 1994–1995.” Hesperia 65.3: 231–61. Capps, E. 1903. The Introduction of Comedy into the City Dionysia. Chicago: Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago. Carey, Christopher. 1994. “Comic Ridicule and Democracy.” In Ritual, Finance, Politics: Athenian Democratic Accounts, edited by Robin Osborne and Simon Hornblower, 69–83. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carey, Christopher, trans. 2000. Aeschines. Austin: University of Texas Press. Carey, Earnest, and Herbert Foster. 1914. Dio’s Roman History. London: Heinemann. Carpenter, Rhys. 1951. “A Contribution to the Vergil-Menander Controversy.” Hesperia 20.1: 34–50. Carpenter, Thomas. 1986. Dionysian Imagery in Archaic Greek Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Carpenter, Thomas. 1993. “On the Beardless Dionysus.” In Masks of Dionysus, edited by Thomas H. Carpenter and Christopher A. Faraone, 185–206. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Carpenter, Thomas. 2005. “Images of Satyr Plays in South Italy.” In Satyr Drama: Tragedy at Play, edited by George W. M. Harrison, 219–36. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales. Carpenter, Thomas, and Christopher Faraone, eds. 1993. Masks of Dionysus. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Cartledge, Paul. 1997. “Deep Plays: Theatre as Process in Greek Civic Life.” In The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, edited by P. E. Easterling, 3–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Castellani, Victor. 1986. “Clio vs. Melpomene; Or, Why So Little Historical Drama from Classical Athens? ” In Themes in Drama, vol. 8, edited by James Redmon, 1–16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chancery, Mark Allen, and Adam Lowry Porter. 2001. “The Archaeology of Roman Palestine.” Near Eastern Archaeology 64.4: 164–203. Charalabopoulos, Nikos. 2012. Platonic Drama and Its Ancient Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Christ, Matthew R. 1990. “Liturgy Avoidance and Antidosis in Classical Athens.” Transactions of the American Philological Society 120: 147–69. Church, Alfred John. 2007. Tacitus: The “Annals” and the “Histories”. New York: Modern Library. Chuvin, Pierre. 1990. A Chronicle of the Last Pagans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Page 318 →Cimok, Fatih. 2000. Antioch Mosaics: A Corpus. Istanbul, Turkey: A Turizm Yayinlari. Clark, Eleanor. 1952. Rome and the Villa. New York: Doubleday. Cleary, Simon Esmonde. 2013. The Roman West, AD 200–500: An Archaeological Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cohen, Ada. 2001. “Art, Myth and Travel in the Hellenistic World.” In Pausanias, Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, edited by Susan Adcock, 93–126. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cohoon, J. W., and H. Lamar Crosby. 1940. Dio Chrysostom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Colaiaco, James. 2001. Socrates against Athens: Philosophy on Trial. New York: Routledge. Coleman-Norton, P. R., ed. 1928. Palladius: Dialogue on the Life of Chrysostom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collard, Christopher. 2008. Aeschylus: “Persians” and Other Plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Collingwood, R. G., and Ian Richmond. 1969. The Archaeology of Roman Britain. London: Methuen. Collins, H. P. 1953. “Decline and Fall of Pompey the Great.” Greece and Rome 22: 98–106. Connerton, Paul. 2009. How Modernity Forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Connolly, Joy. 2001. “Reclaiming the Theatrical in the Second Sophistic.” Helios 28: 75–96. Connor, Walter R. 1985. “The Razing of the House in Greek Society.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 115: 79–102. Connor, Walter R. 1992. The New Politicians of Fifth-Century Athens. Indianapolis: Hackett. Conybeare, F. C. 1927. Philostratus: The Life of Apollonius of Tyana. Vol 1. London: Heinemann. Cooley, Alison E., 2002a. “The Survival of Oscan in Roman Pompeii.” In Becoming Roman, Writing Latin? Literacy and Epigraphy in the Roman West, edited by Alison E. Cooley, 77–86. Journal of Roman Archaeology, supplemental series 48. Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology. Cooley, Alison E., ed. 2002b. Becoming Roman, Writing Latin? Literacy and Epigraphy in the Roman West. Journal of Roman Archaeology, supplemental series 48. Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology. Corbeill, Anthony. 1996. Controlling Laughter: Political Humor in the Late Roman Republic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cormack, Robin. 1981.“The Classical Tradition in the Byzantine Provincial City.” In Byzantium and the Classical Tradition: Proceedings of the Thirteenth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, edited by Margaret Mullett and Roger Scott, 103–19. Birmingham, UK: University of Birmingham. Cornford, Francis MacDonald. 1914. The Origin of Attic Comedy. London: Edward Arnold. Costa, C. D. N., ed. 2001. Greek Fictional Letters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Page 319 →Coulson, W. D. E., ed. 1994. The Archeology of Athens and Attica under the Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coulston, Jon. 2001. “Transport and Travel on Trajan’s Column.” In Travel and Geography in the Roman Empire, edited by Colin Adams and Ray Laurence, 106–37. New York: Routledge. Crawford, Michael. 1978. The Roman Republic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cribiore, R. 2001. Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cromey, R. D. 2000. “Cleisthenes 700 Epistia.” L’AntiquitГ© Classique 69: 43–63.

Crummy, Philip. 1982a. “The Origins of Some Major Romano-British Towns.” Britannia 13: 125–34. Crummy, Philip. 1982b. “The Roman Theatre at Colchester.” Britannia 13: 299–302. Crummy, Philip. 1992. Colchester Archaeological Report. Vol. 6. Colchester, UK: Colchester Archaeological Trust. Crummy, Philip. 1999. “Colchester: Making Towns Out of Fortresses and the First Urban Fortifications in Britain.” In The Coloniae of Roman Britain, edited by Henry Hurst, 88–100. Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology. Csapo, Eric. 2000. “From Aristophanes to Menander? Genre Transformation in Greek Comedy.” In Matrices of Genre: Authors, Canons and Society, edited by Mary Depew and Dirk Obbink, 115–34. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Csapo, Eric. 2010. Actors and Icons of the Ancient Theatre. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Csapo, Eric. 2012. “вЂParade Abuse,’ вЂFrom the Wagons.’” In No Laughing Matter: Studies in Athenian Comedy, edited by C. W. Marshall and George Kovacs, 19–33. London: Bristol Classical Press. Csapo, Eric. 2014. “The Iconography of Comedy.” In The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy, edited by Martin Revermann, 95–127. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Csapo, Eric, and Margaret Miller. 1998. “Democracy, Empire, and Art: Toward a Politics of Time and Narrative.” In Democracy, Empire, and the Arts, edited by Deborah Boedeker and Kurt Raaflaub, 87–126. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Csapo, Eric, and Margaret Miller, eds. 2007. The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond: From Ritual to Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Csapo, Eric, and William Slater. 1994. The Context of Ancient Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cubitt, Geoffrey. 2007. History and Memory. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Curchin, Leonard. 1991. Roman Spain: Conquest and Assimilation. New York: Routledge. David, Ephraim. 1986. “Aeneas Tacticus, 11.7–10 and the Argive Revolution of 370.” American Journal of Philology 107.3: 343–49. Davidson, James. 1977. Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passion of Classical Athens. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Page 320 →Davies, J. K. 1967. “Demosthenes in Liturgies: A Note.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 88: 33–40. Davies, J. K. 1971. Athenian Propertied Families, 600–300 BC. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davies, Percival Vaughan. 1969. Macrobius’ Saturnalia. New York: Columbia University Press. Day, Joseph W. 1980. The Glory of Athens: The Popular Tradition as Reflected in the Panahenaicus of Aelius Aristides. Chicago: Ares Publishing. Dean, Debra. 2007. The Madonnas of Leningrad. New York: Harper. Dearden, C. W. 1988. “Phlyax Comedy in Magna Graecia: A Reassessment.” In Studies in Honour of T. B. L. Webster, vol. 2, edited by J. H. Betts, J. T. Hooker, and J. R. Green, 33–41. London: Bristol Classics Press.

Dearden, C. W. 1995. “Pots, Tumblers and Phlyax Vases.” In Stage Directions: Essays in Ancient Drama in Honour of E. W. Handley, edited by Alan Griffiths, 81–86. London: Institute of Classical Studies, University of London. Dearden, C. W. 1999. “Plays for Export.” Phoenix 53: 222–48. Denard, Hugh. 2007. “Lost Theatre and Performance Traditions in Greece and Italy.” In The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theatre, edited by Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton, 139–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Derks, Ton. 1998. God, Temples and Ritual Practices: The Transformation of Religious Ideas and Values in Roman Gaul. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DeSimone, Russell 1974. Novatian: The Trinity; The Spectacle; Jewish Foods; In Praise of Purity; Letters. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Detienne, Marcel. 1979. Dionysus Slain. Translated by Mireille Muellner and Leonard Muellner. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Deutsch, Monroe. 1926. “Caesar’s Triumphs.” Classical Weekly 19.13: 101–5. Dickey, E. 2007. Ancient Greek Scholarship: A Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding Scholia, Commentaries, Lexica, and Grammatical Treatises. From Their Beginning to the Byzantine Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dihle, Albrecht. 1994. Greek and Latin Literature of the Roman Empire. Translated by Manfred Malzahn. New York: Routledge. Divine, Jim. 2013. “Voices from the Past: Presenting (Re)Constructed Environments through Multimedia Technology.” In Presenting the Romans: Interpreting the Frontiers of the Roman Empire World Heritage Site, edited by Nigel Mills, 113–17. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press. Di Vita, Antonino, Ginette Di Vita-Evrard, and Lidiano Bacchielli, eds. 1998. Libya: The Lost Cities of the Roman Empire. Cologne, Germany: Konemann. Dixon, Philip. 1992. “The Cities Are Not Populated as Once They Were.” In The City in Late Antiquity, edited by John Rich, 145–60. London: Routledge. Dobrov, Gregory, ed. 1995. Beyond Aristophanes: Transition and Diversity in Greek Comedy. Atlanta: Scholar’s Press. Page 321 →Dobrov, Gregory, ed. 1997. The City as Comedy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Dobrov, Gregory, ed. 2010. Brill’s Companion to the Study of Greek Comedy. Boston: E. J. Brill. Dodds, E. R. 1951. Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dodds, E. R. 1960. Bacchae. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Donner, H. 1992. The Mosaic Map of Madaba: An Introductory Guide. Kampen, The Netherlands: Kok Pharos. Dougherty, Carol, and Leslie Kurke, eds. 1998. Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dover, K. J. 1963. “Androtion on Ostracism.” Classical Review 13.3: 256–57.

