Greek Performance Culture

Abstract

Ancient Greece—despite differences in local societies and diverse discontinuities over a span of many centuries—laid distinctive emphasis on verbal art as performance and developed numerous forms of performance culture, from theatrical to political to musical. The present bibliographical article includes sections on major areas related to ancient Greek performance cultures (see below) and discusses scholarship written in different European languages (especially French, German, Greek, and Italian) instead of considering primarily English-language publications. The concept of performance in contemporary research in the social sciences and the humanities has acquired significantly broad connotations (it has become an all-encompassing concept, as in the case of social performance, and sometimes even a metaphor). It has thus been applied to many aspects of human activity and communicative interaction. In light of such usage of the concept, one may trace “performance” in a particularly large number of—or in all, as some theoretically informed scholarship would argue—areas related to ancient Greek material culture and texts. As these are areas surveyed and to be surveyed in the future in other Oxford Bibliographies articles, this bibliographical article does not address topics like ancient Greek sports (except briefly in General Overviews); performance of identity in the ancient Greek world (except, from a particular art-historical perspective, in Archaic and Early Classical Greek Art and Performance); politics and performance; performance and ethnicity; or the performance of hundreds of religious rituals in Greek antiquity (however, see Ritual and Performance and Burkert 1985, cited under General Overviews). In a bibliographical article focusing on performance culture, overlap among some sections is unavoidable. Given the prescribed structure and scope of Oxford Bibliographies articles, it has proved unfeasible to discuss all books, let alone articles, focusing on ancient Greek performance cultures from the archaic period to later eras. This article places emphasis not only on research on the archaeological material and written sources about sufficiently investigated performance contexts like theater and ancient Greek symposia, but also on archaeological and historical investigations of musical and poetic competitions; methodological perspectives on ritual, orality, and popular song; archaeological approaches to Music and Sound; and epigraphic and historical research on artists’ guilds.