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This work examines actors and their popular reception from the origins of theatre in Classical Greece to the Roman Empire. The book presents a highly original viewpoint into several new and contested fields of study and offers a systematic survey of evidence for the spread of theatre outside Athens.

Actors and Icons of the Ancient Theater examines actors and their popular reception from the origins of theater in Classical Greece to the Roman Empire Presents a highly original viewpoint into several new and contested fields of study Offers the first systematic survey of evidence for the spread of theater outside Athens and the impact of the expansion of theater upon actors and dramatic literature Addresses a study of the privatization of theater and reveals how it was driven by political interests Challenges preconceived notions about theater history

In the chaotic decades after the death of Alexander the Great, the world of the Greek city-state became deeply embroiled in the political struggles and unremitting violence of his successors' contest for supremacy. As these presumptive rulers turned to the practical reality of administering the disparate territories under their control, they increasingly developed new cities by merging smaller settlements into large urban agglomerations. This practice of synoikism gave rise to many of the most important cities of the age, initiated major shifts in patterns of settlement, and consolidated numerous previously independent polities. The result was the increasing transformation of the fragmented world of the small Greek polis into an urbanized network of cities. Drawing on a wide array of archaeological, epigraphic, and textual evidence, City and Empire in the Age of the Successors reinterprets the role of urbanization in the creation of the Hellenistic kingdoms and argues for the agency of local actors in the formation of these new imperial cities.

Age-old scholarly dogma holds that the death of serious theatre went hand-in-hand with the 'death' of the city-state and that the fourth century BC ushered in an era of theatrical mediocrity offering shallow entertainment to a depoliticised citizenry. The traditional view of fourth-century culture is encouraged and sustained by the absence of dramatic texts in anything more than fragments. Until recently, little attention was paid to an enormous array of non-literary evidence attesting, not only the sustained vibrancy of theatrical culture, but a huge expansion of theatre throughout (and even beyond) the Greek world. Epigraphic, historiographic, iconographic and archaeological evidence indicates that the fourth century BC was an age of exponential growth in theatre. It saw: the construction of permanent stone theatres across and beyond the Mediterranean world; the addition of theatrical events to existing festivals; the creation of entirely new contexts for drama; and vast investment, both public and private, in all areas of what was rapidly becoming a major 'industry'. This is the first book to explore all the evidence for fourth century ancient theatre: its architecture, drama, dissemination, staging, reception, politics, social impact, finance and memorialisation.

This book offers the first attempt at understanding interpersonal violence in ancient Athens. While the archaic desire for revenge persisted into the classical period, it was channeled by the civil discourse of the democracy. Forensic speeches, curse tablets, and comedy display a remarkable openness regarding the definition of violence. But in daily life, Athenians had to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. They did so by enacting a discourse on violence in the performance of these genres, during which complex negotiations about the legitimacy of violence took place. Since discourse and reality were intertwined and the discourse was ritualized, actual violence might also have been partly ritualized. By still respecting the on-going desire to harm one’s enemy, this partial ritualization of violence helped restrain violence and thus contributed to Athens’ relative stability.

Millis and Olson offer a updated edition of IG II2 2318-2325, the most substantial surviving evidence for the institutional history of the Athenian dramatic festivals. Fresh texts, detailed discussion of restorations, and full epigraphic and prosopographic commentary are included.

This series of essays by prominent academics and practitioners investigates in detail the history of performance in the classical Greek and Roman world. Beginning with the earliest examples of 'dramatic' presentation in the epic cycles and reaching through to the latter days of the Roman Empire and beyond, this 2007 Companion covers many aspects of these broad presentational societies. Dramatic performances that are text-based form only one part of cultures where presentation is a major element of all social and political life. Individual chapters range across a two thousand year timescale, and include specific chapters on acting traditions, masks, properties, playing places, festivals, religion and drama, comedy and society, and commodity, concluding with the dramatic legacy of myth and the modern media. The book addresses the needs of students of drama and classics, as well as anyone with an interest in the theatre's history and practice.

