There was a time, not so very long ago, when the Ion of Euripides was read and discussed with an unwavering solemnity. The serious approach commended itself for a number of reasons. Common decency and good taste made it difficult to talk lightly about rape and attempted murder. Whether the Apollo of the play was respected or despised, the judgement of him was seen as a ‘religious’ and therefore a straight-faced judgement. Those who wanted to use the play as a document of the times may have feared that a light-hearted play would be suspect as a source of historical record. Most potent of all, there was the long tradition of reverential handling of anything called ‘tragedy’. A play so called was expected to display the preoccupations of an Aeschylus or a Sophocles: the steady look at human pain, the moral search, the cosmic connection, the pursuit of value, the sober criticism of life. It was not always easy to find these things in the Ion, but they could be assumed in a ‘tragedy’ and therefore read into the play. In the two most widely-used translations of the play into English, Vellacott's in the Penguin series and Willetts' in the Chicago series, the translator has added stage-directions to suggest an unexpressed dissatisfaction in Ion which reverses the apparently warm and happy tenor of the text Both scholars have made a case for their ironic reading of the play's ending in subsequent critical writing.

Sophocles' Antigone has been a play of wide and enduring popular appeal. Ironically, however, it is also one of the most controversial of ancient Greek tragedies, and its many admirers have seldom reached agreement in their interpretations of the play. Consequently an enormous body of scholarship exists, presenting a bewildering array of opinions on just about every conceivable aspect of the play. And one major area of dispute has been the identification of the central character(s). For many modern readers and viewers, Antigone has emerged as the sentimental favourite because she has been perceived as a champion of human rights which transcend political obligations and as a martyr to individualism and personal integrity, attractive qualities in these days of social regimentation. Her relentless defiance of an authority she believes wrong, her unswerving defence of a tradition she believes right, and her willingness to die for her beliefs have gained her the sympathy of modern audiences. Knox has suggested that Antigone's refusal to compromise is an indication of her ‘heroic temper’, and he, as well as other critics, has argued that she is the ‘hero’ of the play.

It is a well known fact and problem for students of Plautus and Terence that the lack of corresponding Menandrian originals for the comedies known to have been adapted into Latin has forced us to operate with various conjectural theories about the amount and method of change introduced in their adapted plots by the Roman playwrights. We might have expected Donatus to have provided some help here, since he frequently cites the Greek lines that Terence altered in his own way, but Donatus proves remarkably disappointing when it comes to details of plot. There is, however, one passage in Menander's great admirer, Plutarch, which I suggest might be pressed somewhat into service, though cautiously, and it is my purpose here to discuss this passage and its potential utility.

Among the questions debated at banquets, Plutarch introduces one which, reviewing what drama and poetry best suit a dinner party, singles out Menander for special praise. His speaker, Diogenianus by name, expresses total admiration for Menander's style, for his excellent mixture of playful and serious, and his appropriate handling of the erotic material of his comedies. I am interested in the last point and the way Diogenianus elaborates upon it. For him, the important point is that, after a reading of Menander at a symposium, male banqueters are put in the right mood to go home to their own wives. I do not wish to pursue that chauvinistic topic, but rather to examine the scheme of Menandrian love plots which Diogenianus develops by way of explaining his thesis that Greek New Comedy possesses a special propriety for the average male banqueter.

The Romantics usually placed originality at a high premium, downplaying or disguising wherever possible their debts of theme and form to previous literature. But in other periods the ideal of imitation, of re-creating for the new poet's own generation the essence of a great drama from the past, has been more highly regarded; and where the Greek tragedians are the source on which the more modern playwright draws, the results are always of interest, whether they be a deliberate narrowing from the scope of the original to a precise contemporary purpose such as Anouilh's Antigone, or a complex reshaping like Racine's Phèdre, which places the values of Louis XIV's France in a stimulating dialogue with the tragic vision of the Greeks.

In this essay on the relationship between the Elektra of Richard Strauss and that of Sophokles, the idea of dialogue is central. The relationship of Hofmannsthal's Elektra to Sophokles' has been treated by only a handful of writers; only one of these (Hans-Joachim Newiger) exhibits a knowledge of Greek and a familiarity with the range of twentieth century Sophoklean scholarship; and the relationship with Sophokles discussed in these works is always that of Hofmannsthal's play, never that of Strauss's opera.

Despite the broad diversity in our century of views about tragedy, most critics show remarkable agreement about one point: that ‘conflict’ is a central defining characteristic of the form. Tragedy has repeatedly been discussed in terms of a struggle, which involves competing demands or forces that press in on man and shape his conduct. Although the structure of such a conflict has been variously formulated, in general it has been conceived in one of three ways: 1) as a psychological dilemma of inner decision-making, in which the hero must choose between opposing claims that he cannot mediate; 2) as a social collision between agents who hold to different but often equally valid ethical claims; 3) as a religious struggle implicating man in resistance against a force of divine necessity, such as fate, oracles, or the gods.

A wide host of influences could be marshalled to explain the development of popularity of these modern conceptions. Existentialism has had a hand in forming theories of tragedy that concentrate on crises of decision-making. Hegel's critical views of drama in the Vorlesungen ueber die Aesthetik have had an impact on the idea that tragic struggle emerges within the state and the potential competition between civic and familial obligations. And German Romantic critics, for example, Schiller and Schlegel, have made their mark on the notion that the tragic hero asserts his dignity against an external force of necessity threatening personal autonomy. But it has often been argued that these relatively modern influences are themselves derivative. According to many critics, theories of tragic conflict are ultimately indebted to Aristotle's Poetics. The Greek treatise is seen as the primary source for an idea that has by now become commonplace.