tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/sophocles-19566/articlesSophocles – The Conversation2023-11-15T13:22:50Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2046062023-11-15T13:22:50Z2023-11-15T13:22:50ZFrom ancient Greece to Broadway, music has played a critical role in theater<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557575/original/file-20231104-17-el5el8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=747%2C286%2C4559%2C3246&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The remnants of a Greek theater in Sicily.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/panoramic-sights-of-the-beautiful-greek-theater-of-royalty-free-image/1345579639?phrase=++aulos+player+greek+theater&adppopup=true">Fausto Riolo/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Though anxiety about the fate of live theater performances still lingers, Broadway is celebrating its <a href="https://playbill.com/article/whats-currently-playing-on-broadway">third season</a> since <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/arts/broadway-reopening-pandemic-new-york-city-1235046751/">reopening after the COVID-19 pandemic</a>, with a lineup dominated once again <a href="https://www.broadwayworld.com/shows/broadway-musicals.php">by musicals</a>. </p>
<p>The new season includes long-running hits like “<a href="https://hamiltonmusical.com/new-york/">Hamilton</a>,” revivals of classics like “<a href="https://merrilyonbroadway.com/">Merrily We Roll Along</a>,” new musical adaptations of nonmusical works like “<a href="https://daysofwineandrosesbroadway.com/">Days of Wine and Roses</a>,” and even “<a href="https://www.theshed.org/program/301-here-we-are">Here We Are</a>,” the last musical by <a href="https://www.sondheimsociety.com/">Stephen Sondheim</a>. </p>
<p>Despite its centrality to today’s theater, musicals are often thought of as second class to what is considered legitimate theater, such as William Shakespeare’s “<a href="https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/">Hamlet</a>” or Arthur Miller’s “<a href="https://salesmanonbroadway.com/">Death of a Salesman</a>.” In both of those works, music plays little or no role. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="The names of different musicals are illuminated by neon signs." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557877/original/file-20231106-28-ia4o28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557877/original/file-20231106-28-ia4o28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557877/original/file-20231106-28-ia4o28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557877/original/file-20231106-28-ia4o28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557877/original/file-20231106-28-ia4o28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557877/original/file-20231106-28-ia4o28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557877/original/file-20231106-28-ia4o28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Broadway musical theater billboards in Times Square in New York City.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/broadway-theater-billboards-new-york-royalty-free-image/583765685?phrase=broadway+night&adppopup=true">Ozgur Donmaz/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But musicals have been the dominant form of theater across cultures and throughout most of history, including in ancient Greece, the birthplace of theater.</p>
<h2>Music, words and songs</h2>
<p><a href="https://brill.com/view/journals/grms/10/2/article-p306_4.xml">My research</a> focuses on the tragedies and comedies of ancient Greece and Rome. Though no scores from these original plays exist, a remarkable number of clues about the sound of ancient theater can be found in the surviving texts of the plays and other sources.</p>
<p>Evidence reveals that the plays of ancient Greece and Rome were decidedly musical affairs. </p>
<p>For example, in a conspicuous place during the performance stood an elaborately dressed player of the “aulos,” a loud and strident woodwind instrument consisting of two pipes played simultaneously. Both actors and choruses sang during their performances <a href="https://www.emousike.com/athenaeuspaean">to the accompaniment of this instrument</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="In this illustration, a man is using two long pipes as a musical instrument." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557852/original/file-20231106-25-unw1fz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557852/original/file-20231106-25-unw1fz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557852/original/file-20231106-25-unw1fz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557852/original/file-20231106-25-unw1fz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557852/original/file-20231106-25-unw1fz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557852/original/file-20231106-25-unw1fz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557852/original/file-20231106-25-unw1fz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An illustration of a man playing the ‘aulos,’ or double pipe, in ancient Greece.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Just as in modern musicals, the important components of what made the plays work were the actors’ use of words both spoken and sung.</p>
<h2>Oedipus’ woeful song</h2>
<p>Consider Sophocles’ “<a href="https://classics.mit.edu/Sophocles/oedipus.html">Oedipus the King</a>,” thought by many to be the quintessential Greek tragedy, and often taught and performed as a drama without music. The plot and message of the tragedy are profound and disturbing. </p>
<p>Though Oedipus rises to the heights of human success and becomes an admired ruler of the city of Thebes, he is unaware that he had murdered his father and married his mother. When he learns the truth, he blinds himself and begs to be driven from the city.</p>
<p>Music does much of the work in making this powerful play effective. </p>
<p>Clues in the text of “Oedipus the King” suggest that when it was first performed in about 430 B.C., just under a fifth of the verses were sung or chanted to the accompaniment of the aulos. </p>
<p>Most of the play’s passages accompanied by music are <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc97mwbbMds">sung by the chorus</a>. Far from mere interludes, the chorus’s songs expressed key themes in both their words and their music.</p>
<p>When the chorus first enters, for example, they sing stately prayers like the one in which they address the oracle of Apollo:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sweet voiced oracle, Zeus-sent, tell me, what is your message?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But later in the song, their rhythm becomes less self-assured when they turn from prayer to despair at the plague that afflicts their city:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>O dear, I’m bearing countless toils!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In conspicuous contrast to the chorus’s emotional songs, Oedipus does not sing through most of the play in his attempt to maintain control in the face of ever more threatening revelations. </p>
<p>The contrast becomes most pointed when the chorus, singing, defends Oedipus’ brother-in-law against a charge that he is plotting to gain the throne:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Don’t strike down in dishonor, on an unclear charge, a dear one who has sworn an oath.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Then Oedipus replies, speaking and not singing:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Know well that when you seek this you are seeking death or exile from this land for me.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Oedipus later yields to the chorus’s wish, but his refusal to participate in their musical performance reflects both his reluctance and his determination to remain in charge. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="A marble sculpture of the head of a bearded white man." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557542/original/file-20231103-22-37nlbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557542/original/file-20231103-22-37nlbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=784&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557542/original/file-20231103-22-37nlbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=784&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557542/original/file-20231103-22-37nlbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=784&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557542/original/file-20231103-22-37nlbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=985&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557542/original/file-20231103-22-37nlbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=985&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557542/original/file-20231103-22-37nlbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=985&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A marble bust of the playwright Sophocles.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/bust-of-sophocles-athenian-playwright-roman-sculpture-in-news-photo/159829159?adppopup=true">DeAgostini/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But when Oedipus has met disaster and enters from his palace after blinding himself, he sings in his distress, and he calls attention to the change in his performance mode by addressing his now uncontrolled voice:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Oh, Oh, how miserable I am. Where on earth am I going? Where does my voice fly out uncontrollably? Oh, my fortune, where have you leapt to?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In contrast to the earlier scenes, it is now the chorus who speaks, distancing themselves from their fallen king:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>To someplace dreadful, unbearable to listen to or to see.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Recent productions of Greek drama have followed the textual clues to music provided in the texts, with chorus and actors alternating unaccompanied spoken performance with sung verses, accompanied by the aulos or other instruments.</p>
<p>Notable are performances in ancient Greek at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM4sYJ7hdqg">Columbia/Barnard</a> and in English translation at the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MVyAZbRaK0">University of Vermont</a>. These performances indicate how much Greek theater has in common with modern musical theater on Broadway and around the world today.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204606/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Timothy J. Moore does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The use of music in theater goes back to ancient Greece, and its popularity has grown to the modern-day productions of ‘Hamilton.’Timothy J. Moore, John and Penelope Biggs Distinguished Professor of Classics, Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. LouisLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2047332023-05-14T11:18:54Z2023-05-14T11:18:54ZWhy we’ll keep finding meaning in the ‘Oedipus Rex’ plague drama far beyond COVID-19<p>Now that the World Health Organization has said COVID-19 <a href="https://www.who.int/news/item/05-05-2023-statement-on-the-fifteenth-meeting-of-the-international-health-regulations-(2005)-emergency-committee-regarding-the-coronavirus-disease-(covid-19)-pandemic">“no longer constitutes a public health emergency of international concern</a>” but is instead “an ongoing health issue,” how will theatre makers and audiences read plague- and pandemic-themed plays?</p>
