Dionysus en Limnais

The Lenaea (or Lenaia) – festivals of Dionysios in Athens – and the places in which they were held are key to any attempt to understand the performance context and religious context of Athenian drama. In this paper Pickard suggests a location for the sacred precinct of Dionysios en Limnais in which many of the non-theatrical components of the Lenaea would be performed. He uses surviving textual evidence and contemporary excavation to suggest a location somewhere on or at the foot of the southwestern slope of Colonus Agoraeus. The essay provides within its argument a concise collection of the literary evidence for the location of this important precinct and offers supplementary information key to contextualizing the performance context of Athenian drama.