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The primacy of the Greeks in the canon of Western literature is neither an accident nor the result of a decision imposed by a higher authority; it is simply a reflection of the intrinsic worth of the material, its sheer originality and brilliance.Bernard Knox, The Oldest Dead White European MalesTo see the Acropolis is a dream one treasures without even dreaming to realize it. I don't know why this hill harbours the essence of artistic thought. I can appreciate the perfection of these temples and realize that nowhere else are they so extraordinary; and a long time ago I accepted the fact that this place should be like a repository of a sacred standard…Le Corbusier, Journey to the EastBy recalling the beginnings of history when Being unveiled itself in the thinking of the Greeks, it can be shown that the Greeks from the very beginning experienced the Being of beings as the presence of the present.Martin Heidegger, Existence and BeingGreece has played many roles in Europe's story. For a country that, unlike Rome, had very little geopolitical influence on Europe, these roles are neither, in their extent, expectable, nor, in their variety, consistent. Why Greece? As for territory, Egypt and Asia seem to have been more colonisable projects for the Greeks. The texts of Herodotus, Thucydides (Book VIII), Xenophon (ubiquitously) suggest a continuing engagement with Eastern cultures.

This paper has two principal, though interrelated, objectives: to survey issues concerning the status of the texts of Greek Tragedy, particularly with respect to specific distinctions between a play as text-based and as audience experienced, between the “eye” of the reader of a play text and the eye of the theatrical spectator; and to consider some implications of these distinctions for Euripidean drama, above all with respect to The Bacchae, since its procedures, albeit more developed or extravagant than elsewhere, may be construed as characteristic for this drama. Much of what I shall say has reference also to the other—Aeschylean, Sophoclean—texts that we have of Greek Tragedy. But it is with Euripides that the terms of the relationship of text and play are most explicit, and controversial, and, it seems to me, most dislocated. We have “read’ Euripides sometimes very wrongly because we have been reading Euripidean texts.