Drake, H. A., ed. 2006. Violence in Late Antiquity. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Drinkwater, J. F. 1983. Roman Gaul: The Three Provinces, 58 BC–AD 260. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dryden, John, trans. 1952. Plutarch: The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica. Dryden, John, trans. 2001. Plutarch’s “Lives”: The Dryden Translation. New York: Modern Library. Duckworth, George E. 1971. The Nature of Roman Comedy: A Study in Popular Entertainment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dunbabin, Katherine M. 2016. Theater Spectacle in the Art of the Roman Empire. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dzielska, Maria. 1995. Hypatia of Alexandria. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Easterling, P. E. 1997a. “Form and Performance.” In The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, edited by P. E. Easterling, 151–77. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Easterling, P. E. 1997b. “From Repertory to Canon.” In The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, edited by P. E. Easterling, 211–27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Easterling, P. E., ed. 1997c. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Easterling, P. E. 1995. “Menander—Loss and Survival.” In Stage Directions: Essays in Honour of E. W. Handley, edited by Alan Griffiths, 153–60. London: Institute of Classical Studies, University of London. Easterling, P. E., and Richard Miles. 1999. “Dramatic Identities: Tragedy in Late Antiquity.” In Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity, edited by Richard Miles, 95–111. New York: Routledge. Eckardt, Hella. 1999. “The Colchester’s вЂChild’s Grave.’” Britannia 30: 57–90. Edmonds, John M. 1957. Fragments of Attic Comedy. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Edmondson, J. C. 1996. “Dynamic Arenas: Gladiatorial Presentations in the City of the Rome and the Construction of Roman Society during the Early Empire.” In Roman Theatre and Society, edited by William Slater, 69–212. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Edwards, Anthony T. 2002. “Historicizing the Popular Grotesque: Bakhtin’s RabelaisPage 322 → and His World and Attic Old Comedy.” In Bakhtin and the Classics, edited by R. Bracht Branham, 27–55. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Edwards, Catharine. 1997. “Unspeakable Professions: Public Performance and Prostitution in Ancient Rome.” In Roman Sexualities, edited by Judith Hallett and Marilyn Skinner, 66–95. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Edwards, Michael. 2004. “Antiphon the Revolutionary.” In Law, Rhetoric, and Comedy in Classical Athens, edited by D. L. Cairns and R. A. Knox, 75–86. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales. Edwards, Michael, trans. 2007. Isaeus. Austin: University of Texas Press. Eliav, Yaon Z., Elise A. Friedland, and Sharon Herbert, eds. 2008. The Sculptural Environment of the Roman Near East: Reflections on Culture, Ideology, and Power. Dudley, MA: Peeters.

Else, Gerald. 1939. “Aristotle and Satyr Play 1.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 70: 139–57. Else, Gerald. 1964. The Origin and Form of Early Tragedy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ephraim, David. 1986. “A Preliminary Stage of Cleisthenes’ Reforms.” Classical Antiquity 5.1: 1–13. Erasmo, Mario. 2004. Roman Tragedy: Theatre to Theatricality. Austin: University of Texas Press. Erim, Kenan T. 2012. Aphrodisias: A Guide to the Site and Its Museum. Istanbul: Net Books. Evans, Arthur. 1988. What Child Is This? New York: St. Martin’s Press. Faulkner, N. 2008. Rome: Empire of the Eagles. Harlow, UK: Pearson. Favorini, Attilio. 2003. “History, Collective Memory, and Aeschylus’ The Persians.” Theatre Journal 55.1: 99–111. Ferri, Rolando. 2003. Octavia: A Play Attributed to Seneca. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fetch, James. 1900. The Old Oligarch, being the Constitution of the Athenians, ascribed to Xenophon. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Finley, Moses, ed. 1960. Slavery in Classical Antiquity: Views and Controversies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Finley, Moses. 1980. Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology. New York: Viking Press. Fisher, Nick. 2003. “Let Envy Be Absent.” In Envy, Spite and Jealousy: The Rivalrous Emotions in Ancient Greece, edited by David Konstan and N. Keith Rutter, 181–215. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fitch, John G., ed. 2002. Seneca. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fitzgerald, Augustine, ed. 1926. The Letters of Synesius of Cyrene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Flaceliere, Robert. 1964. A Literary History of Greece. Translated by Douglas Garman. Chicago: Aldine Press. Flickinger, Roy. 1936. The Greek Theater and Its Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Flower, Harriet. 1995. “Fabulae Praetextae in Context: When Were Plays on Contemporary Subjects Performed in Republican Rome?” Classical Quarterly 45: 179–90. Page 323 →Flower, Harriet. 2002. “Roman Historical Drama and Nero on Stage: A Commentary on P. Kragelund, вЂHistorical Drama in Ancient Rome: Republican Flourishing and Imperial Deline?’” Symbolae Osloenses 77: 68–72. Flower, Harriet. 2006. The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Fobes, Francis, and Allen Rogers Benner, eds. 1949. The Letters of Alciphron, Aelian, and Philostratus. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Foley, Helene. 1985. Ritual Irony. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Foley, Helene. 1993. “The Politics of Tragic Lamentation.” In Tragedy, Comedy, and the Polis, edited by A. H. Sommerstein et al., 101–43. Bari, Italy: Levante.

Foley, Helene. 2001. Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fontaine, Michael. 2014. “The Reception of Greek Comedy in Rome.” In The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy, edited by Martin Revermann, 404–23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Forsdyke, Sara. Exile, Ostracism, and Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16.1: 22–28. Fowler, Harold North, trans. 1992. Plutarch: Moralia. Vol. 10. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fowler, H. W., and Fowler, F. G. 1905. The Works of Lucian of Samosata. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Frazer, James. 1921. Apollodorus: The Library. London: Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Freeman, Charles. 2008. AD 381: Heretics, Pagans and the Christian State. London: Pimlico. Frere, Sheppard. 1987. Britannia: A History of Roman Britain. London: Pimlico. Frere, Sheppard, and Grace Simpson. 1970. “The Roman Theatre at Canterbury.” Britannia 1: 83–113. Friedrich, Rainer. 1996. “Everything to Do with Dionysus? Ritualism, the Dionysiac, and the Tragic.” In Tragedy and the Tragic, edited by M. S. Silk, 257–83. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frost, Frank. 2005. Politics and the Athenians. Toronto: Edgar Kent Publishers. Funke, Melissa. 2016. “The Menandrian World of Alciphron’s Letters.” In Athenian Comedy in the Roman Empire, edited by C. W. Marshall and Tom Hawkins, 223–38. London: Bloomsbury. Gager, John G. 1992. Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World. New York: Oxford University Press. Galinsky, Karl, and Kenneth Lapatin. 2015. Cultural Memories in the Roman Empire. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum. Gardiner, R. A. 1973. “The International Map of the Roman Empire.” Geographical Journal 139.1: 107–11. Garton, Charles. 1982. “A Revised Register of Augustan Actors.” Aufstieg und Niedergang der rГ¶mischen Welt 2.30.1: 580–609. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1983. “The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey.” Critical Inquiry 9.4: 685–723. Page 324 →Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Geffckin, Johannes. 1978. The Last Days of Greco-Roman Paganism. Translated by S. MacCormack. New York: Elsevier. George-Graves, Nadine, ed. 2015. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gernet, Louis. 1981. “Dionysus.” In Anthropology of Ancient Greece. Translated by John Hamilton and Blaise Nagy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gibbon, Edward. 1993. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 3 vols. New York: Alfred Knopf. Gilkes, Oliver. 2003. The Theatre at Butrint: Luigi Maria Ugolini’s Excavations at Butrint 1928–1932.

Oxford: Alden. Gilula, Dwora. 1987. “Menander’s Comedies Best with Dessert and Wine (Plut. Mor. 712e).” Athenaeum 65: 511–16. Godley, Alfred D. 1920. Herodotus. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goette, Hans R. 2007. “Choregic Monuments and Athenian Democracy.” In The Greek Theatre and Festivals, edited by Peter Wilson, 122–49. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldberg, Sander. 1980. The Making of Menander’s Comedy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Goldhill, Simon. 1986. Reading Greek Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldhill, Simon. 1990. “The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology.” In Nothing to Do with Dionysus? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, edited by John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin, 97–129. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Goldhill, Simon. 1997. “The Audience of Athenian Tragedy.” In The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, edited by P. E. Easterling, 54–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldhill, Simon. 2003. “Tragic Emotions.” In Envy, Spite and Jealousy: The Rivalrous Emotions in Ancient Greece, edited by David Konstan and N. Keith Rutter, 165–80. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Goldhill, Simon, and Robin Osborne, eds. 1999. Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodman, John, ed. 1995. Diderot on Art. Vol. 2. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gordon, Mary. 1960. “The Nationality of Slaves under the Early Roman Empire.” In Slavery in Classical Antiquity: Views and Controversies, edited by Moses Finley, 151–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gottesman, Alex. 2014. Politics and the Street in Democratic Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Graham, Mark, W. 2006. News and Frontier Consciousness in the Late Roman Empire. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Grant, Michael. 1973. The Jews in the Roman World. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Grant, Michael. 1999. The Collapse and Recovery of the Roman Empire. London: Routledge. Page 325 →Graves, Robert, trans. 1980. Suetonius: The Twelve Caesars. New York: Penguin. Green, J. R. 1994. Theatre in Ancient Greek Society. London: Routledge. Green, J. R. 1995. “Theatrical Motifs in Non-theatrical Contexts on Vases of the Later Fifth and Fourth Centuries.” In Stage Directions: Essays in Honour of E. W. Handley, edited by Alan Griffiths, 93–122. London: Institute of Classical Studies, University of London. Green, J. R. 2007. “Let’s Hear It for the Fat Man: Padded Dancers and the Prehistory of Drama.” In The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond, edited by Eric Csapo and Margaret Miller, 96–107. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Green, Peter, trans. 1974. Juvenal: The Sixteen Satires. New York: Penguin.

