The Greek tragedians.

The modernity of Greek tragedy and its singular congruity with our ending millennium cannot but question us. The works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides exert a strange fascination on our contemporaries, even though they know almost nothing about the century of Pericles. Whether we are, consciously or not, the distant intellectual heirs of Greece is not enough to account for the phenomenon. How then can we understand this attraction and this interest, which at first glance seem aberrant? Does the cause lie in the texts whose form and content exert a hold beyond their original conditions of conception and enunciation? And what then is the specificity that gives them, on such a scale, this power? Is the relevance of this Greek theater the consequence of the characteristics of the era in which we live—often described as tragic—which finds the echo of its own disharmony in the insoluble conflicts represented on stage? What part should we give, conversely, to the feeling of exoticism aroused by these works from the depths of time, to the distant perspective they call for, to the distance that philologists, translators and directors are more than ever keen to highlight? This is only a sample of the rich, complex and fascinating questions that Greek tragedy continues to pose to us, but it would be enough, if necessary, to justify this issue of Europe, which offers an overview of research in this field while opening up some new avenues for the future.