The study of ancient Greek theatre outside Athens has entered a Golden Age. To mention only trends having to do with South Italy and Sicily, the last 20 years have seen the publication of a magisterial edition of the fragments of the Sicilian playwright Epicharmus, along with other representatives of Doric comedy, classical mime and so-called ‘phlyakes’, by R. Kassel and C. Austin (PCG 1 [2001]), as well as stimulating work on this material by L. Rodríguez-Noriega Guillén, R. Kerkhof, A. Willi, J.H. Hordern and others. The ‘minor’ Greek tragedians, including many with connections to the Greek West, are also receiving renewed attention, for example in M. J. Cropp's two-volume bilingual edition with commentary (2019–21). The excavation and interpretation of the remains of ancient theatres throughout the region continues apace, along with studies of their connections to the cults of gods (especially Dionysus) and goddesses (especially Demeter and Persephone). Partly as a result of new and still ongoing discoveries, the 1990s had already brought a revolution, led by O. Taplin and E. Csapo, in our understanding of the reperformance of Attic comedy in the West, and the succeeding two decades have witnessed a thoroughgoing reassessment of all theatre-related vase painting, in which these two and many other scholars have participated. In general, a greater willingness to think about performance and reperformance outside Athens has reinvigorated the discussion of several topics on which South Italy and Sicily have a bearing, such as the early spread of tragedy and the ways in which different dramatic genres engage spectators living under different political regimes. Finally, as of last year, those interested in all these topics and more can turn to vol. 2 of A Social and Economic History of the Theatre to 300 bc by E. Csapo and P. Wilson. The first of a planned three volumes, SEHT 2, subtitled Theatre beyond Athens: Documents with Translation and Commentary, devotes about 150 of its stately pages to ‘West Greece’, which can be expected to play a large part in at least the forthcoming third volume, devoted to theatre's performers and political patrons.
As a Ph.D. student in the early 2000s, B. was an energetic and creative early participant in many of the trends just sketched. After her premature death in 2013, Hall and Marconi, renowned experts in Greek tragedy and Sicilian archaeology, respectively, generously undertook to prepare her partially revised 2006 dissertation for publication. In between, B. had been quickly rising to prominence on the strength of well-regarded articles, chapters and encyclopaedia entries on subjects related to her thesis as well as visionary collaborative projects, one of which was a 2010 conference that led to Theater Outside Athens: Drama in Greek Sicily and South Italy (2012). That well-received volume, edited by B., brought together valuable new contributions by leading scholars across the field, including several named in the previous paragraph.
After a brief introduction, the book under review consists of chapters on Epicharmus and early performance in Syracuse, the place of Demeter and Dionysus in the fragments of Epicharmus and other literary and archaeological remains of Sicilian theatre, the political contexts of Sicilian drama, theatre-related vase painting and stone theatres in the West. A brief conclusion revisits the book's major themes.
Despite the accelerating pace of scholarship, the study of Sicilian theatre remains bedevilled by significant gaps in the evidence, and B. is well aware that many of her conclusions must remain tentative. For example, she argues that, while early evidence associating Sicilian theatre with Demeter is vanishingly thin, there are hints as early as Epicharmus that Dionysus became important in performances there, perhaps under the influence of the Athenian theatre scene. The evidence for Dionysus is also limited, and B. pushes some of it quite hard. In her exploration of the political contexts of early fifth-century drama performed in Sicily, B. interestingly views Aeschylean tragedy and Epicharmean comedy together. For Epicharmus, however, the haul still strikes this reviewer as somewhat meagre. For Aeschylus, B. offers an attractive reading of Persians that demonstrates the play's salience for spectators living under the Deinomenid tyranny. In her own contribution to Theater Outside Athens she builds on this interpretation in the course of reviving an old theory that Persians actually received its premiere in Syracuse; the attested production at the Athenian Dionysia of 472 bce would thus fall into the category of reperformance. This thought-provoking piece has already been and will continue to be much cited, even if B.'s is likely to remain a minority view.
Chapters 5 and 6 are the most thoroughly changed vis-à-vis the dissertation. In Chapter 5, on theatre-related vase painting, B. aims to establish the viability of what she calls the ‘combination theory’. Following M. Gigante and especially C. Dearden, she maintains that the images on the vases are at least compatible with a hypothesised blending of Doric and Attic comic traditions in the West; those who deny that the vases have anything at all to do with a distinctive regional tradition (formerly known as ‘phlyakes’) have perhaps gone too far. (Dearden argues anew for this position in his contribution to Theater Outside Athens.) In a substantial section on the well-known ‘Choregoi’ vase (pp. 130–7) B. accepts most of the argument Taplin presented in Comic Angels (1993), but challenges his interpretation of the label ‘choregos’ as the Attic technical term for a wealthy citizen who finances a theatrical production. Although B. misunderstands Taplin's philological reasoning and bases her own on an unconvincing use of Pollux 9.41–2 (= Epich. frr. 13, 103), her view that the figures labelled ‘choregos’ may instead be directors or trainers could be correct and provides a good example of her independence and originality. Also new and original are sections on pipe-players depicted on vases from Sicily and Paestum (pp. 137–47) and Sicilian vases connected with tragedy (pp. 147–9), as well as an avowedly speculative argument (pp. 150–5) that four Sicilian vases that may reflect dramatic performances (two tragic, two comic) and may each depict four actors reveal a regional tradition not subject to the Athenian ‘three-actor rule’. Clearly, B. was not just ‘cleaning up’ her thesis, but restlessly pursuing new arguments, with characteristic imagination and determination, across a broad range of topics. One that she was apparently still pondering is the old question whether Epicharmean comedy had a chorus. B. is inclined to think it did, but in a brief discussion in her chapter on ‘Epicharmus and Early Sicilian Comedy’ in the Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy (ed. M. Revermann [2014], p. 88), she acknowledges that the evidence is inconclusive and scholars are divided (see now SEHT 2, pp. 324–5). Here, place-holding cross-references at p. 134 n. 97 and p. 171 n. 47 promise a review of the question not to be found in the book.
In Chapter 6 B. joins a growing consensus that the influence of the Athenian Theatre of Dionysus on the architectural form of Sicilian theatres was far less pervasive than scholars used to assume. She argues that some of the distinctive features of theatres in the West may be related to their frequent use as places of political assembly. She shows that because many scholars have been in the habit of casually assuming that theatre is essentially democratic, they have asserted an implausibly close connection between the brief period of Timoleon's activity, the prosperity and democracy that followed, and the (in fact not precisely datable) building of theatres across Sicily. Brief concluding sections acknowledge the difficulty of determining what role, if any, Dionysius I played in promoting theatre-building and of understanding how the wave of new construction in the fourth century fits into Sicilian theatre history as a whole.
B. aims throughout to find as much continuity as she can in Sicily's theatrical traditions. One challenge is to bridge the roughly 60-year gap between the end of Epicharmus’ career and the earliest surviving comic vases, some of which depict arguably related characters and motifs. Another is to allow for, without exaggerating, Athenian influence. Still another is to tease out the implications for theatre and performance from a historical record mainly interested in political and military events. As scholarship proceeds on these and related fronts, it is very much to be regretted that we have lost the distinctive voice of B., who contributed so much of value in such a short time.
