Early in the second century AD, during the reign of Hadrian, the proposed structural and functional conversion of the Theatre of Dionysus to stage gladiatorial combats within it led to rioting. The orator Musonius had earlier urged the Athenians to use peaceful persuasion to have the gladiatorial games banned from the sacred precinct of Dionysus. Subsequently the cynic philosopher Demonax went further, opposing gladiatorial games altogether and asserting that if the Athenians introduced them they should tear down the Altar of Mercy. The theatre had then been in use for some seven centuries. Clearly the citizens of Athens conceived both the site itself and its associated functions as in some very fundamental and vital sense 'permanent'. During its long existence it had undergone numerous modifications, few of which, despite the determined and persistent efforts of generations of archaeologists and scholars, can now be identified or traced with much accuracy or confidence. At some point in late antiquity the theatre ceased to be used even for secular entertainments, and the site itself fell into ruin, was overgrown and all but forgotten. In fact, until the nineteenth century, its location was erroneously thought to be the more extensively preserved adjacent site of the late second-century AD Odeon of Herodes Atticus; an irony of history since the impulse to construct this second theatre arose in part from the wish to replace the desecrated venue. Although the location and general lineaments of the Theatre of Dionysus, the most significant of all ancient theatres, are identified and demarcated today, the whole site seems on the verge either of being submerged into the encroaching urban landscape, or alternatively, absorbed back into the living rock of the slopes of the Acropolis, out of which it had originally been fashioned.

The cosmic dance

The performance of ancient dance is largely irrecoverable. Any attempt to recover it involves many technical problems and this essay does not make the attempt. Nor will I provide an encyclopaedic summary of information and views about ancient dance in its immense variety in time and place. My main focus will be on the ways in which the functions and the associations of dance in ancient society differ from those of dance in modern society. A crucial place in this argument will be occupied by theatrical dance.

In Hindu religion Shiva dances the Anandatandava (the dance of bliss), symbolizing the cosmic cycles of creation and destruction, the rhythms of birth and death and the perennial movements of the cosmos. In the hymns of the Veda, the dawn, Ushas, is described as a dancer who appears on a stage. This has no parallel in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. But in Sophocles' Antigone the chorus invoke Dionysus as a choragos (dance-leader) of the fire-breathing stars (1146-7). Plato (Timaeus 40c) describes the heavenly bodies with their 'juxtapositions and their approximations...circling as in dance', and in another work ascribed to Plato the stars are said to move 'through the figures of the fairest and most glorious of dances' (Epinomis 982e). Five centuries later Lucian writes that:

We know with certainty that the mask was an essential feature of theatrical performance in ancient Greece and Rome.

We are frustrated by the paucity of evidence relating to why it was adopted and how it functioned.

We are encouraged by the fact that, like the actors of old, we can don similar masks and learn from the experience of performing in them something about their use and significance in the ancient theatres.

Over a period of fifteen years, I conducted a series of productions and workshops of tragedy and comedy with a view to discovering what we might learn through performance. Specifically, each production was designed to test certain hypotheses about theatrical performance in ancient Greece. It was clearly understood that it was impossible to recreate the original productions or their context. But particular aspects of those performances could be tested in isolation.

The tragedies and comedies performed or workshopped in whole or in part were Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Philoctetes and Ajax; Euripides' Medea and Bacchae, Aristophanes' Women at the Thesmophoria and Lysistrata and the lyrical Homeric Hymn to Demeter.

There is perhaps no stronger impetus within the study of Black American literature and culture than the will to return, the desire to name the original, the source, the root, that seminal moment at which the many-tongued diversity of ancient West Africa gave way to the monolingualism of black North America. This explains why within the span of no more than fifty years the polite nomenclature that has been used to define “us” has moved decidedly backwards. Colored, Negro, Black and finally African. With each renaming one imagines a people groping ever closer to the mystery of their collective truth, a truth always buried within an always heavily veiled past. Thus it should come as no surprise that our theoretical and historical practices so often work to reiterate a sort of “Big Bang” conception of Black American life and culture. Bang. An organic, if multiform, African whole was assaulted, destroyed, and scattered to the far ends of the globe. And, miraculously, modern Black American culture developed at those many awkward locations at which the broken shards of ancient Africa caught, coalesced, melted, and melded into a new and vibrant people. This is, in fact, the idea that stands behind the notion that black literature presumably became more muddled and less sophisticated as it moved from the “simple truths” articulated with slave narratives and toward the “complicated imaginings” of presumably more creative forms.

The most important and most widely published author of African descent in the English-speaking world of the eighteenth century, Olaudah Equiano founded the genre of the African American slave narrative. Writing in 1913, W. E. B. Du Bois recognized Equiano's autobiography as “the beginning of that long series of personal appeals of which Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery is the latest.” The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (London, 1789) established all of the major conventions reproduced in the vast majority of nineteenth- and twentieth-century factual and fictional African American slave narratives: an engraved frontispiece, a claim of authorship, testimonials, an epigraph, the narrative proper, and documentary evidence.

