A ship races across the Eastern Mediterranean, fleeing Egypt for the turquoise water of Nafplio Bay. Fifty maidens on board await landfall. They are the suppliants. They are seeking refuge from their fifty cousins, Egyptian princes who seek their hands in marriage.

Their ship anchors near Argos. The maidens walk to a sacred grove and statuary and are met there by King Pelasgus of Argos. The offer their supplication and beg for protection. The decision is difficult for the King. Protecting the women from their cousins risks war with Egypt. And the women are from Libya, not Argos. But they claim to be descended from Io, the daughter of Argive and first princess of Argos.

Pelasgus takes the decision to the citizens of Argos, who choose to give refuge to the women. An Egyptian herald lands and rudely orders the women, also daughters of a king, back to his ship. The stage is set for conflict.

The Suppliant Maidens, also called The Suppliants, The Supplices, and Hiketes, is Aeschylus’s first play in the The Danaids. The two other plays that belong to the trilogy and the concluding satyr play are lost to history. Since the extant material is limited, I’m covering the entire series in one post.

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High on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, the Temple of Apollo sits on a wide terrace, jutting over a lush and verdant valley, defined by steep green walls blanketed with olive trees, myrtle, oleander, and bay, all leading in a winding canyon passage to the gulf of Corinth. Inside the temple, Pythia, the high priestess and voice of Apollo once sat in a cavernous interior room on a bronze contraption that straddled a naturally occurring chasm steaming with intoxicating vapors. She breathed in fumes and breathed out prophecy. If this sounds too fantastic to be true, let it be known that nineteenth century scholars also believed they had debunked this history as fiction, but geological science has since confirmed -- there was indeed a chasm in the temple.

The Eumenides opens at the temple, where the oracle of Delphi resides. Pythia, the high priestess, fears reentering her own temple. Sleeping figures litter the ground inside. One is a man holding a sword dripping with blood. The rest are female. Noxious fluids drips from their eyes. She finds them repulsive, poorly dressed, and they snore. They are the Furies, elder gods of family, lineage, and blood.

They have been lulled to sleep by Apollo, patron of Orestes. Their sleep allows Orestes, the figure with the blood-covered sword to survive another day of flight. Clytemnestra’s ghost appears and urges the furies back to chase her son and murderer. She communicates with the Furies through their dreams. But she is too late. Hermes leads Orestes safely to the Acropolis and the temple of Athene. Soon after, the Furies arrive, clamoring and violent. Before they can exact their revenge, Athena appears in full armor.

As would be expected, Athena, goddess of wisdom, excels at taking ahold of the situation. She quickly establishes what has happened – takes in the gravity and depth of the conflict between Orestes and the Furies. Who can say which party is in the wrong? She decides the question, the depth of the conflict of values, is so profound that one person alone – even one god or goddess – cannot decide it. In a remarkable moment, she constitutes a jury of twelve Athenian citizens. The Furies serve as prosecuting counsel; Apollo defends. Each side presents its case. The jury deliberates and splits evenly. Athena breaks the tie in favor of Orestes. (Having no mother, she is partial to fathers.) Orestes is saved.

But the Furies swear revenge on Athena and Athens, threatening to let their vindictive passion fall like blood upon the ground, sowing disease where it lands. Acknowledging their claim, Athena attempts to assuage their anger. She offers them a place at the heart of Athens, central to the life and welfare of the city and its inhabitants. Revered among gods and worshipped by the people. Now known as the Eumenides, the newly christened elder goddesses bless Athens with magnificent waves of sunlight and happiness. And perhaps most importantly, they protect Athens from the endless and futile violence of civil strife.

At this point, you should picture me getting up out of my desk chair, circling the house, jumping up and down a little, shouting incomprehensible things to my husband, whatever. I just have to let off a little steam because the social science of this is so strong, so important, so impactful, so insightful. I honestly can’t believe we haven’t been teaching Aeschylus as social theory all along. I have actually introduced it into my courses, and let me tell you, it is a hit.

So, what is this about? Just small topics, like the birth of democracy, the invention of a criminal justice system, the resolution of social conflict, and the improvement of society through the creation of new institutions.

