Der Prokne-Mythos als exemplum in der attischen Tragödie

The Attic tragedians associate the female lament articulated in a high-pitched voice with the nightingale. But how does the tragedians' use of the image of the lamenting nightingale present itself as a metapoetic reference within their reading of the myth? In what ways can we interpret the associative echoes such as programmatic shifts in motifs or figurations, new contextualizations, varying aesthetic connotations, or poetological valences that the nightingale myth experiences in the tragedians? By combining the above aspects, looking at their development from the older tragedies of Aeschylus to the more recent ones of Euripides, this dissertation not only offers a novel approach to the treatment of the myth in Greek tragedy, but also confirms in its study of the extant dramas, taking into account the fragments, that in the tragedians the nightingale is inextricably interwoven with metapoetic functions.