This chapter discusses both premieres and post-premiere performances in Classical Athens and Attica by focusing on their venues and on the tragedies involved. The main dramatic festivals in Athens, the Great Dionysia and the Lenaea, offered post-premiere performances only rarely, but the Dionysia held in the demes, the Attic Dionysia, had a more flexible schedule allowing for both types of dramatic events. After discussing the ancient evidence for dramatic contests at the Attic Dionysia, I argue that these festivals had a key role in the early formation of the dramatic canon. As for the tragedies involved, I present three case-studies: Libation Bearers and Edonians by Aeschylus and Euripides’ Telephus. Dramatic texts suggest that these tragedies were mounted time and again already in Classical Attica, and these early performances laid the groundwork for the popularity that these tragedies enjoyed with later actors and audiences.

In the wake of German Romantic aesthetic thought, Greek tragedy was appropriated by idealist philosophy as a basis for theories of the Tragic. This resulted on the one hand in a positive ontology that led, by way of tragic reversal, to man’s absolute conscience and freedom, and on the other hand in a negative ontology in which human nature’s fundamental indeterminateness eludes language. In this perspective, Greek drama acts as a salutary reminder that human reality eludes Enlightenment reason. A historicized version of these idealist theories of the Tragic, greatly influenced by Christian theology around divine Incarnation and Redemption, finds expression in recent work by various scholars; by staging divine men who suffer and gods who are all too human, Attic tragedy as a genre is held to refer to a ‘minimal theology’ based on the effects of time and animated by a ‘theoretical need’ that is instrumental rather than final; it presents on stage a series of paradoxical individualities. By relying on a template, it enables singular dramatic situations to ‘make sense’.