<p>During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the character Oedipus and the ancient Greek drama based on his tragedy was suddenly everywhere. A figure from ancient Greek myth who was fated to kill his father and marry his mother, Oedipus has been most famous over the last century for the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/science/Oedipus-complex">controversial “complex” that Sigmund Freud</a> named after him.</p>
<p>In the pandemic, out of the shadows of Freud, the world remembered Sophocles’ <em><a href="https://chs.harvard.edu/primary-source/sophocles-oedipus-tyrannus-sb/">Oedipus Tyrannus</a></em> (<em><a href="https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Greek/Oedipus.php">Oedipus Rex</a> /Oedipus the King)</em> was not just a psycho-sexual drama, but a play about a city-devastating plague, <a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/292475">most likely first produced in 429 BCE</a> after <a href="https://www.livius.org/sources/content/thucydides-historian/the-plague/">an unknown disease swept through Athens</a>.</p>
<p>My new edited volume follows global trends in how theatre artists receive and interpret Greek tragedy in contextualizing <a href="https://www.mqup.ca/scapegoat-carnivale---s-tragic-trilogy-products-9780228017646.php">a Montréal-based theatre company’s new translations of Greek tragedy</a>.</p>
<h2>Oedipus abounded</h2>
<p>In the first year of the pandemic, <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-goes-around-comes-around-or-what-greek-mythology-says-about-donald-trump-147428">public commentary</a> compared <a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-03-26/coronavirus-trump-oedipus-rex-plague">former U.S. president Donald Trump to Oedipus</a>.</p>
<p>In Los Angeles, <a href="https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/chicanx">a Chicanx</a> version of <em>Oedipus Rex,</em> <a href="https://www.centertheatregroup.org/tickets/digitalstage/videos/oedipus-el-rey/"><em>Oedipus El Rey</em>, written by Luis Alfaro and directed by Chay Yew, was streaming live from the Center Theatre Group</a> in partnership with the Getty Museum. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1392074362669371394"}"></div></p>
<p>The excellent Theater of War company, under the direction <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtzExQr3cLE">of Brooklyn, N.Y.-based</a> <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/217973/the-theater-of-war-by-bryan-doerries/#">Bryan Doerries</a>, produced a star-studded zoom version in May 2020, <a href="https://theaterofwar.com/projects/the-oedipus-project"><em>The Oedipus Project</em></a>, dedicated to first responders. </p>
<h2>Theban plague parallels</h2>
<p><a href="https://vietnamnews.vn/life-style/939280/vietnamese-theatre-artists-to-attend-online-asian-festival.html">Vietnamese audiences saw what’s believed to be the first-ever Vietnamese production</a> of <em>King Oedipus</em> through an online festival in May 2021. The play, directed by Bùi Nhu Lai, was performed and streamed at the 6th Asian Theatre Schools Festival held in Beijing, by the Hà Nội Academy of Theatre and Cinema. </p>
<p>And as pandemic restrictions began to ease, Oedipus came back to stages. The <a href="https://aefestival.gr/festival_events/oidipoys/?lang=en">Athens/Epidaurus festival reopened in its ancient venues with a version of the play</a> first produced at <a href="https://www.schaubuehne.de/en/ensemblelists/ensemble.html">Berlin’s famous Schaubühne theatre</a>, <em>ödipus</em>, written by Maja Zade and directed by Thomas Ostermeier.</p>
<p>While some revelled in <a href="https://eidolon.pub/i-am-the-virus-2a23b57e8e75">the fresh take on Oedipus these performances brought</a>, at least one critic wondered if maybe we shouldn’t search for a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/theater/oedipus-the-king-plague-covid.html">direct parallel between the Theban plague killing Oedipus’s subjects and COVID-19</a>. </p>
<h2>Multiple crises</h2>
<p>As if in response, Doerries’ <em>The Oedipus Project</em> named its themes as the pandemic <em>and</em> the climate crisis. </p>
<p>When asked by the <em>Guardian’s</em> theatre critic “What play do you think most speaks to this time we are living through?”, Ostermeier answered <em>Oedipus</em>, saying: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Oedipus himself is the origin of the plague, because he killed his own father. That is not only true of the pandemic; we are <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/mar/14/how-has-global-theatre-fared-during-pandemic-schaubuhne-internationaal-amsterdam-public-theater-new-york-odeon-paris-helsingborg">also the origin of an even bigger drama, the drama of our time: global warming</a>.”</p>
</blockquote>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vAMlYJziDhE?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Premiere of ‘The Oedipus Project’ featuring Oscar Isaac, Frances McDormand, Jeffrey Wright, John Turturro.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Montréal productions</h2>
<p>My edited volume <a href="https://www.mqup.ca/scapegoat-carnivale---s-tragic-trilogy-products-9780228017646.php"><em>Scapegoat Carnivale’s Tragic Trilogy</em></a> documents how between 2010 and 2017, the Montréal theatre company Scapegoat Carnivale produced Euripides’ <em>Medea</em> and <em>Bacchae</em>, and Sophocles’ <em>Oedipus Tyrannus</em>. </p>
<p>Through contributors’ essays that discuss the plays’ ancient themes and their current reception histories, this volume tries to tease out tensions: When we ask “why now” of ancient works, we can always come up with an answer, but we don’t always need to. </p>
<p>The Greek tragedies might have been written to work through fifth-century Athens’ own cultural anxieties, but even in Sophocles’ day, they did so through a mythical past, one as removed from Sophocles as he is from anyone today.</p>
<h2>Plague concerns folded into myth</h2>
<p>If Sophocles wrote <em>Oedipus Tyrannus</em> in part as a response to the Athenian plague, he folded that concern into a myth that accommodates today’s <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Reclaiming-Greek-Drama-for-Diverse-Audiences-An-Anthology-of-Adaptations/Powers/p/book/9781138601024">diverse</a> and changing <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/greek-tragedy-in-a-global-crisis-9781350348141/">global</a> anxieties just as well as his own. </p>
<p>As Aristotle says, <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:abo:tlg,0086,034:1451b">poetry, unlike history, is not concerned with particular facts, but instead with general truths</a>.</p>
<p>And Sophocles is a poet, a playwright composing in verse. As I produced Scapegoat’s literal translation of <em>Oedipus Tyrannus</em> for <a href="https://playwrightsguild.ca/paupress/profile/3521/view/">playwright Joseph Shragge</a> to adapt, I often found myself on the edge of my seat as I worked through the play line by line. </p>
<p><em>Oedipus Rex</em> is a perfect mystery-box play, balancing horror and humour, with each scene bringing new revelations, ratcheting up tensions around who Oedipus actually is. Tension builds about who he is in relation to Jocasta, until the terrible denouement reveals her to Oedipus as both his mother and wife, and the play sees her dead and him blinded, both by self-inflicted wounds.</p>
<h2>‘The city … unable to lift her head’</h2>
<p>In <a href="https://www.scapegoatcarnivale.com/oedipus-part-one-assembly">Scapegoat’s contemporary-set staged reading</a>, Shragge’s clean style perfectly captured Sophocles’ irony, humour and pathos. Scapegoat’s minimalist staging favoured people over props, with a massive chorus composed of three local choirs. </p>
<p>The result was over 65 people on stage, a wall of people on risers all around the actors, enveloping them in soaring <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1441190212661229">choral compositions</a> by Brian Lipson. It was Oedipus’s (<a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0419962/">Marcel Jeannin</a>) tragedy, but it was impossible to forget the people whom it affected, as the prologue’s priest (<a href="https://tarragontheatre.com/about/our-team/">Mike Payette</a>) told us:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The city, as you can see, tosses, unable to lift her head from the depths, <a href="https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0192%3Acard%3D14">such are the waves that waste the bud before it blooms, the ox herd in the field, and the unborn child in the womb.</a>” </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Long-suffering Thebans</h2>
<p>To see Oedipus and all his long-suffering Thebans embodied onstage (for me, for the first time), mattered, despite <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0056%3Asection%3D1453b">Aristotle’s claim that the play is just as good without actually seeing this</a>.</p>
<p>Critics agreed, with <em>Montreal Gazette</em> theatre critic Jim Burke “<a href="https://www.scapegoatcarnivale.com/oedipus-part-one-assembly">reminded of what a devastatingly effective play Oedipus is</a>,” while others cited Shragge’s “beautiful adaptation” making the show “a must-see” and “the event of the theatrical season.” </p>
<p>For three shows, I went and sat in a crowded theatre and watched Oedipus’s tragedy unfold, and I laughed and I gasped and I wept. I still get shivers thinking of the choral solo by <a href="http://gitanjali.life/">Gitanjali Jain</a>, describing Thebes’ unending deaths:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“<a href="https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0192%3Acard%3D169">men fly away like birds / faster than unquenchable flame / one by one / to the god of the evening shore</a>.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>COVID-19 is no longer a global emergency, but in Sophocles’ Thebes, all around Oedipus, the plague rages as ever. And Scapegoat’s new translation, like countless others, waits for readers to find new delights in its words, audiences to find new terrors in its enactment and creators to make new meanings of its myth.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204733/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lynn Kozak has worked for and consulted with Scapegoat Carnivale Theatre. They have received funding from SSHRC and, through Scapegoat Carnivale, the Canada Council for the Arts. </span></em></p>During COVID-19, the world remembered Oedipus was not just a psycho-sexual drama. Such is the richness of a play enfolded in rich layers of myth.Lynn Kozak, Associate professor, History and Classical Studies, McGill UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1864232022-07-08T12:18:04Z2022-07-08T12:18:04ZCassidy Hutchinson and Greek tragedy show that courage is rare and cowardice more common<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473062/original/file-20220707-10739-uhbod2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C6%2C4326%2C2873&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Cassidy Hutchinson is sworn in to testify before the House January 6th committee, on June 28, 2022.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/cassidy-hutchinson-a-top-former-aide-to-trump-white-house-news-photo/1241591015?adppopup=true">Andrew Harnik-Pool/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Ever since former White House aide <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/28/us/cassidy-hutchinson-trump.html">Cassidy Hutchinson’s remarkable testimony</a> in the recent January 6 committee hearing, I’ve been thinking – as I’m sure many people have – about courage. Seeking analogies in literature, I think of two women from Greek mythology: Antigone and Iphigenia.</p>
