In a fragmentary speech probably dated to AD 96, Dio Chrysostom describes an unflattering episode from his days in exile. Invited to deliver a speech in Cyzicus, he made his way there and got ready to address his audience only to see them drifting away, choosing a citharode’s performance over his lecture. The citharode upstaged him, but Dio humoured the crowd, joined them and later mentioned this episode to illustrate his fondness for all types of performance but especially drama. Dio is keen to explain why citharodes and actors are better performers than orators. Their voices are more pleasant to hear, their texts well-crafted and the authors of these texts worthy of respect: ‘most of what [actors] give us,’ he writes, ‘comes from ancient times and from men much wiser than our contemporaries.’ Dio mentions again these plays ‘from ancient times’ in another work in which he exposes ambition and its dangers. After reviewing the many legends surrounding the house of Pelops, from the golden lamb to Orestes’ fit of madness, Dio urges his audiences and readers to believe in these stories, ‘which were written by no ordinary men, Euripides and Sophocles, and are also recited in the midst of the theatres’.Footnote ¹ Dio refers to these myths as Euripides and Sophocles treated them in their tragedies and emphasises that they deserve to be trusted. They matter not only because of their venerated authors but also because of the actors who keep staging them. Their survival in contemporary theatres adds to their cultural capital.

For most of antiquity, Greek tragedies circulated both as performance scripts and written texts; they had a ‘double life’.Footnote ² The dramatic productions mentioned by Dio promoted their dissemination just like the many papyri and ancient books that preserved their texts. While both types of sources help us reconstruct the enduring appeal of Greek drama in general, performance-related records belong to a specific strand of its afterlife – one involving actors, stages and audiences. This strand is the subject-matter of this book.

Greek dramatic texts were originally meant to be staged in open-air theatres: poets composed them for performance, and actors and choruses delivered them to an excited audience as a piper provided musical accompaniment. Obvious as it is by now, this point is a relatively recent one. We owe it to several works published over the last fifty years or so and generally known as performance studies. Focusing on the theatrical aspects of dramatic texts, performance studies reconstructed how ancient plays were produced and how specific poets crafted their scripts.Footnote ³ As the venue that hosted the premiere of most surviving plays, fifth-century Athens and her Theatre of Dionysus dominate these scholarly narratives, rooting them all in a specific and well-defined historical context. Central as they are in performance studies, they both faded into the background when performance studies intersected with another scholarly trend now forming a distinctive subfield, reception studies. The focus shifted from premieres to post-premiere performances or reperformances, as they are usually called, and work in this area took two main directions. One turned mostly to contemporary stages and the other to their ancient counterparts.Footnote ⁴

The single main impulse that pointed scholarly research in the second direction came from vase-paintings. After an increasing number of vessels from fourth-century Sicily and South Italy were identified as reproducing specific Greek (Attic) tragedies and comedies, Western Greece became a focal point of attention.Footnote ⁵ So did also Macedon and Attica, as scholars pieced together all kinds of records for how Greek drama spread outside the city of Athens: literary sources on travelling poets, theatre-related inscriptions, remains of theatrical buildings as well as select passages from dramatic texts supposedly appealing to non-Athenian audiences.Footnote ⁶ The topic grew in popularity, and articles gave way to books. In 2014, Vesa Vahtikari treated both premieres and subsequent performances in his Tragedy Performances outside Athens in the Late Fifth and the Fourth Centuries BC. Anna Lamari can claim credit for the first two books featuring reperformances and reperforming on their covers: the volume that she edited in 2015, Reperformances of Drama in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BC: Authors and Contexts, and the monograph that she authored in 2017, Reperforming Greek Tragedy: Theater, Politics, and Cultural Mobility in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BC. Published shortly after Lamari’s monograph, Edmund Stewart’s Greek Tragedy on the Move (Reference Stewart2017) covered much of the same ground to argue that tragedy spread much earlier and much faster than generally thought. I also count at least one recent reference work with a dedicated entry on reperformances and at least one companion with a whole chapter on them.Footnote ⁷ The second volume of A Social and Economic History of the Theatre to 300 BC by Eric Csapo and Peter Wilson, which appeared in 2020, is subtitled Theatre beyond Athens: Documents with Translation and Commentary. As a massive collection of sources documenting how theatre reached all corners of the ancient world, this volume is, in many ways, the culmination of this scholarly trend.

While this book adopts the same multidisciplinary approach that characterises all these studies and builds on their findings, my focus and my scope are both different. At its core, this work collects the records for the performance reception of Greek tragedy from the fourth century BC through to the third century AD. My main interest is in the tragedies that ancient actors continued to stage, and ancient audiences continued to watch: their titles, their authors, the features that made them successful, how they were selected and how they relate to the preserved tragedies. As it turns out, the performance reception of Greek tragedy in antiquity is largely concerned with fifth- and fourth-century scripts. At least occasionally, however, Roman Republican tragedy does offer a few glimpses into later plays and their survival.

