In a scenario in which the advance of populist parties suggests changes in penal policies, it is appropriate to return to the issue of the death penalty and the question of the retributive conception of punishment. In a context in which, for electoral purposes, populist drifts use and instrumentalise the simplistic effects of imagining a “society without the offender”, a legal investigation oriented by the Law and Literature method can open up unexplored horizons that do not stop at the didactic-descriptive dimension of events, but widen to a reflection on the ethicaldidactic dimension. In particular, worthy of investigation is an analysis that takes into due consideration the differences in purpose with which, through different schemes, fairy tale and tragedy give rise to a fictitious reality while contributing to the emergence of an alternative world of values that only apparently overlaps with the real world: if, in order to provide children with the fundamentals of moral education, the “fairy tale jurisprudence” is constructed with a deliberately bare representation of reality and centred on the idea that virtue is always rewarded and vice always punished, the political pedagogy of a work such as Antigone is useful in building in the readers of all times more sophisticated interpretative structures in which, regardless of its physical elimination, the true victor can be an unjustly executed transgressor capable of reincarnating into new subjects, in defence of new rights and against the arrogance of new powers.