Abstract

The introduction traces the relations between burial practices and the rise of the polis in ancient Greece to show that the creation of the city-state was accompanied by an exclusion of dead bodies from urban zones. The city, it seems, was grounded in the difference between life and death. The chapter also describes the importance of tragedies to the civic life of fifth-century Athens, since they were spectacles that staged the state's origins and pondered the legitimacy of its legal structures. In a dissimulated way, the status of the individual and the value of his or her private life played a crucial role in these deliberations. Sophocles's Antigone exemplifies these issues, and to better understand the relations between tragedy, the city, death, and individual life, we should consider not only the play and its historical context, but also the long and rich history of its exegesis, especially in the wake of Hegel's pivotal analysis.

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