It is honestly just stunning to see all of these topics tackled so profoundly in such a brief number of pages.

First, I think we have to acknowledge that this ending challenges our notion of what tragedies are meant to be. Tragedy is now synonymous with the extremities of sadness, disaster, melancholy, misfortune or adversity. But this is not a sad ending. The ending is a celebration, a singing procession of citizens newly united in harmony, and settled in a fertile land filled with gentle breezes, translucent sunlight, and nature’s bountiful harvests.

It should be clear why this trilogy inspired Hegel in his understanding of the dialectic. Where in Agamemnon and The Libation Bearers, we have protagonists and antagonists that are equally matched, only The Eumenides brings these two opposing forces into peaceful resolution through an inspired synthesis, which is the institutionalization of criminal justice and rule of law. Athena creates these institutions by applying reason to the problem of community violence.

The happy outcome bolsters my larger argument in this series that the tragedies were about social intelligence more than creating some consistent emotional state for the audience. This trilogy explains why we need democracy and the rule of law. And now we can see that Orestes hamartia was that he was unaware of the transformative power of institutions.

We know from the first two plays, Agamemnon and The Libation Bearers, that conflicts will arise in society even when people are well-intentioned – in the sense that they are pursuing goals of moral worth. Pursuing those goals can bring people into practical conflict. This is an emergent feature of the complexity of social existence. The complexity at this point has also caught Orestes, the Furies, Apollo, and even Athena in its net. Athena uses the sword of intellect to cut through the mess.

She introduces democratic procedures by constituting a committee of twelve. Is there any better solution to an insoluble problem than creating a committee? Not in academia!

In all seriousness – group decision making has many advantages. The benefits, the drawbacks, and when and where it is best applied is an active frontier of research in social science, the boundaries of which were reported by journalists like James Surowiecki and actively investigated by scientists like Damon Centola, Douglas Guilbeault, Duncan Watts, Scott Page, and Hélène Landemore.

In this case, the advantages are clear. Athena provides a specific rationale. “The matter is too big for any mortal man.” It has already proven too grave a matter for Orestes. He was forced into the role of judge, jury, and executioner, which led to his present predicament. The 12-person jury can provide the additional wisdom of 11 more people, which should help. But to be honest, we have already established that there really is no right answer in this complicated case. So, the jury has another role. It legitimates the decision by giving it the imprimatur of the group – and it removes the decision-making body from the cycle of endless violence. They are too far removed from the context of violence, too large in number, and too bound by formal procedure to become a new target of revenge and retribution.

Interestingly, the source of the idea of appointing twelve jurors in the US legal system is often reported as the Welsh King Morgan of Glamorgan, who chose 12 jurors based on the 12 apostles. Another theory suggests it arose out of an ancient council of judges formed from the 12 tribes of Israel. What a coincidence that this first extant chronicle of legal institutionalism should also have a jury of 12! Or perhaps it is not really a coincidence.

Another way that Athena has brilliantly circumvented the cycle of violence is by putting coercive power at the center of her institution, which is of course the incorporation of the Furies and their transformation into the Eumenides. In this genius move, she has reduced the violence external to the system (the furies were both violent and outside the system) and reinforced its authority over the populace. They must now respect the system of law not only for its value and judiciousness, but also for fear of the rage they might suffer at the hands of the elder gods.

Durkheim makes the same argument in his treatment of organic and mechanical solidarity in The Division of Labor, and again -- not by accident. It is more evidence of the influence of the classics on social theory.

Because the new synthesis of legal justice does not eliminate revenge or violence. Instead, those elements are enshrined at the very heart of the new system. Even the validity of the system – in terms of identifying who was right and who was wrong – is never established. They were both right. And yet, to end the cycle of violence, one party had to be vindicated and another found wrong. So, in the future, Athens could expect laws and justice, to be applied with all the vengeful, spiteful unearthly force of the furies. And whether the judgements are correct or not, is secondary to the fact that they have been made by a group of citizens. Order has been established, harmony and grace restored, but there is also a cost.