Equiano writes that he was born in 1745 in what is now southeastern Nigeria. There, he says, he was enslaved at the age of eleven and sold to English slave traders who took him on the Middle Passage to the West Indies. Within a few days, he tells us, he was taken to Virginia and sold to a local planter. After about a month in Virginia he was purchased by Michael Henry Pascal, an officer in the British Royal Navy, who ironically renamed him Gustavus Vassa and brought him to London. Slaves were often given ironically inappropriate names of powerful historical figures like Caesar and Pompey to emphasize their subjugation to their masters' wills. Gustavus Vasa (sic) was a sixteenth-century Swede who liberated his people from Danish tyranny.

'The cultural moment I most regret having missed is the heyday of Aristophanes,' begins Joshua Kosman, music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, in an article from 16 February 2003 entitled 'Ancient Greek Fun'. He explains that Aristophanes' comedies may well be the most 'context-dependent' works of literature of the past three thousand years, because the playwright drew his humour from the multi-layered political and cultural life of fifth- and fourth-century BC Athens. Kosman regrets: '[O]ur level of understanding is pitiable. Even for Greek scholars, huge numbers of in-jokes, topical allusions, ad hominem digs and serious satirical points whiz by in silent mystery. The rest of us are nowhere.' Kosman warns that even advanced scholarship may fail to crack many of Aristophanes' barbed stings and jokes. My message, too, will be one of caution, especially where the most problematic aspect of the study of Aristophanes - his relationship to politics - is concerned.

The problem originates in the fact that very little is known about the comic playwright's life and personality. This dearth of biographical data did not stop the later tradition from creating an aura of notoriety around Aristophanes that was based solely on the bold content of his corpus of eleven preserved comedies, or a mere quarter of his total output, which was, in all likelihood, very diverse. Diversity and turbulence, too, characterized his life: he saw democracy at work - or at fault - in Athens and its surrounding territories. He observed the city's imperialist expansion and the political and moral demise of a naval empire that could have lasted much longer. He noticed how many Athenians became fascinated with the political model that Sparta harboured and that appeared to supply the basis of its military strength, of which Attica suffered the damaging consequences during the Peloponnesian Wars.

In a reading of scripts, costume and properties may be barely noticed, emerging sharply into view only when critical attention attributes to them a particular significance. In this chapter, I want to emphasize the material nature of classical theatre and to indicate the diversity of their use as essential components of all ancient performances.

One approach to the ancient dramatic texts that survive is to consider them as language intended to be delivered by performers. Another is to treat classical stage practice through the surviving remains of its theatre structures. But in both cases, the transient and the perishable are missing. The transient is everything that belongs to a culture of live performance, from established conventions of artistic expression through to idiosyncratic nuances and specific blunders in the work of performers; the perishable is, in many respects, the subject of this chapter.

Decay affects far more than the pigment applied to stone temples, or the pillage of precious objects. Even metals only survive either in bits (e.g. the clamps that hold stone blocks together) or by chance, when bronze statues that were part of a ship's cargo are discovered more or less intact in the sea. Armour may be found, as may some personal and more domestic items, often in burials. Glass and ceramics are fragile but durable, and complete items do survive. But timber and wood, bone, fabrics of all kinds, ropes and binding materials, basketwork, leather for work (buckets, harnesses) or dress (belts, jerkins, boots and sandals) will be found rarely, almost always in fragments.

Formerly enslaved women, like formerly enslaved men, were active participants in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolition movements. They participated as fugitives helping other fugitives; as speakers; as organizers and fundraisers; and as the writers of slave narratives. Slave women seeking to represent their experience for their audiences shared some of the problems slave men encountered when telling their stories. In an era in which citizenship was limited to white men, representations of the often humiliating experiences of slave men and women potentially exacerbated former slaves' vulnerability in their readers' eyes. If male slave narrators who sought readers' sympathy for themselves and abolition had to contend with feminizations of slave men as “sambo,” as well as depictions of oversexed and violent men, formerly enslaved women had to contend with similar disparaging stereotypes. De-gendered in the eyes of middle-class readers because they performed field and manual labor (where they were often in the majority), yet also viewed as oversexed because of their sexual vulnerability, slave women faced especially contradictory circumstances when they entered the spheres of antislavery publicity. Whether as a “mammy,” a “Jezebel,” or as a masculinized non-woman, when slave women offered first-hand accounts of slavery they were exposed to an intense scrutiny that conflicted with cultural norms that insisted on the privacy of “woman.” Slave women consciously shaped their narratives in direct response to these problematic contexts, as writers and as narrators.

