The Afterlife of Greek Tragedy: Cultural Memory, Identity, and the Transformation of Tragic Myth Across Historical Periods

This article examines the ways in which ancient Greek tragedy has contributed to the formation, negotiation, and transformation of cultural memory and identity across different historical periods. Focusing on the continuing circulation and reinterpretation of tragic myths, it explores how narratives originating in classical antiquity acquire new meanings when transferred into changing social, political, and intellectual contexts. Particular attention is given to the tension between continuity and transformation: recurring mythical structures, characters, and ethical questions preserve recognisable connections with antiquity, while successive communities reshape inherited material in response to their own concerns. Bringing together classical studies, reception studies, and cultural-memory theory, the article approaches tragedy not simply as a corpus of ancient literary texts but as a dynamic historical phenomenon whose meanings are continually reconstructed through performance, translation, adaptation, and political appropriation. It develops case studies of Sophocles’ Antigone in occupied France and post-war Greece, the Aeschylean Oresteia and modern representations of violence and justice, Yannis Ritsos’ Philoctetes and the memory of exile, and George Seferis’ use of Aeschylean tragedy in his poetry on the Greek Civil War. These cases demonstrate that the afterlife of tragedy depends neither on unchanging transmission nor on complete reinvention. Its cultural vitality lies in the productive tension between recognisable inheritance and historical transformation.