As Robert Pirro rightly argues, no one has really studied the link between these two sides of Arendt's thought, that is, her use of the Greek tradition and her storytelling. In his carefully argued and well-documented book, Pirro attempts to “compensate for this neglect by indicating how an unacknowledged theory of Greek tragedy … shaped her understanding of storytelling” (p. 9). He patiently analyzes the distinct foundations and intuitions of Arendt's thought and brings them together toward the discovery of a “theory of tragedy,” which, by analyzing the relation between her narrative method and her admiration for Greek political culture, sheds new light on her work. In so doing, Pirro affirms the relevance of such a theory in promoting contemporary democratic participation, challenging opponents to Arendt's philhellenism, and revealing the task of the political theorist.

The book starts nicely with an analysis of the themes and narrative strategy of Arendt's early article “We Refugees,” which, as Pirro demonstrates, already sets “the basic terms she would use to theorize for the next thirty years about the nature and meaning of politics in the modern world” (p. 5). “We Refugees” reveals two major issues of Arendt's thought. The first is her “struggle both to be a part of and to stand apart from a group of people with whom one identifies,” which is aimed at promoting a “form of public- and critical-minded democratic citizenship” (p. 7). The second is her elaboration of a narrative “that both conveys the shocking novelty of the experiences it recounts and asserts a claim for their exemplary significance” (p. 6).

In chapters 3 and 4 we are shown how Arendt's focus on tragedy follows from these issues. Pirro emphasizes that, according to Arendt, action and freedom need to be limited, or shaped by a stable framework. In other words, contingency appears only in a predetermined structure (pp. 52–3), the lack of which characterizes our modern times. He shows that Arendt distinguishes among three historical periods: a Greek period, during which the stable structures of political freedom were provided by tragedy; a period starting with pagan Rome through to the nineteenth century, defined by authority; and postauthority, contemporary times. In our world, so long as a substitute for authority is lacking, there can be no real practice of political freedom. In ancient tragedy, Arendt finds examples of a political life with a stable framework but without authority, which help her elaborate a postauthority alternative.

Indeed, Pirro's opposition to the widespread view that Arendt is nostalgic for authority is a major quality of his book. Yet, to say that tragedy offers an image of a nonauthoritarian public life does not necessarily imply that the polis was managed in such a nonauthoritarian way. Moreover, Pirro suggests not only that tragedy was, for Arendt, a faithful image of the Athenian polis way of life (p. 75) but also that it promoted such a way of life, that is, a life without authority (pp. 78–9). He is therefore led to the conclusion that Arendt was a pure product of a “predominantly German tradition of thought, which contends explicitly that Greek tragedy acted as the foremost institution of political education” (p. 78). This would be only of historical relevance were not Pirro to suggest that Arendt recommended some “equivalent of tragedy as a contemporary replacement for … authority” (p. 79). This equivalent is storytelling, which serves “to promote political freedom as a mode of being that is accessible, continuous and durable” (p. 76).

To understand how storytelling achieves such a purpose, Pirro turns (in chap. 4) to Arendt's notion of judgment and its corollary, the political spectator. He shows that, again, Arendt finds her examples in Greece, namely, in the Athenian tragic spectator (p. 99). Thus, what seems to interest Arendt in tragedy is not only its educative political content but also a way of listening and looking at the world that tragedy induces in its spectators (p. 139). Pirro then formulates the theory of tragedy implicit in Arendt's work, a theory of “reconciliation and initiative-taking” (p. 142) based on the identification of the audience “with the hero in his twofold role as immortal and as member of the dead” (p. 141).

This formulation of Arendt's understanding of Greek tragedy is highly plausible, as is Pirro's suggestion that her storytelling was intended to replace authority in modern times. Some other claims are less persuasive. Pirro provides many examples of Arendt's analysis of Greek tragedy but almost no examples of her own method of writing. This lack has two main consequences. First, one may still feel entitled to wonder about the modern political relevance of a theory of Ancient Greek tragedy. In other words, Pirro does not evoke the original and new features of Arendt's storytelling and portrays her as focused on preauthority times. Hence, we are still given a “nostalgic Arendt” and find it difficult to understand her contribution to contemporary times.

Second, Pirro provides a lengthy description of the significance for Arendt of tragedy in politics but virtually ignores the tragic features of her own narrative. In other words, he shows what Arendt has to say about tragedy but not what she told tragically. This results in a contradiction. On the one hand, Pirro's emphasis on the importance of storytelling as against or complementary to theory leaves us with a convincing theory of tragedy but fails to provide an account of the political function of storytelling in our times. On the other hand, his exhaustive account of how tragic storytelling worked on Athenian citizens fails to show how a theory of tragedy works on modern citizens. Hence, Pirro fails to contribute to our understanding of how Arendt's theory of tragedy might help resolve modern political problems.