ABSTRACT
The plot of the play unfolds along the three axes of innovations introduced by Euripides on the myth of the Suppliant Women: 1. The role of Aithra, 2. The necessity of war, 3. The universality of pathos. Central to a tragic plot is the shattering of the omnipotence of hubris and the emergence of a tragic subject who “yokes the yoke of necessity”, and personally accepts that what will befall it has to happen because of an ageless planning by mysterious forces. Politics in a democratic polis is the art that manages the tensions that are inherent in institutions, while at the same time opening them up to unknown new areas. Politics is a struggle to hold unbridgeable deep contradictions, that is, split-off, untranslated, impossible links leading to impasses, and to transform them into paradoxes that we can tolerate in transitional spaces. The subject and the political institutions can be thought as works in progress that hold the integrity of the self and the democratic polis. Humans struggle to achieve an oedipal situation, to suffer their passions and the passage of time, and live inside a common reality, an imperfect society.
