The schools of Alexandria continued to be held in highest esteem during Late Antiquity, and excavations have revealed settings constructed especially for the exchange of ideas and information (Derda et al. 2007). In an area of modern Alexandria known as Kom el-Dikka, near the center of the ancient city just off the Via Canopica, in a complex of public buildings including imperial baths and what may have been park-like open space, are three clusters of perhaps twenty lecture halls (figure 45.2). The largest of these, the Small Theatre (so-called in comparison to an even larger building in the eastern part of the city) was first built in the fourth century. In its sixth-century rebuilding the stage was removed, the seating area enlarged, niches framed by columns located behind the seating and, over all, a domed roof. Elaborate sculptural ornamentation of an earlier fifth-century renovation (Corinthian column capitals and bases) was reused in the sixth-century phase of the building.
Until well into the seventh century, these auditoria accommodated teaching and oratorical displays in architectural settings that would have been familiar to the educated elite of the governing class: long rectangular rooms were lined with risers of stepped seating built of stone; the benches continuing in either an angular fashion or a curving arc around one short side of the rectangle. This arrangement allowed the audience to enjoy clear views of each other and of the center of the room; this we know from Late Antique representations of teaching and discoursing scholars represented in similar u-shaped arrangements. This building-type shares features with traditional Graeco-Roman architecture accomodating assembly and public discourse including the theatre, of course, and the city council building, or bouleuterion. This form was also taken up in monumental church architecture in the stepped seating of the synthranon provided for officiating clerics in church apses (in a church, the terminating space of the sanctuary that is semicircular, recessed, and usually vaulted. Indeed, in several of the auditoria the short end wall is apsed). A special seat set in the center of the stepped seating in the semicircular end row of seats in one of the
Figure 45.2 Alexandria. Kom el-Dikka, mid-sixth century, axonometric reconstruction based on results of Polish excavations. Sheila Gibson and J. McKenzie, after McKenzie: 2007.
Auditoria is similar to the bishop’s throne at the center of a synthranon. Mingling with local elites in these auditoria were cosmopolitan intellectuals from places as distant from each other as Italy and Persia, who by the time of the sixth-century rebuilding of the Small Theatre had long been accustomed to competitive public disputation. Seen in this light, lecture halls might be considered arenas, enclosed and specialized, for the transmission of knowledge and oratorical displays.
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