The story of Greek tragedy in the fifth century BC is an extraordinarily difficult one to tell. On the one side there are thirty-two well-known plays transmitted from antiquity through the medieval tradition, plays that have exerted a profound, even immeasurable, influence on Western culture, while on the other there are fragmentary scraps of evidence, often enough distorted by the preconceptions of later times, from which scholars try to reconstruct a whole history of an institution. How Dionysiac festivals were organised, what the earliest theatres, masks and costumes looked like, how the music sounded, what sort of performance-styles and dramatic conventions developed, how far the surviving plays are typical of the hundreds, or thousands, that must have been composed during the period, and what tragedy meant for the contemporary Athenian - and non-Athenian - audiences that watched it: these are the questions that need answers. What is lacking is systematic documentation, surviving from the fifth century itself, of this new and extremely successful artistic and civic phenomenon, and there is no prospect that anything of the kind will ever be recovered.

The best that modern research can hope for is new fragments of evidence - a vase-painting or an inscription, a papyrus text of part of a lost play or of a scholar's introduction (hypothesis) - which will fill some of the gaps in the story. The most striking example was the publication in 1952 of a small papyrus scrap of a hypothesis which proved that Aeschylus' Suppliant Women was not the earliest surviving Greek tragedy but belonged to the 460s, and therefore to a late stage in the poet's career. This play, with its chorus of the daughters of Danaus (the myth said there were fifty of them), had previously been taken as a sample of the tragedy of the 490s and was thought to have a chorus of fifty like the dithyramb; it was read as a 'primitive' piece more akin to choral lyric poetry than to the true dialectic of drama.

This is a chapter about change: the complex and largely irrecoverable process whereby Athenian tragedy transformed itself into an international art-form which became familiar and influential throughout the Greek-speaking world, was translated and imitated by Roman playwrights, mutated into various types of balletic and operatic performance, and as a select corpus of classical texts helped to shape the educational system, and inform the culture, of later antiquity. The small group of plays that survived into the Byzantine period and beyond have of course had a continuing history of reception, which in recent times has once more become a history of performance (see Chs. 10-12 below). But even for the history of tragedy in the ancient world, the range of space and time covered is too vast, the evidence too diverse and uneven, and the phenomenon itself too elusive for a comprehensive account of this momentous process to be written. As one element in what became an elaborate entertainment industry, tragedy cannot easily be studied in isolation from other dramatic media: in terms of performance and organisation it needs to be considered alongside comedy and (increasingly) alongside musical performance and pantomime. And since the language and iconography of theatre in general invaded the life of later antiquity in innumerable ways, its deeper cultural influence is to be found almost anywhere one cares to look.

Coleridge's famous question, 'If you take from Virgil his language and metre, what do you leave him?', is often taken to mean there is little but style to praise in Virgil, and Coleridge does speak elsewhere of Virgil's lack of 'deep feeling'. But the remark may have been prompted by Coleridge's reading a month before of Wordsworth's translation of Aeneid Book 1, and thus be a comment on how much is lost when Virgil is read only in translation. At the end of the twentieth century, the percentage of readers who encounter Virgil only in translation is much higher than in Coleridge's day (that specific comment comes from his Table Talk of 8 May 1824). Further, the tendency for those who do read Virgil in Latin to do so after only a few years of study of the language means that his Latin is not so much 'read' as translated or even 'metathesised', that is to say the Latin words are (at least mentally) rearranged and supplemented to fit some combination of the syntax of the reader's own language and his or her expectations of how a Latin prose sentence should read. At the same time, however, that fewer and fewer people on the planet can read Virgil's Latin either at all, or well, a tiny minority can arguably read the poet's language better than anyone has for several centuries.

How are the texts of ancient drama to be understood by modern interpreters - separated as we are by so great a distance of time and difference of culture? This problem has been treated in many ways in this century, as the study of ancient literature, like the study of other literatures, has undergone rapid institutional and intellectual changes. There are many paths and genealogies that could be traced through this history, and not only do many different methodological approaches overlap and interrelate in a variety of complex ways, but also there is great variety within any one broad heading (such as 'structuralism'). In this chapter I shall try to unravel some of the main threads that make up the texture of contemporary debate about critical methodology with regard to Greek tragedy. The methodology of each critic who works on Greek tragedy - myself included, for sure - is not the application of a ready-made theory so much as the product of (at least) teachers' and colleagues' influence, reading and study within classical scholarship and other fields, institutional pressures, laziness, acumen ... In attempting to trace some of the main lines of enquiry, it is inevitable that the siting of each scholar within the intellectual and social institutions of classical scholarship cannot be finely nuanced. What is more, the teleology of a history that ends with a necessarily partial view of the here and now must distort the picture of the critical developments to be traced. None the less, some lines on the map - however tentatively drawn - will help an appreciation of how contemporary understandings of Greek tragedy have developed.

