George Steiner’s book, The Death of Tragedy, written in 1961, defines tragedy as something that is uniquely Greek in the sense that no other culture really embodies it. Steiner says that, “Tragedy is irreparable,” and that “Tragic drama tells us that the spheres of reason, order, and justice are terribly limited and that no progress in our science or technical resources will enlarge their relevance (8).” These statements clarify what makes Greek tragedy so unlike any other type of tragedy because here it is treated as a senseless and damaging force that occurs without reason. It is thought that the reason why certain Greek works are so perfectly tragic is because of how well they epitomize the dynamic nature of the drastic changes undergone by Athens.
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This entrance of Alcibiades’ at Athens is also emblemized by his appearance in Plato’s Symposium written in 380 B.C., as he disrupts the ladder of love. In Plato’s Republic (375 B.C.), the perfect community that he envisions cannot come to fruition because people are either too entrenched in the ways of nomos or in the ways of physis, the natural world and rule of the strong man. The Bacchae completed by Euripides in 406 B.C., has a community completely destroyed by Dionysius showing that Greek tragedy lacks in any sense of justice or even injustice because the destruction of a whole community occurs without reason. The commonality that exists amongst all of these works is how they are representative of what Greek tragedy truly is, an unreasonable disruption to a person or entire community’s way of life; these works also provide insight into understanding what happened to Athens during the Peloponnesian
This entrance of Alcibiades’ at Athens is also emblemized by his appearance in Plato’s Symposium written in 380 B.C., as he disrupts the ladder of love. In Plato’s Republic (375 B.C.), the perfect community that he envisions cannot come to fruition because people are either too entrenched in the ways of nomos or in the ways of physis, the natural world and rule of the strong man. The Bacchae completed by Euripides in 406 B.C., has a community completely destroyed by Dionysius showing that Greek tragedy lacks in any sense of justice or even injustice because the destruction of a whole community occurs without reason. The commonality that exists amongst all of these works is how they are representative of what Greek tragedy truly is, an unreasonable disruption to a person or entire community’s way of life; these works also provide insight into understanding what happened to Athens during the Peloponnesian