Greek drama has been subject to ongoing textual and historical interpretation, but surprisingly little scholarship has examined the people who composed the theater audiences in Athens. Typically, scholars have presupposed an audience of Athenian male citizens viewing dramas created exclusively for themselvesa model that reduces theater to little more than a medium for propaganda. Womens theater attendance remains controversial, and little attention has been paid to the social class and ethnicity of the spectators. Whose theater was it? Producing the first book-length work on the subject, David Kawalko Roselli draws on archaeological and epigraphic evidence, economic and social history, performance studies, and ancient stories about the theater to offer a wide-ranging study that addresses the contested authority of audiences and their historical constitution. Space, money, the rise of the theater industry, and broader social forces emerge as key factors in this analysis. In repopulating audiences with foreigners, slaves, women, and the poor, this book challenges the basis of orthodox interpretations of Greek drama and places the politically and socially marginal at the heart of the theater. Featuring an analysis of the audiences of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander, Theater of the People brings to life perhaps the most powerful influence on the most prominent dramatic poets of their day.

How can we study globalisation in a way that transcends the material/ideational rift? How has globalisation resonated and/or dominated in different national contexts? What role has been played by national political economies and domestic institutions in this process?Producing globalisation attempts to scrutinise the nature of the interplay between globalisation and national institutional settings. Rather than taking globalisation as a given, this book explores how concrete political actors produced the phenomenon of globalisation. Such an approach aims to bring human agency and its importance to the forefront of theory and practice in world politics and economics. The analysis is based on two case-studies, Greece and Ireland. By examining and comparing the discourses, policies and strategies of key, national institutional actors in these two countries, Producing globalisation offers new insights into the emergence of globalisation as a hegemonic discourse, as well as into the theory of hegemonic discourse itself. Thus the author invites us to think differently both about the nature of globalisation and the nature of the hegemonic within international political economy.

This article critically engages with recent theoretical writings on affect and non-human agency by way of studying the emotive energies discharged by properties and objects appropriated during war from members of the so-called 'enemy' community. The ethnographic material comes from long-term fieldwork in Northern Cyprus, focusing on how it feels to live with the objects and within the ruins left behind by the other, now displaced, community. I study Turkish-Cypriots' relations to houses, land, and objects that they appropriated from the Greek-Cypriots during the war of 1974 and the subsequent partition of Cyprus. My ethnographic material leads me to reflect critically on the object-centred philosophy of Actor Network Theory and on the affective turn in the human sciences after the work of Gilles Deleuze. With the metaphor of 'ruination', I study what goes amiss in scholarly declarations of theoretical turns or shifts. Instead, proposing an anthropologically engaged theory of affect through an ethnographic reflection on spatial and material melancholia, I argue that ethnography, in its most productive moments, is trans-paradigmatic. Retaining what has been ruined as still needful of consideration, I suggest an approach which merges theories of affect and subjectivity as well as of language and materiality. /// L'article examine sous un angle critique les écrits théoriques récents sur l'affect et l'agency non humaine pour étudier les énergies émotives libérées par les biens et objets confisqués lors d'un conflit armé aux membres de la communauté dite \"ennemie\". Le matériel ethnographique provient d'un travail de terrain de longue durée dans le Nord de Chypre, qui portait sur le ressenti de ceux qui vivent avec ces objets, dans les ruines laissées par l'autre communauté désormais déplacée. L'auteure étudie les relations des Chypriotes turcs avec les maisons, les terres et les objets qu'ils se sont appropriés sur les Chypriotes grecs lors de la guerre de 1974 et de la partition de Chypre. Le matériel ethnographique la conduit à une réflexion critique sur la philosophie centrée sur les objets de la théorie de l'acteur-réseau et sur le tournant affectif des sciences humaines à la suite des travaux de Gilles Deleuze. Par la métaphore de la \"ruine\", l'auteur sonde ce qui ne va pas dans les proclamations académiques de tournants théoriques et de changements paradigmatiques. En lieu et place, elle propose une théorie de l'affect engagée dans l'anthropologie, par une réflexion ethnographique sur la mélancolie spatiale et matérielle, et affirme que l'ethnographie, dans ses moments les plus productifs, est trans-paradigmatique. En gardant ce qui est \"ruiné\" comme digne encore de considération, l'auteure suggère une approche qui concilie les théories de l'affect et de la subjectivité et du langage et de la matérialité.