<p>Courage often engenders more of itself: Being brave may make you even braver. In the cases of these two heroines, courage doesn’t save any lives. </p>
<p>But these women’s behavior does make us ask what people are capable of, and whether we too might be able to summon such courage. The behavior of the powerful men around Antigone and Iphigenia shows how only a rare few are able to summon courage, and dramatizes how, instead, the drive to maintain power takes the form of cowardice and willful blindness.</p>
<h2>Courage vs. silence</h2>
<p>In Sophocles’ tragedy <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Sophocles/antigone.html">Antigone</a>, the heroine, daughter of the late King Oedipus, ritually buries her brother Polynices by sprinkling dust on his exposed corpse. </p>
<p>Her act defies King Creon’s recent edict that Polynices be left to rot, unburied. Polynices and his brother Eteocles fought for control of Thebes, and the brothers killed each other. To Creon, Polynices was a traitor who attacked his native Thebes, while Eteocles, who died defending the city, merits a hero’s funeral.</p>
<p>Antigone’s sister Ismene, fearful, tries to dissuade Antigone from this act of rebellion. We can’t defy the king’s command, she protests. Besides, we are only women, and men are stronger. Ismene asks Antigone to pardon her for refusing to help with the rebellious act of burying Polynices. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473078/original/file-20220707-16-zegc8x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman spreading something in her hand over the dead body of a man lying in front of her." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473078/original/file-20220707-16-zegc8x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473078/original/file-20220707-16-zegc8x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473078/original/file-20220707-16-zegc8x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473078/original/file-20220707-16-zegc8x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473078/original/file-20220707-16-zegc8x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=585&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473078/original/file-20220707-16-zegc8x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=585&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473078/original/file-20220707-16-zegc8x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=585&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Antigone’s courage in burying her brother has inspired much art through the centuries, including this work by French painter Jules-Eugène Lenepveu in the 19th century.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/337685">The Metropolitan Museum</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Undaunted, and contemptuous of her sister’s cowardice, Antigone proceeds and is arrested. In the ensuing confrontation, Creon asks whether she has heard his recent decree. Antigone answers defiantly that she is answerable not to Creon’s edict but to unwritten laws so ancient that no one knows when they originated. </p>
<p>Who makes the laws? she asks. To which laws are we answerable? If a law is unjust, need we obey it? </p>
<p>Henry David Thoreau Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr. asked the same questions, <a href="https://xroads.virginia.edu/%7EHyper2/thoreau/civil.html">Thoreau in his essay on civil disobedience</a> and <a href="https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html">King in “Letter from Birmingham Jail</a>.”</p>
<h2>Rewards not the point</h2>
<p>Antigone disregarded Creon’s law out of loyalty to her brother. For Hutchinson, the choice was reversed: Would she heed the law and testify to the committee, or would she be <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/30/jan-6-hutchinson-meadows-mystery-messages-00043638">intimidated by demands of loyalty</a> made by representatives of former president Donald Trump? </p>
<p>Hutchinson testified.</p>
<p>She may be rewarded for her courage. But often, admiration and memories are the only rewards available. Courage isn’t really about rewards. It may be planned or impulsive; it may come as a surprise to the courageous person. It may inspire others to be courageous, or simply inspire with the vision of what this rare quality looks like. </p>
<p>That’s what Ukrainian president <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/13/opinion/courage-heroism-economics.html">Volodymyr Zelenskyy</a> has done; and in a different key, that’s what Hutchinson has done. </p>
<p>The courage required for such defiance is the salient point. Antigone tells Creon that her fellow citizens would speak of their agreement with her act of defiance “if their lips were not sealed by fear.” </p>
<p>“In that view you differ from all these Thebans,” says Creon. </p>
<p>No, answers Antigone: “They also share it, but they curb their tongues for you.” </p>
<p>It’s true that although she has <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cassidy-hutchinson-now-facing-security-130000709.html">received threats to her safety</a>, Hutchinson doesn’t face immediate execution, as Antigone did. But her courage, like Antigone’s, looks all the more remarkable because it contrasts so starkly with the behavior of many others, many of them her superiors at work and most of them men.</p>
<p>As Antigone points out to Creon, the silence of the cowed Theban populace is not exactly a ringing endorsement of his edict. </p>
<h2>‘To show no fear’</h2>
<p>Hutchinson’s <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/06/28/1108396692/jan-6-committee-hearing-transcript">unforgettable descriptions</a> of her boss Mark Meadows’s desperate efforts to distance himself from the alarming news she was trying to give him remind me of another Greek tragedy, Euripides’ <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Euripides/iphi_aul.html">Iphigenia in Aulis</a>. </p>
<p>In that play, the heroine’s father, Agamemnon, decides Iphigenia’s life is more expendable than his ability to lead the Greek army to military victory. Once he has resolved that his daughter must be sacrificed, Agamemnon summons Iphigenia and his wife Clytemnestra to Aulis, where he claims his daughter will marry Achilles. But a distinctly nonmarital altar awaits the trusting young girl.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473075/original/file-20220707-10739-bq3hdz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A painting with a young woman being carried by two people, with a woman on the left, crying and a man on the right, looking away." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473075/original/file-20220707-10739-bq3hdz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473075/original/file-20220707-10739-bq3hdz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=609&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473075/original/file-20220707-10739-bq3hdz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=609&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473075/original/file-20220707-10739-bq3hdz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=609&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473075/original/file-20220707-10739-bq3hdz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=765&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473075/original/file-20220707-10739-bq3hdz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=765&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473075/original/file-20220707-10739-bq3hdz.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=765&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In this wall painting in Pompei, Iphigenia is carried away to the sacrifice by two servants, following her father, Agamemnon.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wall_painting_-_sacrifice_of_Iphigenia_-_Pompeii_(VI_8_5)_-_Napoli_MAN_9112_-_01.jpg#/media/File:Wall_painting_-_sacrifice_of_Iphigenia_-_Pompeii_(VI_8_5)_-_Napoli_MAN_9112_-_01.jpg">Wikipedia/ArchaiOptix</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Part of the thoroughgoing irony of this play lies in the failure of Clytemnestra and Achilles, despite their promises and protestations, to protect the innocent Iphigenia, whose initial horror gives way to a desperate resolve: She has more courage than her mother or Achilles, let alone than her father. Iphigenia finally goes off willingly to be sacrificed.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I must die.<br>
I have to die.<br>
But to die gloriously,<br>
to step free<br>
of lowborn cowardice,<br>
not to be base,<br>
to show no fear - <br>
that is what I wish …</p>
<p>Oh sun that lights the day,<br>
I move now to another life,<br>
to a different fate.<br>
Goodbye, beloved light.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A striking theme is Agamemnon’s refusal to be transparent about the crisis even after Clytemnestra confronts him. He feels for his daughter, but mostly he feels for himself; it’s finally all about him. Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus articulates Agememnon’s character best, as he recalls Agamemnon’s rationalization of the decision to sacrifice Iphigenia: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>God forbid …<br>
that you should lose your power and command,<br>
honor, glory, fame, your burnished name.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Agamemnon feels above all self-pity:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m cornered, trapped, yoked,<br>
a crafty demon’s prey.<br>
Some dire divinity<br>
has outwitted me.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Later in the play, Agamemnon seems to yield up all power and simply acquiesce to the situation:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>No, it’s not a choice. It’s obligation. …<br>
Willing, unwilling - it’s now out of my hands.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If Agamemnon had a phone, it’s easy to imagine him staring at it, as we are told <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/06/28/1108396692/jan-6-committee-hearing-transcript">Meadows did</a>, refusing to look up, refusing to listen.</p>
<h2>Agamemnon to Mark Meadows</h2>
<p>The ending of Iphigenia in Aulis has Iphigenia spirited away by a goddess, while a deer takes her place on the altar and is sacrificed instead of the girl. But many readers have found this solution purposefully unconvincing and ironic, and the text may be unclear. We’re certainly invited to imagine a more dire outcome. </p>
<p>However you imagine the end of this story, a constant seems to be that Agamemnon cannot bear to watch, to see. A mosaic from Pompeii shows him muffling his face in his mantle. The Chorus in Aeschylus’ “<a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Aeschylus/agamemnon.html">Agamemnon</a>” describes the sacrifice right up to the climactic moment, and then they, too, flinch: “What happened next I did not see and will not say.” </p>
