ABSTRACT
As a public art form, intended for the mass audience of all the citizens at the state-sponsored festivals in honor of Dionysus, Greek tragedy reflects on such issues as the nature of authority, justice, the worship of the gods; but it does so in a wide frame of symbolic discourse, made possible by myth, which connects these matters of ethical and political life with questions about the world order on the one hand and on the other hand with more personal matters like the relations between the sexes, tensions within the family, generational conflicts, the pull between public and private or between civic responsibility and individual desires or between family life and politics. It combines a public language of gnomic formulations and ritualized expressions of communal sentiment (generally by the chorus) with unusual (though not necessarily atypical) situations of personal emotions and intimate private life. Euripides goes beyond Aeschylus and Sophocles, however, in maximizing the distance, and the dissonance, between the public and private worlds and between the universality implicit in the myths and the individuality of his dramatic characters.
