For twenty-five centuries, theater has been staging characters who offer themselves to a very special emotional identification, because they are enhanced in the spectator by sharing the same experience, its times and rhythms, and even more so by the value of truth to which it aspires, calling us to penetrate to the heart of the deepest human instances. The question about the meaning of theater descends directly from the question about the meaning of life: whether there exists and how to configure a consistent and unified identity of man, and thus a freedom of man, driven to confront the simultaneously distressing and consoling concept of fatality; how to articulate the eternal dialectic of desires and qualms, which calls into question the difficult internalization of moral judgment. These issues are traced in the book through direct and passionate contact with many masterpieces, most of which are thickened at strategic moments in cultural history: fifth-century B.C. Athens, Seneca as the inescapable crossroads of modernity, Shakespeare's gigantic creativity, French classicism, the progressive fervor of the nineteenth century, the crisis and anti-Aristotelian revolt of the century we have just left behind.