<p>A <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076208/">1977 film version</a> by director Michalis Cacoyannis concludes with Agamemnon staring in horror at something we ultimately cannot see, as a terrifying black-robed prophet grabs the girl, while smoke billows around the altar and obscures the view. </p>
<p>Agamemnon seems paralyzed, helpless to act. In the French tragedian Racine’s 17th-century version of the tragedy, as well as in Euripides, the onlookers all stare at the ground. </p>
<p>If they had phones, that’s where they’d be looking.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/186423/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rachel Hadas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A classics scholar looks at Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony and says only a rare few are able to summon courage. For others, the drive to maintain power produces cowardice and willful blindness.Rachel Hadas, Professor of English, Rutgers University - NewarkLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1497212020-11-16T22:03:35Z2020-11-16T22:03:35ZWhen ‘hope and history rhyme’: Joe Biden quotes an Irish poet to inspire healing in America<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369591/original/file-20201116-17-1k8lly0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C101%2C3580%2C1854&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">President-elect Joe Biden waves as he departs St. Joseph on the Brandywine Catholic Church, Nov. 15, 2020, in Wilmington, Del. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Following president-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the United States, a campaign video of him reading Irish poet <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/seamus-heaney">Seamus Heaney’s</a> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/nov/09/joe-biden-love-for-seamus-heaney-poetry">verse adaptation of an ancient Greek play went viral</a>. </p>
<p>The video features Biden reading the verse over a montage of images both of Biden on the campaign trail and scenes from across the U.S. related to <a href="https://www.irishcentral.com/news/politics/joe-biden-seamus-heaney-campaign-video">the past divisive and charged year characterized by protests and the pandemic</a>.</p>
<p>Biden had long adopted this <a href="https://www.thejournal.ie/readme/the-irish-for-3-5034234-Mar2020">famous Heaney quote</a> as a signature piece. He cited it when he first ran <a href="https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2duip5">in the 2008 presidential primaries</a>, and on occasions when he <a href="https://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/cahirodoherty/seamus-heaney-s-rich-gift-to-vp-joe-biden">spoke as vice-president</a>. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1321807498492354561"}"></div></p>
<p>The verse is from <a href="https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571327652-the-cure-at-troy.html"><em>The Cure at Troy</em>, Heaney’s 1990 version of</a> <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Sophocles/philoct.html"><em>Philoctetes</em>, the play by Sophocles</a> about <a href="https://www.greekmythology.com/Myths/Mortals/Philoctetes/philoctetes.html#:%7E:text=Philoctetes%20was%20the%20son%20of,which%20gave%20him%20insufferable%20pain">the Greek hero Philoctetes who, during the Trojan war, suffers from a festering foot caused by a snakebite</a>. The chorus in the play, aiming towards social healing, recites the lines that have become part of Biden’s political repertoire.</p>
<p>In drawing on this verse, Biden implicitly pitched himself as the man poised to mediate healing and defend “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2020/nov/08/joe-biden-election-victory-speech-in-full-video">the soul of America</a>” after caustic wounding. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump clung to the lyrics of “The Snake,” a song <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/al-wilson-expressive-singer-of-the-snake-814697.html">popularized by soul singer Al Wilson</a> and written by <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/insects-floods-and-the-snake-what-trumps-use-of-metaphors-reveals">Oscar Brown Jr., singer-songwriter and civil rights activist</a>. Trump recited the lyrics at <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/snake-read-full-trump-poem-cpac-anti-immigration-verses-mexican-border-a8225686.html">numerous rallies as well as this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference</a>, prompting <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-tuesday-edition-1.3769348/oscar-brown-jr-s-daughter-wants-trump-to-stop-reading-her-dad-s-snake-lyrics-at-rallies-1.3771185">criticism from Brown’s daughter, Africa Brown, who told CBC radio that “what Donald Trump stands for, and what my father stands for, are in such opposition</a>.”</p>
<p>The song tells the cautionary story of a woman who nurses a near-frozen snake back to health in her home, only to have the reptile fatally bite her in recovery. Trump appropriated the song as a <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/dog-whistle-political-meaning">not-so-subtle dog whistle</a> to convey an anti-immigration, xenophobic message to his Republican base.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CgUBu1lkOMs?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Donald Trump reads ‘The Snake.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Wounded warrior</h2>
<p>Heaney conceived of <em>The Cure at Troy</em> as a drama about reconciliation, about following one’s conscience but also about <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2015.1119985">setting personal feelings aside for the sake of the common good</a>. </p>
<p>In the play, Philoctetes, on his way to fight the Trojan War, has been stranded on a desert island <a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv3znzg2.7">for 10 years</a>, abandoned by Odysseus, whose crew could not bear the noxious smell of his wound.</p>
<p>Now, Odysseus returns with Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus, because it has been prophesized that the Greeks will only prevail over Troy through the use of Hercules’ bow and arrow, now in Philoctetes’ possession.</p>
<p>After Heaney published <em>The Cure at Troy</em>, its resonance with <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/The-Troubles-Northern-Ireland-history">the Troubles in Northern Ireland</a> was immediately recognized, particularly in its lyrical denouement: after Neoptolemus realizes that Odysseus’ advice to trick Philoctetes out of the bow goes against his conscience, he returns to apologize and reconcile with the wounded warrior. </p>
<h2>Hope on this side of the grave</h2>
<p>Neoptolemus urges Philoctetes similarly to relinquish his past grievances and return to the Greek army, be healed and help conquer Troy: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“<a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2015.1119985">Stop just licking your wounds</a>,” urges Neoptolemus, “Start seeing things.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Philoctetes finally agrees. The play’s chorus recites the lines that Biden has returned to:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/20163473">History says, Don’t hope</a> </p>
<p>On this side of the grave. </p>
<p>But then, once in a lifetime </p>
<p>The longed-for tidal wave </p>
<p>Of justice can rise up</p>
<p>And hope and history rhyme.”</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A man stands on a ladder next to a mural of Joe Biden." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369624/original/file-20201116-21-1kjr2vr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369624/original/file-20201116-21-1kjr2vr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369624/original/file-20201116-21-1kjr2vr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369624/original/file-20201116-21-1kjr2vr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369624/original/file-20201116-21-1kjr2vr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369624/original/file-20201116-21-1kjr2vr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/369624/original/file-20201116-21-1kjr2vr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A man puts a U.S. flag up near the mural of president-elect Joe Biden, in the town of Ballina, Ireland, where Biden has ancestral roots and some extended family, Nov. 7, 2020.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Peter Morrison)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Inspired leaders</h2>
<p>The call to renounce vengeful thoughts embodied a national desire for peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland, so that when <a href="https://president.ie/en/media-library/speeches/address-by-the-president-mary-robinson-on-the-occasion-of-her-inauguration">Mary Robinson was elected president of Ireland in 1990, she recited Heaney’s prophetic lines in her inauguration speech</a>.</p>
<p>Similarly, when President <a href="https://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/niallodowd/the-peacemaker-bill-clintons-historic-visit-ireland">Bill Clinton visited Northern Ireland in 1995</a> to commemorate the earlier ceasefire announcement that preceded the eventual <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/14118775">Good Friday Agreement of 1998</a> — what the BBC called “<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-28957532">the beginning of the end</a>” of the conflict — <a href="https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/exhibits/show/northern-ireland/item/57451">he also quoted Heaney</a>.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wikiq0-hdaI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Bill Clinton speaks in Northern Ireland in 1995.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Biden also recited the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/23/joe-biden-picks-seamus-heaney-to-add-to-his-appeal">lines of the chorus at his speech accepting the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in August</a>. </p>
<p>Significantly, it’s not central characters in this ancient drama who sound this call, but the chorus. The chorus surveys the noble characters and finds them wanting: “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/20163473">Shining with self-regard like polished stones</a>,” or “Licking their wounds / And flashing them around like decorations.” </p>
<p>Biden has cannily pitched himself through this campaign as the political chorus: hating the divisiveness, the pettiness, the selfishness sharing the stage with him. </p>
<p>He calls for healing rather than vengeance, unity rather than division, and portrays himself as the figure that can bring together the “you and the me,” the “it of it” all. He offers himself, through this poetic invocation, as a part of the healing ritual of a country hobbled by a snakebite, tricked, forsaken and left abandoned for years, wounded and bereft.</p>
<p>Biden appears to want to pick up Heaney’s call for reconciliation and healing while pitching himself as one among the people.</p>
<h2>‘Double-take of feeling’</h2>
