In this studio version of his 1979 Hannah Arendt Memorial Lecture, with which he inaugurated a new annual series at the University of Southampton. Dr George Steiner looks at the treatment of remorse and justice in the Book of Job and in Sophocles' Antigone, with the aim of clarifying the ancient polarity between Athens and Jerusalem. between the Attic and Hebraic readings of man's membership in the world. He raises the question as to why absolute tragedy is such a rare form and his inquiry brings him down from the ancient world through Kino Lear to Franz Kafka , Osip Man delstam and Paul Celan.