The Attic tragedians associate the female, high-pitched lament with the nightingale. But how does the tragedians’ use of the lamenting nightingale present itself as a metapoetic reference within the framework of their reading of the myth? How can we interpret the associative echoes, the programmatic shifts of motifs or figurations, the new contextualisations, the varying aesthetic connotations and the poetological values that the nightingale myth experiences in tragic poetry? By combining the above-mentioned aspects, with a view to 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 confirms through its analysis of the surviving dramas combined with the fragments that in tragic poetry the nightingale is inextricably interwoven with metapoetic functions.weiterlesen