Ancient Performance

This is something I wanted to post just to give everyone an idea of how expansive performance in the ancient world actually could be; although our class is devoted to dramatic literature, "dramatic" performances in the ancient world occurred in a space that was, in some ways, far more fluid than that of the present day.

Ancient Tragic and Comic performances - particularly in Athens (and the rest of the Greek world) as well as Rome and its territories - combined acting, dance and song into something that may have resembled opera far more than it does theatre. Choruses were sung and danced, as were some of the monologues we read in Oedipus.

Aristotle, in The Poetics, argues that theatre's roots extend back to dithyrambic choral competitions that honor Dionysus (with Theatre proper being born when Thespis, the first actor, stepped out of the chorus and "became" or "imitated" a character about whom the chorus was singing) as well as the poetic tradition of Homeric recitation - The Iliad and The Odyssey were both performed works, passed down orally for centuries.

But these weren't the only performances going on in the ancient world: in the Greek region of Megara improvised stories were quite popular, and this practice of Megaran Mime is believed to be one of the precursors to both Atellan Farce (ancient improv comedy in Rome) and Commedia dell'Arte (Italian comedic improv).

Komos dances were also popular in Ancient Greece.

Another thing to note. By the time of Aristotle (4th Century BCE), the Greek theatre competitions held at the three largest festivals (The City Dionysia, The Rural Dionysia, and the Lenaia) began to award prizes for best actor and best "revival" of a classic play (from the 5th century BCE, i.e., Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus). The result of this is that the theatre of Aristotle's time often featured performances that differed from the surviving scripts: a Tragic actor might rewrite Sophocles' Oedipus such that there is no chorus, and the performance would consist of him giving all of Oedipus' best monologues.

What I'm saying is, there's a lot to ancient performance that we simply can't cover in one day; and that ancient performance covers a lot of ground.

We focus on the theatre, but dance, epic poetry, choral singing, marching, gladiatorial games and even processions and funerals can be considered within the spectrum of ancient performance - and considered worthy objects of study.

Below, I post a recreation of a Roman Triumph; it's from HBO's "ROME" and was researched by an ancient history scholar, with the events drawn from the descriptions found in Roman historians (such as Plutarch). This stuff, as much as the drama, gives us a sense of exactly how different and all-encompassing the study of the ancients could be.