How Come The Ancient Greeks Knew It, But All We Do is to Ignore It?

Antigone with her double loyalty to the family and the city. Complexity of justice in Oresteia. Medea and her revenge.

Can you imagine Greeks parading in front of Euripides house, demanding justice for Jason or condemnation of Medea? Or Greek TV milking the dead bodies of Medea’s children to the hilt demanding the ban, if not bombing to smithereens of all foreigners and refugees?

Euripides, by the way, makes gods lift Medea off the scene of her crime. Can you imagine anyone writing something like that today, without being banned, deplatformed, and silenced for good as the promoter and endorser of the most heinous acts.

The reasons Greeks watched these tragedies as adults is simple: they understood that in these situations both sides are right to a degree, and that we — the audience — is equally complicit with all of their rash, tragic and violent actions, with Creon and Antigone, with Orestes, his mother, and his father.

None had the nerve, stupidity or lack of imagination to sit triumphantly and judge and allocate the guilt, pronounce one side as holy and another as evil, and virtue signal to the rest of the audience on how pure they were.

They also knew that some solution should be found, that the spiral of revenge should be stopped. Aeschylus, the wisest of them all, suggested that we needed some sort of tribunal. The collection of the wisest people who – together with Athena – -would preside over the most thorny cases, and find the solution that would preserve the city and its achievements, preventing it from collapsing into lawlessness.

Alas, where can one find this wise audience, these wise authors, and these wise judges who could make a tough decision that might not be ideal, but still serve life rather than death?