One entrance to Hades, the most important entrance to Hades in, for the Athenians, was in a place called Elefsis.

Okay.

Which is about 15 miles away from Athens, most important ritual site.

And that was the entrance to the underworld, and that was out of there that Persephone returned. Is it a cave? It's a

kind of a hole of a well. There's a well that goes down to Hades and it's even stranger than that.

There's a well that goes down to Hades and that's where Pesophany's mother, Demeter, sat and

wept and she begged Hades or Pluto, and the two names are used interchangeably.

The place where the entrance to Hades is located, is called the plutonium.

The plutonium.

They would have reenacted theatrically the return of Persephone out of Hades back into the light every year.

Hi there. I'm Jason Gatz and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

Well into her 90s, my grandma Selma and I had this running conversation about the state of the world. She'd escaped Polish pogroms as a five-year-old,

lived through the loss of half her relatives in World War II,

and saw the founding of the UN in 1945 and NATO in 1949,

as signs of a world sick of chaos and finally ready to be sensible and humane.

Well, that's not really how

things turned out, is it? And I spent a lot of time trying and failing to reassure Selma that

there was still hope in the world, albeit on a smaller, more localized scale. But what if the

real problem isn't the world but our obsessive tendency to systematize and sanitize it?

My guest today, philosopher Simon Critchley, looks to the form of tragedy in theater,

from ancient Greece to Shakespeare and maybe also to breaking bad, as a possible antidote.

In his new book, Tragedy, The Greeks and Us, he shows us how tragedy works,

...