We hear the word “tragedy” often these days. There are certainly many circumstances that wrench the heart and cause us to feel a sense of tragedy around it. The word has ancient origins, though, and tragedy once described something quite different than our present-day understanding.
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Recently my beloved and I were privileged to watch the first worldwide broadcast of the Greek tragedy, “The Persians” by Aeschylus. It was staged at the amphitheater in Epidaurus, Greece before a live audience. This was especially dear to us because we had visited that spot on our tour of Greece in the summer of 2017.
“The Persians” is the oldest surviving Greek play, written in 472 B.C.E. It is set at the moment when news has reached home of the resounding defeat of the Persian forces in the Battle of Salamis. This battle took place in 480 B.C.E.—exactly 2,500 years ago. The Persian leader of the battle was King Xerxes, son of Darius the First. Eleven years earlier, Darius had sought to expand his empire into Greece, but had been sharply rebuffed, most notably at the Battle of Marathon. Upon Darius' death in 486, Xerxes took up his father's banner and made several successful forays before renewing the war against the Greek city states.
At the start of the play, the Chorus intones darkly of the disposition of the Persian warriors. They count among their braves many skilled in the arts of war, but hint at the woes that may befall them as the battle approaches.
Then enters Atossa, Queen of Persia, and mother of Xerxes. She recounts a prophetic dream, but is arrested in her telling by the arrival of a messenger from the battle front. The Persian forces have been routed by the Athenian host! Though greatly outnumbered, the Greeks, through subterfuge, lured the Persian navy into the Straits of Salamis where they became trapped. Taking advantage of the confusion, the Greeks drove their powerful triremes into the hulls of the Persian ships, sending them to the depths in defeat. Not long after, the army, depending on support from the sea, fell into disarray and died.
Xerxes, vanquished but alive, returns to his mother in rags. He repents of his hubris—that pride which seeks to set man above the Gods—but his sour fate is sealed. He will be immortalized, but it will be the immortality of those crushed by their own vanity. Ignoble, stained for all time.
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So what, then, of tragedy in the 21st Century? Because I am writing on the 11th of September, nineteen years after the Towers fell, I wonder at those things we now give this name. Was the tragedy of 911 the deaths of 2,977 humans in the stark hours of that morning? Was it the death, maiming, and disease of the first responders and rescue workers in the the days and weeks following? Was the tragedy perhaps the blithe advice to go out and shop, to sleep peacefully while Congress enacted laws that gutted the Bill of Rights and the more ancient rule of habeus corpus? Does the tragedy that is 911 end even there? We are now a nation divided by the trivial concerns of a “culture war” over...over...I can’t even bear to articulate what.
I am tempted to go on and speak of the unbearable hubris that now casts its dark shroud over America. We who love the ideals of the founding of this country know it all too well.
I have a vision for the future of our land, and by extension, the future of our world. Like the drunk or addict who has reached the rock bottom of their disease, we may still raise our heads from the gutter and, as Oscar Wilde said, we may look at the stars. The stars, my friends, live within each of us. See the star within your neighbor, and the thousands and millions and billions of stars that are all around you. Rise with them into the firmament of a better future. We can do it if we will it so.