I will detail below the records that inform my discussion, but I hasten to make a few points on terminology. First, here as throughout the book, I draw a distinction between the first, original production of a play and a subsequent staging by using the terms ‘premiere’ and ‘performance’ or ‘post-premiere performance’ whenever ‘performance’ could otherwise create confusion. I consistently avoid both ‘revival’ and ‘reperformance’ for several reasons. Revival implies loss and resurrection, conjuring up notions of dead plays and daring actors, while reperformance makes later productions sound secondary and unoriginal. In short, neither term presents these productions for what they were, theatrical events in their own right. This is why we do not use these expressions when talking about contemporary productions: theatrical companies do not revive or reperform King Lear or Hamlet; they perform them.Footnote ⁸ Second, my interest is in the tragedies that circulated on various stages, and the expression ‘performance reception’ is deliberately broad and flexible, covering performances in Greek as well as in Latin. Roman tragedies are Latin adaptations of Greek plays staged for Latin-speaking audiences and, as such, they are part of the theatrical afterlife of their Greek models. In other words, Roman drama can be treated as a special chapter in the history of Greek drama in performance.

The records are listed in two Appendices. Appendix I collects the sources related to identifiable tragedies and Appendix II those related to their unidentifiable counterparts. Either way, I call these plays ‘repertoire tragedies’ or ‘theatrical classics’. Note also from the onset that over half of the tragedies listed in Appendix I are attested more than once. If some of the sources listed in Appendix II do belong to identifiable tragedies, the number of instances could be higher.Footnote ⁹ As Vahtikari (Reference Vahtikari2014: 215) already noted, ‘the same tragedies … pop up again and again when discussing the different types of evidence’. This trend is important because it suggests continuity in actors’ activities. As I note in my epilogue, this pattern is probably rooted in a well-documented practice that characterises the world of ancient actors and artists in general: the transmission of their craft through family traditions.

Both Appendices collect four main types of records: inscriptions, literary sources, tragedy-related vases and Roman tragedies. They are chronologically arranged under five major headings: fourth-century Athens and Attica, fourth-century Sicily and South Italy, Republican Rome, select sites during the Hellenistic period and select sites across the Roman Empire.

Epigraphic and Literary Sources

Epigraphic and literary records are both geographically and chronologically diverse. We have several inscriptions, mostly catalogues from specific festivals, documenting dramatic activities. They attest to premieres and performances until the third century AD, in both the Greek- and Latin-speaking parts of the Roman Empire. Some festivals left behind more records than others, but only very few of these records name the plays staged. Since they lack specific details, inscriptions are necessarily fewer in Appendix I than in Appendix II.

By contrast, literary sources tend to refer to identifiable plays. I count a little over forty passages recording or suggesting post-premiere performances, and relatively few of them speak to performances in general. They come from all kinds of works: court speeches, biographies, philosophical and historical writings as well as epigrams and comic texts. As for comedy, I list in Appendix I only one passage that explicitly refers to tragedy on the stage, but I discuss several comedies suggesting exposure to specific tragedies.Footnote ¹⁰ Literary references also come in different formats, ranging from passing remarks to stories about audiences and actors. Add also at least a few comments scattered in the notes that accompany the preserved tragedies, the scholia, which probably shed light on dramatic activities in Hellenistic Alexandria.Footnote ¹¹

The scholia provide information of all sorts, and while I include comments related to post-premiere performances, I exclude those that typically fall under the heading of ‘actors’ interpolations’. It stands to logic that actors of all periods tampered with dramatic scripts, but the interpolations that ancient scholars detect in the texts are all problematic. Scholiasts report a handful of instances, all aimed at ‘actors’ in general rather than a specific performer and often based on the authority of a specific scholar, especially Didymus. These claims are sometimes phrased as guesses.Footnote ¹² Specific charges include misattributing lines, slightly changing individual words or verses, omitting a sense pause and adding one line in one case and three lines in another.Footnote ¹³ These are the kinds of mistakes that scribes could easily make.Footnote ¹⁴ Even if we assume that they go back to performers, they cannot qualify as ‘expansive interpolations’ motivated by an actor’s desire ‘to add something of his own’. We know that actors became increasingly visible from the fourth century onwards, apparently overshadowing poets in Aristotle’s opinion, but the actors’ interpolations mentioned by ancient scholiasts are nowhere substantial enough to justify this theory.Footnote ¹⁵

Modern scholars continue to debate how much the extant tragic texts suffered from interpolation and how much of this interpolation is due to performers. This debate rests, more generally, on another one: the relationship between actors’ copies and the extant texts and the impact that the performance tradition had on the textual one.Footnote ¹⁶ While some scholars credit actors for tampering with our texts at several junctures,Footnote ¹⁷ only three tragedies are generally thought to show histrionic interventions on a large scale: Seven against Thebes, Phoenician Women and Iphigenia at Aulis. The case of Iphigenia at Aulis is unique because the play, which premiered after Euripides’ death, may have been left unfinished and was also apparently interpolated at various periods,Footnote ¹⁸ but the suspected alterations to both Seven against Thebes and Phoenician Women share some similarities.Footnote ¹⁹ The ending of the Seven against Thebes, which brings onto the stage Antigone and Ismene, seems to have been crafted under the influence of one or two tragedies, Sophocles’ Antigone and Euripides’ Phoenician Women.Footnote ²⁰ Although there is no agreement on the extent of interpolations marking Euripides’ Phoenician Women, the play’s final part has generated most controversy. For one scholar, it may have been ‘added to reflect the events of both Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus’.Footnote ²¹ If we tie these interventions to ancient producers and identify these texts with their copies, we could have here a glimpse into the early reception of Greek tragedy on the stage.Footnote ²² The records collected in this book are limited to ancient sources and do not include the histrionic interpolations identified by modern scholars. It is worth noting, however, that nearly all the tragedies named here as possibly interpolated or mined by ancient producers do come up in my Appendix I.Footnote ²³

Like inscriptions, literary records refer to performances held in fourth-century Athens or Attica, in various cities across the Hellenistic Greek East and at the Greek festivals celebrated during the Roman Empire. By contrast, two different types of sources bring us to ancient Italy. The tragedy-related vases speak to the performance reception of Greek tragedy in Sicily and South Italy during the fourth century, and Roman tragedies tell us about its success in Rome from the mid-third through to the early first century. They both deserve to be fully presented and, as I argue below, should be considered together.

