ABSTRACT
In Greek tragedy, catastrophe joins together human activity with the divine, as in plays like Antigone or Oedipus Rex. Literally, it was the ‘turning downward’ of the plot in a classical tragedy; traditionally, it occurs in the fourth act of the play after the climax. There is perhaps nothing as profoundly ‘Greek’ and as ‘tragic’ as these Sophoclean tragedies: indeed, as we ( nd in Antigone: ‘Great words of boasting bring great punishments.’
