Atina Demokratia’sının Tragedyası

Abstract

Tragedies that bloom from dithyrambs that emerge from Attica, by being the mouthpiece of the city-state, helped root and sprout the democratic thinking of Athens in the city-state and exposed the essential founding principles primarily being the religious and political of the entity models, that would lay the the ontological, existential, epistemological and aesthetic foundations of the city-state. Tragedy orients us from the protagonist’s, to the society’s - the city-state’s- inner conflict by presenting the founding principles with a phenomenon that has two equivalent powers that are antithetical.Consequently, the democratic values of the new world that oversee the “distinction” that face off the universal and aristocratical values of the old world forms the apparent reality with the act of creation, not an ananke of a given reality. A citizen gives rise to their own existence, on their own horizon of thinking with this act of creation. Because of this, the predestined thinking of the Olympian rhetoric, turns the value of the art overthrown by the power of ordinance inside out by creating and coming into being. So the Dionysian discourse which watches over the individual against the universal ordinance with tragedies, expresses the city-state’s emotions by establishing the structure that provides the formation of a cognitive process in the eyes of the audience by making the instinctive wisdom thrown into the subconscious visible on the stage. Therefore Dionysos as the manifestation of divine power, is covered with the veil of truth in the in-betweenness of antinomy. The coming into open of what had been hidden by the lifting of the vail would be possible with the visualization of the dialectic diffusion on the power of the dialectic incentive that was eliminated by the logocentric world view. It should also be noted that the tragic consciousness of the city-state would be ready to compromise towards the “more sublimed” with all its opposite phenomenons. This reconciliation would be presented to the citizen as a balance with tragedies. In this respect Sophrosyne which exposes the political attitude as a virtue of the city-state, reveals itself as a solution to social, political, and moral dilemmas. In this new Dionysiac world, Sophrosyne now turns into a demos’ virtue for the city-state from being the virtue of the aristocrats who were acknowledged by the old tradition. Our study, focusing on the 6 B.C. on the Athens city, takes the responsibility of the research that will showcase how tragic consciousness makes itself visible with democratic elements in tragedy as well as involving an examination of what constitutive elements constitute the relationship between demokratia and tragedy. Nevertheless, in our study for the sake of the value of our research, a response to the question of what pushed the Ancient Greeks into tragical thinking, and its association with philosophia will also be attempted.