Sublime

Charles Segal, a recently retired Harvard professor of classics who taught my Greek Tragedy course, spoke about how the Oedipus trilogy reminded him of Erik Erikson’s three stages of development. In youth, Professor Segal said, a person struggles to figure out who they are in relation to their parents (a real head scratcher in Oedipus’s case). In

social engagement to sustain democracy, people’s shared exercise of power. All of these essentials of social life are jeopardized by contemporary cultural trends which damage communication and prioritize self-interest.

But not all societies and eras have seen success and failure in such a stark and forbidding light. In ancient Greece, another rather remarkable possibility – ignored by our own era – was envisaged: you could be good and yet fail. To keep this idea at the front of the collective imagination, the ancient Greeks developed a particular art form: tragic