Ancient Greece’s Legacy for Liberty: The Tragedy of Politics

In his Suppliant Women, Euripides puts democratic ideology into the mouth of the legendary Athenian hero Theseus. When a Theban herald arrives and asks to speak to the “master” of the city, Theseus replies:

When the herald boasts in reply that his own city “is controlled / By one man, not a mob,” Theseus responds with a defense of democracy and a critique of dictatorship:

All this is, of course, bizarrely anachronistic – about as anachronistic as, say, having King Lear singing the praises of Britain’s National Health Service. Theseus is traditionally the king of Athens, in an era long before the city had become democratic; the master that the herald sought, then, would properly have been Theseus himself.³ But Euripides is more interested in contrasting democratic with monarchical political systems than in remaining faithful to the details of the Theseus legend.

One of the best-​known political ideas in Greek tragedy is found in Sophocles’ Antigone, in which the titular protagonist, accused of breaking the law by performing funeral rites for her brother, a slain rebel, despite the ruler Kreon’s prohibition on doing so, appeals to a higher moral law that overrides the law of the state:

This idea of a higher law is one that we will see explored in more detail by thinkers like Socrates and the Stoics.

The conflict between justice and mere human authority is one that Sophocles also takes up in another of his plays, the Philoctetes. In Greek legend, Philoctetes was a member of the Greek expedition to Troy who was unjustly marooned on an island after he suffered a festering wound whose smell, combined with his cries of pain, his comrades found too annoying to put up with. When the Greeks later realize that they need his magic bow in order to defeat the Trojans, Odysseus sails back to the island to retrieve it. Recognizing that Philoctetes, naturally resentful of his treatment at the hands of his former comrades, is unlikely to part with the bow willingly, the wily Odysseus, in Sophocles’ account, instructs the young Neoptolemus, son of the late Achilles, to obtain the bow by deceit. Neoptolemus reluctantly agrees to the plan, and indeed succeeds in tricking Philoctetes into surrendering the bow. But then – in an episode that may be an innovation of Sophocles’ – he suffers from pangs of conscience and decides to return the bow to Philoctetes, defying Odysseus’s commands:

Just as Antigone presents favorably a woman’s defiance of Kreon’s twofold superiority as both her king and her uncle, so Philoctetes presents favorably a soldier’s disobedience to a direct order from a commanding officer in time of war. In both plays, the authority of a human superior is trumped by the higher authority of the moral law.