The founding insight of tragic wisdom is that all are born to die. Herodotus tells a story that the Persian king Xerxes wept as he watched his magnificent army stride past him on its way to defeat and near destruction at Greek hands. The king couldn’t have known he would lose, but he knew that even the youngest, strongest, and most indomitable of his warriors would be dust in time. This is the poignant knowledge of what it means to be human that defines tragedy.

From the Greeks to modern times, the incontrovertible fact of human mortality marks the most sorrowful works of imagination. Even when the tragic figures are kings and nobles, the perfect democracy of death prevails: Hamlet and King Lear (“Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life / And thou no breath at all?” laments Lear over Cordelia’s body), John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil (“Webster was much possessed by death, / And saw the skull beneath the skin,” as T.S. Eliot put it), John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea (“No man at all can be living forever, and we must be satisfied”), Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (“Stay around and they would kill you”), and the philosophizing, sometimes tenderhearted and sometimes iron-hearted, of Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Unamuno, and Heidegger.

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