The Siting of Greek Theatres

Abstract

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the orientation of buildings in ancient Greece received a great deal of scholarly attention; since that time, it has fallen from favour. In 1939, William Bell Dinsmoor made an ‘attempt to illustrate a method of obtaining more accurate information concerning the dates of Greek temples and certain details of religious practice through the application of an outmoded theory, that of “orientation”’. When this complex study, replete with trigonometric calculations of seasonal star positions met with little favour, orientation became a dead issue for several decades, only reviving in 1962 with the publication of Vincent Scully's The Earth, The Temple, and the Gods (New Haven: Yale University Press).