Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece

Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (French Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne, 1972 and 1986 in two volumes, English translation 1981 and 1988) is the joint work of Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet through which the Paris school of structural anthropology of the ancient world made its major statement on Greek tragedy.

The central argument reframes tragedy as the literary form proper to a specific historical moment: the fifth-century Athenian polis in which the older heroic code of archaic Greece met the new civic and juridical institutions of the democracy, and the dissonance between them became representable only through tragic form. The tragic hero is suspended between two systems of moral-psychological accounting — the archaic error of the hero and the civic deliberation of the citizen — and the tragic pleasure is the recognition of this suspension. For the Seba lineage, the work is load-bearing for its reading of the ambiguity of agent and function and the double motivation of tragic action. See jean-pierre-vernant and marcel-detienne.

Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece

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