Green, Peter, trans. 2006. Diodorus Siculus: Greek History, 480–431. The Alternative History. Austin: University of Texas Press. Green, Peter, trans. 2010. Diodorus Siculus: The Persian Wars to the Fall of Athens. Austin: University of Texas Press. Green, Ricky. 2001. Democratic Virtue in the Trial and Death of Socrates: Resistance to Imperialism in Classical Athens. New York: Peter Lang. Greene, Elizabeth. 2013. “Female Networks in Military Communities.” In Women in the Roman City in the Latin West, edited by Emily Hemelrijk and Greg Woolf, 369–90. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Gribble, David. 1999. Alcibiades and Athens: A Study in Literary Presentation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Griffiths, Alan, ed. 1995. Stage Directions: Essays in Ancient Drama in Honour of E. W. Handley. London: Institute of Classical Studies, University of London. Gruen, Erich S. 1990. Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gruen, Erich S. 1992. Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Guilhamet, Leon. 1985. “Socrates and the Post-Socratic Satire.” Journal of the History of Ideas 46.1: 3–12. Gulick, Charles Burton, ed. and trans. 1993. Athenaeus: The Deipnosophists. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gunderson, E. 2003. “The Flavian Amphitheatre: All the World as Stage.” In Flavian Rome: Culture, Image, Text, edited by A. J. Boyle and W. J. Dominik, 637–58. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Gutzwiller, Katherine, and Omar Г‡elik. 2000. “The Tragic Mask of Comedy: Metatheatricality in Menander.” Classical Antiquity 19.1: 102–37. Gutzwiller, Katherine, and Omar Г‡elik. 2012. “New Menander Mosaics from Antioch.” American Journal of Archeology 116: 573–623. Hadas, Moses. 1950. History of Greek Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Hadas, Moses, trans. 1953. Three Greek Romances: Longus, Xenophon, Dio Chrysostom. Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill. Hadas, Moses, trans. 1957. Heliodorus: An Ethiopian Romance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hall, Edith, trans. 1996. Aeschylus: Persians. Warminster, UK: Aris and Phillips. Hall, Edith. 1999. “Actor’s Song in Tragedy.” In Performance Culture and Athenian Page 326 →Democracy, edited by Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne, 96–124. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, Edith. 2006. The Theatrical Cast of Athens: Interactions between Ancient Greek Drama and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hall, Edith. 2014. “Comedy and Athenian Festival Culture.” In The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy, edited by Martin Revermann, 306–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, Edith, and Rosie Wyles, eds. 2008. New Directions in Ancient Pantomime. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hallett, Judith, and Marilyn Skinner, eds. 1997. Roman Sexualities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Halliwell, Stephen. 1991. “Comic Satire and Freedom of Speech in Classical Athens.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 111: 48–70. Halliwell, Stephen. 2004. “Aischrology, Shame, and Comedy.” In Free Speech in Classical Antiquity, edited by Ineke Sluiter and Ralph Rosen, 115–45. Boston: E. J. Brill. Halliwell, Stephen. 2008. Greek Laughter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hannah, Robert. 2005. Greek and Roman Calendars: Constructions of Time in the Classical World. London: Duckworth. Hansen, Inge Lyse, and Richard Hodges, eds. 2007. Roman Butrint: An Assessment. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Hanson, John A. 1959. Roman Theater Temples. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hanson, William, and Richard Conolly. 2002. “Language and Literacy in Roman Britain: Some Archaeological Considerations.” In Becoming Roman, Writing Latin? Literacy and Epigraphy in the Roman West, edited by Alison E. Cooley, 152–64. Journal of Roman Archaeology, supplemental series 48. Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology. Harding, Philip. 2008. The Story of Athens: The Fragments of the Local Chronicles of Attika. New York: Routledge. Harmon, A. M. 1947. Lucian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harries, Jill, and Ian Wood, eds. 1993. The Theodosian Code: Studies in the Imperial Law of Late Antiquity. London: Duckworth. Harris, Edward, trans. 2008. Demosthenes, Speeches 20–22. Austin: University of Texas Press. Harris, William V. 1979. War and Imperialism in Republican Rome. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Harris, William V. 2001. Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harrison, George W. M., ed. 2005. Satyr Drama: Tragedy at Play. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales. Harrison, Jane. 1908–9. “The Kouretes and Zeus Kouros: A Study in Pre-historic Sociology.” Annual of the British School of Athens 15: 308–38. Harrison, Thomas. 2000. The Emptiness of Asia: Aeschylus’ Persians and the History of the Fifth Century. London: Duckworth. HГ¤ussler, Ralph. 1998. “Motivation and Ideologies of Romanization.” In ProceedingsPage 327 → of the Seventh Annual Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference, edited by Colin Forcey et al., 11–19. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Hawkes, G. 2001. “The Archeology of Food: A Case Study from Roman Britain.” In TRAC 2000: Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Theoretical Roman Archeology Conference, edited by G. Davis, A. Gardner, and K. Lockyear, 94–103. Oxford: Oxbow. Hedrick, Charles, Jr. 2000. History and Silence: Purge and Rehabilitation of Memory in Late Antiquity. Austin: University of Texas Press. Hemelrijk, Emily, and Greg Woolf, eds. 2013. Women in the Roman City in the Latin West. Boston: E. J. Brill.

Henderson, Jeffrey. 1990. “The Demos and Comic Competition.” In Nothing to Do with Dionysus? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, edited by John Winkler and Froma Zeitlin, 271–313. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Henderson, Jeffrey. 1998. “Attic Old Comedy, Frank Speech, and Democracy.” In Democracy, Empire, and the Arts in Fifth-Century Athens, edited by Deborah Boedeker and Kurt Raaflaub, 255–73. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Henrichs, Albert. 1978. “Greek Maenadism from Olympias to Messalina.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 82: 121–60. Herington, John. 1985. Poetry into Drama: Early Tragedy and the Greek Poetic Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hezser, Catherine, ed. 2010. Oxford Handbook of Daily Jewish Life in Roman Palestine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hicks, R. D. 1972. Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hignett, Charles. 1958. A History of the Athenian Constitution to the End of the Fifth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hill, Dorothy Kent. 1943–44. “The Temple above Pompey’s Theater.” Classical Journal 39: 360–65. Hill, Edmund. 1990. The Works of St. Augustine: Sermons. Brooklyn, NY: New City Press. Hill, Elizabeth Wolfram. 2010. “Civilization under Construction: Depictions of Architecture on the Column of Trajan.” American Journal of Archeology 114.1: 27–43. Hill, George F. 1913. The Life of Porphyry, Bishop of Gaza, by Mark the Deacon. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Holdern, J. H. 2002. The Fragments of Timotheus of Miletus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holford-Strevens, L. 2003. Aulus Gellius: An Antonine Scholar and His Achievements. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holliday, James. 1977. “The Flowers of Peisistratus.” Greece and Rome, 2nd ser., 24.1: 40–56. Honig, Bonnie. 2009. “Antigone’s Lament, Creon’s Grief: Mourning, Membership, and the Politics of Exception.” Political Theory 37.1: 5–43. Hopkins, Keith. 1983. Death and Renewal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. HГ¶schele, Regina. 2013. “From Ecloga the Mime to Vergil’s вЂEclogues’ as Mimes: вЂEin Gedankenspiel.’” Vergilius 59: 37–60. Page 328 →Howatson, M. C. 2013. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hughes, Alan. 2012. Performing Greek Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hughes, Bettany. 2010. The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life. New York: A. A. Knopf. Hunt, David. 1993. “Christianising the Roman Empire: The Evidence of the Code.” In The Theodosian Code, edited by Jill Harries and Ian Wood, 143–58. London: Duckworth.

