[1] The existence of a theatre at Syracuse is attested by the end of the fifth century BC by the mime author, Sophron, who names the architect as Damokopos, called "Myrilla" because he made heavy use of perfume ("myrrha") at the inauguration.

It has been theorised by Polacco that in this period the theatre did not yet have the semicircular form that became canonical in the course of the third century, but might instead have been made up of straight banks of seating arranged in a trapezoid.

Plutarch recounts the escape of an angry bull during a citizen assembly in 355 BC and the arrival of Timoleon in a carriage in 336, while the people were meeting here, testifying to the importance of the building in public life.

The theatron had a diameter of 138.6 metres, one of the largest in the Greek world, and originally had 67 rows of seating, mostly cut into rock, and divided into nine sectors (cunei) by access stairs.

A passage dug under the orchestra, accessible by a staircase from the stage and ending in a small room probably belongs to Hieron II's time: it is hypothetically identified with the "Stairs of Charon," which allowed the actors sudden entrances and exits.

In the centre of the foundation wall was a grotto, the grotta del Ninfeo, excavated in the rock, bordered by niches probably designed to host statues and originally probably surrounded by architectural elements of the Doric order (of which only parts of a frieze survives).

In the orchestra, the old euripos was buried, replaced by a new canal, much tighter and closer to the stairs of the cavea, expanding its diameter from 16 m to 21.4 m. The decoration of the scene probably underwent renovations in the Flavian and/or Antonine periods.

Traces of adaptations to allow the theatre to host gladiatorial battles and spectacles with beasts by the elimination of the first steps of the cavea to create a raised wall protecting the spectators do not exist.

At the end of the eighteenth century, interest in the theatre revived and it was mentioned and depicted by the erudites of the period (Arezzo, Fazello, Mirabella, Bonanni) and by famous travellers (d'Orville, von Riedesel,[n 1] Jean-Claude Richard, Houel, Denon,[n 2] etc.).

In 1914, the Istituto Nazionale del Dramma Antico (INDA) began the annual performance of Greek drama in the ancient theatre (the first was the tragedy Agamemnon of Aeschylus, directed by Ettore Romagnoli).

[3] The ancient Greek tragedies are performed at sunset, in Italian (with translations by famous writers such as Salvatore Quasimodo), without sound systems because of the quality of the theatre's acoustics.