Tragic Drama In Ancient Athens

It was in Athens in the fifth century BCE that a democratic system of government seems to have been invented (I guess evolved is the better term), of course, limited as we all know, to property-owning freeborn males, thus disenfranchising all women, foreign born males, and enslaved or formerly enslaved persons.  Still, there was an assembly, and votes were taken and majorities ruled, and these entitled Athenian males could speak their mind whether rich or poor.  The other major assembly of people in that period was the amphitheater carved out of the stone of the Acropolis, the theater dedicated to the god Dionysos, sort of a parallel institution, one might say, where vital questions of the culture were presented through the medium of dramatic enactments of what seems to have been mostly family conflicts; it is not clear from the evidence if enslaved persons or women were habitually free to attend--we do know that foreign born persons were admitted.  Society, some would say, is the family writ large, so it made sense, this focus on family conflicts, and by keeping the families represented in the plays to the various royal families of myth and legend, the audience was sufficiently distanced not to become too distressed.  The action was thus a kind of abstraction--all so very different to the enactments of familial misery in the television of our times, so 'real,' so close to everybody's personal experience, palliated only on commercial television by the relentless, upbeat proclamations emanating from the advertisements ("yes, yes, there is a remedy for ring around the collar!").  Democracy as a political system expressed the people's will, if only in a sketchy way, still does here, sort of, despite the obvious inadequacies and constipation of our two parties, beholden more to special interests; slowly but surely there is some kind of evolution or revolution, change this way or that.  Alongside this democracy the great aristocratic families who lived in the countryside throughout Attica, which is the land mass where Athens is the major city, survived and in their way flourished throughout the fifth century.  Tragic drama expressed the ideology of that era, one based on the tragic sense of life.  As such it was supremely anti-democratic.  Democracy suggests a people in control--in our own time, every man and woman out at Home Depot shopping for lumber, new plumbing, remaking their situation.  An aristocrat is someone born to a social position, an aristocrat has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, not only to assure the material wealth associated with the rank, but also the status and family name.  Tragic drama rehearses again and again the narratives of persons locked into a situation for which there is no exit, horrible and sad for an Oedipus or a Medea or a Pentheus.  Democracy, on the other hand, is all about choice, change, and challenge. I mention Medea, and that was how she is presented in the current production at London's National Theater, superbly acted by all the cast.  And yet, at the end when Medea has killed her children, thus destroyed herself and her former husband, just by rendering them bereft in that impossibly desolate way of parents who lose their children, she is shown to walk off into the dark of the offstage and that is The End.  In the Euripidean text, however, her ancestor, the Sun God, sends a winged chariot that picks her up out of the tragic mess she has created and presumably will deposit her in Athens where she indeed has been offered sanctuary.  So, one is left scratching his/her head: Medea is thumbing her nose at Jason?  Medea goes on to better things?  Medea is a special kind of monster that, like a snake, hisses, bites, and kills, and wriggles off into the grass?  The text suggests something other than tragic action.  Interesting.