Sublime

Thyestes is ready with conventional, quasi-philosophical wisdom about the relative unimportance of indifferent things, like power and wealth. He declares to his young son—named Tantalus for his ancestor—that the real blessing is a life of simplicity and stability, untainted by wealth or danger:

Seneca was still fairly young: the sense of dread was something he carried with him all his life. Seneca’s Oedipus declares, This fear drove me away from my father’s kingdom. For this I fled and left the gods of my hearth. I mistrusted myself, but kept safe your laws, Nature! When your dread is vast, you must feel fear even at things you think

He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing.

is uncannily reminiscent of Seneca’s philosophical ideal, the Stoic Sage (Fig. 3.7). The ideal of virtue, as of vice, is for absolute autonomy, absolute power over circumstance and fortune—a desire that the tragic heroes try to achieve not by a life in conformity with nature, but by actions and passions that run counter to every natural law.

Yet what happened was shown to be to a large extent in the hands of what the Greeks called ‘fate’ or ‘the gods’. It was the Greeks’ poetic way of saying that things often work out randomly, according to dynamics that simply don’t reflect the merits of the individuals concerned. The great Greek tragedians – Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles –

You weren’t supposed to learn about Oedipus and his motivations, you’re supposed to fantasize your Oedipus and motivations into the concrete story. There’s nothing universal in the character of Oedipus, what’s universal is the story of Oedipus. In order for your Oedipus to feel guilty, it had to be for something that could make you feel guilty. Not

THE PROPHECY TOLD TRULY. Now that Pyrrhus has come, Troy falls. He does not do it alone, of course. There is the horse, and Odysseus’ plan, and a whole army besides. But he is the one who kills Priam. He is the one who hunts down Hector’s wife, Andromache, hiding in a cellar with her son.