Ancient Greek
Sophocles
497–406 BC
“For I am taught by suffering to endure, And the long years that have grown old with me, And last not least, by true nobility.”
Sophocles was an Athenian tragic poet and public figure of the fifth century BC. In the written edict of the city meets an older, unwritten law that no ruler may set aside. Antigone buries her brother against Creon's command and appeals to statutes that have always been. In knowledge comes too late and fate works through human choice. The plays leave right and wrong entangled. They open the space in which natural and positive law, duty and civic obligation, will be argued for the rest of the tradition.
In the Conversation
6 of the Great Ideas
Ethics
Justice
There is an unwritten justice of the gods, and a written justice of the city, and there are cases in which a just act under one is a wrong under the other.
Duty
Duties can collide, and when they do, the agent is forced to choose between obligations each of which has a binding hold on her, and no appeal to a higher rule can dissolve the conflict.
Politics
Law
There is a law of the city written and pronounced by its rulers, and there is an older law, unwritten and unfailing, which no edict of the city can set aside.
Family
The claims of blood and of the household are older than the claims of the city, and they cannot be silenced by its edicts without violence to what the living owe to the dead.