Tragedy-Related Vases and Their Contexts

Anybody who studies the pictorial record from Western Greece or has an interest in ancient theatre will come across several vases bearing some connection to comedy and tragedy. These vessels entered the scholarly discussion well before Arthur Trendall catalogued, classified and attributed the thousands and thousands of pots excavated across Sicily, Apulia, Lucania and Campania.Footnote ²⁴ Trendall treated comic vases in a separate collection published in 1959 and updated in 1967, Phlyax Vases. In 1971, he co-authored with T. L. B. Webster a larger work discussing comic vases along with vessels related to both tragedy and satyr play, Illustrations of Greek Drama. While both studies are still important reference works, their titles soon came under fire. Trendall knew that at least some of the comic pots that he collected reflect Attic comedies, not the phlyakes traditionally associated with Rhinthon.Footnote ²⁵ Years later, two scholars independently identified an Apulian bell krater as reproducing Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae.Footnote ²⁶ As more pots were tied to specific Attic comedies, the visual record from Western Greece came to be placed within a new narrative: how Attic comedies travelled across the Adriatic to be staged in local theatres.Footnote ²⁷ Trendall and Webster did not explicitly define the word ‘illustration’, but this term did not serve them well.Footnote ²⁸ If anything, it gave scholars some ground for common agreement. Since the pots do not show photographs of tragic texts or tragic performances, they do not illustrate plays. Building on this premise, some scholars went even further by treating these images as simple products of iconographic conventions, devoid of any source.Footnote ²⁹ The debate has been vigorous, and the two positions have been variously branded. One scholar speaks of philo-dramatists and iconocentrists, another of ‘text-driven’ philologists-iconographers and ‘autonomous’ iconologists.Footnote ³⁰ Labels aside, the shortcomings of both views seem clear. It stands to reason that expressions such as ‘total dependence’ or ‘total independence’ are too reductive for the world of visual arts. They do not bring us far.

Few scholars would now deny that at least some vases reflect tragic versions of specific myths. The story of Orestes’ revenge, for example, goes back to the archaic period, and so do many of its elements: the oracle of Apollo, the famous hairlock, the Furies and probably Orestes’ trial in Athens as well.Footnote ³¹ No source, however, brings Orestes to Delphi before Aeschylus’ Eumenides. As far as we know, Aeschylus introduced this episode into the saga, and ancient painters continued to reproduce it on their pots.Footnote ³² Another legend that brings Orestes to Delphi, this time to kill Neoptolemus, offers a second example. Several poets mention that Neoptolemus died at Delphi, but Euripides was the first to involve Orestes.Footnote ³³ In Andromache, Orestes announces to a despairing Hermione that Neoptolemus will die. Then he travels to Delphi, where Neoptolemus falls at the hands of local men and ‘a stranger from Mycenae,’ as a messenger reports.Footnote ³⁴ This specific version of Neoptolemus’ death lies behind an Apulian volute krater attributed to the Ilioupersis Painter, who took care to label three figures: Neoptolemus, Orestes and Apollo.Footnote ³⁵ The wounded Neoptolemus kneels at the altar, Orestes crouches behind the omphalos with a drawn sword and Apollo sits high above, his temple looming over the whole scene.Footnote ³⁶ The Ilioupersis Painter and his colleagues did not illustrate a specific scene as they may have read it on a papyrus or watched it on the stage, but tragedy both informs and defines the images that they painted. The catalogue by Todisco and his team (CFST) calls these vessels ‘of tragic subject-matter’. Taplin’s selective collection (P&P) speaks of pots ‘interacting’ with Greek tragedies. Kannicht includes several of them among the testimonia for Euripides’ fragmentary plays (TrGF V 1–2). These pots are, in other words, tragedy-related.

The tragedy-related vases have grown in number over the years, now counting in the hundreds.Footnote ³⁷ They are dated from around 400 to shortly after 320, when the activities of the artists traditionally associated with the Darius Painter came to an end. Apart from a few Attic imports, most pots were locally produced in all the fabrics that Trendall identified: Apulian, Lucanian, Campanian, Paestan and Sicilian.Footnote ³⁸ My list reflects the relative prominence of these fabrics, and this trend coincides with the findspots of the vases. While most vessels are Apulian and were found in Apulia, Sicily both produced and preserved the lowest number of them.Footnote ³⁹ The data for the comedy-related vases show a similar pattern in terms of fabrics and distribution.Footnote ⁴⁰ Note also that at least a few artists painted images related to tragedy as well as scenes or masks related to comedy. They include the Tarporley Painter, the Dirce Painter, Asteas and the Darius Painter.Footnote ⁴¹

