  Ancient Greek sculpture, which Hegel would have known almost exclusively from Roman copies or from plaster casts, presents what he calls pure or “absolute” beauty (PKÄ,  124). It does not, however, exhaust the idea of beauty, for it does not give us beauty in its most concrete and developed form. This we find in ancient Greek drama—especially tragedy—in which free individuals proceed to action that leads to conflict and, finally, to resolution (sometimes violently, as in Sophocles’ Antigone, sometimes peacefully, as in Aeschylus’ Oresteian trilogy). The gods represented in Greek sculpture are beautiful because their physical shape perfectly embodies their spiritual freedom and is not marred by marks of physical frailty or dependence. The principal heroes and heroines of Greek tragedy are beautiful because their free activity is informed and animated by an ethical interest or “pathos” (such as care for the family, as in the case of Antigone, or concern for the welfare of the state, as in the case of Creon), rather than by petty human foibles or passions.  These heroes are not allegorical representations of abstract virtues, but are living human beings with imagination, character and free will; but what moves them is a passion for an aspect of our ethical life, an aspect that is supported and promoted by a god.