Plato against Poets: Public and Privet in Ethical View of Plato and ancient Greek tragedians

Ancient Greek plays, especially tragedies, and Plato's dialogues are two main sources of investigating the ethical perspective of the ancient Greeks about morality and moral choices. These two sources are opponent with each other and show different approaches to morality and the role of emotions in moral choices. That is the reason for the animosity of philosophers and poets according to Plato. In this paper, I will focus on the three famous plays of ancient Greek tragedians, i.e. Agamemnon by Aeschylus, Medea by Euripides and Antigone by Sophocles; in comparison with the Plato's Republic, to examine two different views on ethics and priority of moral choices in the public and private spheres. At the same time, I examine the role and moral agency of women in these works. Again, I examine the significance of emotions and moral values associated with femininity in both points of view. In the end, I conclude that the tragedies standpoint pays more attention to the emotions in ethical life and recognize the feminine approach to ethics; meanwhile, tragedies show concrete and contextual understanding of human problems in ethical life and all these facts provide sufficient reason for re-reading and re-examining them from a modern point of view.