By 300 BC or so Athenian tragedy had become the property of every Greek city, performed in its local theatre and reflected in its visual arts. This iconic prominence was sustained throughout the Graeco-Roman world for the next 600 years and more. That is why, for example, many of the wallpaintings discovered at Pompeii and Herculaneum show tragic subjects, and even more include the motif of the tragic mask. These provide their own interest, but this chapter will concentrate on the period from 500 to 300 BC, the era when Athens was still the active centre of drama. It will also concentrate mainly on painted pottery, if only because very little that is relevant survives of the wall-paintings, sculpture, metal-work or other artforms.

As is amply shown throughout this Companion, tragedy was a major prestigious event within the cultural and political life of classical Athens. Pottery-painting was, by comparison, a humble and domestic art-form. Detailed paintings in the red-figure techniques were, none the less, an especially Athenian achievement; and, like drama, this Attic product was disseminated to all corners of the Hellenic world. While many of the vessels were standard and mass-produced, many others display elaborate workmanship, and must have been objects which expected individual attention. A fair number, furthermore, represent mythological and heroic scenes; and they do so in a dignified and serious style - at first glance not unlike that of tragedy.

Servius (called Marius or Maurus Servius Honoratus in MSS from the ninth century onwards) was a grammarian of the fourth century AD, the author of a celebrated commentary on Virgil. This is generally held to be based on a commentary (now lost) by an earlier fourth-century AD commentator, Aelius Donatus (the teacher of St Jerome), and exists in two forms: the longer, known as Servius Auctus, Servius Danielis, DServius, or DS, was first published in 1600 by Pierre Daniel, and is thought to be a seventh- to eighth-century expansion of the shorter form on the basis of material from Donatus' commentary not used by Servius himself. We know little about Servius' life, but he appears as a young man in Macrobius' dialogue the Saturnalia (dramatic date 383-4, but probably composed later in the fifth century) as a respectful follower of the pagan leader Aurelius Symmachus (Sat. 1.2.15).

Servius' commentary comes at the end of a long period of Virgilian commentary, which had begun in the first century BC. The commentary form itself goes back to Hellenistic and earlier Greek scholarship, above all on Homer, and in a sense Servius' work bears the same relationship to Homeric commentary as the Aeneid does to the Iliad and Odyssey. The format is the familiar one of a lemma (one or more words of the text) followed by comments, in the manner of a modern variorum edition: sometimes scholars are named, but more commonly (especially in the shorter version) we have merely expressions like 'some say . . . others . ..' The text is typically seen as raising a 'problem' (quaestio), to which a 'solution' is offered: the methodology goes back to the beginnings of Homeric commentary.

In 1930 Europe celebrated the bimillennium of Virgil's birth. The celebrations fell in the middle of Mussolini's dictatorship (1922-43), strengthening the links that Mussolini sought to establish between his Italian regime and ancient Rome. The Aeneid, singing of the birth of a new city and a new empire, helped to validate Mussolini's imperialist policies, and in 1936 a new Italian empire was born. In the same year the Austrian writer Hermann Broch began to meditate upon Virgil's position in the modern world and by 1937 he had conceived his novel The Death of Virgil. This envoi will focus in particular on Broch's novel, since it probes and anticipates many of the anxieties attached to twentieth-century responses to Virgil.

The opposed political approaches to Virgil offered by Mussolini and the anti-Fascist Broch typify the variety of Virgilian studies proliferating at this time. A renaissance of interest in Virgil was due not solely to the bimillennium, but more suggestively to the sense of crisis pervading Europe in the entre-deux-guerres period. George Steiner has observed that after the First World War the European ear became more attuned to the Virgilian voice of exile than to the Homeric cry of triumph. Such a claim seems validated by the wealth of Virgilian biographies published in the 1920s and 1930s.