ABSTRACT
The most common of these generalizations concerns the religious aspect of the plays. Critics of the older school, when they thought of performance at all, chose to consider it as a kind of ritual. The more recent critics disavow this, pointing to the lack of direct association between the plays and the festivals at which they were performed. Yet the view persists that the performance of tragedy and comedy in Athens at festivals in honour of a god is in itself proof that a fifth century BC audience responded to the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides as though they were attending, if not a twentieth-century church service, at least a medieval mass. It is not so much that the modern age falls into the Victorian trap of viewing Olympian morality through Christian spectacles, but rather that post-Nietzschean scepticism has found it hard to accept that those otherwise advanced and thoughtful dramatists really believed in their gods. If they did take them seriously, the argument proceeds, then Aeschylus and Sophocles must surely have accorded to the gods they introduced into their plays a supernatural authority, while the sceptical Euripides introduced gods onto his stage in order to prove that they did not exist at all.
