Life in the cities of Asia Minor between the 260s and the 320s is rarely studied: there is a bibliographical gap for the period between High Empire and Late Antiquity. Different sources, of an epigraphic, literary, juridical, hagiographic or patristic nature, nevertheless allow for the analysis of the modes of community life on a local scale and of its new dynamics. The uses of the theater and the collective emotions that were displayed there thus provide a case study, allowing one to identify and clarify the historiographical and historical issues. Analysis reveals a rapid and profound evolution in the manner in which community life was presented in the theater at the turn of the 3rd and 4th centuries in the cities of Asia Minor.