A Companion to Aeschylus [1 ed.] 1405188049, 9781405188043, 2021021058, 2021021059, 9781119072331, 9781119072409, 9781119072348

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A COMPANION TO AESCHYLUS

BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO THE ANCIENT WORLD This series provides sophisticated and authoritative overviews of periods of ancient history, genres of classical literature, and the most important themes in ancient culture. Each volume comprises approximately twenty-five and forty concise essays written by individual scholars within their area of specialisation. The essays are written in a clear, provocative, and lively manner, designed for an international audience of scholars, students, and general readers.

Ancient History

A Companion to the Roman Army Edited by Paul Erdkamp A Companion to the Roman Republic Edited by Nathan Rosenstein and Robert Morstein-Marx A Companion to the Classical Greek World Edited by Konrad H. Kinzl A Companion to the Ancient Near East Edited by Daniel C. Snell A Companion to the Hellenistic World Edited by Andrew Erskine A Companion to Late Antiquity Edited by Philip Rousseau A Companion to Ancient History Edited by Andrew Erskine A Companion to Archaic Greece Edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub and Hans van Wees

A Companion to Greeks Across the Ancient World Edited by Franco De Angelis A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism -Third Century BCE - Seventh Century CE Edited by Naomi Koltun-Fromm and Gwynn Kessler A Companion to the Archaeology of Early Greece and the Mediterranean Edited by Irene S. Lemos and Antonios Kotsonas A Companion to Assyria Edited by Eckart Frahm A Companion to Sparta Edited by Anton Powell A Companion to Greco-Roman and Late Antique Egypt Edited by Katelijn Vandorpe A Companion to Ancient Agriculture Edited by David Hollander and Timothy Howe Literature and Culture

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A Companion to Roman Italy Edited by Alison E. Cooley

A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought Edited by Ryan K. Balot

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A Companion to Ovid Edited by Peter E. Knox

A Companion to the Flavian Age of Imperial Rome Edited by Andrew Zissos

A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language Edited by Egbert Bakker

A Companion to Science, Technology, and Medicine in Ancient Greece and Rome Edited by Georgia L. Irby

A Companion to Hellenistic Literature Edited by Martine Cuypers and James J. Clauss

A Companion to the City of Rome Edited by Amanda Claridge and Claire Holleran

A Companion to Vergil’s Aeneid and its Tradition Edited by Joseph Farrell and Michael C. J. Putnam

A Companion to Horace Edited by Gregson Davis

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A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds Edited by Beryl Rawson

A Companion to Ancient Egyptian Art Edited by Melinda Hartwig

A Companion to Greek Mythology Edited by Ken Dowden and Niall Livingstone

A Companion to the Archaeology of Religion in the Ancient World Edited by Rubina Raja and Jörg Rüpke

A Companion to the Latin Language Edited by James Clackson A Companion to Tacitus Edited by Victoria Emma Pagán A Companion to Women in the Ancient World Edited by Sharon L. James and Sheila Dillon A Companion to Sophocles Edited by Kirk Ormand A Companion to the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East Edited by Daniel Potts A Companion to Roman Love Elegy Edited by Barbara K. Gold A Companion to Greek Art Edited by Tyler Jo Smith and Dimitris Plantzos A Companion to Persius and Juvenal Edited by Susanna Braund and Josiah Osgood A Companion to the Archaeology of the Roman Republic Edited by Jane DeRose Evans A Companion to Terence Edited by Antony Augoustakis and Ariana Traill A Companion to Roman Architecture Edited by Roger B. Ulrich and Caroline K. Quenemoen A Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity Edited by Paul Christesen and Donald G. Kyle

A Companion to Food in the Ancient World Edited by John Wilkins and Robin Nadeau A Companion to Ancient Education Edited by W. Martin Bloomer A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics Edited by Pierre Destrée & Penelope Murray A Companion to Roman Art Edited by Barbara Borg A Companion to Greek Literature Edited by Martin Hose and David Schenker A Companion to Josephus in his World Edited by Honora Howell Chapman and Zuleika Rodgers A Companion to Greek Architecture Edited by Margaret M. Miles A Companion to Plautus Edited by Dorota Dutsch and George Fredric Franko A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages Edited by Rebecca Hasselbach-Andee A Companion to Ancient Greece and Rome on Screen Edited by Arthur J. Pomeroy A Companion to Euripedes Edited by Laura K. McClure A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Art Edited by Ann C. Gunter

A Companion to Plutarch Edited by Mark Beck

A Companion to Ancient Epigram Edited by Christer Henriksén

A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities Edited by Thomas K. Hubbard

A Companion to Late Antique Literature Edited by Scott McGill and Edward Watts

A Companion to the Ancient Novel Edited by Edmund P. Cueva and Shannon N. Byrne

A Companion to Religion in Late Antiquity Edited by Josef Lössl and Nicholas Baker-Brian

A COMPANION TO AESCHYLUS Edited by

Jacques A. Bromberg University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA

Peter Burian Duke University Durham, NC

This edition first published 2023 © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. The right of Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law. Registered Offices John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Office 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www. wiley.com. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bromberg, Jacques A., 1978- editor. Burian, Peter, 1943- editor. Title: A companion to Aeschylus edited by Jacques A. Bromberg, Peter Burian. Description: Hoboken, NJ John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2022. Includes   bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021021058 (print) LCCN 2021021059 (ebook)   ISBN 9781405188043 (hardback) ISBN 9781119072331 (pdf)   ISBN 9781119072409 (epub) ISBN 9781119072348 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH Aeschylus--Criticism and interpretation. Greek drama   (Tragedy)--History and criticism. Classification: LCC PA3829. C656 2022 (print) LCC PA3829 (ebook)   DDC 882.01--dc23 LC record available at httpslccn.loc.gov2021021058 LC ebook record available at httpslccn.loc.gov2021021059

Cover image: © Antikenmuseum Basel und Sammlung Ludwig/Andreas F. Voegelin Cover design by Wiley Set in 9.5/11.5pt Galliard Std by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry, India

In memory of

MAE SMETHURST

pioneering scholar and dear friend

Contents

List of Figures Preface and Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors

xii xiii xiv

Introduction: Aeschylus and His Place in History1 Peter Burian Part I  Aeschylus in His Time

13

1 Democracy’s Age of Bronze: Aeschylus’s Plays and Athenian History, 508/7–454 bce15 Robert W. Wallace 2 Aeschylus, Lyric and Epic P. J. Finglass

27

3 Tragedy before Aeschylus P. J. Finglass

40

4 Aeschylean Drama and Intellectual History Jacques A. Bromberg

47

5 Aeschylus in Sicily between Tyranny and Democracy Malcolm Bell, III

61

Part II  Aeschylus as Playwright

75

6 Persians A. F. Garvie

77

7 Seven against Thebes Isabelle Torrance

88

8 Fear of Foreign Women in Aeschylus’s Suppliants99 Rebecca Futo Kennedy 9 Disorder, Resolution and Language: The Oresteia114 David H. Porter

x

Contents

10 Eumenides: Justice, Gender, the Gods and the City Peter Burian

130

11 Intertheatricality and Narrative Structure in the Electra Plays Kirk Ormand

145

12 Prometheus Bound: The Principle of Hope I. A. Ruffell

158

13 Slices from Aeschylus’s Feast: The Fragmentary Works Anthony Podlecki

171

14 Aeschylean Satyr Drama Carl Shaw

185

15 The Tetralogy Alan H. Sommerstein

201

16 Visualising the Stage A. C. Duncan

214

17 The Choruses of Aeschylus Eva Stehle

230

18 Music, Dance and Metre in Aeschylean Tragedy Naomi Weiss

242

19 Aeschylus: Language and Style R. B. Rutherford

254

20 The Long View in Aeschylus: Intergenerational Myth-Making through the “Other” Arum Park

267

Part III  Aeschylus and Greek Society

281

21 Aeschylus and Subversion of Ritual Richard Seaford

283

22 Ghosts, Demons and Gods: Supernatural Challenges Amit Shilo

295

23 Inscribing Justice in Aeschylean Drama Sarah Nooter

310

24 Race in Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women and Persians323 Sarah Derbew 25 Aeschylus’s Persians and the “Just War” Sydnor Roy

334

26 Aeschylus and History Emily Baragwanath

346

27 Aeschylus and Athenian Law F. S. Naiden

361

28 Aeschylus’s Athens between Hegemony and Empire David Rosenbloom

373



Contents xi

Part IV  The Influence of Aeschylus

389

29 Critical Approaches to Aeschylus, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present Mark Griffith

391

30 The Reception of Aeschylus in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries C. W. Marshall

412

31 The Transmission of Aeschylus: The Miracle of Survival Marsh McCall

425

32 The Bow of Ulysses: Aeschylus and his Translators Deborah H. Roberts

437

33 Variations on a Theme: Prometheus Theodore Ziolkowski

455

34 Myth, History and Revolution in the Nineteenth-Century Reception of the Oresteia467 Adam Lecznar 35 Three Landmarks in the Reception of the Oresteia in Twentieth-Century Drama Vayos Liapis

479

36 Oresteia on Stage: Koun, Stein, Hall and Mnouchkine Hallie Rebecca Marshall

491

37 Transforming Aeschylus on the Modern Stage Helene P. Foley

505

38 Applied Aeschylus Peter Meineck

518

39 Teaching the Oresteia as a Work for the Theatre Robin Mitchell-Boyask

533

Epilogue Jacques A. Bromberg

544

Index

558

List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 Eastern Sicily in the era of Aeschylus. Akragas is on the coast, further to the west. Fig. 5.2 Tetradrachm of Aitna: head of satyr, obverse; enthroned Zeus Aitnaios, reverse (KBR, Royal Library of Belgium). Fig. 8.1 The Danaids as staged in Moni Ovadia’s production of The Suppliants (Sicily, Summer 2015). Photograph courtesy of Peter Burian. Fig. 8.2 Moni Ovadia as King Pelasgos in The Suppliants (Sicily, Summer 2015). Photograph courtesy of Peter Burian. Fig. 14.1 An Attic amphora fragment by Eucharides Painter. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection, Malibu, California. 86. AE.190.6. Terracotta. Fig. 14.2 Sphinx with Chorus of Satyrs, Athenian Red-figure Hydria. Tokyo, Fujita, ZA20. ©Martin von Wagner Museum der Universität Würzburg, Photo: P. Neckermann. Fig. 21.1 Hades takes Persephone off to the underworld. (After Tillyard 1923, pl.33; cf. Jenkins 1983, pl. 18). Fig. 31.1 Facsimile image from the Medicean manuscript of Aeschylus (Rostagno 1896, pl. 18). The text of Agamemnon breaks off at the bottom of the left page, after v.1159; the text of Libation Bearers starts in, without any sign of a change of play, at the top of the right page. Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

63 65 103 104 187 191 289

433

Preface and Acknowledgements

This volume arrives at a moment when renewed interest in ancient Greek drama is evident in the number of translations, adaptations, and performances appearing around the world across multiple media. Aeschylus may not be as familiar to many readers as Sophocles and Euripides, but we have striven to attract and accommodate a broad audience by providing English translations of all Greek, consistently spelling out names of journals and reference works, and in general keeping abbreviations to a minimum. Even in the few chapters that deal with technical issues such as metre and textual transmission, we have made every effort to explain unfamiliar terms and avoid disciplinary jargon. Each chapter contains suggestions for further reading as well as bibliographical information on all works cited. We hope students reading Aeschylus in high school or college classes, professional scholars, and everyone in between, will find useful guidance within these pages. We owe much to many who have fostered this project. We offer thanks first to the helpful staff at Wiley-Blackwell: Haze Humbert, the acquisitions editor who commissioned this volume, a long succession of project managers, most recently Andrew Minton, and of editorial assistants. All these people were consistently encouraging and amazingly patient over the long gestation of the book. Our copy editor, Katherine Carr, did a thoughtful and meticulous job. And of course, we thank our contributors, some of whom have waited a long time to see their work on this project in print, others of whom produced splendid contributions on very short notice. We are delighted by the mix of more established and younger scholars, as well as the range of methodologies, viewpoints, and expertises represented by their contributions.

Notes on Contributors

Emily Baragwanath is Associate Professor in the Classics Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her publications include Motivation and Narrative in Herodotus (Oxford, 2008), articles on the literary techniques employed by the Greek historians, and the co-edited volumes Myth, Truth, and Narrative in Herodotus (Oxford, 2012) and Clio and Thalia: Attic Comedy and Historiography (Histos Supplement 2017). At present she is completing a monograph on Xenophon’s representation of women. Malcolm Bell III is Professor Emeritus of classical archaeology at the University of Virginia and has long been co-director of the American excavations at the ancient Sicilian city of Morgantina. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Princeton University and has served as professor-in-charge at the American Academy in Rome. He has written extensively on the art, archaeology, and political economy of Greek Sicily, and on works of Greek sculpture found in Rome. The relevance of Pindar, Theocritus and other Greek poets to sculpture and painting has been a recurrent theme in his writing. Bell’s study of the city plan and civic architecture of Morgantina will appear as volume seven in the series Morgantina Studies. Jacques A. Bromberg holds degrees in Classics and Classical Studies from Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania, and has taught at Colby College and Duke University. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Pittsburgh, and affiliate of the Global Studies Center and the Center for Bioethics and Health Law. He has published research on ancient academic disciplines, the Socratic tradition in Greek drama, receptions of Aeschylus in Latin America and the history and philosophy of sport. He is author of Global Classics (Routledge, 2021), and founding editor and editor-inchief of the open-access journal, Global Antiquities. Peter Burian is Professor Emeritus of Classical Studies at Duke University, where he served as Professor of Classical and Comparative Literature, Professor of Theater Studies, and Dean of the Humanities. His research interests centre on Greek theatre and classical reception. His publications include numerous essays on the surviving Greek tragedians, an Aris and Phillips edition of Euripides’ Helen and a Bryn Mawr commentary on Aristophanes’ Birds. He has edited a number of volumes, including the complete Greek Tragedy in New Translations (Oxford University Press). He is also active as a translator from Greek (including plays by Aeschylus and Euripides) and Italian. He was twice professor-in-charge



Notes on Contributors xv

at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome and was awarded Fulbright and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. His current projects include a study of theatre of the fifth century as a participant in the Athenian democracy and an adaptation of Birds. Sarah Derbew received her PhD in Classics from Yale University and was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Classics at Stanford University, where she is affiliated with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her research focuses on literary and artistic representations of black people in ancient Greece. Her interests extend to the twenty-first century; she has written about GrecoRoman antiquity in the African diaspora. She recently completed on her book, Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity, in which she employs critical race theory to map out an expansive archaeology of blackness in ancient Greek literature and art. A. C. Duncan is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Research Fellow at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. His research focuses on fifth-century Athenian drama and its aesthetic and political receptions across time and culture. In recent and forthcoming publications, including a monograph on theatrical ugliness, he pays special attention to the affective, material and cognitive dimensions of ancient drama. He has written on the offstage life of masks and the ways theatregoers’ intersubjective presence shapes the experience and meaning of drama. A theatremaker himself, he has over 15 years’ experience directing, translating and producing ancient plays for the stage. He makes a joyful habit of engaging with modern performance, and looks forward to future work on the politics of producing Greek tragedy in postcolonial contexts. P. J. Finglass is Henry Overton Wills Professor of Greek at the University of Bristol, UK. Having recently completed terms as Director of the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership and as Head of the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Bristol, he now holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship whose goal is a new edition with commentary of Sappho and Alcaeus. He has published a monograph Sophocles (2019) in the series “Greece and Rome New Surveys in the Classics”, as well as editions of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (2018), Ajax (2011), and Electra (2007), of Stesichorus (2014), and of Pindar’s Pythian Eleven (2007) in the series “Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries”. He has co-edited several volumes, including (with Adrian Kelly) The Cambridge Companion to Sappho (2021) and Stesichorus in Context (2015) and (with Lyndsay Coo) Female Characters in Fragmentary Greek Tragedy (2020). He also edits the journal Classical Quarterly. Helene P. Foley is Claire Tow Professor of Classics, Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of books and articles on Greek epic and drama, on women and gender in antiquity, and on modern performance and adaptation of Greek drama. Author of Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides, The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy, Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage, and Euripides: Hecuba and co-author of Women in the Classical World: Image and Text, she edited Reflections of Women in Antiquity and co-edited Visualizing the Tragic: Drama, Myth and Ritual in Greek Art and Literature, Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage, and Aristophanes and Politics. A. F. Garvie is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Glasgow. His principal interest has been Homer and Greek Tragedy. His full-scale commentaries on Aeschylus Choephori (Oxford

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Notes on Contributors

University Press, 1986) and Aeschylus Persae (Oxford University Press, 2009) are for advanced readers, while The Plays of Aeschylus (2nd ed. Bloomsbury, 2016) and The Plays of Sophocles (2nd ed. Bloomsbury, 2016) are more suitable for the non-specialist. He has given lectures in many universities in Europe, particularly in Italy, and in addition to producing commentaries on Homer and Sophocles, he has made many contributions to classical journals and other publications on various aspects of Greek tragedy. For a year he was the Visiting Gillespie Professor at the College of Wooster, Ohio, and he also taught for a summer semester at the Ohio State University, and briefly at the University of Guelph, Ontario. For six years he was co-editor of Classical Review. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Edinburgh. Mark Griffith was Klio Distinguished Professor of Classical Literature at University of California, Berkeley until his retirement in 2020, and also held an appointment in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. He is the author of monographs The Authenticity of Prometheus Bound (1977), Aristophanes’ Frogs (2013), and Greek Satyr Play: Five Studies (2015), and has edited the Aeschylean Prometheus Bound and Sophocles’ Antigone for the Cambridge “Green and Yellow” series. With Glenn Most he co-edited the revised set of translations of The Complete Greek Tragedies (Chicago University Press, 2013). He has written articles on Greek tragedy and satyr-play, Vergil, Hesiod, Greek lyric, mules, early Greek education, music and performance, and is currently completing an ethnomusicological book on Music and Difference in Ancient Greece. Rebecca Futo Kennedy, PhD, is Associate Professor of Classical Studies, Environmental Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Denison University (Granville, Ohio). Her areas of research include Athenian tragedy and political, social, legal and economic history as well as race, ethnicity and immigration in the ancient Mediterranean. She is author of Athena’s Justice (Lang, 2009) and Immigrant Women in Athens (Routledge, 2014) and is editor of Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Aeschylus (2018). She co-edited The Routledge Handbook to Identity and the Environment (2015) with Molly Jones-Lewis and co-edited and translated Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World: An Anthology of Primary Sources (Hackett, 2013) with C. Sydnor Roy and Max Goldman. Adam Lecznar has taught in Classics departments across the UK, including at University College London, Bristol, Leeds and Royal Holloway. His research interests mainly concern classical reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in particular the way that the category of the ancient past and the notion of classicism have provided inspiration for modern literature and philosophy. Lecznar has recently published his first monograph Dionysus after Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Literature Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and a co-edited essay collection on Classicisms in the Black Atlantic (Oxford University Press, 2020), alongside various essays on reception, postcolonialism and Greek literature. He is now beginning work on his second monograph on the hybrid classicism of the Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka. Vayos Liapis is Professor of Ancient Theatre and Its Reception at the Open University of Cyprus. He has previously been faculty at Universities in Cyprus, Montreal and Patras, Visiting Professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and Elizabeth and J. Richardson Dilworth Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He is the author of A Commentary on the Rhesus Attributed to Euripides (Oxford, 2012) and co-editor of Greek Tragedy after the Fifth Century (Cambridge, 2018) and Adapting Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 2020). He is the recipient of the 2018 National Prize for the Translation of Ancient Greek Literature into Modern Greek (Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports).



Notes on Contributors xvii

C. W. Marshall is Professor of Greek at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. He is the author of The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy (2006), The Structure and Stagecraft of Euripides’ Helen (2014), Aeschylus: Libation Bearers (2017) and Aristophanes: Frogs (2020). His research focuses on ancient performance techniques and how they contribute to the interpretation of drama, and on the reception of classical literature in antiquity and modern times, with a particular emphasis on comics and television. Hallie Rebecca Marshall is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on ancient Greek drama in performance and its reception in later periods. She has published on the plays of Aristophanes, Sarah Kane, Ted Hughes, Marie Clements, Deanne Kasokeo and Tony Harrison, and is co-editor of Greek Drama V: Studies in the Theatre of the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BCE (Bloomsbury, 2020). She is currently working on a monograph on the classical plays of British poet Tony Harrison. Marsh McCall holds degrees in Classics and Classical Philology from Harvard, and has taught at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Berkeley and, since 1976, Stanford. He held a Junior Fellowship at the Center for Hellenic Studies in 1968–69, an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship at the Institute for Classical Studies, London in 1973–74, and an ACLS Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center in 1984–85. He has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Melbourne University in 1980, a Visiting Fellow at Magdalen College Oxford in 1992–93, a Visiting Research Fellow at Merton College Oxford in 1999–2000, and a Visiting Researcher at St Anne’s College Oxford in 2005 and 2008. His work has centred in Ancient Rhetoric and, especially, Greek Tragedy. A series of articles established the manuscript sources of the earliest printed editions – including the Aldine editio princeps – of Aeschylus, specifically for the Suppliant Women. Peter Meineck holds the endowed chair of Professor of Classics in the Modern World at New York University. He is also the founder of Aquila Theatre. Publications include Theatrocracy: Greek Drama, Cognition and the Imperative for Theatre (Routledge, 2018), The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Cognitive Theory (Routledge, 2019), Sophocles’ Philoctetes (Hackett, 2014) and Combat Trauma and the Ancient Greeks (with David Konstan, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). He has translated, published, directed and produced several Aeschylus plays and used Aeschylean texts in public programmes with veterans, marginalised teens, refugees and people gathered at public libraries, arts facilities, community centres and museums. He is currently working on a biography of Aeschylus and his relationship to democracy. Robin Mitchell-Boyask is Professor of Greek and Roman Classics at Temple University. He has also been a Junior Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington DC, and a Fellow of Wolfson College and the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge University. In addition to a number of articles on Greek tragedy and Vergilian epic, he has written two monographs – Plague and The Athenian Imagination: Drama, History and the Cult of Asclepius (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Aeschylus Eumenides (Duckworth, 2009) – and edited Approaches to Teaching the Dramas of Euripides (MLA, 2002). He currently edits the journal Classical World and is working on a commentary on Euripides’ Bacchae. F. S. Naiden studies ancient Greek law, religion and warfare, including Near-Eastern parallels, especially among the Western Semites. Chief periods of interest are the Classical and Hellenistic. Recently completed is a study of Alexander the Great, his officers and the role of religion in Macedonian conquests, Soldier, Priest, and God, combining his interests in war-

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fare, religion and the Near East. Now underway is a study of war councils and command and control throughout antiquity and into the early modern period. Sarah Nooter is a Professor of Classics and Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Soundscape of Tragedy (Cambridge, 2012) and The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus (Cambridge, 2017), as well as many articles on Greek tragedy, classical reception in Africa, poetry and sound studies. She also co-edited Sound and the Ancient Senses (Routledge, 2019) with Shane Butler, and is the editor-in-chief of the journal Classical Philology. She is now finishing a book which explores modes of embodiment and temporality in ancient Greek poetry and song. Kirk Ormand is the Nathan A. Greenberg Professor of Classics at Oberlin College, where he has taught since 2001. He is the author of Exchange and the Maiden: Marriage in Sophoclean Tragedy (1999), The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and Archaic Greece (2014), and Controlling Desires: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome (2nd ed., 2018); he has edited A Companion to Sophocles (2012) and co-edited with Ruby Blondell Ancient Sex: New Essays (2015). He has published articles on Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, Hipponax, Sophocles, Euripides, Ovid, Lucan, Heliodorus, Michel Foucault and Clint Eastwood. Arum Park is an Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Arizona. Her publications include articles and book chapters on archaic and classical Greek poetry, the Greek novel, and Augustan poetry, as well as public-facing pieces on #metoo in Greco-Roman literature, race and diversity in Classics, and classical reception. She is the editor of Resemblance and Reality in Greek Thought: Essays in Honor of Peter M. Smith (Routledge, 2017) and the author of Reciprocity, Truth, and Gender in Pindar and Aeschylus (forthcoming, University of Michigan Press). Anthony Podlecki holds degrees from Holy Cross College, Worcester MA, Oxford and University of Toronto. He taught at Northwestern, Penn State and University of British Columbia. He specialised in the history and literature of archaic and classical Greece, and the interrelations between these two areas. His publications include studies of Homer, Greek lyric, drama and the fifth-century political figures Themistocles and Pericles. David H. Porter (1935–2016) excelled in at least three careers, as a scholar, academic administrator, and musician. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he received a PhD in classics from Princeton. He taught from 1962 to 1987 (classics, music and liberal arts) at Carleton College, serving as its interim president during his final year there. He then served as president of Skidmore College from 1987 to 1999, returning after visiting appointments at Williams College and Indiana University to resume teaching until his retirement in 2013. Porter had broad scholarly interests, publishing books on Greek tragedy, Horace, Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and Willa Cather, as well as numerous articles on literary subjects and liberal arts education. He was also a distinguished pianist, having studied with Eduard Steuermann, whose writings he later edited. Porter performed frequently on campus and gave recitals around the US and in the UK. Deborah H. Roberts is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Haverford College, Pennsylvania. She works primarily on Greek tragedy, classical reception and translation studies, and is the author of Apollo and his Oracle in the Oresteia (Göttingen, 1984), co-editor (with Francis Dunn and Don Fowler) of Reading the



