Euripides Outside Athens: A Speculative Note

TLDR

The study reviews evidence from vase paintings and play texts that Athenian tragedy and comedy reached South Italian and Sicilian cities as early as the fifth century B.C., with continuous theatrical links such as Aeschylus’ works performed in Sicily. The paper aims to examine the fifth‑century spread of Athenian tragedy beyond Athens, arguing that literary sources, in addition to material evidence, can shed further light on the development of the classic repertoire.

Abstract

Oliver Taplin1 has recently taken a fresh and challenging look at what we can learn from vase paintings about responses to the theatre in the Greek cities of South Italy and Sicily from the fifth to the third centuries B.C. It is not a new idea, of course, that other cities were powerfully attracted by the drama, as by the visual art, of Athens, but what needs to be stressed, as Taplin rightly claims, is the fact that the process begins so early, spreads so widely and involves both tragedy and comedy. My concern in this paper is with the spread of tragedy outside Athens— not only in the West—in the fifth century. I want to suggest that in addition to the material souvenirs of performances, especially painted pottery, and to the inscriptions relating to city and deme festivals at Athens, which have helped us understand how a classic repertoire developed,2 there is also more to be gathered from the literary sources. It is not just a matter of evaluating what has been transmitted, and often enough distorted, by the ancient biographical and critical traditions; the texts of the plays themselves also have something to offer. As Taplin notes,3 theatrical connexions between Syracuse and related cities on the one hand and Athens on the other started early; it is not out of the question that Aeschylus' Women of Aetna was produced for performance at Aetna as early as 476/5, and there is every reason to think that the links continued during Aeschylus' lifetime (the ancient Life [68] says he put on a successful revival of Persians in Sicily, and we know that he was at Gela at the time of his death in 456). It would certainly be very odd if there was then a complete break in dramatic contacts between the Sicilian cities and Athens until the tyrant Dionysius won the prize for tragedy at the Athenian Lenaea in 368. One text that can help to fill the gap