And yet, there is agreement that this outcome, nothing less than the institutionalization of a new criminal justice system, is better than the unregulated violence that preceded it. And here again is a true lesson for building social intelligence and more intelligent societies. It is possible, though difficult, to craft institutions that can improve social existence, increase cooperations, reduce conflict, and nurture a prosperous and harmonious community. This certainly is not the same as saying that all institutions are good. Some institutions, even those created by well-intentioned people, are going to make things worse. But this is again the task of the tragedian and social scientist, to consider when the worst unintended consequences created by the endless exigencies of social circumstance can be averted and avoided.

The same lesson is applied to an entirely different context in The Suppliant Maidens, where we must think about love and romance as a great problem of social existence that must also be managed – and has been managed – by social institutions.

References and citations:

Emile Durkheim. The Division of Labour in Society (1893)

Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel. Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (Doubleday, 2004)

Damon Centola, Goodthink: The New Science of Collective Intelligence (Penguin Random House, 2026)

Damon Centola, Douglas R. Guilbeault, Urmimala Sarkar, Elaine Khoong, Jingwen Zhang. “The Reduction of Race and Gender Bias in Clinical Treatment Recommendations Using Clniicial Peer Networks in an Experimental Setting. (Nature Communications, November 2021)

Winter Mason and Duncan Watts, “Collaborative learning in Networks” (PNAS 109 (3), 2012)

Scott Page, The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off in the Knowledge Economy (Princeton University Press 2017).

Hélène Landemore, Open Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2020)

Overview – This entry is part of a series that distills social intelligence from classic Greek tragedies. The Libation Bearers tackles a central question in sociological theory, what is the relationship between freedom and constraint. How are we to think of the idea of free will or choice in a world that dictates and limits the actions we can take. Understanding that there is a relationship between freedom and unfreedom is a hard-won lesson in social intelligence.

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It is also difficult to begin with the beginning of The Libation Bearers, but for an entirely different reason than Agamemnon. The only copy of the play to have survived beyond the medieval era was brought to Florence in 1423 by Giovanni Aurispa. At some point in the four hundred years since it was first transcribed in Constantinople, several pages were ripped out. They were from the very beginning of the play, which opens with Orestes addressing the audience -- noted as a particularly famous passage by Aristophanes. The speech is delivered in front of Agamemnon’s tomb, and Orestes is soon met there by a procession of slaves bearing pitchers of precious drinks.

Slavery, as well as democracy, existed in ancient Athenian society. Prisoners of war, like Agamemnon’s captive Cassandra, were taken as slaves and debtors were forced into lifelong servitude, devoid of basic rights. Slaves worked in mines, in the fields, and as household servants. The slaves who serve as the chorus in the play accompany Electra, sister of Orestes, daughter of Clytemnestra, to pour offerings of milk and honey or water and wine on the grave of her father Agamemnon. This offering is not like white carnations on the green grass of a fresh grave; they are not a token of remembrance. They are an attempt by Clytemnestra to appease the vengeful spirit of the deceased that she believes plagues her nights with dark visions and sleeplessness.

In true tragic form, Clytemnestra’s attempts to avoid a specific fate ends up ushering it forward. The nightmare that drove her to send libations to the tomb was a vision of a snake swaddled in baby’s clothes, sucking from her breast, drawing blood as well as milk. The symbolism is clear to all characters. Clytemnestra dreams of Orestes, whom she fears may return to Mycenae to avenge his father. Electra bitterly resents the insincerity of her mother’s offering and resents being subject to her commands. But following her mother’s orders leads Electra to Orestes. At this reunion, they plot the death of their mother and her consort, Aegisthus.

Orestes, who has not been home for many years, is to pretend to be a weary traveler knocking at the gates of the palace for shelter. With this ruse, he gains entrance to the palace, kills Aegisthus, then finds himself torn and troubled by the second task that he has had set before him. After a long disquisition, he overcomes his qualms and kills his mother.

Clytemnestra now suffers the same fate as her husband, the ultimate reversal of fortune, and pays for ignoring how Agamemnon’s death affected not only the protagonist and antagonist, but also those around them – in this case, their children. Her peripeteia, like Agamemnon’s, hinges on lack of social knowledge.

