The mountain has been, and continues to this day to be, a natural environment laden with religious, cultural and symbolic meanings. In Western culture it has indeed represented a place that is “other” with respect to the city and to civilised society in general, becoming in the collective imagination a place laden with history and myth, as the stories and legends bound up with the nearby Sibylline Mountains also attest: it is both the place of encounter with mysterious entities (one thinks – to remain within this geographical area – of the cave of the Sibyl or the lake of Pilate) and the place where man, having withdrawn from the frenzy of the world, seeks contact with God, as one may still experience today by visiting the Benedictine monastery of Norcia [1]. Even by digging down to the roots of Western culture one can observe how the mountain environment, though laden with a profound otherness with respect to the civilised world, holds important symbolic and practical meanings for the communities that interact with it. In this article I wish, in particular, to offer the reader the image, or rather the images, of the mountain that the Greek-classical world presents to us, dwelling in particular on the tragic work of the three great Greek playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

Reading, indeed, the texts of the Greek tragedies that have come down to us, one can observe how the mountain is often a key place for the events narrated (for example, Heracles, dying, arranges to be burned on Mount Oeta; in Euripides’ Bacchae, Pentheus is killed on Mount Cithaeron, the same mountain beside which the infant Oedipus is abandoned). Many Greek myths, in fact, are set in the mountains, of which all Greece is rich; the Greeks themselves identify Olympus as the seat of the gods and set the birth and childhood of many divinities in mountain places (one thinks, for example, of the childhood of Zeus spent on Mount Ida in Crete, or of the birth of Hermes on Cyllene). To analyse the relationship between the mountain and Greek tragedy presupposes first of all an understanding of what the mountain was in the eyes of the Greeks.

With the term ὄρος (transliterated oros, pl. ὄρη, ore) the Greeks designated both high mountains, such as Olympus or Mount Lycaeus (which reach a height of 2900 metres and 1400 metres above sea level respectively), and rises less than 200 metres above sea level. Strabo [2], for example, in his Geography calls the “mountain” Cynthus (113 m above sea level), near the island of Delos, an oros; similarly Pausanias [3] speaks (in the genitive) of the “τοῦ ὄρους τοῦ Κρονίου”, with reference to Mount Cronius, near Olympia, only 123 metres high. It is therefore clear that it is not possible to define what an oros is by considering altitude alone. Not all rises, in fact, are described by the sources as ore: the acropolis, though a fortified height, is never called a “mountain”. Richard Buxton, professor of Ancient Greek at the University of Bristol and author of an article concerning mountains in the Greek imagination (Buxton 1992), defines the oros as “a height outside inhabited and cultivated space – outside the polis, the astu, and the komai” (Buxton 1992, 2). The mountain, then, is seen by the Greeks as something external to society and to those spaces bound up with the activity of the polis. The ore, however, cannot be considered wild places, entirely detached from every kind of bond with society. Buxton, in his article, observes how in ancient Greece the mountain had peculiar roles, some of which (such as, for example, pastoralism) have survived down the centuries. The mountain, in fact, served for pasture, above all during the period of the summer heat; pastoralism, then, constituted the chief activity that drove men to spend long periods in the mountains. These, moreover, provided raw materials, such as wood, metals and stone. Hunting was practised on the plain as well, but Xenophon [4] observes that near the mountains it was possible to see and capture deer even by day. The oros, therefore, was also the place to which groups of people went to capture wild animals and then return to their own communities. It is known, moreover, that mountains, though having by nature a morphology that hinders the passage of people, were often used as routes for the movement of individuals and of armies. For part of the latter, then, the mountain could also constitute terrain suited to combat: light troops, in fact, unlike the hoplite phalanx, could conduct warlike actions even in a mountain environment. In this natural setting, outside city and plain, is placed also part of the military training of the young, who, being adolescents, were not yet full members of the community. There is knowledge, too, of ascents into the mountains for the gathering of fruits and plants, for the observation of the sky, and for purposes that we moderns would call “touristic”. The siting of sanctuaries of the gods in the mountain environment constitutes, then, an important “use” of the mountain on the part of the Greeks; in particular, in the monumental work of A.B. Cook concerning Zeus (Cook 1914-1940), reference is made to almost a hundred places of worship of the father of the gods situated on the ore. [5]

