Il teatro davanti agli occhi della filosofia greca

The article deals with the way archaic and classical Greek philosophy looked at theatre. Taking up and analyzing first some of the main evidences of pre-Socratic philosophy concerning tragedy, and then the texts Plato and Aristotle devoted to tragic and comic drama, the article comes to the conclusion that, contrary to what many modern critics – influenced in particular by Nietzsche, who believed that the understanding of what was most genuine in Greek theatre had already been lost with the affirmation of Socratic rationality – may have thought, we must conversely speak of an understanding only progressive of the traits that distinguished tragic and comic drama. An understanding that began with Plato’s denunciation of the theatrokratia of his time, and reached its zenith with Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, in which melos and opsis assume an important, if not decisive, role.