Law and Justice - Antigone and the Defense of Tradition - 6.2 Tragedy and Democracy

Tragedy. It means a terrible thing in our own vernacular, but it's a Greek word, and in fact its etymology in Greek is goat songs, reflecting its origins in religious rituals that would culminate in the sacrifice of a goat. But in classical Athens, these religious songs became such a fundamental part of public culture that would allow the form of tragedy to flourish into one of the great medium, media of artistic expression in all of human history. And as we think about concepts of justice, we can look to classic literary texts, for texts that ask timeless questions and that express timeless truths. And today we'll look at one of the tragic authors, Sophocles, and his great play, The Antigone. Tragedy was essentially part of Greek democratic culture. Tragedy as an art form was born in the late 6th century BC. In the decades after the reforms of Solon, in fact in the age of the tyranny of Peisistratus, tragedy became embedded in the public culture of Athens. Over the 5th century BC, the greatest age of Athenian democracy, tragedy would flourish. The three canonical greats of tragedy, the authors Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, would flourish in the 5th century in the context of democratic Athens. Tragedy was fundamentally a part of the democratic culture of Athens. It was a public event. Every year, thousands of men would gather in a religious ceremony that was held in honor of the Greek god Dionysus. The public stage where the tragedies were performed were part of the public face of democratic Athens. Every year, three tragic playwrights would offer a series of new plays that would provide a form of entertainment, but also a form of education. Tragedy was part of democratic culture because tragedy was a medium, a venue, where the tragic playwrights could raise fundamental questions of morality, of religion, of law. So tragedy is part of the democratic conversation, and tragedies allowed the authors of these plays to raise questions that were pertinent to the Athenian democracy, to the people who ruled in this city-state. And it's in that context that we turn to one of the greatest of the tragedies, one of the classics, truly, of Greek literature, the Antigone of Sophocles.