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End: Closure in Greek and Latin Literature (Princeton, 1997), and co-author (with Sheila Murnaghan) of Childhood and the Classics: Britain and America, 1850–1965 (Oxford, 2018). Her translations of Greek tragedy include Euripides’ Ion (Penn Greek Drama series, Philadelphia 1999), Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound (Indianapolis 2012), and Euripides’ Andromache (Chicago series, revised edition, Chicago 2013); she is currently working on a translation of Aeschylus’s Persians. David Rosenbloom is Professor and Chair of the Ancient Studies Department at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He has published a book on Aeschylus’s Persians and co-edited Greek Drama IV, a volume of essays on tragedy, comedy, satyr-play and theatrical culture. He has published extensively on Attic tragedy and comedy as well as on Athenian history and oratory. He was a Junior Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies and has held visiting positions at Princeton and Johns Hopkins Universities. Sydnor Roy is Assistant Professor of Classics in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literature at Texas Tech University. She is the co-author of Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World (Hackett, 2013, with R. Kennedy and M. Goldman). Her primary research focus is political history and theory in the ancient Mediterranean, with a special focus on Greek interactions with Persia, Phoenicia and Egypt. She is currently working on a monograph on political thought in Herodotus’s Histories. I. A. Ruffell is Professor of Greek Drama and Culture at the University of Glasgow. Her publications include monographs on Greek comedy (Politics and Anti-Realism in Athenian Old Comedy: The Art of the Impossible, Oxford, 2011) and tragedy (Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound, London, 2012). She has translated Aeschylus and Euripides for professional theatre productions. As well as drama, she has also published on Roman satire and on ancient technology. R. B. Rutherford is Tutor in Greek and Latin Literature at Christ Church, University of Oxford. He has taught and lectured on Greek tragedy for many years. Among his publications are Greek Tragic Style (2012) and commentaries on Homer, Iliad 18 (2019) and Odyssey 19 and 20 (1992). Richard Seaford is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Greek at the University of Exeter. He is the author of numerous books and articles on ancient Greek drama, poetry, religion, economic history and philosophy. In 2009 he was Honorary President of the UK Classical Association. His recent books include Cosmology and the Polis. The Social Construction of Space and Time in the Tragedies of Aeschylus (2012), Tragedy, Ritual and Money in Ancient Greece: Selected Essays, edited by Robert Bostock (2018), and The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India: A Historical Comparison (2020), all published by Cambridge. Carl Shaw teaches all levels of ancient Greek language and literature at New College, the honors college of Florida. His scholarly interests lie broadly in the areas of Greek literature and culture, with a particular focus on drama. He is the author of Satyric Play: The Evolution of Greek Comedy and Satyr Drama (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Euripides: Cyclops (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018). Amit Shilo is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His forthcoming book is Beyond Death in the Oresteia: Poetics, Ethics, and Politics. He is a co-founder of Classics and Social Justice. His current research is on polytheism and Athenian democratic thought.

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Alan H. Sommerstein is Emeritus Professor of Greek in the University of Nottingham. Among much else, he has edited and translated the plays and fragments of Aeschylus for the Loeb Classical Library (2008) and published Aeschylean Tragedy (2nd ed. 2010) and editions with commentary of Eumenides (1989) and Suppliants (2019). Eva Stehle is Professor Emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park and author of Performance and Gender in Ancient Greece (Princeton, 1997) as well as numerous articles on Greek poetry and performance, with a special focus on women. She is completing a book on Sappho and at work on a book about performance of communal rituals, especially women’s rituals in classical Greece. Isabelle Torrance is Professor of Classical Reception at Aarhus University, Denmark. A Classicist by training, she has published extensively on Greek tragedy and its reception. Her books include Aeschylus: Seven against Thebes (London, 2007), Metapoetry in Euripides (Oxford, 2013), Aeschylus and War: Comparative Perspectives on Seven against Thebes (London, 2017), Euripides (London, 2019), Euripides: Iphigenia among the Taurians (London, 2019), and Classics and Irish Politics, 1916–2016 (Oxford, 2020; with D. O’Rourke). From 2019 she has been Principal Investigator on the project “Classical Influences and Irish Culture” funded by the European Research Council, a post she will hold until 2024. Robert W. Wallace is Professor of Classics at Northwestern University. He is the author of some 95 articles on Greek literature, history, intellectual history, law, numismatics and music theory. His books include The Areopagos Council, to 307 BC (1989) and Reconstructing Damon: Music, Wisdom Teaching, and Politics in Perikles’ Athens (2015). In addition, he coauthored Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece (2007) and Aristotle Constitution of the Athenians (2015), and co-edited Harmonia Mundi: Musica e filosofia nel’antichità, Poet, Public, and Performance in Ancient Greece, Transitions to Empire 360–146 BC, and Symposion 2001 on Greek law. He has been a visiting professor at the universities of Pisa, Siena, Trent, Urbino and Syracuse, and has lectured widely in the US and Europe. Naomi Weiss is Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. She is the author of The Music of Tragedy: Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Theater (University of California Press, 2018) and Seeing Theater: The Phenomenologies of Classical Greek Drama (University of California Press, 2023). She co-edited both Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models (Brill, 2019) and Music and Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds (Cambridge University Press, 2021). She is beginning work on two projects: a commentary on Euripides’ Orestes (with Sarah Olsen) and a monograph on the interaction between tragic and novel form in 21st-century fiction. Theodore Ziolkowski is Class of 1900 Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He has published 35 books, mainly on German Romanticism and on the reception of classical antiquity in modern literature, including several chapters on Prometheus.

Introduction: Aeschylus and His Place in History Peter Burian

This volume, written by a team of scholars that includes some of the most prominent senior Aeschyleans alongside extraordinarily accomplished younger scholars, is intended to explore, in so far as a single book can, every aspect of Aeschylus’s art, including the historical, intellectual and cultural milieu from which his work emerged (Part I); chapters on the plays themselves, along with consideration of fragmentary works as well as literary and dramatic perspectives (Part II); Aeschylean drama in its larger social, political and religious contexts (Part III); and a broad range of topics in the reception of Aeschylus from antiquity to the present day (Part IV).It is the first such comprehensive, multi-authored work in English dedicated to the first surviving Greek tragedian. Jacques Bromberg synthesises the contents of the volume in his Epilogue, whereas this Introduction is meant simply to set the scene. It examines the sources of our information about the man himself and his career in order to suggest what we can know and reasonably surmise about his life, and offers an initial assessment of his significance, above all the significance of his contributions to the history of drama. Aeschylus comes onto the scene, not at the very beginning of the Athenian tragic theatre but close enough to it to be regarded as the essential founding figure. The surviving corpus of his work consists of six complete plays – less than 10% of his production and all dating from the last two decades of his long career –and Prometheus Bound, which is likely not his. In addition, there are somewhat fewer than five hundred fragments longer than a single word or isolated phrase. The enormous admiration and popularity which he enjoyed in his lifetime and through the fifth century bce yielded later to the consensus that Sophocles was the more perfect artist and Euripides the more exciting and intellectually challenging playwright, but Aeschylus’s role in the development of tragedy was never forgotten. Here, for example, is the image of Aeschylus brought to mind in, of all places, the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, a novelistic account of the supposed miracles and travels of a first-century ce sage written by Philostratus in the early third century. Apollonius is relating his reaction to an encounter with a group of Indian philosophers:

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Peter Burian When I met them, I experienced something regarding the men’s message akin to what the Athenians are said to have experienced when confronted with the ingenuity of Aeschylus. For he was a tragic poet, and saw the art unformed and, as yet, lacking sophistication. If he had simply shortened the choruses, which were too long, or invented the actors’ dialogues, rejecting long solos, or contrived offstage deaths, so that murder was not committed before the audience’s eyes, this would not be lacking in ingenuity, but might seem such as to have provided opportunities for inventiveness even to someone else who was less skilled in poetry. But he, reflecting that he was worthy of composing tragic poetry, and further, that tragedy as an art form was suited to the sublime rather than the humble and commonplace, adopted masks and other stage properties that captured the appearance of the heroes and mounted the actors on high boots so that they would have an heroic gait, and he was the first to adorn them with costumes fitting for heroes and heroines to wear. As a result of which, the Athenians considered him the father of tragedy, and summoned him even after death to the Dionysiac festivals. For, following a public vote, Aeschylus’s plays were given repeat performances, and he won anew.

This Greek writer of the Roman imperial period, at any rate, whose generation was apparently the last to have access to many tragedies soon to be lost, except in anthologised excerpts (see Robert Garland (2004, 70 and 234)) considered Aeschylus worthy of being called the father of tragedy for the excellence of both his poetry and his innovative stagecraft. His list of Aeschylus’s accomplishments is not unique, however; on the contrary we find versions of it in almost every ancient source examined in what follows.

The Life of Aeschylus What we can say with any certainty about Aeschylus’s life is severely limited and does not permit us to construct anything like a full biography, but evidence gleaned from a number of disparate sources offers at least a plausible outline. The most substantial primary source of information about Aeschylus’s life is a short Greek Life, usually known as the Vita Aeschyli, an undated compendium based on earlier materials. Mary Lefkowitz (1981), examining a whole series of such literary biographies, concludes that they are mostly fictional, made up of gleanings from the poets’ works applied to their authors and fleshed out with anecdotes of varying provenance and credibility. Lefkowitz’s insistence on more or less complete fictionality has met with resistance (e.g. Kivilo 2010) and most critics today are willing to see in these lives a mixture of fact and fiction allowing room to exercise judgement. Even Lefkowitz does not deny that there are entirely plausible elements within the Life: she sees no reason, for example, to doubt the claim that Aeschylus took part in the battle of Marathon alongside his brother Cynaegirus, whose death in that battle is recorded by Herodotus, 6.114, and fought also at Salamis and Platea, The tradition that stipulates that Aeschylus saw action at the three greatest Greek victories of the Persian Wars need not be fictional: most Athenian men neither too young nor too old to fight must have participated in these crucial encounters. But, as we shall see, Aeschylus’s reputation as a military man will become an important part of the way he and his dramas are characterised. One must nevertheless consider the ways the portrait in the Life has likely been “touched up”. Where, for example, the Life states as a simple fact that Aeschylus’s family belonged to the aristocracy, Suzanne Saïd (2005), 217 suggests that this “may be a translation into biographical terms of his striving for a ‘grand style’”. And the fact that his family was from Eleusis may well have given rise to the story that he was prosecuted for revealing secrets of the Eleusinian Mysteries in his plays and acquitted of the crime. Lefkowitz rejects this story on the ground that its source, the fourth-century polymath Heraclides Ponticus, is unreliable,



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suggesting that Heraclides may have drawn his anecdote from a scene in comedy. We have, however, an offhand reference in the less capricious Aristotle, who cites Aeschylus’s explanation of his revelation of secrets as an example of people who did not know what they were doing: “they were not aware that the matter was a secret, as Aeschylus said of the Mysteries” (Nicomachean Ethics 3.111a). The casualness of the remark suggests that there was a wellknown incident in which Aeschylus answered the charge that he had profaned the Eleusinian Mysteries in one of his dramas, but this does not show that Aeschylus was formally tried and acquitted in court. Heraclides’ story might simply be the embellishment of a complaint made by someone who objected to Aeschylus’s employment of ritual words or acts meant to be kept from the uninitiated. The story of Aeschylus’s death is the most bizarre of the various anecdotes told in our sources. As the Life recounts it, an eagle had seized a tortoise, but as it was not strong enough to break open its prey, dropped it on the rocks to crush its shell. But the tortoise fell on the poet’s head and killed him. He had in fact received this oracle: “a weapon thrown from the heavens will kill you”.

The first-century ce Roman authors Pliny the Elder and Valerius Maximus offer variant versions that attempt in different ways to make the story more plausible. Pliny, the encyclopedic natural historian, describing a particular kind of eagle he calls “morphnos”, recasts the oracle in a way that makes Aeschylus’s strange demise the result of a sensible but utterly mistaken response to prophecy – the typical tale of an oracle misunderstood: This eagle has the instinct to break the shell of the tortoise by letting it fall from aloft, a circumstance which caused the death of the poet Aeschylus. An oracle, it is said, had predicted his death on that day by the fall of a house, upon which he took the precaution of trusting himself only under the canopy of the heavens. (Historia naturalis 10. 1. 3)

Valerius, on the other hand, does not even mention the oracle, but adds the detail that Aeschylus was bald and so the eagle mistook the top of his head for a rock: Aeschylus did not meet a willing death, but it is worth mentioning because of its novelty. As he was leaving the walls where he was staying in Italy, he stopped in a sunny spot. An eagle who was flying above him carrying a tortoise was tricked by his shining skull – for he had no hair – and it dropped it on him as if he were a stone so that it might eat the flesh from the broken shell. (Facta et Dicta Memorabilia 9.12)

These Roman takes on the story nicely represent its very divergent possibilities. Valerius’s version is almost comic in tone: a funny thing happened on the way to the seashore. Aeschylus is the victim of chance misfortune, tyche – admittedly a bizarre one. His only fault is sitting in the sun with his bald pate on full view. Ironically, in a kind of parody of tragic ignorance, the mistaken identity in this tragedy is the eagle’s confusion of that pate for a rock. Pliny, on the other hand, puts the poet’s error at the centre of the tale. Like Oedipus, he runs in the wrong direction because he thinks he knows what he must avoid, and instead goes straight into it. How might such a tale come into being in the first place? There is of course no certain answer, but given the difference in its tellings, one might think that more than one impulse shaped it from the beginning. Aeschylus himself may have unwittingly had a hand. A fragment of Aeschylus’s Psychagogoi, a play that took as its subject the Odyssean Nekyia (Book 11), has Tiresias foretell that a heron will drop its dung from on high, containing the barbs

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of a sea creature that will rot Odysseus’s “old and hairless skin” [i.e. scalp], frag. 274. This is at least as bizarre as Aeschylus’s fate and it already contains the elements of something lethal dropped from the sky onto a bald head, as well as potentially comic oddity. Then of course, entirely devoid of such elements, there are the eagles in the great simile of Agamemnon 109–20 that swoop down to devour a pregnant hare and her offspring still in the womb. Lefkowitz, commenting on the version in the Life, observes that death as the fulfilment of prophecy misunderstood or ignored aligns Aeschylus with other great poets, like Homer and Hesiod, whose deaths were also foretold but also brought to pass in unexpected ways. The missile is guided by destiny: aimed at the rocks but hits the poet, elevating him to the status of hero, as evidenced in the Life by the description of sacrifices and other honours he received at his tomb. But Lefkowitz acknowledges as well that the account in the Life “both marks Aeschylus as extraordinary and at the same time demeans him”. We are left with a series of ironies, not the least of which is that the instrument of Aeschylus’s destruction was the tortoise, whose shell is used to make the poet’s lyre. A paradigmatic case of embellishment arises from the various explanations of reports that Aeschylus left Athens for Sicily, apparently on at least two occasions, and died while there. The simple explanation that he received repeated invitations from the Sicilian ruler Hieron I to put on dramas there is given in the Life but apparently not perceived as sufficient. There are three different explanations offered, all of them involving negative feelings in Athens and making his journeys seem like self-chosen exile. The first two relate his departure to rejections in favour of other poets: according to some, Aeschylus went to stay with Hieron after being criticised and losing the dramatic competition to Sophocles, when the latter was still young; others say it was because Simonides bested him in a contest for an elegy to commemorate the fallen at Marathon. The third is of a different order, involving the performance of Eumenides, the third tragedy of the Oresteia. The entrance of the Chorus of Furies in that play is said to have so frightened the audience that children fainted and pregnant women miscarried. Apart from the interest of the assumption that young children and pregnant women were in the audience (for confirmation of this possibility, see the evidence cited in Pickard-Cambridge 1968, 263–65), this anecdote seems to be stitched together, as Lefkowitz points out, from a series of lines in the play in which the Furies threaten to destroy the seed (187–88), households (354) and childbearing (785) of the land. Yet a fourth reason for the supposed flight to Sicily is provided by another important source of information about Aeschylus, a brief entry in the Suda, a tenth-century Byzantine lexiconencyclopedia whose remarks on literary history are of particular value when quoting or paraphrasing scholia (annotations) to ancient texts, many of them now lost, or providing dates that derive from official records. On the subject of Aeschylus’s travel to Sicily, the Suda offers a version different from those in the Life, but which nevertheless, like them, implies strong Athenian disfavour for the poet and consequent self-imposed exile. In this version Aeschylus fled after the stage (or wooden seating: the word ἴκρια is so used by Aristophanes and the comic poet Cratinus) of the Theatre of Dionysus collapsed during a performance of one of his plays. Why these negative explanations for what might well have been considered a sign of international recognition for the Athenian poet? After all, the lyric poets Simonides from Ceos and Pindar from Thebes were known to have been similarly honoured by Hieron. The seeming need to find failures or mishaps to account for Aeschylus’s Sicilian sojourns might suggest some embarrassment at his departure from Athens. The fact that the most important contemporary poet of the democratic polis went to serve in the court of a tyrant may perhaps have raised Athenian hackles, but none of the ancient sources suggest this. It seems more likely, given the account of Hieron’s lavish patronage and the honours bestowed upon the



Introduction: Aeschylus and His Place in History 5

poet in Sicily, both before and after his death, that the stories of Aeschylus’s flight imply a feeling that the poet had not been given his due by the Athenians during his lifetime. Recompense is accomplished with posthumous honours. After describing the rich burial given Aeschylus by the people of Gela, the sacrifices and dramatic recitations offered at his hero’s tomb, the Life points out that, the Athenians too gave him a singular honour after his death, awarding a chorus (i.e. authorising a performance at the Dionysia) or, in a variant reading, a golden crown to anyone who wished to put on one of his plays. It also mentions that his plays won “not a few” posthumous victories at the Dionysia, implying that Aeschylean tetralogies were put into competition with new ones. From what we know of Aeschylus’s success in his home city, the stories of failures and disparagement in our sources are not easy to explain. Indeed, to judge from the number of victories attributed to him in the Life and the Suda, Aeschylus seems to have been enormously popular. Both give the number of victories he won as 13 (and without other qualification we can assume that the figure refers to first prizes awarded at the Great Dionysia). This means that 52 of Aeschylus’s plays, out of a total number that seems to have been more than 70 and perhaps as many as 90, were victorious and the first of these came only after he had been presenting dramas at the Dionysia for about 15 years. Assuming that he competed roughly every two years (as suggested by Wiles 2000, 172), that would give him a record of 13 wins in roughly 20 outings. Whatever the exact numbers, it is clear that Aeschylus was by far the most successful dramatist of his day. The number of victories is likely to be derived from official records and thus reliable, but two additional elements in the sources make the story a bit more complicated. The first is that the Suda and the Life are not in complete agreement about the numbers: Suda: He wrote (ἔγραψε) elegies and ninety tragedies. He won twenty-eight victories. Some say it was thirteen. Life: He lived for sixty-three years, during which he composed (or put on, ἐποίησεv) seventy dramas and additionally around five [?] satyr plays. The Suda clearly provides information about the number of victories from two different sources. Twenty-eight victories, if meant to indicate victories at the Great Dionysia, seems an improbably high number, but the figure might include victories in Rural Dionysia or even prize-winning performances elsewhere in the Greek world. The difference in the total number of plays by Aeschylus reflects an uncertainty that may have already have existed in antiquity. There are more than 70 titles attributed to Aeschylus in our sources, a number of which may be misattributed, and others are no doubt missing. In the circumstance, a number between 70 and 90 seems to be as close as we are likely to get to the total number. There are two other points to notice in these statements. The first is the Suda’s mention of elegies, which we know from other sources that Aeschylus wrote and of which a few lines survive. Plutarch, in the first of his nine books of his Symposiaka (Table-Talk), Quaestiones Conviviales I.10.628d–e, tells us that Glaucias (an Athenian orator otherwise unknown) gleaned specific information about the battle of Marathon from Aeschylus’s elegy on the subject. The existence of this elegy may have prompted, but cannot confirm, the story that Aeschylus fled Athens after Simonides’ Marathon elegy had defeated his. The second point concerns the statement in the Life that on top of 70 dramata, Aeschylus composed some five (? – the number is likely corrupt) satyrika, satyr plays, a genre of which he was recognised as the greatest practitioner (see Shaw, Chapter 14 in this volume). A treatise on style in literature attributed to an otherwise unknown Demetrius neatly labelled satyr drama “tragedy at play”, τραγῳδίαν παίζουσαν (On Style 169). As practised by Aeschylus and his successors, it used myths and the conventions of tragedy in a much lighter vein, with

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choruses of satyrs and suffused, in Demetrius’s terms, with “laughter and charm”. So far as we know, Aeschylus’s satyr plays were all designed to follow three tragedies (the “trilogy”) to constitute the “tetralogy” (three tragedies and a satyr play by a single poet, performed as a set in competition with two other such sets at the festival known as the Great or City Dionysia). Might there at this time have been some opportunity for which no records survive to present satyr play apart from tragic trilogies? Or, if we assume the number in the text is wrong, might dramata here stand in, quite irregularly, for “tragedies”, and the requisite (lost) number of satyr plays correspond in fact to those needed to make up tetralogies? If that were the case, the total number of 70 would move to something over the 90 given in the Suda. Neither of these “solutions” seems probable and what the compiler of the Life had in mind here may not be recoverable. Several of our sources offer information about important dates in Aeschylus’s life, drawn in all likelihood from official records. The so-called Parian Marble, a monumental inscription found on the island of Paros that recounts Greek history from 1581 to 264 bce, and thus was presumably carved in the mid-third century, provides dates (among much else) for poets’ births and deaths, victories in competitions and other noteworthy items of literary history (see Rotstein 2016). The Parian Marble informs us that Aeschylus fought in the battle of Marathon (490 bce) when he was 35 years old, and further that he died at Gela in Sicily at the age of 69. These entries both point to Aeschylus’s birth in 525/4 and death in 456/5. It further gives us the date of Aeschylus’s first victory in tragedy as 485/4 – also the year given for Euripides’ birth. We can add to these dates the Suda’s report that Aeschylus “competed” (sc. for the first time) at the age of 25. This is confirmed in the entry on Pratinas of Phlius, which specifies that this playwright competed with Aeschylus and Choerilus in the 70th Olympiad, i.e. 500–496. There are brief “hypotheses” (statements transmitted in the manuscripts of Greek drama, usually containing a plot synopsis and critique) to six of the surviving plays, informing us that they were parts of victorious tetralogies, and name the other plays; five give their dates, presumably derived from official records. The sixth, Suppliants, can be dated at least approximately on the basis of a fragmentary hypothesis to the Danaid tetralogy, of which it was part, and contained in an Oxyrhynchus Papyrus published only in 1952. The fragment breaks off just where the date would have appeared, but since it names as one of the competitors Sophocles, who won first prize in 468 in what is said to have been the first time he competed, the tetralogy most likely dates to the mid-to-late 460s. Indeed, if the letters ἐπὶ αρ] conceal a name rather than the phrase ἐπὶ ἄρχοντος (i.e. in the year of eponymous archon X), that name, by process of elimination, would have to be Archedemides and the year 463. The seventh, Prometheus Bound, is a special case; not only is no date recorded for its production, but a majority of scholars today do not consider the play that has come down to us to be the work of Aeschylus. A degree of consensus seems to be building around an attribution to Aeschylus’s tragedian son Euphorion. The strongest case for authenticity, however, is made by Herington (1970) and puts it at the very end of Aeschylus’s career, in Sicily. Putting all this information together, we can construct this skeletal chronology: 525/4 Aeschylus son of Euphorion, born to an Eleusinian family, presumably in Eleusis. In addition to his father, the Suda names several other male relatives: three brothers Ameinias, Euphorion and Cynaegirus; and two sons Euphorion and Euaeon, both of whom were tragedians. 499–496 First tetralogy performed at the Great Dionysia. 484 First victory at the Great Dionysia. 476–70  Women of Aetna (Aitniai: the name could also refer to a chorus of nymphs of Mount Etna), performed in Sicily to celebrate Hieron’s founding of the city of



Introduction: Aeschylus and His Place in History 7 Aetna, possibly at its founding in 476/5, possibly some years later, perhaps on the same visit he made to perform Persians at Hieron’s request. This has usually been assumed to have followed on the 472 performance in Athens. A number of scholars now suggest that the play was written for and first presented in Sicily (see Bosher 2012, 97–111, but see Bell, Chapter 5 in this volume). 472  Persians performed as part of a victorious tetralogy consisting of Phineus, Persians, Glaucus of Potniae and Prometheus (satyr play). 467  Seven against Thebes performed as part of a victorious tetralogy consisting of Laius, Oedipus, Seven and Sphinx (satyr play). 463?  Suppliants performed as first (or as some argue, second) play of a victorious tetralogy that included Egyptians (Aigyptioi, i.e. the sons of Aegyptus), Danaids (i.e. the daughters of Danaus) and Amymone (satyr play). 458  Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides performed as parts of the victorious Oresteia tetralogy, along with Proteus (satyr play). 456 Aeschylus dies at Gela in Sicily.

