City of Suppliants: Tragedy and the Athenian Empire

Introduction

1 In this book, I argue that the depiction of Athens as a city that welcomed suppliants from other cities lends insight into the Athenians’ view of their empire . Athens’ compassion and generosity toward suppliants became a topos in Athenian civic ideology and was employed to justify possession of her empire.1 Athenian tragedy praised the city’s altruism and denied that the pursuit of power was a factor motivating the Athenians’ interest in helping others.2 Yet Athenians outside the theater justified their rule over other Greek cities more bluntly, often by asserting that the strong rule over the weak or by claiming that ruling over others allowed them to maintain their own freedom .3 My analysis traces the historical development of this ideology in the Athenian suppliant plays, Aeschylus’ Eumenides (458 Bc), Euripides’ Children of Heracles (ca. 430 Bc), and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (ca. 407/6 Bc). Viewed as a group, these plays affirm the belief that Athens ruled justly and benevolently. Many of the memorable disenfranchised figures of tragedy, such as Orestes and Oedipus, are gravely defiled by crimes they have committed against their kin and unable to reclaim their ties with their native cities. Others, such as Heracles’ children, lose their home and are relentlessly pursued by a tyrant. Athens earns her reputation for magnanimity repeatedly by surmounting successfully the obstacles that impede the reception of the suppliants into the city (e.g., heavy pollution or war by pursuers). Athens reaps significant benefits by incorporating these foreigners into the civic body, often as cult-heroes (e.g., Oedipus in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus or Eurystheus in Euripides’ Children of Heracles), because they bring some special boon. This book is not a study of all the plays that are grouped under the category of suppliant drama. Instead, it offers case studies of three plays, one by each of the major playwrights, which taken together contribute to a new understanding of supplication and its relevance to Athenian hegemony. Because most of the suppliant plays are staged in Athens, one of the objectives INTRODUCTION CITY of SUPPLIANTS 2 of this monograph is to demonstrate the significance of place. While other plays exist that contain elements relevant to this thesis, my idea that hegemony presents a unifying interpretive framework for the Athenian suppliant plays will be developed from a systematic study of Eumenides, Children of Heracles, and Oedipus at Colonus. Other plays fit the pattern as well. Even though Euripides’ Medea is staged in Corinth, the outcome of Medea’s supplication of Aegeus in Euripides’ play is reminiscent of the pattern that we find in the Athenian suppliant plays: she too is promised a home in Athens by Aegeus. Similarly, in Euripides’ Heracles , Theseus persuades Heracles to follow him to Athens, though the bonds of friendship and hospitality offer a more appropriate context for relating this play to the familiar theme of Athens’ generosity toward strangers.While these two plays pay tribute to Athens, they do not go further in their explication of Athenian hegemony. On the other hand, Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women is the only suppliant play set in Argos, not Athens. For this reason, I discuss some aspects of the play programmatically in the introduction to establish some important differences between Suppliant Women, Eumenides, and the rest of the suppliant plays, which depict Athens as the hegemonic city of Greece. The many facets of Athenian hegemony cannot be exhausted within the small space of a single monograph, and in fact one encounters the complex character of Athenian hegemony in other plays as well. It is my hope that this book will pave the way for a broader examination of this topic. Aeschylus’ Eumenides, Euripides’ Children of Heracles, and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus allow us to trace the development of the dramatic expression of Athenian hegemonic ideology, as it evolved from the height of Athenian imperialism to the end of the Peloponnesian War. Moreover, Euripides’ Suppliant Women (424 Bc) shares the characteristics of the other Athenian suppliant plays but is more briefly treated than the others (see Chapter 3). In studying Euripides’ political plays—Children of Heracles (ca. 430 Bc) and Suppliant Women—I opted for the former because it has been less studied in light of the workings of Athenian hegemonic ideology than has Suppliant Women. Finally, while both plays date to the first decade of the Peloponnesian War, Children of Heracles bears more clearly the imprint of the changes in the history of the empire that had...