Greek Tragedy and Contemporary Democracy

This engaging work tells the story of democracy through the perspective of tragic drama. It shows how the ancient tales of greatness and its loss point to the potential dangers of democracy then and now.
Greek Tragedy dramatized a variety of stories, characters, and voices drawn from reality, especially from those marginalized by Athens's democracy. It brought up dissident figures through its multivocal form, disrupting the perception of an ordered reality. Today, this helps us grasp the reality of Athenian democracy, that is, a system steeped in patriarchy, slavery, warmongering, and xenophobia. The book reads through two renditions of Aeschylus' Suppliants as democratic texts for the twenty-first century, to show how such multivocal dramas actually address not only the pitfalls of our contemporary democracy, but also a range of environmental, security, socio-economic, and political dilemmas that afflict democratic politics today.
Written in a very accessible manner, Greek Tragedy and Contemporary Democracy is a lively book that will appeal to any political science and international relations student interested in issues of democracy, governance, democratic peace, and democratic theory.

Mark Chou is Lecturer in Politics in the Faculty of Education and Arts at Australian Catholic University. He is also the author of Theorising Democide: Why and How Democracies Fail.

Introduction: Democracy and Tragedy 1. Democracy and Tragedy in Ancient Athens 2. A Multivocal Democracy: The Democratic Impact of Tragedy's Multivocal Form in Ancient Athens and Today 3. Dramatizing Democracy: Introducing Aeschylus' Suppliants 4. Marginal Women, Marginalized Stories: Democracy and the Politics of Fifth-Century Supplication 5. Civilization and Violence: A New Vision for Contemporary Democracy 6. Toward a Multivocal Democracy Bibliography Index