Aeschylus’s Character and the Character of His Plays Depictions of the poet’s character are subject to the same kinds of elaboration and distortion that afflict biographical information. Pausanias, the second-century ce author of a Description of Greece in 10 books, records a charming story purportedly told by Aeschylus himself about the source of his inspiration (1.21.1): Aeschylus said that when he was a boy sleeping in a field to guard the grapes, Dionysus appeared to him and ordered him to compose tragedy. And when it was day, since he wanted to obey, he attempted to compose and was already able to do so very easily. The trope of a poet describing the moment of his poetic inspiration goes back at least to Hesiod’s invocation of the Muses who visited him as he was pasturing his sheep and “breathed a godlike voice into me” (Theogony 31–32). Pausnias’s version, about an apparently benign visit by a potentially dangerous god, may be one of the elements that led to the conclusion that Aeschylus (like more than one poet, ancient Greek or otherwise) was a drunkard who wrote his plays under the influence of the wine god. Plutarch, again in his “Table Talk” (Quaestiones Conviviales 1.5.1) says that “Aeschylus, too, composed his tragedies while drinking and thoroughly lit up” (διαθερμαινόμενον, literally “heated through and through”). Athenaeus (late second–early third century ce), in his huge compendium of information about eating, drinking and their attendant arts and pleasures, Deipnosophistai 10.48, repeats this, connecting it directly with one of the plays, Cabiri, sometimes called a satyr drama, but on Athenaeus’s evidence a tragedy, which is what makes the drunkenness scandalous: For [Aeschylus] was the first and not, as some say, Euripides, to introduce the sight of drunkards into tragedy. For in Cabiri, he brings on Jason’s companions drunk, and with the thing the tragedian himself was doing, he besmirched his heroes. The fact is, he used to write his tragedies while drunk, which is why even Sophocles rebuked him, saying, “Aeschylus, even if you do the things as you should, you don’t know what you are doing”. Thus Chamaeleon writes in his On Aeschylus.

A couple of things stand out here here: first, the reference to a treatise on Aeschylus by Chamaeleon, a pupil of Aristotle, brings this accusation against Aeschylus back to the late

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fourth or early third century bce, even implicating Sophocles as an accuser. Secondly, and more importantly, we have a clear confirmation of one of Lefkowitz’s central points about poets’ biographies, the transfer of matter applied from a work to the poet’s life, which is here made quite explicit. Indeed, the case for this practice in Aeschylus is particularly strong given the way that Aristophanes’ Frogs uses lines from Aeschylus to characterise the poet in his play. In this comedy of 405, shortly after the deaths of Sophocles and Euripides and just before the disastrous end of the Peloponnesian War, Dionysus has descended to Hades to bring Euripides back to the world above, but when the two finally meet, Euripides is about to engage Aeschylus in a spirited agōn to see which of them deserves to hold the chair of poetry at Hades’ table, and appropriately Dionysus is chosen to judge it. This agōn, extended over many rounds, provides clear descriptions of Aeschylus as a man of the Marathon generation, stern, haughty and very much the laudator temporis acti, the man who praises the past at the expense of the present. Aeschylean poetry is praised for its elevated seriousness (semnotēs) and his stagecraft for its many innovations; his work is criticised (largely but not wholly by Euripides) as written in an overly elevated, even ponderous style, full of monstrous, incomprehensible words unknown to the audience and irrelevant to contemporary life. Moreover, Aeschylean plots are faulted for lack of action and the complex twists and turns that enliven Euripides’ work. This characterisation is the foundation for the direct source of most descriptions of Aeschylus and his drama for centuries to come. Aeschylus defends himself by invoking the noble traditions of the archaic poets, who taught the Greeks not only useful knowledge and skills, but also noble and beneficial habits. In particular it is the military prowess and courage of the heroes of old that he clams to instil in his audiences. His passion is manifest from the beginning of the scene, when Dionysus has to ask him to control his righteous anger, and he is entirely scornful of Euripides’ subtleties and sophistries, not to mention the “democratic” licence his rival exercises by allowing the highborn and the lowly, the virtuous and the shamelessly corrupt, men and women, citizens and slaves the right to speak at will. And it should be said that Dionysus’s decision to bring Aeschylus, rather than his beloved Euripides, back to Athens as the poet most likely to save the city is a vindication of the patriotism and practical wisdom of the older poet and the worth of his old-fashioned values. It is, however, primarily the bluff, rough-edged, warrior-poet with the grandeur and awkwardness of his language and the lack of sophistication in his plots who comes down to future generations in the biographical and critical tradition, albeit alongside the recognition of his pioneering elevation of tragedy to a major form of artistic and cultural expression. What we are dealing with here is different from the elaborations and fictionalisation that characterise many of the anecdotes we have examined. Strange compounds like a bird called “the tawny horsecock” (Frogs 932) and difficult language in lyric passages are genuine Aeschylus, as are peculiarities such as characters who come on stage and remain silent for hundreds of lines before they speak. In the Oresteia, for example, Cassandra, who enters at about Agamemnon 782 only speaks from 1072, after seeming entirely unresponsive, and Pylades, who enters with Orestes at the beginning of Libation Bearers, does not speak until line 900, and then only three crucial lines. The issue, then, is not one of authenticity, but of selection and emphasis. The examples given by Aristophanes are chosen for use in the agōn precisely because of their argumentative and satirical usefulness, not to represent the character of the poets or their work in a fair and balanced way. And yet, they are then adopted by biographers, critics and literary historians as a kind of shorthand to classify Aeschylus and his place in history: archaic, patriotic, belligerent, with rough edges, but nevertheless a grand and pathbreaking poet.



Introduction: Aeschylus and His Place in History 9

Aeschylus, the Creator of Tragedy? The first two sections of this Introduction have focused to a considerable extent on the gaps and probable distortions in our sources for Aeschylus’s life and character. About his singular accomplishments and historical significance, however, we can speak with confidence. Aeschylus, the Creator of Tragedy, the title of Gilbert Murray’s 1940 book, is amply justified if we consider his role in the early development and full flowering of drama in Athens and beyond. The shadowy figure of Thespis was credited in antiquity as the first tragedian, in effect by separating an individual actor from the dithyrambic chorus, and single-actor tragedy continued to be written at the end of the sixth century and the dawn of the fifth. But as Aristotle claimed in Poetics 1440a16 – and there is no reason to doubt him on this – Aeschylus introduced a second actor onto the tragic stage. It is hard to overstate the significance of this innovation, for only then does drama in the full sense of the word become possible. We have no examples of early single-actor tragedies, but there are scenes in extant Aeschylean plays that can give us an idea of their effect. In Persians, the Messenger who has announced the Persian defeat at Salamis departs at line 515, leaving only the Queen and the Chorus on the scene until 531, when the Queen, too, exits. After the choral stasimon, the Queen returns (598) to announce her preparations for calling up the ghost of Darius and to ask the Chorus to call up the ghost of Darius with propitious song while she pours libations; their chants and another stasimon follow (623–71). Suppliants offers several long tracts in which the Chorus and a single actor question and answer each other. In lines 234–489, although Danaus is present alongside King Pelasgus, it is only the Chorus and Pelasgus who exchange in dialogue, at first in spoken verse between the Chorus Leader and the King, and then in a commatic exchange, with the whole Chorus intensifying the emotional force of their plea through song and dance, while Pelasgus continues in speech mode. A structure entirely analogous to the exchange in Persians follows. After Danaus (503) and then Pelasgus (523) depart for the city to persuade the Argive people to accept the Danaids’ supplication, the Chorus is left alone on stage to chant and sing their prayer for success. Their father returns and, in the shortest episode in extant tragedy (600–24), tells them that Argos has granted their wish and promised them protection. They respond with a stasimon of thanks and blessings on Argos (625–709). Such highly emotional and musically rich sequences work brilliantly, but one can see right away their limitation: the single actor provides information to the Chorus, who then react to it. There might at times have been doubt or disagreement expressed in their response, but where only one actor can appear on stage, there is no room for confrontations between individuals, and thus for the full development of conflict, in deeds as well as in words, the lifeblood of drama. The addition of the second actor, then, is in itself enough to make Aeschylus the creator of tragedy in its full form, but in the Life and several other accounts it is just one item on a list of his enhancement of dramatic art. The Life lists as “very noble effects” Aeschylus’s introduction of “pictures and devices”, including “altars, tombs, trumpets, images and Furies”, and says he dignified the actors by giving them gloves, long robes and higher boots. As Lefkowitz points out, it is likely that all this was attributed to him because he was considered the first dramatist of lasting importance. What one can, I think, assert with considerable confidence is that throughout his career Aeschylus never ceased to experiment with poetic form, dramatic presentation and theatrical resources. Although Aristotle attributes the addition of the third actor to Sophocles (Poetics 1449a18–19), others (including sources known to the author of the Life, who endorses the view) believe it was Aeschylus himself. Be that as it may, Aeschylus adopts the additional actor by the time of the Oresteia and puts him to special and effective use (see Knox 1979 for the remarkable effects achieved above all in the Casssandra scene).

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As regards staging, the earlier plays all place the action outside and all entrances would presumably been made from the parodoi leading from either side to the orchestra. Only Suppliants requires a substantial construction, the altar of the gods at which the Danaids take refuge and from whose statues they threaten to hang themselves if their supplication fails. There is no consensus about how this was provided. There was an altar to Dionysus in the middle of the orchestra over which a superstructure might have been erected for the purpose. Alternatively, if the outcropping of rock known to have existed at one side of the orchestra had not yet been cut away, it might have housed the altar, giving the maidens a higher and more secure refuge, or it might even have been placed on the low stage behind the orchestra. Only the Oresteia requires that there be a stage building (skēnē) behind the stage, with a large door and a practicable roof, and Aeschylus’s trilogy demonstrates that he made full use of the resources of the skēnē, boldly beginning Agamemnon with a watchman who reports what he is seeing and feeling from the rooftop, and using the ekkyklēma, a cart that could be pushed through the door to show what is inside or bring it outside. This device appears to great effect in all three plays, in Agamemnon bringing out a tableau of Clytemnestra standing over the slain Agamemnon and Cassandra, in Libation Bearers with a mirroring tableau of Orestes over the bodies of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, in Eumenides bearing Orestes, beset by Furies, at the navel-stone in Delphi. Aeschylus’s brilliant employment of these features of the Theatre of Dionysus would be all the more remarkable if Hammond (1972) is right that the wooden stage building was a novel addition to the Theatre of Dionysus in 458. What emerges from this picture reinforces a point made by many critics and nicely summarised almost fifty years ago by Marsh McCall: “A rare statement may be made of Aeschylus: he is a man responsible at once for both the early development and the flowering of an art” (McCall 1972, 1). We are, I believe, the beneficiaries of a contemporary revival of interest in this singular artist, fuelled not only, indeed not chiefly, by scholars and critics, but by important performances and adaptations, and new works of art that have roots in the ancient soil of Aeschylus’s thought and poetry. (For more on this, see the relevant chapters in Part IV of this volume as well as the two recent multi-author volumes devoted to Aeschylus reception, Constantinidis 2017, Kennedy 2018.) There are of course many Aeschyluses beyond those of the classicist and the theatre historian: as many as there are playwrights, poets and writers, composers, theatre directors, theatre-goers and others who over the centuries have engaged with him and continue to do so. Aeschylus’s reach may be longer than we usually imagine. I want to remind us all of an iconic moment in the still (alas) not distant history of the United States. In 1968, Robert Kennedy, campaigning for the presidency, was informed moments before he spoke at a rally that Martin Luther King had just been assassinated in Memphis. In announcing this to his audience, he turned to Aeschylus to offer consolation. Spontaneously and from a full heart, he quoted (with a slight variation) a passage from Edith Hamilton’s translation of Agamemnon that must have meant a great deal to him after his own brother’s assassination: “My favorite poem, my – my favorite poet was Aeschylus”, he said, “and he once wrote: Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

May Aeschylus continue to inspire in expected and unexpected ways!



Introduction: Aeschylus and His Place in History 11

REFERENCES Bosher, K. (2012). “Hieron’s Aeschylus.” In Bosher, ed. Theater Outside Athens. Cambridge, 97–111. Constantinidis, S. E., ed. (2017). The Reception of Aeschylus’ Plays through Shifting Models and Frontiers. Leiden and Boston. Garland, R. (2004). Surviving Greek Tragedy. London. Hammond, N. G. L. (1972). “The Conditions of Dramatic Production to the Death of Aeschylus.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 13, 387–450. Herington, C. J. (1970). The Author of the Prometheus Bound. Austin. Kennedy, R. (1968). Robert Kennedy’s remarks can easily be accessed online. A particularly moving video that gives the full context is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoKzCff8Zbs Kennedy, R. F., ed. (2018). Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Aeschylus. Leiden and Boston. Kivilo, M. (2010). Early Greek Poets’ Lives: The Shaping of the Tradition. Mnemosyne. Supplement 322. Knox, B. (1979). “Aeschylus and the Third Actor.” In Word and Action. Baltimore, 39–55. Reprinted from American Journal of Philology 92, 1972. Lefkowitz, M. R. (1981). The Lives of the Greek Poets. London. McCall, M. H., ed (1972). Aeschylus: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Murray, G. (1940). Aeschylus, the Creator of Tragedy. Oxford. Pickard-Cambridge, A. W. (1968). The Dramatic Festivals of Athens. Second Edition. (J. Gould and D. M. Lewis, eds.). Oxford. Rotstein, A. (2016). “Literary History in the Parian Marble.” Hellenic Center Studies 68. Washington, DC. Saïd, S. (2005). “Aeschylean Tragedy.” In J. Gregory, ed. A Companion to Greek Tragedy. Malden, MA, 215–32. Wiles, D. (2000). Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction. Cambridge.

PART I

Aeschylus in His Time

CHAPTER 1

Democracy’s Age of Bronze: Aeschylus’s Plays and Athenian History, 508/7–454 bce Robert W. Wallace Written in a period of exceptional change, Aeschylus’s tragedies were deeply engaged with major political, social and military issues confronting Athens after 508/7, although the nature of that engagement has recently become more complicated. If over the last century these plays have often been judged liberal, progressive and democratic (Bowie 1993, 10–11; Griffith 1995, 63–64, with references), recent work has sometimes been more cautious (Debnar 2005, 11, with references), and major scholars now describe him in darker terms, including misogynist, elitist and “inventor of the barbarian”. The current chapter considers Aeschylus’s plays in respect to these and other issues, on which all the plays prove similar, whether supporting or challenging recent interpretations. Already from the disastrous quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon that drives Homer’s Iliad, Greek communities suffered from elite competitive violence for personal prestige and dominance. Civil strife (stasis: Herodotus 5.66.2) between two aristocrats, Isagoras and Cleisthenes, resurged at Athens after the Athenians expelled their last tyrant in 510. To end it, in 508/7 (when Aeschylus was a teenager) the Athenian people, “who had previously been thrust aside” (Herodotus 5.69.2), enacted a democratic constitution, assigning most civic powers to all adult male citizens. Public assemblies now decided most matters affecting the community and people’s courts adjudicated most legal cases. Most officials were chosen by lot from all citizens except the poorest, serving on boards usually of 10 for no pay and subject to frequent public scrutiny. To break the power of local aristocrats, Athens’ four tribes were replaced by 10, composed from different areas of Attica. “To strengthen the democracy… religious ceremonies held at private shrines [were now] concentrated on a few public ones” (Aristotle Politics 1319b19–27). The Attic territory was divided into 139 demes (civic wards) locally governed by residents, confirming the citizenry’s demand for self-rule. Citizens were henceforth formally identified not by their father’s but their deme’s name, community before family. Although political leaders remained aristocrats, success in politics meant persuading the assembled citizen body, the demos. “As free men”, the Athenians now “went from strength to strength, proving… how noble a thing everyone’s equal voice in

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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politics [isēgoria] is … when freedom was won” (Herodotus 5.78). From 488/7, the demos tasted the pleasure of formally ostracising – banishing for a decade – one aristocrat in each of seven years: at first would-be tyrants, then men who had simply become too prominent (pseudo-Aristotle Constitution of the Athenians 22.6). An attempt by aristocrats to overthrow the democracy in 479 failed (Plutarch Life of Aristeides 13). While Aeschylus’s ancient Life calls him aristocratic by birth, his dramas all express pride in Greek citizen communities and democratic government, and mostly scorn elite rulers. Persians, sponsored by another populist aristocrat, Pericles, in 472, contrasts Persian despotism (e.g. 24–25, 41–45) with Athenian democracy. When Queen Atossa asks the chorus of aged Persians, “Who is the shepherd, master and commander, over [the Athenian] army?”, the chorus leader replies, “They’re not called slaves or subjects of any man” (241–42). Unlike Athens’ public scrutiny of officials, Atossa states that if the Persian king fails to conquer Greece, “he is not accountable to the community” (213). Persians 402–05 first expresses (and links with the Persian wars) the ideology of Greek political freedom, a key component of Greek democracy. In Seven against Thebes of 467, the Theban ruler Eteocles is a monarch (2–3, 39, 62–63, 652, 882) and himself decides each Theban hero’s station in battle (375–676), choosing “the best men” (aristoi) “selected out from the city” (57, 282–84, compare Xerxes’ similar competence in Persians 1–7). “Am I not capable enough myself of deciding about these things?” (248). Although Eteocles stresses the importance of saving Thebes (which he calls his) and champions Thebes’ freedom from slavery (70–75), in 198 the word psēphos – in civic contexts a democratic voting pebble – ironically refers to his own decision (cf. Sophocles Antigone 60, Creon’s “psēphos of tyrants”). By contrast, Seven never mentions that Argos, Thebes’ enemy, has a king (Adrastos), whom it names only once (575) and not specifically as king or one of the seven against Thebes, as in other accounts. The seven Argive heroes themselves draw lots to decide which gate each will attack, unlike Eteocles (55–57, see also 125–27 stressing the lot, 376, 423, 458–59, and Mitchell 2006, 216–17 n. 33). In 467 Argos was a democracy, soon to be Athens’ ally. In Suppliant Women, produced c. 466–63, the chorus of Danaus’s daughters praises “the ruling hand of the demos” (δήμου κρατούσα χείρ, (604)), i.e. majority voting by raising hands, an early allusion to dēmokratia. The play is set in Argos “which does not like long speeches” (273) and early on Pelasgus states that he is its ruler (251–52; κρατῶ, “I rule” 255, 259). Not understanding democracy, the Egyptian Danaid chorus tells him, “you are the city, you are the people, a head of state not subject to judgement, you rule the altar (κρατύνεις βωμόν), hearth of the city … by your lone voting-pebbles (μονοψήφοισι) and nods, and by your lone sceptres (μονοσκήπτροισι) on the throne” (370–75). But Pelasgus defers to the vote of the assembled demos (365–69, 396–401, 600–14, quoting the democratic assembly formula “it seemed best to the Argives”). Now the people “rule the polis” (τò πτόλιν κρατύνει, 699) and their vote is final (739–40, 942–44). Suppliant Women’s Argive demos protects suppliants, as the Athenians will do in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus and Euripides’ Suppliant Women, Medea and other plays. Among extant tragedies, only Eumenides of 458 features an archaic Athens with no king (just as Argos in Seven). Eumenides also commends Athens’ alliance with Argos (286–91, 669–73, 762–74), for which Aeschylus transferred Oresteia’s setting from Mycenae to Argos. Although the goddess Athena acquits the aristocratic scion Orestes of matricide, the Areopagos’s citizen jury divides evenly on the question of his guilt or innocence. Aeschylus (Persians, Seven, Oresteia) and other tragedians often dramatise the terrifying, irremediable downfall of introverted aristocratic ruling houses (Seaford 1994). A main theme of Seven is the violent competition between King Oedipus’s sons Eteocles and Polynices for the throne of Thebes (e.g. 639–41, 647–48, 764). Polynices (Poly-neikes, “Much-strife”, as

Democracy’s Age of Bronze: Aeschylus’s Plays and Athenian History, 508/7–454 bce 17 Seven often notes: 577–78, 658, 830) curses (63) and attacks his own city, he and his brother aim to kill each other and do. Eteocles is imperious (e.g. 196–99, “if anyone fails to obey my rule” he will be stoned; at 224–25 he again demands obedience). He is nasty towards the suffering women of his polis and household (e.g. 187–88: “May I not share my home with the female gender”, and 181–202 passim). He vows to fight Polynices, “ruler against ruler, brother against brother, enemy against enemy” (674–75), although the chorus protests that he lusts after unlawful blood (693–95). His fight with Eteocles over Oedipus’s inheritance (711, 785–90) and the throne (882) leads to civil war, endangering Thebes (e.g. 71, 321– 68) and destroying the house of Laios, who himself defied an oracle’s warning (691–92, 811–18, 951–60; Seaford 1994, 346–48; cf. Goldhill 2000, 51). In a long, densely argued essay, a leading student of Greek tragedy Mark Griffith has proposed that alongside Oresteia’s “ringing endorsement of Athens and its political system” (1995, 64, see also 81), it offers its audience “assurance of the continuation of a class of aristocratic leaders, vulnerable, occasionally flawed but in the last resort infinitely precious and indispensable” (110), “brilliant dynasts” also collaborating with “an international elite of ruling families” (64). Space precludes a systematic critique of Griffith’s thesis (briefly, Goldhill 2000, 50–51). However, Aeschylus is once again critical of Greek elite, often intrafamilial rivalry for domination at the community’s expense. Agamemnon, who “rules” (kratei: Agamemnon 943), calls Odysseus “alone” a loyal friend (842). Elites embroil communities in terrible conflicts, while “justice honours righteous men in smoky hovels” (681–749, 773–75). “Trusty comrade” Pylades says to Orestes just one thing: kill your mother (see Libation Bearers 900–02). Orestes quickly agrees. Orestes deceives and lies to his mother and host Clytemnestra, then kills her. Community resentment at aristocratic outrage was a constant force in archaic history, yielding law-codes, then popular tyrants, then constitutional governments, and then democracies and citizen rule (Wallace 2009). In Athens, elite politicians were obliged to persuade the demos, whose ostraka (inscribed potsherds, used occasionally to vote ambitious politicians into exile) against them often feature gratuitous insults. Notwithstanding Griffith’s assertion (1995, 67) that ordinary citizens “never speak”, free speech in fifth-century assemblies is well attested (see two paragraphs below). Orestes’ jurors vote in silence but not to indicate submission, as Griffith suggests (78). Athens’ democratic jurors were forbidden to speak, in order not to influence others. Another relevant question needs to be addressed. In 458 Eumenides celebrated the foundation of Athens’ Areopagos court. From 479, the Areopagos Council exercised important powers and may have been judged undemocratic. In 462/1 Athens’ progressives had these powers transferred to the democracy. The resulting struggle was brutal and the progressives’ leader Ephialtes was murdered. Does Eumenides side with anti-democrats by championing the Areopagos? A hoary debate whether Aeschylus supported the pre-Ephialtic Areopagos by praising it or the post-Ephialtic Areopagos by founding it as a homicide court (its competence after 462/1), loses force because all Attic legends establish the Areopagos as a homicide court (Wallace 1989, 9–10). Aeschylus’s stroke of genius lay in inverting the Areopagos’s significance. Eumenides’ Erinyes are the old order of blood vendetta. The Areopagos is the new, representing peithō, “persuasion” (970) and the judicial process, endangered after Ephialtes’ reforms (Wallace 1989, 87–93). In similar words both the Areopagos’s founder Athena and the Erinyes (696–97, 526–28) exhort the Athenians to reject anarchy, tyranny and stasis, civil war. Athena condemns “my citizens’ internecine warfare, bold against each other” (Eumenides 858–66). The Erinyes pray, “May stasis, insatiate of evils, never ring out within this city, or the rich dust drink the citizens’ black blood and through anger work ruinous retaliatory murders in the destruction of the polis” (976–83, also 956–57). Aeschylus makes clear his contemporary reference, when in closing her foundation speech (681–710) against tyranny and anarchy, Athena addresses “my people for the future” (707–08).