Agamemnon and Clytemnestra were triumphant after their horrific deeds because of their lack of regard for others. In contrast, Orestes is destroyed by his act and its consequences for others. “Pain flowers for him” after the murder. His torments become manifest and he sees black gorgons coming for him. Nightmare visions in the waking world, with eyes dripping blood and dark mantles of pulsing, intercoiled snakes wreathed over their shoulders and falling down around their bodies. These demons – the furies -- chase him from the stage and out of Mycenae.

The horrors of Orestes amplify and repeat central themes already present in Agamemnon. The cycle of violence runs on through like a perpetual motion machine, dragging generation after generation of Atreides into its destructive motor. But the emphasis of The Libation Bearers, the lesson in social intelligence, is different.

Agamemnon and Clytemnestra drive forward the violence through their own machinations. Orestes and Electra are victims of a momentum they cannot reverse.

Once the choice is made Agamemnon does not hesitate to sacrifice his daughter. There is no record of agony or regret. Clytemnestra does not waver in her bloodthirst. There is no remorse, no second guessing. The two parents even profit – in the short term -- from their despicable acts. Agamemnon gains glory and victory in war. Clytemnestra takes the throne of Mycenae for herself.

The unwholesomely matched pair either do not truly realize or do not truly care how their actions will affect others. Orestes and Electra, in contrast, are weighed down -- as if by a thousand tons -- with the knowledge that they are contemplating actions that are evil and will bring evil to others. The lesson in social complexity they present to the audience is different from the lesson of Agamemnon.

Orestes and Electra are both free citizens, considerably freer than the slaves of the household, and yet they refer to themselves as slaves. They are bound to the acts they believe they must take. And most of the play is spent debating whether they should take those actions.

Electra deliberates over how to perform the ritual libation without begging favor for her now-despised mother or disrespecting her now-loved father. She is as free and unfree as the slaves that accompany her. All have been commanded to pour the libation, but all retain some freedom in choosing how to go about it. In either case, “the day of destiny” awaits them all.

Orestes is also acting under duress. The god Apollo has commanded Orestes through the oracle at Delphi to kill Clytemnestra. And he did not simply deliver an order, Loxias (the title for Apollo as oracle) threatened Orestes with madness, horror, and even leprosy should he fail in his duty.

Whether Orestes will ultimately do the horrible deed lies at the center of the dramatic tension of the play.

The chorus repeatedly vocalizes their anxiety that Orestes will not actually go through with it. Uncertainty haunts the long discussion between sister and brother at the graveyard. When Orestes meets Aegisthus as the play nears conclusion, the chorus agonizes: will the traitors be allowed to live and complete the ruin of the house of Agamemnon or will Orestes act and begin its redemption? After the death of Aegisthus, they describe Clytemnestra’s neck as on a razor’s edge. A thin line separating life from death -- depending on the choice of Orestes as to whether or not to act decisively.

And despite all his reservations and attempts to evade the burden, Orestes eventually does act.

By dramatizing his decision, making it the crux of the dramatic arc, the play raises the question of when does the freedom to choose actually occur, when does an individual’s will – their will to act in the world -- guide action? And the answer seems to be that the will to act arises when choices are difficult – when there are constraints upon action.

Orestes and Electra are free and unfree. They are slaves under the reign of their mother, and slaves to the murder that is asked of them by the gods. Neither path produces something like freedom, yet they are free to choose between them.

Choice, action, free and unfree. All of this comes together in the metaphor introduced early in the play that reappears in the final pages. The net that bound Agamemnon. This net arguably binds all the characters.

The net is social structure.

Social structure is the emergent product of the combined set of actions and interactions of a large population. The competitive pressures of the market, for example, emerge from the combined actions of a great many people trying to do something for themselves – but their actions produce constraints and effects for other people. In this case, the combined actions of the Atreides produce a net that constrained their fates and actions. A net so tight it felt like enslavement to Orestes, but that also created a juncture in which Orestes had to make a crucial decision. In social theory, the terms used to describe comparable situations are ‘structure’ and ‘agency.’ Structure is the set of circumstances that determine possible paths of action, created by the complex interactions of other elements of social life. Agency is the control an individual may exert over what action they take. As Aeschylus explores, these two poles, that seem to exist as opposites, are in fact very closely interrelated. This is part of the complexity of social existence.

