Profezia di Apollo, mantica di Dioniso : la voce divina ‘fuori campo’ in Andromaca, in Baccanti, in Edipo re e nel perduto Edipo di Eschilo

The paper focuses on the quality of the god’s voice, and more specifically the timbre of Apollo’s voice and that of Dionysus, as they resonated on stage of the 5th century theatre in Athens. The analysis does not concern the lines pronounced by divine characters as personae dramatis – ‘Apollo’ in Eumenides for instance, or ‘Dionysus’ in Bacchae or Frogs. In order to test the hypothesis that there is a difference between the two divine voices, it seemed more useful to subject to analysis the traces in the theatrical texts of the ‘true’ divine voice, not mediated by the dramaturgical role or by the character himself: the god’s voice that bursts onto the stage directly as an off-screen voice, or that resounds as a reenactment of the words that the deity himself has uttered. Within this framework, the tragedies taken into account are: Andromache by Euripides and the lost Oedipus by Aeschylus, for the voice of Apollo; Bacchae by Euripides and Oedipus Rex by Sophocles for the voice of Dionysus.