Departing from Nietzsche's revolutionary reinterpretation of Greek civilization, the study analyzes the creative transformation of Greek tragedy, as the canonic model of Western theatre, by a wide range of European and American dramatists (Hofmannsthal, Jahnn, Hauptmann and Brecht; Cocteau, Gide, Giraudoux, Anouilh and Sartre; Jeffers, O'Neill, Eliot, among others). Detailed interpretations (juxtaposing modern versions, their Greek 'pre-texts' and 17/18th century variants) are intertwined with theoretical evaluations from an intertextual and cultural-historical perspective, to assess the possibility and meaning of tragedy within the realm of secular modernism.