Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women: The Tragedy of Immigration

Conclusion

122 S uppliant Women offers a poetic portrait of a specific time and place. But its treatment of the Danaids’ flight from Egypt and the sanctuary they find in Greece is noteworthy not for what it reveals about Bronze Age Argos, but for the light it shines on classical Athens. In staging the myth, Aeschylus drew upon his own community’s experiences with immigration. The play’s stagecraft emphasizes the newcomers’ liminal status. The decree of its citizen assembly (ἡμᾶς μετοικεῖν τῆσδε γῆς ἐλευθέρους, 609) awards them metoikia. And its dramatic particulars explore what the presence of these metics portends for the polis. The juridical status of metoikia was likely created in the late 470s at Athens. The play thus offers a mythic pedigree for a political innovation . By linking metoikia to the older customs of supplication and guest-friendship, the playwright lent the new institution legitimacy, showing how aristocratic tradition might be accommodated within and adapted to a democratic context. In this aetiological dimension, Suppliant Women resembles Eumenides, a slightly later Aeschylean work that provided a legendary origin for the Areopagus and its supervision of homicide trials.1 But the similarities between the two plays go deeper. Both conclude with the introduction of a secondary chorus and a politically significant exeunt in which a joint procession of metics and citizens departs the theater.2 As in Suppliant Women, so too in Eumenides the secondary chorus is composed of the citizens who earlier performed a political function. In this instance they are the jurors who helped decide the fate of Orestes.3 Athena addresses them at lines 1010–12, telling them to lead the Furies to their new home beneath the citadel: Conclusion Conclusion 123 You Acropolis-holding children of Cranaos, lead these metics. And may the citizens’ intention be good in return for good. ὑμεῖς δ’ ἡγεῖσθε, πολισσοῦχοι παῖδες Κραναοῦ, ταῖσδε μετοίκοι〈ς〉· εἴη δ’ ἀγαθῶν ἀγαθὴ διάνοια πολίταις. The goddesses are here described as metics (μετοίκοις), while the adjective πολισσοῦχοι (“citadel-holding”) suggests that their escorts are citizens.4 The goddesses are also contrasted with the Athenians more broadly via the term πολίταις (“citizens”); its case and line position match those of the μετοίκοις just two lines above. Athena’s hope is that concord will mark relations between the two groups in her city.5 The final tableau of Eumenides stresses this civic unity, incorporating several features of an idealized Panathenaic procession.6 And “the chorus’ final strophe and antistrophe are each introduced by a repeated χαίρετε (996, 1014) which is both a salvete from these new μέτοικοι to the city that is receiving them and a valete from the performers of the Oresteia to its audience.”7 Suppliant Women and Eumenides are similar in theme as well as stagecraft . Each play revolves around what to do with a suppliant and presents persuasion (peitho) as superior to violence (bia).8 And in each the issue is put before a group of citizens who hear arguments and express their collective opinion by voting.9 There are admittedly differences between the two works.10 In Suppliant Women the political venue is the Argive assembly; debate and voting take place off-stage; the latter occurs by show of hands (χερσὶ δεξιωνύμοις, 607) and is unanimous (οὐ διχορρόπως, 605). In Eumenides, by contrast, the venue is the council of the Areopagus; the process involves ballots that are cast on-stage (ψῆφον αἴρειν καὶ διαγνῶναι δίκην, 709) and results in a split vote (ἴσον γάρ ἐστι τἀρίθμημα τῶν πάλων, 753). But taken together these two plays endorse a crucial element of popular sovereignty: the primacy of persuasion in democratic bodies.11 Aeschylus’s sympathy for the political institutions of his own city is a hallmark of his dramaturgy. Suppliant Women clearly functioned as a charter myth, creating a historical aition for an important contemporary phenomenon. But it also gave the spectators the mental license to think through a pressing issue in an extended way, and at a safe remove. Who should share in the city? And on what terms? As an institution, metoikia was theoretically 124 Conclusion a voluntary arrangement based on peitho. The Danaids had to convince the Argives to accept them, while the Argives in turn had to persuade the Danaids to accept the status they were offered. Metoikia rested on the possibility of mutual benefit, for citizens and newcomers alike. Despite these significant parallels with Eumenides, Suppliant Women is nevertheless a more somber play; its final tableau cannot dispel the very real anxieties the Danaids have created in the polis that has taken them in. At one level, this is apparent in the fact that...