What do you think?
Rate this book
Ruins: Classical Theater and Broken Memory
Much of the theater of antiquity is marked by missing origins, broken genres, fragments of plays, ruins of architecture, absented gods, remains of older practices imperfectly buried and ghosting through the civic productions that replaced them. Classical Theater and Broken Memory traces the remains, the remembering, and the forgetting of performance traditions of classical theater. The book argues that it is only when we look back over the accumulation of small evidence over a thousand-year sweep of classical theater that the remarkable and unequaled endurance of the tradition emerges. In the absence of more evidence, Odai Johnson turns instead to the absence itself, pressing its most legible gaps into a narrative about scars, vanishings, erasures, and all the breakages that constitute the ruins of antiquity. In ten wide-ranging case studies, theater history and performance theory are brought together to examine the texts, artifacts, and icons left behind, reading them in fresh ways to offer an elegantly written, extended meditation on “how the aesthetic of ruins offered a model for an ideal that dislodged and ultimately stood in for the historic.”
358 pages, Hardcover
Published October 10, 2018
1 person is currently reading
4 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 14, 2026
This is a very good 150-page book wrapped in an interesting but frustrating 265-page book.
Johnson's idea here is to ask a series of questions about what is missing from the historical record of classical theatre, to see where the absences and gaps are marked. This is a delightful (and frequently poetic) tactic. The book is at its best when it's making arguments that ask us to think about the political shifts that were occurring when big changes in the theatre take place, as when the shift to Greek Middle Comedy from Greek Old Comedy allegedly takes place circa 370 BCE. Johnson's method of describing shifts in theatrical form as related to the needs of the state to "remember to forget" work very well.
The chapters break down like this. 1 is a poetic meditation on the remainder of the rites of Dionysus in Greek tragic performance. 2 is on the fining of Phrynicus and the shift toward the only types of ancient Greek tragedy we have extant, mythical tales. 3 is on Greek Old Comedy and its weaponization to force ostracisms. 4 is about Menander and his popularity as a likely politically motivated ethical position. 5 theorizes the way that many performers and other theatre makers in ancient Rome were actually traumatized survivors of Roman genocides. 6 wonders about the proliferation of Roman theatre buildings in every one of Rome's colonial outposts. 7 proposes that Roman theatre comes from a particularly drunk and obscene version of Greek theatre from the Tarentum region in Magna Græcia. 8 puzzles about why Romans imported the Greek theatre in the first place, proposing that Greek theatre was a way for Romans to remember their victories over Greek civilization. 9 asks us to read Seneca as a kind of memory of a past that cannot be remembered, that can no longer exist—Senecan tragedy as an exercise in nostalgia. 10 thinks about the long tradition of theatre scholarship that existed, unbroken from Aristotle until the Christian destruction of memory, knowledge, and history in the 3rd century CE. 11 thinks with relish about the people's affection for and commitment to attending the theatre despite the persistent attempts Christian preachers such as John Chrysostom made to get people to leave the theatre.
I enjoyed much of this book, and it's filled with information and pleasurable turns of phrase. It is aimed only at relative experts in classical theatre history. To understand this text one must know rather a lot about debates in classical theatre history, Gerald Else, John Jones, Richard Beacham, Matthew Wright, Clifford Ashby, and the discussions of many others, including the literature itself—Terence, Seneca, Plautus, Menander, Aristophanes, Æschylus, Sophocles, Sophron, and Euripides. One should even already have a passing knowledge of what is missing in the historical record.
But Johnson repeats himself rather frequently. He tells entire stories more than once, recounting again something he's told us just a few pages earlier; he puzzles over the same problems again and again in print, taking us along the journey of his line of thinking when we would be better served (at least to my mind) by more robust arguments and proposals even if wildly fanciful.
Perhaps this book is best understood as a kind of monument of mourning, a document that records what we have lost and stares into the ashes of a library that has been burned. Johnson tells us many stories from those ashes, and asks many provocative questions about what no one any longer can remember. For the most part, I enjoyed those questions.
Johnson's idea here is to ask a series of questions about what is missing from the historical record of classical theatre, to see where the absences and gaps are marked. This is a delightful (and frequently poetic) tactic. The book is at its best when it's making arguments that ask us to think about the political shifts that were occurring when big changes in the theatre take place, as when the shift to Greek Middle Comedy from Greek Old Comedy allegedly takes place circa 370 BCE. Johnson's method of describing shifts in theatrical form as related to the needs of the state to "remember to forget" work very well.
