Euripides: Suppliant Women (review)

Ian Storey's volume on Euripides' Suppliant Women is the nineteenth volume in the Duckworth Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy series. Storey's book offers a valuable and wide-ranging treatment of one of Euripides' less commonly studied plays that fits the aim of the series to provide "accessible introductions" to ancient tragedies.

Chapter 1 ("Prelude to a Play") provides the background necessary for setting the play in its context. It offers an overview of other treatments of the myth, highlighting the innovations of Aeschylus (in his lost Men of Eleusis) and Euripides in presenting Theseus and Athens as the solution to the impasse between Thebes and Argive Adrastos. It also delineates the roles that Thebes, Argos, and Athens played in myth and sketches the historical back story of relations among these cities both before and during the Peloponnesian War. The section on the implications for the play of its setting at the sanctuary at Eleusis is particularly interesting. The chapter closes by examining the vexed question of the dating of the play (Storey favors 424 or 422 bce; although he acknowledges that this is "a matter of personal judgment," the time chart on page 157 lists "424 or 422" as opposed to the date ranges or circa notation employed for other plays), and speculates on which other plays Euripides might have presented alongside it.

The next four chapters offer a sequential analysis of the play itself. Chapter 2 ("Adrastos' Supplication") begins by drawing attention to the importance of supplication in Greek literature and unpacking the meaning of the act and its dramatization. Storey is surely right to argue that Adrastos and Theseus "both disappoint in their initial appearance" (33), though Theseus's list of the gifts given to humans by the gods is not as simplistic and generic as he suggests: the catalogue opens with reason and language (see Shaw 1998, Mendelsohn 2002, and Morwood 2007 for the importance of these in the play) and closes with prophecy. Later the author helpfully points out the basis on which Theseus refused to grant the suppliants' request: not because of fear of incurring the enmity of a powerful adversary in doing so (the grounds for hesitation in Aeschylus's Suppliants and Eumenides), but because the expedition that Adrastos mounted was impious and unjust. Appreciating this fact highlights the crucial role of parent-child relationships in the play: Aithra succeeds where Adrastos failed because of the special bond she shares with her son. Storey explores Aithra's central role in this scene both in terms of the rhetoric by which she persuades and in the staging of the scene.

Chapter 3 ("Confrontation with Thebes") opens with an analysis of the debate between Theseus and the Theban herald, offering a sensitive treatment of the political nuances of their word choices. There are many cross-references here to treatment of similar themes in Thucydides; these are illuminating, though it would be helpful to point out that these correspondences do not imply direct influence. The editor draws attention to the failure of these verbal contests to effect resolution, and to the disturbing notes that sound in the messenger-speech and the ensuing exchange and that color the otherwise heroic scene of Athenian victory.

Chapter 4 ("Mourning the Dead") discusses the aftermath of the successful supplication. Storey introduces several key interpretative questions. In discussing the question of what we are to make of Adrastos's eulogy of Kapaneus (860–71) in the light of the messenger's earlier characterization of him, he does an excellent job of representing the variety of possible responses while also finding room to express his own viewpoint. For Storey, Adrastos's comments are an example of the victor rewriting history. Adrastos's rehabilitation of the monstrous Kapaneus prepares the way for the startling scene that follows, in which Euadne's devotion to Kapaneus inspires her to kill herself rather than be separated from him. The editor's commentary on Euadne's suicide is a particularly salient example of the...