The comedy-related vases are self-consciously theatrical. They show masked figures acting on a stage, wearing costumes comparable to those that Aristophanes describes in his plays and sporting phalluses of varying size.Footnote ⁴² By contrast, only a couple of their tragic peers include a stage or hint at masks.Footnote ⁴³ Many others, however, look ‘stagey’. At least some of the figures painted on the tragedy-related vases, including the ‘Furies’ or ‘Erinyes’ that mark so many of them, have long-sleeved costumes and boots. These costumes recall the theatrical attire that we find on vessels that have a clear connection to the world of the stage, such as the Pronomos vase and the Choregoi vase.Footnote ⁴⁴ Some pots include architectural structures that suggest stage-houses, the same architectural structures included on comic pots.Footnote ⁴⁵ Others still show a male figure with a set of standard traits: he is old, wears a cloak with tightly fitted sleeves, has boots with flaps often big and fancy, and holds a cane. Sometimes he stands by merely observing the scene, and sometimes he gesticulates, often appearing in distress. We find him on several pots and under different names: two painters label him ‘child-carer’, another ‘herdsman’ and another still uses this iconographic type to reproduce a shepherd.Footnote ⁴⁶ Regardless of his specific role, this figure does not belong to the world of myth. He comes from the tragic stage. Since different painters portray him with the same recognisable features, they also seem to give us ‘a fairly accurate reflection of the stage costume’.Footnote ⁴⁷ The paidagogos figure, as I will call him, is one of the strongest indicators of tragedy.Footnote ⁴⁸

All the elements that I have mentioned so far, from specific narratives to fancy costumes and paidagogos figures, are among the ‘signals’ that Taplin identifies as characterising tragedy-related vases.Footnote ⁴⁹ They also feature in the list provided by Vahtikari, who adds yet another clue suggesting theatricality: the expressions of the figures reproduced on the vases, along with their gestures and poses.Footnote ⁵⁰ While none of these elements prove to be infallible, they are all consistent with the likelihood that the tragedies reproduced on the vases were known through performances. This allows us to mine the iconographic record to reconstruct actors’ activities across fourth-century Sicily and South Italy.

We otherwise know that these regions hosted dramatic productions. The spread of Greek tragedy across the Adriatic dates to Aeschylus’ stay in the court of Hieron in Syracuse, if not earlier. Aeschylus staged his Persians in Syracuse and he also mounted a brand-new tragedy, Women of Aetna, possibly in Aetna (Catane). His biography gives us the earliest evidence for both a specific tragedy performed after its premiere and one commissioned by a tyrant.Footnote ⁵¹ While this is the obvious starting point of all discussions on Greek tragedy across the Adriatic, the studies that I mentioned above have added all kinds of records to this narrative. They have counted some six playwrights born on the island, from the now obscure Empedocles of Acragas to the tyrant who ruled Syracuse from 405 to 367, Dionysius I.Footnote ⁵²According to Tzetzes, Dionysius produced ‘many tragedies in Athens’ before his victory with Ransom of Hector at the Lenaea in 367.Footnote ⁵³ Since Dionysius I reportedly turned to Aeschylus and Euripides for inspiration, he seems to have been familiar with their tragedies,Footnote ⁵⁴ but he also surrounded himself with several intellectuals and poets, including the tragedian Antiphon.Footnote ⁵⁵ His son and successor Dionysius II as well had a tragedian at his court, Carcinus the Younger.Footnote ⁵⁶

Recent studies have also discussed the theatrical buildings erected in Sicily by the fourth century, identifying at least six sites: Syracuse and Leontini in the south-east,Footnote ⁵⁷ Messana in the north-east,Footnote ⁵⁸ Heraclea Minoa and Selinus on the west coast and Montagna dei Cavalli in the hinterland.Footnote ⁵⁹ We know that in Sicily theatrical buildings were often used for a range of political events, but they may have also hosted the stages that the comedy-related vessels consistently show. Painted stages are clearly made from wood, but at least some of them do not look ‘portable.’ They tend to be thick, and their stage-houses can be quite elaborate, with double doors, porches, windows, columns and even roofs.Footnote ⁶⁰ By contrast, sites where we find evidence for dramatic activities but no theatrical building probably relied on temporary stages: Gela, Lipari and Camarina are obvious examples.Footnote ⁶¹After all, these kinds of stages were commonly used throughout most of antiquity, even in centres that had a permanent theatre like Republican Rome.Footnote ⁶²

Fourth-century South Italy also had its own theatres. Their remains are still visible in three sites along the Ionic coast and one on the Tyrrhenian littoral: Rhegium, Locris, Metapontum and Hyele (Elea).Footnote ⁶³ Modern Taranto conceals ancient Taras, but this city celebrated its own Dionysia by 360 and had a theatre by 320.Footnote ⁶⁴ Add two more buildings that may have served as venues for dramatic activities, one at Castiglione di Paludi (probably ancient Cossa) and the other at Paestum.Footnote ⁶⁵ We have no epigraphic evidence for drama in any of these sites, but the theatre-related objects found in some of them do imply it. The famous Apulian fragment that depicts a tragic actor holding his mask comes from Taras, and so does a relief reproducing a young man dressed up as a tragic chorus member.Footnote ⁶⁶ The wells or drains surrounding the stage building of the theatre in Locri yielded several objects in terracotta. One of them is the statuette of an actor dressed as a frog, another a New Comedy mask.Footnote ⁶⁷ Like Sicily, South Italy was also home to theatrical practitioners. The comic poet Alexis, the tragic playwright Patrocles and the actor Archias all came from Thurii. Aristodemos, one of the most celebrated performers of all antiquity, hailed from Metapontum.Footnote ⁶⁸

