• Photos and Panorama Movies • Theatre Archive Home • Glossary of Terms The Hellenistic Theater at Morgantina
The theater of Morgantina was constructed toward the middle of the third century BCE, on the site of an earlier and more modest structure of the same function. The existing theater is part of an ambitious unitary project of the embellishment of the agorà. The koilon or cavea, constructed in roughly squared blocks of local limestone, has a maximum diameter of m 57.7. and is divided horizontally in two parts: below, the ima cavea composed of sixteen rows of seats, and above, the summa cavea, an earthen embankment which was never furnished with stone seats (except for four straight seats behind the fourth sector). The ima cavea is divided into six kerkides or wedge-shaped sections, by seven klimakes or rows of steps, two of which are placed next to the analemmata.The cavea was constructed on an extension of the hill slope, over which was deposited a large quantity of sand and earth. This material was contained within the heavy external walls of the analemmata, which were in turn strengthened by internal buttresses. These external retaining walls each consist of a western section at right angles to the axis of the theater, and another joining the first at an obtuse angle, inclined toward the hill-slope. Both are double-faced in construction, with pseudo-isodomic masonry facing outwards and an irregular surface on the inside, with rubble packing between.
The theater-restoration of 1963-67
The northern analemma had collapsed in antiquity and was set upright in 1963, when a secondary retaining wall was also added internally to help resist the outward pressure of the earthen fill behind the first wedge-shaped section of the cavea. In 1966 the first two sections of seating were restored, the second two the following year. In the first section the missing seats were restored using cement, as can still be seen today in the lower seats. This method was not judged to be entirely successful, and in the other sections local rubble limestone was used far the missing seat-blocks. The cavea was consolidated with two concentric underground walls of masonry, located beneath seat-rows V-VI and X-XI. The surviving seat-blocks were put back in place and cleaned, with replacement blocks added as described above. In spite of the visual uniformity of the restored sections of seats, it is easy to distinguish the original blocks from the replacements.
The new restoration
Carried out in 2003-2006, the restoration concerned sectors V and VI of the cavea, as well as the consolidation of the south analemma, which risked collapse. In the course of work several probes were carried out. In probe no. 7, in front of the analemma, the foundation was uncovered in order to reveal the courses below ground, in addition to those in elevation; and also to establish the extent of the outwards lean of the latter. The presence of a wider foundation suggested the existence of a euthynteria or foundation-cap. But from the diversity of the outwards tilt, from the differing dimension of the blocks, and from the different quality of limestone, another hypothesis suggested itself: originally wall C1-C3 existed here, then suffered a collapse and was replaced by wall C4-C9, with new stone, a different wall-structure, and in a slightly set-back position; and it was thus this wall that survives today, having suffered an outwards lean.
To determine the causes of this problem various laboratory studies were made to evaluate the mechanical structure of the materials. Two campaigns of geological analysis were carried out, identifying two principal horizons. A) The first concerned the nature of the fill-material placed within the south analemma, heterogeneous material with a granular size ranging from clay to gravel; and B) clay and sand mud representing one of the geological formations of the site itself, and also the sedimentary consequences of the foundations of the analemma. Analysis of the laboratory results showed that the south analemma, because of the pressure of the earth (consisting of more than 50% of fine grained material, in which the ground water exerted an outward pressure), had suffered a rotation, resulting in an outward distortion of the wall of up to cm 40. The originaI fill-material was certainly not appropriate here and for this reason needed to be entirely the replacement consisted of loose sand and gravel, which will (it is hoped) allow water to drain away and not generate any outwards pressure.
Consequently the analemma wall was partially dismantled, the original earthen fill behind it removed and replacement by new dry material; a drainage pipe was installed at the interior base of the wall, and the wall surface was covered with a reinforced and impermeable geo-membrane. In conjunction with this, geocomposite materials were laid down in order to improve the drainage of ground water. Geo-textile material was also placed in the dry material behind the wall at a vertical distance of m 0.6 -0.9. These steps are supposed to assure an appropriate exterior support far the stone seats in sectors V and VI of the cavea. There two kinds of procedure were undertaken: l) seats that were still in situ but had slipped forward were placed in their original positions, with stones added as fill; and 2) missing blocks were replaced by new construction utilizing smaller stones, as was done in the earlier restoration of the 1960’s.
The prof. Alberto Sposito designed and directed the restoration. This restoration was sponsored by the Regional Province of Enna, with financing provided by the European Fund for Regional Development (F.E.R.S.) to the amount of € 1,549,371.
