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The Great Conversation: How Should We Live?

  • Abigail Adams Institute 14 Arrow Street Cambridge United States (map)

How should we live? This question lies at the core of what it means to be human. In volume I we explore the “best which has been thought and said” from the dawn of civilization through the fall of Rome. Today’s session is on Antigone:

The life of Sophocles spans most of the fifth century B.C., which sees the rise of Athenian hegemony due to its leadership against the invading Persian Empire, the cultural development of democratic Athens in the age of Pericles, and the disastrous Peloponnesian War. Sophocles was the preeminent playwright of the century. His Antigone grapples with what the higher law might require of us in opposition to the apparent demands of political order.