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‘Why 386 BC?’ Lost Empire, Old Tragedy and Reperformance in the Era of the Corinthian War

Abstract: 386 BC is considered to be one of the most important dates in the history of Greek theater: that year palaion drama was first introduced to the programme of the Great Dionysia. This paper argues that these performances amounted to state-mandated revivals of tragedy associated with the fifth-century Athenian empire. During the Corinthian War and its immediate aftermath a number of Athenians fostered ambitions of rebuilding an empire, and the palaion drama category actively promoted the notion that Athenian cultural efflorescence and cultural hegemony had gone hand in hand. Here it is also proposed that these tragic revivals marked a ‘strong’ form of reperformance, because they were meant in part to recall the plays’ debuts at earlier and more obviously ‘imperial’ instantiations of the Great Dionysia. Sources from this period, including Plato’s Menexenus and Aristophanes’ Wealth, also reveal a general fixation with the fifth century, and the reform of the festival programme should be viewed in the context of this wider preoccupation and longing for the imperial past.