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Agamemnon begins so horribly, I don’t want to begin with the beginning. I don’t think Aeschylus did either. He begins the play ten years after the true starting point, with a solitary watchman standing on the roof of the palace. From his perch, he sees why he has been posted to watch: a distant flare lights up the skies far across the dark night waters of the Mediterranean. It signals the victory of the Achaeans in the Trojan War and is a sign that the King, Agamemnon, will be returning to Mycenae.

If you would have second thoughts about welcoming this guy into your home, you are not alone.

It is what the King did before going to war that ignites the motor of the complex plot of the play. In order to set sail in a dead calm, to join his brother Menelaus in avenging the abduction of Helen, Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter, by his own hand. Killing her on an altar. In the words of the play, ‘as if a goat.’ I don’t know if it is possible to imagine a worse act. Whether this act is a crime, whether it can have any possible justification, and how to meet it properly is central to the conflicts that unfold across the three plays of the Oresteia.

Clytemnestra, the queen and wife, joins the watchmen and chorus. She feels joy at the return of her husband. But her joy lies in the pleasure she expects to take in killing him. She intends to avenge the death of her beloved daughter.

If it is horrible that Agamemnon took his daughter’s life—and I don’t mind saying that I think it was horrible – he did so because a goddess demanded it. Artemis required the sacrifice to restart the wind, which she had calmed, that could fill the sails of his navy. If he did not set sail, the battle could not be won. The battle was fought to avenge the theft of Helen from Menelaus, Agamemnon’s brother. If Helen could not be retaken, his brother’s honor could not be avenged. This long-chain of inexorably linked circumstances is a hallmark of emergent systems – and of Greek tragedy.

The chain of actions and reactions that led to this act of sacrifice stretched beyond the Trojan War. Agamemnon came from a family with a long and bloody history of violence. His great-great-grandfather, Tantalus, was condemned to the torment of eternal and unquenchable thirst, with water held just out of his reach. This is the origin of the word ‘tantalize.’ It was a punishment for a crime similar to Agamemnon’s, but one that was, or is now, even less comprehensible. To test the omniscience of the gods, Tantalus killed his own son, and served him as a meal on Olympus, to see whether the gods would eat human flesh. Disgusted, the gods condemned Tantalus to eternal punishment—and also showed mercy. They brought his son, Pelops, back to life.

But the act of mercy did not end the violence. Two of Pelops’ sons, Atreus and Thyestes, fell into a bitter feud. Atreus killed Thyestes’ sons and served them to him for dinner. Atreus bore Agamemnon and Menelaus, who were cursed from birth because of their father’s (and great- great- grandfather’s) actions.

This backstory underscores—but does not excuse—the cycle of violence and generational abuse that preceded Iphigenia’s murder.

Clytemnestra had been set on Agamemnon’s death since the sacrifice of Iphigenia and did not hesitate to take a lover to help. That lover was none other than Agamemnon’s cousin, Aegisthus, the only surviving son of Thyestes and bitter enemy of Atreus and his heirs.

Clytemnestra and Aegisthus kill Agamemnon, stabbing him to death over a carpet of deep crimson. Clytemnestra wields the knife. The murder, an act of vengeance, is a classic reversal of circumstance, the king brought low: peripeteia.

These two characters are locked in a conflict created by their situation and the different motivations, goals, and desires they embody. There is another Greek word central to the tragic tradition that can help guide us: Hamartia. For Aristotle, Hamartia is an error made because of inadequate knowledge of circumstance. It is also the cause that leads to peripeteia.

So, one of our guiding questions to understand the value and import of the play should be what kind of circumstances must be known to avoid the tragic reversal of fortune.

The problem is not that the main characters held what would have been considered reprehensible values. The full scope of Clytemnestra’s downfall has not yet been revealed in this first play, but the act of the murder of her husband is unmistakably wrong to the other characters of the play. Nevertheless, her motivations are not wrong.

