Theater on the periphery: A social and political history of theater in early Sicily.

Abstract

More than a hundred years of scholarship on the fragments of Epicharmus have produced many analyses of the influence of Athenian theater on Sicilian and vice versa. Likewise, the paintings on the Sicilian and South Italian comic vases, produced a couple of generations after Epicharmus, are now being traced back to Athenian comedies. Though this association between Sicilian and Athenian drama remains an intricate and important problem, the local, social history of Sicilian theater in Sicilian cities also deserves attention. These western traditions have not been studied as a coherent and independent development before, because the evidence has seemed too sparse and fragmentary. In recent years, however, significant discoveries have been made by archaeologists, papyrologists and philologists, and, by drawing on all these kinds of evidence, it is possible to piece together the outlines of the development of western theater. Incorporating methodology from recent archaeological and literary studies, this thesis expands the traditional history of Attic theater to the West. Central to the thesis are questions of Sicilian cult and religious practice, especially that of Demeter; the Sicilian tyrants', Gelon, Hieron, and, later, Dionysius I, use of theater for propaganda; and the threads of continuity between Epicharmus at the beginning of the 5<super>th</super> century and the proliferation of theaters and comic vases in the 4<super>th</super> century. This study concludes that theater in the Greek West, especially in Syracuse, developed relatively independently of Athens and flourished in periods of tyrannical rule.