Greek Drama in the Hellenistic world

Miles, Sarah

Abstract

This chapter starts with an outline of developments in the performance of Greek drama, and then traces the parallel and contemporary reception of Greek drama in textual form, focusing on Hellenistic scholarship and literature. Modern scholars see a mixture of these processes of performance and textualization as contributing to the canonization of tragedy and comedy. Two factors have a direct bearing on the efficacy of tracing the reception of Greek drama in the Hellenistic world: the state of modern scholarship; and the extant primary sources. Scholarship on the reception of drama in antiquity owes its greatest debt to Easterling, and is only now gathering pace. The textual reception of Greek drama went through a new stage of development outside Athens, in the Hellenistic library of Alexandria in Ptolemaic Egypt from the late fourth century BC onward. Alexandria provides the best evidence for developments in ancient scholarship on Greek drama.

Citation

Miles, S. (2016). Greek Drama in the Hellenistic world. In B. van Zyl Smit (Ed.), A handbook to the reception of Greek drama (45-62). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118347805.ch3

• Online Publication Date: Apr 29, 2016
• Publication Date: May 1, 2016
• Deposit Date: Apr 23, 2013
• Publisher: Wiley
• Pages: 45-62
• Series Title: Wiley-Blackwell handbooks to classical reception series
• Book Title: A handbook to the reception of Greek drama.
• ISBN: 9781118347751
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118347805.ch3
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1676716