Antigone’s Judicial Hierarchy Essay -- Sophocles Antigone Papers

Antigone’s Judicial Hierarchy In Antigone, one of the most renowned Greek tragedies, Sophocles constructs a conflict that questions the very definition of justice. Considering a play based almost entirely on the acts of a single individual in clear defiance of a king’s decree, questions of right and wrong necessarily persist. It is difficult, however, for one to understand justice in deciphering the opinions of the two conflicting parties, Creon and Antigone, as these two clearly have opposing biased perspectives. It becomes prudent to examine the concept of justice in the eyes of the chorus, who has the necessary perspective to provide unbiased commentary in Antigone. Throughout Antigone, the chorus constructs a judicial hierarchy in which the subjects of the polis must submit to the laws of their king, and the king must fulfill his obligations according to the universal law established by the gods. The judicial hierarchy of Antigone is established early on in the tragedy, and is finally articulated clearly in the final lines spoken by the chorus. For the chorus, justice requires that the ruler of a polis have absolute power, and that his subjects follow his decrees to the letter. Early on, the chorus says, â€Å"to use any legal means lies in your power, both about the dead and those of us who live,† (ln.213-214). This could be interpreted simply as a citizen appealing to the hubris of his ruler, straying from honesty and moving toward appeasement, but given the manner in which the chorus interacts with Creon later in the play, it is much more likely that he truly believes that Creon, or any leader for that matter, is just in demanding that his laws be followed by his subjects. The implication here is that Creon has absolut... ...us in Antigone constructs a controversial conception of judicial hierarchy, which places accountability for the actions of a country’s subjects in the hands of the ruler and the accountability of that ruler in the hands of the gods. According to this system, both Antigone and Creon are guilty of injustices, and both received the just punishment for their actions. Antigone suffered at the hands of her ruler for the violation of his decrees, and rightly so. For what is a constitution in which the word of the sovereign is inefficacious? Creon suffered at the hands of the gods, to whom he alone was accountable. The pain that he feels as a result of the death of his son and wife is swift retribution from the gods, cutting off his foolish path, a path toward injustice. Works Cited Sophocles, Antigone. Trans. Grene. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991.

People Who Are Making a Difference in the World

PEOPLE WHO ARE MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD Thurday 12/03/09 1. I’m Bob Doughty. 2. And I’m Barbara Klein with EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English. Today we tell about five individuals around the world who are making a difference. They are making the world a better place by helping people in special ways. 1. Our first individual who is making a difference is a refugee from Burma. Thousands of people flee Burma each year to escape poverty, oppression and civil war. Many of them choose to stay in Thailand. Cynthia Maung is a Burmese doctor who operates a small public health center near the Thai border with Burma.She is making a difference in her community by providing services that are not available to most people in this area. 2. Many people are waiting at the public health center. Mothers and their children wait in line to get vaccines to protect them against diseases. In another line, parents with newborn babies wait for documents that show their babies were born i n Thailand. The documents take the place of birth certificates. Thai officials do not recognize these people because they are refugees. But Doctor Cynthia Maung does. 1.Doctor Cynthia, as she is called, fled Burma in nineteen eighty-eight after a military campaign against people who demonstrated for democracy and justice. She says she joined with the demonstrators. She says people started disappearing or fleeing to the border when Burma’s military seized power. She decided to settle near the border to work for political change. 2. In a small building, Cynthia Maung started performing operations and helping women give birth. She cleaned her instruments in a rice cooker. She also trained young volunteer health workers.Today, those workers treat people for landmine injuries and many diseases. Her health care center receives donations of money from non-governmental organizations and foreign governments, including the United States. 1. Doctor Cynthia makes a little money go a long way. Each year, one hundred fifty thousand people come for treatment. Those who can, pay less than one dollar. 2. Doctor Cynthia lives next to the health center. She says the workers there do not only treat diseases. They also educate young people who go back and support health activities in their communities.For example, the center trains volunteer health workers who go back to work in the ethnic Karen and other areas of Burma. Some of the volunteers are former patients who are now helping others. Doctor Cynthia says young people should be taught not to feel like victims. Instead, she says, they should see themselves as people who can change and improve their situation. 1. Theary Seng is a human rights activist working to heal her country, Cambodia. As a child, she lived through the rule of the Khmer Rouge during the nineteen seventies.During four years in power, the Khmer Rouge was responsible for the deaths of at least one million, five hundred thousand Cambodians. Theary Sengâ €™s parents were among those killed. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge, she escaped to Thailand and then went to the United States. She attended law school and became a lawyer. 1. Now, Theary Seng is back in Cambodia, supporting human rights as the head of the Center for Social Development. She is a critic of corruption and abuse wherever it exists — in Cambodia and around the world.At a recent demonstration in Phnom Penh, she attempted to leave flowers to honor those killed in the civil war in the Darfur area of Sudan. But Cambodian government officials prevented her from doing so. 2. Theary Seng takes a special interest in the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. The court is starting to take legal action against former Khmer Rouge leaders for their crimes. She serves as an official representative for the victims. 1. She also has a television show. It seeks to find the country’s next generation of young leaders.Theary Seng says her work is not to do anything big but to be a com mon citizen in her homeland where she suffered in the past. THEARY SENG: â€Å"And now, I’m taking that suffering, and shaping it into hope, and trying to work with individuals who had not the time and space to heal that I’ve had. † 1. William Saydee is making a difference in his country, Liberia. In Monrovia, the capital, the sound of typing mixes with the sound of cars in the street. Mister Saydee is a clergyman and former accountant. (SOUND) He now works as a typist and teacher. He is teaching unemployed Liberians how to type.The students do not pay him anything. One of the students is Isaiah Thomas. He says he is learning to type because he wants to work for an international company. 2. William Saydee says he wants to help young people gain a skill to succeed. He says it is the best he can do to help Liberia re-build after years of civil war. Mister Saydee earns money by typing contracts and other documents, like resumes. A resume is a list of a personâ€⠄¢s education and work experience. It can be useful when a person is looking for a job. (MUSIC) 1. Comic book artist Robert Walker is making a difference in New York City.He uses his art to help people understand the disease AIDS. Many children and even adults in the United States enjoy reading comic books. Superheroes in comic books have unusual abilities. They use their abilities to help people and save the world. Like most superheroes, Mister Walker’s characters have special powers. For example, one superhero can see in the dark. One can lift more than three hundred tons. Another can come back from the dead. Also, like most superheroes, his characters have to deal with trouble. These superheroes all have H. I. V. , the virus that causes AIDS.Mister Walker says some members of his family died of AIDS when he was a child. That gave him the idea to create a comic book called â€Å"O Men. † It includes nine characters living with H. I. V. The characters are men and wome n who represent different races and socio-economic groups. They also were infected with the virus in different ways. Mister Walker says he wanted to fight depressing images connected with the disease. ROBERT WALKER: â€Å"It’s not a black disease. It’s not a white disease. It’s not a gay disease. It’s a disease of humanity that lacks awareness. † 1.Gerry Gladston is the co-owner of Midtown Comics in New York City. He says many comic books have important political, social and educational messages. Mister Walker spoke to many H. I. V. and AIDS organizations in researching his comic book. He says he wanted to make the stories realistic as well as factual. 2. Yohannes Gebregiorgis is an Ethiopian-American who returned to the land of his birth to make a difference. Yohannes, as he is known, became an American citizen many years ago. But he gave up his life as a children’s librarian in San Francisco, California.Yohannes says he was concerned that Ethiopian children had no books. He said most schools in Ethiopia do not have libraries. There are almost no children’s books in any of Ethiopia’s many languages. So Yohannes started the Donkey Mobile Library to provide children with their first books. His group brings books to children who have none. YOHANNES GEBREGIORGIS: â€Å"Most kids we have noticed holding a book upside down. We have taken pictures of those kids. But later on we find out that those kids learn how to use the book, how to flip the pages and to look at the pictures and then gradually to read the stories in the book. 1. More donkey mobile libraries are planned, with money from groups in the United States. Donated English-language books have begun arriving in Ethiopia. Also, Yohannes has established a publishing company to produce books in languages that local children can read. His first book was published in three languages. It is a re-telling of an old folk story about, what do you think? A boy a nd his favorite animal — a donkey! 2. In the beginning, children came to the mobile library mainly because of the donkeys. But Yohannes discovered that what really excited the children was the books.He dreams about taking his donkey mobile libraries to more Ethiopian towns and villages. After all, there are millions of other children who want to learn to read. 1. This program was written by VOA correspondents and adapted by Shelley Gollust. Our producer was Mario Ritter. I’m Bob Doughty. 2. And I’m Barbara Klein. You can download audio and read scripts on our Web site, voaspecialenglish. com. Join us again next week for EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English. http://blog. 360. yahoo. com/blog-Z3b93Sw5dKiGLDSLftiVYk1BXzLWCwAr3Q–;_ylt=AkizEO6ZhqbgHK3F3A9hoyK0AOJ3? cq=1

