Shaping History By Molding Minds: Confucius and Laozi

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It is hard to imagine a world without television, movie theaters, and Netflix. It also seems to be an impossible feat for the entertainment industry to create one work that can please the masses. In ancient Greece, these would be “blockbusters” were called Athenian Tragedies, and Sophocles and Euripides were masters of this craft. Through their careful interpretation of ancient stories told through oral tradition, they were able to create a legacy of emotional distress and puzzling logic in the best possible way. In “Oedipus the King”, Sophocles analyzes a series of decisions and fateful consequences that led to a king’s demise, or so we are to believe. On a different scale, Euripides’ “Medea” tells the story of a woman scorned, and a revenge that would put all other forms of revenge to shame. Although both Sophocles’ Oedipus and Euripides’ Medea meet the expectations set for an Athenian Tragedy, they stand apart from one another in influence and cultural significance.
Encompassing a wide variety of emotion, an Athenian tragedy can be described as a mixed bag of “compelling stories about human relationships, whose melodramatic plots invite us to think about profound issues…” according to the Norton Anthology of World Literature. (644) It is the ability to manipulate human circumstances in the most outlandish way that grabs an audience’s attention; while the articulation and careful consideration with plot structure and dialogue leaves an audience to ponder long after the story is over. Sophocles took this idea and ran with it when he wrote Oedipus the King, arguably one of the most popular Athenian tragedies ever written. The Norton Anthology of World Literature provides support to this claim by explaining that, “Aristotle descr...

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...y, we learn more about who we are as a society and what we value in entertainment and in life.

Works Cited

Anderson, Joshua. “Sen and the Bhagavad Gita: Lessons for a Theory of Justice.” Asian Philosophy 22.1 (2012): 63-74. Academic Search Complete. Web. 27 Mar. 2014.
Bassett, Samuel E. "Achilles’ Treatment of Hector’s Body." Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 64 (1933): 41-65. JSTOR. Web. 27 Mar. 2014.
Homer. "The Iliad." The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Gen. ed. Martin Puchner. 3rd ed. Vol. A. New York: Norton, 2012. 230-331. Print.
Hume, Robert E. “Hinduism and War.” The American Journal of Theology 20.1 (1916): 31-44. JSTOR. Web. 27 Mar. 2014.
Dvaipayana, Krsna. "The Bhagavad-Gita." The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Gen. ed. Martin Puchner. 3rd ed. Vol. A. New York: Norton, 2012. 1285-1301. Print.

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