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 democracy. D.G. Smith, emphasising non-Athenocentric approaches, examines how references to Xuthus as a Dorian Heraclid in a Stesichorean fragment, in Aeschylus' Aetnaean Women and in Euripides' Ion exploited mythical versions that reflected Sicilian politics.

A. Duncan casts doubt upon sources which regarded Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse, as a worthless writer. He was among the first autocrats to appropriate tragic dress and rhetoric, and won a Lenaean prize for Ransom of Hector in 367 (his Limos is the only Sicilian satyr drama mentioned in the volume, p. 145). Duncan suggests that Dionysius' mythical tragedies, and a kind of autobiographical tragedy which he may have introduced, promoted a portrait of the just ruler, presumably modelled on Theseus in fifth-century tragedy. S.S. Monoson makes the original remark that the setting of the Republic at Polemarchus' house in Piraeus is meant to recall the Syracusan metic Cephalus' family destabilised by ‘continuities between tyranny and democracy’, ‘a key theme’ of Plato's political thought (p. 156). Revisiting the critique in Gorgias and the Republic against tyranny, democracy and their support for poetry, theatre and oratory, Monoson argues that Plato's target was not only Athens, but also, by implication, Dionysius I and Sicilian culture. Part 1 often suggests that poetry and theatre were mainly used for populist propaganda, at least in classical Sicily under tyrants. But we cannot know whether Aeschylus, or indeed Epicharmus, was as willing to promote Hieron's politics as Pindar, and how Sicilian culture developed later in the fifth century.

Part 2, ‘Stone Theaters, Wooden Stages, and Western Performance Traditions’ (Chapters 9–15), reviews the archaeological evidence for Greek theatre in Sicily and South Italy, and for important links between local and Athenian traditions of performance and iconography. C. Marconi comments on the first stone theatre-buildings and their theatrical and socio-political functions in multicultural Sicily from the repopulation in the mid-fourth century to the late third. S. Vassallo offers additional evidence from the ongoing excavation of the late-fourth century stone theatre at Monte dei Cavalli, identified as the ancient Hippana.

O. Taplin argues that, except for Epicharmus' comedies, most Sicilian productions seem to have depended on Athens as the centre of theatre, dramatists and actors. Taplin's working hypothesis is that by the mid-fourth century successful Athenian plays could have been regularly revived by troupes of actors at local festivals in Attica, mainland Greece and the West. This could explain the long influence of Athenian tragedy and comedy on South-Italian and Sicilian vase-paintings, some of which include inscribed Greek names or phrases. L. Todisco provides lists of late-fourth century Apulian funerary vase-paintings linked with scenes from myths or specific fifth-century Athenian tragedies. As most vases seem to come from areas of illiterate indigenous communities with no knowledge of Greek, Todisco suggests that local vase-painters or assistants, partly bilingual, must have explained the paintings to buyers.

C. Dearden, supporting non-Athenocentric approaches, outlines the evidence for Sicilian performances as a background to fourth-century pictorial material. He refers to Sicilian dramatists, Epicharmus the ‘father’ of (possibly non-choral) comedy, and presumably regular performances of local tragedy, comedy and revivals of Athenian plays in Syracuse under the fifth- and fourth-century tyrants and during the intermediate democratic regime, which reshaped the wooden theatre toward the mid-fifth century. Centring on fourth-century vase-paintings linked with theatre and on South-Italian or Sicilian ‘Greek comic vases’ (once called ‘phlyax-vases’), Dearden explains that some of them reflect revivals of fifth- or fourth-century Athenian comedies, but others must be linked with lost plays from the important local traditions.

J.R. Green offers a masterly precis of apparently typical or distinctive themes and styles of comic vase-paintings from Attica (mid-sixth to mid-fourth century), South Italy (late fifth to early third century) and Sicily (mid-fourth century), and stresses how vase-painting, however ‘unrealistic’ (p. 307), reflected phases of the history of comedy. He observes that an important number of South-Italian and Sicilian vases suggest scenes from revivals of Athenian plays as well as a ‘continuity’ with themes and techniques used for Attic vases, while other South-Italian vase-paintings show a local interest in reflecting comedy in a rather general way. B. Maclachlan discusses evidence for the coexistence of chthonic and comic elements as a major feature of Sicilian and South-Italian culture from the fifth to the third century.

Part 3 (Chapters 16–17) assesses examples of ‘Hellenistic Reflections’ of Sicilian texts and performances. D. Kutzko attempts to define Sophron's lost late-fifth century mime by exploring Sophron's traces in Herodas' Hellenistic mimiambs. Kutzko points out that Sophron had refined a Sicilian tradition of mime with elements of Sicilian and Athenian comedy and used literary Doric prose to depict every-day scenes in monologues or dialogues, presumably performed at Syracusan symposia. B. Acosta-Hughes reviews research on poetic and theatrical contests under the Ptolemies, and raises the possibility of original performance for Theocritus' mimes among the Idylls, which he discusses in the context of Sicilian traditions.

The volume (with a few misprints) contains preliminary information (list of figures and maps, contributors, acknowledgements), frequent cross-references to sections, helpful appendices to Chapters 9, 11, 14 and final indexes. Marconi's chapter can make one think how the idea of ancient Sicilian Greek culture matters in the history of the twentieth-century Festival of Syracuse. But the volume is important for research on ancient Greek theatre: it shows, as B. put it (p. 102), how ‘developments in the west … help us understand the larger context of Athenian theater and Greek culture’. By contrast with chapters privileging colonial or exclusively non-Athenocentric models, the first two make clear that we should not risk ‘allowing the epichoric model to become reductive’ (Morgan, p. 45), but should instead consider an extensive and deep interaction of forms and uses of myth, music, poetry, pictorial arts and philosophy from the sixth century, as well as of theatre and rhetoric from the fifth century onwards, as they travelled between the East and the West.