Science Is Proving That Tragic Curses Are Real
In the first lines of Sophocles’ Antigone, the title character bemoans her fate to the chorus:
How many miseries our father caused!
And is there one of them that does not fall
On us while yet we live?
Antigone must reckon with the choices her father Oedipus made and the slippery, obscure moral inheritance that he leaves her. She ultimately chooses to pay with her life, not for her sins, but for her father’s.
Children reckoning with and reenacting the sins of their forebears is a key part of the tragic form. The great Greek tragedians—Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—incorporated ancestral fault into their works, as Orestes, Electra, and Antigone reap what their powerful but monumentally flawed parents sow. The Greeks took the idea of moral inheritance well past the stage, weaving it into the fabric of their society, from elegiac poetry to philosophical treatises to medical literature. Ancient Greek philosophers like Hermias and Proclus were known to have used medical imagery to illustrate the concept of delayed punishment.1
The data are showing us that descendants undoubtedly bear the imprints of ancestral violence.
In the ensuing centuries,
