Greek tragedy is not fashionable among us, because half the country intensely dislikes the scandalous crimes tragedy talks about, and the other half dislikes, just as intensely, the lack of progress achieved by committing those same transgressions. But “sacred transgression” might be a good name for what tragedy is about, so we might learn a great deal from tragedy if we stopped to look at America today in light of it. The country seems ripe for a war of the sexes that is not merely comical. Since divorce was followed by marriagelessness and in turn by loneliness, and since the young are politically very polarized by sex, we might want to think about man and woman without the easy assumption that family, marriage, and society will go together and make for public peace, private happiness.

There is, however, a great difficulty as soon as we try to gain some understanding of our problems by turning to poetry. To think about tragedy is to think that one could be simultaneously guilty and innocent, that a just man could by a mistake end up in a situation he can neither understand nor deal with. Such a painful thought further involves a way for us as a community to take responsibility, since the trouble of the just man is our trouble. Put otherwise, he acts out our beliefs. One further step and we realize that our beliefs, in turn, are prompted somehow by the world we live in, over which we have very little control.

So we can summarize tragedy as a study of a beautiful protagonist who turns out, once he gets in trouble, to be the innocent champion of a beautiful way of life which itself is a beautification—an attempt to maintain innocence—of fundamental experiences, that we are not in control of ourselves, that are terrifying. Tragedy is the uniquely artful investigation of the strangest thing about our very civilized way of life, that we should be not only unhappy, but afraid. Even though we don’t have tragedies in our entertainment, we seem to prefer stories that play on our fears and the revealing of great ugliness. The thinking through of the experience of fear is, of course, fundamental to political philosophy—one thinks immediately of modern writers like Hobbes and Rousseau who erect government based on fear of death. But it is no less true that Plato’s Republic has at its core a fantasy called “the beautiful city,” in which one never needs fear. Yet this philosophical treatment doesn’t seem to do justice to our passions, and so we might turn to poetry instead. After all, the pursuit of knowledge is defined by the tragic formula “learn by suffering.” This phrase recurs often, in various interpretations, in Michael Davis’s Electras.

The Drama of Justice

Davis is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College and has written extensively on tragedy throughout his career, including translating Aristotle’s Poetics with Seth Benardete. Benardete is the greatest American classicist and might be the great classicist of the twentieth century, a distinction that doesn’t seem to involve much honor. Davis adds his dedication of Electras to Benardete’s homages, and I would add mine in saying that I am convinced that Electras is the best introduction to Benardete’s own writing on tragedy.

Electras is a study of the three Greek tragedians through their treatment of this selfsame character, the only one they all dealt with and of whom the works have been preserved. The volume is in three chapters, each an interpretation of one play, independent, yet constantly moving backward and forward to the other plays and their respective chapters. The chapters show a unity of thought through diverse perspectives on the same fundamental problem, the doubleness of human nature as human and at the same time as man and woman. The introduction and conclusion connect Greek tragedy to contemporary American troubles about men and women, so that Electras as a whole functions as a defense of the academic way of life to which Davis has dedicated himself, that is, the pursuit of wisdom through study of the most beautiful writings and reflection on the human experience they articulate. Of course, since he speaks from experience, he cannot be trusted, because he is self-interested. Yet in taking an interest in the Greek writers and tragedy, Davis shows a way to turn self-interest into interest in the self, something we can all potentially share. Moreover, Davis shows the difficulty with education and the dangers of poetic charm when he interprets the three tragedies. He shows that the tragic poets themselves call to be challenged and, in a way, to have us complete their work, to add intelligence to our passions by reflecting on these passions and on the problems that give rise to them.

The story of Electra is part of the great interest of the second greatest tragic city, Argos. Thebes takes first place, since philosophers from Aristotle to Nietzsche have agreed that the Theban tragedy is greatest, whether the Oedipus tragedy, Sophocles’ Oedipus King or Antigone, or the tragedy of King Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae. Argos is the city of Agamemnon, the king who takes the Greeks to fight the Trojan war. Argos becomes tragic first through the vision of Aeschylus, whose Oresteia, the only extant trilogy in Greek tragedy, follows the fate of Agamemnon, who is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra, and that of his children, Orestes and Electra, who kill their mother in turn. All this leads Aeschylus to Athens and the foundation of political right, of the courts of law and the jury, things of some importance in our own lives.

Sophocles and Euripides then tell the same story as Aeschylus, but with wildly different emphases that raise questions about the nature of tragedy—they are the first interpreters and critics of Aeschylus. An understandable taste for novelty might lead us to want any number of tragedies about the same subject. But a certain seriousness about the life and death issues involved and a certain depth of spirit that helps us understand these greatest Athenian poets as intelligent men both demand that there be only one Electra. While these three tragedians portray Electra differently, their disagreement, after all, implies a common ground—we have to agree that there is something about which to disagree. Davis, in interpreting the tragedies, is therefore attempting to restore a philosophical understanding that has been lost to us. He makes sense of the attempts of the poets to not only imitate human things, but to articulate fundamental human problems and also to prove their wisdom by fostering a way of living fitting for human beings. This also means, of course, that the problems in human nature are permanent. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to understand the tragedies and we wouldn’t need to, either.

