City of Suppliants: Tragedy and the Athenian Empire

Conclusion

129 The Athenian suppliant plays, whose production coincides roughly with the rise and the decline of the Athenian empire, promoted an image of the city as open to non-Athenians and as bent on protecting the rights of those wronged. At its core lie quintessentially Athenian traits such as justice, piety, compassion , and generosity. Taken together, these plays trace the beginnings of Athens’ preeminence in the distant past and sketch discrete facets of the city’s hegemonic history, past and present. Suppliant drama offered an apt template for articulating the mythical history of Athens’ ascendancy. Her mythical victories in wars, fought on behalf of others, asserted her military superiority and legitimated her claims to leadership. Viewed against the backdrop of empire, the suppliant plays afforded an alternative view of Athenian interstate relations. The suppliants’ interactions with Athens underwrite an ideal model of leadership, based on consent and reciprocity. The free and unimpeded access that foreigners gain to the city represented Athens as an open and inclusive city, intent on punishing injustice and abetting suffering strangers. Funeral and panegyric speeches of the fifth and fourth centuries also promoted a similar portrait of Athenian hegemony . But the justifications that the suppliant plays offered in support of Athens’ leadership were far more complex than those presented by the orators . More specifically, the tragic variety of moral hegemony looked back to Athens’ hegemonic alliance in 478/7 Bc and instantiated Athens’ leadership as deriving from the Athenians’ idealized conception of their past and present conduct. The suppliant plays document the progressive evolution of Athens’ hegemonic ideology in the course of the history of the empire. The panegyric of Athens as a city of justice (Aeschylus’ Eumenides), a free city (Euripides’ Children of Heracles), and a pious city (Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus) varies the coordinates of the shared pattern in response to key transitions during the CONCLUSION CITY of SUPPLIANTS 130 history of the empire. More specifically, Athens’ claims to sole leadership over Greece and the unrest in Athens following the reforms of Ephialtes underpin the negotiation of her representation as a hegemonic city in Aeschylus’ Eumenides. In turn, Athens’ depiction as a free city in Euripides’ Children of Heracles defends Athens against the charge of tyranny and offers a response to Sparta’s criticism at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. Sophocles’ last play is also the last encomium of Athens before the end of the war. Oedipus at Colonus underscores Athens’ reverent treatment of suppliants as the empire was coming to an end. While its outward aim is to defend Athens’ conduct during the war, the manipulation of the play’s hegemonic message suggests that this ideology was by then probably on the wane. Placed against the broader framework of the history of Athenian imperialism , the Athenian suppliant plays also document the progressive evolution of the concept of moral hegemony through which tragedy addresses the evolving realities of Athens’ rule. We can sketch the contours of this evolution as well by situating the development of this ideology against the historical circumstances that prompted Athens’ rise to power. In this regard, the origins of the empire in the Athenian alliance of 478/7 Bc condition the parameters of the dialectic that shapes the suppliant plays, themselves the product of imperialism at a later stage. The confrontation that takes place between Athens and the suppliants’ enemies in the plays provides a foil for the positive character of Athens’ interactions with mythical outsiders.The suppliants’ recognition of Athens’ power and their willingness to reciprocate her generosity in kind idealize Athens’ hegemonic leadership and model the partnerships that issue from them upon the principles of a hegemonic alliance. Closely probed, the plays differentiate Athens’ hegemonic image from the empire’s forceful tactics of domination. The dialectic that the plays mobilize between consent and force is endemic to the process of ideology. The manifestations of Athenian hegemonic ideology are the outcome of a dynamic and open-ended process, conditioned by both external and internal forces. Athenian ideals are defined against the changing historical circumstances of the empire and against other ideologies, which the plays counter, rival, or attempt to align with the message of Athens’ moral hegemony. From Aeschylus’ Eumenides to Euripides’ Suppliant Women to Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, the major changes that the empire underwent under Athens’ imperial democracy left their imprint on the plays, which date to the post-Cimonian phase of the empire. By the 450s, the practices of Athenian imperialism had been more fully...