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Outside courtrooms, free speech was central to democracy already in the early fifth century. In Plutarch Life of Cimon 8.1, when the aristocratic general Miltiades asked the assembly for an olive crown for defeating the Persians at Marathon, one Sophanes of Dekeleia “rose up from the middle of the assembly” and objected: “Let Miltiades ask for such an honour for himself when he has conquered the barbarian single-handed.” The citizens sided with Sophanes. Before the Persian invasion of 480, Herodotus reports a lively assembly debate over a Delphic oracle that Zeus had given Athens “a wall of wood” to protect it. Different citizens offered alternate explanations of this phrase, the assembly finally preferring Themistokles’ (7.141–44). According to Aeschines (3.183 –85), after the Athenians defeated the Persians at the Strymon river ca. 476, their generals asked to be honored by the assembly. The assembly agreed and voted them three stone statues of Hermes, “on condition that they not inscribe their own names on them, lest the inscriptions seem to honor the generals, not the people.” Aeschines quotes the three inscriptions, none naming individuals. In Persians of 472 Athens’ victorious general Themistokles remains unnamed. Shortly afterwards he was ostracized, reportedly for excessive self-glorification (Plutarch Themistocles 22). Just so in Aeschylus, after Xerxes’ defeat, the chorus of Persians laments, “nor do men any longer keep their tongue under guard, for the people have been let loose to bark free things” (591–93, see also 694–96). Of the two women yoked by Xerxes in Atossa’s dream (188–96), the well-dressed woman symbolising Persia “towered herself proud in the harness, and kept her mouth well-governed by the reins”. The Greek woman “bucked stubborn and with both hands wrenched harness from the chariot fittings and dragged it by sheer force, bridle flung off, and shattered the yoke mid-span”. In Seven’s undemocratic Thebes, Eteocles forbids public talk (250–86, 550–57), but the Argive demos enjoys rowdy free speech (441–47, 466–69, 483, 486–87, 497–98, 549 by a metic!, 551, 563–66, 570–89, 632–41). In Suppliant Women, Danaus warns his immigrant daughters not to “speak boldly” (θρασυστομεĩν, 203), whereas Pelasgus informs the Egyptian herald of the Argive people’s decision to protect the suppliants “from the plain words of a free man’s tongue” ἐξ ἐλευθεροστόμου γλώσσης (948). In Prometheus Bound, perhaps c. 445 and not by Aeschylus (Griffith 1977; West 1990, 51–72; Sommerstein 2010a, 228–34), the chorus warns Prometheus that he is “too free in his speech” (ἄγαν δ’ έλευθεροστομεĩς) for tyrant Zeus’s liking (180). Athens’ post-508/7 democracy was also active on military campaigns. Except for one action near Troy in 607 (Herodotus 5.94–95), no wars by Athens are attested down to 506, and according to the pseudo-Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians 15.3–4, Athens’ tyrants disbanded its army. The new democracy reconstituted that army (Anderson 2003, 147–57, with references). The results were spectacular, with major victories against Boeotia and Chalcis in 506 “on the same day” (Herodotus 5.77). Heavy-armed citizen battalions, fighting side by side, reinforced the Athenians’ egalitarian and dominant sense of self. In 497, Athens’ indecisive aid to the east Greeks’ revolt against Persia (Herodotus 5.97) spurred Persia’s attack at Marathon in 490. The Athenians’ victory was unexpected; they were “the first Greeks who charged at a run, the first who endured to face the Persians. Until then, the mere name of the Persians brought fear among the Greeks” (Herodotus 6.112). Athens’ 192 fatalities included Aeschylus’s brother (Herodotus 6.114). The playwright’s own epitaph, composed in Sicily by himself (Athen. 627c, Paus. 1.14.5) or a contemporary (Sommerstein 2010b), mentions no plays but only Marathon: “Under this monument lies Aeschylus the Athenian/Euphorion’s son, who died in the wheatlands of Gela/The grove of Marathon, with its glories, can speak of his valor in battle/The long-haired Persian remembers and can speak of it too.” In 480 and 479 the Athenians won or helped to win three further victories over Persia, at Salamis, Plataia and Mykale. In Persians 1025 the chorus tells Xerxes, “The Greeks never ran

Democracy’s Age of Bronze: Aeschylus’s Plays and Athenian History, 508/7–454 bce 19 from the spear”. These victories were transformative. From 477 the Athenians headed a naval league of some 300 city-states, which mostly contributed modest amounts of silver – typically, the major city Miletos contributed just five talents per year, enough to deploy five ships for one month – to ensure that Athens’ 400 warships protected them. The next 30 years saw tremendous fighting mostly by Athenians across the Aegean and coastal Near East. As Kurt Raaflaub (2007, 102) observes, “Such constant and intense military activity was unprecedented among Greeks, a result of the introduction of naval warfare on a large scale … chang[ing] the entire face of war”. In Plutarch Cimon 12, if we substitute “the Athenians” for Plutarch’s heroising “Cimon” (Athens’ general), Plutarch writes: [The Athenians] followed right at the Great King’s heels, and before the barbarians had come to a halt and taken breath, they sacked and overthrew here, or subverted and annexed to the Greeks there, until Asia from Ionia to Pamphilia was entirely cleared of Persian arms.

One spectacular success was Athens’ triple victory against Persia at the Eurymedon river in southwest Anatolia c. 467 (Plutarch Cimon 12–13). An inscription of 459 lists 177 dead from one of Athens’ 10 tribes, Erechtheis (IG 13 1147, available online at https://www. atticinscriptions.com/inscription/IGI3/1147). Its heading reads, “those who died in the war, in Cyprus, in Egypt, in Phoenicia, at Halieis, at Aegina, at Megara, in the same year”. If Erechtheis was typical, Athens’ military casualties for 459 will have totalled some 1800 men, from an adult male citizen population of not more than 40 000. Athenians fought and died protecting themselves and their allies, their dedication to fellow Greeks challenging the notion in some current scholarship that behind Xerxes’ hubris in Persians Aeschylus meant Athens’ (for caution see e.g. Griffith 1995, 79 n. 66; Debnar 2005, 7–9). Unlike other sources and writing in a darker period, Thucydides describes Athens’ behaviour as head of the league as brutal from the start (compare the account in e.g. Thucydides 1.98–99 with Plutarch Cimon 11), morally justifying Athens’ 404 defeat. By contrast, in Eumenides of 458 Athena offers an extraordinary blessing on her people: “May you have external war, and plenty of it” (864). And, whereas in Suppliants 701–03 the Egyptian Danaids caution Athens to offer other states “painless justice under fair agreements” before resorting to war, Orestes apparently alludes favourably to Athens’ Egyptian expedition against Persia in the very year of the play’s production (Eumenides 292–95, see e.g. Sommerstein 1989 on those lines). Moreover, in Eumenides 397–402 Athena lays claim to Persian land that Athens had contested in 607 bce. In 460, Athens provoked war against Sparta and Corinth, with heavy fighting in mainland Greece, winning victories against the Peloponnesians in 458. At the battle of Tanagra in 457 there were major losses on both sides, but Sparta finally won. Two months later came Athens’ major victory against the Boeotians at Oinophyta (Thucydides 1.105–08). Despite Aeschylus’s complexities, all his plays support democracy and Athens’ external military campaigns and condemn elite rulers and upper-class stasis for personal domination. Although the traditional date of his death, 456/5, may well have been invented as midway between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars (Euripides’ first dramatic performance is also dated 456/5; Euripides’ birth and Aeschylus’s first dramatic victory are both dated 484, with Aeschylus’s birth a standard 40 years earlier), none of his plays reflect Athens’ military retrenchment after a period of incompetent generals (pseudo-Aristotle Constitution of the Athenians 26.1), major defeats in Egypt and Cyprus in 454, peace with Persia in 449, then peace with Sparta in 446. Cratinus, a predecessor of Aristophanes, inaugurated political comedy at the Dionysia with his Nemesis (c. 455), probably criticising Athens’ increasingly disastrous support for Egypt’s revolt against Persia. Elsewhere I have argued that, despite Thucydides and Pericles, Athenian

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militarism, its “age of bronze”, waned from 454 (Wallace 2011, 42–44), within a wider framework of reduced violence evident in Athenian vase-painting from c. 470 and various Athenian texts, and the decline of military dedications at sanctuaries (van Wees 2008). Athens’ democracy, military successes and citizen solidarity also yielded darker consequences, as citizen men, equal together and conscious of their power, excluded and denigrated others: women, foreigners and slaves. As Josh Ober observed (1989, 5), “the political cohesiveness of the citizenry was partly a product of the oppression of non-citizen groups within the polis”. Although such exclusionist attitudes are thought to characterise classical Athens generally, they appeared fairly soon after 508/7 and from c. 470 came to be modified, not least by Aeschylus. Chattel slavery increased at Athens after 508/7, in part because greater civic and egalitarian liberty limited exploitation within the civic community, and broad participation in democracy and the military required freedom from physical toil. Moses Finley concluded, “the cities in which individual freedom reached its highest expression – most obviously Athens – were cities in which chattel slavery flourished”, noting “the advance, hand in hand, of freedom and slavery” (Finley 1982, 114–15, his italics). Agamemnon’s Cassandra is a captive female slave, as are the chorus in Libation Bearers and Orestes’ nurse. Although mistreatment of slaves is well documented in Athens’ democracy, Libation Bearers’ chorus engage in friendly conversation with their mistress Electra (84–211), and Orestes’ nurse is also sympathetic (734–82). Libation Bearers’ chorus call their masters sometimes unjust but are nonetheless loyal to them (75–81), implying the injustice of slavery and the play’s desire that slaves feel good will toward their owners. Although Clytemnestra seems at first to sympathise with Cassandra’s situation and promises to be kind (1035–46), she turns cold after failing to persuade her to speak (1055–56, 1064–68). Cassandra bravely goes to meet her fate, “the death of a slave, an easy victim” (1326). “Thus the slave proves herself superior to the conqueror, the barbarian to the Greek, the woman to the man” (Winnington-Ingram 1948, 134). Aeschylus’s sympathetic comments at least on female slavery challenge the view that such sentiments were uncommon before Euripides. On Athenian attitudes towards foreigners, Edith Hall (esp. 1989, 1996) has argued that the Athenians now “invent the barbarian”, anti-Greek opposites to democratic Athenians. Contemporary data confirm the diffusion of anti-foreign prejudice. Various ostraka accuse elites of either Persian treachery or foreign birth (Brenne 2002, Testimonia 1/37, 1/41, 1/47–61, etc.). A vase of the later 460s shows what might be a trousered Persian saying “I am Eurymedon, I stand bent over”, as an Athenian approaches, distending his penis, linking military with sexual domination (cf. Hall 1993; Smith 1999). We recall Athens’ Persian victory at the Eurymedon. Pericles’ law of 451/0 requiring that parents of future citizens both be citizens in part reflects a context of devaluing foreigners. Democratic Athens never lost its prejudice against foreigners. Following Athens’ victories over Persia, “orientalism” is attested in Aeschylus’s Persians, reportedly based on Phrynichus’s Phoenician Women of 476, produced by Themistokles, another democratic aristocrat and Persian victor. (In Phrynichus’s opening line, a eunuch announces Xerxes’ defeat.) Aeschylus’s Persians are presented as slaves prostrating themselves before their rulers who consider themselves gods. They fight with cowardly arrows, not brave spears. Just as contemporary Athenians viewed themselves as democratic, non-hierarchical, temperate and masculine, Aeschylus’s Persians are tyrannical, decadent, luxurious and effeminate (Hall 1989, 81–86, 1996, 5). By contrast, other passages counterbalance these sentiments. If Xerxes is mostly bad, his parents Darius and Atossa are mostly admirable and mostly blame Xerxes for Persia’s troubles (709–842). As Mitchell points out, Aeschylus calls the Persian and Greek women in Atossa’s dream “of the same race” (2006, 185–86). Marianne Hopman observes (2013, 64–67) that Persians’ chorus stresses the anguish of parents and

Democracy’s Age of Bronze: Aeschylus’s Plays and Athenian History, 508/7–454 bce 21 wives whom the Persian soldiers had left behind (61–64, 134–37, 288–89, 579–83), just as the Argive chorus in Agamemnon addresses the pain of Greek casualties. In Suppliant Women, Danaus and his daughters the Danaids are also complicated, as Geoffrey Bakewell (2013) shows in a critical survey of relevant scholarship. They are Egyptian immigrants to Argos, dark-skinned non-Greeks (70, 154–55, 277–90, 496–97, 719–20) with non-Greek voices (117–19, 972–73) and “barbarian robes” (235–37; cf. Derbew, Chapter 24 in this volume). The Danaids don’t understand democracy and threaten pollution (370–75), while their father, whom they call stasiarchos (“leader of stasis”? 12) has sometimes been judged duplicitous (Bakewell 2013, 42–45). In this play, accommodating foreigners is not without problems (cf. Kennedy, Chapter 8 in this volume). On the other hand, as descendants of Io the Danaids’ genos originated in Argos (324–25), they are modest and respect Greek gods (210–23, 241–43, 704–09). A mixed bag, they are called astoxenoi (“locals/foreigners”), designating strangers of citizen descent (356, 618, 652). Despite these complexities, Pelasgus (419, 615–20, 963) and the Argive people (621–24, 964) commit to protecting them. By unanimous vote they become metoikoi, “dwellers among”, Athens’ formal designation for resident aliens, a category which Bakewell (2013, 17–33) argues was established shortly before 463, Aeschylus’s play serving as charter myth. At the end of Eumenides (1011), the Erinyes also become honoured metics, bringing prosperity to Athens. They proclaim, “honouring my metoikia you will not fault the outcomes of your lives in any way” (1018–20). They don purple clothes (1027), like metics in Athens’ Panathenaic procession. Mitchell (2006, 220–22) explores possible rapprochements between Athenians and Persians or Egyptians c. 465–50, partly reflected in Suppliant Women. By contrast, Aeschylus’s play extends little respect to barbarian men. Pelasgus tells the Egyptian herald, “Do you really think you have come to a city of women? Karbanos ( = barbarian) that you are, you show an unduly insulting attitude toward Greeks” (913–14). “Males you shall find in this land – not people who drink barleycorn brew!” (951–52). Any foreign rapprochements ended after mid-century. Metic status was always marked by discriminatory legislation. For example, metics could not own land or (from 451/0) marry Athenians. They were also obliged to pay a poll-tax (metoikion). Finally, after 508/7 the status of Athenian women changed, as symbolised by the institution of deme citizen lists registering only men. The Athenians’ claim to be autochthonous, “born from the earth” of ancient Attica, also first appears, denoting superiority not only to non-Athenian Greeks, considered immigrants to their lands (Thucydides 1.2), but also to women, as man born from earth excludes man born from woman. Nicole Loraux (2000) linked post-508/7 isonomia (“equality”) with isogonia, “equal birth” in which “the Other” – women, slaves and foreigners – did not share. Evidence for women in public now diminishes, while the number of all-male civic festivals expands. In 508/7 the Athenians instituted annual dithyrambic contests, their 10 new civic tribes each supplying choruses of 50 men and 50 boys (Wilson 2003). Unlike other citystates and times (cf. Calame 1977: The Choruses of Young Women in Archaic Greece), classical Athens did not sponsor female choruses (Wilson 2000, 40–42; Stehle 1997, 117–18). Before 480, 17 dedications by women are preserved from the Acropolis. After 480 there is only one. Many black figure vases before 480 show women at the fountain. Only one red figure vase does. Herodotus, a non-Athenian, mentions women some 375 times. The Athenian Thucydides hardly mentions them and in his Funeral Oration, Pericles – a democrat – says the best thing for women is simply not to be mentioned (2.45.2). More darkly, Robert Sutton (1992) examined vase depictions of gender relations and sexuality from archaic Athens down through the fifth century. Although democratic man’s ancestor “middling man” (ho mesos; see Morris 2000, 164) had long expressed disdain for women (cf. Hesiod’s story of Pandora, Works and Days 60–105 and Theogony 590–93), Sutton writes

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that between 510 and 470 many especially symposium pots depict “a strictly male-oriented, egocentric eroticism” (4), “active hostility and the abuse and degradation of prostitutes” (11), for example aged whores being beaten with slippers while satisfying two men (Beazley 1963 no. 86a = Keuls 1985, 166). While not snapshots of daily realities, these images will have reflected some male social ideologies and fantasies. Although most of these pots were found in Etruria, their chronological correlation with the appearance, then fading of public misogyny in Athens after 470 argues a link with Athenian taste. All of Aeschylus’s surviving plays, written in the years 472 to 458 when misogyny was fading, feature women, in most cases positively. In Persians, we have seen, the Greek woman in Atossa’s dream is proud, strong and defiant. Persian women and Atossa herself are also impressive. A central theme of Seven is the suffering of women in war. Scholars debate whether the Theban Eteocles’ scorn for the chorus of women, whom he calls “insufferable creatures” and orders to shut up and stay at home (182–262, 712–13), qualifies him as misogynist (see e.g. Foley 2001, 45–51; Torrance 2007, 94–101). Gagarin (1976, 154–61) and others are persuasive in supporting the chorus. Six of Suppliant Women’s 14 suggested themes (Bakewell 2013, 4) defend women. The Danaids have fled to Argos, preferring to die rather than endure hateful marriages “under the sway of the males” (392–93, also 643–45, 816–21). The Argive demos votes to protect them. As for Oresteia, Agamemnon brutally sacrificed his daughter Iphigeneia, abandoned his wife for 10 years, returns home with a barbarian concubine, speaks first not to his wife but to the gods and chorus (when Clytemnestra appears [Agamemnon 855], she also speaks first to the chorus, “citizen men”). Agamemnon walks on a red carpet like a woman, a barbarian and a god (918–25). Agamemnon’s citizen chorus condemns him for deciding to kill his daughter (218–25): When he put on the yoke-strap of necessity, his spirit veered impious, impure, unholy, from that point he resolved a deed of uttermost audacity… Emboldened by wretched delusion … he dared to become the sacrificer of his daughter,

a piteous young girl slaughtered by “war-loving chieftains, … like a goat over the altar” (230– 32). Agamemnon is appalling throughout this play (contrast Griffith 1995, 84–87, exaggerating the chorus’s support). When Agamemnon first appears on stage, the chorus addresses him with bitter words, for his dishonesty, hypocrisy and misconduct (790–804). He himself describes the conflagration of Troy: “Vaulting over its towered walls, the raw-eating lion lapped his fill of tyrant blood” (827–28); “The gales of destruction live” (819). The chorus speaks ominously of the Greek community’s anger against Agamemnon and Menelaus. “Female mourning reigns, with a heart that endures suffering, and dead warriors are returned as ashes to every man’s house” (429–36). “They lament” these warriors’ deaths “for another man’s wife, that is what they snarl, under their breath, and pain steals over them mixed with resentment against the chief prosecutors the sons of Atreus” (445–51, also 456–60). Each reader will have his or her reaction to Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra. Her portrait in Agamemnon is explosive. In Odyssey, Aegisthus is the main villain of this story, seducing Clytemnestra, killing Agamemnon and ruling for seven years until Orestes kills him (1.29–43; 3.263–75, 304–12; 4.518–37). Agamemnon’s chorus praises Clytemnestra just before she appears (255–57). She prays for the army’s safe return (341–49): May no longing first come on the army to ravage what they should not ravage, vanquished by love of gain!… And even if the army should return without offence against the gods, may it wreak no sudden havoc… may the good prevail.