She is a mother. Anyone who threatens or harms her offspring will suffer from her hand. This is how she protects her children. If she represents a value, it is the value of motherhood and family. A commitment to our offspring, our sons and daughters, or perhaps, in a larger sense, our bloodline, family tree, or kin.

Agamemnon also represents something, though I believe that for modern readers it is a little less clear than Clytemnestra’s motivation. A common interpretation is that Agamemnon represents civic duty and the needs of the state. He is going to war, which is a state action. This lends support to this interpretation. But the war he is going to is based on personal grievances—and represented as such in the play. If there is any refrain to the chorus, it is how awful it was that such small decisions made by so few people— Paris and Helen—led to the mass shedding of blood and the deaths of so many Greeks and Trojans. And the war does not lead to greatness for Mycenae. It more closely resembles a blight, one that ruined the city when it was deserted by all the able warriors, an entire generation of men, for a full decade. And many of those men—husbands, sons, and fathers—never returned to their family or city but instead died in the battlefield or on the treacherous sea journey home.

The specific lines representing Agamemnon’s fateful decision, in Richard Lattimore’s translation, speak of his “faith of battle,” a toughness that led him to “stay the strength of war, waged for a woman,” and “the kings passioned for battle.” These words do not indicate a commitment to governance or civic duty. They speak of militarism, the heroics of the battlefield, a desire for glory, and the defense of challenges to those ideals. Agamemnon is supporting his brother, who is also his brother-in-arms, so there is a fraternal element, which may be interpreted as familial or about loyalty more generally. All of which is also layered within a family history, which given all the crimes against children, a modern reader might interpret as a history of abuse, something we have found in modern research makes future instances of abuse more likely.

If we as modern readers might be more skeptical of the value of militarism than ancient Greeks, it is also true that Agamemnon is humble on his return, while Clytemnestra is spiteful. Neither is meant to be entirely in the right. And Aeschylus did not mean for the audience to think that either was completely in the wrong. Instead, we have a conflict between two people triggered by very specific social and political entanglements that caused these individuals to make reasoned decisions based on their own values that perpetuates and escalates a cycle of violence.

If moment of reversal is not dependent upon the choice of wrong values, which would be the domain of ethics, philosophy, or possibly education. Perhaps social science can help us to understand which circumstances went ignored and where things subsequently began to go wrong.

Let us begin with the existence of intergenerational effects, a.k.a. the curse of the Atreides.

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“What has this to do with Dionysus?” The phrase—which I desperately hope comes back into circulation—dates to 6^th Century BCE. It was a crowd critique used to shout down parts of the festival of City Dionysia, a week-long festival honoring the god of wine and harvest.

The 500s BCE were a turning point for Greek society. The religious festival honoring Dionysus was taking on new social and political dimensions -- evolving in form as well as content. Thespis introduced a stunning new idea, an actor stepping apart from a chorus and speaking imagined lines directly to the audience. By the 5^th Century, Aeschylus had introduced the idea of two actors speaking to each other. Drama was born, and it took the form of tragedy.

Not everyone embraced the change. If the plays were not admired, the unhappy playwright might hear a yell from the stadium seats: ‘what has this to do with Dionysus?’ The saying outlasted the festival more than two millennia—used as an oblique jab accusing people of speaking nonsense. Its persistence is a reminder of the continued controversy over what the tragedies actually meant—what they were intended to convey to audiences. A question that is still being fought over by readers, audiences, and experts.

Why the confusion? The tragedies were performed at a week-long celebration of Dionysus, yet they barely refer to the god. It is hard for us now to say whether they were fertility rites or political theater. Were they meant to induce catharsis and ecstatic revelation or sober rationality? Are they immoral, as Plato would say, or profoundly moral? Are they art, ritual, or something else entirely?

I’m here to take a stand in this argument. To me it seems perfectly clear that the tragedies were unarguably tools for understanding the complexities of social existence. As a social scientist I believe I can recognize social science when I see it. And I assure you that the tragedies contain profound and enduring insights into how and why people act the way they do. They provide a deep and perhaps unparalleled source of social intelligence.

