After a brief overview of Heidegger’s motivations and interest in engaging Greek tragedy understood as a downgoing in the realm of shadows, this chapter addresses three shadow figures that mark Greek tragedy as an experience of the uncanny – Oedipus, Antigone, and Medea. Whereas Heidegger addresses the first two figures at length, there is no mention of Medea in his works. By focusing on the notion of passion for being (originally advanced by Heidegger’s reading of Oedipus), this chapter explores relations of homeliness and unhomeliness, internal and external enmity, family and polis, citizen and foreigner/stranger, love and resistance, trust and betrayal of trust in Heidegger’s reading of tragedy. Ultimately, the chapter points to Medea’s (absent) character as a needed figure to maintain Heidegger’s relation to tragedy open to the possibility of a politically and existentially non-totalizing way of thinking aligned with Heidegger’s initial ambitions when returning to Greek tragedy as a theme for philosophy.

The Introduction outlines the historigraphical, conceptual and methodological underpinnings of the work. The concept of enmity allows us to rethink some common assumptions about the emergence of the European state, the law, violence and innate emotions. I am concerned with real people and their experience. Enmity is rooted in the ubiquitous nature of competition and rivalry between individuals and groups. Enmity is distinguished by the intensification of antagonism in which another group or person is perceived as threatening and must be countered by force. It is a relationship legitimised by a narrative which seeks to demonise the other, who is characterised as evil or subversive or a threat to one’s existence. The movement is not all one-way. We can make allies out of enemies or return to a healthy sense of rivalry. Enmity represents a particular threat to democracy whose flourishing relies on a healthy civil society and sense of social trust. In the period 1500-1700 the distinction between public and private enemies was more blurred than it is today because of the frequency of civil conflict. The transformation of social relations in the West was not the culmination of an ineluctable process, either of state formation or of the repression of instinct.

This chapter considers the impact of the wider political environment on social relations. The word ‘quarrel’ had different meaning for early modern English people. Manners were not progressively civilised: the rise in the homicide rate between the 1570s and the 1620s came at precisely the same time that new ideas and codes of behaviour were imported from Europe. Ciceronian ideals ennobled the pursuit of private enemies in the name of the public good. In the first decades of the seventeenth century the distinction between public and private became highly charged with a moral force and potency, which drew upon classical republicanism, traditional ideas of the commonwealth and radical Calvinism. The chapter traces the fortunes of the English quarrel. It looks at the nature of the spike in violence in the period 1570-1620; assesses the role played by civil society in mediating quarrels before the civil war; reflects on what contemporary ego-documents have to say about enmity; and concludes with some speculation about the reasons for the second spike in elite violence, 1660-1720.

Women’s social relations and mobility are the main focus of the fourth chapter. Ties of friendship and love, but also enmity and hate, figure prominently in the first part of the chapter. It includes inscriptions mentioning women setting up a statue for, or receiving one from, a male or female friend, providing for a friend’s burial or including friends in their own tombs (and vice versa), but also curse tablets in which women figured both as commisioners and as targets.The second part deals with women’s involvement in patronage, their various engagements with the voluntary associations (collegia) that shaped social life in Roman cities and their presence in the main centres of social gathering: the baths, the theatre and amphitheatre. The final part of this chapter deals with inscriptions testifying to women’s travels and migration, showing thatwomen travelled for various reasons, mostly with their families but sometimes on their own (with a retinue), over considerable distances. The chapter ends with foreign (non-Roman) women migrating to Rome and Italy.