Tragedy

Abstract

Abstract Many of the key themes of this book occur repeatedly throughout the corpus of Greek tragedy, causation and responsibility, good and evil, reality and appearances, authority and control. An entire volume could easily be devoted to those topics in Greek drama alone. We shall have to be more than usually selective, concentrating on just a handful of plays to study what they have to say about plagues, disease, madness, pollution, about foreknowledge and helplessness: who is sound, who ill, who is mad, who can tell, who save? Sophocles is important for our purposes not just because his extant plays, the Oedipus Tyrannus especially, deal with such themes with such subtlety and depth, but also because of other facts we know about his life.