<p>After U.S. media announced that Biden had won Pennsylvania and had enough electoral college votes to become president-elect, the Irish network RTÉ tweeted Biden’s voice reading the lines over a montage of news footage in tribute. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1325192497337950208"}"></div></p>
<p>The lines Biden has highlighted propose a hopeful view that renewed relationships are possible in human life. Biden’s chorus invokes the “miracle self-healing / The utter, self-revealing / Double-take of feeling.” </p>
<p>The “double-take of feeling” suggests an ability to change one’s mind, to change directions, to forgive and reconcile as aspects of the fundamental changeability of human nature. For Biden, such possibilities animate hopes for “miracle” of “self-healing” needed in the country he is about to lead. These lines are short and direct iambic trimeter, a rhyme scheme often utilized by that other great poet of Irish politics, <a href="https://poets.org/poet/w-b-yeats">W.B. Yeats</a>. The triple end-rhyme <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/26509648?seq=1">links them together in the reader’s mind</a>.</p>
<p>It is perhaps this layered capacity for empathy and for self-examination, for personal and political change, that would make “hope and history rhyme.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/149721/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Libin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In the drama of envisioning a future for the United States, Joe Biden and Donald Trump both invoked stories about snakes to suggest different views about self-interest and the common good.Mark Libin, Associate Professor, Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media, University of ManitobaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1474282020-10-07T15:22:27Z2020-10-07T15:22:27Z‘What goes around comes around,’ or what Greek mythology says about Donald Trump<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/361983/original/file-20201006-20-z5nxum.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=46%2C120%2C6095%2C4001&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Donald Trump's helicopter landing at the White House, Oct. 5, as he returns from being hospitalized at Walter Reed.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/oct-6-2020-the-marine-one-carrying-u-s-president-donald-news-photo/1228924322?adppopup=true">Liu Jie/Xinhua via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s hard to process the news of the <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/latest-updates-trump-covid-19-results/2020/10/03/919898777/timeline-what-we-know-of-president-trumps-covid-19-diagnosis">president’s positive COVID-19 diagnosis</a> without having recourse to some kind of mythological system, some larger frame of reference. </p>
<p>Karma, wrote one journalist, and then reproached himself for the ungenerous thought. Or perhaps it was simple irony on display when, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-seemed-to-defy-the-laws-of-science-and-disease-then-the-coronavirus-caught-up-with-him/2020/10/02/5b4c5232-04bf-11eb-897d-3a6201d6643f_story.html">Washington Post</a> reporters wrote, “President Trump contracted the novel coronavirus after months in which he and people around him…avoided taking basic steps to prevent the virus’s spread.”</p>
<p>All these reactions make sense. If there’s one thing we know about a virus that’s still mysterious in many ways, it’s that this coronavirus is expert at going around. </p>
<p>And as a classics scholar, I can assure you: What goes around comes around. Greek mythology provides insight to help us understand today’s chaos.</p>
<h2>Failure to see until too late</h2>
<p>Many years ago, my high school English teachers put a lot of stress on terms like foreshadowing, climax and denouement. All these words marked points along a steep curve of the development of a story: rising action, turning point, falling action. </p>
<p>There was also a lot of emphasis, as we discussed plots, on a term I then found harder to understand: pride. Pride: arrogance; an exaggerated sense of self-worth. Pride tended to be followed by catastrophe – that falling action again. </p>
<p>As a high school student, I tended to confuse pride with vanity, with narcissistic preening; the tragic penalty of vanity seemed exaggeratedly severe. </p>
<p>What does “pride” really mean? <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/hubris">The Greek word it translates is hubris</a>, and pride doesn’t quite cover the range of the meaning of hubris. Vanity may well be part of hubris, but a more crucial sense of the word is terrible judgment, gross overconfidence, blindness, obtuseness, a failure to see what is staring you in the face – a failure to see it until it’s too late. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/361985/original/file-20201006-18-1oay2kp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Trump stands, maskless, on the Truman Balcony" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/361985/original/file-20201006-18-1oay2kp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/361985/original/file-20201006-18-1oay2kp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/361985/original/file-20201006-18-1oay2kp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/361985/original/file-20201006-18-1oay2kp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/361985/original/file-20201006-18-1oay2kp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/361985/original/file-20201006-18-1oay2kp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/361985/original/file-20201006-18-1oay2kp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Trump stands, maskless, on the Truman Balcony after returning to the White House.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/president-donald-trump-stands-on-the-truman-balcony-after-news-photo/1278690383?adppopup=true">Win McNamee/Getty Images)</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Retribution and rashness</h2>
<p>I don’t recall my teachers mentioning <a href="https://www.greekmythology.com/Other_Gods/Nemesis/nemesis.html">nemesis</a> or <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ate">até</a>, forces or principles that are closely associated with hubris in Greek mythology. </p>
<p>Nemesis is more often personified, and hence capitalized, than até. She’s a goddess of retribution, and she can follow acts of hubris with the certainty of a law of gravity – except that there may be a considerable time lag, as if one dropped a plate and it took a generation for it to break. That concept likewise <a href="https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Jeremiah-31-29/">appears in the Bible’s book of Ezekiel</a>, which says “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the teeth of the children shall be set on edge.” </p>
<p>Até is a more unpredictable figure, not necessarily personified – classics scholar E.R. Dodds in “<a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520242302/the-greeks-and-the-irrational">The Greeks and the Irrational</a>” tentatively defines até as “a sort of guilty rashness.” </p>
<p>On the other hand, até can be unforgettably personified, as when <a href="http://shakespeare.mit.edu/julius_caesar/full.html">Mark Antony addresses the body of Caesar and predicts civil war</a> in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar:” </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“And Caesar’s spirit ranging for revenge,<br>
With Até by his side, come hot from hell,<br>
Shall in these confines, with a monarch’s voice,<br>
Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war…”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Goddess or not, até, like nemesis, can be thought of as a kind of mechanism whereby one evil is succeeded by another. There’s a chain reaction, a cause and result. Nemesis seems cooler, more targeted and precise; até lets all hell break loose, and also is the hell that breaks loose. Categories blur in the chaos.</p>
<h2>‘He himself is the polluter’</h2>
<p>When I studied and taught Sophocles’ tragedy “<a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Oedipus-Rex-play-by-Sophocles">Oedipus the King</a>,” the stress was on hubris, irony, blindness. What wasn’t emphasized is that the <a href="https://theconversation.com/plagues-follow-bad-leadership-in-ancient-greek-tales-133139">play was written during and is set in the midst of a plague</a>. </p>
<p>The citizens of Thebes, in the tragedy’s opening scene, implore their wise and resourceful ruler Oedipus to save them from this disastrous illness. Oedipus, moved by their plight and confident in his own capability, promises to do exactly that. His effort to hunt down the criminal whose unpunished sin is polluting the city and causing the plague leads to Oedipus’s own exposure as the source of that pollution. </p>
<p>But he persists in his hunt for the truth – even though the truth, as every student learns, turns out to be that he himself is the polluter whom he seeks. Trump, like Oedipus, is the source of the pollution - or at the very least, a vector, a spreader, an enabler. Unlike Oedipus, the president has actively discouraged the hunt for the truth.</p>
<p>The final words of the tragedy are addressed by the chorus to the citizens of Thebes. Presumably the plague will be routed; the city has indeed been cleansed. In contrast, the citizens of our country keep on dying. The president removes his mask and proclaims his triumph.</p>
<p><a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.1.1.html">Aristotle recommends in his “Poetics”</a> that in the best tragedies, the pivot or reversal – called “peripeteia” – from the height of success to disaster is accompanied by some kind of knowledge – anagnorisis, or recognition. “Pathei mathos,” sings the chorus in <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Aeschylus/agamemnon.html">Aeschylus’s tragedy “Agamemnon”</a>: wisdom comes through suffering. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_Poph2fvdQc?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A scene from the Theater of War’s production of ‘Oedipus Rex’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The simultaneity of Oedipus’s enlightenment and his catastrophe is one of the factors that made Aristotle so admire this elegantly plotted play. </p>
<p>The untranslatable, chaotic force of até plays out in the cycle of reversal followed by recognition; arrogance followed by retribution. What are we supposed to think?</p>
<p>Whether we rejoice or mourn, whether we’re elated or fearful, and whatever happens in the weeks and months to come, this news – that the president has COVID-19 – arrives with a freight of predictability: This particular infection seems, in retrospect, if not inevitable then at least overwhelmingly likely. </p>
<p>Hubris: not seeing what’s in front of your nose. <a href="https://www.justsecurity.org/72565/all-the-presidents-lawsuits-fraud-defamation-and-the-westfall-act-jean-carroll-mary-trump/">Even as lawsuits</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/books/trump-books-simon-schuster-bolton-mary-trump.html">tell-all books</a> have piled up, Trump has always seemed triumphantly immune. Not any more.</p>
<h2>Tragedy’s lesson</h2>
<p>What happens next? Unlike Oedipus, Trump has denied that there was ever a dangerous illness in the city – although <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bob-woodward-rage-book-trump/2020/09/09/0368fe3c-efd2-11ea-b4bc-3a2098fc73d4_story.html">Bob Woodward’s book, “Rage”</a> makes clear that he knew there was. Unlike Oedipus, he has refused his people’s pleas for help.</p>
