Le parole della gioia nel teatro e nel pensiero greco antico

Abstract

This contribution aims at presenting and illustrating one of the most enduring ideas in the ancient Greek tradition about poetry: the very close relationship between joy and poetry. We find it in many forms, enunciated, interpreted, reinterpreted, used and reused in all kinds of texts, both in poetry and in prose and in the various genres, from all periods in Greek history. Then it focuses in the ways in which this is presented, used and discussed in drama, which leads us to the relationship between joy and pain, a subject proper to tragedy, which belongs in tragedy indeed, where it appears in various forms. Although it will be also discussed in other contexts, particularly in the philosophical schools, its first theorization is in drama, and in the Bacchae it constitutes one of the main subjects of the play.