Ancient Greek Tragedies and Our Own

I have been rereading some ancient Greek tragedies, and I am impressed by how relevant their themes remain, especially for our struggles in families and societies.

In the final installment of Aeschylus' Oresteia, The Eumenides, we encounter two battling views of justice:  that represented by the Furies (who advocate the older, intimate, family-based system) and that by Athena (who advocates the newer, impersonal, state-based system).

Orestes, backed by Apollo, pursued by winged Fury.

We also face two competing systems of social cohesion:  the Furies represent the view that society is held together by families and bloodlines in their local communities; Athena represents the view that society is held together by the larger institutions of the state and its anonymous peers.

Athens in the fifth century BCE was making this very sort of transition to a new form of government, justice, and society.  But a city-state need not be on its way from tyranny (a technical Greek term) to democracy for these dramatic concerns to be relevant.  Is not a constant source of tension in American society the questions (a) to what one owes one's greatest allegiance and (b) where one finds one's guiding notion of justice?  Athens answered those questions by trying to retain a place for the older family-based system but only by subjecting it to the new state system and its institutions.

Today many civic republicans and communitarians look to fifth-century Athens as a paradigm of a better way to keep politics local and in tune with the real needs and interests of families and communities.  In The Eumenides, Aeschylus suggests that a tension exists as the growing state apparatus was already recasting the role of the family and what it means to belong.  This is a contemporary problem as well.

Or consider the concept of blindness in Oedipus Rex.  As Sophocles' drama unfolds, so does Oedipus' impetuous personality.  His wife Jocasta notes as much when she visits Apollo's oracle:

For Oedipus excites himself too much
at every sort of trouble, not conjecturing,
like a man of sense, what will be from what was,
when he speaks terrors.  I can do no good
by my advice ... (914-18)

His impetuosity is one cause of his blindness to, his self-deception about, who is the culprit behind the pollution that is decimating his land's crops and offspring.  We learn early on that the miasma is connected to the murder of the region's former king Laius.  The play is about discovering who the murderer is so as to exact punishment and stay that plague.

Oedipus, solving the Sphinx's riddle, blind to others.

Oedipus is at once blind to reality and eager for the truth.  Perhaps more than in other Greek tragedies, which make varied use of the chorus, Oedipus Rex seems to overflow with dialogue involving stage directions ("look who's coming") and interpretations ("I perceive that he is a seer").  In particular, the back-and-forth about what seems so hard for Oedipus to grasp would be comedic if it were not tragic.  This dramatic devise effectively builds the play's tension; it raises some impatience in the audience.  "Why doesn't he see what seems so plain?  Come on already!"  In this way the cumulative effect is not unlike the snowballing disbelief of readers in the disciples' unbelief in Mark's gospel.  In both, the audience sees much sooner than the characters the nature of reality and the real identity of the protagonist.

And that's the point:  blindness that attends one's identity, who one actually is, when the evidence is clear.

Oedipus is not alone in his blindness.  His wife Jocasta, and as we also learn his mother, supports his self-justifying theories of innocence.  She seeks to reinterpret reality.  At least she does until it becomes untenable to continue doing so.  When Oedipus asks Jocasta whether he should fear fulfilling the old prophecy about his sleeping with his mother, she downplays the significance of incest in her reply and says not to give it a second thought:

Why should man fear since chance is all in all
for him, and he can clearly foreknow nothing?
Best to live lightly, as one can, unthinkingly.
As to your mother's marriage bed, -- don't fear it.
Before this, in dreams too, as well as oracles,
many a man has lain with his own mother.
But he to whom such things are nothing bears
his life most easily. (977-84)

One can see why Freud had a field day with this play.  What becomes clear, however, is something about which Freud was more right than wrong, a different sort of psychological repression.  It is that Jocasta's dismissals and Oedipus' self-deception, or just plain obtuseness, is a function of their trying to deal with the deep grief that attends acknowledgement of reality.  She suppresses the truth because of its monstrosity and the concomitant pain.

When Oedipus doggedly closes in on the truth, Jacasta pleads with him to stop.  The pain she feels because of the truth that she is suppressing is too hard to bear:

I beg you -- do not hunt this out -- I beg you,
if you have any care for your own life.
What I am suffering is enough. ...

O be persuaded by me, I entreat you;
do not do this. 

O Oedipus, God help you!
God keep you from the knowledge of who you are!  (1060-62, 1064, 1067-68)

Jocasta would rather live a lie, pretending that she is not married to and has not birthed children by her own son, than openly acknowledge the truth.  Both Oedipus' plaguing imperceptivity and Jocasta's reality-denying repression tear their family apart.

Oedipus has trouble seeing reality as it is even when he wants to, and Jocasta avoids seeing reality as it is precisely because she does not want to.  Husband-wife relationships influence fundamentally the parties' perceptions of themselves individually and collectively.

Of course, blindness does not depart from Oedipus once he discovers who he is:  Laius' son (he killed his father), Jocasta's son (he married his mother and fathered children by her), and the pollution of Thebes (he is the curse to be dispatched).  Mental and emotional blindness gives way to physical blindness.  He takes Jocasta's brooches and

dashe[s] them on his own eyeballs, shrieking out
such things as: they will never see the crime
I have committed or had done upon me! ...
with such imprecations
he struck his eyes again and yet again
with the brooches. (1270-72, 1274-76)

All of this is to deny himself the anguish of seeing what terrible things he could not formerly see:

Why should I see whose vision showed me nothing sweet to see? ...
It is sweet to keep our thoughts out of the range of hurt. (1335, 1390)

People will go to great lengths to keep the painful truth at bay.

In our lives, do we not know people who do not perceive reality as it truly is, people who instead tell themselves -- and others, and often repeatedly -- an alternative story that puts them in a more favorable light?  Do we not know people whose pain at actually recognizing the truth and whose relational tie to someone else prompts them to avoid what they internally may acknowledge?  Have we not felt the horrendous relational effects that flow from these behaviors?

In both The Eumenides and Oedipus Rex, families are torn apart by pride, violence, and repressing blindness.  When I consider myself and my friends, the daily relational difficulties that we face, and how frequently it seems as though nothing can right the cycle of wrongs, it is then that I think I understand better why the Greek tragedians felt the need for a deus ex machina to resolve these relationships.  Humans cannot do it alone.