<p>What does Oedipus learn in the course of the drama? Quite a lot. He may blame the gods or fate for his plight, but he also takes responsibility for what has happened.</p>
<p>[<em>The Conversation’s newsletter explains what’s going on with the coronavirus pandemic. <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=coronavirus-going-on">Subscribe now</a>.</em>]</p>
<p>What will Covid – his own personal, irrefutable experience of COVID-19 – teach Trump? Humility? Compassion? Respect for expert advice? The existence of Nemesis? His own diagnosis of hubris, with a measure of até thrown in? </p>
<p>The answer is all too clear. Released from the hospital, <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1313186529058136070">Trump tweeted</a>: “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life!” He also said “Maybe I’m immune” and took off his mask when returning to the White House.</p>
<p>Tragedy, I tell my students, doesn’t teach a lesson or preach a moral. It offers a vision. Not: don’t be arrogant, prideful, hubristic. Rather: Men of Thebes, look upon Oedipus.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/147428/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rachel Hadas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A classics scholar and poet turns to Greek mythology, especially the story of Oedipus the King, to explain the drama – or perhaps tragedy – that is taking place in the highest office in the land.Rachel Hadas, Professor of English, Rutgers University - NewarkLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1241552020-02-10T19:10:23Z2020-02-10T19:10:23ZAs Fates would have it - what we learn from minor players in Greek tragedies and Hollywood films<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313918/original/file-20200206-43074-16kdkar.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=81%2C135%2C5880%2C3827&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/ancient-stonework-myra-demre-turkey-1106508368">Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Many will be familiar with the looming presence of Oedipus or Antigone in Classical Greek tragedy. But how many remember the so-called secondary characters (nurses, soldiers, pedagogues) with whom the great heroes of the past appeared on stage? </p>
<p>“Minor” characters of 5th century BC works have an important role in encouraging audience reflection. </p>
<p>Recent research has taken an interest in these roles. They reflect the reality of life for non-elite members of society — pinpointing biases and encouraging the less-privileged to defend themselves against prejudice. </p>
<p>Likewise, in modern theatre or Hollywood blockbusters, secondary characters often represent the unconscious biases of contemporary society, and are increasingly used as ways to denounce those biases.</p>
<h2>We don’t need another hero</h2>
<p>Classical scholars have historically been preoccupied with the study of heroes like Ajax and Oedipus, or characters belonging to mythological royal families, like Antigone or Creon. </p>
<p>Nineteenth century scholarship tended to see Classical Greek tragedy as an ideal, elevated literary genre, whose target audience was a restricted group of elite Athenian citizens. </p>
<p>For scholars who usually belonged to the social elite, only mythological heroes and elite citizens deserved to be studied. </p>
<p>More recently, with the opening of the field of Classical studies to more diverse students and scholars, a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/20/classics-for-the-people-ancient-greeks">shift away</a> from this restricted view of the past has taken place. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313916/original/file-20200206-43102-r8bqfr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313916/original/file-20200206-43102-r8bqfr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313916/original/file-20200206-43102-r8bqfr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313916/original/file-20200206-43102-r8bqfr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313916/original/file-20200206-43102-r8bqfr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313916/original/file-20200206-43102-r8bqfr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313916/original/file-20200206-43102-r8bqfr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313916/original/file-20200206-43102-r8bqfr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Plenty of space for the masses in Delphi, Greece.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/ancient-theater-delphi-greece-130952996">Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Recent studies have examined <a href="https://sms.hypotheses.org/13572">poverty</a> in ancient societies and brought together literature, inscriptions, and archaeological evidence to <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/poverty-wealth-and-well-being-9780198786931?cc=au&lang=en&">examine expression</a> among non-elites in Athens. </p>
<p>Scholars now acknowledge the ancient audiences of these works were more diverse than previously assumed and included spectators from lower socio-political backgrounds. </p>
<p>Suddenly, it makes sense to pay more attention to the minor, non-elite, characters onstage in Athenian theatres. <a href="https://brill.com/view/title/21654">Anonymous characters</a> take on new significance with this frame. My <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvbqs7zt">book</a> on Sophocles’ non-elite characters is part of this effort. </p>
<h2>Growing influence</h2>
<p>Our access to what was performed on stage in Classical Athens is limited. Among the hundreds of tragedies composed and performed at the time, only about <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118351222.wbegt2940">30 complete plays have survived</a>, authored by the three great tragic poets of the 5th century BC: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.</p>
<p>The secondary characters in these surviving plays are much more than literary tools used to tell the audience about events that happened off stage. Many of them interact with the principal characters and try to influence the action. </p>
<p>Interestingly, non-elite figures are staged as much more active and efficacious in the later plays than in early ones. This phenomenon can be linked to the growing socio-political importance of non-elite citizens at the time they were written.</p>
<p>With the reinforcement of democracy in the second half of the 5th century BC, an increasing number of citizens from lower social status began to actively participate in the political life of their city. Socrates, in Xenophon’s Memorabilia, trying to encourage someone to speak in the political assembly of citizens, tells him that there is nothing to fear, because the assembly is now (at the beginning of the 4th century) full of fullers, cobblers, builders, smiths, farmers, and merchants. While the remark may be comic, a progression towards a <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/44242586?seq=1">widening participation</a> of lower-status citizens by the end of the 5th century is clear. </p>
<p>When members of the audience saw that someone of a similar socio-political background to them was able to express their opinion even among people of a superior social status, their own political practice was encouraged. Their place within democracy was reinforced.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313911/original/file-20200206-43095-1g7zn9q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313911/original/file-20200206-43095-1g7zn9q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313911/original/file-20200206-43095-1g7zn9q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313911/original/file-20200206-43095-1g7zn9q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313911/original/file-20200206-43095-1g7zn9q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313911/original/file-20200206-43095-1g7zn9q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313911/original/file-20200206-43095-1g7zn9q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313911/original/file-20200206-43095-1g7zn9q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The model for the assistant-finds-their-own-power Hollywood narrative can be seen in the Greek Tragedy Antigone.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458352/mediaviewer/rm2491452416">IMDB</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A good example of this dynamic is the guard in Sophocles’ play Antigone. When he arrives on stage for the first time, he addresses the king (Creon) in a clumsy way, as if he does not know how to speak in public or to someone who is higher on the social ladder. The king has a bullying attitude towards him, treating him almost as a slave. </p>
<p>When the same character returns in the second part of the play, he brings along Antigone (caught burying her brother, against the orders of the king), thus proving himself useful. This time, he not only succeeds in speaking clearly to Creon, but wins a debate between them. </p>
<p>By showing a simple guard as receiving a higher status by acquiring the ability to speak well and defend his opinions, the play encouraged non-elite spectators to do the same in their daily lives.</p>
<p>In dramatic terms, this character is the basis for a classic Hollywood trope: the underling who finds their power. See: <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458352/?ref_=fn_al_tt_5">The Devil wears Prada</a>, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096463/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Working Girl</a> or darker versions in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114594/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Swimming with Sharks</a> and the upcoming <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/31/entertainment/the-assistant-review/index.html">The Assistant</a>. </p>
<h2>Theatre today</h2>
<p>Although the conventions of modern theatre are different from those of Classical Greek theatre, it is worth paying attention to the way secondary characters are staged today. </p>
<p>Scholars note that <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/25070055?seq=1">translating Greek Tragedy</a> to the modern stage is not just about the relationship between the text and the director but also the cultural context. Canadian film <a href="http://filmuforia.co.uk/antigone-2019-tiff-2019/">Antigone</a> last year offered the story as a snapshot of the refugee crisis. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313913/original/file-20200206-43079-j0vvw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313913/original/file-20200206-43079-j0vvw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313913/original/file-20200206-43079-j0vvw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313913/original/file-20200206-43079-j0vvw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313913/original/file-20200206-43079-j0vvw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313913/original/file-20200206-43079-j0vvw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313913/original/file-20200206-43079-j0vvw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313913/original/file-20200206-43079-j0vvw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Canadian film Antigone (2019) was a social realist re-imagining of the Sophocles’ play.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10260042/mediaviewer/rm2010155265">IMDB</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Re-stagings of Classical drama sometimes still use ancient secondary characters as a way of sending a message to the modern audience. A good example is the way in which the war captive is treated in the 2004 staging of Martin Crimp’s <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/cruel-and-tender-young-vic-london-564528.html">Cruel and Tender</a> directed by Luc Bondy (inspired by Sophocles’ Women of Trachis). By showing her as seductive and manipulative, the play encourages the audience to reflect on some modern prejudices.</p>