So far the principal roles that the mountain played in the reality of ancient Greece have been presented; in myth, however, the real world is reflected and, at times, transformed. The reality of the mountain too finds its reflection in myth: mythical shepherds (such as, for example, Euripides’ Cyclops) live on the mountains (in the case of the Cyclops, on Etna), just like real shepherds; like the latter they practise transhumance, like the two shepherds of Oedipus Rex, who “from spring to the rising of Arcturus” [6] were wont to be with their flocks on the mountains. The mountains, in myth as in reality, provide timber: of mountain pine was the Trojan horse made, and from Pelion came the timbers with which the ship Argo was built. [7] Mythical mountains, like real ones, are hunting territory (hunting on Cithaeron, Tiresias saw Athena) [8], a place of transit (in Euripides’ Rhesus a shepherd of Ida speaks of the march of Rhesus) [9] and the favoured place of certain divinities, first among them Zeus, god of rain and lightning, lord of Olympus.

Myths, then, reflect the real world, but they often perform another action as well: they refract the real world (and thus the mountain too), transforming it in a process definable as a selective exaggeration of its characteristics. Such a process is not, however, univocal; the mountain in Greek myths is not always the place of disorder, set against the ordered life of the city, as I shall try to show by analysing some passages of Sophocles.

So far, in presenting what the word oros might evoke in the mind of a Greek, the sphere of reality has been kept distinct from that of myth. Yet it is well to remember that “myths feed back into the perceptions of everyday life” (Buxton 1992, 10), and this interpenetration of myth and real life is particularly evident in Greek religious rites, on the occasion of some of which the citizenry went into the mountains in various ways and in honour of various divinities. One of these ritual occasions closely bound up with the mountain environment is the oreibasia, the run that the women of certain Greek cities, in the grip of Bacchic ecstasy, performed on the ore in honour of Dionysus. This rite constitutes an example of how the mountain is seen as a place of the overturning of normal values: the women, temporarily legitimated in their “madness”, wander free on the mountains, while not committing all those crimes (the killing of children, the beheading of poets et similia) that belong properly to myth [10].

I now wish to dwell on three Greek tragedies (two by Sophocles and one by Euripides), in which the mountain environment, playing an important role in the events narrated, is painted in three very different tonalities.

The Trachiniae

The tragedy, written by Sophocles and staged for the first time in the second half of the fifth century BC, is set in Thessaly, near the city of Trachis, where the family of Heracles is given hospitality. In this drama the element of the contrast between oros and polis appears. This contrast, present in other tragedies as well (in particular in the Oedipus Rex and the Bacchae), is here painted in particular tonalities, which mean that it cannot be reduced to the mere opposition “wild nature versus civilisation”. The city of Trachis, in fact, is “relatively insignificant in the drama” (Buxton 1992, 14), playing a lesser role than that which Thebes assumes in the Oedipus Rex and the Bacchae.

Moreover, Heracles’ own biography does not permit a clear-cut opposition between a civilised humanity dwelling in the cities and a nature that expresses its wildness in the mountain. Heracles, in fact, has long been in the wild and to it he will wish to return, when in the final part of the tragedy he asks his son Hyllus to burn him on Mount Oeta, which, as can be seen from the map, lies not far from the city.

Although Oeta comes to the foreground only in the final part of the tragedy, there are references to this mountain from line 200 onwards. When the messenger reports to Deianira that her husband will soon appear before her, she, turning to Zeus, exclaims (l.200):

ὦ Ζεῦ, τὸν Οἴτης ἄτομον ὃς λειμῶν’ ἔχεις,

(“O Zeus, you who possess the inviolate meadows of Oeta”) [11]

This line does not refer to “meadows” (Gr. λειμῶνα) in the strict sense, but to that whole territory sacred to Zeus of Mount Ida, groves (Gr. ἄλσος, sing.) included. The reason for this lies in a linguistic aspect, which Oddone Longo, in his commentary on the Trachiniae, explained thus: “When applied, as here, to a sacred place, λειμών has no restrictive value: it is a λειμών but at the same time an ἄλσος . Thus in Eur. I.A. 1463 we have Ἀρτέμιδος λειμών, but the same place is designated at l. 1544 as Ἀρτέμιδος ἄλσος λείμακάς τ’ ἀνθεσφόρους, and at l. 1548 as ἄλσος tout court. […] This justifies the recourse to an epithet such as ἄτομον, which, said of λειμών in its proper sense, would be catachrestic, since τέμνω is never used of meadows or grass, but of plants […] : of grass and flowers one says δρέπω, κείρω” (Longo 1968, 97).

