The great classicist Edith Hamilton, writing in 1930, explained that tragedy is the beauty of intolerable truths, and that real tragedy is not the triumph of evil over good but the suffering caused by the triumph of one good over another. When the ancient Greeks realized that there is “something irremediably wrong in the world,” while such a world must be judged “at the same time as beautiful,” tragedy was born. “The great tragic artists of the world are four,” Hamilton announced, “and three of them are Greek”: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The fourth, of course, was Shakespeare. Precisely because Periclean Athens and Elizabethan England were periods of “unfathomable possibilities”—and not periods of “darkness and defeat”—the idea of tragedy could flourish. Those audiences, separated in time by over 2,000 years, were awestruck by the heroic and often futile struggles against fate, even as they were in a position—owing to their own good fortune—to accept it with serenity. To be clear, tragedy is not cruelty or misery, per se. The Holocaust and Rwanda were certainly not tragedies: they were vast and vile crimes, period. “The dignity and the significance of human life—of these, and of these alone, tragedy will never let go,” Hamilton observes. Thus, the tragic sensibility is neither pessimistic nor cynical: rather, it has more in common with bravery and supreme passion. Not to think tragically is to be “sordid,” she writes.
Tragedy is the beauty of intolerable truths.
Because the ancient
