Abstract–The Actors’ Repertoire, Fifth-Century Drama and Early Tragic Revivals


This contribution deals with the theatrical afterlife of Euripides’ Telephus, Aeschylus’Edonians and Libation Bearers. The sources for their ancient reception share two features: (i) Classical dramatists recall the visual aspects of these plays, thus suggesting familiarity with their performance, decades after they premiered; and (ii) these tragedies can be consistently identified in the theatre-related records from the fourth century onwards. This pattern is probably not a coincidence. It suggests that these plays were reperformed around the Mediterranean after the fifth century because they were already successfully restaged in late fifth-century Attica.