Hunter, L. W., and S. A. Hanford. 1927. Aeneas on Siegecraft. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hunter, R. 1983. Eupolis: The Fragments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutton, William. 2005. Describing Greece: Landscape and Literature in the Periegesis of Pausanias. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Inge, R. M. 1918. The Philosophy of Plotinus. Vol. 2. London: Longmans, Green. Inomata, Takeshi, and Lawrence S. Coben. 2006. Archaeology of Performance: Theaters of Power, Community and Politics. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press. Isaac, Benjamin. 2004. The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Isler-KerГ©nyi, Cornelia. 2007a. Dionysus in Archaic Greece: An Understanding through Image. Boston: E. J. Brill. Isler-KerГ©nyi, Cornelia. 2007b. “Komasts, Mythic Imaginary, and Ritual.” In The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond: From Ritual to Drama, edited by Eric Csapo and Margaret Miller, 77–95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jacob, Christian. 2000. “Athenaeus the Librarian.” In Athenaeus and His World: Reading Greek Culture in the Roman Empire, edited by David Braund and John Wilkins, 85–110. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press. Jeffreys, Elizabeth, et al., eds. 1986. The Chronicle of John Malalas. Melbourne: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies. Jervis, Amy. 2001. “Talking Heads: The Iconography of Mutilation in the Roman Republic.” PhD diss., Stanford University. Jocelyn, H. D. 1967. The Tragedies of Ennius. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, Stephen. 1980. Later Roman Britain. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Jones, Christopher. 1971. Plutarch and Rome. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jones, Christopher, ed. and trans. 2005. Philostratus: The Life of Apollonius of Tyana. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jones, Horace L. 1949. The Geography of Strabo. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jones, Michael. 1998. The End of Roman Britain. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jones, S. 1997. The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Identities in the Past and Present. New York: Routledge. Jones, Tom B. 1978. In the Twilight of Antiquity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Page 329 →Jordan, David. R. 1985a. “Defixiones from a Well in the Southwest Corner of the Athenian Agora.” Hesperia 54.3: 205–55. Jordan, David R. 1985b. “A Survey of Greek Defixiones Not Included in the Special Corpora.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 26: 151–97. Jory, E. J. 1970. “Associations of Actors in Rome.” Hermes 98.2: 224–53. Jory, E. J. 1995. “Ars Ludicra and the Ludus Talarius.” In Stage Directions: Essays in Ancient Drama in Honour of E. W. Handley, edited by Alan Griffiths, 38–152. London: Institute of Classical Studies, University

of London. Joyce, Michael, trans. 1935. Plato’s Symposium. J. M. Dent and Sons. Jullian, Camille. 1927. Histoire de la Gaule. Vol. 4, Le Gouvernement de Rome. Paris: Hachette. Kagan, Donald. 1987. The Fall of the Athenian Empire. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Keay, Simon J. 1988. Roman Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press; London: British Museum. Ker, James. 2009. The Deaths of Seneca. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Keuls, Eva. 1993. The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens. Berkeley: University of California Press. Konstan, David. 2006. The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Konstan, David. 2012. “A World without Salves: Crates’ ThД“ria.” In No Laughing Matter, edited by C. W. Marshall and George Kovacs, 13–18. New York: Bristol Classical Press. Konstan, David. 2014. “Defining the Genre.” In The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy, edited by Martin Revermann, 27–42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Konstan, David, and N. Keith Rutter, eds. 2003. Envy, Spite and Jealousy: The Rivalrous Emotions in Ancient Greece. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kowalzig, Barbara. 2007. “вЂAnd Now All the World Shall Dance’: Dionysus’ Choroi between Drama and Ritual.” In The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond: From Ritual to Drama, edited by Eric Csapo and Margaret Miller, 221–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kragelund, P. 2002. “Historical Drama in Ancient Rome: Republican Flourishing and Imperial Decline?” Symbolae Osloenses 77: 5–51. Kristensen, Troels Myrup. 2013. Making and Breaking the Gods: Christian Responses to Pagan Sculpture in Late Antiquity. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press. Krueger, Derek. 1996. Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius’ Life and the Late Antiquity City. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kyle, Donald. 1998. Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome. New York: Routledge. Laing, Jennifer. 1997. Art and Society in Roman Britain. Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton. Lanciani, Rodolfo. 1888. Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Lang, Mabel. 1987. The Athenian Citizen. Princeton, NJ: American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Page 330 →Lantier, R. 1946. “Roman Gaul, 1940–1944.” Journal of Roman Studies 36: 76–90. Lape, Susan. 2004. Reproducing Athens: Menander’s Comedy, Democratic Culture, and the Hellenistic City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lardinois, AndrГ©, and Laura McClure, eds. 2001. Making Silence Speak: Women’s Voices in Greek Literature and Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Laurence, Ray. 2001a. “The Creation of Geography: An Interpretation of Roman Britain.” In Travel and Geography in the Roman Empire, edited by Colin Adams and Ray Laurence, 67–94. New York: Routledge. Laurence, Ray. 2001b. “Travel and Empire.” In Travel and Geography in the Roman Empire, edited by Colin Adams and Ray Laurence, 167–76. New York: Routledge. Laurence, Ray, and Joanne Berry, eds. 1998. Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire. New York: Routledge. Laurence, Ray, Simon Esmonde Cleary, and Gareth Sears. 2011. The City in the Roman West, c. 250 BC–c. AD 250. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, A. D. 2000. Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity: A Sourcebook. New York: Routledge. Lefkowitz, Mary. 1986. Women in Greek Myth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lefkowitz, Mary, and Maureen B. Fant. 2005. Women’s Life in Greece and Rome. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Leibowitz, David. 2010. The Ironic Defense of Socrates: Plato’s Apology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leigh, Mathew. 2004. Comedy and the Rise of Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lemerle, Paul. 1986. Byzantine Humanism: The First Phase. Canberra: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies. Leontis, Artemis. 1995. Topographies of Hellenism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Leppin, Hartmut. 1992. Histrionen: Untersuchungen zur sozialen Stellung von BГјhnenkГјnstler im Westen des RГ¶mischen Reiches zur Zeit der Republik und des Principats. Bonn: Habelt. Le Roy, Julien-David. 2004. The Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute. Levi, D. 1947. Antioch Mosaic Pavements. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Levi, Peter. 1979. Pausanias: Guide to Greece. New York: Penguin. Lewis, Michael J. T. 1966. Temples in Roman Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, S. 2002. The Athenian Woman: An Iconographic Handbook. New York: Routledge. Leyerle, Blake. 2001. Theatrical Shows and Aesthetic Lives: John Chrysostom’s Attack on Spiritual Marriage. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lim, Richard. 1999. “People as Power: Games, Munificence, and Contested Topography.” In The Transformation of Urbs Roma in Late Antiquity, edited by William V. Harris, 265–82. Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archeology. Page 331 →Lintott, Andrew. 1970. “The Tradition of Violence in the Annals of Early Rome.” Historia 19: 12–29. Lintott, Andrew. 1982. Violence, Civil Strife, and Revolution in the Classical City. London: Croom Helm. Lissarrague, FranГ§ois. 1990. “Why Satyrs Are Good to Represent.” In Nothing to Do with Dionysus? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, edited by John Winkler and Froma Zeitlin, 228–36. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Lissarrague, FranГ§ois. 1993. “The Wildness of Satyrs.” In The Masks of Dionysus, edited by Thomas Carpenter and Christopher Faraone, 207–20. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lloyd-Jones, Hugh. 1990. “Problems of Early Greek Tragedy: Pratinus, Phrynichus, the Gyges Fragment.” In Greek Epic, Lyric and Tragedy: The Academic Papers of Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 225–37. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loraux, Nicole. 1998. “Of Amnesty and Its Opposite.” In Mothers in Mourning, translated by Corinne Pache, 83–110. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Loraux, Nicole. 2002. The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens. New York: Zone Books. Lowe, George. 1848. A Description of the Roman Theatre of Verulam. London: George Bell. Luce, T. J., and A. J. Woodman, eds. 1993. Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Maas, Michael, ed. 2000. Readings in Late Antiquity: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge. Macaulay, Rose. 1984. Pleasure of Ruins. London: Thames and Hudson. MacDowell, Douglas M. 1978. The Law in Classical Athens. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. MacDowell, Douglas M., trans. 2004. Demosthenes, Speeches 27–38. Austin: University of Texas Press. Macleod, M. D. 1947. Lucian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. MacMullen, Ramsay. 1959. “Roman Imperial Building in the Provinces.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 64: 207–35. MacMullen, Ramsay. 1981. Paganism in the Roman Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. MacMullen, Ramsay. 1984. Christianizing the Roman Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. MacMullen, Ramsay. 2000. Romanization in the Time of Augustus. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Mango, Cyril. 1972. The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 312–1453. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Manuwald, Gesine. 2012. Roman Republican Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marciniak, Przemzslaw. 2004. Greek Drama in Byzantine Times. Wydawnictwo, Poland: Slaskiego University. Marsh, G. D. 1979. “Three Theatre Masks from London.” Britannia 10: 263–65. Marshall, C. W. 2004. “Being Roman: Expressing Identity in a Provincial Setting.” Journal of Roman Archaeology 17: 5–25. Page 332 →Marshall, C. W. 2006a. An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire, 54 BC–AD 409. London: Allen Lane. Marshall, C. W. 2006b. The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marshall, C. W. 2012. “Cratinus, Menander, and the Daphne Mosaic.” In No Laughing Matter: Studies in Athenian Comedy, edited by C. W. Marshall and George Kovacs, 187–96. London: Bristol Classical Press. Marshall, C. W., and George Kovacs, eds. 2012. No Laughing Matter: Studies in Athenian Comedy. London:

