Abstract

There has been a considerable, and very welcome, scholarly engagement with performances in late antiquity over the last couple of years, and especially those performance arts that had hitherto been designated both the cause and symptom of so-called cultural decadence. This recent wave of scholarship owes more than a passing debt to Pat Easterling's chapter, "From Repertoire to Canon," in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, in which she pointed out that the survival of Greek tragedy was due to no small degree to ancient pantomime, sometimes referred to in inscriptions as "rhythmic tragic dancing," with its solo dancer, a musician, and a singing chorus who performed scenes from the fifth-century tragedians' works throughout the Roman Empire.