<p>In 2015, Adena Jacobs <a href="https://vimeo.com/156041657">restaged</a> Euripides’ The Bacchae for the Melbourne Festival, with teenage girls driving the action rather than men relating events. </p>
<figure>
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/155894048" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A modern staging of The Bacchae removed the men telling the story.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Broadway’s 14-time Tony Award-nominated hit musical <a href="https://www.hadestown.com/#home">Hadestown</a> weaves together the Greek myths of Orpheus & Eurydice and Hades & Persephone. Three Fates - with <a href="https://www.broadwaybox.com/daily-scoop/get-to-know-the-fates-of-hadestown-on-broadway/">show-stopping moves and tunes</a> transcend their traditionally behind-the-stage roles and control the destinies of the main players. </p>
<p>So, next time you go to the theatre, whether to watch a contemporary play or one inspired by the Classics, pay attention to the secondary figures on the stage: they might teach you something about society or even encourage you to think more deeply about the difference each one of us can make.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/124155/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Elodie Paillard receives funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation. </span></em></p>Heroes and heroines of Classical Greek tragedy used to get all the glory. Today scholars, and theatre and film directors are looking to what the minor players can tell us about the zeitgeist.Elodie Paillard, Honorary Associate, Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1148142019-04-26T10:51:25Z2019-04-26T10:51:25ZWhat the Greek tragedy Antigone can teach us about the dangers of extremism<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270794/original/file-20190424-121241-2n2fez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A scene from playwright Roy Williams' modern adaptation of Antigone for the Pilot Theatre.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/pilottheatre/15287579905/in/photostream/">Flickr/Robert Day photo</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In a Greek tragedy written in the middle of the fifth century B.C., three teenagers struggle with a question that could be asked now: What happens when a ruler declares that those who resist his dictates are enemies of the state, and that ruler has as many supporters as he has detractors? </p>
<p>The story of <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Sophocles/antigone.html">Sophocles’ Antigone</a> and the accursed royal family of Thebes belongs to the mythical pre-history of Greece. </p>
<p>Greek tragedy portrays in broad strokes the cruelties that take place within families and cities, but keeps them in the safe distance of the mythical past. The mythical past provided a safe space to present contemporary problems without outright political affiliation.</p>
<p>The play, named after its young heroine, mirrors the state of America’s current disunion: Political and moral views are framed in terms of a <a href="https://theconversation.com/im-not-a-traitor-you-are-political-argument-from-the-founding-fathers-to-todays-partisans-111130">fight between patriot and traitor</a>, defenders of civic order and its enemies, and law and conscience.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270803/original/file-20190424-121237-fj4mlf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270803/original/file-20190424-121237-fj4mlf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270803/original/file-20190424-121237-fj4mlf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270803/original/file-20190424-121237-fj4mlf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270803/original/file-20190424-121237-fj4mlf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270803/original/file-20190424-121237-fj4mlf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270803/original/file-20190424-121237-fj4mlf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270803/original/file-20190424-121237-fj4mlf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Antigone confronted with the dead Polynices.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.hellenicaworld.com/Greece/Mythology/en/Polynices.html">Painting by Nikiforos Lytras; National Gallery and Alexander Soutsos Museum, Athens Greece</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Shocking decree</h2>
<p>The play begins only hours after the end of a civil war and is set in Thebes’ royal household.</p>
<p>Oedipus, the Greek king, is Antigone’s, Etocles’ and Polyneices’ father. </p>
<p>After Oedipus was banished from the city, Antigone’s two brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices, were meant to share the kingship. But Eteocles exiled Polyneices and made himself sole ruler. Before his death, Oedipus cursed his two sons, saying that they would die at each other’s hands.</p>
<p>Polyneices returned with a small band of warriors; Eteocles fought him with the city’s army. As their father said would happen, the brothers died at each other’s hands. Polyneices’ allies were driven off, leaving his corpse outside the city walls. </p>
<p>With both heirs to the throne dead, their uncle Creon declared himself king, as was his right.</p>
<p>Creon then makes a shocking decree: No one is to perform funeral rites for Polyneices, because he was a traitor. His body is to be left rotting in the sun and preyed upon by vultures and scavenging dogs. Anyone caught trying to bury him will be executed.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/271081/original/file-20190425-121216-113g3cy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/271081/original/file-20190425-121216-113g3cy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/271081/original/file-20190425-121216-113g3cy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/271081/original/file-20190425-121216-113g3cy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/271081/original/file-20190425-121216-113g3cy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/271081/original/file-20190425-121216-113g3cy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/271081/original/file-20190425-121216-113g3cy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/271081/original/file-20190425-121216-113g3cy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Oedipus Cursing His Son, Polynices’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.61391.html">Henry Fuseli, painter; Paul Mellon Collection, National Gallery of Art</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Family vs. civic order</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.rhm.uni-koeln.de/126/Rosivach.pdf">Refusing burial rites to traitors</a> was not unheard of in Sophocles’ time; it was an accepted means of quashing sympathizers. </p>
<p>But not burying a relative was different. </p>
<p>Creon’s situation was out of the ordinary. As head of the family, he was obliged by religious custom to oversee the burial of his nephew. But in the larger civic context of the country he led, he could refuse those rites to a traitor. Creon chose to maintain civic order, as he alone saw fit.</p>
<p>We first see Antigone as she rushes to tell her sister Ismene the news. She is sure that Ismene will join her in disobeying the decree, for the gods are offended by a body unburied; without a proper burial, their brother’s spirit cannot enter the underworld. And, most of all, he is their brother, traitor or not, and it is their duty as his remaining family members to bury him.</p>
<p>Yet Ismene begs her not to defy their uncle Creon. We are just girls, she says. We can’t fight the decree. The dead will not judge us. We will die; what good will that do? </p>
<p>Antigone turns on her sister immediately and says, “You - go ahead and dishonor what the gods honor, if you think it’s best.” </p>
<p>Antigone tells Ismene that she hates her, and rushes offstage to carry out her plan: to go outside the city walls, where her brother’s body lies, and cover it with a few handfuls of dust. It’s the best she can do. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270825/original/file-20190424-121249-13qnzbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270825/original/file-20190424-121249-13qnzbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270825/original/file-20190424-121249-13qnzbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=815&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270825/original/file-20190424-121249-13qnzbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=815&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270825/original/file-20190424-121249-13qnzbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=815&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270825/original/file-20190424-121249-13qnzbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1024&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270825/original/file-20190424-121249-13qnzbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1024&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270825/original/file-20190424-121249-13qnzbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1024&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sophocles, the tragedian who wrote Antigone, from a cast of a bust in the Pushkin Museum.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5573891">Shakko - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>‘I am impious’</h2>
<p>When Creon finds out what Antigone has done, he has her brought before him, and declares that she must die. </p>
<p>She is defiant and scornful. Her challenge to his authority only increases Creon’s resolve. When his son Haemon, Antigone’s fiancé, tries to reason with him, he refuses to listen. </p>
<p>Ismene, now remorseful, claims that she buried the body herself, to which Antigone responds with contempt. </p>
<p>In their solo crusades for justice, both Creon and Antigone ignore the grief of their loved ones.</p>
<p>Creon orders that Antigone be taken to a cave and left to starve; she is led away. He then receives word from a prophet that the gods will punish him for putting a living soul underground and keeping a dead body above ground.</p>
<p>Creon dismisses the prophecy, but the chorus of citizens convinces him to go save Antigone and bury Polyneices. He rushes to her tomb, too late. He finds two dead bodies there. Antigone has hung herself, and Creon’s son Haemon has fallen on his sword. When Creon’s wife hears the news of her son’s death, she too kills herself.</p>
<p>“Lead me away,” a stunned Creon says to the city elders. “I am worse than useless; I am impious.”</p>
<h2>Danger in the extreme</h2>
