The idea that the march of history moves in a particular direction, developing in a linear fashion upward to irreversible progress, is one that dates from the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century, with its belief in the triumph of science and the spread of the catastrophic optimism of Marxist theories, was the period when those ideas superseded a concept of cyclical history characterized by regressions and leaps forward … The birth of these views in the nineteenth century … made it possible to establish the idea that time is a neutral quality that is measurable and is characterized by non-repetition. In the magic, primitive view, in contrast, time is apprehended as discontinuous (periods of disorder or festivity alternate with the everyday), uneven (some days are propitious, some unpropitious) and cyclical (by analogy with natural, organic rhythms).

[T]ragic representation becomes central to civic discourse in moments at which the city seeks to question its own value or sustainability, as in fifth-century bce Athens. Tragedies like Oedipus and Antigone ask us to consider how we can best … transmit the conditions of living with one another … Indeed, it may be that we come to measure the significance or value of our bodily lives together in terms of its worldly inheritability – the relative transmissibility of rights, entitlements, possessions, institutions, and prerogatives that we might wish to bestow on those we love.