She is not a fiercely rebellious teenager but a human token designed to be caught in an ultimate, unresolvable clash of fearfully fundamental forces, a cosmic rift-here the one between family and city, between blood and politics. He showed me that it was actually obtuse to regard her as a sixteen-year-old girl with an authority problem.
A few years ago I was having lunch with a colleague, Jonathan Badger, who had just lectured on Sophocles’ Antigone, and expressing to him my view of that tragic heroine as a teenage monster. I think to myself: “What little bit of good sense could have circumvented this mess?” Moreover, I feel my way into the inwardness of the tragic heroines and heroes and find myself repelled by their super- and sub-human lack of what one might call life-intelligence. When I read a Greek drama, I immediately fall to considering how its “tragedy” could have been forestalled. 18) I recognize myself as a minor instantiation of the Socratism that Nietzsche fears and despises, this-I might say, American-optimism that wants to nullify deep tragedy by the light of reason and neutralize fate by the devices of ingenuity. He writes: ”And now one must not hide from oneself what is hidden in the bosom of this Socratic culture: an optimism that deems itself limitless.” (Ch. In his youthful work, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1870), Nietzsche propounds a stark opposition between Socratic and tragic culture. I ought to confess at the outset that I love this play, but that Greek tragedy, as a genre, is alien to me. My aim will be to flesh out and give precision to these notions, in sum to delineate the idea of a reverent revolution.
This people, the ”Attic folk,” schooled by their divinity, have the wisdom to domesticate dread and to innovate moderately.
This poet, however, loves for cause and with a thoughtful passion. It is an account of the origin of Athens’ Supreme Court and a love poem to Athena and her people and places. Aeschylus’ Eumenides is a play about an institutional innovation and a paean to the goddess of the city.
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