What Greek Tragedy can teach us about the Media
How art glues the political community together
Twice a year, nearly the entire population of ancient Athens settled itself into a massive semicircular amphitheater hewn into a hillside on the outskirts of the city. Under the open night sky, tens of thousands of wine-drunk Athenians braced themselves for the Festival of Dionysius—a fierce competition between Greek playwrights to entertain and inform the citizenry, punctuated by discussions and revelries. Not only did these festivals give rise to some of the finest works of human literature, they were critical to the survival of Athens’ often fragile democracy.
In a democracy, decisions are made by the state’s citizens. The fate of the society therefore depends on how well citizens can weigh political issues, and cast their ballots wisely.
Citizens don’t magically have the information they need to cast their votes on complicated political issues. Citizens need tools to help them dissect the delicate moral conundrums that ratchet up tensions in their community. Without a populace able to digest complicated issues on their own terms, the quality of political discourse declines. Then, if internal divisions don’t pull the democracy apart, bad decision making will.
The ancient Greeks solved this problem by cultivating a rich theatre tradition. Our contemporary struggles to hold together fragile democratic institutions aren’t unprecedented. Greek city states weathered storms of misinformation, polarization, and cronyism millennia before us, and we can look at the Greek theatre tradition for guidance on how to manage the threats to democracy we face today.
The winner of Athens’ Festival of Dionysius in 441 B.C. was a tragedian named Sophocles. His winning play Antigone is gripping, sonorous, funny, and shockingly entertaining to read even today. Most importantly, Sophocles quietly gets you to engage with complicated questions of political philosophy, just by following the plot.
Two brothers are dead after leading opposing factions in a civil war in the city of Thebes. A tenuous ceasefire has been reached, and Thebes’ new king Creon is desperate to maintain the delicate peace. He needs to hold the favour of one of the factions to maintain stability in the city state, so he hosts a grand funeral for the brother who died commanding the faction that gained the upper hand.
To send a clear signal to potential rebels, Creon orders the other brother’s body to be left to rot on the battlefield. Creon’s decision about how to treat the brothers’ bodies isn’t made lightly, but he believes it’s the only way to maintain the fragile peace in his city.
Antigone is the sister of the two dead brothers. One of her brother’s bodies has been anointed, and buried with full honours, ensuring its safe passage through the underworld. Her other brother’s body is left to be desecrated by vultures and wolves. Antigone decides to sneak out, visit her brother’s corpse under the cover of darkness, say some prayers for him, and put him under some dirt to keep him from being ripped apart by the wildlife.
Antigone is caught in the act by soldiers, and hauled before Creon. The people of Thebes are growing rowdy hearing about Antigone’s dutiful veneration of the fallen rebel leader’s corpse, and Creon is at a loss about how to hold the tenuous peace in his city. He has no choice but to treat her as a rebel, and sentences her to death. Antigone’s boyfriend is beside himself with grief, and kills himself upon seeing her body. The boyfriend’s mother, an influential noblewoman in the city, also takes her life, and the fragile peace Creon desperately tries to keep spirals into civil war once again.
Antigone is carefully crafted to spark discussion—its message isn’t black and white. We leave the play feeling bad for Antigone, who wanted to pay her respects to her dead brother, but also for Creon, as he wrings his hands trying to find a way to preserve a fragile ceasefire.
After the stage lights dimmed at the Festival of Dionysius, tens of thousands of Athenians gathered their snacks and settled into symposia, where they sipped away at their wine, and discussed Antigone under the starry sky. The play gave them a colourful palette of characters and symbols they could use to have productive conversations about political tensions in their society—the conflict between familial duties and duties to the state, the tension between state power and religious custom, the scope of personal freedom, and the limits of a ruler’s authority.
Since Athens was a democracy, the very same people discussing Antigone at the Festival of Dionysius would vote on delicate issues which often hinged on philosophical questions articulated in the play.
The Greeks understood that stories and symbols can only catalyse fruitful political dialogue if they’re shared. Today, we encourage each other to watch whatever we want, listen to whatever we want, and read whatever we want. Everyone’s phone has become a private amphitheater, feeding them exactly the sort of story that will keep them scrolling as long as possible.
If people hear completely different stories about the upcoming vote, budget, or war, social and political divisions only entrench themselves more deeply. The community as a whole loses the ability to have conversations that get to the heart of the issues they’re facing.
Furthermore, the Greeks also understood that delicate political problems need delicate tools to be solved. Sacrificing literary quality at the altar of ideological conviction is a recipe for disaster; not only do political divides entrench themselves in the artistic world, but people lose the narrative tools to communicate with each other about the roots of those political divides.
There are two important lessons the Festival of Dionysius has for those of us living in 21st century democracies:
First—it’s critical to prevent the media landscape from fracturing further if we want to stand a chance of healing the political divisions tearing our society apart from the inside. We should strive to glue the pieces back together however we can. This means editors, producers, and screenwriters need to shelve their personal political designs, and instead focus on getting as many voters' eyes on the same screen.
Second—we need to prioritize writing stories that help people talk through political issues in a fruitful way. We need to prioritize the sophistication of the art we produce over its ideological conformity, to make sure we have the subtle symbolic tools to engage with each other about difficult issues.
Not all democracies stand the test of time. A house divided against itself, cannot stand. But divisions can be healed if a collective effort is made to see eye to eye—and seeing eye to eye often starts by fixing our eyes on the same screen.