To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please. 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. 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.
Icarus is perhaps the most straightforward example of hubris. But Icarus flies too close to the sun, his wings are melted, he falls, and is swallowed by the sea. Either ignorant or unconcerned with his mortality, in flying too close to the sun he has encroached upon the realm of the gods, and in doing so has lost touch with his own rationality, duty, and life.
Icarus attempts to seize the heavens, and for this is lost forever to the depths. Here we can see that the punishment for hubris is often mired in irony, another device central to Greek storytelling.
If hubris is born from the ignorance of a character — from their being unaware of their limits, and proudly so — then irony grows out of their ignorance of their ignorance. The thematic consequences they suffer serve to highlight their ignorance, and caution the audience against reckless pride. This entrapment in time and space — this subjugation to story — is core to Greek narrative notions of human life, mortality, and fate.
At the center of the most famous Greek stories is a single man or woman into whose narrative orbit fall people, monsters, and gods. Obviously, the public will relate readily to stories of common people or highly anthropomorphic deities overcoming Herculean struggles. The anthropocentrism also reinforces the importance of human life and of human mortality.
The archetypal Greek tragedy is both an affirmation of life and an acquiescence to death, for to live and to die is the lot of wo man, and to live honorably and die humbly is the lot of a great wo man. Those characters who do not recognize this and most, in the end, do not are doomed by their hubris to ironic destruction. They will achieve immortality in a sense, but only through the denial of their selves. Pericles, the great leader and statesman of Golden Age Athens, would be claimed by a ravenous plague that decimated the city as a result of the Peloponnesian War with Sparta of BCE.
Convinced though it was of its inevitable victory, Athens lost the war, along with its democracy, its empire, and its cultural preeminence. The war entangled every major power on the Greek peninsula, along with their overseas colonies and military alliances. By the end, poverty and disease ran rampant across the city-states. Religious taboos were shattered as Pan-Hellenic festivals were invaded and temples sacked and burned. Devastating civil wars and revolts proliferated, some of which would last until Phillip II, father of Alexander the Great but viewed by the Athenians as little more than a barbarian warlord easily conquered the peninsula in BCE.
The Peloponnesian War marked nothing less than the complete upheaval of the social order so beloved by Pericles. Athenians were, in the end, ignorant of their own fate and unheeding of the very legends that described their proclivity towards greatness and the downfall that might result. A few lines of his speech demonstrate the irony particularly well. Thucydides accounts for many different aspects of justice, power, and human nature through his text. The order, the style of his writing, choice of words, and relations of what he believes actually happened, allows the reader to make different inferences about the message he's trying to convey.
The juxtaposition of the two stories. Present Day Politics. The ideals of living in a democracy have been drastically changed from their original meanings and diluted into persuasive political language to become mere rhetoric as. Open Document. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. Hubris means excessive pride. Most characters in Greek tragedies had that as a characteristic, in which leads them to death or failure. This was the same case with the Peloponnesian War.
Athens thought they were going to win the war from the start. Though, they were almost beaten when a group of Spartans came to Athens and started burning down part of their city. Athens thought they were safe as long as they had a good supply of food, which they did. The city was safe as long as ships could sail into port with food from other Athenian colonies and other foreign states.
This made them cocky and a bit egotistical. Everything was destroyed. This lead to their defeat in B. Some may think that it was a good thing for Athens to be confident in themselves, but there is a difference. Being confident is okay, but cocky is not. If one is cocky then they will lose sight of what is really important.
Athens was a democracy and Sparta had two kings and an oligarchic system, but both were important in the development of Greek society and culture. Pericles set about toppling the Areopagus ar-ee-OP-uh-guhs , or the noble council of Athens, in favor of a more democratic system that represented the interests of the people. He introduced the practice of paying citizens to serve on juries, which allowed poor men to leave work and participate in the justice system.
Pericles introduced direct democracy citizens rule directly and not through representatives. Direct democracy meant that Athens would have more citizens engaged in self-government than any other city-states. These reforms made Athens one of the most democratic government in history. In his speech, Pericles states that he had been emphasising the greatness of Athens in order to convey that the citizens of Athens must continue to support the war, to show them that what they were fighting for was of the utmost importance.
Greek democracy created at Athens was direct, rather than representative: any adult male citizen over the age of 20 could take part, and it was a duty to do so. The officials of the democracy were in part elected by the Assembly and in large part chosen by lottery in a process called sortition. Table of Contents. We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits.
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