Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women: The Tragedy of Immigration

2. Spoken Like a Metic

34 Spoken Like a Metic T he Argive decision to accept the Danaids is one of the focal points of Suppliant Women. The welcome the newcomers receive is only partial, however: they are offered metoikia rather than citizenship . The play gives no explicit rationale for the motion adopted by the Argive assemblymen. Their meeting occurs off-stage, and the audience hears only a summary account of the proceedings from an interested party. Yet the Argives may act as they do because of their fears about the potential impact of the newcomers. This chapter traces the political lineaments of their unease, arguing that the play posits important connections between civic status and speech norms. In their foreign speech, antidemocratic inclinations, and willingness to put their own interests ahead of the city’s, the Danaid women constitute a threat to Argos. And their father proves worse. Although he encourages his daughters to mind their tongues and manners, his guile matches and indeed surpasses their violence. His unprepossessing request for Argive bodyguards conceals something more sinister: coup d’état and tyranny. In contrast to the newcomers, Pelasgus exemplifies virtuous principles of citizen speech. His free-speaking, forthright ways embody the isegoria and peitho upon which democracy depends. The fears Suppliant Women evokes about metic speech are consonant with Pericles’s citizenship law of 451/50 limiting membership in the city to those born of two Athenian parents. Some scholars have understood the law as an attempt to regulate the number of citizens. While this view has some merits, other scholars have shown that the law can simultaneously be read as an attempt to regulate the caliber of the citizen body and craft an Athenian civic identity. One way it does so is by restricting metic political activity. Because non-citizens could not 2 Spoken Like a Metic 35 be trusted to subordinate their own interests to those of Athens, they were given no opportunity to serve on the deliberative bodies governing its democracy. In short, they were barred from participating in the assembly (ekklesia), council (boule), and law courts (dikasteria) because they could not be trusted to speak and listen like citizens. Like their real-life counterparts, Danaus and his daughters seemed insufficiently committed to persuasion (πειθώ). Preferring bold speech (θρασυστομεῖν) and guile to free speech (ἐλευθεροστομεῖν) and truth, they could never be safely assimilated into the polis. The Danaids: Metic Speech and Bia The newcomers from Egypt are a linguistic anomaly at Argos. At lines 118–19, and again at 129–30, the chorus address the soil on which they now stand: ἱλεῶμαι1 μὲν Ἀπίαν βοῦνιν— / καρβᾶνα δ’ αὐδὰν εὖ γᾶ κοννεῖς—. Their first clause is straightforward: “I propitiate the Apian territory”; the second, however, admits of multiple meanings. Its verb κοννέω is unusual, glossed by Hesychius as equivalent to συνίημι, ἐπίσταμαι, and γινώσκω.2 On one interpretation, the accusative καρβᾶνα δ’ αὐδάν functions as its direct object: “land, well you know my foreign tongue.” But as a verb of knowing or understanding, κοννεῖς can also (like those mentioned by Hesychius) introduce indirect statement. Understood with an omitted participle or infinitive, the clause might then mean: “land, well you know that my speech is foreign.” One reading suggests previous acquaintance, the other a first encounter: which is to be preferred ? The chorus’s words are Greek, and their use of the adjective Ἀπίαν suggests that these descendants of Io may already know some version of the story Pelasgus will later recount at lines 268–70.3 On this understanding, the arrivals and the land recognize one another despite the passage of time and supervening changes.4 Yet the Danaids’ use of Greek requires little or no explanation, since “it is the established convention of tragedy to disregard [differences of language] . . . unless their mention serves some special purpose.”5 Of greater interest is the Danaids’ vocabulary: in addition to the rare κοννέω, they employ an unusual word for “foreign” (καρβάν, κάρβανος).6 In some ways, then, the women’s speech parallels their exotic appearance. As Sandin puts it, “the language [of the first ode] is peculiar at times even by Aeschylean standards . . . [and] perhaps a deliberate means to depict . . . the foreignness of the Danaids.”7 The newcomers’ strange speech works to isolate 36 Spoken Like a Metic them from the natives they will soon encounter.8 Friis Johansen and Whittle conclude that “their language is intelligible to the land from which they draw their origin . . . but not . . . to any other human beings in it than themselves.”9 The Danaids’ political sentiments are...