Bristol Classical Press. Martin, Hubert, Jr. 1961. “The Character of Plutarch’s Themistocles.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 92: 326–39. Mattingly, David. 2011. Imperialism, Power, and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mattingly, Harold. 2009. Tacitus: Agricola, Germania. London: Penguin Classics. McDonald, Marianne, and J. Michael Walton, eds. 2007. The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McGrath, Alister, ed. 2007. The Christian Theology Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. McNally, Sheila. 1984. “The Maenad in Early Greek Art.” In Women in the Ancient World: The Arethusa Papers, edited by John Peradotto and J. P. Sullivan, 107–41. Albany: State University of New York Press. Merkelbach, R., and Martin West. 1964. “The Religious Meaning of Greek Tragedy and Comedy, according to the вЂErigone’ of Eratosthenes.” History of Religions 3.2: 175–90. Meritt, Benjamin. D. 1961. The Athenian Year. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mikalson, J. D. 1975. The Sacred and Civil Calendar of the Athenian Year. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Miles, Richard, ed. 1999. Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity. New York: Routledge. Millar, Fergus. 2007. A Greek Roman Empire. Berkeley: University of California Press. Millett, Martin. 1990. The Romanization of Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Millett, Martin. 1999. “Coloniae and Romano-British Studies.” In The Coloniea of Roman Britain: New Studies and a Review, edited by Henry Hurst, 191–96. Journal of Roman Archaeology, supplementary series 36. Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology. Mills, Nigel, ed. 2013. Presenting the Romans: Interpreting the Frontier of the Roman Empire World Heritage Site. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Boydell and Brewer. Mirhady, David C., and Yun Lee Too, trans. 2000. Isocrates I. Austin: University of Texas Press. Mitchell, Stephen. 1987. “Imperial Building in the Eastern Roman Provinces.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 91: 333–65. Molloy, Margaret. 1996. Libanius and the Dancers. New York: Olms-Weidmann. Momigliano, Arnaldo, ed. 1964. The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Page 333 →Montague, John. 1995. Collected Poems. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press. Moretti, Franco. 2005. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. London: Verso. Morris, John. 1982. Londinium: London in the Roman Empire. London: Phoenix. Morstein-Marx, Robert. 2004. Mass Oratory and Political Power in Late Roman Republic. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press. Most, Glenn W. 2006. “Athens as the School of Greece.” In Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome, edited by James I. Porter, 377–88. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mullen, Alex. 2013. Southern Gaul and the Mediterranean: Multilingualism and Multiple Identities in the Iron Age and Roman Periods. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mullett, Margaret, and Roger Scott, eds. 1981. Byzantium and the Classical Tradition: Proceedings of the Thirteenth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies. Birmingham, UK: University of Birmingham. Murdoch, Iris. 1968. The Nice and the Good. New York: Penguin. Myers, Eric M., and Mark A. Chancey. 2012. Alexander to Constantine: Archeology of the Land of the Bible. Vol. 3. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Nervegna, Sebastiana. 2013. Menander in Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Netzer, Ehud, and Zeev Weiss. 1994. Zippori. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society. Nivlett, Rosalind. Verulamium: The Roman City of St. Albans. 2001. Gloucestershire, UK: Tempus. Nixon, Paul, ed. and trans. 1932. Plautus: The Little Carthaginian, Pseudolus, The Rope. London: Heinemann. Norman, A. F. 2000. Antioch as a Center of Hellenic Culture, as Observed by Libanius. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Norman, Joseph William Thrower. 1972. Maps and Civilization: Cartography in Culture and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. NГјnlist, RenГ©. 2009. The Ancient Critic at Work: Terms and Concepts of Literary Criticism in Greek Scholia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Obbink, Dirk. 1993. “Dionysus Poured Out: Ancient and Modern Theories of Sacrifice and Cultural Formation.” In Masks of Dionysos, edited by Thomas Carpenter and Christopher Faraone, 65–88. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ober, Josiah. 2004. “The Athenian Revolution of 508/7 B.C.: Violence, Authority, and the Origins of Democracy.” In Athenian Democracy, edited by P. J. Rhodes, 260–86. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oldfather, Charles Henry, trans. 1935. Diodorus Siculus. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Olson, Douglass. 2007. Broken Laughter: Select Fragments of Attic Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Olson, Douglass. 2010. “Comedy, Politics, and Society.” In Brill’s Companion to the Study of Greek Comedy, edited by Gregory Dobrov, 35–70. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Page 334 →Olson, Douglass, and Benjamin Millis, eds. 2012. Inscriptional Records for the Dramatic Festivals in Athens. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Osborne, Robin. 1993. “Competitive Festivals and the Polis: A Context for Dramatic Festivals at Athens.” In Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis: Papers from the Greek Drama Conference, edited by Alan Sommerstein et al., 21–38. Bari, Italy: Levante Editori. Osborne, Robin. 1996. Greece in the Making, 1200–479 BC. New York: Routledge.

Osborne, Robin. 2010. Athens and Athenian Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Otto, Walter. 1965. Dionysus: Myth and Cult. Translated by Robert Palmer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Padel, Ruth. 1995. Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Papillon, Terry, L., trans. 2004. Isocrates II. Austin: University of Texas Press. Parker, Douglass. 1974. Complete Comedies of Terence. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Parker, L. P. E. 1988. “Eupolis the Unruly.” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 214: 115–22. Passage, Charles E., trans. 1983. The Complete Works of Horace. New York: Frederick Ungar. Patrich, Joseph. 2002. “Herod’s Theatre in Jerusalem.” Israel Exploration Journal 52.2: 23139. Pelling, Christopher. 2002. Plutarch and History: Eighteen Studies. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales. Peradotto, John, and J. P. Sullivan, eds. 1984. Women in the Ancient World: The Arethusa Papers. Albany: State University of New York Press. Petch, James. 1900. The Old Oligarch; being the Constitution of the Athenians. Oxford: Basil Blackford. Phang, Sara. 2001. The Marriage of Roman Soldiers (13 BC–AD 235): Law and Family in the Imperial Army. Boston: E. J. Brill. Pharr, Clyde, ed. 1944–46. The Theodosian Code. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Department of Classics. Pharr, Clyde. 1952. The Theodosian Code and Novels and the Sirmondian Constitutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; London: Geoffrey Cumberledge. Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge. Picard, Gilbert. 1970. “Les ThГ©atres Ruraux de Gaule.” Revue ArchГ©ologique n.s. 1: 185–92. Pickard, John. 1893. “Dionysus бјђОЅ Λὶμνας” (Dionysus in Limnas). American Journal of Archeology and of the History of the Fine Arts 8.1: 55–82. Pickard-Cambridge, A. W. 1914. Demosthenes and the Last Days of Greek Freedom. New York: G. P. Putnam. Pickard-Cambridge, A. W. 1962. Dithyramb, Tragedy and Comedy. 2nd ed. Edited by T. B. L. Webster. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pickard-Cambridge, A. W. 1968. Dramatic Festivals of Athens. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Page 335 →Pickard-Cambridge, A. W. 1988. Dramatic Festivals of Athens. Edited and revised by J. Gould and D. M. Lewis. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pitts, Martin. 2007. “The Emperor’s New Clothes? The Utility of Identity in Roman Archeology.” American Journal of Archeology 111.4: 693–713. Podlecki, A. J. 1966. The Political Background of Aeschylean Tragedy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Podlecki, A. J. 1975. The Life of Themistocles. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Podlecki, A. J. 2005. “Aischylos Satyrikos.” In Satyr Drama: Tragedy at Play, edited by George W. M. Harrison, 1–19. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales. Pollini, J. 1984. “Damnatio Memoriae in Stone: Two Portraits of Nero Recut to Vespasian in American Museums.” American Journal of Archeology 88: 547–55. Polybius. 1979. The Rise of the Roman Empire. Translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert. New York: Penguin. Pomeroy, Sarah. 1975. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. New York: Schocken Books. Porter, James. 2001. “Ideals and Ruins: Pausanias, Longinus, and the Second Sophistic.” In Pausanias, Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, edited by Susan Adcock, John Cherry, and Jas Elsner, 63–92. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Porter, James, ed. 2006. The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Potter, T. W., and Catherine Johns. 1992. Roman Britain. London: British Museum Press. Pratt, Mary Louise. 2004. “The Anticolonial Past.” Modern Language Quarterly 65.3: 44–56. Proust, Marcel. 2000. In Search of Lost Time: Time Regained. Translated by Andrea Mayor and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright. London: Vintage. Quinn, T. 2001. “Aristotle, Comedy and Menander.” Classical Bulletin 77: 3–18. Raaflaub, Kurt A. 2004. “Aristocracy and Freedom of Speech in the Greco-Roman World.” In Free Speech in Classical Antiquity, edited by Ineke Sluiter and Ralph Rosen, 41–62. Boston: E. J. Brill. Rackham, H. 1960. Cicero: De Oratore. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Radice, Betty. 1969. Pliny: Letters, Books viii–x, Panegyricus. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Raffel, Burton, trans. 1983.The Essential Horace: Odes, Epodes, Satires, and Epistles. San Francisco: North Point Press. Rapp, Claudia, and H. A. Drake, eds. 2014. The City in the Classical and Post-classical World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rasmussen, Tom, and Nigel Jonathan Spivey, eds. 1991. Looking at Greek Vases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reece, Richard. 1990. “Romanization: A Point of View.” In The Early Roman Empire in the West, edited by T. Blagg and M. Millett, 30–34. Oxford: Oxbow Press. Reece, Richard. 1992. “The End of the City in Roman Britain.” In The City in Late Antiquity, edited by John Rich, 136–44. New York: Routledge. Page 336 →Reich, Ronnie, and Ya’akov Billig. 2000. “A Group of Theatre Seats Discovered Near the South-West Corner of the Temple Mount.” Israel Exploration Journal 50.3–4: 175–84. Reiter, William. 1988. Amelius Paullus, Conqueror of Greece. New York: Croom Helm. Retzleff, Alexandra. 2003. “Near Eastern Theaters in Late Antiquity.” Phoenix 57: 115–38.