Democracy’s Age of Bronze: Aeschylus’s Plays and Athenian History, 508/7–454 bce 23 The chorus commends her wisdom (351–52), but the choral song that follows on these words and the subsequent accounts of the Herald reveal the extent of the army’s misdeeds. When she proclaims herself a loyal wife through two-thirds of Agamemnon, the audience is uncertain how to judge her, but senses that the chorus knows something more. I must make best haste to receive my honoured husband on his return – for what day’s light dawns sweeter for a woman than this?… Report this to my husband, that he should come as quickly as he can, a darling to the city. When he comes may he find in the house a faithful wife just as he left her, a good guard dog for him and an enemy to those who are hostile. Such is my boast, a boast replete with truth, not shameful for a noble lady to utter. (601–14)

After Agamemnon appears on stage, Clytemnestra arrives and tells the chorus how much she loves him. She addresses women’s lot in sympathetic ways. “In the first place, it is a terrible trial for a wife to be sitting alone at home without her man, hearing many dire reports… Many a noose hung from above was untied from my neck by others after I had been seized and held by force” (855–76, see also 891–903). And if at Agamemnon’s climax Clytemnestra proves “transgressive”, killing her appalling husband and his mistress and aspiring to power, she is also bold, strong and justified. Christopher Pelling writes, “she, and her rhetoric, dominate the stage… Much of [her] power comes from the uncanny closeness of what she says to the truth… She sees the way the world is” (2005, 95). He notes that while she deceives, the audience only learns this at the end, when she admits it and takes responsibility for killing Agamemnon, in for me the most powerful speech in Greek tragedy: Much have I said before to serve the needs of the moment and I shall feel no shame to contradict it now. How else could one, devising hate against enemies who seem to be friends, fence the snares of ruin too high to overleap? This is the contest of an ancient feud, pondered by me of old, and it has come, however long delayed. I stand where I dealt the blow; my work is accomplished. Thus have I done it; deny it I will not. Around him, as if to catch a haul of fish, I cast an impassable net – fatal wealth of robe – so that he should neither escape nor ward off doom. Twice I struck him, and with two groans his limbs relaxed. Once he had fallen, I dealt him yet a third stroke to grace my prayer to Zeus of the underworld, the saviour of the dead. Fallen thus, he gasped away his life, and as he breathed forth quick spurts of blood, he struck me with dark drops of gory dew; while I rejoiced no less than the sown earth is gladdened in heaven’s refreshing rain at the birthtime of the flower buds… Since then the case stands thus, old men of Argos, rejoice, if you would rejoice. As for me, I glory in the deed. (1374–95)

As Victoria Wohl observed at a conference on tragedy and law, Clytemnestra’s killing is “for her at once a sacrament and an orgasm”, which I read as the corruption of regular marital relations. On stage she stands courageously and alone, defying 12 older men who surround her and call her “bold-mouthed” (θρασύστομος, 1399). She blames the chorus for doing nothing about Agamemnon’s murder of Iphigeneia or his concubine – she had no other recourse against her husband. She defends Helen (1462–67) whom earlier the chorus of elders had harshly condemned. Finally she proclaims that she is not Agamemnon’s wife but the curse on the house of Atreus (1431–47, 1497–1504); the chorus still declares its loyalty. At the end of the play, after Aegisthus has shown himself ridiculous, Clytemnestra asks the chorus for reconciliation. “Such are the words of a woman, if anyone sees fit to learn from them” (1661). In Libation Bearers, the chorus and Orestes badmouth both Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, although Clytemnestra is most courteous to her visitors. She

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and Aegisthus pay the price for their deeds, setting up the dilemma that Eumenides will resolve. Winnington-Ingram observed, “It is hard to believe that Aeschylus, whose women have such powers and courage, regarded with complacency… the degraded status of women,… an injustice which damaged their society” (1948, 147). As we have seen, Aeschylus’s other plays also defend women against men. In addition, Iphigeneia frag. 94 reads, “it is not right to revile women. How could it be?” Europa frag. 99 piteously recounts Europa’s rape by Zeus. Women are most often the choruses in tragedies (22 as compared to 11 for men), balancing Athens’ post-508/7 male democratic choruses (Murnaghan 2005). Virtually all extant tragedies between 467 and 431 star brave, strong women challenging terrible, often pathetic men: after Aeschylus, Sophocles’ Tecmessa and Ajax, Antigone and Creon, Deianeira and Herakles; Io and both Zeus and Hera in Prometheus Bound; then Euripides’ Alcestis and Medea. Although sometimes read as reflecting social realities of gender relations, these characters are first protests by men to audiences of men, against the mistreatment of women in the first two generations of Athens’ democracy. Social history and the archaeological record show that from the 450s, women’s situations at Athens improved (Osborne 1997). Finally, women are implicated in another theme of Oresteia, justice. Athena votes to acquit Orestes of matricide when his mother had killed his father, because she herself did not have a mother. I and others (e.g. Cohen 1986; Griffith 1994) reject the old-fashioned view that Oresteia ends with the establishment of universal justice. On the contrary, the gods remain crazy, fickle and mostly unprincipled. In Agamemnon’s “Hymn to Zeus” 1600–72, the chorus sings that Zeus overthrew his father Kronos, who had killed his father Ouranos. When Apollo claims that Zeus commanded all his words including a father’s greater importance than a mother’s (Eumenides 614–39), the chorus responds, “According to your argument, Zeus has preferential regard for a father’s death, but he himself bound his aged father Kronos. Can you deny that this contradicts your recent arguments? I call upon you [Areopagites] as witnesses that you hear this” (640–43). I agree with Sommerstein that Apollo’s arguments defending Orestes, for example that the mother only carried the seed of the father, need not have convinced the theatre audience. Athena’s reasoning is personal, wrong (she had a mother, though was not born from one) and legally absurd. Greeks recognised tragic gods’ often arbitrary and unjust conduct. “Such are the doings of the younger gods, who rule, altogether beyond justice, a throne dripping blood”, the Erinyes say (Eumenides 162–64). Donald Mastronarde 2005, 321 cites “the preponderance… of malevolent, punitive, or destructive interventions of the divine… in Greek tragedy”, including by Athena. In Sophocles’ Ajax she savagely mocks that great warrior (and Athenian tribal hero) whom she has reduced to misery. “To laugh at your enemies, what sweeter laughter can there be than that?” (78– 79). Eumenides’ Athena tells the Erinyes that unless they comply with her wishes, she knows where Zeus keeps his thunderbolts (826–29). Divine justice has not improved when she acquits Orestes. Justice lay with Athens’ citizen-jurors, equally divided on Orestes’ guilt. In conclusion, Aeschylus’s plays support democracy against violent upper-class domination, and Athens’ aggressive foreign policy. Their mixed sentiments on barbarians, even within single plays, may have reflected those of other Athenians at the time. Their sympathies at least regarding female slavery and women’s mistreatment by men were progressive sentiments occurring in other tragedians, and increasingly shared by many Athenians. *Most translations are adapted from Alan Sommerstein 2008, vols.1 and 2. Length stipulations have restricted the number of works cited. Many thanks to Anne-Sophie Noel (Lyon) for comments on this essay and to Victoria Wohl for permission to quote from a lecture.

Democracy’s Age of Bronze: Aeschylus’s Plays and Athenian History, 508/7–454 bce 25

FURTHER READING The last generation produced fine scholarship on Aeschylus and the issues addressed in this essay, notably by Pat Easterling, Simon Goldhill, Mark Griffith, Alan Sommerstein, and from the previous generation, R. P. Winnington-Ingram. Anything they write is recommended. On the current chapter, see further Goldhill 1990, 1992 and 2000. On the politics of Aeschylean tragedy and many other topics, see also Sommerstein 2010a. Pelling, ed. 1997 is a collection of essays full of riches, as is Foley 2001 (note especially the chapter “Tragic Wives: Clytemnestras”). Torrance, ed. 2017 illuminates a neglected play. Osborne 2018, chapter 5, has further thoughts on pornographic and non-pornographic vase-paintings. Neer 2002, chapter 4, addresses “negotiations/reconciliations” (diallagai) between elite and democratic aspects of contemporary vase-paintings involving jurors, cavalrymen, tyrant killers and Theseus. The democratic nature of Athens’ classical democracy is the main theme of Ober 1989.

REFERENCES Anderson, G. (2003). The Athenian Experiment: Building an Imagined Political Community in Ancient Attica, 508–490 B.C. Ann Arbor. Bakewell, G. (2013). Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women. The Tragedy of Immigration. Madison. Beazley, J. D. (1963). Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters. Oxford. Bowie, A. M. (1993). “Religion and Politics in Aeschylus’ Oresteia.” Classical Quarterly 43, 10–31. Brenne, S. (2002). “Die Ostraka (487–ca. 416 v. Chr.) als Testimonien.” In P. Siewert, ed. OstrakismosTestimonien I. Historia Einzelschrift 155. Stuttgart, 36–166. Calame, C. (1977). Les Choeurs de jeunes filles en Grèce archaïque. Rome. Trans. as Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece 2001. Lanham, MD. Cohen, D. (1986). “The Theodicy of Aeschylus: Justice and Tyranny in the Oresteia.” Greece & Rome 33, 129–41. Debnar, P. (2005). “Fifth-century Athenian History and Tragedy.” In Gregory ed., 3–22. Finley, M. (1982). “Was Greek Civilisation Based on Slave Labour?” In B. Shaw and R. Saller, eds. Economy and Society in Ancient Greece. New York, 145–64. Foley, H. P. (2001). Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton. Gagarin, M. (1976). Aeschylean Drama. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Goldhill, S. (1990). “The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology.” In J. Winkler and F. Zeitlin, eds. Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context. Princeton, 97–129. Goldhill, S. (1992). Aeschylus: The Oresteia. Cambridge. Goldhill, S. (2000). “Civic Ideology and the Problem of Difference: The Politics of Aeschylean Tragedy, Once Again.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 120, 34–56. Gregory, J. ed. (2005). A Companion to Greek Tragedy. Oxford. Griffith, M. (1977). The Authenticity of Prometheus Bound. Cambridge. Griffith, M. (1994). Review of Sommerstein, Aeschylus. Eumenides, Classical Philology 89, 183–84. Griffith, M. (1995). “Brilliant Dynasts: Power and Politics in the Oresteia.” Classical Antiquity 14, 62–129. Hall, E. (1989). Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-definition through Tragedy. Oxford. Hall, E. (1993). “Asia Unmanned: Images of Victory in Classical Athens.” In J. Rich and G. Shipley, eds. War and Society in the Greek World. London, 108–33. Hall, E. (1996). Aeschylus Persians. Warminster. Hopman, M. G. (2013). “Chorus, Conflict, and Closure in Aeschylus’ Persians.” In R. Gagné and M. G Hopman, eds. Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy. Cambridge, 58–77. Keuls, E. (1985). The Reign of the Phallus. Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens. New York. Loraux, N. (2000). Born of the Earth: Myth and Politics in Athens (trans. S. Stewart). Ithaca, NY. Mastronarde, D. (2005). “The Gods.” In Gregory ed., 321–33. Mitchell, L. G. (2006). “Greeks, Barbarians and Aeschylus’ Suppliants.” Greece & Rome 53, 205–23.

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Morris, I. (2000). Archaeology as Cultural History. Malden, MA. Murnaghan, S. (2005). “Women in Groups: Aeschylus’s Suppliants and the Female Choruses of Greek Tragedy.” In V. Pedrick and S. M. Oberhelman, eds. The Soul of Tragedy: Essays on Athenian Drama. Chicago, 183–98. Neer, R. (2002). Style and Politics in Athenian Vase-Painting: The Craft of Democracy ca. 530–460 B.C.E. Cambridge. Ober, J. (1989). Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens. Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People. Princeton. Osborne, R. (1997). “Law, the Democratic Citizen and the Representation of Women in Classical Athens.” Past & Present 155, 3–37. Osborne, R. (2018). The Transformation of Athens. Painted Pottery and the Creation of Classical Greece. Princeton. Pelling, C., ed. (1997). Greek Tragedy and the Historian. Oxford. Pelling, C. (2005). “Tragedy, Rhetoric, and Performance Culture.” In Gregory ed., 83–102. Raaflaub, K. (2007). “Warfare and Athenian Society.” In L. J. Samons II, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Pericles. Cambridge, 96–124. Seaford, R. (1994). Reciprocity and Ritual. Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State. Oxford. Smith, A. (1999). “Eurymedon and the Evolution of Political Personifications in the Early Classical Period.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 119, 128–41. Sommerstein, A. H. (1989). Aeschylus. Eumenides. Cambridge. Sommerstein, A. H. (2008). Aeschylus I–III. Cambridge, MA. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010a). Aeschylean Tragedy. Second Edition. London. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010b). “Aeschylus’ Epitaph.” In The Tangled Ways of Zeus, and Other Studies in and around Greek Tragedy. Oxford, 195–201. Stehle, E. (1997). Performance and Gender in Ancient Greece: Non-dramatic Poetry in Its Setting. Princeton. Sutton, R., Jr. (1992). “Pornography and Persuasion on Attic Pottery.” In A. Richlin, ed. Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome. Oxford, 3–35. Torrance, I. (2007). Aeschylus Seven against Thebes. London. Torrance, I. (2017). Aeschylus and War. Comparative Perspectives on Seven against Thebes. Abingdon. van Wees, H. (2008). “Review Article ‘Violence.’” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 128, 172–75. Wallace, R. (1989). The Areopagos Council, to 307 B.C. Baltimore. Wallace, R. (2009). “Charismatic Leaders.” In K. Raaflaub and H. van Wees, eds. Blackwell Companion to Archaic Greece. Oxford, 411–26. Wallace, R. (2011). “Integrating Athens, 463–431 BC.” In G. Herman, ed. Stability and Crisis in the Athenian Democracy. Stuttgart, 31–44. West, M. (1990). Studies in Aeschylus. Stuttgart. Wilson, P. (2000). The Athenian Institution of the Khoregia: The Chorus, the City and the Stage. Cambridge. Wilson, P. (2003). “The Politics of Dance: Dithyrambic Contest and Social Order in Ancient Greece.” In D. Phillips and D. Pritchard, eds. Sport and Festival in the Ancient Greek World. Swansea, 163–96. Winnington-Ingram, R. P. (1948). “Clytemnestra and the Vote of Athena.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 68, 130–47. Zeitlin, F. (1978). “The Dynamics of misogyny: myth and mythmaking in the Oresteia,” Arethusa 11, 149–84. Reprinted in Zeitlin, Playing the Other, Chicago 1996, with minor editorial changes (where the Introduction downplays “misogyny” [p.8] although the essay reprinted with changes continues to use that term) and five additional pages (115–19) on a misogynist myth, the significance of which depends on its date.

CHAPTER 2

Aeschylus, Lyric and Epic P. J. Finglass Introduction As everyone knows, the Oresteia depicts the killing of king Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra. Agamemnon returns to Greece in triumph from his ten-year siege of Troy, having finally captured the city and recovered Helen, his brother’s wife; but he meets his end at his own spouse’s hands soon after he makes it home. She had been angered at her husband because of his sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia, which Agamemnon had perpetrated to ensure the Greeks’ safe arrival at Troy. Agamemnon and Clytemnestra had a son, too: Orestes, a child at the time of his father’s death. Years later, when grown to manhood, Orestes returns to his household. Making an offering of a lock of hair at his father’s tomb, he is recognised by his sister, who had been sent there by her mother; Clytemnestra had been disturbed by a terrible dream featuring a snake, which convinced her that retribution was coming for her offence. She is indeed killed by her son Orestes, who then endures the pursuit of the Erinyes, those avenging spirits of the underworld who were angered by the matricide; the god Apollo comes to his aid, however, and against these demons his bow proves a powerful defence. “The Oresteia” – the phrase always denotes Aeschylus’s Oresteia, the only connected trilogy to survive from the genre of Greek tragedy; one of the masterpieces of Greek, European and world literature, it is the composition on which Aeschylus’s reputation today chiefly rests. The paragraph above, however, gives the plot, as far as it can be reconstructed from its remains, of Stesichorus’s Oresteia, a lyric poem written before Aeschylus was even born, and which decisively shaped his work. Taking the Orestes myth as its case study, this chapter examines the impact of Stesichorus, and of other lyric poetry, on Aeschylus, before turning to the influence of that other great super-genre of archaic poetry, namely epic, including but not limited to Homer. For while Aeschylus has always been justly famous for his engagement with Homeric poetry – in a much-quoted remark quite possibly uttered by the man himself, his tragedies are described as “slices from the rich banquets of Homer” (testimonium 112 in Radt 1985) – his extensive interaction with the poetry that came before him goes far beyond the Iliad and Odyssey. Indeed, it is one of the many signs of Aeschylus’s greatness as an artist that this manifold poetic inheritance did not crush his own powers of originality beneath its weight, but rather through its extraordinary variety consistently inspired him to fashion something new.

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Lyric Oresteias: 1. Stesichorus Who was this Stesichorus whose Oresteia provided Aeschylus with such a model for his own? Born probably in Metaurus in south Italy and most commonly associated with Himera on the north coast of Sicily, Stesichorus was active for some period between roughly 610 and 540. He composed long lyric narratives that covered a variety of mythological topics, dealing in each case with myths pan-Hellenic in their appeal (Heracles, the Trojan and Theban cycles, and so on) rather than intimately associated with any particular city-state. The inference that they were intended not for a local but for a pan-Hellenic audience is supported by the sheer scale of the poems, which each took up over a thousand lines – massive, ambitious compositions, which seem to demand repeat performances across different Greek communities. Stesichorus’s lyric narratives were, we may conclude, a significant part of Greek literary culture across the Greek Mediterranean during the archaic period. Today they are mostly lost. Some of them survived until the early third century ce, but after then, in common with so many works of ancient Greek literature, they ceased to be copied and vanished from history, apart from a few quotations preserved in authors whose works were lucky enough to make it to the modern period. From the 1950s onwards, however, the publication of several Stesichorean papyri, some very extensive, has shed considerable light on his poetry, and as a result today his achievement can be appreciated better than at any time since antiquity. While Stesichorus is mostly lost to us, he was certainly not for Aeschylus. Rather, from his vantage-point in the first half of the fifth century, Stesichorus will have seemed one of the most prominent of the poets whose tellings of myth preceded the genre of tragedy. Aeschylus may have identified in him a kindred spirit, given the range of similarities between him and Stesichorus that can readily be observed. Both were deeply influenced by epic poetry, including but not limited to that of Homer; though both, as we will see, were self-confident enough to engage very closely indeed with Homer’s work. Both were fond of lengthy compositions. Poems by Sappho, Ibycus or other archaic lyricists might last at most a few dozen lines, whereas Stesichorus’s lyrics, as just noted, were far more extensive; Aeschylus, too, in contrast to the great tragedians of the next generation, showed particular fondness for connected trilogies/tetralogies depicting a single mythological narrative. (Length provides a further point of contact between the two poets’ Oresteias, which are likely to have been on a comparable scale: the edition of Stesichorus’s work by Hellenistic scholars at Alexandria took up at least two volumes and so roughly between 2500 and 4000 lines – more if there was a further book or books, though we have no actual evidence for Stesichorean poems in three books or more – while Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy is c. 3800 lines long, which would increase to c. 4800 if we include the now-missing satyr drama Proteus.) The performance of Stesichorus’s works, like those of Aeschylus, involved a chorus which sang and danced (Stesichorus’s name indeed means “he who sets up the chorus”), though unlike in Aeschylus no actors were involved. Perhaps the lines delivered by particular characters – and direct speech is very much a feature of Stesichorus’s poetry – were sung by distinct sections of the chorus, but that is just a guess. Both Stesichorus and Aeschylus also took a considerable interest in female characters, whose particular impact in both narratives is clear. Stesichorus’s Clytemnestra is driven to kill her husband because he had killed their daughter; as a consequence her action, while hardly likely to receive unmixed approval from the audience, nevertheless cannot simply be condemned without further thought. So, too, in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, the chorus come to an understanding of, if not sympathy for, Clytemnestra’s position during the lyric exchange that follows her arrival on stage with the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra, the Trojan princess whom he had enslaved (1399–1576). That interest in Clytemnestra’s psychology, apparent even from a bare summary of the plot of Stesichorus’s Oresteia, is confirmed by a fragment of the poem cited from Plutarch in his treatise On the Delay of Divine Vengeance (frag. 180 in Finglass 2014b):



Aeschylus, Lyric and Epic 29 For that rashness and the bold nature of wickedness is strong and active until crimes are committed; but then the passion, like a tempest losing its force so that it becomes slack and weak, surrenders itself to superstitious fears and terrors. So Stesichorus fashioned the dream of Clytemnestra in accordance with what really happens, speaking thus: A snake seemed to come to her, the crest of its head covered in gore. And then, out of it, appeared a prince of the line of Plisthenes. For visions in dreams, noon-day apparitions, oracles, descents into hell, and whatever else which may be thought to be accomplished through a divine cause, raise storms and horrors in people who are disposed in this way.

Plutarch cites this passage of Stesichorus because it suits his theme: the effect of a guilty conscience on its bearer. Clearly in Stesichorus too, Clytemnestra’s guilt played an important role – for otherwise Plutarch will hardly have reached for this poem to serve his purpose. And since we know from another source that Orestes was recognised by a lock of hair, it is reasonable to infer that this lock was left at the tomb of his father and that it was discovered by someone sent to that tomb by Clytemnestra in order to assuage the dead man’s anger in response to her dream – presumably her daughter, the ideal person to carry both these actions out. Whether this was purely a defensive measure prompted by Clytemnestra’s awareness of her guilt, whether it reflected actual regret on her part, or whether some mixture of the two was apparent is unknowable on present evidence. What is clear is that Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra, that extraordinary figure who so dominates the first play of the trilogy not just by her decisive action but by her ability to justify those actions, to at least some extent takes Stesichorus’s Clytemnestra as a model. The contents of Clytemnestra’s dream form another point of contact between the works. In Libation Bearers, Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra dreams that she gives birth to a snake, wraps it in swaddling clothes and gives it her breast, which the animal proceeds to bite, drawing forth blood. She wakes, screaming, and torches are set up throughout the palace; she consults dream-interpreters who tell her that “those beneath the earth” are angry with “the killers”, and sends Electra to Agamemnon’s grave with libations to remedy the situation (Libation Bearers 523–52, 32–41). Of the dream in Stesichorus only two lines remain, but that is enough for us to see connections with Aeschylus’s dream, and significant differences too. The dead snake evidently represents Agamemnon – Aeschylus, by contrast, makes the snake represent Orestes, who indeed explicitly identifies himself with the creature. The wound to the snake’s head suggests that Stesichorus’s Agamemnon was killed by an axe, a weapon which characteristically delivers wounds in that location, rather than a sword as in Aeschylus. The arrival of the snake is denoted by a colourless verb of motion; there is no question of Clytemnestra giving birth to it as in Aeschylus. We cannot be sure who the “prince of the line of Plisthenes” (one of the ancestors of the Atreids) is meant to be: both Agamemnon and Orestes are possible candidates, but Orestes is the more likely option since the prince emerges out of the snake and would thus symbolise the next generation’s stepping forward to avenge the wrongs done to the old. If that is correct, then Stesichorus presents Agamemnon as it were giving birth to Orestes, eliminating Clytemnestra from the generative process altogether. So when Aeschylus made the snake correspond to Orestes rather than to Agamemnon, he also introduced the idea that Clytemnestra gave birth to the animal – yet if Stesichorus’s prince does correspond to Orestes, then the idea of unusual birth in this context has a Stesichorean precedent, which Aeschylus adapts to make sense within the dream as he refashions it. Such is the complexity of the interaction between Aeschylus and his lyric source. Clytemnestra is not the only prominent woman in the two Oresteias. The daughter whose sacrifice led Clytemnestra to take her drastic step, Iphigenia, is summoned in Stesichorus to the place of sacrifice on the pretext that she is going to marry Achilles (Finglass 2014b, frags. 181a.25–27, 178; on this plot element see further p. 34 below). The deceit which this involves

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accentuates the horror of the killing, as does the perverted association of a joyful wedding with human sacrifice; and while this precise plot element is absent from Aeschylus’s trilogy, the wedding imagery which the Agamemnon’s chorus associates with the sacrifice at Aulis (223– 47) is all the more powerful for this Stesichorean background. Both Stesichorus and Aeschylus also feature Orestes’ nurse (Finglass 2014b, frag. 179, Libation Bearers 734–82), though here again we can identify a difference in their handling of this character. Aeschylus’s Cilissa (with an ethnic name such as was typically given to slaves in Athens) describes in graphic terms how she looked after Orestes as a baby, before taking an unexpectedly key part in the plot against Aegisthus. Stesichorus’s nurse, by contrast, has the noble name Laodamia, which associates her rather with epic nurses. We cannot tell what function she performed in the narrative – whether helping against Aegisthus as in Aeschylus, or saving the infant Orestes from death as in other accounts, including in a mid-sixth-century metope from the temple at Foce del Sele – except that, given her name, it is unlikely to have involved prominent references to everyday baby care. Aeschylus probably took from Stesichorus the idea of the Nurse playing a role in the myth at all. But his highlighting of her humdrum concerns in the middle of the tense conspiracy against Aegisthus is likely to be his innovation, aimed at contrasting her quasi-maternal concern for Orestes with Clytemnestra’s insincere lament for his supposed death. A final set of powerful females who appear in both works are the Erinyes. Their prominence in Aeschylus, where of course they constitute the chorus of Eumenides, has a precedent in Stesichorus, where they are prominent enough to require Apollo to lend Orestes his bow – something again taken over by Aeschylus, except that his Apollo remains master of his own weapons. The presence of the Erinyes may be a further sign of the interest of Stesichorus’s work, like Aeschylus’s, in psychological states, if the external attacks of the Erinyes on Orestes were accompanied by mental torments of some kind. The presence of Apollo in both indicates that Stesichorus’s Orestes, like Aeschylus’s, was not abandoned by the gods after committing matricide, though unfortunately we are not in a position to take the comparison much further. Orestes’ trial at Athens, which speaks so powerfully to Aeschylus’s own audience, will have been his invention; but since we know nothing about the ending of Stesichorus’s poem, we cannot tell whether any other aspects of the final part of Eumenides derive from him. The impact of Stesichorus’s Oresteia on Aeschylus’s thus goes beyond the fundamentals of the plot; the two poems share a tragic ethos with a focus on psychology and on female characters. The connection between them was noted in antiquity, being highlighted by an ancient analysis, discovered on papyrus, which explicitly emphasises Stesichorus’s influence on tragedy (Finglass 2014b, frag. 181a). Yet as we have seen, enough survives for us to observe differences too, and to identify places where Aeschylus is adapting his lyric predecessor to serve his particular dramatic ends. We see this again in the respective openings to the two works. The following lines appear at the beginning of Stesichorus’s poem (Finglass 2014b, frags. 172–74): Muse, do you, rejecting wars with me, celebrating the weddings of gods, the feasts of men, and the banquets of the blessed, … Such are the songs of the fair-tressed Graces that we must sing, devising a Phrygian melody in refined comfort, at spring’s approach … … when the swallow sounds in spring-time …

The address to the Muse sets us in quite a different world from the opening of a drama, where the first character to speak, or the chorus, invokes no divinities as they begin. Aeschylus’s Oresteia begins with the Watchman, awaiting the blaze that will signify the fall of Troy and complaining about the lengthy watch to which he has been assigned; this could scarcely be more different from the apparently optimistic focus of Stesichorus’s narrator on



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the Muses, the Graces and the glories of spring. Yet Aeschylus’s Watchman soon expresses intense joy of his own as the blaze shines forth – a mood which will be rare indeed in the trilogy that follows. Given its contents, Stesichorus’s poem must have transitioned from its joyful opening too, though how that happened we are not in a position to say. There is even a tantalising Stesichorean precedent for a lowly character beginning a work on a lofty topic. His Sack of Troy opens (after an address to a Muse) with Epeius, whose menial job of carrying water for the Greek kings prompts Athena to pity him and inspire him to build the Wooden Horse (Finglass 2014b, frag. 100); like the Watchman, his labours are at an end, though the troubles of others are about to start. Aeschylus will have been steeped in Stesichorus and so it would not be surprising if he drew inspiration in this way from a further poem in his corpus. Our evidence is sufficient for us to advance the hypothesis, though far from adequate to prove it.