Consider Oedipus Rex, written by Sophocles, first performed around 429BCE.

A child is left to die on a hillside, but someone hears it crying. The infant is rescued and adopted by a generous and apparently kind and noble family—the king and queen of Corinth. The child’s adoption sounds at first like a moment of exceptionally good luck, a reprieve from cruelty, but in fact it pushes the child forward into a future of profound misery.

The child was left to die on the hillside because its parents received a prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother. When grown, the young man (who is of course Oedipus) receives the same prophecy. The Oracle of Delphi was nothing if not consistent.

To avoid the horrific fate, Oedipus leaves the city. Very soon after setting out, he gets into a traffic altercation, which escalates quickly. In the resulting fight, he kills an older man guilty of insulting his honor by ordering him off the road. The man is his father, but he doesn’t know that yet. Continuing down the road, he runs into a sphinx. The sphinx asks him a riddle about the life course of a man. Oedipus solves the riddle, defeats the sphinx, and saves the city of Thebes. The city rewards him by crowning him King and marrying him to the queen, whom he does not yet know is his own mother. Eventually, the truth of his parentage is revealed. In a fit of unendurable agony, he stabs out his own eyes.

The plot is often taken to convey a deep truth about the inexorability of fate or destiny. It is deeply layered, so more than one interpretation is possible. But this common read ignores something truly fundamental to what the tragedies were meant to accomplish.

Everyone agrees that Oedipus blinding himself is symbolically important. So, we should ask, what was Oedipus blind to? And the answer is very simple. He was blind to his relationships.

We usually know who we are related to, but that is something we have knowledge of, not something we perceive through our senses. No red line pops into view linking everyone tied together by blood lineage. No hue or halo lights up around our friends when we see them. They have no special scent of orange blossoms or old books. Enemies cast no special shadow.

This is a problem of social perception. And it can be a very serious problem, if for example, you are trying to determine whether someone is your friend or enemy. It was certainly a very serious problem for Oedipus. His agony was caused by the simple fact that he did not know to whom he was related. And, it turns out, that is really important knowledge to have.

Oedipus Rex is the most famous of the tragedies, and rightfully so, because it captures the essential project at the heart of the transformation of ritual into drama. The narrative arc hinges on the character’s lack of social awareness. And this is what tragedies did—they preserved and communicated social intelligence—knowledge about the intricacies and complexities of social existence. Awareness of social relations, social ties, and even social networks. If Oedipus had more knowledge of his social position, his family ties, he would have avoided the tragic outcome.

Seen from this perspective, tragic plots alert people to the danger of ignoring social complexity.

Much like fate, social relationships bind us in complex patterns. Different relationships crisscross people and communities in dense networks that constrain knowledge and opportunity—and have the potential to subvert the relationship between what someone intends and what they bring about. In the tragedies, deeply held beliefs about justice, honor, and the greater good drive individuals into action. Oedipus was motivated by honor and the desire to help others. But those intentions led him—and other tragic figures—to commit atrocities. This aspect of the tragedies is so central, it has its own word: peripeteia.

Since ancient Greek is no longer a living language, there is disagreement over the precise meaning of peripeteia. The roots are peri, ‘around,’ and peteia, ‘to fall.’ This indicates a fall around—a reversal. Aristotle defined it as “a change by which the action veers round to its opposite.” It is the reversal of fortune that grinds heroes to dust, turns the richest kings into beggars, and dishonors the honorable.

Peripeteia fills the pages of literary history. It takes shape when Squire Allworthy kicks poor Tom Jones out of the house, when Othello begins to suspect Desdemona’s fidelity, when Newland Archer steps onto the street from the stairs leading out of Ellen Olenska’s apartment and realizes the people shying away from him are right, he actually is guilty of having an affair. It is even the supremely oedipal moment when Darth Vader’s intones the immortal phrase in that deep baritone: “Luke, I am your father.”

These moments reverse fortune and defy intention. Jones wanted nothing more to stay in the house of Squire Allworthy, Desdemona desired (and deserved) only love from Othello. Newland Archer considered himself the epitome of moral virtue, and Luke did not fly to Cloud City to fight his father.

