‘Reading a poem’, writes Geoffrey Hartman, ‘is like walking on silence – on volcanic silence. We feel the historical ground; the buried life of words.’1 This sense of uncertain depth, uncertain soundings, is nowhere more evident than in Greek tragedy’s relation to the tradition of earlier writings. Although a relatively small proportion of the stories of the three major tragedians appear to have been drawn directly from the Homeric poems, and although the poetic language of tragedy does not reflect constant and close dependence on Homeric usage (as do some other genres),2 it is none the less impossible to understand Greek tragedy without a consideration of the way Homer and Hesiod resound and echo through these texts at a variety of levels and in a variety of important ways. I have already mentioned in Chapters 4 and 5 the complex dialectic between past and present that is enacted by the plays performed before the city but set in the heroic past,3 and in Chapter 1 I discussed the specific democratic rewriting of the Hesiodic injunction not to give crooked judgement in the Oresteia’s depiction of the establishment of the lawcourt. In this chapter, I intend to discuss in as much detail as space permits the relations of the texts of Greek tragedy to the tradition in and against which they are written and must be read. Aeschylus is said to have claimed his works were ‘slices from the banquets of Homer’4 (though whether this means left-overs or choice pieces is less than clear) and, ‘Sophocles might have taken for himself the Aeschylean claim.’5 Euripides, too, is impossible to understand without some sense of the heroic tradition and the place of Homer in more than a literary context. It is on the varying attitudes to and uses of the past, and on the literary tradition, particularly of Homer, in and against which the plays of the tragic corpus are formed, that this chapter will focus.