Revermann, Martin. 1997. “Cratinus’ Dionyalexandros and the Head of Pericles.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 117: 197–200. Revermann, Martin. 2006. Comic Business: Theatricality, Dramatic Technique, and Performance Contexts of Aristophanic Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Revermann, Martin, ed. 2014. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reynolds, Joyce. 1982. Aphrodisias and Rome: Documents from the Excavation of the Theatre at Aphrodisias. London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies. Reynolds, Joyce, Charlotte RouechГ©, and Gabriel Bodard, eds. 2007. Inscriptions of Aphrodisias. http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007. Rhoades, James. 1881. The Georgics of Virgil. London: C. Kegan Paul. Rhodes, P. J., ed. 2004. Athenian Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rhodes, P. J. 1994. “The Ostracism of Hyperbolus.” In Ritual, Finance, Politics: Athenian Democratic Accounts, Presented to D. M. Lewis, edited by Simon Hornblower and Robin Osbourne, 85–98. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rhodes, P. J. 2003. “вЂNothing to Do with Democracy’: Athenian Drama and the Polis.” Journal of Hellenistic Studies 123: 104–19. Rice, E. E. 1983. The Grand Procession of Ptolemy Philadelphus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rich, John, ed. 1992. The City in Late Antiquity. New York: Routledge. Richards, Jeffrey. 1980. Consul of God: The Life and Times of Gregory the Great. New York: Routledge. Richardson, J. S. 2000. Appian: War of the Romans in Iberia. Warminster, UK: Aris and Phillips. Richlin, Amy. 2006. Marcus Aurelius in Love. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rivet, A. L. F. 1988. Gallia Narbonensis: Southern France in Roman Times. London: B. T. Batsford. Roberts, Jennifer Tolbert. 1994. Athens on Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Roberts, W. Rhys. 1941. “Rhetorica.” In The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by Richard McKeon. New York: Random House. Robertson, Noel. 1993. “Athens’ Festival of the New Wine.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 95: 197–250. Robinson, David. 1940. “A New Marble Bust of Menander Wrongly Called Vergil.” Proceedings of the American Philological Society 83.3: 465–77. Page 337 →Rogers, Adam. 2011. Late Roman Towns in Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roller, Matthew, B. 2010. “Demolished Houses, Monumentality and Memory in Roman Culture.” Classical Antiquity 29.1: 117–80.

Romer, F. E. 1998. Pomponius Mela’s Description of the World. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Romm, James, ed. 2012. The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander. New York: Anchor Books. Romm, James. 2014. Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero. New York: Vintage Books. Ros, Karen. 1996. “The Roman Theatre at Carthage.” American Journal of Archaeology 100.3: 449–89. Rosen, Ralph. 1988. Old Comedy and the Iambographic Tradition. Atlanta: Scholars’ Press. Rosen, Ralph. 1995. “Plato Comicus and the Evolution of Greek Comedy.” In Beyond Aristophanes: Transition and Diversity in Greek Comedy, edited by Gregory Dobrov, 119–37. Atlanta: Scholars’ Press. Rosen, Ralph. 2007. Making Mockery: The Poetics of Ancient Satire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosen, Ralph. 2016. “Lucian’s Aristophanes: On Understanding Old Comedy in the Roman Imperial Period.” In Athenian Comedy in the Roman Empire, edited by C. W. Marshall and Tom Hawkins, 141–62. London: Bloomsbury. Rosenbloom, David. 1993. “Shouting вЂFire’ in a Crowded Theater: Phrynicos’ Capture of Miletos and the Politics of Fear in Early Attic tragedy.” Philologus 137.2: 159–96. Rosenbloom, David. 2006. Aeschylus: Persians. London: Duckworth. Rosokoki, A. 1995. Die “Erigone” des Eratosthenes: Eine kommentierte Ausgabe der Fragmente, Bibliothek der klassischen Altertumswissenschaften 2.94. Heidelberg: UniversitГ¤tsverlag C. Winter. Rothwell, Kenneth S. 2007. Nature, Culture, and the Origins of Greek Comedy: A Study of Animal Choruses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. RouechГ©, Charlotte. 1991. “Inscriptions and the Later History of the Theatre.” In Aphrodisias Papers, 2nd ed., edited by K. T. Erim and R. R. R. Smith, 99–108. Journal of Roman Archaeology Monograph 2. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. RouechГ©, Charlotte. 1993. Performers and Partisans at Aphrodisias in the Roman and Late Roman Periods. Vol. 1. London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies. RouechГ©, Charlotte. 2006. “Written Display in the Late Antiquity and Byzantine City.” In Proceedings of the 21st International Congress of Byzantine Studies, edited by Elizabeth Jeffreys and Fiona Haarer, 235–53. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Rowland, Ingrid D., and Thomas Noble Howe, eds. 1999. Vitruvius: Ten Books on Architecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rowland, Robert, Jr. 1983. “Rome’s Earliest Imperialism.” Latmus 42: 749–62. Roymans, N. 1995. “Romanization, Cultural Identity, and the Ethnic Discussion.” In Integration in the Early Roman West: The Role of Culture and Ideology, Page 338 →edited by J. Metzlet et al., 47–64. Luxembourg City, Luxembourg: MusГ©e Nationale d’Histoire et d’Art. Russell, D. A. 1996. Imaginary Speeches: A Selection of Declamations. London: Duckworth. Russell, Norman. 1981. Lives of the Desert Fathers: The “Historia Monochorum in Aegypto”. London: Mowbray. Rusten, Jeffrey. 2006. “Who вЂInvented’ Comedy: The Ancient Candidates for the Origins of Comedy and the Visual Evidence.” American Journal of Philology 27.1: 37–66.

Rusten, Jeffrey, ed. 2011. The Birth of Comedy: Texts, Documents, and Art from Athenian Comic Competitions. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Salzman, Michele Renee. 2006. “Re-thinking Pagan-Christian Violence.” In Violence in Late Antiquity, edited by H. A. Drake, 265–86. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Sandridge, Norman. 2008. “Feeling Vulnerable, but Not Too Vulnerable: Pity in Sophocles’ Oedipus Coloneus, Ajax, and Philoctetes.” Classical Journal 103.4: 433–48. Santangelo, Federico. 2007. “Pompey and Religion.” Hermes 135: 228–33. Schacter, D., ed. 1995. Memory Distortions: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct Their Past. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schaff, P., and H. Wace, eds. 1955. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. 2nd series, vol. 14. 1890; rpt. Grand Rapids, MI: William. B. Eerdmans. Schaps, D. M. 1979. Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Schlesier, Renate. 1993. “Mixtures of Masks: Maenads as Tragic Models.” In Masks of Dionysos, edited by Thomas Carpenter and Christopher Faraone, 89–114. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Schneider, Rebecca. 2011. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. New York: Routledge. Schnusenberg, C. C. 1988. The Relationship between the Church and the Theatre Exemplified by Selected Writings of the Church Fathers and by Liturgical Texts until Amalarius of Maetz—775–852 AD. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Schoch, Richard. 2012. “Inventing the Origins of Theatre History.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 27.1: 5–23. Scodel, Ruth, ed. 1993. Theatre and Society in the Classical World. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Seaford, Richard. 1993. “Dionysus as Destroyer of the Household: Homer, Tragedy, and the Polis.” In Masks of Dionysos, edited by Thomas Carpenter and Christopher Faraone, 115–46. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Seaford, Richard. 1994. Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seaford, Richard. 1996. “Something to Do with Dionysus—Tragedy and the Dionysiac: Response to Friedrich.” In Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond, edited by M. S. Silk, 284–94. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Page 339 →Sear, Frank. 1990. “Vitruvius and Roman Theatre Design.” American Journal of Archeology 94: 249–58. Sear, Frank. 2006. Roman Theatres: An Architectural Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seeberg, Alex. 1995. “From Padded Dancers to Comedy.” In Stage Directions: Essays in Ancient Drama in Honour of E. W. Handley, edited by Alan Griffiths, 1–12. London: Institute of Classical Studies, University of London.

Segal, Arthur. 1995. Theatres in Roman Palestine and Provincial Arabia. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Segal, Charles. 1992. Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides’ Bacchae. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Seiwert, P., ed. 2002. Ostrakimos: Testimo nien I. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner. SГ©lincourt, Aubrey de. 1954. Herodotus: The Histories. New York: Penguin. Shapiro, H. A. 1998. “Hipparchos and the Rhapsodes.” In Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece, edited by Carol Dougherty and Leslie Kurke, 92–107. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sharples, N. M. 1991. Maiden Castle: Excavations and Field Survey. Archaeological Report 19. London: English Heritage. Shaw, Carl A. 2014. Satyric Play: The Evolution of Greek Comedy and Satyr Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shear, T. Leslie. 1936. “The Campaign of 1935.” Hesperia 5.1: 1–42. Sherk, Robert. 1970. The Municipal Decrees of the Roman West. Buffalo: Department of Classics Press, State University of New York. Shipley, Frederick, trans. 1967. C. Velleius Paterculus: A Compendium of Roman History. London: Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Sickinger, James P. 1999. Public Records and Archives in Classical Athens. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina. Sidwell, Keith. 2000. “Athenaeus Lucian and Fifth Century Comedy.” In Athenaeus and His World: Reading Greek Culture in the Roman Empire, edited by David Braund and John Wilkins, 136–52. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press. Sidwell, Keith. C. 2009. Aristophanes the Democrat: The Politics of Satirical Comedy during the Peloponnesian War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silk, M. S., ed. 1996. Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Slater, Niall W. 2005. “Nothing to do with Satyrs? Alcestis and the Concept of Prosatyric Drama.” In Satyr Drama: Tragedy at Play, edited by George W. M. Harrison, 8–102. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales. Slater, William. 1988. “The Epiphany of Demosthenes.” Phoenix 42: 126–30. Slater, William. 1996a. “Nero’s Masks.” Classical World 90.1: 33–40. Slater, William, ed. 1996b. Roman Theatre and Society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Slater, William. 2007. “Deconstructing Festivals.” In The Greek Theatre and Festivals, edited by Peter Wilson, 21–47. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sluiter, Ineke, and Ralph Rosen, eds. 2004. Free Speech in Classical Antiquity. Boston: E. J. Brill. Small, David. 1983. “Studies in Roman Theater Design.” American Journal of Archaeology 87.1: 55–68. Page 340 →Smith, Bruce. 1988. Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage, 1500–1700. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Smith, R. Payne. 1860. Ecclesiastical History of John, Bishop of Ephesus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, R. R. R. 1991. “Late Roman Philosophers.” In Aphrodisias Papers 2, edited by R. R. R. Smith and Kenan T. Erim, 144–58. Ann Arbor, MI: Journal of Roman Archaeology. Smith, Tyler Jo. 2007. “The Corpus of Komast Vases: From Identity to Exegesis.” In The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond: From Ritual to Drama, edited by Eric Csapo and Margaret Miller, 48–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Socrates Scholasticus. 1844. The Ecclesiastical History. London: Samuel Bagster. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. 1973. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956. Translated by Thomas Whitney. New York: Harper and Row. Sommerstein, Alan. 1986. “The Decree of Syrakosios.” Classical Quarterly 36: 101–7. Sommerstein, Alan. 2004a. “Comedy and the Unspeakable.” In Law, Rhetoric, and Comedy in Classical Athens: Essays in Honour of Douglass M. MacDowell, edited by D. L. Cairns and R. A. Knox, 205–22. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales. Sommerstein, Alan. 2004b. “Harassing the Satirist: The Alleged Attempts to Prosecute Aristophanes.” In Free Speech in Classical Antiquity, edited by Ineke Sluiter and Ralph Rosen, 145–74. Boston: E. J. Brill. Sommerstein, Alan. 2014. “The Politics of Greek Comedy.” In The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy, edited by Martin Revermann, 291–305. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sourvinou-Inwood, Christiane. 1994. “Something to Do with Athens: Tragedy and Ritual.” In Ritual, Finance, Politics: Athenian Democratic Accounts, edited by Simon Hornblower and Robin Osborne, 269–90. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sourvinou-Inwood, Christiane. 2003. Tragedy and Athenian Religion. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Stanton, G. R. 1984. “The Tribal Reforms of Kliestenes the Alkmeonid.” Chiron 14: 1–41. Stehle, Eva. 2001. “The Good Daughter: Mother’s Tutelage in Erinna’s Distaff and Fourth Century Epitaphs.” In Making Silence Speak, edited by AndrГ© Lardinois and Laura McClure, 179–200. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stek, Tesse D. 2010. Cult Places and Cultural Change in Republican Italy. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Stewart, Peter. 1999. “The Destruction of Statues in Late Antiquity.” In Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity, edited by Richard Miles, 159–89. New York: Routledge. Stewart, Peter. 2003. Statues in Roman Society, Representation and Response. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stillwell, Richard, et al., eds. 1976. Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Studies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Page 341 →Stock, R D. 1989. The Flutes of Dionysus: Daemonic Enthrallment in Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Stone, Isidor F. 1988. The Trial of Socrates. Boston: Little, Brown. Storey, Ian. 2003. Eupolis: Poet of Old Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Storey, Ian. 2005. “But Comedy Has Satyrs Too.” In Satyr Drama: Tragedy at Play, edited by George W.

