Le feste sulla scena tragica: alcuni esempi

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.