Plays have spawned no more central or enduring questions than the nature of the order over which the gods of the Greek pantheon preside and to what extent and in what manner human beings should revere them for it. The tragic consciousness of responsibility appears when the human and divine levels are sufficiently distinct for them to be opposed while still appearing to be inseparable. The tragic sense of responsibility emerges when human action becomes the object of reflection and debate while still not being regarded as sufficiently autonomous to be fully self-sufficient. The particular domain of tragedy lies in this border zone, where human actions hinge on divine powers and where their true meaning, unsuspected by even those who initiated them and take responsibility for them, is only revealed when it becomes a part of an order that is beyond man and escapes him. When members of chorus in Agamemnon indict regicide, Clytemnestra, for her crime against the state and yet freely admit to her the appropriateness of her moral outrage at her husband's crime against the family, they find themselves in the same moral dilemma as the one Agamemnon faced at Aulis.
Men are self-determining centers of decision free enough to act in response to religious ananke.
That Agamemnon so responds and the chorus members do not challenges the impartiality and univefsality of even the most primitive sense of law and rebritution and raises issue of theodicy all over again. Divine ordination of human events remains a contingent reality, ever vulnerable to the potential improprieties of human free choice. Source of evil destiny of heroes and houses in tragic poets lies in the faulty praxis of men's highest virtues, not divine malice. They degenerate into a social anomie that, at one extreme, leads to thoughtless submission to conformity and, on the other, to arbitrary and anomalous acts of deviance. Aeschylus and Sophocles acknowledge the interdependent threat of these twin perils to genuine polity through their repeated juxtaposition of the group conformity and collective irresponsibilitiy of the choruses' conventionally pious but ever inconsequential deliberations with the precipitous, exclusively self-determined commitment to righteous action of the heroes.