Le théâtre d’Aphrodisias

The book is the full publication of the stage structures of the theatre in the Carian city of Aphrodisias. Dedicated by C. Julius Zoilos, freedman of Octavian, between 30 and 27 BC, the theatre’s original stage building was preserved unmodified until its collapse in the seventh century. Almost all of the elements of the stage façade were buried under a Byzantine fort and the modern village of Geyre, until the excavations of Prof. K. Erim in 1964-1971. No other theatre stage façade of the first century BC is preserved in the Mediterranean world. The book begins with an architectural analysis of the theatre’s main structures: a semicircular auditorium, divided into 11 cunei, an arena surrounded by a podium, a marble-paved stage floor resting on a pulpitum-wall and a rectangular stage building fronted in the west by a Doric portico. In 1988 and 1989 several sondages around the stage building and in the arena confirmed the chronology of the monument’s phases which J. M. Reynolds had established on the basis of epigraphic evidence. In the middle imperial period, the theatre was progressively transformed to accommodate gladiatorial games and wild beast hunts. The recording of all the architectural elements permitted a full restoration of the stage façade, its innovative design, and its original decoration. Contemporary with the treatise of Vitruvius, the Aphrodisias theatre allows a more precise evaluation of the relationship between Greek and Roman theatre designs.