Theater Outside Athens: Drama in Greek Sicily and South Italy by Kathryn Bosher (review)

While the magisterial surviving plays of Athenian tragedy and comedy may seem like marble monuments, they are really very fragile things, their texts reconstructed from multiple recensions and their performance history traceable mostly from scattered stones and broken images. As we journey outside of Athens, the evidence for ancient theater’s history disintegrates even more into fragments. What remains are fragile vase paintings, the often casually remembered lines or stories of long-lost playwrights, performances, and plays, and the traces of long-ruined theaters set in imposing landscapes. In Theater Outside Athens: Drama in Greek Sicily and South Italy, a collection of essays edited by Kathryn Bosher, archaeologists, historians, and literary critics painstakingly reassemble such pieces to unearth the history of a theater that thrived in the courts of tyrants and the cities of the western Greek world. Far from being peripheral, this recovered world has the potential to unsettle our assumptions about the Athenian theater itself.