The play’s final tableau, the triumphant Medea leaving on the Sun’s chariot, had quite an impact on ancient viewers. Euripides’ Medea was another tragedy that retained the favor of later audiences. Later scholars took care to record the realia of later performances and both Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Dio Chrystostom do seem to have seen Orestes staged in the theatre of their day. Staged at the Great Dionysia in Athens by both Neoptolemos in 341-340 BCE and by a now anonymous Hellenistic actor in the years 190-170 BCE, Orestes was, in the words of Aristophanes of Byzantion, one ‘of the plays that enjoy success on the stage’ (τῶν ἐπὶ σκηνῆς εὐδοκιμούντων). Euripides’ plays are prominent among them and Orestes is probably the most famous example. Several plays by the canonical tragedians became repertoire tragedies. Actors, too, selected Greek tragedies: they formed a repertoire that they continued to stage around the Mediterranean. ġ§2 Scholars and readers chose Greek tragedies by focusing on a limited number of dramas, and eventually reducing them into the select plays, seven by Aeschylus and Sophocles, and ten by Euripides. They are the ‘old tragedies’ and the ‘old comedies’ attested on festival records across the Empire, although only few sources preserve the details of the plays produced. Classical and early-Hellenistic plays continued to entertain theatregoers well into the Imperial period. The same areas that produced a substantial amount of theatre-related artifacts, Apulia and Campania, were also home to the earliest poets who adapted Greek dramas into Latin for performance in Rome, often selecting the same tragedies that can be identified on the theatre-related pots from southern Italy. By the mid-third century, Greek plays arrived in Rome. Greek drama quickly travelled to South Italy to be performed on local stages and to be reproduced on hundreds of theatre-related pots dated to the fourth century BCE. Inscriptions attest to tragic revivals at the Great Dionysia in Athens starting in 386 BCE, when ‘the tragoidoi first offered in addition an old play’ (παλαιὸν δρᾶμα πρῶτο παραδίδαξαν οἱ τραγ, IG II 2 2318, 201-203). The theatrical afterlife of Greek tragedy- the fascinating process whereby Greek plays became a staple on the stages scattered around the Mediterranean - is yet to be fully studied, but it can be sketched in its main outlines. Of these two strands in the ancient reception of Greek tragedy, textual transmission has received far more attention for at least two main reasons, the long-standing scholarly interest in Greek plays as texts and the greater availability of sources, both literary and papyrological. ġ§1 In antiquity as today, Greek tragedies circulated both as written texts for the reading public and as scripts for performance on public stages. “The Actors’ Repertoire, Fifth-Century Comedy and Early Tragic Revivals.” CHS Research Bulletin 3, no.
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