Διονυσιάζουσαι

51

believes that in the Great Dionysia, as in Assembly and the courts, the city was
represented exclusively by men.62 If Athenian women were indeed excluded from
attending the theatre, as they were excluded from Assembly and other political
institutions, then we might imagine women attempting to invade or seize control
of the theatre, an area controlled by men. Drunken women, for example, in the
frame of the Dionysia, would form an attractive comic spectacle. In that case,
Timocles’ Dionysiazousai would have been modelled on Aristophanes’ Assembly
Women and Lysistrata, where women also invade a space from which they were
excluded in real life. Another title which seems to allude to a similar enterprise is
Aristophanes’ Women Claiming Tent-Sites, where women participating in a festival
attempt to seize tent-sites in order to attend a performance, which seems to be
theatrical; cf. Henderson 2007, 343.63 A less plausible possibility is that the term
‘Dionysiazousai’ is used to describe women of low social status, associated with
theatrical performance, i. e. musicians, women on stage or performing mute roles,
of the sort examined by Alan Hughes (2008, 1-27; cf. 2012, 201-13).
The preserved fragment, taken together with the title, seems to allude to trage-
dies currently being (re)performed at the Great Dionysia. An additional internal
indication might be όρα in v. 15, which, in the strict sense, means that the plays
mentioned in the fragment are performed on stage. Indeed, there is inscriptional
evidence that old tragedies were re-performed after 386 BC at the Dionysia. These
reproductions might sometimes include only extracts of the original plays; cf.
Pickard-Cambridge 1968, 99-101; Hanink 2014, 189-206. But it is also possible
that the speaker has contemporary performances of new tragedies in mind, since
it seems that the spectators especially liked to attend new tragedies; see below,
under “Interpretation”.
Concerning the dramatic context of the preserved fragment, it is highly possib-
le that after the account of the benefits which tragedy offers to spectators, a section
referring to the benefits of the other dramatic genres would follow (cf. v. 8 τούς
γάρ τραγωδούς πρώτον... σκοπεί). That was most probably comedy, the other
dramatic genre which was considered a rival of tragedy.64 It seems unlikely that the
traditional satyr drama would receive equal treatment in Timocles’ time, although
the genre reappeared in dramatic festivals in a modified form during that period.65
It might be indicative that in the famous comparison of the advantages enjoyed

62 Podlecki 1990, 27-43 has collected the ancient testimonia, which are also open to am-
bivalent interpretations; cf. Roselli 2011, 158-94.
63 Plato’s Women from the Festival might contain a religious parody (cf. Pirotta 2009,
76-7) and the same might be true of Philippides’ Women Celebrating the Adonia, but
the preserved fragments are not helpful for further speculation.
64 Cf. Sommerstein 2009,116-7, who notes that, with the exception of Ar. Th. 157-8 and
com. ad. fr. 694, satyr drama is not mentioned in Attic Comedy.
65 A representative sample of this form is Python’s Άγην; cf. Sutton 1980, 75-94; Cipolla
2003, 333-61; Pretagostini 2003; O’Sullivan-Collard 2013, 448-55; Shaw 2014.