The chapters break down like this. 1 is a poetic meditation on the remainder of the rites of Dionysus in Greek tragic performance. 2 is on the fining of Phrynicus and the shift toward the only types of ancient Greek tragedy we have extant, mythical tales. 3 is on Greek Old Comedy and its weaponization to force ostracisms. 4 is about Menander and his popularity as a likely politically motivated ethical position. 5 theorizes the way that many performers and other theatre makers in ancient Rome were actually traumatized survivors of Roman genocides. 6 wonders about the proliferation of Roman theatre buildings in every one of Rome's colonial outposts. 7 proposes that Roman theatre comes from a particularly drunk and obscene version of Greek theatre from the Tarentum region in Magna Græcia. 8 puzzles about why Romans imported the Greek theatre in the first place, proposing that Greek theatre was a way for Romans to remember their victories over Greek civilization. 9 asks us to read Seneca as a kind of memory of a past that cannot be remembered, that can no longer exist—Senecan tragedy as an exercise in nostalgia. 10 thinks about the long tradition of theatre scholarship that existed, unbroken from Aristotle until the Christian destruction of memory, knowledge, and history in the 3rd century CE. 11 thinks with relish about the people's affection for and commitment to attending the theatre despite the persistent attempts Christian preachers such as John Chrysostom made to get people to leave the theatre.
I enjoyed much of this book, and it's filled with information and pleasurable turns of phrase. It is aimed only at relative experts in classical theatre history. To understand this text one must know rather a lot about debates in classical theatre history, Gerald Else, John Jones, Richard Beacham, Matthew Wright, Clifford Ashby, and the discussions of many others, including the literature itself—Terence, Seneca, Plautus, Menander, Aristophanes, Æschylus, Sophocles, Sophron, and Euripides. One should even already have a passing knowledge of what is missing in the historical record.
But Johnson repeats himself rather frequently. He tells entire stories more than once, recounting again something he's told us just a few pages earlier; he puzzles over the same problems again and again in print, taking us along the journey of his line of thinking when we would be better served (at least to my mind) by more robust arguments and proposals even if wildly fanciful.
Perhaps this book is best understood as a kind of monument of mourning, a document that records what we have lost and stares into the ashes of a library that has been burned. Johnson tells us many stories from those ashes, and asks many provocative questions about what no one any longer can remember. For the most part, I enjoyed those questions.
January 28, 2026
Okay, what Aaron said: this is a great 150 page book stuck inside a 266 page book. The repetition either grew less or bothered me less as I settled into it, but the first two chapters were almost infuriating. It was like Johnson only had 3 pages of anything to say but had promised someone it would be 15 pages -- same anecdotes, restated, same thesis. And while this too I think grows slowly less over the many chapters of the book, each chapter (there are MANY for an academic monograph: 11 plus an introduction, a prologue and a conclusion) has really a one sentence thesis that doesn't always much exceed that one sentence. They ARE evocative but sometimes maybe didn't need a whole chapter to do justice to.
I almost gave this 4 stars though because I'm really not well read in Classical theater, and it was really helpful to just sit with sources and commentary for 266 pages... I feel more prepared to lecture on this stuff and as much as I've predicated my life as a thtr historian on hating Greece and Rome, I have to admit I've been getting really into it in the last few years. ARgh.
Chapter 1: argues that there was a dangerous and ecstatic prehistory to Dionsyiac theatre that is already lost in the mists of time when we get documented drama. Everyone refers to it, but no one can really describe it because it's lost. This is the chapter that irritated me most because Johnson never once entertains the counterpoint: people SAY there was a dangerous, more exciting past that drama domesticated, defanged as it were, but what if they just SAY that?! That's also interesting, and could sustain some ruminating, but repetitively Odai takes these "it used to be wild" guys at their word-- and why? They admit they weren't there! All this despite the fact that I too am susceptible to the allure of the more dangerous Dionysiac. But no evidence shared sustained the appropriateness of only arguing that such a thing was.
Chapter 2: topical, current events plays got banned and Greek tragedy became all myth all the time. Again, 1-2 compelling anecdotes, a long time explaining them. Basically, Phrynicus wrote a play about current events- a massacre in the city of Miletus in which Athens (where this play premiered) had sort of chickened out of helping, therefore bearing some of the blame for the slaughter. This made people FEEL TOO MUCH PERSONALLY and they decided they didn't want plays to do this anymore and from then on, the topics of tragedy were always mythological or far history. Again, interesting, and once more Johnson hits the same note again and again without exploring any of the other options, like: how interesting to explore well, what does lamenting a personal failing DO for us? Would sitting with current events have made the world, or the Athenians, better people? The inference Johnson leaves for us is that it would have - that it was craven to legislate that theatre not do this anymore. But I would reply: well, we have nice liberal people consuming guilt-inducing news all day every day in the 21st century, feeling terrible and trying to think of what they should do about their sense of implication, and... are we making the world better because we "face" our complicity? I am not sure. So much to consider in this provocative thesis, and again, it's not broached. EVEN THOUGH the thesis he chose is compelling and interesting.
