The paper is a case study of a cultural transfer between Germany and France. It questions the categories of acting, agent and action in Jean-Pierre Vernant’s and Bruno Snell’s ideas: how could the reflection of a German Greek scholar, which results from the encounter of meticulous philology and idealist philosophy, continue to impact fifty years later the thinking of an iconoclastic researcher, inspired by social sciences? Snell claims that tragedy shows and creates at the same time the process of autonomous human acting. Vernant on the other hand questions this theory as it had played a strong role on him. Snell, who is more involved with the categories of decision and will, projects this, according to Vernant, from modern notions into Greek texts. In his opinion, tragedy presents the human being in a complex web of autonomy and heteronomy. However, this critic throws a new light on Vernant’s thought itself, revealing its deep ambivalence.