Lyric Oresteias: 2. Xanthus Stesichorus’s was not the only lyric account important for Aeschylus’s telling of the myth. Almost nothing survives of a poem on the subject by Xanthus, a poet of whom we know nothing, not even his place of origin. We are told, however, that his work was influential on Stesichorus’s Oresteia and that it featured Electra (someone absent from epic treatments of the myth), who received this name because she remained unmarried after her father’s killing (compare Greek alektros, “unwedded”). The poem was known to the fourth-century grammarian Megaclides and so could have been known to Aeschylus; but since Megaclides is our sole source, its circulation may well have been restricted even by the fifth century. In any case, the poem evidently had an impact on Stesichorus’s Oresteia, and thus indirectly (at least) on Aeschylus, who is drawing on a long lyric tradition whether or not he was personally familiar with it all. We have moreover already inferred that Clytemnestra’s daughter featured in Stesichorus’s poem: if that is correct, then we have at least one element of the story which originates in Xanthus, was taken over by Stesichorus, and then taken over, probably from Stesichorus, by Aeschylus. This is unlikely to be the only feature of Aeschylus’s trilogy which begins with Xanthus, but it is the only one about which we are informed; and while we can always hope for more papyri of Stesichorus, getting one of the obscure Xanthus would indeed be a miracle.

Lyric Oresteias: 3. Pindar Pindar’s entire account of the myth is so short that it can be quoted in full. The poem begins with the narrator urging the daughters of Cadmus, founder of Thebes, to celebrate the competition at Delphi, in which Thrasydaeus caused his ancestral hearth to be remembered by casting a third wreath upon it, as a victor in the rich fields of Pylades, guest-friend of Laconian Orestes. As his father was being slaughtered by the mighty hands of Clytemnestra, the nurse Arsinoa snatched him away from her baneful treachery, when with the grey bronze Clytemnestra dispatched Dardanid Priam’s daughter, the girl Cassandra, to the shady shore of Acheron along with the soul of Agamemnon – the pitiless woman. So was it that the sacrifice of Iphigenia at the Euripus, far from her fatherland, provoked her to raise her heavy-handed anger? Or were her nightly couplings leading her astray, enthralled as she was to another man’s bed? That offence is most hateful in young wives and impossible to conceal because of other people’s tongues: one’s fellow-townsmen are scandalmongers. For wealth

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incurs an envy no less than itself, whereas the lowly man blusters unheard. The very son of Atreus, the warrior, was killed in famous Amyclae when at last he returned, and he brought destruction on the prophetic maiden, when he despoiled the houses of the Trojans of their luxury, set on fire because of Helen. But Orestes, the young lad, came to the old man Strophius, his family friend, who dwelt at the foot of Parnassus. With Ares’ eventual help, he slew his mother and laid Aegisthus in gore. (Pindar, Pythian Eleven 17–37, trans. Finglass 2007, 65–69)

Lucky though we are that this poem survives in full, here too we still confront uncertainty. For whether Aeschylus could be influenced by Pindar’s Pythian Eleven, in which the Oresteia story is found in miniature, depends on whether it dates to 474 or 454, since both of these dates are found in the ancient commentaries (“scholia”) on the poem. Some critics indeed shy away from the idea that Pindar’s small poem could have had an impact on Aeschylus’s masterwork and on that basis have preferred to date Pindar’s work to 454, preferring to make Pindar indebted to Aeschylus rather than the other way around. But when we consider the scholia without preconceptions as to which direction influence ought to flow, it is clear enough that 474 has stronger support in the ancient evidence. And that opens up the possibility of Aeschylus’s interaction with a further lyric source. Apart from the marvellous compression which Pindar achieves in this narrative, taking a myth to which Stesichorus had devoted, and to which Aeschylus would devote, thousands of lines and rendering it within the confines of a few words, what is particularly striking here is the emphasis on Clytemnestra’s psychology. The heart of the narrative is a consideration of why she acted as she did, of what motivated her to undertake such a momentous action. As we have seen, this was clearly prominent in Stesichorus’s poem too. Yet the alternative questions posed by Pindar present the dilemma concerning the interpretation of her character in a particularly stark (though unhurried) format, something designed to suit the strict confines of this poem rather than the more diffuse world of Stesichorean lyric. And while the narrator’s emphasis seems to fall on the second alternative, which is less favourable to Clytemnestra – it is placed second, and therefore climactically, and developed through to the end of the mythical narration, where the Erinyes are dispensed with and Orestes’ killing of his mother is not presented in negative terms – the first alternative is never rejected, and the very interest shown in Clytemnestra’s psychology concedes that her motivation, and thus the actions of others which might affect it, is a critical element affecting any decision about the culpability of her actions. Given that, as we have seen, Clytemnestra’s psychology was explored in Stesichorus’s Oresteia too, we cannot now pick apart to what extent Aeschylus’s treatment of the subject owes more to Stesichorus or more to Pindar. No doubt both had their impact. Certainly, in Aeschylus as in Pindar we hear of Iphigenia’s sacrifice before we hear of Clytemnestra’s adultery, and both have key roles to play in shaping the audience’s reaction to her. Moreover, whereas in Stesichorus Iphigenia is rescued, probably by Artemis, and turned into Hecate (Finglass 2014b, frag. 178), there is no rescue for Pindar’s Iphigenia, any more than there is for Aeschylus’s. This intensifies the tragedy of the story, emphasising the gravity of Agamemnon’s offence and also (in Aeschylus) the implacability of the gods; how weak the parodos of Agamemnon would sound if, at the last minute, the inexorable Artemis changed her mind and let the girl live. In creating his tragedy it was to Pindar, not to Stesichorus, that Aeschylus turned here. In other respects, Stesichorus and Pindar offer a version of the myth which Aeschylus rejects: so Pindar’s nurse, like Stesichorus’s, has a noble name (and saves the child Orestes from death, a matter on which, as we have seen, the fragments of Stesichorus do not inform us, but which is not Aeschylean), and Pindar puts Agamemnon’s palace in Amyclae (a Spartan village), just as Stesichorus had put it at Sparta, whereas Aeschylus sets it in Argos, influenced by the contemporary alliance between Athens and Argos which is given an origin myth in Eumenides (754–77). (Contrast Homer’s Agamemnon, who in both Iliad and Odyssey has his palace at



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Mycenae; so while Aeschylus’s setting is innovative, he follows the lyric tradition at least in rejecting Homeric authority for even this basic element of the story.) Pindar’s lyric is sometimes called “Pindar’s Oresteia”, with Aeschylus as the suppressed referent. Perhaps the expression should be recalibrated to refer as much to Stesichorus, given how much their approaches to the myth have in common. Or perhaps we should acknowledge the tragedian’s debt to the world of lyric by sometimes calling his great trilogy “Aeschylus’s Pythian Eleven” instead?

Epic Oresteias: 1. Iliad and Odyssey When we turn to the influence of epic on Aeschylus’s Oresteia, we again find a multiplicity of sources. Of these, by far the least important is the Iliad, where the House of Atreus is an apparently harmonious institution utterly unsuited for any tragic treatment. In that poem Agamemnon leans on a sceptre which has been passed down the generations of his family in an apparently peaceful manner (2.100–08); he has three living daughters, and not a hint of a dead one (9.145 = 287); Aulis is remembered for a prophecy concerning the ending of the war, not the sacrifice of an innocent girl (2.299–332); any disharmony between him and Clytemnestra is limited to his proclaiming his preference for the slave-girl Chryseis (1.113–15). This is a version of the myth that Aeschylus entirely rejects. The Orestes myth told at different points throughout the Odyssey (3.255–75, 303–12, 4.524–37, 11.405–34) presents the Atreids in a different light from the Iliad, however: Aegisthus seduces Clytemnestra during Agamemnon’s absence from home; Agamemnon returns from Troy only to be slain by Aegisthus at a feast; Orestes returns to take revenge on his father’s killer; Orestes organises a funeral feast after the death of Aegisthus and his mother. But no mention is made of how Clytemnestra met her end, and therefore no explicit statement regarding matricide; listeners are able to take her death as resulting from suicide or some other cause. This is a tragic tale for Agamemnon, to be sure, whose laments we hear in book 11 when Odysseus speaks with him in the underworld – but the tragedy ends there, with Orestes’ revenge regarded as an act of valiant heroism which brings the woes of his house to a happy and uncomplicated end. That is not to say that Xanthus and Stesichorus invented the myth familiar to us today out of whole cloth; elements were doubtless circulating before then. The Odyssey poet had an interest in playing down or eliminating aspects of the myth such as Orestes’ vengeance on his mother, since he features so prominently as a role model for Odysseus’s son Telemachus, another young man with an absent father whose mother is in the meantime the subject of extramarital male attention. An Orestes who killed his mother would have made an inappropriate comparison for Telemachus; his pursuit by Erinyes, too, would have fatally compromised the role in which the Odyssey poet puts him. As for the Iliad, there was no place in that poem for a detailed treatment of the conflicts in the House of Atreus, and even a brief reference to them would have unbalanced the presentation of Agamemnon, making his failings seem, at least in part, the result of his family background rather than his own foolishness and arrogance.

Epic Oresteias: 2. The Catalogue of Women and the Epic Cycle Iphigenia’s sacrifice may be absent from Homer, but it is attested in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, which dates to roughly the same period as Stesichorus’s poetry:

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Because of her beauty] Agamemnon, [lord of men,] married Tyndareus’s] daughter, dark-eyed [Clytemestra; she [bore beautiful-ankled Iphimede] in the halls and Electra who contended in beauty with the immortal goddesses. The well-greaved Achaeans sacrificed Iphimede on the altar of [golden-spindled] noisy [Artemis], on the day [when they were sailing on boats to] Troy, to wreak] vengeance for the [beautiful-]ankled Argive woman – a phantom: [herself, the deer-shooting] Arrow-shooter had very easily saved, and lovely [ambrosia she dripped onto her head, [so that her] flesh would be steadfast forever, and she made her immortal [and ageless all her] days. Now the tribes of human beings [on the] earth call her Artemis by the Road, [temple servant of the glorious] Arrow-shooter. As the last one in the [halls, dark-eyed Clytemestra,] overpowered by [Agamemnon], bore godly Orestes, who when he reached puberty [took vengeance] on his father’s murderer, and he killed his [own man-destroying] mother with the pitiless [bronze]. ([Hesiod] frag. 19.13–30 Most, transl. Most 2007, 69, 71)

The Orestes myth appears in the Epic Cycle too, whose poems were designed to fill in the mythological gaps before the Iliad, between the Iliad and Odyssey, and after the Odyssey, and which will have drawn on earlier material. In the Cypria, Iphigenia’s sacrifice at Aulis is ordered by Calchas; brought there through the pretext of marriage with Achilles, she is rescued ahead of the sacrifice by Artemis, who substitutes a deer at the altar (West 2003, Argument 8, 74–75). In the Returns (Nostoi), Orestes and his companion Pylades are said to take vengeance on Aegisthus and Clytemnestra for the killing of Agamemnon, presumably by killing them in their turn (West 2003, Argument 5, 156–57). So in both the Cypria and in the Catalogue, as in Stesichorus, Agamemnon’s daughter is rescued when on the point of being sacrificed. Of the Cypria’s episode we have merely a short prose summary; the Catalogue’s treatment of the story largely survives, though, as we have seen, its narrative is relatively matter-of-fact. If this was what epic tellings of the Orestes myth were like, no wonder Xanthus and Stesichorus thought that they could do better in their lyric songs; no wonder that Aeschylus closely engaged with Stesichorus’s poem rather than the somewhat colourless alternatives. There is no reason why Aeschylus should have considered why the Iliad and Odyssey are reticent (to different degrees) in their handling of the Orestes myth. From his perspective, there were different tellings that he might draw on for his great tetralogy – and it was in particular to Xanthus’s, Stesichorus’s and Pindar’s, as well as to some extent that of the Catalogue and the Epic Cycle, and not to Homer’s, to which he turned for inspiration. Put another way, it was the lyric poets in whose hands the tragic aspect of this myth first began to be drawn out. Since Stesichorus’s poem, as well as Xanthus’s, have not survived, we will never have a full account of how Aeschylus’s tragic treatment of the story interacted with and developed their material; but despite the ravages of time, enough has reached us to let us see the extraordinary complexity and sophistication of Aeschylus’s response to his lyric forebears.

Beyond the Oresteia: Transforming Epic Though Aeschylus rejects the Homeric poems as a model for his Oresteia, in other works the impact of Homer on his dramas is clear. In this section of the chapter, I look briefly at possible Aeschylean trilogies and the debts that they owe to different epic poems – the Iliad and Odyssey, but also the epic cycle, since the reference to Homer in the “slices” analogy will have included epic poems from that cycle too. The towering ambition of Aeschylus’s engagement with Homer can be seen most clearly in his Myrmidons trilogy. Across three plays he retells the story of the Iliad, depicting



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Achilles’ anger against the Greeks, the deaths of Patroclus and Hector and the release of Hector’s body. In the first, Myrmidons, Achilles long refuses to speak to those encouraging him to re-enter the fighting against the Trojans, but sits muffled in his cloak; in time he permits Patroclus to go and fight and he is shattered by the news of his death. In Nereids, Thetis accompanied by the Nereids brings Achilles new weapons from Hephaestus to replace those lent to Patroclus and despoiled by Hector; Hector then meets his death at Achilles’ hands. The third play, Phrygians or The Ransoming of Hector, sees Priam come to Achilles’ tent to recover his son’s body in return for a ransom. The satyr play that rounded off the tetralogy is unknown. Myrmidons is particularly famous for its portrayal of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. In the Iliad this is a deep, non-sexual friendship; in Aeschylus’s account, by contrast, the two men are lovers, with Patroclus as the junior, passive partner, which contradicts the epic account in which he was the older man. This is evident from the following lines delivered by Achilles after Patroclus’s death: And you did not respect the sacred honor of the thigh-bond, ungrateful that you were for those countless kisses! And I honored the intimacy of your thighs by bewailing you. (Radt 1985, frags. 135, 136)

While Homer’s Achilles is undeniably passionate, that passion is never manifested in sexual matters; he declares that he loved Briseis (9.342–43), but that sense of personal connection is only a small part of his desolation at being deprived of her, which is much more to do with the concomitant loss of honour and status which that involves. Aeschylus’s decision to make his relationship with Patroclus sexual moves the plot in an unexpected direction; and the fragments above allow some insight, however uncertain and provisional, into how Aeschylus made use of that change. That is, Achilles’ address to the dead Patroclus appears to be a “monstrous complaint” (Sommerstein 2010, 244) because Achilles himself bears responsibility for Patroclus’s death: the need for Patroclus to go and fight arose only because Achilles had withdrawn from the fighting, and even if (as in the Iliad) Patroclus had wanted to enter the fighting himself, he can hardly be blamed for not coming back. Failure to show due gratitude for services rendered is (at least in the Iliad) a centrepiece of Achilles’ accusations against Agamemnon; for Achilles to turn such an accusation against Patroclus is startling. Though as always with fragments, the lack of a wider context must always be borne in mind. It remains possible that Achilles went on to withdraw his accusations, perhaps reproaching himself in the light of the considerations mentioned above; moreover, he will have been speaking these words in the throes of passionate grief and so they may not reflect his character as displayed elsewhere in the trilogy. Again, the fragment allows us to ask questions and pose hypotheses; but certainty is far from our grasp. The success of Aeschylus’s trilogy is demonstrated by the impact that it has on vase-painting. From the 490s we find vases depicting two scenes from the trilogy: Achilles veiled by his cloak, from the early part of Myrmidons, and Thetis accompanied by Nereids (and thus contrary to the Iliad’s account) bringing the armour forged by Hephaestus to Achilles, who is often depicted as muffled there too. While it is right to be cautious in positing the influence of a particular tragedy or tragic trilogy on any particular vase-painting, in this case the simultaneous emergence of these two iconographies strongly suggests a link with Aeschylus’s trilogy. This was no artistic failure on Aeschylus’s part, we may infer. It is worth underlining the point because the prospect of failure must have loomed large over him as he wrote. Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence may not have been written yet, but only someone inhuman could have tackled the key subject matter of the Iliad, at a time when that poem had already achieved a position of incomparable cultural eminence, and not have felt at least some apprehension.

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However good his work was as a tragic trilogy, would it really match up to the work of the old master, whom Plato would later call the “leader of tragedy” (Republic 595c1–3, 598d9), describing a literary relationship of which Aeschylus will already have been all too aware? The vase-paintings provide strong evidence that, remarkably, it did match up. And although the trilogy, like so many great works, did not survive antiquity, even in its incomplete state it continues to have a cultural impact today, with Achilles’ lines above movingly repeated in Tom Stoppard’s play on the life of A. E. Housman, The Invention of Love (1997). The Odyssey, too, may have received an Aeschylean tetralogy: Ghost-Raisers (Psychagōgoi), in which Odysseus consulted the spirits of the Underworld as in Odyssey 11 and which contained a prophecy by Tiresias of Odysseus’s death; Penelope, whose one surviving fragment has a character (no doubt Odysseus) declaring himself to be Cretan, as Homer’s Odysseus does so often in his lying tales, and which presumably included Penelope’s meeting with Odysseus and, perhaps, the slaying of the suitors; Bone-Gatherers (Ostologoi), in which the suitors’ relatives gathered the bones of their fallen kin; and Circe, which on the basis of its fragments is likely to have been a satyr play, and which would be eminently suitable for inclusion here. The evidence for the tetralogy here is less strong than for the Myrmidons trilogy, in that there is no external data (in the form of vase-painting, say) which points to a work on such a scale, and so the hypothesis of its existence relies on the content of the plays as inferred from their fragments and the reasonable possibility that they formed a unified whole. Yet even if they did not, that would hardly demote the significance of the Odyssey as a source for Aeschylus; in that case he would have returned repeatedly to its plot for inspiration. If the tetralogy hypothesis is correct, then we see him tackling that poem head-on in the same way as he does with the Iliad. In either case, the importance of epic is clear – as is both the respect for and rivalry with the older genre which is inherent in such an undertaking. Yet even here, where Aeschylus confronts the two great epics directly and apparently unmediated, we can observe the influence of lyric too. In 1956, a papyrus of Stesichorus was published which closely imitated a scene from the Odyssey in which Helen interprets a bird omen (Finglass 2014b, frag. 170; Odyssey 15.1–184); Stesichorus adapts certain aspects of the episode, but it is clearly referring to that particular part of that particular poem. Writing not long after its publication, Werner Peek voiced the astonishment which the papyrus created in the scholarly community, asking, “who would have suspected that the dependence [i.e. of Stesichorus on Homer] could have gone so far in terms of subject matter too [i.e. in addition to his imitation of individual words and phrases, which was already evident from the quoted fragments]?” (Peek 1958, 173, trans. Finglass and Kelly 2015b, 4). Stesichorus had been called “most Homeric” from antiquity (not the only author to receive that designation), but the papyri let us see how deep his relationship was with the epic poet; we may contrast the epic poets of the Cycle, whose poems were rather designed to fill in the gaps left by Homer. So by taking on Homer so closely in his tragedies, Aeschylus was implicitly paying a kind of tribute to the first poet to do so, whose work too he knew so well. Aeschylus’s engagement with epic goes beyond the Iliad and Odyssey. To focus on just one example, his trilogy centred on Ajax’s suicide, which scholars have posited depicts a myth found briefly in Homer, mentioned when Odysseus meets Ajax in the underworld (Odyssey 11.543–67), but which is told more fully in two poems of the Epic Cycle, the Aethiopis and the Little Iliad. In the first play, The Judgement of the Arms, the arms of the dead Achilles are awarded not to Ajax, as he had hoped, but to Odysseus; Thetis, Achilles’ mother, featured as a character, presumably to set out the weapons ahead of the contest as she does in the Odyssey. Thracian Women, which is named after its chorus of Thracian slave-women, depicts Ajax’s suicide though the narration of a messenger. The contents of Salaminian Women are unknown, but by a plausible conjecture the play is thought to feature the banishment of Ajax’s half-brother Teucer by his father Telamon, angry at his supposed failure to protect his



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brother, and Teucer’s departure from his homeland, the Greek Salamis, to found a new Salamis in Cyprus. The spreading of the myth over fully three plays, if the trilogy hypothesis is correct, will have allowed for a lengthier handling of a myth which epic apparently handled only as an episode in poems that ranged over many events, without affording it a dedicated treatment. In Sophocles’ Ajax the Judgement has already taken place, while Teucer’s banishment is foretold by Teucer himself in a desperate speech after he discovers Ajax’s body (1019–21); Sophocles also wrote a Teucer, but that is most unlikely to have formed part of a connected trilogy. Aeschylus, by contrast, gives us the full account, with a whole play on the Judgement itself; and if this was decided by voting on the part of the army, it would bring the events of epic home to the contemporary world of Athens, where democracy was still a relatively new invention. Further interaction with the Epic Cycle – whether with the Aethiopis, the epic composed to describe the events immediately after the end of the Iliad, in his Memnon and The Weighing of Souls; with the Theban epics, in his tetralogy Laius – Oedipus – Seven against Thebes – Sphinx (which was also influenced by a poem of Stesichorus); or in the case of other plays – goes beyond beyond the scope of this chapter.

Conclusion “On Sophocles the Disciple of Homer is the book that I would like to write, but one life would not be enough.” Eduard Fraenkel’s modest claim (1977, 15) could just as well be said of Sophocles’ predecessor Aeschylus, whose relationship to Homer, and to epic poetry, is a fundamental aspect of his art. Aeschylus was not the first non-epic poet, though, to engage creatively with epic poetry. He was following a tradition whose earliest exponent was the lyric poet Stesichorus, and Aeschylus’s engagement with epic could indeed thereby be seen as a tribute to him. But he engaged with Stesichorus and other lyric poets, directly too, taking inspiration, for example, from the tragic manner in which they, unlike Homer, treated the Orestes myth. Yet just as Aeschylus’s productive use of earlier tragedy (see Finglass, Chapter 3 in this volume) tends to be neglected because the evidence for those earlier tragedies survives only in fragments, so too Aeschylus’s relationship with lyric has tended to be downplayed compared with his relationship with epic, because in the case of epic we have complete texts to examine, whereas analysing lyric requires us to concentrate on fragmentary evidence, something that many classicists continue to eschew. Situating Aeschylus in his literary context, though, requires us to look beyond epic; to realise the depth of his creative interaction with the poetic inheritance constituted by lyric; and to savour the slices which the tragedian cut from the rich banquets of Stesichorus.

FURTHER READING For the “slices from banquets” comment and its possible origin (Aeschylus’s contemporary Ion of Chios) see West 2000, 338 = 2011–13, ii 227. For Aeschylus’s Oresteia see Sommerstein 2010, 121–212. For a detailed introduction to Stesichorus see Finglass 2014a; Burkert 1987 = 2001–11, i 198–217= Cairns 2001, 92–116 is a fundamental treatment of his place in Greek literary history. The surviving fragments of Stesichorus’s Oresteia are found in Finglass 2014b as frags. 171–81b, with an introduction, translation and commentary in Davies and Finglass 2014, 482–511 (which also discusses what is known about the shadowy Xanthus). For the performance of Stesichorus’s poetry see Finglass 2017; for the fragment from Plutarch see Finglass 2021. For a sceptical, perhaps too sceptical, account of the relationship between Stesichorus and Homer see Kelly 2015; for accounts of Stesichorus and tragedy see Swift 2015; Finglass 2018a, 149, 2018b; for Stesichorus and Aeschylus see Thalmann 1982; Coward 2018.