Chapter 3 is about Old Comedy being used as a tool of social power from the demos, or at least more ordinary people, toward individuals who gained a lot of power. The way ostracism paralleled uses of Old Comedy relentlessly lampooning the poweful as a sort of check and balance on their power. Fair. Interesing. This book is starting to have more material for its theses. This trend will, thankfully, continue.
Chapter 4 continues the reasoning of 3 and considers how this powerful use of comedy ends, moving into middle comedy and later, which is noticeably less politically acute, even blandly status quo. (Maybe- Johnson is going to undercut this claim of his own in later chapters.) The central anecdote here is the apocryphal claim that comedian Eupolis was drowned by the man he had lampooned because he was so angry about the portrayal. This moves us to Menander whose bland comedies "utterly disengage its citizenry from the political exigencies at hand" (101), although I would argue *THIS IS ALSO AN ACTIVITY WITH POLITICAL POWER* - but it's power that preserves the status quo, something Johnson admits happens all the time, but, like most of us resistance-happy academics, doesn't like to explicate.
5) I'd read before in an anthology and I think it's really smart, and undercuts the idea of later comedy as ACTUALLY toothless, because he reads the lines and laments of enslaved characters for the trauma of war and captivity. Compares to curse tablets, another poignant source of the voices of the oppressed.
6, 7, 8: lots about "Mapping Rome" and how theater helps us see how Rome laid claim to territory through "civilizing" (read: Romanizing) forces, even one as patently complicated to their own political and social standards as theater. Six is about the repeated building of theaters across the empire, and especially over the sites of previous shrines and religious/cultural spaces, maybe on purpose to replace something holy with something profane... maybe?? Seven notes how it was easy to build theaters in the provinces, but hard to get them to stick permanently inside Rome itself (seemingly in the republic era, mostly). Notes the influence of Greek slaves, especially comedy-obsessed Tarentum, and the infamia status conferred on actors and theater people, even as the buildings gained ground. Nine is about the slow appropriation/naturalization of theater as a Roman thing, instead of as a foreign thing.
Chapter 9) is about Pausanias' travel guide to Athens and how it is only interested in the ruins of the past (500+ years ago at that point) not the present.
Chapter 10) is about Athenaeus' massive tome from 180-200CE which is the last gasp, for Johnson, of a living dialectic of the canon of classical work. After Athenaeus, the chain is broken and we only converse with Classical antiquity from across an epistemic divide (not what Johnson calls it). He notes that other people find A's Symposium weird and bloated, but Odai reads it for how it indexes this continuity with everything that existed, canon-wise.
Chapter 11) is about Roman practices of forgetting -- damnatio memoriae -- chiseling faces out of people who got, let's call it, cancelled, but leaving the bodies so you KNOW they're gone. Someone was purposefully erased from memory. Anyway, and this chapter traces the erasing of the classical world and pagan knowledge/culture as the Roman empire fell and Christianized leaders purposefully went about erasing the past. Theaters both did and didn't fall under this violence-- many buildings were pulled down and repurposed for other new uses, both post-empire and Christian uses, but then, Johnson says, mimes persisted in a wild way that DID preserve pagan memory, even as the Christian leaders tried their damnedest (if you will) to get people to give it up.
Oof okay, I really got to get to other work, but trying to do due diligence to work I read so I can reaccess more easily...
Some key terms used:
kataskaphe
Amnesty (original, political definition)
damnatio memoriae
Infamia
I almost gave this 4 stars though because I'm really not well read in Classical theater, and it was really helpful to just sit with sources and commentary for 266 pages... I feel more prepared to lecture on this stuff and as much as I've predicated my life as a thtr historian on hating Greece and Rome, I have to admit I've been getting really into it in the last few years. ARgh.
Chapter 1: argues that there was a dangerous and ecstatic prehistory to Dionsyiac theatre that is already lost in the mists of time when we get documented drama. Everyone refers to it, but no one can really describe it because it's lost. This is the chapter that irritated me most because Johnson never once entertains the counterpoint: people SAY there was a dangerous, more exciting past that drama domesticated, defanged as it were, but what if they just SAY that?! That's also interesting, and could sustain some ruminating, but repetitively Odai takes these "it used to be wild" guys at their word-- and why? They admit they weren't there! All this despite the fact that I too am susceptible to the allure of the more dangerous Dionysiac. But no evidence shared sustained the appropriateness of only arguing that such a thing was.
