The End of an Era?

This short paper considers the problems involved in the writing of intellectual history, or – to be less grandiose – in the attempt to give an account of Attic tragedy in the first half of the fourth century b.c . Not surprisingly, it poses questions rather than offering answers. The period I have in mind, roughly that of the first couple of generations after the Peloponnesian War, is poorly represented by surviving evidence. No tragedy of the period, apart perhaps from Rhesus , has been preserved for us complete, and what we have, in quotations and papyrus fragments, is not easy to evaluate. This is in striking contrast with the fascinating range of material surviving from the last decade of the fifth century: Philoctetes , Oedipus at Colonus , Orestes , Iphigeneia at Aulis , Bacchae and perhaps also Ion and Phoenissae .