Ruins: Classical Theater and Broken Memory by Odai Johnson (review)

In this ambitious book, Odai Johnson brings questions and methods familiar from his earlier work on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American theatre to bear on the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. In a series of ten case studies that stretch from the origins of ancient Greek theatre to late antiquity, a period of over a thousand years, Johnson probes the scars in the historical and material record that tell us that something significant once existed but does no longer. Ruins argues that even in antiquity, the theatre created a notion of the "classical" past not by conserving tradition, but by marking absences imbued with "an excess of memory" (3). The endurance of the Greco-Roman theatre over this thousand-year span occurs through and despite these absences, which keep people going to the theatre in droves even when their pastors, in the fifth-century ce, demand that they go to church instead.

Johnson's method is like that of a forensic scientist. Arriving at the crime scene of antiquity, he looks for evidence of what is not there—the flecks of blood that suggest a past struggle—in order to extract clues about how the Greeks and Romans constructed their own past, and indeed, committed crimes that they remembered to forget, through the textual and material remains of the theatre. To this task he brings to bear a toolkit of scholarship by classicists, theatre historians, and cultural theorists. Of the latter, most important are the fields of trauma theory and memory studies. To my knowledge, this combination of approaches has never before been applied to the classical theatre, especially not to its development over such a long period of time.

The astonishing sweep of time canvassed in this study is both its strength and its weakness. As a specialist in Greek theatre of the fifth and fourth centuries bce, I learned a great deal from Johnson's startling juxtapositions of material from my period of study with material from the fifth century ce. Yet, as will emerge from discussions of specific case studies, I also found myself wanting more nuanced engagement with both primary and secondary materials for each period. Chapter 4 is emblematic of the perils of Johnson's approach. This chapter aims to explain why Menander's comedies do not engage in the personal barbs against politicians that were typical of Aristophanes' genre of comedy a hundred years earlier. Johnson suspects a link with the concept of amnesty that developed in Athens after the bloody period of civil war that marked the reign of the Thirty Tyrants. While this explanation is reasonable, Johnson overplays the differences between Old and New Comedy when he repeatedly represents Menander's comedies as frivolous, apolitical, benign, and even low-IQ (89). Johnson is correct to point out that comedy's approach to social commentary changed, but I find very difficult to digest the suggestion that Menander's drama is "harmless," that "nothing offended" (89)—this of comedies that obsessively replay a rape plot in which citizen-girls are raped and, in the end, forced to marry their rapist. Harmless to whom? Johnson does not ask what social or political forces Menander was responding to when he replayed this plot line so incessantly, although Susan Lape, among others, has illuminated the relevance of these rape plots to Athenian civic ideology. Instead, he suggests that "New Comedy is itself a monument of cultural dementia" (103), marked primarily by its disappointing difference from Old Comedy.

By contrast, the merits of Johnson's diachronic approach are evident in chapter 2, on Phrynichus's Sack of Miletus and the genre of tragedy, and in chapters 6–8, a suite of chapters on the theatre's evolution from an alien institution, antithetical to Roman values, to weaponized imperial architecture, symbol of Roman dominance. Chapter 2 productively reads the censoring of Phrynichus as a defining moment in the development of the tragic genre. Johnson argues that the trauma that the representation of recent historical...