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Theatre Journal 55.1 (2003) 182-183



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The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander. By Phiroze Vasunia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. pp. 346. $45.00 cloth.

Beginning with the work of Edward Said, many scholars in diverse disciplines have sought to unveil the specific processes by which Western civilization produced and maintained its fantasies about the East as its "Other." In The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander, Phiroze Vasunia contributes well to this project by examining the specific role of Egypt in the ancient Greek imagination. Although there has recently been an increasing attention in classical scholarship to the Greeks' process of "othering" in their ideology, a process consolidated most notably around the category of "barbarian," as Vasunia demonstrates, his particular focus on Egypt is necessary because of the unique position Egypt held within the Greek category of "barbarian," serving as a source of both admiration and anxiety (2, 6).

As Vasunia recognizes, his project therefore seeks not to outline Egypt as an historical entity, but rather to document the ways in which representations of Egypt allowed the Greeks to examine and define themselves, giving them an imagined space for the interrogation of concepts like tyranny, democracy, history, gender, writing, and human sacrifice (31). Yet, Vasunia, in a gesture rarely taken by classicists, also aims to contrast Greek representations of Egypt with the Egyptians' own conceptions of self and nation (8)—an especially strong feature of his work. So, too, in acknowledging the strong influence of cultural studies and postcolonial theory, Vasunia goes beyond the more traditional limits of classical scholarship, including its often troubling tendency to treat literature as completely isolated from historical context, and admirably attempts not only to consider Greek representations of Egypt in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, but also theconsequences of such representations, that is, the ways in which such representations might have laid the ideological groundwork for Greek colonization of Egypt beginning with Alexander the Great.

Although Vasunia analyzes a number of Greek texts (including Aeschylus' Suppliants; Herodotus' Histories; Euripides' Helen; Isocrates' Busiris; and Plato's Phaedrus, Timaeus, and Critias), his chapter on Egyptians in Greek tragedy might be of greatest interest here. Before examining Vasunia's interpretations, however, it is worth briefly reminding readers of the increasing emphasis classical scholars have placed on the role of Greek tragedy in articulating Athenian self-definition during the fifth century BCE; that is, despite tragedy's notable (and almost exclusive) reliance on mythology for plot and character, classical scholars have recently sought to reveal its persistent reference to concepts central to both the emergence of democracy in Athens at the beginning of the fifth century and to its subsequent collapse by the end of that century, concepts that include political order, citizenship, and social status. In this way, Vasunia's "political" reading of Egyptians in Aeschylus and Euripides' work nicely complements the work of other current scholars who have examined similar traces of contemporary Athenian ideology at work in Greek tragedy. In methodological terms, then, Vasunia's chapter joins other recent work on tragedy in attempting to demonstrate the multiple ways tragedy worked to help enable (or at times, subvert) the polis and the self-conception of its citizens. [End Page 182]

Focusing on Aeschylus' Suppliants and Euripides' Helen, Vasunia seeks to demonstrate the specific and pervasive ways in which Greek tragedy used Egypt to explore sexual anxieties, casting "sexually aggressive behavior . . . as the chief characteristic of . . . Egyptian males" (34). Aeschylus' Suppliants, the earlier of the two plays, portrays the plight of the Danaids, who have fled from Egypt and their prospective cousin-bridegrooms. Arriving in Greece, the women appeal to the king Pelasgus for protection, an appeal that, according to Vasunia, demands the intervention of Greek men and marks Egyptian male desire as violently anti-social. Although the role of the Danaids themselves seems to demand more careful treatment (Vasunia does not give nearly enough attention to the Danaids' own ability to claim at variant points both Greek and Egyptian...

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