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Finglass 2007 offers a text, translation, introduction and commentary to Pindar’s Pythian Eleven. For the date of the poem see Finglass 2007, 5–27 (who argues for 474) and Kurke 2013 (who argues for 454). The edited collection Fantuzzi and Tsagalis 2015 is an excellent introduction to all aspects of the Epic Cycle; for its relationship with tragedy in particular see Sommerstein 2015. Text, translation and introduction to all Aeschylus’s fragmentary plays can be found in Sommerstein 2008; Radt 1985 is the major critical edition, which at pp. 111–19 includes details on the history of which scholar first posited the different Aeschylean trilogies mentioned above. For detailed discussion of Aeschylus’s Iliadic and Odyssean tetralogies see Sommerstein 2010, 241–52. For the Myrmidons trilogy see also West 2000 = 2011–13, ii 227–49; Uhlig 2020 (who favour a different ordering of its last two plays); for the Odyssey trilogy see Grossardt 2003; for the Ajax trilogy see Finglass 2011, 33–34. For Aeschylean trilogies in general see Yoon 2016. Homeric influence on Aeschylus’s language, a topic not touched on by this chapter, is treated by Sideras 1971; a more recent, wide-ranging treatment of this topic (and Aeschylus’s language more generally) is provided by Griffith 2009.

REFERENCES Andújar, R., Coward, T. R. P. and Hadjimichael, T., eds. (2018). Paths of Song. Interactions between Lyric and Tragic Poetry. Trends in Classics supplement 58. Berlin and Boston. Burkert, W. (1987). “The Making of Homer in the Sixth Century B.C.: Rhapsodes versus Stesichoros.” In True, ed. 1987, 43–62. [= 2001–11: i 198–217 = Cairns ed., 92–116]. Burkert, W. (2001–11). Kleine Schriften. 8 vols. Hypomnemata supplement 2. Göttingen. Cairns, D. L., ed. (2001). Oxford Readings in Homer’s Iliad. Oxford. Coward, T. R. P. (2018). “Stesichorean Footsteps in the Parodos of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.” In Andújar et al., eds. 39–64. Davies, M. and Finglass, P. J. (2014). Stesichorus. The Poems. Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries 54. Cambridge. Fantuzzi, M. and Tsagalis, C., eds. (2015). The Greek Epic Cycle and Its Ancient Reception. A Companion. Cambridge. Finglass, P. J. (2007). Pindar. Pythian Eleven. Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries 45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Finglass, P. J. (2011). Sophocles. Ajax. Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries 48. Cambridge. Finglass, P. J. (2014a). “Introduction.” In Davies and Finglass, 1–91. Finglass, P. J. (2014b). “Text and Critical Apparatus.” In Davies and Finglass, 93–204. Finglass, P. J. (2017). “Dancing with Stesichorus.” In Gianvittorio ed. 67–89. Finglass, P. J. (2018a). “Stesichorus and Greek Tragedy.” In Andújar et al., eds. 19–37. Finglass, P. J. (2018b). “Gazing at Helen with Stesichorus.” In Kampakoglou and Novokhatko eds., 140–59. Finglass, P. J. (2021). “Editare frammenti nel loro contesto.” In Mastellari ed., 13–22. Finglass, P. J. and Coo, L., eds. (2020). Female Characters in Fragmentary Greek Tragedy. Cambridge. Finglass, P. J. and Kelly, A., eds. (2015a). Stesichorus in Context. Cambridge. Finglass, P. J. and Kelly, A. (2015b). “The State of Stesichorean Studies.” In Finglass and Kelly eds., 1–17. Fraenkel, E. (1977). Due seminari romani di Eduard Fraenkel, ed. L. E. Rossi. Sussidi Eruditi 28. Rome. Gianvittorio, L., ed. (2017). Choreutika. Performing and Theorising Dance in Ancient Greece. Biblioteca di Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 13. Pisa and Rome. Griffith, M. (2009). “The Poetry of Aeschylus (in its Traditional Context).” In Jouanna, Montanari, and Hernández, eds., 1–55. Grossardt, P. (2003). “The Title of Aeschylus’ Ostologoi.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 101, 155–58.



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Jouanna, J., Montanari, F. and Hernández, A. P., eds. (2009). Eschyle à l’aube du théâtre occidental: neuf exposés suivis de discussions. Vandoeuvres–Genève, 25–29 août 2008. Entretiens sur l’Antiquité classique 55. Geneva. Kampakoglou, A. and Novokhatko, A., eds. (2018). Gaze, Vision, and Visuality in Ancient Greek Literature. Trends in Classics supplement 54. Berlin and Boston. Kelly, A. (2015). “Stesichorus’ Homer.” In Finglass and Kelly, eds. 21–44. Kurke, L. (2013). “Pindar’s Pythian 11 and the Oresteia: Contestatory Ritual Poetics in the 5th c. BCE.” Classical Antiquity 32, 101–75. Mastellari, V., ed. (2021). Fragments in Context – Frammenti e dintorni. Studia Comica 11. Göttingen. Most, G. W. (2007). Hesiod. The Shield. Catalogue of Women. Other Fragments. Cambridge, MA. Peek, W. (1958). “Die Nostoi des Stesichoros.” Philologus 102, 169–77. Radt, S. L. (1985). Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. Vol. 3 Aeschylus. Göttingen. Sideras, A. (1971). Aeschylus Homericus. Untersuchungen zu den Homerismen der aischyleischen Sprache. Hypomnemata 31. Göttingen. Sommerstein, A. H. (2008). Aeschylus III: Fragments. Cambridge, MA. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010). Aeschylean Tragedy. Second Edition. London. [First edition Bari 1996] Sommerstein, A. H. (2015). “Tragedy and the Epic Cycle.” In Fantuzzi and Tsagalis eds. 461–86. Swift, L. A. (2015). “Stesichorus on Stage.” In Finglass and Kelly eds. 125–44. Thalmann, W. G. (1982). “The Lille Stesichorus and the ‘Seven against Thebes’.” Hermes 110, 385–91. True, M., ed. (1987). Papers on the Amasis Painter and His World. Colloquium Sponsored by the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities and Symposium Sponsored by the J. Paul Getty Museum. Malibu, CA. Uhlig, A. (2020). “Dancing on the Plain of the Sea: Gender and Theatrical Space in Aeschylus’ Achilleis Trilogy.” In Finglass and Coo, eds. 105–24. West, M. L. (2000). “Iliad and Aethiopis on the Stage: Aeschylus and Son.” Classical Quarterly 50, 338–52. [= 2011–13: ii 227–49]. West, M. L. (2003). Greek Epic Fragments from the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries BC. Cambridge, MA. West, M. L. (2011–13). Hellenica. Selected Papers on Greek Literature and Thought. 3 vols. Oxford. Yoon, F. (2016). “Against a Prometheia: Rethinking the Connected Trilogy.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 146, 257–80.

CHAPTER 3

Tragedy before Aeschylus P. J. Finglass Introduction The long and winding paths of textual transmission have left us with a skewed picture of Greek tragedy as a genre. Out of hundreds of plays performed at Athens from the late sixth century onwards, only 32 have been preserved complete. Among these plays, only five authors are represented: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and the authors of Prometheus Bound (on the question of its authenticity, see Ruffell, Chapter 12 in this volume) and Rhesus. With the likely exception of Rhesus, probably a fourth-century drama, all the preserved tragedies are from the fifth century. And those tragedies do not even span that century in full: for while Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus saw its first performance in 401 (after its author’s death in 405), the earliest surviving play, Aeschylus’s Persians, dates to 472, by which time Aeschylus was an experienced playwright who had been delighting audiences for some three decades, and whose career had already produced works of lasting influence. Not a single play survives from the first quarter of the century, a period that will have been crucial for the development of the genre. The loss of these earlier works is particularly damaging for our understanding of Aeschylus. When discussing a play by Sophocles or Euripides, we may have access to Aeschylus’s version of the same myth; and comparing how the later playwrights tackled a legend already handled by the old master is always a thought-provoking exercise. What about, though, when the old master was himself young? How did his plays interact with, develop and break the conventions of their time? What debt did he owe to his fellow-tragedians and in what ways did he go beyond them? What impact did Aeschylus have on the genre at this crucial stage in its development? No firm answer can be given to these questions: but sifting the little evidence that has survived may at least allow us to hazard an occasional guess.

The Search for Origins Greek tragedy is often seen today as intimately and essentially bound up with Athenian democracy. This connection is in large part thanks to Aeschylus. His Persians commemorates the victory at Salamis which preserved the nascent democratic state; his Suppliant Women

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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portrays a king (of Argos) who nevertheless defers to his city’s democratic assembly; his Oresteia concludes unexpectedly with the establishment of the jury system which was at the heart of democratic Athens. He himself fought at Marathon and Salamis in the service of his city; and would later be presented (by the comic poet Aristophanes, particularly in his Frogs of 405) as the paragon of traditional Athenian values from an earlier and better age. It can come as a surprise, then, to learn that the earliest instance of tragic performances attested in our sources takes place in a context that is neither democratic nor Athenian. Writing probably in the third quarter of the fifth century, the historian Herodotus describes how the early sixth-century tyrant Clisthenes of Sicyon in the north-east Peloponnese abolished the honours which had previously been paid in his city to the mythical Argive king Adrastus, and in the course of this account he states: Apart from other honours that the Sicyonians paid to Adrastus, they commemorated his sufferings with tragic choruses, honouring not Dionysus but Adrastus. But Clisthenes gave the choruses back to Dionysus. (5.67.5; see Wellenbach 2016)

Nearly a century before Aeschylus first competed, then, we have evidence for “tragic choruses” at Sicyon, though what exactly these were we cannot tell. The language is significant: “‘Tragic’ means what it says … if H had meant dithyrambs, he had the vocabulary to say so” (Hornblower 2013, 204). But while Herodotus drew that distinction, how were these choruses characterised by the Sicyonians themselves? Did they use the term “tragic”, or is Herodotus equating their distinct institution with the tragic choruses so familiar from his own time, probably more than a century and a half after the period that he is describing? The latter seems more likely; but even if the Sicyonians did use (or come to use) the term “tragic”, they may have employed it in a different sense from how the Athenians would. Moreover, whether or not the use of the term was continuous, what were the features of these choruses that encouraged Herodotus to label them tragic? Perhaps the focus on the “sufferings” of a king whose experienced great catastrophe may have encouraged him to assimilate the Sicyonians’ tragic choruses to the tragedy which he knew at Athens, with its frequent portrayals of monarchs experiencing ill fortune; but without access to his source we cannot tell for sure. This fascinating passage, then, opens up more questions than it answers; and that is before we begin to wonder about all those other Greek city-states in the sixth century, whose choruses were never commented on by Herodotus and so are lost to history altogether. On the other hand, that is not unusual when we are dealing with evidence from the archaic period; we should be grateful that we have this brief reference at all, with its reminder that our Athenocentric evidential base provides a shaky foundation for modern hypotheses. Moreover, there is the occasional further flash of light amid the gloom. A lead curse tablet from a grave in south-east Sicily, which dates to c. 470, testifies to a flourishing culture of choral performances, probably in a theatrical context: Apellis, for love of Eunikos that no one be taken more seriously or be more popular than Eunikos but that all praise and admire him both willingly and unwillingly. For love of Eunikos I mark down all the khoragoi so that they be ineffectual both in word and deed, along with their sons and fathers; and so that they fail both in the contest and outside the contests – whoever does not leave him (sc. Eunikos) with me … Pyria, Mysskelos, Damophantos and the[ir khorag]os I mark down, along with their sons and fathers, and all the others who arrive here. May no one be taken more seriously than Eunikos either among men or women. As this lead, so … may they support Eunikos to be victorious always everywhere. (Wilson 2007b, 352–53; see further Eidinow 2007, 156–63; Jordan 2007)

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The curse indicates a potent rivalry between khoragoi – “chorus-leaders”, a term used in Athens (as khorēgoi, with Attic-Ionic vocalisation) to denote the individual who funded a chorus, a significant financial outlay. And while the tablet that preserves it does not predate Aeschylus, the world that it presents may well. It is anyway likely that choral contests of some kind were a feature of Sicilian life: “If Miller’s suggested Geloan provenance [for the tablet] is correct, we must remember that Aischylos was in the town in the 470s; neither he nor Pindar is likely to have been attracted to Gela if the city had no structure of poetic competitions” (Jordan 2007, 344; on Aeschylus in Sicily see Bell, Chapter 5 in this volume). Such a structure was indeed probably much older than 470. For Sicily was the island of Stesichorus of Himera, who composed long lyric-epic narratives for choral performance during the first half of the sixth century (Davies and Finglass 2014; Finglass 2014a). In the few fragments that survive we can detect Stesichorus’s influence, particular of his Oresteia, on tragedy, particularly Aeschylus (Swift 2015; Coward 2018; Finglass 2018). Whether or not a Stesichorean chorus could itself have been described as “tragic” at the time, Stesichorean poetry described the moral dilemmas that tragedy would later confront. In his Geryoneis, for example, the monster Geryon is portrayed with surprising sympathy; his mother pleads with him not to face Heracles, who will indeed kill Geryon when they face each other in combat (Finglass 2014b, frags. 17, 19). His Sack of Troy opens with the pity shown by the goddess Athena to the menial servant Epeius, whose daily drudgery involves carrying water for the Greek kings; but that act of pity will have appalling consequences for the thousands who will lose their lives thanks to the stratagem of the Wooden Horse which Athena will inspire Epeius to create (Finglass 2014b, frag. 100). (There is a possible parallel in the low-status character of the Watchman who begins Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, for whom the shining forth of the beacon marks the transformation of his fortunes; but the light will have altogether graver consequences for the more significant characters in the work.) The essentially tragic nature of his plots provided a clear legacy to Aeschylus from the choruses of Sicily. Whether the choral competitions mentioned in the tablet were called “tragic”, or whether they were fundamentally similar to Athenian tragedy, we cannot tell. But we can at least be sure that when Aeschylus first came to Sicily (in or after 476/5: T1.33, Sommerstein 2010, 6) to produce his tragedies for Hieron, tyrant of Syracuse, he was encountering a world where choruses engaged in the dramatic representation of narrative were already well-known, probably from long before his time. Aristotle’s Poetics (written at some point between the 360s and 320s) mentions in passing how Dorian Greeks (which would include both Sicyonians and many Sicilians) claimed tragedy as their own invention (Ch. 3, 1448a29-31), but does not elaborate, apart from noting the specifically Sicilian associations of early comedy. His account of the development of tragedy, however, goes into more detail: To consider whether tragedy is by now sufficiently developed in its types – judging it both in itself and in relation to audiences – is a separate matter. At any rate, having come into being from an improvisational origin (which is true both of tragedy and comedy, the first starting from the leaders of the dithyramb, the second from the leaders of the phallic songs which are still customary in many cities), tragedy was gradually enhanced as poets made progress with the potential which they could see in the genre. And when it had gone through many changes, tragedy ceased to evolve, since it had attained its natural fulfilment. It was Aeschylus who first increased the number of actors from one to two, reduced the choral parts, and gave speech the leading role; the third actor and scene-painting came with Sophocles. A further aspect of change concerns scale; after a period of slight plots and humorous diction, it was only at a late state that tragedy attained dignity by departing from the style of satyr-plays, and when the iambic metre replaced the trochaic tetrameter. To begin with, poets used the tetrameter because the poetry had more of the tone of a satyr-play and of dance; and it was only when speech was brought in that the nature of the genre found its appropriate metre. (Ch. 4, 1449a7–24; trans. Halliwell 1987, 35)



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The Poetics is probably the most influential work of literary criticism ever, and this passage has been picked apart by scholars for centuries; yet unfortunately there is little here that really helps us to unpack the early history of the genre. Aristotle’s interest lies in providing not key factual information from the earliest days of the genre in Athens, but a teleological model for tragedy, showing how successive prominent authors (here Aeschylus and Sophocles) contributed to its development until it culminated in the “natural fulfilment” that it saw later in the fifth century. But while tragedy undoubtedly evolved during the course of its lifetime (to continue the biological metaphor which lies at the heart of Aristotle’s analysis), there is no reason to think that it ever achieved some kind of perfect state, or to assume that earlier stages of the genre were necessarily inferior to later ones. As a consequence, “ancient theory is a poor point of departure for a study of tragedy’s background” (Csapo and Wilson 2014, 927). Taking account of the material evidence for early tragedy turns out to be more fruitful an exercise, as recent work by Csapo and Wilson has emphasised. As they point out, “at ca. 508 the plausible literary, epigraphic, iconographic, and architectual evidence converge”, noting how that year is given as the first competition for the “men’s lyric chorus” by the Parian Marble (a third-century bce chronicle which relies on earlier sources); how two separate major Athenian inscriptions containing details of winners in the tragic competitions seem to begin in the late sixth century; how our first monument set up by a successful khorēgos dates to around 500; how our earliest depictions of tragic performers on vases are from 490–80; how the temple of Dionysus itself was built c. 500–490 (Csapo and Wilson 2015, 319, 322). Given this timing, it is not at all unreasonable to associate the coming of tragedy with the coming of democracy to Athens in the Clisthenic revolution of 509/8. The connection of tragedy to democracy with which we began turns out to be correct, even if it is only part of the picture and does not take account of possible tragic developments elsewhere in the Greek world.

Early Practitioners The supposed founder of the tragic genre, Thespis (TrGF i 1, Cropp 2019, 3–17), is a shadowy figure and we cannot even be certain that he ever existed. He is said to have produced his first tragedies some time during the period 535–32 (T1, from the tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia the Suda); statements in handbooks that Greek tragedy originated in the 530s are based on this supposed fact. But these and other dates associated with tragic poets from the sixth century cannot be relied on; they look like later confections, evenly spaced out by a later chronographer attempting to give order to the darkness (West 1989 = 2012, 151–56; also Scullion 2002, 2005). At this very early stage of the tragic genre, records will not have been as thorough as they would be later in the century, and those records which did exist may have been damaged or lost during the Persian sack of the city in 480; the very scripts of the plays may not always have been kept (though see later in this section for evidence that plays were reperformed already in this early period, implying the preservation of at least some scripts). And as we have just seen, different types of evidence all point in the direction of tragedy beginning at Athens in the very late sixth century, some time after the supposed date for Thespis. The few fragments attributed to him have long been recognised as coming from much later texts: some may have been written by Heraclides of Pontus in the fourth century, who is known to have composed tragedies under the name of Thespis (Cropp 2019, 3). The “real” Thespis is best removed from literary history and consigned to myth. Aeschylus’s own first entry in the tragic competitions is said to have taken place between 499 and 496 (T52), though it was over a decade before he won first prize in 484 (T54a). He was competing against established masters: Choerilus, Pratinas and Phrynichus (Sommerstein 2008, x, 2010, 3; Collard 2014, 538; Cropp 2019, 18–52). Phrynichus (TrGF i 3), the figure from this trio about whom we know the most, is said by the Suda to have won his first victory

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in some year between 511 and 508; to have introduced female characters (still played by men, of course) and the tetrameter metre (T1); and to have composed nine plays, seven of which are named by the Suda (two of them with one or two alternative titles). The date in the Suda is likely to be made up, although it remains clear that Phrynichus began his tragic career before Aeschylus did. The details of his supposed theatrical innovations cannot be relied on: it was the habit of later writers (such as Aristotle and his school) to attribute the introduction of particular features of tragedy to certain named individuals without evidence to back these claims up, in order to create a developmental narrative for the genre. As for the Suda’s list of plays, references to Phrynichus in other authors indicate (as we should expect) that it is far from complete, nor does it include the two famous plays discussed in the following paragraphs. So every piece of (the very brief) information that the encyclopedia supplies about Phrynichus’s life and career is suspect or inadequate: a reminder of how difficult it is to make use even of the scarce evidence (if we can call it that) which we possess. The first play by Phrynichus about which we are in a position to say anything, The Capture of Miletus, was produced in 492, not so long after Aeschylus began to produce plays himself. The drama depicted an event from 494, only two years previously: the fall of Miletus (an Athenian ally on the coast of Asia Minor, believed by the Athenians to have been originally founded from Athens itself) to the Persians, from whom the city, together with the other Ionian Greeks, had revolted in 499. The work was not a success: indeed, the Athenians fined Phrynichus a thousand drachmas for the production, ordering that no-one should ever produce the play again, because it reminded them of their own misfortunes (Herodotus 6.21.2  =  T2, Finglass 2015, 209–10; the anecdote is evidence for early reperformance of tragedy, and thus the preservation of scripts in at least some cases, as noted above). Perhaps Phrynichus’s play tells us what one particular type of pre-Aeschylean tragedy looked like: historical tragedy about very recent events. Or else it was an innovation – Aeschylus will not have been the only innovator among the early tragedians, after all – though an innovation that went badly wrong. However that may be, the reaction of the Athenians is a telling one in terms of expectations of the genre. Tragedy did portray sufferings, and that was understood and accepted; but those sufferings ought to belong to somebody else, not to the spectators themselves. This was not Phrynichus’s only historical tragedy. Another play of his, called Phoenician Women, depicted the Athenian victory over the Persian fleet at Salamis in 480; the play seems to have been performed in 476, since we know from inscriptional evidence that Phrynichus was victorious in that year and that Themistocles, Athens’ victorious admiral in that battle, was chorēgos, or responsible for financing the production (T4). Again, perhaps this was another instance of a historical tragedy genre which was more prevalent in these early years than it would be in succeeding decades; or else it was another one-off, an attempt by Phrynichus to produce a tragedy on a historical topic that was guaranteed to avoid the fate of his earlier attempt in this genre. We know one further detail about Phrynichus’s Phoenician Women: that it began with a eunuch setting out the chairs for the Persian leaders and announcing the defeat of Xerxes, the Persian king (Finglass 2014b, frag. 8). As a consequence, presumably the play was set in Susa, the Persian capital. So was Aeschylus’s Persians of 472, which dealt with the same overall topic only four years after Phrynichus’s drama. Aeschylus’s play differed from Phrynichus’s, however, in that at its opening the Persian elders (who make up the play’s chorus and utter the first lines) are unaware of the catastrophe that has overcome their king. Not until the Queen has come on stage and conversed with the elders does a Messenger arrive to reveal the terrible news, following that up with a detailed narrative of how this unexpected outcome came to be. Aeschylus’s account gives the play a superior narrative structure, allowing anticipation to build among the figures on stage before the dramatic revelation part-way through. The effect



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is heightened, moreover, because the spectators are aware of information that the characters lack; the characters discuss the expedition in front of an audience anticipating the moment when they learn of the catastrophe that has enveloped their army. Taking on the elder master in this way suggests a competitive spirit on Aeschylus’s part; of course he had, as noted above, been composing tragedy for many years himself by this point, but his predecessor Phrynichus was still winning victories and it could not but have been quite a statement on Aeschylus’s part to produce a play on the same topic a mere four years later. About the other early playwrights we know even less than about Phrynichus. Choerilus (TrGF i 2) is said to have produced 160 dramas in a career that began between 523 and 520 inclusive and saw 13 victories, and to have made innovations in masks and the stage building (or, by a likely emendation, costume). As with Phrynichus, however, the date span for his first production and the reference to his theatrical innovation are wholly unreliable; unlike Phrynichus, we have virtually no other evidence for his career, with only one play title preserved (Alopē), and scarcely any fragments. Pratinas (TrGF i 4), unlike the Athenians Phrynichus and Choerilus, was from Phlius in the north-east Peloponnese (Stewart 2017, 76–77, 94–97); he first competed between 499 and 496. A few miles downstream from Phlius lay Sicyon, whose associations with the genre have already been indicated; this may be relevant to Pratinas’s literary specialism. He is said to have invented satyr drama, a genre related to tragedy in which serious mythological events are recounted with a chorus of ribald satyrs, human-animal hybrids with a fondness for drunkenness and sex; he wrote 50 plays, 32 of them satyr dramas, and won only once. Aeschylus is said to have excelled in this genre (T125), but exactly how this genre developed in its earliest stages is a matter for speculation (see Shaw, Chapter 14 in this volume).

