Sociology and the (un)happy endings of ancient Greek tragedy: Some timely meditations on Alexander's Aeschylus

Jeffrey C. Alexander's (2026) recent contribution to the comprehension of how warfare relates to what he conceptualises as ‘civil spheres’ rather strikingly and unexpectedly puts centre-stage The Eumenides , the final play of ancient Athenian tragedian Aeschylus’ Oristeia trilogy. What Alexander might construe as the Athenian civil sphere was at its symbolic foundation made dramatically and rhetorically compatible by Aeschylus with potentially vicious and violent relations with other polities. The problem here may go beyond the making compatible of apparent incompatibles: civility as it occurs within the polity and possibly radical incivility between polities. It may also be that the former is dependent upon the latter as a condition of its possibility. If there is a dark side to modernity, there is also a dark side to Greek antiquity's possible imaginings of what civility is, even in what we might take as its most apparently democratic dimensions. This paper situates Alexander's treatment of Aeschylus within the history of interpretations of the Oristeia , to encourage the author and others to take analysis of Aeschylean themes further for Civil Sphere and other kinds of social theory. The contingent rather than necessary dependence of civil spheres on warfare is emphasised.