The theme of the 2023 Dioniso conference is Eros in ancient drama. We are aware that we are proposing a theme that is no less difficult than fascinating, as is also shown by the fact that its discussion is hardly frequent in scholarship. Indeed, perhaps it is not too far-fetched to suspect that the interdict – or at least the mistrust – that amorous desire has aroused, due to its destabilising potential, in almost all eras, and in particular in those we are considering here, has been transmitted to scholars in a sort of homeopathy.
Of the pendulum between repressed and repression, Euripides’ Hippolytus provides an exemplary scenic representation: having fallen in love with her stepchild Hippolytus for a revenge that the goddess Aphrodite wants to take on him, not on her, Phaedra experiences her passion not as pure desire, but as a tension between the uncontrollable divine impulse and the all-too-human qualms of ethics: eros thus struggles mightily to prevail over the barriers of silence, but the very duration of resistance sanctions its centrality, which Racine’s rewriting will transmit to European culture.
In Greek tragedy, a sexophobic moralism is pervasive: the pains and misdeeds of love are always vigorously denounced, while its rare thaumaturgies on the positive side are somewhat neutralised.
Euripides’ Alcestis stages the death of a woman who dies in place of her husband Admetus, the recipient of a fable-like privilege; it is understood that Plato in the Symposium made her the very icon of eros. But in Euripides, Alcestis does not describe the motive of her action in the same way, as she seems to frame it in a bland and generic regime of family affectivity; when on the point of death she asks Admetus not to remarry, she declares that she does so in order not to give her children a stepmother.

But euphemisms and reticence are easily unmasked: in replying to her, Admetus does not even mention his children to proclaim instead the immortality of his personal relationship with her; and the greater freedom granted to male language allows him to use the term eros twice (both times establishing a revolutionary link with thanatos).
In the Supplices, also by Euripides, Evadne throws herself on the stake of her husband Capaneus, but since her sacrifice is ‘useless’, the exaltation is all subjective, clashing with the respectable moralism of her father Iphis.
When the theme of love returns in Seneca, it has one more adversary, the Stoic condemnation of passions, and on the other hand it gains prominence in the tragic action: for instance in his Phaedra, the protagonist kills herself not to slander her beloved and take revenge for his refusal, but to unite their fata, since it was impossible to unite their animos.
Moving on to the horizon of comedy, in Aristophanic drama, the erotic drive is not censored because no drive is censored: the comic message conveys a narcissistic desire for absolute, cosmic happiness, of which sex is an integral part, but not a prominent one: on the whole it plays a lesser role than, for example, the desire for food.
In Lysistrata, however, a reorganisation of the relationship between sexes is affirmed that gives the preponderant part to female desire, endowed with the same strength as male desire, but assisted by a far-sighted project and a lucid awareness of values: male desire is indeed, through the notorious sex strike, used as a political instrument, in a line of thought that affirms the incompatibility of love (and family affectivity) with the unreasonable universe of violence and war.