Video Title: Gerry Rose: Greek Tragedy and Statecraft. Source: OaklandLYM. Date Published: July 28, 2012. Description:
March 5th, 1996 Chicago Il. Gerry Rose lectures on Greek tragedy and statecraft, demonstrating why Shelley claimed that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". It is entirely lawful that Shakespeare should accomplish in four plays of some hundred pages, what the two most prominent historians of Rome, Edward Gibbon and Theodor Mommsen, could not do in several thousands. For, from its very inception, Classical tragedy took its impulse from the question of statecraft: What kind of government is best to increase the happiness of the population? And so, beginning with Homer, Classical tragedy has always been "political."
