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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
In 1947, Carlo Anti published Teatri Greci Arcaici da Minosse a Pericle. In this book, he formulated what one reviewer termed ‘the dogma of the originally rectangular orchestra’. This directly contradicted over a century of research which had concluded that Greek performance areas began with a completely circular dancing place and gradually changed to an arrangement which used a partial circle backed by a scene house. Over a hundred part-circular orchestras, lastingly embalmed in stone, attest to the accuracy of at least part of this curvilinear hypothesis. All of these stone remains, however, are from the mid-fourth century or later; nothing remains of the wooden theatres in which the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes were first performed.
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