Reversals like these elicit empathy and emotion in the audience by conjuring the fragility of human existence (as per Walter Kauffmann and Margaret Nussbaum). This is important. However, also important is the more commonly ignored fact that they dramatize—in a highly telegraphed fashion—a very common and eminently recognizable part of human existence: unintended consequences.

We have so many names for this: luck, fate, Murphy’s law, side effects, secondary consequences, collateral damage, accidents, the cunning of reason, invisible hand, and emergency. In the same way that the word ‘tragedy’ is associated with the terrible, emergency is associated with dangerous or life-threatening. But it originally meant ‘the rise of a submerged body above the surface of the water.’ In the sciences, emergence has come to mean the process where the composition and relations between components of a system or entity take on properties or behaviors not possessed by the parts themselves.

Emergence is when the structure and complex relations show themselves, rise above the waters, by affecting what we would otherwise expect to be a straightforward path between individual actions (and intentions) and the outcomes they produce. Like submerged rocks or coral reefs, we cannot see them directly above the water, but we can see their effect on the surface of the water. Peripeteia captures and describes moments when the complexity of social existence affects individual lives. And by describing peripeteia, the authors of the Greek tragedies gave audiences vital information about the complex system of relations and social institutions that exerted indelible, but difficult to observe force on their everyday lives. The exact thing that Oedipus was blind to. This is what the tragedies are about.

In short, the citizens of ancient Athens needed help with social complexity.

Ancient Greece is often imagined as the Arcadian paradise of pastoral meadows, bright sunlight, cool streams, and olive trees. But it was also a society undergoing rapid change. Increasing urbanization was challenging the efficacy of the traditional clan structure. Conflict was rampant. Cleisthenes instituted sweeping democratic reforms that used spatial, organizational, and procedural strategies to weaken the ties of family and strengthen the bonds of civic community. He introduced transformative institutions including democratic citizenship, voting rights, and trial by jury.

By the early 400s, workers were carting white marble from Mount Pentelicus to construct buildings that reflected those new institutions: The sturdy doric columns of Parthenon, the graceful statues of the Erechtheion, and the delicate fluting of the Temple of Athena Nike. They were all testaments to the newly created democratic institutions. These construction projects took place during the life of Sophocles and Euripides, as they were writing their masterpieces, which, amazingly, were just as enduring as the marble buildings.

Like the buildings, the tragedies were both models of and active forces shaping society and civic participation. Sitting together as an audience, divided by a carefully ordered seating arrangement into clans, Athenian elites collectively learned what it meant to be a citizen, how to participate in democracy, and how to navigate the overlapping and contradictory obligations. And perhaps most importantly, they learned about the ways that the complexities of social existence could distort the relationship between intentions and outcomes: the problem of emergence represented as peripeteia, twists and turns of fortune that cannot be predicted or understood based on intentions alone.

They passed along truths about social life that far outlived the society of the time.

Tragedies were invented to help people understand and manage the many difficulties that plague social existence. We love people, we depend on others, but they also drive us crazy. That is a tragic paradox. Why have the tragedies endured so long? Because they help us deal with that paradox—not because they are about Dionysus. It is because they are one of our best tools to navigate social relations and complexity.

In the next posts, I systematically explore the idea that the tragedies contain social insights that resonate with the knowledge we have built up over time in the social sciences. Weekly posts will focus on one tragedy. And the result, I hope, will unlock some of the deep insight in both the tragedies and social sciences to help readers build and expand their own social intelligence.

In the next post, the first play of the extant trilogy of the Oresteia.

Relevant and recommended citations and sources:

Belfiore, Elizabeth. “ΠΕΡΙΠΕΤΕΙΑ as Discontinuous Action: Aristotle” Poetics” 11. 1452a22-29.” Classical Philology 83, no. 3 (1988): 183-194.

Kaufmann, Walter. Tragedy and Philosophy. Doubleday, 1968.

Nussbaum, Martha C. (Martha Craven). The Fragility of Goodness : Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Winkler, John J., and Froma I. Zeitlin. Nothing to Do with Dionysos?: Athenian Drama in Its Social Context. Princeton University Press, 2020.

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