Alberto Sposito*, Vanna. Lisa Ruggirello**
* Professore Ordinario, Facoltà di Architettura – Università di Palermo
** Assegnista di Ricerca, Dipartimento di Progetto e Costruzione Edilizia – Università di PalermoMorgantina is an archaeological site in east central Sicily, southern Italy. It is sixty kilometres from the coast of the Ionian Sea, in the province of Enna. The closest modern town is Aidone, two kilometres southwest of the site. The site consists of a two-kilometre long ridge running southwest-northeast, known as Serra Orlando, and a neighboring hill at the northeast called Cittadella. Morgantina was inhabited in several periods. The earliest major settlement was made at Cittadella and lasted from about 1000/900 to about 450 BCE. The other major settlement was located on Serra Orlando, and existed from about 450 BCE to about 50 CE. Morgantina has been the subject of archaeological investigation since the early 20th century.
Serra Orlando was identified as Morgantina by Kenan Erim following the discovery of a number of coins bearing the Latin word HISPANORUM. Erim used these coins and passages from Livy to argue that the city found at Serra Orlando was in fact the ancient city of Morgantina.[1]
The name appears in different forms among different authors: Morgantia, Murgantia and Morgantium in scholarship; in ancient sources Strabo used the name Μοργ?ντιον and Diodorus Siculus used Μοργαντ?νη. The name is variously written by Latin writers as Murgantia, Murgentia and Morgentia. The inhabitants were called Murgentini by Cicero and Pliny the Elder.
According to Strabo Morgantina was founded by a pre-Roman Italian group known as the Morgetes of Rhegium.[2] Dionysius of Halicarnassus wrote that the Morgetes were led by a king named Morges.[3] The earliest historical date associated with Morgantina is 459 BCE, when Ducetius, leader of the indigenous Sicel population of central Sicily, attacked the city and captured it.[4] Morgantina was probably still under Ducetius' control when he was defeated at Nomai by Syracuse in 449 BCE.[5]
No later mention of Morgantina is made until Thucydides lists it as part of the terms of a truce in the war of 427–424 BCE between Syracuse and the Dorian cities of Sicily on one side, and Kamarina, the Khalkidian cities of Sicily, the Sikels, and Athens on the other side.[6] Thucydides says that Syracuse agreed at the Congress of Gela to give Morgantina to Kamarina in return for payment of an indemnity. Kamarina was destroyed in 405 by the Carthaginians. Morgantina therefore must have been independent from at least this date, although it was soon recaptured by Dionysios of Syracuse in 396.[7] Syracuse retained (occasionally more nominal than actual) control of Morgantina until the Second Punic War. In 317, Morgantina received the tyrant Agathocles, then in exile, and offered him help in returning to Syracuse. He was elected praetor at Morgantina, and later dux.[8]
As part of the Syracusan kingdom of Hiero II, Morgantina fell under the hegemony of Rome when Hieron became a Roman vassal in 263. In 214, Morgantina switched its allegiance from Rome to Carthage.[9] Morgantina remained autonomous until 211, when it became the last Sicilian town to be captured by the Romans. It was given as payment by Rome to a group of Spanish mercenaries.[10] In 133, Morgantina was the place where Eunus, the leader of the slave rebellion known as the First Servile War, died.[11] In the Second Servile War, Morgantina was besieged and taken by slaves. The final mention of Morgantina comes again from Strabo, who notes that in his own time, the first century CE, the city had ceased to exist.[12]
A few literary sources describe Morgantina and its economy. Most famous of these are the references to the vitis murgentina, a strain of grape mentioned by Cato, Columella, and Pliny the Elder.[13] These grapes were prized for their wine — Pliny called it "the very best among all those that come from Sicily" — and had been transplanted from Sicily to mainland Italy by the 2nd century BCE. (Wikipedia contributors. (2019, March 15). Morgantina. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 15:08, May 17, 2019, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Morgantina&oldid=887923921)
HISTORY OF MORGANTINA
The ancient city of Morgantina is situated on the Serra Orlando ridge, near the modern town of Aidone in the central Sicilian province of Enna. Overlooking the broad plain of Catania, it sits astride the pass through the mountains to the Plain of Gela in the South.
Inhabited as early as the Bronze Age, Morgantina had an important Iron Age settlement of longhouses centered on an acropolis known as the Cittadella. In the second quarter of the sixth century B.C., buildings that are Greek in construction technique and decoration appear, and the cemeteries seen a major influx of imported Greek ceramics.
