Le feste sulla scena tragica: alcuni esempi

Abstract

Greek Tragedies were staged during festivals, in particular during the festival for Dionysus Eleutherus. The topic of tragedies in festival has been widely studied under different perspectives, starting from Aristoteles until recent years. What happens if festivals in tragedies are studied? What can we say about the ways and the meaning of evoking a festival – a specific festival - on the stage or, more frequently, in the orchestra? In this paper, after a brief sketch about the ways in which the topic of rituals and tragedy have been studied in the last decades, some specific examples are discussed: the Panathenaea in Euripides’ Children of Heracles, as well as the Eleusinian Mysteries in Euripides’ Ion and in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus.

Andrea Taddei is associate professor of Ancient Greek Language and Literature at the University of Pisa where he also teaches Anthropology of the Ancient World. He works on the relationships among Ancient Greek religion, Greek law and Greek Literature, on some aspects of History of Culture, and also on the ways of teaching classics in secondary schools. He has edited some previously unpublished texts by Louis Gernet (Diritto e civiltà in Grecia antica, Firenze 2000; Louis Gernet e le tecniche del diritto ateniese, Pisa 2001) and a commented translation of Lycurgus’Against Leocrates (Milano 2012). He has recently published Heortè. Azioni sacre sulla scena tragica euripidea (Pisa 2020) and edited Hierà kai Hosia. Antropologia storica e letteratura greca. Studi per Riccardo Di Donato (Pisa 2020). He is Scientific Secretary of Laboratorio di Antropologia del Mondo Antico (http://lama.fileli.unipi.it).

Keywords: Tragedy, Festivals, Greek Religion, Historical Anthropology of Ancient Greece