Lecturing and have no scenical purposes. The so-called odeum of Agrippa in the Athenian agora, dedicated in about 15 BCE, was itself established not far from the gymnasium of Ptolemy—and was probably connected with it.
Cultic assembly halls, either semicircular (as on Delos) or inscribed (as at Dura-Europos in Syria), have also been called odea. Indeed, at Delos, religious processions or epiphanies of the goddess’s statue did certainly take place, but tlie monument has no scaena and was evidently not used for real sacred dramas, as has sometimes been thought. On the contrary, the auditorium at Dura, suggested by an imperial dedication and a graffito on one of the seats, was certainly the colony’s bouleuterion in tire tliird century CE and has nothing in common with the nearby hall of the Artemis Nanaia temple. Monuments at Gerasa (tlie festival theater at the Birketein), Sahr, and El-Hammeh (?) seem to have been dependencies of their respective sanctuaries but do not share architectural characteristics with well-identified odea. They represent a third group of buildings whose purposes and functions were distinct from the odea’s.
Real odea are certainly larger than a city’s boule, a gymnasium, or auditoria for religious spectacles, as they were intended for larger assemblies. The capacities of the buildings at Corinth, Lyon, and Vienna are calculated to have held some three thousand spectators and that of Herodes Atticus to have approached five thousand. There is, therefore, no comparison with simple auditoria and cultal theaters (such as on Delos), which seat only hundreds, and still less witli the largest bouleuteria (Aphrodisias, Ephesus), which may have seated fourteen hundred.
With an exterior diameter of about 63-76 m, tlie odea at Athens, Corinth, Lyon, and Vienna are clearly situated between die largest bouleuteria and medium-sized theaters; the monument at Carthage, with its 95-meter diameter, was still wider, and nearer to real theaters. The smallest (Catania, Nicopolis, Patras) have the same diameter (about 4348 m) as the largest uninscribed bouleuteria. In plan, many of the real odea “were simply theaters in miniature,” as John B. Ward-Perldns put it, which is the sense of the inscription of the theatroeides odeion at Qanawat (W. H. Wad-dington and P. LeBas, Voyage archeologiques en Grece etAsie Mineure: Insaiptions et Applications, 3 vols., Paris, 1870, 2341) and the expression of the architectural evolution from inscribed rectangular buildings to wider semicircular constructions that clearly resemble theaters. The only significant distinctions seem to have been tliat odea were covered, in order to facilitate a better acoustic environment for concerts and lectures; their stage was of a simple and more severe design.
Except in the great cities of the empire (Athens, Carthage, Corinth, Lyon, Rome, Smyrna), which were often visited by famous rhetors and in which the spectacles were more diversified than in small cities, odea existed where there were special festivals and games: at Argos, the monument’s orchestra is paved with a mosaic that bears an undisputable allusion to the Nemean games; at Nicopolis, it may well be related to the celebration of the Actiaca; at Carthage (built in 207 ce) it may be related to tlie Pytliian games; and in Rome itself, the odeum of Domitian was probably intended, just as its stadium was, for the Certamen Capitolinum, instituted in 86 CE.
Odea are often directly connected with tlieaters (Athens, Corinth, Catania, Lyon, and Vienna); both constructions use the same lie of the ground, with its pending particularly adapted for the setting of a cavea. However, at Akrai, So-luntum, and Amman, the bouleuterion also takes the same topographic advantages of this proximity to become, as Statius said for Naples {Silv. 3.5.91), tliis geminam ntolem nudi tectique theatri, an important element in the city’s landscape. The joining of the two monuments, interesting as it is for ancient town planning, is tlius no absolute criterion by itself for identifying the smaller one as an odeum.
[See also Public Buildings; Theaters.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baity, Jean Ch. Cvria Ordinis: Recherches d’architecture et d’urbanisme antiques sur les curies provinciales du rnonde romain. Academie Royale de Belgique, Memoires de la Classe des Beaux-Arts, Coll. in-4°, 2C ser., XV.2. Brussels, 1991. Devotes an entire chapter to bouleuteria (some of which had been called odea) witli an inscribed rectangular and semicircular plan (see pp. 429-600).
Bieber, Margarete. The History of the Greek and Roman Theater. 2d ed. Princeton, 1961. Classic study, providing a list of odea throughout the provinces of the Roman Empire (see pp. 174-177, 220-222). Broneer, Oscar T. The Odeum. Corinth, 10. Cambridge, Mass., 1932.
Excellent monograph on the building at Corintli.
Crcma, Luigi. L’architettura romana. Turin, 1959. One of tire best guides to Roman architecture, witli good coverage of odea (see pp. 92-93, 202-203, 425-428).
Ginouves, Rene. Le theatron d gradins droits et I’Odeon d’Argos. Btudes Peloponnesiennes, 6. Paris, 1972. Exemplary monograph on the odeum at Argos, with extended comparative material on other odea and roofed theaters in the Roman world.
Izenour, George C. Roofed Theaters of Classical Antiquity. New Haven, 1992. New and interesting approach to the problem by one of the leading specialists of modern assembly halls, unfortunately confusing odea, bouleuteria, and auditoria.
Meinel, Reudiger. Das Odeion: Untersuchungen an uberdachten antiken ¦ Theatergebduden. Frankfurt, 1979. Standard work on the subject, drawing special attention to the problem of construction, but uncritically mixing odea, bouleuteria, and auditoria.
Neppi Modona, Aldo. Gli edifici tealrali greci e romani. Florence, 1961. Brief, uncritical coverage of odea.
Jean Ch. Balty
World History