These records tell us that Greek drama was staged in at least some of the Greek settlements that I have named, from Syracuse to Taras, Thurii and Metapontum, for instance.Footnote ⁶⁹ The theatre-related vases, however, introduce a third point of reference, the Italic communities. Almost half of these vessels can be tied to a specific findspot, and the data overwhelmingly point to native settlements.Footnote ⁷⁰ They come from the tombs of Italic clients who, in death, defined themselves as Greek by using the imagery of Greek theatre. Sicily is the notable exception, for more than one reason. We can identify the findspots of all the vessels excavated here, and they include a mix of Greek and non-Greek sites. The native communities living on the island, however, are consistently described as ‘tightly linked to the Greek colonies’ and fully participating in Greek culture.Footnote ⁷¹ This is not the case for their counterparts on the Italian peninsula, and the scholarly debate has largely focused on the region richest in findings, Apulia.

Ancient Apulia was home to the Iapygians and their three subgroups: the Daunians in the north, the Peucetians in the centre and the Messapians in the south.Footnote ⁷² The two sites that preserved the largest number of tragedy-related vessels are Ruvo in Peucetia and Canosa in Daunia.Footnote ⁷³ Their inhabitants spoke Messapic, a non-Indo-European tongue that borrowed its alphabet from the Greek spoken in Taras.Footnote ⁷⁴ The argument that makes the Apulian communities unable to appreciate dramatic performances in Greek is built on two related issues, linguistic barriers and the quality of the pictorial narratives reproduced on Apulian vases. For some scholars, these communities were both culturally and linguistically isolated and thus incapable of decoding the vessels and their sophisticated images. Although they would commission and buy these vessels, they needed highly educated intermediaries to understand their iconography. Variously identified with ‘funeral orators’ or the painters themselves, these intermediaries would be tasked with explaining and interpreting images at the funeral ceremonies where the vases were supposedly displayed.Footnote ⁷⁵ In this scenario, texts were key to the spread of Greek tragedies. The painters relied on them, and only a highly literate viewer could make sense of their pictorial narratives.Footnote ⁷⁶

There are, however, good reasons not to cast the native communities of Apulia in this light. The Iapygians interacted with Taras during the fifth and fourth centuries, and while their relationships were often hostile, they also fought on the same side. Thucydides mentions a ‘long-standing allegiance’ (παλαιὰ φιλία) between the Iapygians and the Athenians, renewed during the Athenian expedition in Sicily.Footnote ⁷⁷ The fifth-century Attic vases found in forty Italic settlements across Apulia, especially in Peucetia, probably came directly from Athens without passing through Taras.Footnote ⁷⁸ In the fourth century, Attic vases gave way to Apulian vases, and the sheer quantity of Apulian pottery excavated in native sites as opposed to Taras points to local workshops.Footnote ⁷⁹ According to the traditional view, Taras produced Apulian vessels for Italic clients, but Ruvo, Canosa and Ceglie del Campo have all been named as likely workshop sites.Footnote ⁸⁰ Note also the popularity of vessels with specific shapes. Volute kraters are as common in Italic tombs as they are rare in their Greek counterparts, and column kraters are attested only in native sites.Footnote ⁸¹ These are ‘local pots for local people’, painted by artists who knew their clients and their taste.Footnote ⁸²

Interactions with Greek-speaking communities presuppose a certain level of familiarity with Greek language, and other records support this point. When Pythagoras arrived in South Italy sometime in the late sixth century, he sojourned first in Croton and then in Metapontum. Aristoxenus makes him popular among various peoples, including the Messapians and Peucetians, and we are told that ‘many kings and dynastai from the neighbouring barbarian land (ἀπὸ τῆς σύνεγγυς βαρβάρου χώρας)’ entered his school.Footnote ⁸³ The school’s official language was Doric Greek and its prose was reportedly obscure and archaic, but Pythagoras instructed his followers to use their own tongue.Footnote ⁸⁴ Starting from the fourth century, ancient authors connect Pythagoras and his school with the expression ‘Great Greece’, a geographic and political reality that spans from the end of the sixth to the beginning of the fifth century.Footnote ⁸⁵ As Strabo has it, ‘Great Greece’ coincides with the flourishing of the Greek colonies in South Italy, which became as powerful as to finally make Greece ‘great’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Great Greece does not oppose but rather complements continental Greece. It may also include rather than obliterate the Italic presence in South Italy.

