Theater of the People: Spectators and Society in Ancient Athens

Abstract

438 PHOENIX Theater of the People: Spectators and Society in Ancient Athens. By David Kawalko Roselli. Austin: University of Texas Press. 2011. Pp. 285. To Plato, the mass audience was a threat to political order and to the appreciation of art. In recent scholarship, from Vernant and Vidal-Naquet to Winkler and Zeitlin, the collective audience and its role in the development of Athenian democracy has been celebrated.1 In Theater of the People, the first book-length treatment of the ancient Athenian audience, David Kawalko Roselli navigates between ancient and modern perspectives and argues that the idea of a collective or mass audience was always in tension with the many points of view that spectators brought to the theater. In this valuable book, Roselli collects wide-ranging evidence and organizes it in the service of several important questions: Who was in the Athenian theater audience and when? How influential was the audience and in what ways? How did the physical arrangements of the theatron (seating area) and the changing economics of the theater affect the composition of the audience? In the first chapter, “The Idea of the Audience,” Roselli examines various aspects of the relationship between the ancient Athenian audience, theater practitioners, and the political elite. The chapter is subdivided into ten sections (e.g., Crazy about Drama, Capturing the Audience, Who Judges?), some of which are further divided into subsections (the subsections of Celebratory Performance in Drama are, for example, Performing Victory in Tragedy, Satyric Victories, and New Comedy and Beyond). To some extent these sections help organize the material, but many of the topics (judging, audience response, etc.) are threaded through the sections and the chapter is better read as an extended and learned meditation on the nature of the audience. In “Critical Views of the Theater Audience,” one of the last sections of the chapter, Roselli steps back to consider two key sources, Thucydides and Plato, within the larger context of democracy and popular influence on government. In this section, but also over the course of the chapter as a whole, Roselli contributes to the lively debate in current scholarship on the relationship between Greek drama and the Athenian democracy. Chapters Two (“Space and Spectators in the Theater”) and Three (“The Economics of the Theater: Theoric Distributions and Class Divisions”) take up practical questions about audience seating arrangements, ticket sales, and the financing of productions. Roselli shows how developments in these practical arrangements changed the composition of the Athenian audience over the course of the classical and hellenistic periods. The composition of the audience can be glimpsed through the comments of Attic dramatists (Chapter Three, especially 110–115) and Roselli concludes that, in the classical period, “In light of the available space, finances and the sociology of the population of Athens . . . it seems inescapable that more than half of the spectators on any festival day were poor” (116). In the late classical and hellenistic periods, however, the audience gradually became more homogeneous, not least because, in this later period, “if you were watching the performance, you had to pay cash” (116). At the heart of Chapter Two, and important to the book as a whole, is Roselli’s argument that there was an unofficial and free viewing space north of the theater of Dionysus through the fifth and some of the fourth century (72–75). This unofficial seating area allowed poorer spectators, and, notably, 1 J. P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet, Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne (Paris 1972 and 1986, vols. 1 and 2); J. Winkler and F. Zeitlin (eds.), Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context (Princeton 1990). BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 439 non-citizens to attend the theater. As Roselli describes in Chapter Three, when this free area was built over and tickets began to be sold for all seats at the festival, state funds (theorika) were made available to subsidize attendance costs. These, however, were disbursed only to citizens (87), whereas, at least in theory, women, slaves, foreigners, and non-citizens of all sorts had been able to watch from the uncontrolled viewing space in earlier years. In developing this history of the changing Athenian...