The Human Drama

The centerpiece of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, the Libation Bearers, seems to be about granting Electra her wish—the return of her lost brother Orestes, who was taken away from Argos after his mother, Clytemnestra, murdered their father, Agamemnon, presumably in fear for the boy’s life, as a potential avenger of his father and claimant of his throne. Moreover, Electra wants revenge on her mother and her lover, Aegisthus. Electra is a bunch of contradictions. Politically, she is a princess, but in fact powerless; she’s a young woman, but is part of the old regime overturned recently in Argos; and though a woman, she demands a male avenger of the female wrong committed by her too manly mother. Electra’s problem is justice.

When looking carefully at the demand in justice, Aeschylus observes the complexity of the problem that confronts Electra: the wrong to be set right (avenge the killers of Agamemnon) somehow requires the cancelation of time, a return to the past. So Electra pours libations for her dead father and prays that he return to life. Perhaps what she’s wishing for is a world where wrong is not even possible. Tragedy is always full of these problems and Davis accordingly starts his chapters by noticing carefully the puzzles the tragic poets place in the way of our rush to believe what we want about guilt or innocence, about who’s who and what’s what. For example, they show that it is not possible to be innocent while acting to secure justice. Tragedy replicates reality by making details get in the way of our opinions, but it does so in two contradictory ways. The beautiful speeches in tragedy make us believe we understand the protagonists, that we take up their cause, and that they will achieve what we want to see achieved, a just settling of their suffering—they are ourselves, but magnified. Yet the astonishingly difficult language and mysteries in plot or structure force us to delay our satisfaction until it is almost impossible to believe anything ever gets settled. The greatness of tragedy turns out to be our experience of our own lives, which we start by trying to escape through timeless poetry.

Aeschylus’s Electra does not know that Orestes, the brother she wants returned to her as a guarantor that something in the family is maintained must also be the avenger who destroys their mother, in the name of justice, and later goes mad and is therefore lost to her. In her helplessness, she turns from family to politics and becomes part of a political order that demands strict obedience to answers about who’s who and what’s what that her life uniquely reveals aren’t precise or adequate. Her father was not innocent, having sacrificed one of her sisters in order to go to war in Troy. Her mother may have been right to kill him for that sacrifice. Divine providence turns out either to be completely unavailable, since these calamities befall the family, or instead to be political control over life—the law which replaces revenge, a political justice which will turn out at the end of the tragedy to excuse Orestes’ matricide.

Sophocles’ Electra takes up this problem of helplessness as the necessary experience at the origin of our desire for justice, but it also can make justice impossible. Sophocles names the play for the woman and has her on stage pretty much all the time, talking endlessly, never acting. This clarifies Aeschylus’ Electra who is also passive, unwilling to act, but who therefore disappears, letting Orestes do the unthinkable she nevertheless desires. Since it’s impossible to cancel time, all Electra can do is mourn until she dies of mourning. Though she understands herself as the perfect victim, she nevertheless wants her victimhood to be understood and therefore reversed, so she must get justice before she dies, which would come at the price of leaving her with no self-understanding or identity. More than a tragedy of helplessness, Sophocles’ Electra is a tragedy of despair.

Euripides’ Electra is stranger still. She is as talkative as in Sophocles and as political as in Aeschylus, but she believes in none of the things the latter believed and shares not at all in the former’s passivity. She believes she is truly a princess and will do anything to prove it, and therefore she has no shyness about matricide or manipulating everyone around her. She rules by speeches and threatens to transform life itself into merely willful speeches. Yet her astonishing success in dominating the play, as in Sophocles, and in getting what she wants, as in Aeschylus, shows with the greatest clarity how getting what you want might mean losing everything. With Euripides, the problem stated by Aeschylus, the necessary politicizing of nature, of turning revenge into law, family into city, and therefore women into citizens with a share in rule, is radicalized until it’s not clear what is left of nature.

Davis constantly refers to Genesis 1:27: “In the image of God He created it, male and female he created them.” Male stands for politics in Greek tragedy, for action, rule, justice; female stands for whatever is before and after politics—it is passive, weak, and angry, but can also be wise or loving; it is the deeper and more powerful of the two and yet cannot be public because there are limits to our lives and our understanding. Davis shows both the importance of the female to politics, tragedy, and philosophy, and the way we have lost sight of it as a metaphysical as opposed to an ideological concern. We have our own ironic Euripidean victory to regret, which conceals from us the fundamental difficulty of putting together man and woman. We are pursuing a speech about equality, a vision of perfect justice built on an ignorance of what men and women are, as we can see from the terrible unhappiness in our society and the self-hatred shown in the pursuit of fantastic identities by the young. Learning about tragedy might teach us to fight off this attempt to politicize human nature.