Eric Csapo

Performance and Iconographic Tradition in the Illustrations of Menander

The House of Menander in Mytilene gets its name from the mosaics found in the dining room and in an adjoining portico. Variously dated from the late third to the fourth century C.E., they show fully labelled scenes illustrating eleven plays of Menander (along with a bust of Thalia, a bust of Menander, a scene from Plato’s Phaedo, and a comic mask). So far discussion of these mosaics has focussed mainly upon the reconstruction of Menander’s lost plays.1 I will ask

Greek theatre in the fourth century B.C.

Past scholarship described the fourth century BC as an age of theatrical decline. This book, the first to explore all aspects of fourth-century theatre, reveals it to be an epoch of unparalleled expansion and innovation. 19 leading scholars evaluate the evidence for fourth-century drama to become the pre-eminent cultural institution of the ancient world.

Drama Outside Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BC

Abstract: This chapter surveys evidence for the spread, in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, of drama and theatrical culture around the eastern Mediterranean from Sicily to Babylon and from the Black Sea to Cyrene. 116 sites are examined with some attention given to the chronological, social, political and festival context of the reception of theater and, where specifically attested, of drama.