Chapter 2: topical, current events plays got banned and Greek tragedy became all myth all the time. Again, 1-2 compelling anecdotes, a long time explaining them. Basically, Phrynicus wrote a play about current events- a massacre in the city of Miletus in which Athens (where this play premiered) had sort of chickened out of helping, therefore bearing some of the blame for the slaughter. This made people FEEL TOO MUCH PERSONALLY and they decided they didn't want plays to do this anymore and from then on, the topics of tragedy were always mythological or far history. Again, interesting, and once more Johnson hits the same note again and again without exploring any of the other options, like: how interesting to explore well, what does lamenting a personal failing DO for us? Would sitting with current events have made the world, or the Athenians, better people? The inference Johnson leaves for us is that it would have - that it was craven to legislate that theatre not do this anymore. But I would reply: well, we have nice liberal people consuming guilt-inducing news all day every day in the 21st century, feeling terrible and trying to think of what they should do about their sense of implication, and... are we making the world better because we "face" our complicity? I am not sure. So much to consider in this provocative thesis, and again, it's not broached. EVEN THOUGH the thesis he chose is compelling and interesting.
Chapter 3 is about Old Comedy being used as a tool of social power from the demos, or at least more ordinary people, toward individuals who gained a lot of power. The way ostracism paralleled uses of Old Comedy relentlessly lampooning the poweful as a sort of check and balance on their power. Fair. Interesing. This book is starting to have more material for its theses. This trend will, thankfully, continue.
Chapter 4 continues the reasoning of 3 and considers how this powerful use of comedy ends, moving into middle comedy and later, which is noticeably less politically acute, even blandly status quo. (Maybe- Johnson is going to undercut this claim of his own in later chapters.) The central anecdote here is the apocryphal claim that comedian Eupolis was drowned by the man he had lampooned because he was so angry about the portrayal. This moves us to Menander whose bland comedies "utterly disengage its citizenry from the political exigencies at hand" (101), although I would argue *THIS IS ALSO AN ACTIVITY WITH POLITICAL POWER* - but it's power that preserves the status quo, something Johnson admits happens all the time, but, like most of us resistance-happy academics, doesn't like to explicate.
5) I'd read before in an anthology and I think it's really smart, and undercuts the idea of later comedy as ACTUALLY toothless, because he reads the lines and laments of enslaved characters for the trauma of war and captivity. Compares to curse tablets, another poignant source of the voices of the oppressed.
6, 7, 8: lots about "Mapping Rome" and how theater helps us see how Rome laid claim to territory through "civilizing" (read: Romanizing) forces, even one as patently complicated to their own political and social standards as theater. Six is about the repeated building of theaters across the empire, and especially over the sites of previous shrines and religious/cultural spaces, maybe on purpose to replace something holy with something profane... maybe?? Seven notes how it was easy to build theaters in the provinces, but hard to get them to stick permanently inside Rome itself (seemingly in the republic era, mostly). Notes the influence of Greek slaves, especially comedy-obsessed Tarentum, and the infamia status conferred on actors and theater people, even as the buildings gained ground. Nine is about the slow appropriation/naturalization of theater as a Roman thing, instead of as a foreign thing.
Chapter 9) is about Pausanias' travel guide to Athens and how it is only interested in the ruins of the past (500+ years ago at that point) not the present.
Chapter 10) is about Athenaeus' massive tome from 180-200CE which is the last gasp, for Johnson, of a living dialectic of the canon of classical work. After Athenaeus, the chain is broken and we only converse with Classical antiquity from across an epistemic divide (not what Johnson calls it). He notes that other people find A's Symposium weird and bloated, but Odai reads it for how it indexes this continuity with everything that existed, canon-wise.
Chapter 11) is about Roman practices of forgetting -- damnatio memoriae -- chiseling faces out of people who got, let's call it, cancelled, but leaving the bodies so you KNOW they're gone. Someone was purposefully erased from memory. Anyway, and this chapter traces the erasing of the classical world and pagan knowledge/culture as the Roman empire fell and Christianized leaders purposefully went about erasing the past. Theaters both did and didn't fall under this violence-- many buildings were pulled down and repurposed for other new uses, both post-empire and Christian uses, but then, Johnson says, mimes persisted in a wild way that DID preserve pagan memory, even as the Christian leaders tried their damnedest (if you will) to get people to give it up.
Oof okay, I really got to get to other work, but trying to do due diligence to work I read so I can reaccess more easily...
Some key terms used:
kataskaphe
Amnesty (original, political definition)
damnatio memoriae
Infamia
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews