Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: The World of the Polis

Titel: The World of the Polis

Stichwort: Tragödie (Aischylos, Sophokles, Euripides): gesellschaftliche Voraussetzung; Peitho und Dike

Kurzinhalt: Under such conditions the social function of tragedy will become problematic; when Peitho, persuasion in this pregnant sense, is no longer socially effectivie ...

Textausschnitt: 326b With the spirit of Marathon the tragedy would have to die. The shouldering of fate would become too heavy a burden. In the full unfolding of tragedy, in the grandiose personalities of Sophocles, one can sense the exceptional character of such suffering; a solitude begins to spread around the hero that makes his suffering unrepresentative for the common man. And Euripides, as we shall see, was preoccupied already with the problem of the hero who breaks under his fate. A sense of demonic capriciousness of the gods becomes stronger than the faith in the ultimately harmonizing order of Dike. Under such conditions the social function of tragedy will become problematic and, finally, impossible. The Suppliants has its distinctive place in the history of order because the line along which the tragedy as an institution of the polis will break emerges from the action itself. Pelasgus, the King, as we have seen, has gone through the decision in his own soul; and then he must induce the same process in the soul of the citizens through his speech, re-acting his own argument and that of the Chorus before the assembly. Through Peitho (persuasion) the paradigmatic action of the hero must expand into the soul of the people, binding it to the communal purpose. In the last work of Aeschylus, the Oresteia, Peitho becomes the great instrument of the order of Zeus by which the demonic divinities of the old law, the Erinyes, are themselves bent to Dike and are transformed into the Eumenides. In the Suppliants this meaning of Peitho as the persuasion of Jovian Dike (not perhaps as psychological management) is suggested in the lines of the Chorus that the people made the decision but that "Zeus brought the end to pass" (623-24). When Peitho, persuasion in this pregnant sense, is no longer socially effective, the political order of the democracy which must rest on Dike will disintegrate and give way to the nightmarish disorder that we find described by Thucydides. The restoration of social order in the polis, when it is to rest on spirit and not on fearful subservience to power, will then require the restoration of spiritual persuasion. And this has, indeed, become one of the great themes of Platonic politics, with increasing intensity in the later works, until in the Timaeus Peitho appears as the force of the psyche that imposes order on the recalcitrant Ananke of the cosmos. (Fs) (notabene)