An account of tragedy on the basis of the courage with which the hero
confronts his boundary situation:
Don Draper accounts that a tragic hero, who as an individual with the quality
of soul that can conquer death, has the courage to face the cruel destiny and
situation which stands in his way.
In the context of
the Fabula Praetexta, plays on Roman
historical topics, which very often seem to have treated an act of heroism by a
recently deceased personage; Seneca’s Octavia
and Sophocles’ Antigone survive the
whole. In the former, the play focuses on the person and history of Octavia,
the rejected and persecuted wife of the emperor Nero. And in the later,
Antigone, a well established character, in pursuit of the tragic cycle and
‘tragic courage' as revealed in her stubbornness, sees her right as a heroic
individual to reject society’s infringement on her freedom to perform a
personal obligation, obvious in her refusal to let Creon dictate what she is
allowed to do with her family members. She says to Ismene about Creon’s edict,
‘He has no right to stay me.’
Asserted by Draper,
the tragic events in a Fabula Praetexta
plays seem to be created and aggravated by the courage of the tragic hero. In Octavia, Octavia states to her Nurse:
Although I may patiently suffer these things,
And appear to tolerate them, my misfortunes
Can never be brought to an end, but by the
Sad alternative means of death!
She dares to be the
character through whose hand shall come the fall of the tyrant ruler, Nero, who
was her brother and now her husband. In the explanatory question by the Chorus
in Octavia, they ask: ‘But where is
the ancient courage of the Roman populace, which often caused the most
illustrious of men to fly for their lives?’ The idea of this is that the
ancient historical plays plug into the fact that a hero is supposed to emerge
with absolute and extreme courage to face the unlikely situation of the
populace or what he, the hero, rejects to be a part of the society, even if he
stands unsupported.
Antigone’s solely
unsupported second burial of her brother is in the stubbornness that the law is
not absolute, and that it can be broken in civil disobedience in extreme cases,
such as honouring the gods, whose rule and authority outweighs Creon’s. In the
issue of this second burial; when Antigone poured dust over her brother’s
corpse, she completed the burial ritual and thus fulfilled her duty to him –
the dead. Having been properly buried, Polyneices’ soul could proceed to the
underworld whether or not the dust was removed from his body. However, Antigone
went back after his body was uncovered and performed the ritual again, an act
that seems to be completely unmotivated by anything other than a plot necessity
so that she could be caught in the act of disobedience, leaving no doubt of her
guilt.
J. L. Rose, in
analyzing Antigone’s courage to bury her brother the second time maintains that
the solution to the problem of the second burial is solved by Antigone as a
tragic character. Being a tragic character, she is completely obsessed by one
idea, and for her this is giving her brother his due respect in death and
demonstrating her love for him and for what is right. When she sees her
brother’s body uncovered, she is overcome by emotion and acts impulsively to
cover him again, with no regards to the necessity of the action or its
consequences for her safety.