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Spring 2009 67 Glocality, Byzantine Style: A Study in Pre-Electronic Culture Andrew W. White Althoughtheconceptofglocalityservesasausefulframeworkforunderstanding the matrix of contemporary cultural phenomena, our fascination with our own times has perhaps blinded us to the history of similar responses to mass media and “world culture” in pre-electronic societies.1 Conquering peoples typically seek to enhance their power through the export of their cultural institutions. This top-down cultural alignment, reinforced through the introduction of imperial mass media, sometimes goes to the extreme of supplanting local languages with the language of Empire. These efforts lead to inevitable clashes between dominant/“global” and subject/“local” societies, with results that are often surprising in their variety. In this article, I hope to demonstrate how the history of traditional theatre in the eastern Mediterranean, culminating in the early years of the Eastern Roman or “Byzantine” Empire,2 can be used as a case study in what might be called glocal cultural historiography. Traditionally dated from the fourth through fifteenth centuries CE, the Eastern Empire, although politically Roman, was rooted in a sophisticated Hellenistic cultural scene first established in Classical Athens. Byzantines used their “global” Hellenistic culture to project their power and mystique throughout the known world. However, this elite culture was dynamic and open to interventions from non-Hellenistic localities, interventions that by the sixth century CE had led to the downfall of one of the institutions most cherished by the Greeks—their state-supported theatre. Athens is Everywhere, and Everywhere is Athens For millennia, Greek culture was transmitted to subject populations from North Africa to today’sAfghan/Tadjik border through the mass media of the stage and the written word. Alexander the Great’s conquests in the fourth century BCE marked the beginning of international Greek cultural hegemony, and a Hellenistic “world culture.” The construction of Greek urban areas complete with theatres and the foundation of Greek-language schools were critical to the projects ofAlexander and his successors. In spite of a wealth of indigenous languages and cultural traditions, Andrew W. White, currently Professorial Lecturer with the Performing Arts Department of American University (Washington, D.C.), recently completed his dissertation The Artifice of Eternity: Studies of Representational Practices in the Byzantine Theatre and Orthodox Church at the University of Maryland, College Park. A former Fulbright scholar, he has taught at the University of Maryland and University of South Carolina’s Washington Semester Program. His chief research interest is in the history of Hellenistic culture from Antiquity through the Middle Ages, and its intersections with ritual practice. Throughout his academic career White has continued to work as a theatre artist in the Washington, D.C. area, producing, directing, and performing for several years as a member of the mime-based francophone company, Théâtre Le Neon. 68 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism locals aspiring to elite status were trained in Greek gymnasia where they studied the Greek classics. So powerful was the attraction of Greek education that, as Rome conquered mainland Greece and acquired the numerous Greek-speaking colonies of Asia Minor, it embraced the language of its “subjects”; all the Roman elite became effectively bilingual. Rome’s embrace of Greek learning, in turn, made the abandonment of Latin as the language of imperial administration almost inevitable, and final “hellenization” of Rome began in 330 CE when the Empire moved its capital to Constantinople, a city that sat in the heart of the Greek-speaking world.3 Apart from a handful of more ancient works by poets like Homer and Sappho, the Greek curriculum was drawn from a corpus largely of Athenian origin; dating primarily from the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, the Athenian classics continued to serve as the foundation for Greek education well into the MiddleAges. Theatrical works were a part of the curriculum from the beginning; before Alexander the Great’s time, successful Athenian dramatists would sometimes retire to Greek communities in Sicily or Macedonia and (local productions notwithstanding) leave the written record of their plays behind them. However, with the foundation of Alexandria, the brand-new “City of Alexander” on the Nile Delta, and the transfer of the entire corpus ofAthenian drama to its library, the legacy of the...

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