WESTERN GREEK DRAMA - † (K.) Bosher (ed.) Theater Outside Athens. Drama in Greek Sicily and South Italy. Pp. xviii + 473, ills, maps. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Cased, £70, US$110. ISBN: 978-0-521-76178-9.

Abstract

It is deeply sad that the editor no longer lives to pursue the topics initiated or revisited by this interdisciplinary volume, following a conference at Northwestern University in 2008. As B.'s introduction demonstrates, the book traces the 'Western' culture of Sicilian and South-Italian poetry, drama and performance as distinct from, but interrelated with, Greek mainland traditions from late archaic to early Hellenistic times. J.M. Hall (Chapter 1) makes the strong historical point that Greek settlements in the west from the eighth century onwards cannot be defined by any modern expansionist colonial paradigms, but require a dynamic model 'of both active agency and historical contingency' (p. 34). Fifth-century and later inscriptional and literary evidence suggests the long regular socio-cultural and linguistic coexistence of a mixed population of natives and Greeks in South-Italian and Sicilian cities. K.A. Morgan (Chapter 2) focuses on archaic South-Italian and Sicilian Greek culture as a rich background for fifth-century theatre in Sicily, drawing attention to the gradual dissemination of myths, music, poetical genres and performances between Ionia, mainland Greece and the West. Morgan is cautious of interpretations of Stesichorus' 'epicizing lyric' (p. 35) as a 'Western' hybrid, stressing how innovative archaic poets could be throughout the Greek-speaking world. She also examines how Pindaric poems like Pythian 1 offer insights into the encomiastic role of serious poetry and theatre under Sicilian rulers. In the following chapters (3-8) of Part 1, 'Tyrants, Texts, and Theater in Early Sicily', scarce or fragmentary texts and testimonies are exploited for working hypotheses on comedy and tragedy in classical Sicily. Two chapters discuss Epicharmus' short preserved fragments both as an indirect picture of contemporary Sicilian life, cult, rhetoric, comedy and Doric Greek, and as precedents for the wit and social function of Aristophanic comedy. A. Willi emphasises parody, considering how the 'Westerner' Epicharmus offered, like Stesichorus, Theagenes and Xenophanes, a liberating 'colonial' revision of the Greek mainland culture. L. Rodríguez-Noriega Guillén highlights the poetic, iambic, Presocratic and Sicilian background of Epicharmus' comic and philosophising fragments. Reviving E.J. Kiehl's view of 1852 that Aeschylus' Persians was first performed in Syracuse, B. investigates 'unorthodox' (p. 107) theatrical and political elements in the only surviving early historical tragedy and the lost Aetnaean Women, presumably performed as single plays at Hieron's court. B. argues that Persians suggested a parallelism between the victories at Salamis and Himera (cf. Pythian 1), and implied that Hieron, by contrast with his evil predecessor Phalaris (cf. Pythian 1), could be a ruler as wise as Darius' ghost, opposed to Xerxes. This is an appealing hypothesis, although most critics would accept that Persians, like some mythical tragedies, criticises expansionist warfare and tyranny and indirectly favours Athens and dem...