These inviolate meadows consecrated to the divinity – it is a typical feature of sacred spaces that they be untouched [12] – constitute one of the aspects of connection between Mount Oeta and Zeus. Another aspect is that of the violence that the father of the gods can manifest on the summit of this mountain; Deianira, in fact, turning to Lichas, in a peremptory tone asks that the truth not be hidden from her “in the name of Zeus who hurls his thunderbolts on the wooded heights of Oeta” (ll.436-437)[13].

These two aspects of Zeus (having the uncontaminated mountain as his sacred place, and being the lord of thunderbolts), which bind the father of the gods to the mountain, recur also after the arrival of Heracles. He, in fact, before coming to know of the deceit of Nessus [14], asks that his sufferings come to an end, imploring Zeus to strike him with lightning, saying (ll.1086-1088):

ὦ Διὸς ἀκτίς, παῖσον.

ἔνσεισον, ὦναξ, ἐγκατάσκηψον βέλος,

πάτερ, κεραυνοῦ.

(“O fire of Zeus, strike me! Hurl, O lord, cast down, my father, the shaft of the thunderbolt.”)

The invocation of Zeus’ thunderbolt is not a rare thing in tragedy (Rodighiero 2004, 232) [15]; peculiar here is the use of ἀκτίς, which is normally the ray of the sun, to indicate the lightning-flash (Longo 1968).

Then, having come to know the truth, he turns to his son Hyllus, to arrange to be burned on Mount Oeta, saying (l.1191):

οἶσθ’ οὖν τὸν Οἴτης Ζηνὸς ὑψίστον πάγον;

(“do you know the highest peak of Oeta, sacred to Zeus?”)

In this last part of the tragedy, Heracles, “the wild Herakles” (Buxton 1992, 14), arranges to be burned on the “wild” Mount Oeta, where he will find peace, burning on a pyre “of deep-rooted oak and […] of sturdy wild olive” [16]. Mount Oeta, in this tragedy, transcends the mere opposition civilised polis versus wild oros, taking shape as a place characterised by ceremonial order: the fact that Hyllus has performed sacrifices several times on the summit of Oeta (l.1192: “I know it: I have been up there many times to perform sacrifices”), the specifications for the pyre, the procession with which the drama closes; all these elements give a different image of the mountain from, for example, that of Euripides’ Bacchae. Myth, in the case of the Trachiniae, refracts the reality of Mount Oeta, through the emphasising of the formality and rituality of Heracles’ death and by placing particular accent on the bond between the oros and Zeus. Zeus is not Dionysus; on the Mount Oeta of the Trachiniae everything unfolds according to an ordered rituality, quite different from what happens on the Cithaeron of the Bacchae. All this because [17] there is an order in the relationship between god and man, an order of which Zeus is the guardian (l.1278):

κοὐδὲν τούτων ὅ τι μὴ Ζεύς

(“Nothing is there in this that Zeus has not willed”.)

Oedipus Rex

The mountain constitutes, within the story of Oedipus, one of the two key places of his destiny, together with the crossroads, at which he killed his father Laius, without knowing his identity. The mountain in question is Cithaeron, in Greek Κιϑαιρών, a mountain range of south-eastern Greece, culminating at 1411 m above sea level and situated along the border between Attica and Boeotia. Upon it are located some episodes of Greek mythology: the myth of Pentheus and Dionysus, the song of Orpheus, the marriage of Zeus and Hera, the death of Actaeon, the exposure of Oedipus and the slaughter of the Niobids; festivals in honour of Dionysus and the Daedala festivals were celebrated there.

Except for the reference to Cithaeron present in Tiresias’ speech at l.421 (“what Cithaeron will not resound with your voice”), the oros comes to the foreground in this Sophoclean drama, staged for the first time probably in the decade 430-420 BC, only after the arrival of the messenger from Corinth. Oedipus, who defines himself as παῖδα τῆς Τύχης, “son of Fortune”, wishes to know his origin, and the Chorus is confident that, on the morrow, their king will celebrate Cithaeron as πατριώταν […] καὶ τροφὸν καὶ ματέρ. [18]

Cithaeron seems, then, a place of great fortune. But fortune can have a double face: once he has become aware of the truth, Oedipus asks to be taken away – ἀπάγετ’ ἐκτόπιον ὅτι τάχιστά με (l.1340; “Quickly, take me away”) – and, in despair, turns to the mountain itself, saying (ll.1391-1393):

ἰὼ Κιθαιρών, τί μ’ ἐδέχου; τί μ’ οὐ λαβὼν

ἔκτεινας εὐθύς, ὡς ἔδειξα μήποτε

ἐμαυτὸν ἀνθρώποισιν ἔνθεν ἦ γεγώς;

(“Ah, Cithaeron, why did you receive me? Why, having taken me, did you not kill me at once? So I would never have shown to all men from whom I was born”)

Myth, that of Oedipus too, reflects reality: the shepherds of the tragedy practise transhumance [19] just like those of reality; moreover, myth refracts reality, in a perspective of selective emphasis of certain elements: here, in fact, the role that the oros can have is underlined, as a place of the abandonment of newborns, to such a point that Oedipus, in the end, will call Cithaeron itself “a most worthy tomb” (ll.1451-1453):

ἀλλ’ ἔα με ναίειν ὄρεσιν, ἔνθα κλῄζεται

οὑμὸς Κιθαιρὼν οὗτος, ὃν μήτηρ τέ μοι

πατήρ τ’ ἐθέσθην ζῶντε κύριον τάφον

The Bacchae

If Greek theatre was born and developed “in the name of Dionysus” [20], with the Bacchae, Euripides’ last work, staged posthumously at Athens in 403 BC, we are faced with a drama in which it is the god of theatre himself who comes on stage from the prologue onwards: Euripides makes Dionysus the protagonist of his drama. The mountain, which in this drama remains extra-scenic, is a key place of the tragedy and invades, seduces and threatens to overturn the city; the authority of Dionysus is rooted in the oros, where not only the oreibasia takes place, the unbridled run of the women in honour of Bacchus, but also the killing of Pentheus by his mother Agave, in the grip of ecstasy. The maenads coming from Phrygia too are associated with the mountain; in the prologue, in fact, Dionysus turns to them saying: (ll. 55-57)

ἀλλ’, ὦ λιποῦσαι Τμῶλον, ἔρυμα Λυδίας, (55)

θίασος ἐμός, γυναῖκες ἃς ἐκ βαρβάρων

ἐκόμισα παρέδρους καὶ ξυνεμπόρους ἐμοί,

(“Come now, you who have left Tmolus, bulwark of Lydia, you my thiasos, women whom from barbarian peoples I have brought with me, companions of quiet and of journeys”). [21]

It is well to know that Tmolus is the ancient name of a mountain range, situated south of Sardis, in Lydia, and now called Bozdoğan.

In the first stasimon they sing of their passion for the Bacchic cults on the mountains, saying that “it is a sweet thing up on the mountains, when from the thiasoi in their running one falls to the ground, wearing the sacred fawnskin, hunting the blood of the slain goat, and the pleasure of eating raw flesh, with inward impulse, toward the mountains of Phrygia, of Lydia, and the leader is he, Bromius” (ll. 135-141).

Analysing now, with more attention, the relationship between Pentheus and the mountain, one can observe how he believes it to be the place where the women, under the pretext of the Bacchic cults, go to consummate sexual acts, “feigning Bacchic possession” (l.218). Instead Pentheus – he is the one who feigns to be something he is not, when he goes onto the mountain disguised as a maenad – will understand at his own cost that the possession of the Theban women, among them his mother Agave, is real. Cithaeron thus becomes the place where the slaughter of the king of Thebes is consummated. Agave, then, after returning triumphant to the city and after learning the frightful truth of her actions, says, in her last speech before the end of the drama: “I want to go somewhere where neither may Cithaeron see me, the unclean one, nor I Cithaeron with these eyes of mine, nor where the votive offering of the thyrsus stirs memories: let other women be the bacchants, let them attend to these things.”

The invasion of the city by the mountain brings with it irreversible consequences in the drama: Agave has truly killed her son; the Bacchic rites of this myth (unlike the wintry oreibasie, at the end of which the women returned to their looms) have truly destroyed the life of Pentheus and that of his mother Agave.

Conclusions

Basing myself also on the analysis presented above of some passages of Sophocles’ Trachiniae and Oedipus Rex and of Euripides’ Bacchae, I wish in this last part to present the various images that these and the other Greek tragedies offer us with reference to the mountain, proposing to condense – in a summarising perspective – the various roles that it plays in such works.

That myth – and thus Greek tragedy too – reflects reality also in relation to the representation of the mountain is a fact that, reading the tragedies, one can confirm. From the analysis of Oedipus Rex and of the Iphigenia in Aulis it emerges, in fact, how the mountain of myth is a favoured place for abandoning newborns (respectively Oedipus on Cithaeron and Paris on Ida) and for taking the flocks to pasture during the summer; in Greek reality too the shepherds performed transhumance. On the real mountains, moreover, people went hunting, lit signal fires, passed through, went to gather timber, and could meet with tragic accidents. All this is found reflected in the Greek tragedies: the allusion to hunting on the mountains in the Hippolytus (ll.1127-1130), the signal fires lit from mountain to mountain to carry the news of victory from Troy as far as Argos in the Agamemnon (ll.281-311), the passage of the troops of Rhesus across Mount Ida, narrated by a shepherd in the Rhesus (ll. 280-289), the allusion to the building of the ship Argo with timber coming from Pelion in the Medea (ll.1-6) and the order to go and gather timber on Helicon and Parnassus, given by Lycus in the Heracles (ll. 240-246) and the tragic death of many Persian soldiers in retreat, caused by the breaking of the ice of the river Strymon in the Persians (ll.492-507).

Myths, then, reflect reality; “but they also refract, transforming the world [and thus the mountain too, inasmuch as it is part of this “world”] by a process of selective emphasis and clarification and exaggeration” (Buxton 1992, 7). The image that the tragedies give us of the mountains presents, then, three aspects:

1. the mountains as an “outside” and wild place: on them, it is said in the Iphigenia in Aulis (1046-1047), live the Centaurs (biform figures, sharing in the nature of the horse and of man); by a mountain, we read in the Phoenician Women (ll.806-810), lived the Sphinx; on Cithaeron Pentheus is slaughtered with wild violence (as we saw in the passage cited above from the Bacchae);
2. the mountains as the first childhood dwelling of many gods and heroes: in the Iphigenia in Aulis (ll.1284-1289) reference is made to the abandonment of Paris on Mount Ida and to his childhood spent as a shepherd;
3. the mountains as a place of reversals: the human and the divine – usually two separate spheres – are joined on the mountains, which happens in the marriage between Peleus and Thetis, recalled in the Iphigenia in Aulis (ll.1036-1047); the order of the city in the Bacchae is overturned by the Dionysiac cults that take place on Cithaeron, and even love and maternal protection towards a child, a natural order, are overturned on that mountain, where Agave kills her son Pentheus.

The mountain, moreover, as a real place of which Greece is rich (see the map placed below) presents two aspects that were clear to the Greek man, spectator of the tragic performances:

• the ore are an uninhabited place, outside the polis;
• the ore are a place that, because of their natural morphology, lead man to wonder what lies beyond or above them, often making him resort to religious answers. In sum: the mountain as a place bound up with the gods. [22]

All this has contributed to the creation of a fourth aspect of the mythic imagination of the oros: the mountain as a place where the divinity, or the divinities, exercise their power in a special way; of all this three examples can be given.

The first example we find in the Trachiniae, in which from l. 200 onwards the bond between Mount Oeta and Zeus appears; this connection between the oros and the father of the gods will run through the whole of this tragedy to issue in the finale, in which Heracles, dying, will give his son instructions concerning the pyre that is to burn his body and the funeral procession. The image of this mountain that can be drawn from this tragedy is characterised by a rituality and an order which, far from the image of wild confusion that we can see in other tragedies [23], are traceable to the power of Zeus.

In the Philoctetes, instead, we find a mountain that, already in its name, recalls the figure of another divinity, Hermes, protector god of those who cross “external” spaces (Vernant, 1982). For this reason Philoctetes, as he prepares to depart and, after years of imprisonment, to leave the island of Lemnos, addresses his farewell to the “Ἑρμαῖον ὄρος”. Of this last we have a citation also in the Agamemnon, as one of the mountains on which was lit the signal fire that carried the news of the end of the Trojan war. This mountain of Hermes was, during Philoctetes’ isolation on Lemnos, only a hill from which the echo of his laments returned; but, at the end of the tragedy, the protagonist, just before going out into the spaces external to that island, addresses his farewell to that oros of which is cited – at the beginning of line 1459 – the adjective Ἑρμαῖον.

The third divinity that the tragedies analysed – in particular the Phoenician Women and, above all, the Bacchae – place in connection with the mountain is Dionysus. He is an ecumenical god, who draws the citizen out of his social role; he is the god who leads to ecstasy (ek-stasis: “standing outside”), attained with wine, with music (of wind instruments and drums) and with orgiastic dance; he is the god of disguise and of theatre. Euripides, now old, makes this divinity the protagonist of one of his dramas, the Bacchae, a great and terrible discourse on the senselessness of existence, in which the mountain, though always remaining extra-scenic, is a key place for the unfolding of events; it is the place where Dionysus fully exercises his power and where his cults are celebrated. Dionysus being a god very different from Zeus, the Cithaeron of the Bacchae too turns out to be an oros very different from the Oeta of the Trachiniae: the mountain of this Euripidean tragedy is not regulated by that ordered rituality which appears in the Sophoclean drama; the god who exercises his power here is Dionysus, not Zeus.

In conclusion, the reading of the works of Aeschylus, of Sophocles and of Euripides shows how the mountains were for the Greeks places external to society, places of confusion among the various dimensions (human, divine and animal) and bound up with violence, with death (for example, that of Heracles in the Trachiniae) and with the divinities (in particular with Zeus, father of the gods, and with Dionysus, god of theatre). The image of the mountains that the Greek world gives us is not that of a locus amoenus; to have a positive vision of the mountain, from the aesthetic point of view as well, one will have to wait for the modern age: only from the end of the seventeenth century (with the development of the applied sciences) did the mountain begin to exercise its fascination on scholars and men of letters; this made it possible to arrive, in the Romantic age, at the idea of the “sacredness of the summit”, considered the homeland of the soul.

Notes

[1] The presence of Benedictine monks at Norcia, interrupted for almost two centuries following the Napoleonic laws on ecclesiastical property, was resumed in 2000 by an ever more numerous group of young monks, faithful to the Rule of the patron saint of Europe. Following the devastating earthquake of 2016 the religious committed themselves to the construction of a new earthquake-resistant monastery outside the walls of the Umbrian town, without, moreover, interrupting their pastoral activity and their welcome of the numerous pilgrims. For more detailed information, see the monastery’s website: https://it.nursia.org.

[2] Strab. 10.5.2

[3] Paus. 5.21.2, 6.20.1

[4] X. Cyn. 9.11; 9.17; 10.22

[5] Analysing these data, Buxton, in the article already cited, speaks of a “structuralising opposition between Zeus, god of the summit of the oros, and Athene, goddes of the acropolis”, while nonetheless tempering this opposition, asserting both that Athena herself could at times be venerated on an ὄρος and that to Zeus temples and altars are dedicated on some acropoleis, as on the Athenian one

[6] Soph. O.T. 1133 (trans. G. Paduano)

[7] Eur. Tro. 534, Med. 3-4

[8] Call. Hymn 5.75

[9] Eur. Rh. 282ff.

[10] For a fuller treatment concerning these cultic events, see Dodds 1959, in particular the first appendix.

[11] The translation of this and of the other passages from Sophocles’ Trachiniae, present in this essay, is by Maria Pia Pattoni (BUR, Milan, 2011).

[12] Rodighiero, on this point, suggests comparing for example Homeric Hymn IV, 72 and Euripides, Hippolytus 73-77 (Rodighiero 2004, 164).

[13] This aspect, which connects Zeus to the mountain, is placed at a key point of the tragedy from a stylistic point of view; indeed, after the colloquial tone – “brawling” (Rodighiero 2004, 177) – of the dialogue between Lichas and the Messenger, with this invocation to Zeus there comes a heightening of the level of style, which will grow more refined in the rhesis that follows.

[14] The centaur Nessus, as he lay dying, killed by Heracles, had promised Deianira that the philtre made from his own blood would secure for her the love of Heracles. The philtre, in reality, is deadly; but by now it is too late when Deianira realises it: Heracles, in fact, is already dying and at first rejoices at the news of Deianira’s suicide, believing her guilty. When the hero hears the name of Nessus, he remembers an oracle which had foretold that only a dead man would kill him, and he accepts to die, arranging that his son Hyllus burn him on Mount Oeta.

[15] In his commentary ad loc. Rodighiero cites, as examples of invocation of Zeus’ thunderbolt, the following passages: Aeschylus, Prometheus 582; Euripides, Medea, 144-145, Andromache 847, Suppliants 831.

[16] Sophocles, Trachiniae, ll.1195-1197, [BUR, Milan 2011, Italian trans. by Maria Pia Pattoni].

[17] Here I follow the interpretation of Richard Buxton given in Buxton 1992, 14.

[18] The verses referred to are given here in full:

[19] Soph. O.T. 1133 ff.

[20] With this expression I consciously wish to hark back to the eponymous title of an important essay on Greek tragedy by the Genoese philologist Umberto Albini; see Albini 1999.

[21] The translation of the passages from Euripides’ Bacchae is by Vincenzo Di Benedetto (BUR, Milan, 2010).

[22] This element is proper to many civilisations and religions, from Judaism to animist cults.

[23] Cf. Bacchae

ll.1086-1095

εἴπερ ἐγὼ μάντις εἰ-

μι καὶ κατὰ γνώμαν ἴδρις,

οὐ τὸν Ὄλυμπον ἀπείρων,

ὦ Κιθαιρών, οὐκ ἔσῃ τὰν αὔριον

πανσέληνον μὴ οὐ σέ γε τὸν πατριώταν Οἰδίπου (1090)

καὶ τροφὸν καὶ ματέρ’ αὔξειν,

καὶ χορεύεσθαι πρὸς ἡ-

μῶν ὡς ἐπίηρα φέροντα

τοῖς ἐμοῖς τυράννοις.

(“If I am a good prophet and keen in mind, tomorrow at the full moon you shall not fail, by Olympus, to be celebrated, O Cithaeron, as fellow countryman and father of Oedipus, and songs and dances you shall have from us for the favours you rendered to my sovereign.”)

The translation of this and of the other passages from Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is by Franco Ferrari (BUR, Milan, 2012).

Bibliography

Albini, Umberto (1999), Nel nome di Dioniso. Il grande teatro classico rivisitato con occhio contemporaneo, Garzanti, Milano.

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The Greek texts cited in this article are taken from the following critical editions:

Trachiniae:

292. Lloyd-Jones and N.G. Wilson (1990), Sophoclis fabulae, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 240-292.

Oedipus Rex:

180. Lloyd-Jones and N.G. Wilson (1990), Sophoclis fabulae, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 120-180.

Bacchae:

1. Murray (1902), Euripidis fabulae, Clarendon Press, Oxford

Michele Coscia, trained in historical and philological-literary studies, produced, within a Trento-Dresden double-degree project, a significant thesis on a precious manuscript of the local library (SLUB. Mscr. Dresd. Ob. 6): ‘Legend of Saint Anthony the Abbot’, in the city where he obtained his second qualifying degree for Latin, Greek and Italian. He devotes himself in particular to studies on classical antiquity. He lives and works permanently in Dresden.