Spring 2010 - Interpretation

Book Review: Greek Tragedy and Political Philosophy
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Peter J. Ahrensdorf, Greek Tragedy and Political Philosophy: Rationalism
and Religion in Sophocles’ Theban Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009, 192 pp., $80.
Pat r ic k C oby
Smith College
pcoby@smith.edu
First the praise: Peter Ahrensdorf has written a wonderful
study of the Theban plays by Sophocles. Disputing the view that the poet
preaches the superiority of piety over reason, Ahrensdorf contends that the
Theban plays endorse the moderate rationalism associated with Socratic philosophy;
also that Socratic philosophy shares the brave pessimism reflected in
Greek tragedy—or that philosophy and tragedy are not adversaries but companions.
With irresistible logic and meticulous attention to textual detail,
Ahrensdorf provides his readers with what may be the best interpretations to
date of Oedipus the Tyrant, Oedipus at Colonnus, and Antigone.
Nietzsche, Plato, and Aristotle are brought in as parties to
the conversation. Nietzsche is presented, familiarly enough, as celebrating
Greek tragedy for its ferocious honesty in the face of metaphysical meaninglessness
and its noble affirmation of human suffering; and for denouncing
Socratic philosophy for its optimistic utilitarianism culminating in “lastman”
decay. Less familiar, and perhaps wholly original, is Ahrensdorf’s claim
that Plato rejects tragedy because its very nihilism, rather than hardening
men (as attested to by Nietzsche), has actually a softening effect, though not
in the sense of turning men into cowards, but of causing them instead to
seek comfort in the false hopes of religion; thus the charge laid in the Republic
is that tragedy engenders piety. About Aristotle it is said that he rescues
tragedy from Plato’s critique by showing that the tragic hero’s lack of wisdom,
and not chaotic nature, is responsible for the ruin that ensues, and that
the purgation of pity and fear, attributed to tragedy, is what readies men to
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