It wasn't until the very end of my education that I first read a slave narrative. Growing up in Rochester, New York, once an abolitionist stronghold, I knew about slavery and encountered evidence of it both in the classroom and the community. I vividly remember being taken as a small child to see a hidden room in a local restaurant which was a “stop” on the Underground Railroad. But I never read or was asked to read a slave narrative until the end of my coursework in graduate school.

My experience was not unique. In the not-so-distant past, few students read slave narratives in secondary school, in universities, or even in graduate school. For a variety of reasons, including political change caused by the Civil Rights movement, the steadfast work of many devoted scholars, and a radical shift in notions of what literature is and why we read it, the value of the slave narrative has multiplied exponentially. Today, students at every level are likely to encounter these narratives of slavery, escape, and freedom written by fugitives of British colonial and American slavery in a wide range of courses.

Indeed, the existence of this volume is a testament to that sea change. Volumes in the Cambridge Companion series offer what Cambridge University Press describes as “lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics and periods.” The publication of this Companion confirms that the African American slave narrative is now recognized as a “major” genre, firmly established in the academic canon of what should be read and studied.

Introduction: ancient religion

Ancient religion, as the modern mantra goes, is ritual-based, polytheistic and embedded; its gods are anthropomorphic, its rituals sociomorphic; belief and its higher form, theology, are incidental only. As far as it goes, this is correct. Ancient religion pervaded every aspect of collective and individual life. It expressed itself in rituals that treated the gods in human shape as social partners: they received gifts through offerings, praise and promises from prayers, and were invited to common meals through sacrifices. It was not what one believed that counted, but participation in the collective rituals of one's group. This did not preclude personal piety or personal scepticism, even agnosticism, nor did it exclude public debate on the character of the divine powers and their role in the life of the city, the family and each individual.

Drama, as representation of human life, reflects the importance of ritual in the lives of Greeks and Romans. But it also reflects their complex and often contradictory thinking and speaking about the gods and heroes who were honoured in the rituals, all the more contradictory in the absence of any process for creating binding dogmas about what humans were to think about their gods.

Greek and Latin literature and drama have been central and formative components of the Western cultural tradition ever since the Middle Ages; and modern conceptions of theatre in general, as of 'tragedy' and 'comedy' as particular dramatic forms, are indelibly shaped by the specific performance modes that evolved during the sixth to the fourth centuries BC in Athens and during the third to the first centuries BC in Rome. The surviving Greek texts of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes and Menander, and the Latin texts of Seneca, Plautus and Terence, comprise a body of 'classical' drama that has long been recognized as canonical and that sometimes feels almost inevitable. (As Aristotle put it, with Sophocles and Euripides 'tragedy attained its nature [phusis]', Poetics ch. 4. 1449a15.) But as one follows the developments in Greek and Roman culture that led to the evolution of these forms of drama, one quickly comes to see what a large and diverse body of performance traditions had preceded them, and how many options were available to those theatrical pioneers as they set about shaping the plays that we have come to know so well.

Of course the Greeks were not the first to perform stories, or act out social and religious rituals, using words, music, dance, costume and impersonation in some combination or other. 'Theatrical' performances, in the sense of solo or group activities formally presented to an audience in a designated space and for a conventionally recognized purpose or occasion, can be found in almost all societies, ancient or modern, Eastern and Western, and the line between ritual and theatre, ceremony and 'play', may not always be easy - or necessary - to draw.

Most books on drama are about plays and playwrights. This is a book about theatre and, though the words 'drama' (from the Greek drama, 'something done') and 'theatre' (from theatron, 'a seeing-place' and theama, 'a show') both imply a performance dimension, it is the circumstances of presentation rather than the material that was presented that serve as its focus. Tragedy and comedy are part of a big-city art, their history defined for the most part by what happened in the capitals to which major artists have always tended to gravitate; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Marlowe from Canterbury, Shakespeare from Stratford, Beaumont from Leicestershire, Fletcher from Sussex and Wycherley from Shrewsbury, all naturally heading for London; Lully from Florence to Paris; Monteverdi from Cremona to Venice; modern American playwrights to New York or Los Angeles.

Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes and Menander were all Athenian bred, but of the Latin playwrights whose work has survived, Plautus was a native of Umbria, Terence born in Africa and Seneca in Spain. They all ended up living in Rome. Herodas, the writer of Greek 'mimes', a few of which have survived in written form, is the exception, living and working in Alexandria, but in the third century BC, when Herodas flourished, Alexandria was as much a cultural centre as was Athens or Rome.

The justification for this second Companion, following the earlier Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, edited by Patricia Easterling (1997), is only in part that this new one looks at comedy as well as tragedy, the Roman world as well as the Greek. More important is an acknowledgment that, however much the surviving written playtexts became the foundation of the western repertoire, they form only one element of a broad theatrical tradition.