Chapter 2 contextualises the mēchanē within the broader picture of rich visual theologies that existed both on the tragic stage and within the context of the Great Dionysia. The mēchanē should be interpreted alongside actors playing gods, statues depicting gods, and altars denoting sacred places. The plurality of visual theologies in the theatre and in the festival context parallels broader cultural norms in ancient Greece. This is important, on the one hand, to understand how the machine existed within broader religious and cultural expectations. On the other hand, putting the mēchanē and mechanical epiphany among other, contemporary strategies also helps to demonstrate the deus ex machina’s unique material, theatrical and theological characteristics.

This chapter discusses both premieres and post-premiere performances in Classical Athens and Attica by focusing on their venues and on the tragedies involved. The main dramatic festivals in Athens, the Great Dionysia and the Lenaea, offered post-premiere performances only rarely, but the Dionysia held in the demes, the Attic Dionysia, had a more flexible schedule allowing for both types of dramatic events. After discussing the ancient evidence for dramatic contests at the Attic Dionysia, I argue that these festivals had a key role in the early formation of the dramatic canon. As for the tragedies involved, I present three case-studies: Libation Bearers and Edonians by Aeschylus and Euripides’ Telephus. Dramatic texts suggest that these tragedies were mounted time and again already in Classical Attica, and these early performances laid the groundwork for the popularity that these tragedies enjoyed with later actors and audiences.

In the wake of German Romantic aesthetic thought, Greek tragedy was appropriated by idealist philosophy as a basis for theories of the Tragic. This resulted on the one hand in a positive ontology that led, by way of tragic reversal, to man’s absolute conscience and freedom, and on the other hand in a negative ontology in which human nature’s fundamental indeterminateness eludes language. In this perspective, Greek drama acts as a salutary reminder that human reality eludes Enlightenment reason. A historicized version of these idealist theories of the Tragic, greatly influenced by Christian theology around divine Incarnation and Redemption, finds expression in recent work by various scholars; by staging divine men who suffer and gods who are all too human, Attic tragedy as a genre is held to refer to a ‘minimal theology’ based on the effects of time and animated by a ‘theoretical need’ that is instrumental rather than final; it presents on stage a series of paradoxical individualities. By relying on a template, it enables singular dramatic situations to ‘make sense’.