<p>Creon started from a position of defending the civil order: Traitors must be punished, and those who show love for them are equally traitors. </p>
<p>But his principles lead to the deaths of many, including his son, Haemon, who was not a rebel, only a young man in love. </p>
<p>Haemon was a moderate, who, with Ismene, tried to persuade Antigone and Creon to drop their intransigence. Ultimately, however, they too were dragged over the edge into chaos and violence. Even Haemon’s mother, who appears on stage only briefly, becomes a victim. </p>
<p>Every character in the play was forced to enter the arena of good versus evil, either because they loved each other, or they loved their own convictions. </p>
<p>It is impossible for any character to remain in the middle – they are forced to the extremes, where death or grief are either chosen or thrust on them. </p>
<h2>‘Moderates suffered most’</h2>
<p>What can be learned from the tragedy of Antigone?</p>
<p>At least this: When fellow citizens become enemies, their bonds of friendship and family are weakened if not destroyed. When primary identity is reduced to “us” and “them,” the definition of justice narrows. It becomes simply what helps “us” and harms “them.” </p>
<p>When a leader urges citizens to identify his enemies as enemies of the state, what those citizens may end up having most in common with each other is anger, fear and mutual contempt.</p>
<p>And what of the Ismenes and Haemons of the world, those who try to dissuade others from rash actions and de-escalate tensions? </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thucydides-Greek-historian">historian Thucydides</a>, Sophocles’ younger contemporary, observed that when a community is at war with itself, “moderates suffered most, because they were subject to attack by both factions.” </p>
<p>Sophocles offers another lesson in Antigone. Namely, that a single person in power, if he persuades or frightens enough people, can cause the suffering of innocents and the loss of institutions and customs on which civil order rely.</p>
<p>It is a lesson we have witnessed more than once, in living memory. </p>
<p><em>This article has been updated to correct the amount of time Haemon’s mother spends on stage.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/114814/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Elizabeth A. Bobrick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A play written in the fifth century B.C. mirrors America’s current disunion: Political and moral views are framed in terms of a fight between patriot and traitor, law and conscience, and chaos and order.Elizabeth A. Bobrick, Visiting Scholar in Classical Studies, Wesleyan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/461362015-08-18T20:32:41Z2015-08-18T20:32:41ZAntigone now: Greek tragedy is the debate we have to have<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92204/original/image-20150818-5095-yyc0d9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Greek tragedy remains the most modern form of drama, unafraid to question everything we value. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sarah Walker. Photo: Jane Montgomery Griffiths as The Leader and Aaron Orzech as Haemon.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>When you hear the words Greek tragedy, you might think of white masks, or even the ongoing economic crisis – ancient drama and modern depravity in its most enticing form. These first impressions may seem simple, but within them lays a theatrical form that refuses to die. </p>
<p>Maybe we have never truly progressed beyond this classical period; maybe we just have no other way to express ourselves; but regardless of reasoning and the plethora of scholarship that exists, Greek tragedy remains the most modern form of drama. It is unafraid to question everything we value. </p>
<p>There has been a surge of modern translations, adaptations and everything in-between of Greek plays in both Australia and the UK. This is indicative of our times, where we are beginning to question the ethics of democracy, something Greek tragedy was born to do. </p>
<p>This week, those in Melbourne will have a chance to see another modern interpretation of Greek tragedy, when the Malthouse Theatre stages Sophocles’ <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Sophocles/antigone.html">Antigone</a> (442BC), adapted by <a href="http://profiles.arts.monash.edu.au/jane-griffiths/">Jane Montgomery Griffiths</a> and directed by Adena Jacobs. Unlike most adapters and performers of classical drama, Griffiths is a Classical Studies scholar who is fluent in Ancient Greek.</p>
<p>That allows her to translate and adapt the nuances of Greek verse into a convincing modern Australian context, with the intellectual rigour of an academic as well as the vigour of a performer. In Griffiths’ 2015 version, the lines between translation and adaptation are blurred. She uncovers the blanket of silence that covers the voices of the dead and dying in Australian society, bravely deconstructing the doublethink surrounding recent asylum seeker and terrorism policies. </p>
<p>This is reminiscent of Aeschylus’ <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Aeschylus/persians.html">The Persians</a> (472BC), through which Athenian audiences were asked thousands of years ago to sympathise with characters that were responsible for the death of their friends and family members. Could any theatre maker in Australia dare do this? Portray a terrorist sympathetically? We struggle to portray ourselves on stage, let alone our so-called enemies. </p>
<p>Lucky then we have Greek tragedy, the mask we can still put on to face the identity crisis existing within our own culture. </p>
<p>Greek tragedy, like all things Greek, has been migrating around the world since its conception in 5th century Athens. Back then it was a religious festival, known as the <a href="http://www.britannica.com/topic/Great-Dionysia">City Dionysia</a>, and it was a civic responsibility for Athenian citizens (male and white) to attend the theatre where they saw competing adaptations of well-known myths. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92207/original/image-20150818-5121-xlsxk9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92207/original/image-20150818-5121-xlsxk9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92207/original/image-20150818-5121-xlsxk9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92207/original/image-20150818-5121-xlsxk9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92207/original/image-20150818-5121-xlsxk9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92207/original/image-20150818-5121-xlsxk9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92207/original/image-20150818-5121-xlsxk9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92207/original/image-20150818-5121-xlsxk9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Adean Jacobs (director) and Samara Hersch (assistant director).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sarah Walker</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The playwrights were usually financially backed by politicians whose primal aim was to indoctrinate citizens into the ideology of democracy that celebrated debate. </p>
<p>Sophocles’ Antigone puts these two loyalties (religion and state) against one another and questions whether the political realm can control personal faiths. In Griffiths’ adaptation, the political figure is no longer the authoritarian Creon, Anouilh and Brecht adapted post-WW2, but a Julie Bishop-like Leader whose supreme convictions are executed with the type of order and precision Australian citizens would admire. </p>
<p>She has both style and grace and she is even unafraid to do dirty man’s work – the perfect female politician in all its beauty and gore. On the other hand, there’s Antigone, not the glorified freedom fighter, but the self-indulgent idealist who is just too young and naïve to realise that the state knows best. </p>
<p>Who wins? State or religion? Creon or Antigone? Old or young? In Greek tragedy there is never a winner, just a set of competing answers, striving to prove their worth. </p>
<p>For that reason, Greek tragedy remains the perfect vehicle for philosophers, from Hegel to Butler, as it can be appropriated to suit any episteme, from dialectics to gender performativity. What other dramatic form has been appropriated and re-appropriated into many art forms for thousands of years? </p>
<p>Greek tragedy can fit into any time and place and yet it still seems to evolve and change, reflecting our public concerns in the most private ways. </p>
<p>This is how Plato defined all art forms: a reflection of life <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/nmeictproject/home/plato-s-theory-of-mimesis-and-aristotle-s-defence">known as mimesis</a>. This new adaptation of Antigone bravely reflects not the self, but the abject other, epitomised by the corpses that dominate and resonate on the stage. Plato exiled poetry from his ideal republic and now Griffiths takes the violence out of the backstage and makes us smell it. </p>
<p>This is what <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/aris-poe/#H3">Aristotelian catharsis</a> is all about: purging out our inner fears and pities. Freud used Greek tragedy to illustrate unconscious desire; Lacan also used it to portray desire in its purist form, then Zizek revealed how it can be politically dangerous. </p>
<p>The “danger” in this production, however, is not actually the blood or vomit, but the mundanely apathetic manner the business of death and ruling are portrayed. </p>
<p>This truly is an illustration of what the political philosopher Hannah Arendt termed <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/arendt/">the banality of evil</a>. The Leader is not an inhumane monster, just a woman who is very good at her job. The Leader is not a murdering psychopath, just a bureaucrat doing her duty. It is the political system itself that remains elusive and God-like, controlling everything, but never appearing precisely anywhere, not unlike the form of Greek tragedy. </p>
<p>It presents you with a seemingly neat binary, only to rip it apart and destroy it with ongoing critical questioning, all the while you are wondering, what was that? </p>
<p>Earlier this year, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/30/guardian-view-greek-tragedy-someting-old-new">The Guardian reported</a> that the Greek Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, justified taking any measure to save the Euro:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Because Greece is the country of Sophocles, who taught us with his Antigone that there are moments in which the supreme law is justice.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sophocles also taught us to question supreme law as well as justice. Greek tragedy is a debate, not a recession that we have to have. </p>
<p><br>
<em>Antigone is at the Malthouse, Melbourne, from August 21 to September 13. Details <a href="http://malthousetheatre.com.au/whats-on/antigone">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/46136/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christine Lambrianidis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Regardless of reasoning and the plethora of scholarship that exists, Greek tragedy remains the most modern form of drama. It is unafraid to question everything we value.Christine Lambrianidis, Playwright and theatre researcher , Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.