Concept
The idea of the precise boundaries of existence and the need to live within those boundaries, beyond which dramatic costs are paid, permeates ancient Greek theater starting from the first surviving text, the first of all Western theater, Aeschylus’s “The Persians” (472 BCE). In the central scene, Darius explains to his courtiers and Queen Atossa the reason for the surprising defeat at Salamis. His son Xerxes had demonstrated hubris, that is, arrogance mixed with pride, by crossing the limits imposed by nature on all men, creating land where once there was sea and vice versa.
This arrogant defiance had caused a resounding defeat and the end of the Persian Empire. The tragedy also stages the first visible conflict between the West (the Greeks) and the East (the Persians), delineating boundaries that even today seem impossible to heal, pacify, or quell. A clear boundary is also the one imposed on the Thebans by King Creon through the ban issued in Sophocles’ “Antigone” (442 BCE) against anyone who attempts to bury the country’s enemies. The first of those enemies, Polynices, is for the young Antigone her brother. Thus, Oedipus’ daughter transgresses that prohibition, ‘shouted’ in a public proclamation and imposed by a temporary political power, opposing the strength of her own conscience and the unwritten law of the gods, which requires her to honor her brother and cross that barrier, even at the cost of her own death.
A few years later, Euripides’ first surviving tragedy, “Alcestis” (438 BCE), was staged. The prologue is already a struggle between the god Apollo and Death, who sets boundaries that cannot be crossed. Alcestis, however, “is alive and apparently dead”, the only character in Greek tragedy who acts ‘in limine mortis’, and exits the stage, in an ambiguous ending, in the same condition. The boundaries between real life and that envisioned in the afterlife are tenuous in this tragedy, perhaps the most elusive of the entire 5th century BC. Is it possible to draw, and do they really exist, impassable lines of demarcation?