La circolazione della tragedia in età pre-alessandrina: le testimonianze.

The dissemination of Tragedy outside Athens is one of the most popular topics in the field of Classical Studies. The knowledge of this subject has been for long hindered by the dearth «of basic collections, syntheses, and reports of the relevant architectural, epigraphic, textual and iconographic evidence», 1 but the last decades saw an increasing number of papers and monographies devoted to this phenomenon. One of the latest outcome of this strand of research is a re-evaluation of the concept of “reperformance”,2 in reaction to the deep-rooted, Athenocentric prejudice according to which fifthcentury plays were written for a single performance in the Theatre of Dionysus.3 Yet, despite the existence of many recent studies about dramatic reperformances in the 5th and 4th century BC, we still lack a thorough investigation into the literary and inscriptional evidence on the spread of classical tragedies after their first, official performance in Athens. This dissertation aims at filling this gap in the scholarship on Ancient Theatre, by collecting 62 textual and epigraphic testimonies on the circulation of Tragedy in the pre-Alexandrian age. The structure of this database mirrors the fluid interaction, typical of this period, between oral and written forms of communication, thus approaching, from a new perspective, an issue much debated by classical scholars in the second part of 20th century (and extremely dear to Urbino’s school). After a brief introduction, which gives a synopsis of the interpretative problems dealt with over the research, the evidence is divided into four sections: testimonies on theatrical reperformances, on sympotic reperformances, on other oral contexts of the circulation of tragedy, and, finally, on the diffusion of tragedies’ texts. While each document is separately commented, cross references provide the reader with the connections between the phenomena analysed. In the commentary, particular stress is laid on philological issues, especially when the interpretation of the text is crucial to the overall assessment of a testimony; parallels are drawn between distinctive features of the pre-Alexandrian age and later developments in the dissemination of Drama; ample attention is devoted to the ancient reception of tragedies, as well as to the evidence on actors’ activity, in the belief that the “journey” of dramatic texts from the 5th century BC to the Alexandrian editions has been, above all, a passage “from repertory to canon”. 4 The result of this investigation is a picture of the ancient transmission of Drama much more colourful than the standard account of the early history of tragic texts, substantially based on the pseudo-Plutarchean passage about the so-called “Lycurgus’ edition” of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides’ plays,5 and on Galen’s anecdote on the fraudulent acquisition by Ptolemy III Euergetes of Athenian βιβλία containing the works of that canonical triad.6 In fact, before Alexandrians created the conditions for a long-lasting survival of drama beside its continuous, ephemeral revivals on stage, tragedies were reperformed in all the Greek World, and several testimonies show that this phenomenon, traditionally considered as typical of the 4th century BC, had older roots; despite the differences between two separate cultural worlds such as the theatre and the symposium, the sympotic repertoire increasingly embraced speeches and songs from the stages, thus becoming a significant context for the reception and the (re)performance of tragedies. Moreover, looking through the complex evidence provided by comic and biographical sources, it is possible to see the continued existence of an oral dissemination of tragic passages, even after the emerging of a book culture; finally, while it is reassuring to consider the ancient transmission of tragedy as a linear process from the Lycurgan measure against actors’ interpolations to the exegetical activity on drama in the Museum, this should not be a reason to forget the many other paths through which, in the pre-Alexandrian age, tragedies’ books were disseminated. 1 E. CSAPO, P. WILSON, Drama Outside Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BC, «Trends in Classics», VII, 2, 2015, p. 317. 2 Trends in Classics. 7. 2 (2015). R. HUNTER, A. UHLIG, Imagining Reperformance in Ancient Culture. Studies in the tradition of Drama and Lyric, Cambridge, 2017. 3 N.W. SLATER, The idea of the actor, in Nothing to do with Dionysos? Athenian drama in its social context, edited by J.J. Winkler, F.I. Zetlin, Princeton, 1990, pp. 385-395. 4 P.E. EASTERLING, From repertoire to canon, in P.E. EASTERLING (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, Cambridge, 1997, pp. 211-227.