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Ancient Greek Wisdom

The Tragedy That Was Athens

Alex Holzman sees the history of Golden Age Athens as a play with Pericles and Socrates as its tragic heroes.

The most prominent dramatic distinction we’ve inherited from the Greeks is that between comedy and tragedy. Comedies end in marriages and happily-ever-afters. Greek tragedies are also easy to identify, as they usually end with the death, imprisonment, despondency, or some other unraveling of the principal character(s). This is almost always due to some set of character flaws, or hamartia, from the Greek meaning ‘to err’.

One recurrent tragic set of character flaws revolves around hubris, which refers to an over-reaching mixture of pride and arrogance, generally against some divine force, entity, or hierarchy (it originally meant the use of bodily violence to shame a victim).

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