The three archaeological cultures of ancient Apulia differ in their epigraphic habit: the Messapians stand out for the many records that they produced, and the Daunians for the little that they left behind.Footnote ⁸⁷ All Iapygian communities, however, minted coins in Greek and some of them also inscribed honorific objects with the same language.Footnote ⁸⁸ We otherwise know of local artists who signed their work in Greek or used Greek morphology to write their non-Greek names.Footnote ⁸⁹ The labels on the theatre-related vessels are virtually all in Attic Greek.Footnote ⁹⁰ It is worth noting that these labels are used in a way that is both inconsistent and at least occasionally superfluous, which suggests that ancient viewers did not necessarily rely on them for decoding the images. They were added at the patrons’ request, as ‘intentional signals’ pointing to identification with a specific strand of Greek culture: Attic culture from mainland Greece.Footnote ⁹¹ By the third century, we have at least one inscription combining Greek and Messapic (or Peucetian), a pinax from Ruvo.Footnote ⁹² All these records – the literary evidence about Pythagoras’ school, the Greek inscriptions from across Apulia as well as the fact that the tragedy-related vases were both produced and used in native contexts – are at the core of two related claims. The first is about Greek-Messapic disglossia, if not bilingualism.Footnote ⁹³ The second is about dramatic performances among the native communities of Apulia, or at least select members from them.Footnote ⁹⁴

Moving from Apulia to Campania, Paestum is the site that preserved the highest number of tragedy-related vases. Originally a Greek colony, Poseidonia, the town fell to the Lucanians after 400.Footnote ⁹⁵ The Lucanians were among the Oscan-speaking populations that the Romans called ‘Samnites’ and that moved from Central into Southern Italy from the fifth century onwards, occupying various towns across the region.Footnote ⁹⁶ Nothing suggests a violent takeover, and much indicates cultural continuity between the Greek Poseidonia and the Lucanian Paestum. Greek artisans and craftsmen continued to ply their trade, Greeks mingled with the Paestan elite, and we otherwise hear of intermarriages in Campania.Footnote ⁹⁷ Votive offerings show that Greek cults continued to flourish, as the Lucanians maintained and even repaired Greek sanctuaries while also building new temples and stoas.Footnote ⁹⁸ The Lucanians brought with them their language, Oscan, and Lucanian Paestum does preserve inscriptions written in Oscan. They are, however, not as many as those in Greek.Footnote ⁹⁹ We are not as well informed on another important site for tragedy-related vases, Capua. Originally an Etruscan settlement, Capua fell to another people of Samnite stock, the Campanians, in 423 and came to speak Oscan but continued to issue coins with Greek legends.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ As I have already mentioned, only one native site preserves a building possibly used as a theatre, Castiglione di Paludi, in Bruttian territory. Ennius calls the Bruttians bilingual, and an ancient grammarian specifies that they spoke both Greek and Oscan. According to Arrian, the Bruttians sent ambassadors to Alexander the Great to congratulate him on his successful campaign in Asia.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The Oscan-speaking populations both produced plenty of theatre-related pottery and gave us at least two playwrights, including the earliest known tragedian of non-Greek origin: Mamercus. A Roman historian describes him as an ‘Italian leader, a wealthy and warlike man who came to Sicily to assist the tyrants’ when Timoleon invaded the island in the 340s.Footnote ¹⁰² Plutarch knew both his name and his works. He cites an elegiac couplet ‘full of arrogance’ that Mamercus composed when he dedicated his enemies’ shields to the gods (a typically Greek custom). Right before quoting the epigram, Plutarch notes that Mamercus ‘thought highly of his poems and tragedies’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Another Oscan who composed plays in Greek is Blaesus of Capri. Both his name and his provenance make him Oscan-Italic, but he wrote in the Tarantine Greek used by the dramatist with whom he is associated, Rhinthon.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ It is probably not a coincidence to find Oscans composing Greek plays. The Oscans stand out among native communities for having their own form of drama, a type of comedy that originated in the Campanian town of Atella and was named after it, the Atellana. We know very little about the Oscan Atellana, but this genre was successful enough to be adapted into Latin for performance in Rome, probably starting in the third century.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Since we lack literary texts in Oscan, Roman poets are generally thought to have been the first to script the Atellana, but this may not be the case. If indeed ‘there is no reason to assume that [literary texts in Oscan] were never written,’ the Oscan Atellana may not have been exclusively oral.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

From the Iapygians in Apulia to the Oscan-speaking peoples that occupied Campania and the interior of modern Basilicata, the native Italic communities were neither monoglot nor monocultural. This is also true of the Greek settlements in South Italy. Consider Metapontum, for instance. The tombs from two burial sites excavated here, one in the surrounding region and the other just outside the city’s walls, show a great deal of mixture and intermarriage between Greeks and Italics already by the sixth century. In the decades leading to the war with Alexander the Molossian in the 330s, the Lucanian presence in Metapontum was so strong that some scholars suspected that the Lucanians had occupied the site.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ As I mentioned above, nobody doubts that the native communities housed across Sicily were thoroughly Hellenised, but the theatrical buildings excavated in Sicily were not all built in Greek territory. At least five of the relevant sites were directly controlled by Carthage: Montagna dei Cavalli, Segesta, Solunto, Heraclea Minoa and Iato.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In Metapontum as in these Sicilian towns, then, theatre and drama were not strictly for Greeks. The tragedy-related vases are not alone in suggesting that Greek plays attracted culturally diverse audiences across fourth-century Sicily and South Italy. This scenario is also consistent with the performance reception of Greek drama during the following century. Greek plays arrived on Roman stages after – or probably because – they circulated among the native Italic populations, brought to Rome by poets who came from mixed cultural backgrounds.

