Dramaturgical Memory and Virtual Theatre in the Scholia to Aristophanes’ Frogs

The close examination of a sample of scholia vetera to Aristophanes’ Frogs, concerning aspects of theatrical staging inherent to the prologue and the parodos of that comedy, reveals a general sensitivity of some ancient commentators to these issues but, at the same time, displays the complex and multilayer character of this testimony. The Alexandrian grammarians seem to have drawn on sources possibly rooted in the performative culture of the previous centuries, though with an interest which appears predominantly diorthotic. The same dramaturgical notions were refunctionalised by exegetes of the subsequent eras and the compiler(s) of the scholiastic corpus to construct a virtual theatre, that is a stage practice explained in words to an audience of readers and students of written texts.