M. Harrison, 201–18. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales. Storey, Ian. 2010. “Origins of Fifth-Century Comedy.” In Brill’s Companion to the Study of Greek Comedy, edited by Gregory Dobrov, 179–226. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Storey, Ian, ed. and trans. 2011. Fragments of Old Comedy. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Storm, William. 1998. After Dionysus: A Theory of the Tragic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Strassler, Robert, ed. 1996. The Landmark Thucydides. New York: Touchstone. Strassler, Robert, ed. 2007. The Landmark Herodotus. New York: Anchor Books. Sutton, Dana F. 1980. The Greek Satyr Play. Meisenheim am Glan, Germany: Hain. Swain, S. C. R. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism and Power in the Greek World, AD 50–250. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Talgam, Rina. 2004. “The Ekphrasis Eikonos of Procopius of Gaza: The Depiction of Mythological Themes in Palestine and Arabia during the Fifth and Sixth Centuries.” In Christian Gaza in Late Antiquity, edited by Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony and Aryeh Kofsky, 209–34. Boston: E. J. Brill. Taplin, Oliver. 1978. Greek Tragedy in Action. Berkeley: University of California Press. Taplin, Oliver. 1986. “Fifth-Century Tragedy and Comedy: A Synkrisis.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 106: 163–74. Taplin, Oliver. 1992. Comic Angels and Other Approaches to Greek Drama through Vase Painting. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taplin, Oliver. 1997. “The Pictorial Record.” The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, edited by P. E. Easterling. 69–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Theodoretus. 1843. Ecclesiastical History. London: Samuel Bagster. Thomas, Edmund. 2007. Monumentality and the Roman Empire: Architecture in the Antonine Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thompson, E. A. 1977. “Britain AD 406–410.” Britannia 8: 303–18. Thompson, Homer A. 1950. “Excavations in the Athenian Agora: 1949.” Hesperia 19.4: 313–37. Thompson, Homer A. 1981. “Athens Faces Adversity.” Hesperia 50.4: 343–55. Todd, M. 1985. “Oppida and the Roman Army: A Review of Recent Evidence.” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 4.2: 187–99. Todd, O. J., trans. 1922. Xenophon: Symposium and Apology. London: Heinemann. Todd, S. C., trans. 2000. Lysias. Oratory of Classical Greece. Austin: University of Texas Press. Tomlin, R. S. O. 2002. “Writing to the Gods in Britain.” In Becoming Roman, Writing Latin? Literacy and Epigraphy in the Roman West, edited by Alison Cooley, 165–79. Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology. Page 342 →Tomlinson, R. A. 1972. Argos and the Argolid from the End of the Bronze Age to the Roman