Roman Republican Tragedies

By the end of the fourth century, theatre-related images drop out of the iconographic record from Sicily and South Italy. Local painters and their clients came to prefer different motifs over them, but by the mid-third century Greek plays made their way into central Italy. We can trace them in the one city that already controlled much of the peninsula, Rome. Having defeated Carthage after long years of warfare, the Romans celebrated their military achievements with a lavish festival that was to become a watershed moment in Roman culture. At the Roman Games of 240, Livius Andronicus ‘first produced a play’ or ‘first dared to abandon the saturae and compose a play with a plot’, as another author has it.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Many details remain obscure, from the play offered to how this production was arranged, but this event marks the birth of Latin literature. The earliest literary texts in Latin were adaptations of Greek plays, the by-products of the ‘translation project’ pioneered by Livius Andronicus.Footnote ¹¹⁰

The biographies of Roman playwrights make it clear that Greek drama reached Rome not from Athens and mainland Greece but from the same regions that produced and preserved so many theatre-related vases, Apulia and Campania. Livius Andronicus was Greek – Andronikos – or ‘half-Greek’, as Suetonius describes him. He worked in Rome, where he forged a connection with the gens Livia and eventually acquired Roman citizenship, but his hometown was Taras.Footnote ¹¹¹ Naevius, who started his career just a few years after Livius Andronicus, came from Campania, probably Capua.Footnote ¹¹² His name is Oscan, and Oscan was probably his native language. Ennius arrived in Rome from Sardinia in 204, at the age of thirty-five, but his hometown was a Messapian centre south of Taras, Rudiae.Footnote ¹¹³ Ennius was a key figure in Roman literature, and as common for key figures, his cultural profile was subject to competing claims. For the Greek Strabo, Rudiae was a ‘Greek city’ and Ennius the only author of Latin poetry worth naming.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Cicero, who admired Ennius without restraint, often calls him ‘our Ennius’, by which he means ‘Roman’ or ‘writing Latin’ as opposed to Greek.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Ennius himself, however, claimed descent from the eponymous king of Messapia. He proudly advertised his mixed cultural background by stating ‘to have three hearts because he knew how to speak Greek, Oscan and Latin’. Since Rudiae was a Messapic foundation, Ennius probably also had a fourth language, Messapic.Footnote ¹¹⁶ His Messapian and Greek identities may have been so intertwined that he felt no discontinuity between them.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Ennius belongs to the second wave of Roman dramatists, like his nephew Pacuvius (ca. 220–130) and Accius (170–ca. 80). Pacuvius was born in Brundisium, worked in Rome and retired in Taras where he reportedly met Accius – the first native-born Roman citizen to compose Latin poetry.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Accius was also the first Roman playwright to adapt Greek plays into his own language, as modern translators commonly do.Footnote ¹¹⁹

The pioneers of Roman drama must have seen Greek plays staged in their hometowns before they began their careers in Rome, and the scripts that they adapted likely came not from the book collections of wealthy Romans but from the theatrical companies active across South Italy.Footnote ¹²⁰ Livius Andronicus was otherwise remembered as a practising actor. A Roman historian notes that he ‘acted in his own plays like everybody else in those days’, and this remark suggests that Naevius as well was both a playwright and an actor.Footnote ¹²¹ Cicero was notoriously unforgiving with Livius Andronicus’ style by judging his plays unworthy of a second reading, and we may suspect that he would not have appreciated his accent either if he had seen him perform.Footnote ¹²² Aside from their activities as ‘translators’, the earliest Roman playwrights can perhaps be compared to the didaskaloi (‘producers’) tasked with staging plays. We often find them in the associations of artists of Dionysus active across the ancient world from the third century onwards.Footnote ¹²³

For all its success in and out of ancient theatres, Roman Republican tragedy is poorly preserved. All we have are about 1600 lines cobbled together from various fragments and some 100 play-titles.Footnote ¹²⁴ We can, however, establish at least a few points both about the entire genre and specific plays. ‘Roman tragedies’ here refers to the Roman tragedies ‘in Greek costume’, the fabulae crepidatae or cothurnatae, as opposed to the Roman tragedies set in Roman surroundings and dealing with Roman events, the fabulae praetextae. Roman comedies as well differ according to their subject matter: the fabulae palliatae in Greek style, the fabulae togatae set in Roman surroundings and the Atellanae that I mentioned above. This terminology goes back to the ancient scholars who classified dramatic genres retroactively and not always without confusion,Footnote ¹²⁵ but the Roman plays in Greek style were clearly the earliest forms of drama in Latin. The praetextae, for instance, share metre, diction and probably formal structure with the cothurnatae. Ancient authors like Horace and Cicero felt free to compare Afranius’ togatae with Menander’s comedies.Footnote ¹²⁶

Roman comic poets name both the Greek plays that they adapted and their authors: Plautus does so sporadically and Terence consistently.Footnote ¹²⁷ Roman tragedians do not volunteer these details for obvious reasons, but ancient writers help us fill at least some gaps. Cicero, Gellius and Varro, among others, mention some of the Greek tragedies that had a new lease of life on Roman stages. At least some fragments from Roman tragedies are substantial or significant enough to point to specific Greek plays: there can be little doubt, for instance, that Ennius adapted both Aeschylus’ Eumenides and Euripides’ Telephus. In other cases, model-identification is trickier and often impossible, especially for Pacuvius and Accius. Both poets seem to be more daring and innovative than their predecessors, and relatively few of their plays can be tied to a specific Greek tragedy. There is, however, no positive evidence that either poet, or any of their colleagues, worked independently of a specific source.Footnote ¹²⁸ Cicero consistently mentions Roman plays when discussing adaptations of Greek works into Latin, and his statements fly in the face of any assumption that Roman playwrights composed their own, brand-new dramas. To be sure, Cicero is not unequivocal on the details. On the one hand, he speaks of Greek plays adapted into Latin ‘word by word’ (ad verbum), naming in this context Ennius’ Medea, Pacuvius’ Antiopa and Atilius’ Electra. On the other hand, elsewhere he writes: ‘Ennius, Pacuvius, Accius and many others expressed not the words but the impact (non verba sed vim) of Greek poets.’ Cicero offers two different views on how Roman poets rendered their Greek models, literally in one case and freely in the other, but both views clearly rest on the same premise: Roman tragedies had a Greek model.Footnote ¹²⁹ From Horace to Diomedes, other ancient authors speak of Roman plays as adapted from the Greek.Footnote ¹³⁰ The Roman tragedies that we cannot tie to a specific Greek prototype, then, were based on plays that now escape identification.

