Navid Hokmabadi; Ali Salmani
Abstract
In Greek tragedies, we face a form of cosmic justice and fate that strikes us as strange. Oedipus punishes himself for his unintentional sin. Antigone is paying for her family deeds, ...
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In Greek tragedies, we face a form of cosmic justice and fate that strikes us as strange. Oedipus punishes himself for his unintentional sin. Antigone is paying for her family deeds, Prometheus is punished through his benevolence, and Ajax becomes the puppet of the gods. In all of the mentioned tragedies, and generally in all Greek tragedies, we face a kind of fateful justice, which seems unjust in the standard perspective of modern man. Reading these classic tragedies, we encounter the following question: What did the Greek mind think of righteousness and justice? And In general, what kind of legal system does Greek tragedy promote, which is strange to us? This paper tries to answer the above questions by exploring the concept of justice in the three areas of naturalism, metaphysics, and politics of Presocratic thinkers. In order to achieve this, we place the main focus of this research on the tragedies of Sophocles’ trilogy; Oedipus the Prince, Oedipus in Colonus, and Antigone. These three tragedies, which illustrate the sinister fate of the Labdacides progeny, respectively, are good examples of examining the notion of justice in Greek thought, and refer effectively to various aspects that the concept of justice brought to the mind of the Greeks. These aspects are peculiar to the Greek mind and can be understood only in the sphere of philosophical thought of classical Greek time
