Living with the Dead: Athenian Tragedy and the Limits of the Political

Abstract

This dissertation argues that the surviving tragic corpus of classical Athenian tragedy consistently interrogates the role of the dead in political communities, and that studying the genre’s approach to this question can offer a new perspective on tragedy’s capacity for political thought. I show that the tragic dead are persistently disruptive figures. Because they are neither part of the living world nor completely removed from it, they challenge both characters and audiences to grapple with the constitutive limits of political community. In particular, they do so by surfacing tensions in the organization of territorial sovereignty, political freedom, and gendered embodiment, all of which are importantly connected with the dead across the tragic corpus. Athens, throughout the fifth century BCE, saw a series of important shifts in cultural practices related to death. When read in this context, tragedy functions as an aesthetic technology for managing the boundary that divides the living from the dead, as well as an exploration of what happens when that boundary turns fluid. Reading across the surviving plays, I explore phenomena that I take to be characteristic of the three major tragic poets’ respective approaches to the dead: ghosts in Aeschylus, corpses in Sophocles, and suicide in Euripides. Part 1 focuses on Aeschylus’s Persians and Libation Bearers. It argues that Aeschylus is deeply concerned with how the dead past can haunt the present, and that he uses this preoccupation to reflect critically on political power and its exclusions. Part 2 focuses on Sophocles’ Ajax and Oedipus at Colonus. It shows that Sophoclean drama explores the use of male heroic corpses to legitimize claims to territorial sovereignty and political freedom while highlighting these corpses’ limitations as a source of political authority. Part 3 focuses on Euripides’ Suppliant Women and Phoenician Women. It argues that Euripidean drama uses suicide to explore the relationship between individual death and collective self-destruction. Across the dissertation, I argue that tragic encounters with the dead are an important site for recovering the genre’s experimental political imaginary.