ABSTRACT
In The Waning of the Middle Ages Johan Huizinga wrote that 'In an epoch of pre-eminently visual inspiration, like the fifteenth century, pictorial expression easily surpasses literary expression. Although representing only the visual forms of things, painting nevertheless expresses a powerful inner sense, which literature when it limits itself to describing externals wholly fails to do' 1• Pindar and Thucydides notwithstanding, much the same could be said of the Athens of Pericles and the rest of Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Though forms of government were so diverse that periods of peace were exceptional, there was a universality of reference in religious and artistic expression which the tragic theatre of Athens both typified and exploited. This being so, the difficulty of deciphering the details of the original staging of the tragedies becomes less of a problem.
