Departing the Polis: Travel and Travellers in the Extant Plays and Fragments of Greek Drama

This is the first study of travel, or mobility, and the ancient Greek theatre. The essays collected here, by leading figures in the field of ancient drama, examine both historical travel (the actual mobility of audiences and performers who attended the dramatic contests) and the character of the traveller as it is imagined in the surviving texts and fragments of Greek tragedy, satyr play and comedy. This subject has relevance for two major areas of study: the historical context of theatrical performance and the performances themselves, most particularly the use or creation of dramatic space. And yet this volume also breaks new ground: we build on recent research that has emphasised the Panhellenic aspects of the context of Greek drama and, furthermore, show how this interconnected world is reflected in the plays themselves. In the process we argue that the postmodern ’spatial turn’, as it has manifested in scholarship on ancient drama, has missed, almost completely, the key importance of movement within that space. This book reinserts travellers back into ancient dramatic space, as they move on distant journeys beyond the polis.

Anna Lamari, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece; Edmund Stewart, The University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK.