Il mito come filtro interpretativo della realtà: la guerra di Troia nei tragici greci

The expedition against Troy, the subject of the first written narrative of the West, with its very rich complex of heroic legends, was for antiquity the war par excellence. Especially for Attic tragedians, it represented a sort of screen, consecrated by the authority of myth, on which to project their own ideological vision of war, and in particular of the real wars in which the polis Athenian was involved. The aim of this essay is to analyze the tragedies dedicated to the Trojan war in the three major Attic tragedians (in particular Aeschlylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Ajax and Philoctetes, Euripides’ Troades) in order to bring to light the different ideological approaches underlying them.