Occupation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Too, Yun Lee. 2000. “The Walking Library: The Performance of Cultural Memories.” In Athenaeus and His World: Reading Greek Culture in the Roman Empire, edited by David Braund and John Wilkins, 111–16. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press. Too, Yun Lee. 2010. The Idea of the Library in the Ancient World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Treadgold, Warren, T. 1980. The Nature of the Biblioteca of Photios. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies. Trendall, A. D. 1967. Phlyax Vases. 2nd ed. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 19. London: Institute of Classical Studies, University of London. Trendall, A. D. 1991. “Farce and Tragedy in South Italian Vase-Painting.” In Looking at Greek Vases, edited by Tom Rasmussen and Nigel Jonathan Spivey, 151–82. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trevett, Jeremy. 2000. “Was There a Degree of Syrakosios?” Classical Quarterly 50: 598–600. Trevett, Jeremy, trans. 2011. Demosthenes, Speeches 1–17. Austin: University of Texas Press. Trombley, Frank. 2008. “The Destruction of Pagan Statuary and Christianization.” In The Sculptural Environment of the Roman Near East: Reflections on Culture, Ideology, and Power, edited by Yaron Z. Eliav, Elise A. Friedland, and Sharon Herbert, 143–64. Dudley, MA: Peeters. Trzaskoma, Stephen M. 2010. Two Novels from Ancient Greece: Callirhoe and An Ephesian Story. Indianapolis: Hackett. Tsafrir, Yoram. 2008. “The Classical Heritage in Late Antique Palestine.” In The Sculptural Environment of the Roman Near East: Reflections on Culture, Ideology, and Power, edited by Yaron Z. Eliav, Elise A. Friedland, and Sharon Herbert, 117–41. Dudley, MA: Peeters. Umholtz, Gretchen. 2002. “Architectural Arrogance? Dedicatory Inscriptions in Greek Architecture of the Classical Period.” Hesperia 71.3: 261–93. Vanderpool, Eugene. 1970. Ostracism at Athens. Cincinnati, OH: University of Cincinnati Press. Van der Veen, Marijke, Alexandra Livarda, and Alistair Hill. 2007. “The Archaeobotany of Roman Britain: Current State of Identification of Research Priorities.” Britannia 38: 181–210. Van Dommelen, P. 1998. “Punic Persistence, Colonialism and Cultural Identities in Roman Sardinia.” In Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire, edited by Ray Laurence and Joanne Berry, 25–48. London: Routledge. Van Rossum-Steenbeck, M. 1998. “Greek Readers’ Digests? Studies on a Selection of Sub-literary Papyri.” Mnemosyne supplement 175. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Van Slyke, Daniel G. 2005. “The Devil and His Pomps in Fifth Century Carthage: Renouncing Spectacula with Spectacular Imagery.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 59: 53–72. Varner, Eric. 2004. Mutilation and Transformation: Damnatio Memoriae and Roman Imperial Portraiture. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Page 343 →VersГ©nyi, Laszlo. 1962. “Dionysus and Tragedy.” Review of Metaphysics 16.1: 82–97. Viano, Cristina. 2003. “Competitive Emotions and Thumos in Aristotle’s Rhetoric.” In Envy, Spite and Jealousy: The Rivalrous Emotions in Ancient Greece, edited by David Konstan and N. Keith Rutter, 85–97.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Vickers, Michael. 1985. “Persepolis, Vitruvius, and the Erectheum Caryatids: The Iconography of Medism and Servitude.” Revue Archéologique 1: 3–28. Vickers, Michael. 2008. Sophocles and Alcibiades: Athenian Politics in Ancient Greek Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Vince, Ronald. 1984. Ancient and Medieval Theatre: A Historiographical Handbook. Westport CT: Greenwood Press. Vout, Caroline. 2006. “What’s in a Beard? Re-thinking Hadrian’s Hellenism.” In Re-thinking Revolutions through Ancient Greece, edited by Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne, 96–112. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wacher, John. 1995. The Towns of Roman Britain. London: B. T. Batsford. Waelkens, Marc. 1995. “Rise and Fall of Sagalassos.” Archaeology 48.3: 28–34. Walbank, F. W. 1969. The Awful Revolution: The Decline of the Roman Empire in the West. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Walbank, F. W. 1985. Selected Papers: Studies in Greek and Roman History and Historiography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walbank, F. W. 1992. Polybius. Berkeley: University of California Press. Walsh, Gerald, Demetrius Zea, Grace Monohan, and Daniel Honan, eds. 1958. City of God, Saint Augustine. New York: Image Books. Walton, Francis. 1957–84. Diodorus of Sicily: The Library of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Watson, Walter. 2012. The Lost Second Book of Aristotle’s Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Webb, Ruth. 2008. Demons and Dancers: Performance in Late Antiquity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Webster, Jane. 2001. “Creolizing the Roman Provinces.” American Journal of Archaeology 105.2: 209–25. Webster, T. B. L. 1948. “South Italian Vases and Attic Drama.” Classical Quarterly 48: 15–27. Webster, T. B. L. 1960. “Greek Dramatic Monuments from Agora and the Pnyx.” Hesperia 29: 254-–84. Webster, T. B. L. 1973. Athenian Culture and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weiss, Zeev. 2004. “Games and Spectacles in Ancient Gaza: Performances for the Masses in Buildings Now Lost.” In Christian Gaza in Late Antiquity, edited by Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony and Aryeh Kofsky, 23–29. Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Weiss, Zeev. 2012. “Theatres, Hippodromes and Amphitheaters in Ancient Palestine.” In The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Daily Life in Roman Palestine, edited by C. Hezser, 623–40. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weiss, Zeev. 2014. Public Spectacles in Roman and Late Antique Palestine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press. Page 344 →Wells, Colin. 2006. Sailing to Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World. New York: Delacorte Press. Wells, Peter. 1999. The Barbarians Speak: How the Conquered Peoples Shaped Roman Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. West, Louise. 1932. “The Economic Collapse of the Roman Empire.” Classical Journal 28.2: 96–106. West, M. L. 1992. Ancient Greek Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. West, M. L. 2001. Documents of Ancient Greek Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Whiston, William. 1998. Josephus: The Complete Works. Dallas, TX: Thomas Nelson. White, Horace, ed. 1972. Appian: The Punic Wars. London: Heinemann. Whitehead, David. 1990. Aineias the Tactician: How to Survive under Siege. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Whitley, James. 2005. “Archeology in Greece, 2004–2005.” Archeological Reports 51: 1–118. Whitmarsh, Tim. 2005. The Second Sophistic. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whittaker, C. R. 1994. Frontiers of the Roman Empire: A Social and Economic Study. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wiles, David. 2004. The Masks of Menander. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiles, David. 2011. Theatre and Citizenship: The History of a Practice. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press. Wilkins, John. 2000. The Boastful Chef: The Discourse of Food in Ancient Greek Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilmott, Tony. 2007. The Roman Amphitheatre in Britain. Stroud, UK: Tempus. Wilson, Emily. 2007. The Death of Socrates. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wilson, N. G. 1994. Photius: The Bibliotheca. London: Duckworth Press. Wilson, N. G. 1997. Aelian: Historical Miscellany (Varia Historia). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wilson, Peter. 2000. The Athenian Institution of the Khoregia: The Chorus, the City, and the Stage. Cambridge University Press. Wilson, Peter, ed. 2007. The Greek Theatre and Festivals: Documentary Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, William. 2016. Complete Works of Clement of Alexandria. Hastings, UK: Delphi Classics. Winkler, John. 1990. “The Ephebe’s Song: Tragoidia and Polis.” In Nothing to Do with Dionysus? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, edited by John Winkler and Froma Zeitlin, 20–62. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Winkler, John, and Froma Zeitlin, eds. 1990. Nothing to Do with Dionysus? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Wise, Jennifer. 1998. Dionysus Writes: The Invention of Theatre in Ancient Greece. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wiseman, T. P. 2007. “Names Remembered, Names Suppressed.” Journal of Roman Archeology 20: 421–28. Wiseman, T. P. 2008. Unwritten Rome. Exeter, UK: Exeter Press. Woodman, A. J. 1993. “Amateur Dramatics at the Court of Nero (Tac. Ann. Page 345 →15.48–74).” In Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition, edited by T. J. Luce and A. J. Woodman, 104–28. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Woolf, Greg. 1996. “Power and the Spread of Writing in the West.” In Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, edited by Alan K. Bowman and Greg Woolf, 83–98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woolf, Greg. 1997. “Beyond Romans and Natives.” World Archaeology 28.3: 339–50. Woolf, Greg. 1998. Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Worthington, Ian, Craig Cooper, and Edward Harris. 2001. Dinarchus, Hyperides, and Lycurgus. Austin: University of Texas Press. Wright, W. C., trans. 1913. Julian: Misopogon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Yardley, J. C., trans. 1994. Justin: Epitome of the “Philippic History” of Pompeius Trogus. Atlanta: Scholar’s Press. Yarnold, Edward. 2000. Cyril of Jerusalem. New York: Routledge. Yates, Francis. 1966. The Art of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Yunis, Harvey, trans. 2005. Demosthenes, Speeches 18 and 19. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Page 346 →Page 347 →

Index Aeschines, 2, 55 Aeschylus, 28–30, 37, 57, 58–61, 91, 191, 216, 217, 230; Proteus, 218; Seven Against Thebes, 220; Oresteia, 7; Persians, 50, 57–61 Agathon, 65, 76, 85, 230 Alcibiades, 70, 76, 78–79, 85, 89, 280 Alexis, 32, 89, 215, 218, 225 Amnesty, 2, 15, 30, 52, 54–56, 81, 88–91, 104, 235–36 Andronicus, Livius, 111, 162–64, 186 Antiphon, 1–2, 54, 276 Aphrodisias, 6, 10, 128, 139–40 Archeptolemus, 2, 276 Aristides, 58 Aristophanes, 65–66, 75, 76, 82, 83–84, 88, 102, 209, 217, 223, 264–65; Frogs, 20–21, 60–62, 83, 98; Clouds, 78, 84, 87; Peace, 84; Babylonians, 84; The Dress Rehearsal, 217 Aristotle, Constitution of Athens, 2, 54–55, 67, 75, 211, 220; Poetics, 24, 66–67, 70, 265; Didaskaliae, 211–12; Rhetoric, 50–51 Athenaeus, 14, 203–21 passim Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, 237–38, 242–43 Boudicca, 136–138, 201–2 Carthage, 108–109, 111, 113, 116, 120, 126, 128, 129, 179, 242–43, 250, 251 Caryatids, 21, 172–73 Choricius of Gaza, 7, 53, 89, 92, 251, 258 Chrysostom, John, 7, 52, 248–50, 251–54 Cimon, 58, 70, 71 City Dionysia, 12, 26–27, 31–32, 41, 44, 66, 71, 75, 159 Cleisthenes, 31, 70 Clement of Alexandria, 24, 36, 39, 52 Cleon, 76, 84

Curse tablets, 113–14 Damnatio Memoriae, 15, 53, 235–37, 262 Demosthenes, 20–21, 76–77, 97, 99 Diderot, Denis, 5 Dionysus, 18–22, 23–45 passim Eupolis, 69, 84–87 Euripides, Bacchae, 23, 25, 27, 41, 84, 94, 162, 195, 231; illustration, 246; Andromeda, 181; iconoclasm, 246 Galen, 23, 82, 262 Glycera, 93, 95, 262 Hadrian, 175 Herod, 128, 176 Herodotus, 9, 26, 48–49 Hippias, 82, 192 Hunayn ibn Ishaq, 264–65 Hypatia of Alexandria, 247, 308 Hyperbolus, 72, 79 Iconoclasm, 3–4, 239–41 Infamia, 157, 165, 299 Josephus, 133–34 Juba, 141, 207–8, 212, 214–15, 233 Juvenal, 180, 185 Kataskaphē, 1–2, 5 Maenads, 23–24, 28, 39, 40–44 Menander, 9, 13, 80, 90–104 passim Middle Comedy, 82, 87–89, 212, 218, 225–27 Miltiades, 57, 68 Mimes, 6, 10, 102, 134, 143–44, 146–49 Nero, 182, 199–201 New Comedy, 2, 9, 89–104 passim

Orange (Aurasio), 124–25, 142, 176 Old Comedy, 2, 9, 11, 64–79 passim, 81–84, 223–24 Ostraca, 65, 70–79 Ostracism, 64–79 passim Pausanias, 14, 188–97 Phrynichus, Fall of Miletus, 12, 47–61, 63; Phoenician Women, 50, 58, 76 Phylakes, 158–59, 160–61 Piranesi, Giovanni, 5 Page 348 →Plautus, 112, 114 Plato, Symposium, 65–66, 76, 78 Plutarch, 9, 55–56, 80–81 Pompey Magnus, 156, 164, 165–68 Pseudo-Xenophon , 69 Roman Britain, 132, 134, 137–38, 142–43, 146, 153 Roman Gaul, 109–10, 123–25, 128–38, 142, 144, 149, 154, 176–77, 250, 255 Roman Judea, 10, 133, 134–35, 139, 167 Roman Spain, 106, 108, 109, 134, 136, 142, 149–50, 154, 183 Romanizing, 123–25, 127–55 passim Satyrs, 11, 15, 19, 25, 28, 34, 35–39, 41, 266 Satyr plays, 7, 26, 31, 37, 39, 41, 158, 218, 250, 259 Scipio Africanus, 106–7, 108–9, 156 Seneca, 185, 187, 188, 198, 200–201 Sicilian campaign, 62, 86 Socrates, 65–66, 72, 77–79, 216 Sulla, 195–96 Synesius of Cyrene, 7, 24, 53, 250 Tarentum, 158–62, 168 Terence, 111–12, 116–21 Themistocles, 57–58, 61, 68, 69–70, 71–76

Theodosian Code, 241–45, 255–56 Theoric Fund, 97, 101 Verecunda, 146–48 Verulamium, 177–78 Vindolanda, 146–47 Vitruvius, 132, 157, 169–73 Xenophon, Symposium, 33–35 Yazid II, 262 Zenobius, 30, 31, 35, 45 Zeugma, 10, 93, 94 Zoilos, Gaius Julius, 139–40, 141, 144, 154