Humanities and Social Sciences Colloquium - Eric Csapo

A New History of the Ancient Theatre from 500-300 BC

In this paper I will sketch the early results of a new history of the ancient theatre. From the birth of 'modern' ancient theatre history (in Germany in the 1790s) right up until the 1990s, scholarship on the ancient theatre (as a social institution) was limited by a focus on tragedy, on received texts, on Athens and on the fifth century BC. Until the late twentieth century, scholarship insisted that for most of the fifth and fourth century BC theatre was a purely Athenian institution, deeply imbued with Athenian values, but that it also somehow in the third century BC suddenly became 'Panhellenic'. With the new millennium came a 'liberating' paradigm shift (in the words of Pat Easterling). For the first time, the recent collection and the recent receptivity to evidence for theatre outside Athens permit us to think of the first two centuries of theatre history as a dynamic, diachronic process with more subtle political, social and economic dimensions than earlier scholarship allowed.