Comparing Mans Downfall in Second Coming and The world...

Mans Downfall in Second Coming and The world is too much with us Although W.B. Yeats wrote roughly a century after the Era of Romanticism, his Romantic precursors influenced his writing greatly. One of his most famous poems, The Second Coming, echoes both Blakes The Book of Urizen and Shelleys most ambitious poem Prometheus Unbound (Bloom 530). Despite less criticism on the relationship between Yeatss poems and the writing of another one of his Romantic predecessors, William Wordsworth, Wordsworths reproach of greed and materialism in a waxing industrial society influences Yeats poetic interpretation of the apocalypse. Both Wordsworth and Yeats depict mans downfall; The world is too much with us foreshadows and†¦show more content†¦Frustrated, Wordsworth declares that he and his society lay waste [their] powers admitting to the evils of their frivolousness. Although humans efforts would be much better directed toward Nature, their greed and self-indulgence have brought them to the point where they can hardly identify with Nature anymore. With the act of giv[ing] [their] hearts away in line 4, Wordsworth voluntarily accepts that the humans can not help themselves but need divine aid. The complaint of the poem might thus be rewritten, the world is too much with us: not enough in us, of us (Levinson 645). Mans loss of focus on Nature, described in the first four lines of The world is too much with us results in a loss of control of Nature in lines 1-4 of The Second Coming: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world (Yeats 2280). Ostensibly, Yeats echoes Wordsworths first line, Little we see in Nature that is ours. However, Yeatss portrayal of mans break with Nature seems more urgent than Wordsworths did. The falcon (mans mastery of Nature) cannot hear the falconer (man) not because the bird wills disobedience, but because it has spun too far out to hear its master (Bloom 531). While the men of The world is too much with us spend their time absorbingShow MoreRelated Comparing the Epic of Gilgamesh, Hesiods Theogony, and Ovids Metamorphoses3432 Words   |  14 PagesComparing the Epic of Gilgamesh, Hesiods Theogony, and Ovids Metamorphoses   Ã‚   There are many parallels between the Epic of Gilgamesh, Hesiods Theogony, and Ovids Metamorphoses. The first similarity is immediately apparent: structure. We can view the structure of the Gilgamesh story as three concentric circles: a story within a story within a story. In the outer circle, a narrator prepares the audience for the primary narrative, contained within the second circle: the tale of Gilgameshs adventuresRead MoreEssay on Silent Spring - Rachel Carson30092 Words   |  121 Pagespublic image was irrevocably transformed. 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