Why Do We Still Love Antigone?

Those who see “Western civilization” as one great architecture, rising from the Greco-Roman and Hebrew past all the way up the present (where perhaps its summits are tottering), will be prone to think of Greek tragedy as one of this structure’s cornerstones. Greek tragedy appears as a sequence of wondrous plays which re-tells timeless myths and express in burnished poetry, and with searing dramatic intensity, the agony and ecstasy of being human. Even today, in as much as ancient Greek literature is still read at all, Greek tragedies are among its best-known components: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides are—alongside Homer, Plato and Aristotle—ancient Greece’s most familiar authors. The plays are read in schools and universities; they are widely performed in many languages; several have been filmed. Oedipus and Medea, perhaps even Antigone, maintain some grip on the public imaginary.

There is of course no denying the magnificence of Greek tragedy. Still, as a genre, it is a curious sort of cornerstone for the Western tradition, because it is one that was largely submerged for about a millennium. In Western Europe, no one read Greek tragedy at all between the end of antiquity and the Italian Renaissance. The very existence of these texts was almost forgotten. This was part of the more general collapse in the knowledge of Greek in the medieval West: from circa AD 600 to circa 1400, only tiny handfuls of people in Western Europe were able to read any Greek, and none of them were reading tragedies. Even in Byzantium, where ancient Greek was always read, tragedy was neglected until the 10th century, as part of the overall turn of early Orthodox Christians away from the classical Greek past.

Greek literature re-entered Latin Europe in two stages. First, from the late 12th century, universities, then emerging as institutions, adopted Aristotle as a central part of their philosophy curriculum. Aristotle was however read only in Latin translations, and the number of Westerners who could read Greek remained minuscule. However, from the late 14th century, Italian humanists became determined to revive the heritage of antiquity through a comprehensive knowledge thereof. This determination, combined with the exile of Greek scholars after the 1453 fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, led to the flooding into Europe of Greek texts, and the development of curricula for the widespread teaching of ancient Greek. The tragedies came to Europe alongside the exiles, so that the most important manuscripts of the plays are today housed not in Athens or Istanbul, but in such cities as Florence, Venice, Rome and Paris.

Greek tragedy is as much a creation of modernity as it is an artifact of antiquity.

Yet, in the immediate, neither the arrival of Greek texts, nor the arrival of Greeks who could teach Renaissance humanists how to read them, were enough for tragedy to gain a substantial foothold. The classical Greek texts most immediately engrossing to humanists were those which fit into the antiquity with which they were already familiar, namely the philosophical tradition, and the myth and history of Rome. So Plato, as Aristotle’s predecessor, and Greeks writing under the Roman empire, such as Plutarch and Lucian, were quite rapidly adopted (both Montaigne and Shakespeare were fascinated by Plutarch). Greek tragedy, in contrast, stemmed from the deeply alien world of 5th century BC, democratic Athens. Moreover, the language of Greek tragedy has a unique, highly poetic idiom, for which reason the medieval manuscripts which preserve the plays are notably corrupt. It took about a century for specialized scholars simply to make decent sense of the texts and their context, so that the tragedies could plausibly enter the cultural mainstream.