This volume contains seven studies published in France and else- where. We have collected them together because they all belong to a research project on which we have been collaborating over the

years and that owesits inspiration to the teaching of Louis Gemet. What exactly do we mean by Myth and Tragedy? Tragedies are - not, of course, myths. It can on the contrary be claimed that the tragic genre 'only emerges at the end of the sixth century, at the moment when the language of myth ceases to have a hold on the political realities of the city. The tragic universe lies between two
worlds, for at this date myth was seen as belonging both to a past age - but one still present in men's minds - and to the new values developed so rapidly by the city-state of Pisistratos, Cleisthenes, Themistocles, and Pericles. One of the original features of trag- edy, indeed the very mainspring of its action, is this dual relation- ship with myth. In the tragic conflict the hero, the king, and the
tyrant certainly still appear committed to the heroic and mythical. tradition, but the solution to the drama escapes them. It is never provided by the hero on his own; it always expresses the triumph of the collective values imposed by the new democratic city-state.
In these circumstances, what does the task of the analyst