Roman playwrights manipulated their text-sources with originality and creativity. Like all cross-cultural practices, their translation project included both appropriation and reuse: ‘for Roman writers it was common practice to base their own drama on Greek precedents, but […] in that process they transformed them and adapted them for a Roman public.’Footnote ¹³¹ The point that I would like to stress is, however, a different one. As Latin adaptations staged for public audiences, Roman Republican tragedies belong to the performance reception of Greek tragedy. One of the reasons why Roman dramatists adapted specific scripts was the success of these scripts on the stage. As we will see, many of their models can already be identified in the pictorial record from Sicily and South Italy or in the performance-related records from other areas. Even when their Greek originals elude us, Roman Republican tragedies are an untapped body of evidence for the popular appeal of specific plots, scenes and motifs. Coming at the end of a long theatrical tradition, they help us reconstruct not only the taste of Roman audiences but also those of their earlier counterparts.

The case is different for the tragedies ascribed to Seneca. Spanning at least the Claudian and Neronian periods, they are the only Latin tragedies preserved in their entirety.Footnote ¹³² Why Seneca wrote tragedies and how these plays circulated during his lifetime remain open questions. Scholars have proposed different scenarios, variously suggesting that Seneca composed his plays for private readings, recitations, stage-performances or a mixture of recitations and performances.Footnote ¹³³ There is, however, no evidence substantiating any of these claims, and there are no records for actors mounting Seneca’s tragedies either publicly or privately. Seneca’s plays clearly speak to the enduring appeal of Classical Greek tragedies for ancient intellectuals, who drew (also) from them to craft their own dramas,Footnote ¹³⁴ but we cannot place them within the performance reception of Greek tragedy in antiquity and mine them to document this process.

Actors and Plays: Greek Tragedy in Ancient Theatres

This book collects in one place, for the first time, the records for the afterlife of Greek tragedies in ancient theatres. As I briefly mention in my epilogue, Greek tragedies also provided material to all kinds of stage artists, from musicians to singers, mimes and especially pantomimes, but this book is about actors and how they promoted both the survival and the spread of Greek tragedies among the larger public. As for the format of these performances, there is no positive evidence that actors mounted Greek tragedies in variously abridged versions. If actors ever excerpted dramatic texts, the evidence points only to performances without choral songs.Footnote ¹³⁵ As for the audiences attending these performances, we cannot always detail them with precision. We may suspect that only select members of the Italic communities of the fourth century were familiar with dramatic performances, but this was not the case elsewhere. The broader public had access to the dramatic festivals held across the ancient world including Republican Rome, and ancient writers paint a colourful picture of the crowds that flocked to the games under the Roman Empire.Footnote ¹³⁶ While Greek drama was also produced in private settings, the sources related to this practice are generally few and lacking in detail. The presence of the same actors in both private and public contexts, however, suggests that the plays on offer were the same ones.Footnote ¹³⁷

My discussion proceeds through four chapters. Although my starting point is necessarily Classical Athens, Chapter 1 surveys the evidence for performances in fifth-century Athens and Attica in general while also introducing later records. I focus on three tragedies that we can legitimately suspect to have been mounted time and again on contemporary Attic stages and I argue that these early performances are the background to the warm reception that these plays enjoyed on later stages. Chapter 2 reconstructs the afterlife of Greek tragedies in three areas: fourth-century Athens and Attica, fourth-century Sicily and South Italy, and Republican Rome. My discussion is arranged by poet, and my main interest is in the trends emerging from the performance-related records. Despite regional variations, we can often trace the same plays staged in different places. Chapter 3 surveys the evidence from the many festivals held across the Hellenistic and Roman periods. These festivals continued to offer both premieres and post-premiere performances. While we can gather at least a few details on the original tragedies composed and staged from the third century onwards, specific sources for post-premiere performances are largely concerned with fifth- and fourth-century tragedies. Finally, Chapter 4 looks at repertoire tragedies and their features before considering their relationship with the preserved tragedies. I argue that the surviving scripts are the product of scholarly rather than theatrical activities and I identify at least some of the factors that led both scholars and actors to create their own canon.

Cobbled together from scattered sources that we can often identify with varying degrees of confidence, the performance reception of Greek tragedy in antiquity is no material for a grand narrative. The story that emerges from these records is necessarily thin and patchy but still very important. This is the story of how Greek tragedies survived and circulated as plays staged for smaller or larger audiences rather than literary masterpieces confined to shrinking circles of intellectuals. As such, it brings us as close as we can get to what we could call the non-elite reception of Greek tragedy in antiquity.