This chapter argues that Plato wrote the Phaedo so that we would see Socrates as a philosophical hero, a replacement for traditional heroes such as Theseus or Heracles. The dialogue tells a new sort of story of how a hero faces death, providing an alternative to tragedy, as Plato thought that tragedy was actually practiced. I discuss the topic here because the opening of the dialogue plays an important role in setting up the Phaedo as an alternative to tragedy. But my case’s strength comes from cumulative evidence drawn from across the dialogue, and so this chapter provides an overall reading of the dialogue as an alternative to tragedy. After arguing for this, I turn to two other ways in which storytelling arises in the opening of the dialogue: in Socrates’ Aesop fable and in his dream that tells him to compose poetry.

This chapter examines the antagonistic relationship with Nietzsche’s Greeks that was managed by one of the main writers of modernism, D. H. Lawrence. By thinking about the position of Nietzsche in the British intellectual climate of the early twentieth century, and in particular his association to the anti-Germanic feeling surrounding the First World War, this chapter contextualises the tension between Lawrence’s antipathy towards Nietzsche and the clear resonances between the two authors’ attitudes towards the irrational nature of ancient Greece. The chapter examines the differing attitudes towards tragedy that Lawrence puts forward across his voluminous writings, including especially his 1920 novel Women in Love, his critical-theoretical essay ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ (written 1914/1915, published posthumously in 1946), and his travel writings about his visits to Etruscan tombs. It uses the idea of the ‘gay science’, which Lawrence took from Nietzsche’s work of the same name from 1882, to situate Lawrence’s desire to establish an anti-tragic form of art and literature with a genealogy that stretches back to antiquity.