The early period of the city’s history ended in 459 B.C., when the Sikel leader Duketios captured Morgantina in a vain attempt to free central Sicily from Greek control. The Serra Orlando plateau became the site of the city. In 396 B.C. Morgantina was captured by Dionysios of Syracuse, and for the next two centuries it remained in the Syracusan sphere of influence. It was its greatest period of prosperity and building during the third century BC as an outpost of the Hellenistic kingdom of Syracuse under King Hieron II. Morgantina’s fate would change at the end of the third century B.C., when it took the wrong side in the Second Punic War, was sacked by the Roman army in 211 B.C. and given to Spanish mercenaries. This catastrophe was followed by a slow decline through the second and first centuries B.C., ending with the abandonment of the site in the first century A.D.
Excavations at Morgantina were carried out from 1955 to 1963 and 1966 to 1967 by the Princeton University Archaeological Expedition to Sicily under the joint directorship of Professors Erik Sjöqvist and Richard Stillwell of the department of Art and Archaeology.
Initially authorized by the Superintendency of Syracuse (1955-68), the American project subsequently worked with the Superintendencies of Agrigento (1968-1986) and Enna (1986-2010) and since 2010 has had an active collaboration with the new Parco Archeologico Regionale di Morgantina (ongoing).
From 1968 to 1972 the directorship of the project, now the Illinois-Princeton Morgantina Expedition, passed to Hugh Allen, who had recently received his PhD from the program at Princeton. The records of this period of work, i.e. the papers of Hubert L. Allen, are housed in the archives of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
William A. P. Childs, Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, who had served as a trenchmaster in 1966 was field director in 1978 and 1979.
In 1980, Malcolm Bell III, professor of art history at the University of Virginia, became director of the Expedition.
In 1990, Bell invited Carla Antonaccio, now Professor of Classical Studies at Duke University, to co-direct the excavations, taking responsibility for the Archaic site on the Cittadella.
From: “Morgantina: The American Excavation.” https://morgantina.org/morgantinashistory/. Accessed 2/15/2019
Morgantina Excavations: Excavations and published reports or the U.S. expedition
After the discovery in 1956 of a massive wall at the southwest (subsequently explored further in 1957, and then in 1959 of a similar wall to the north, the area between the two walls was fully excavaed in 1960, leading to the recognition that these two heavy walls are the analemmata or retaining waIls or a theater, and the ruins in between to the east are the remains of the scene building.
The first report on the theater dealt with the campaigns of 1960-61. Prof Erik Sjöqvist of Princeton University posed such fundamental questions as the date of the monument and its original dedication. Sjöqvist’s dating indicated the time of the Syracusan tyrant Agathokles (ca. 310 BC), but on the basis of numismatic evidence the date has reeently been lowered to the middle of the third century BC, during the era of Hieron II of Syracuse. As for the dedication, Sjöqvist published a surviving inscription on the outer face of the tenth row of seats in the third section of the cavea (counting from the north), reading “ARCHELAS SON OF EUKLEIDAS [DEDICATES THIS] TO DIONYSOS “. We know nothing else of the rich local citizen Archelas, who at is own expense constructed the cavea, or perhaps even the entire theater.
Description of the cavea
As preserved today the theater of Morgantina was constructed toward the middle of the third century BC, on the site of an earlier and more modest structure of the same function. The existing theater is part of an ambitious unitary project of the embellishment of the agorà. The koilon or cavea, constructed in roughly squared blocks of local limestone, has a maximum diameter of m 57.7. and is divided horizontally in two parts: below, the ima cavea composed of sixteen rows of seats, and above, the summa cavea, an earthen embankment which was never furnished with stone seats (except for four straight seats behind the fourth sector). The ima cavea is divided into six kerkides or wedge-shaped sections, by seven klimakes or rows of steps, two of which are placed next to the analemmata.
The cavea was constructed on an extension of the hill slope, over which was deposited a large quantity of sand and earth. This material was contained within the heavy external walls of the analemmata, which were in turn strengthened by internal buttresses. These external retaining walls each consist of a western section at right angles to the axis of the theater, and another joining the first at an obtuse angle, inclined toward the hill-slope. Both are double-faced in construction, with pseudo-isodomic masonry facing outwards and an irregular surface on the inside, with rubble packing between.
The theater-restoration of 1963-67
The northern analemma had collapsed in antiquity and was set upright in 1963, when a secondary retaining wall was also added internally to help resist the outward pressure of the earthen fill behind the first wedge-shaped section of the cavea. In 1966 the first two sections of seating were restored, the second two the following year. In the first section the missing seats were restored using cement, as can still be seen today in the lower seats. This method was not judged to be entirely successful, and in the other sections local rubble limestone was used far the missing seat-blocks. The cavea was consolidated with two concentric underground walls of masonry, located beneath seat-rows V-VI and X-XI. The surviving seat-blocks were put back in place and cleaned, with replacement blocks added as described above. In spite of the visual uniformity of the restored sections of seats, it is easy to distinguish the original blocks from the replacements.
