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59 The Cypriote Stamp T he preceding chapter addressed the political difficulties involved in the incorporation of metics. But as Grethlein notes, in Suppliant Women “the problem of the integration of strangers is made yet more difficult by the position of women whose place in the polis is not fixed by marriage.”1 The Danaids’ rootlessness is not an incidental matter : the attempt to avoid their cousins’ suit is what brings them to Argos . Despite the importance of the question, the reason for their refusal remains opaque. Over the years scholars have proposed a wide range of ingenious solutions; most see the women’s stance as anomalous and requiring explanation.2 Wilamowitz, for instance, famously argued that the women act “out of an inborn hostility to men.”3 Others consider the women opposed to the Aegyptids in particular, not men in general. Of these, one subset link the women’s hostility to the hybris of their pursuers .4 Another subset claim that the men’s status as first cousins renders them objectionable.5 G. D. Thomson sees a broader principle at stake in the family relationships, arguing that the Aegyptids represent the principle of endogamy over exogamy.6 The Danaids’ relationship with their father may also be germane.7 Feminist scholarship has, however, begun to shift the interpretive focus , calling attention to tragedy’s interest in (and sympathy for) “female experience and female subjectivity.”8 Seaford, for instance, has claimed that the Danaids’ reluctance to marry the Aegyptids is not so much an anomaly requiring explanation as an intensification of everyday reality. The women’s misgivings about marriage “[resemble] in several respects the attitude associated with the Greek bride or her female companions, but taken to an exotic extreme.”9 In their devotion to their father, their anxiety about separation from their natal oikos, and their fear of violent 3 60 The Cypriote Stamp male sexuality as embodied by their suitors, the Danaids have much in common with real-life women. Zeitlin accordingly reads the play as an exploration of the mixed feelings that both women and the polis have about marriage. For her, Suppliant Women revolves around the civic education needed to transform fearful parthenoi into responsible gunaikes. She also reconstructs the Danaid trilogy to provide a historical aition: after the Danaids slaughter their cousins and become reconciled to marriage , they import from Egypt the celebration of the Thesmophoria.10 In these rites “marriage itself as an institution is given a place of honor in the city’s ideology and is elevated from a relation the Danaids view as enslavement and degradation to a microcosmic reflection of the hieros gamos.”11 Although Zeitlin’s reconstruction has considerable appeal, it suffers from several important difficulties. First, there is no Aeschylean evidence linking the Danaids with the Thesmophoria; Herodotus (2.171) is our only source for the association. Second, the festival emphasized the kinship between daughter and mother, not daughter and father.12 Yet Suppliant Women is strictly patrilineal, eliding all mention of mothers other than Io.13 Simply put, there is no one with whom the Danaids could appropriately celebrate the festival. Finally, the Thesmophoria celebrates fertility, not marriage per se.14 According to Zeitlin, the trilogy depicts stages in the successful integration of the Danaids into the polis: from suppliant astoxenoi the women become metoikoi and ultimately “citizen wi[ves] of the Thesmophoria .”15 Yet she does not give sufficient weight to the distinctions the play draws between these various statuses. It takes a decree of the assembly to turn the women into metoikoi, and nowhere in Suppliant Women are they further transformed into ἀσταί.16 Evidence from the rest of the trilogy is equally thin in this regard. Little but the title remains from Sons of Aegyptus, and the two surviving fragments from Danaids are shorn of most context. Although the women do seem to marry Argive men by the end of the trilogy, there is no evidence for any change in their civic status.17 We are therefore not justified in assuming that the trilogy had a happy ending in which the women become citizens and live happily ever after.18 On the contrary, their sexual and marital status at Argos seems to remain every bit as problematic as their political status. Their foreignness lends the Danaids an exotic, erotic allure. Put differently , their metic status makes them more sexually independent and available than citizen women. In their relative freedom from...

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