The new restoration
Carried out in 2003-2006, the restoration concerned sectors V and VI of the cavea, as well as the consolidation of the south analemma, which risked collapse. In the course of work several probes were carried out. In probe no. 7, in front of the analemma, the foundation was uncovered in order to reveal the courses below ground, in addition to those in elevation; and also to establish the extent of the outwards lean of the latter. The presence of a wider foundation suggested the existence of a euthynteria or foundation-cap. But from the diversity of the outwards tilt, from the differing dimension of the blocks, and from the different quality of limestone, another hypothesis suggested itself: originally wall C1-C3 existed here, then suffered a collapse and was replaced by wall C4-C9, with new stone, a different wall-structure, and in a slightly set-back position; and it was thus this wall that survives today, having suffered an outwards lean.
To determine the causes of this problem various laboratory studies were made to evaluate the mechanical structure of the materials. Two campaigns of geological analysis were carried out, identifying two principal horizons. A) The first concerned the nature of the fill-material placed within the south analemma, heterogeneous material with a granular size ranging from clay to gravel; and B) clay and sand mud representing one of the geological formations of the site itself, and also the sedimentary consequences of the foundations of the analemma. Analysis of the laboratory results showed that the south analemma, because of the pressure of the earth (consisting of more than 50% of fine grained material, in which the ground water exerted an outward pressure), had suffered a rotation, resulting in an outward distortion of the wall of up to cm 40. The originaI fill-material was certainly not appropriate here and for this reason needed to be entirely the replacement consisted of loose sand and gravel, which will (it is hoped) allow water to drain away and not generate any outwards pressure.
Consequently the analemma wall was partially dismantled, the original earthen fill behind it removed and replacement by new dry material; a drainage pipe was installed at the interior base of the wall, and the wall surface was covered with a reinforced and impermeable geo-membrane. In conjunction with this, geocomposite materials were laid down in order to improve the drainage of ground water. Geo-textile material was also placed in the dry material behind the wall at a vertical distance of m 0.6 -0.9. These steps are supposed to assure an appropriate exterior support far the stone seats in sectors V and VI of the cavea. There two kinds of procedure were undertaken: l) seats that were still in situ but had slipped forward were placed in their original positions, with stones added as fill; and 2) missing blocks were replaced by new construction utilizing smaller stones, as was done in the earlier restoration of the 1960’s.
The prof. Alberto Sposito designed and directed the restoration. This restoration was sponsored by the Regional Province of Enna, with financing provided by the European Fund for Regional Development (F.E.R.S.) to the amount of € 1,549,371.
Alberto Sposito*, Vanna. Lisa Ruggirello**, “The Hellenistic Theatre at Morgantina.” <http://www.architetturadipietra.it/wp/?p=1946> , accessed 2/14/2019.
* Professore Ordinario, Facoltà di Architettura – Università di Palermo
** Assegnista di Ricerca, Dipartimento di Progetto e Costruzione Edilizia – Università di Palermo
Bibliography:
“American Journal of Archaeology” (AJA) 61 (1957) 152-153; 62 (1958) 162; 64 (1960) 129-130; 65 (1961) 279; 66 (1962) 137-138; 71 (1967) 245-246; 74 (1970) 359-366; 86 (1982) 584-585. KOKALOS 10-11 (1964-65) 579-588; 21 (1975) 226-230.
Karina Mitens, “Teatri greci e teatri ispirati all’architettura greca in Sicilia e nell’Italia meridionale, c. 350-50 a. C.,” in Analecta Romana Instituti Danici, suppl. XIII, 1987;
Sposito A. et Al., Morgantina e Solunto: analisi e problemi conservativi, Dipartimento DPCE, Palermo 2001;
Sposito Alberto et Al., Morgantina: Architettura e Città Ellenistiche, Alloro, Palermo, 1995;
Sposito Alberto, “Il Teatro ellenistico di Morgantina” in Dioniso n.2, Palumbo, Palermo 2003, pp. 318-349;
Ruggirello V.L., “Regole progettuali di alcuni edifici teatrali in Sicilia”, in Dioniso n.5, Palumbo, Palermo 2006, pp.284-296.
|
|
|
|
|
|
- Copyright © 2019 Thomas G. Hines, Department of Theatre, Whitman College. All Rights Reserved. The Ancient Theatre Archive is a non-profit, educational project, located at Whitman College, USA. Research and Publication Partially Funded Through Grants from Whitman College, The United States Institute for Theatre Technology, The Benson Foundation, and The National Endowment for the Humanities.
- © This website is copyright protected. Pages may be downloaded, printed, copied, and distributed as long as they remain unchanged and The Ancient Theatre Archive is given due credit.Last Update 5/20/2019.