Aeschylus’s Distinctive Contribution? As already noted, identifying Aeschylus’s particular contribution to the development of tragedy is difficult given the paucity of the evidence; but a couple of points can be hazarded nonetheless. Historical tragedy had already been treated, by Phrynichus: but Aeschylus with his Persians showed a surer grasp of what could be achieved in that form, both avoiding Phrynichus’s blunder with The Capture of Miletus and offering a more dramatic narrative than in his Phoenician Women. And Aeschylus’s highly sophisticated engagement with earlier lyric poetry, as well as with epic – a sophistication encouraged by his adoption, and perhaps invention, of the continuous tragic trilogy format, often with thematically related satyr play (see Sommerstein, Chapter 15 in this volume), with its extended possibilities for treating a narrative in depth – provided future tragedians with a clear path to follow: for over a century (at least), classical tragedy continued to engage directly with these two genres, especially but not exclusively Homer (see Finglass, Chapter 2 in this volume). It is a melancholy tribute to the impact of Aeschylus’s dramas, however, that subsequent generations showed little interest in his predecessors and elder contemporaries: so authoritative was his handling of the genre that, for all practical purposes, tragedy began with him.

FURTHER READING The key texts are edited and translated with a commentary in Cropp 2019; see also Wright 2016. Up to date accounts of the origins of tragedy can be found in Csapo and Miller 2009 and Csapo and Wilson 2014; the treatment of West 1989 = 2012, 151–56 remains fundamental. Sicilian choruses are treated by Wilson 2007b, the crucial evidence of Herodotus by Wellenbach 2016; Davies and Finglass 2014

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provide an introduction, text, translation and commentary for Stesichorus. The relationship between Greek tragedy and Athenian democracy has seen much interest over the past three decades: Connor 1989 and Carter 2011 are good places to start.

REFERENCES Andújar, R., Coward, T. R. P. and Hadjimichael, T., eds. (2018). Paths of Song. Interactions Between Lyric and Tragic Poetry. Trends in Classics supplement 58. Berlin and Boston. Carter, D., ed. (2011). Why Athens? A Reappraisal of Tragic Politics. Oxford. Collard, C. (2014). “Fragmentary and Lost Plays.” In Roisman ed., i 536–53. Connor, W. R. (1989). “City Dionysia and Athenian democracy.” Classica & Mediaevalia 40, 7–32. Coward, T. R. P. (2018). “Stesichorean Footsteps in the Parodos of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.” In Andújar et al. eds., 39–64. Cropp, M. J. (2019). Minor Greek Tragedians. Fragments from the Tragedies with Selected Testimonia. Volume 1: The Fifth Century. Liverpool. Csapo, E. and Miller, M. C. (2009). The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond. From Ritual to Drama. Cambridge. Csapo, E. and Wilson, P. (2014). “Origins and History of Greek Tragedy.” In Roisman ed., ii 926–37. Csapo, E. and Wilson, P. (2015). “Drama Outside Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BC.” Trends in Classics 7, 316–95. Davies, M. and Finglass, P. J. (2014). Stesichorus. The Poems. Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries 54. Cambridge. Eidinow, E. (2007). Oracles, Curses, and Risk among the Ancient Greeks. Oxford. Finglass, P. J. (2014a). “Introduction.” In Davies and Finglass, 1–91. Finglass, P. J. (2014b). “Text and Critical Apparatus.” In Davies and Finglass, 93–204. Finglass, P. J. (2015). “Ancient Reperformances of Sophocles.” Trends in Classics 7, 207–23. Finglass, P. J. (2018). “Stesichorus and Greek Tragedy.” In Andújar et al. eds., 19–37. Finglass, P. J. and Kelly, A., eds. (2015). Stesichorus in Context. Cambridge. Gregory, J., ed. (2005). A Companion to Greek Tragedy. Malden, MA. Halliwell, S. (1987). The Poetics of Aristotle. Translation and Commentary. London. Hornblower, S. (2013). Herodotus. Histories V. Cambridge. Jordan, D. R. (2007). “An Opisthographic Lead Tablet from Sicily with a Financial Document and a Curse Concerning choregoi.” In Wilson ed., 335–50. Roisman, H. M. (2014). The Encyclopedia of Greek Tragedy. 3 vols. Malden, MA. Scullion, S. (2002). “Tragic Dates.” Classical Quarterly 52, 81–101. Scullion, S. (2005). “Tragedy and Ritual: The Problem of Origins.” In Gregory ed., 23–37. Sommerstein, A. H. (2008). Aeschylus. Persians. Seven against Thebes. Suppliants. Prometheus Bound. Loeb Classical Library 145. Cambridge, MA and London. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010). Aeschylean Tragedy. Second Edition. London. [First Edition. Bari 1996]. Stewart, E. (2017). Greek Tragedy on the Move. The Birth of a Panhellenic Art Form c. 500–300 BC. Oxford. Swift, L. A. (2015). “Stesichorus on Stage.” In Finglass and Kelly eds., 125–44. Wellenbach, M. (2016). “Herodotus’ Tragic Choruses.” Trends in Classics 8, 17–32. West, M. L. (1989). “The Early Chronology of Greek Tragedy.” Classical Quarterly 39, 251–54. [=2012: 151–56]. West, M. L. (2012). Hellenica. Selected Papers on Greek Literature and Thought. Volume II: Lyric and Drama. Oxford. Wilson, P., ed. (2007a). The Greek Theatre and Festivals. Oxford. Wilson, P. (2007b). “Sicilian Choruses.” In Wilson ed., 351–77. Wright, M. (2016). The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy. Volume 1: Neglected Authors. London.

CHAPTER 4

Aeschylean Drama and Intellectual History Jacques A. Bromberg Any attempt to situate Aeschylean tragedy within the intellectual history of the early fifth century bce must also consider how Aeschylus’s dramas themselves may be read as primary sources for that history, recognising and analysing Aeschylus’s interactions with and contributions to the broad intellectual trends of his time. The years through which Aeschylus lived (c. 525–456 bce ) were characterised by upheaval, disruption, and innovation in many aspects of Athenian public life. The Life of Aeschylus written in antiquity emphasises Aeschylus’s role in this history (though its accuracy is subject to serious doubt; see the Introduction to this volume and Podlecki 1966, 1–7; Sommerstein 2010, 1–16); and Aeschylus is furthermore himself characterised as an innovator, credited most notably with introducing the second speaking actor into tragic drama (Aristotle Poetics 1449a15–17). As the only complete works that survive from Athens in the first half of the fifth century bce, Aeschylus’s extant plays are central to reconstructing the history of ideas during this unique period and enhance our understanding of Athenian intellectual life at a poorly documented, but nevertheless critical, moment in its history. Where in Aeschylean drama should we look for evidence of his engagement with contemporary intellectual culture, and how shall we know when we have found it? The first task requires deciding what we mean by “intellectual culture”, a phrase that defies easy definition and itself invites further questioning. The extant plays and fragments display interests in a wide variety of subjects and appear to engage actively with an equally wide variety of thought traditions. At times, Aeschylus’s inherited knowledge appears fully traditional. The worldencircling ocean described by the Chorus of Seven against Thebes (310–11) evokes wellknown descriptions in Homer (on Achilles’ shield, for instance, Iliad 18.607–8; see also 21.194–97) and in Hesiod (e.g. Theogony 337–45, 367–70) (see Kirk et al. 1983, 10–17). Other passages appear proverbial, even banal, as in Eteocles’ proclamation that “Obedience is mother of Success, and wife of Salvation” (Seven against Thebes 224–45), for which he seems to want to apologise by adding “so goes the saying” (ὧδ’ ἔχει λόγος, 225); or the Persian Queen’s aphorism – drawn from competitive wrestling and so “not her invention” (μῦθον οὐδαμῶς ἐμαυτῆς, Persians 162) – that “great wealth trips prosperity with the foot, making a cloud of dust upon the ground” (163–64). In some instances, Aeschylus’s

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characters display what might best be characterised as folk wisdom, such as the delightfully obscure knowledge that snakes apparently hiss loudly at noon, used to describe Tydeus’s war-cry in Seven against Thebes (381). Other moments reveal detailed technical knowledge. In Suppliants, for instance, the Chorus describe the ship that brought them to Argos from Egypt as a “linen-sewn house” (λινορραφής δόμος, 134–45), a poetic expression much puzzled over, which may refer to the use of fabric to assemble (or mend) the wooden boards of a ship’s hull (see Homer Odyssey 14.383). In another passage, from Libation Bearers, the Chorus pray at the reunion of Orestes and Electra that “the house [i.e. family] must provide the plug (ἔμμοτον) [that will be] a cure of these matters” (Libation Bearers 741–42), an almost certain appropriation of technical medical terminology, as the term ἔμμοτον is elsewhere almost entirely confined to medical writers (e.g. Hippocrates On Wounds of the Head 14 and Diseases 2.47). Aeschylus’s engagement with traditional and contemporary “thought” is thus manifestly diverse and eclectic, and the task of accounting for the intellectual context and content of the plays becomes increasingly difficult the more specifically one attempts to identify his sources. Before we advance further, however, a note on Prometheus Bound. Because the ensuing narrative is essentially a historical one, seeking out potential points of mutual interest between Aeschylus and his contemporaries, I have chosen to focus on the six datable dramas (i.e. Persians, Seven against Thebes, Suppliants, and the Oresteia trilogy). Though Prometheus Bound contains much of interest (including possible engagements with Ionian theology and materialist cosmologies, as well as with medical and democratic theories; see Conacher 1977; Ruffell 2012, esp. chapter 3, and Chapter 12 in this volume), the uncertainty surrounding its dating and authorship precludes assigning it a place within the chronology of intellectual history (see the most recent contribution to this question by Manousakis 2020). Traditional histories of philosophy typically identify two groups of thinkers before the schools of Plato and Aristotle. The first grouping is that of the so-called “Presocratic philosophers” – “so-called” because of the phrase’s well-known limitations (Laks 2018). A number of the figures grouped among the “pre-socratics” were in fact contemporary with Socrates (and some, like Democritus, even younger than him), while the intellectual category of “philosophy” is the product of a later age, adopted by Isocrates and Plato in the fourth century to describe the pursuits of their rival schools. Moore (2020) has documented how the word evolved from a term of abuse, to a serious academic discipline. The figures grouped under the heading of “Presocratic” are most commonly associated with the speculative questioning of the origins, operations, and limits of the natural world (cosmology, physics, eschatology) as well as with the nature of divinity (theology). The second grouping of intellectuals is the “Sophists”, an equally diverse and eclectic group of thinkers (many of them also, in the literal sense, “Presocratic”), whose interests in human affairs (ethics, politics, psychology, persuasion, and epistemology) facilitate the dichotomy between the two groups. This conventional division is reflected, for instance, in the standard edition of the surviving testimonia and fragments by Herman Diels and Walter Kranz (1959–60; all Presocratic fragments will be cited in this chapter by their Diels-Kranz numbers), and in the multi-volume history of early Greek philosophy by W. C. K. Guthrie (1962, 1965, 1969). Both of these works divide the Presocratics from the Sophists into separate volumes. While it is tempting therefore to project a version of C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” into the remote past – with the Presocratics representing the “sciences” and the Sophists the “humanities” – no such distinction existed in Aeschylus’s day (or in the century that followed his death). On the contrary, the Presocratics commonly pursued interests in ethics, politics, and theology, while the Sophists were themselves concerned with “the so-called cosmos” (ὁ καλούμενος… κόσμος) and with “the reasons for heavenly phenomena” (Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.1.10; Laks 2018, 4–8).



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Other factors further complicate the task, especially the fact that the writings of the Presocratics and the Sophists survive only in fragments (frequently preserved, I might add, in the polemics of later critics, disinclined to offer a complete or sympathetic view of earlier thinkers). The loss of their original contexts, in addition to their obscure (even oracular) style and language, makes it difficult and at times simply impossible to determine the fragments’ meanings and to assemble them into coherent theories and doctrines (let alone, schools). More problematic still in approaching Aeschylus’s relationship with this diverse material is determining when and whether similarities in language, thought and argument reflect one author’s “engagement” or “influence” with another. When the ghost of Darius remarks that “many evils arise for mortals, both from the sea and from the land” (Persians 707–08), is Aeschylus quoting a line of Hesiod, “the earth is full of evils, and the sea is full” (Works and Days 101)? When Agamemnon comments that “one should call a man ‘happy’ only when he has come to the end of his life in prosperity” (Agamemnon 928–29), does the passage reflect an Aeschylean thought, a literary or dramatic commonplace, or a slice of inherited proverbial (even folk) wisdom? And if inherited, then from where? How do we determine its relationship with the thought attributed by Herodotus to Solon that “one should not call a man ‘happy’ before he dies” (1.32)? The discontinuous and fragmentary remains of philosophical writings before the time of Plato (c. 428–348 bce) undermines any attempt to chart genealogies of words and ideas. At the same time, the hypercategorisation of texts by school (e.g. “Ionian”, “Eleatic”, “Pythagorean”) and discipline (e.g. cosmology, physics, theology) obscures a range of thought-traditions from which Aeschylus (and others of his day) would have drawn ideas about the cosmos, about the nature of nature, and about the experience and meaning of human life. Most obviously among them are the cosmopoietic narratives of the Homeric epics (see Finglass (Chapter 2), Podlecki (Chapter 13) and Park (Chapter 20) in this volume; Sommerstein 2010, 241–53), but no less significant are the didactic poems of Hesiod (Solmsen 1949), the “gnomic” poetry of Tyrtaeus, Solon, Simonides, Theognis and Pindar, and the paraenetic traditions represented by Archilochus and Aesop (Griffith 2009, 11–14). Many of these figures belonged to a multigenerational, transnational, elite intelligentsia, which Aeschylus would one day join. For this reason, the chapters in this volume on the epic, lyric and tragic traditions before Aeschylus (Chapters 2–3) as well as those on mythmaking, ritual, divinity, justice, race, war, history, law and empire (Chapters 20–28) treat equally salient features of Aeschylus’s thinking and worldview. It is therefore wise when searching for “intellectual culture” to cast a wide net and not view the plays’ intellectual, philosophical or speculative contents as discursively or generically foreign to tragedy, intruding or exerting an influence from separate, discernible disciplines or subjects. Keeping these concerns in mind, we can appreciate moments in Aeschylus’s plays and fragments that share the interests, debates, and theories of Greek philosophers in his day. Writing nearly a half-century ago, Friedrich Solmsen (1975) exuberantly characterised the intellectual history of the sixth and fifth centuries bce as a “Greek Enlightenment”. Borrowed from the periodisation of European modernity, the phrase denoted the transitional, formative period of intellectual development and cultural growth: it followed a “renaissance” of Hellenic culture during the eighth and seventh centuries and precipitated a “classical” period in the fifth and fourth centuries: “reason, exulting in a formerly unknown freedom and confidence, would turn a searchlight upon itself and discover a potential of which it may have been simply conscious but which it had not yet put to the test” (p. 4). Despite occasional hyperbole such as this, Solmsen’s lectures are typical of scholarship (especially German) from the middle of the last century in its adoption of a linear, teleological model of intellectual and spiritual development. The “great demerit” of studies of this type, as one scholar has put it, is the “a priori assumption…that there is inevitably a

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progression, both from earlier to later Greek authors and from antiquity to modernity, from primitive, irrational, and supernatural explanations to naturalistic, rational, and sophisticated ones” (Cairns 2013, x–xi). Such a view assumes a developmentalist approach that too often characterises earlier thinkers as eclectic and unrefined, in contrast to focused and systematic later figures (especially Plato and Aristotle). Nevertheless, it remains generally accepted that the turn of the fifth century bce is a historical threshold, anticipating the rise of the Hellenic imperial centres (especially Athens and Syracuse) and characterised by population growth, economic expansion, cultural innovation and intellectual creativity (e.g. Davies 1993, 1–2 opens his history of Greek democracy by distinguishing between Greece before and after 478). While only 14 years separate Aeschylus’s earliest extant play (Persians of 472 bce) from his latest (the Oresteia tetralogy of 458 bce), his adult life spanned the entire first half-century of Athenian democracy (508/7–456 bce) and his career as dramatist and performer – recall Aristotle’s remark in Rhetoric that “at first, poets acted their tragedies” (1403b; cf. Herington 1985, 170–71) – extended over four decades. He was born c. 525 bce at Eleusis in Western Attica, just a decade after the first prizes for tragic dramas were awarded in Athens (c. 534 bce). His native community (deme) of Eleusis was a significant religious centre, home to the “Eleusinian” mysteries of Demeter and Persephone that were among the Athenians’ most hallowed institutions: “there are indeed many things that one might see in Hellas worthy of wonder to hear about”, wrote Pausanias, travelling through the region around the year 200 ce, “but the Eleusinian rites and the Olympic games seem especially to have a share in the mind of god” (5.10.1). How Aeschylus’s birth and upbringing in this unique setting – a site between realms, connecting the cosmic, terrestrial, and infernal – affected his thinking and his worldview cannot be determined with confidence, but some have detected traces of Eleusinian ritual language in Aeschylean imagery (Bowie 1993, esp. 24–26 and n. 92; for the mysteries at Eleusis, see Simon 1983, 24–35; Burkert 1987; Clinton 2007; Patera 2010; Seaford 2012, 24–51). The Argive watchman’s prologue to Agamemnon offers some especially famous examples: his yearning for “deliverance from these toils” (τῶνδ’ ἀπαλλαγὴν πόνων, 1) recalls the Eleusinian promise of a blissful afterlife (cf. Eumenides 83; Bowie 1993, 24); his ecstatic exclamation at the appearance of the beacon in Agamemnon (22–24) echoes the light-play of mystic ritual and introduces the theme of darkness and light that will reappear throughout the trilogy (e.g. Libation Bearers 808–11, 961–24; see Thomson 1996; Seaford 2012, 181 n. 12 and 295–96; Anderson 2010); and his memorable expression for maintaining silence, “an ox stands upon my tongue” (Agamemnon 36–37) evokes the image of the “key on the tongue” associated with Eleusinian secrecy and ritual silence (cf. Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus 1050–53). Two unattributed fragments cited by ancient commentators on Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus may also allude to the mysteries: one invokes again the theme of light and dark, “with bright flashes of lightning, with the strength of torches” (λαμπραῖσιν ἀστραπαῖσι λαμπάδων σθένει, frag. 386 in Radt 1985, 433; Sommerstein 2008, 324–25); in another, perhaps from a prologue or messenger speech, an unnamed character reports, “I shuddered with passion for this mystic ritual” (ἔφριξ’ ἔρωτι τοῦδε μυστικοῦ τέλους, frag. 387 in Radt 1985, 433–34; Sommerstein 2008, 324–25). Eleusinian religion is central to Aristophanes’ parody in Frogs: the comedic chorus of initiates aspires to the blissful afterlife promised at Eleusis and, before the contest with Euripides, Aeschylus prays to “Demeter who nurtured my mind” (Δήμητερ ἡ θρέψασα τὴν ἐμὴν φρένα, 886). (For the anecdote, perhaps inspired by passages like these and suggested by Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1111a8– 10, that Aeschylus was accused of revealing Eleusinian secrets, see Sommerstein 2010, 8–9; an ancient comment on Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1117a10 further lists Aeschylus’s Lady Archers (Toxotides), Priestesses, Sisyphus the Stoneroller, Iphigenia, and Oedipus among plays that touched on details of Demeter’s rites.)



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In addition to the religious and eschatological wonder that his birthplace must have inspired, Aeschylus’s experiences as a young citizen in late-sixth-century Athens would have been equally formidable. He was 10 when the tyrant Hipparchus was assassinated, and perhaps 13 when Hipparchus’s elder brother Hippias was expelled from Athens. The years following the expulsion of the tyrants are commonly associated with the growth of Athenian wealth, military power and political influence (see Wallace (Chapter 1) and Rosenbloom (Chapter 28) in this volume): “Though Athens was already great before”, remarks Herodotus, “it became greater still when freed from the tyrants” (5.66). More significantly, perhaps, Aeschylus bore witness as a youth to the crises that followed Hippias’s expulsion: a series of polarising confrontations between oligarchs and populists, two Spartan invasions of Athens, and a political revolution that produced sweeping constitutional reforms. In fact, if indeed he was born around 525 bce, Aeschylus would have turned 18 (the age of majority) in the year when Cleisthenes is supposed to have enacted his reforms (508/7 bce) and when Athens instituted annual dithyrambic contests, with the 10 new Cleisthenic tribes each supplying choruses of 50 men and 50 boys (Wilson 2003; cf. Wallace (Chapter 1) and Finglass (Chapter 3) in this volume). Doubtless, Aeschylus’s participation in the democratic processes of his town and city facilitated his development of the skills in argument and persuasion that we encounter in the extant tragedies – in Suppliants, for instance, when Danaus instructs his daughters in the proper words and gestures for foreigners in Argos (191–203) or when Pelasgus promises to teach (διδάξω, 519) Danaus how effectively to address the assembly. (For Aeschylus’s role in the history of rhetoric, see Sansone 2012.) The wars with Achaemenid Persia, beginning in 499 bce (the same year Aeschylus produced his first dramas) thrust Athens even further into the spotlight, cementing its already preeminent status as a leading city of Ionia and reaffirming its strong ties to the Ionian Greeks of the eastern Aegean sea. Five years later in 494 bce, as Aeschylus was entering middle age (perhaps, his thirties), the Ionian rebels suffered a final, crushing defeat. The city of Miletus, famous for its intellectual vitality and as a multicultural crossroads, was destroyed. How profoundly its destruction was mourned in Athens is illustrated by the anger directed at the tragedian Phrynichus (Aeschylus’s future rival), who orchestrated a tragic representation of the sack of Miletus in 493 bce. Herodotus explains that the entire theatre “fell to weeping” and that Phrynichus was heavily fined for having reminded them of their “personal calamities” (6.21). Herodotus’s description of the sack of Miletus as a disaster that affected them personally, as if in their own country or household (οἰκήια), reveals the community’s investment in the Ionian campaign and their perception of shared kinship with the Milesians. In fact, by Aeschylus’s 40th birthday in 485 bce (a year before his first victory at the dramatic festivals of 484), he would have heard (and perhaps participated in) a decade of debates in the Athenian assembly about whether or not to continue fighting alongside and on behalf of the Ionian cities. Those debates continued in the wake of Hellenic victories at Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale, first as the victorious allies contemplated bringing the eastern Aegean islands (especially Chios, Lesbos, and Samos) into their alliance, and then as their ongoing successes against the Persian army and navy made some of the islanders question the need for a continued military alliance. The kinship of Aeschylus’s Athens with the Ionian communities is among the central themes of Persians: the grieving chorus of Persian elders lists Lesbos, Samos and Chios first (884–45) in the catalogue of lost Achaemenid possessions in Ionia and also repeatedly characterises Xerxes’ defeat as an Ionian victory (951, 1011, 1025; though, to be fair, the “Dorian spear” of the Spartans is acknowledged for the victory at Plataea at 817). This emphasis in Persians on the collective achievement of the Ionians (with Athens as their leading city) may have been designed to promote the cause of ongoing military engagement in the eastern Aegean at a moment when some were beginning to question it (see Avery 1964; Kantzios 2004; Krikona 2018). We are better positioned to evaluate Aeschylus’s engagement with Presocratic (especially Ionian) philosophy when we keep this unique historical moment in mind.

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It is impossible to know – though perhaps, likely enough to suggest – that those who advocated on behalf of the Ionians throughout this period would have alluded to these communities as the birthplaces of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes (Miletus); Pythagoras and later Melissus (Samos); Xenophanes (Colophon); Heraclitus (Ephesus); Anaxagoras (Clazomenae); and others. Moreover, the destabilisation of the Hellenic communities in the eastern Aegean by a half-century of tyranny and conflict would have displaced many inhabitants of Ionia and created opportunities for mobility and travel, including to Athens and southern Italy, where Aeschylus and his contemporaries may have encountered them (or, at least, their ideas) directly. While it would clearly be a mistake to assign Aeschylus to any single philosophical “school”, a great deal of current research on the relation between tragedy and early Greek philosophy is preoccupied with identifying allusions to this or that fragment of Presocratic philosophy, and thereby to catalogue the influence of individual thinkers. The survey of the evidence by Rösler (1970) concluded that no such influence was discernible in the tragedies, but others have since then taken on the task and drawn connections between Aeschylean thought and the philosophies of Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, and Empedocles and (Allen 2005; Griffith 2009; Seaford 2005, 2012, 2013; Podlecki 2013; Scapin 2020). Let us look at the evidence. Pythagoras: Pythagoras (c. 570–495 bce) abandoned his native Samos around 530 bce, some claim out of disgust with the tyrant Polycrates (Porphyry Life of Pythagoras 9; Riedweg 2005, 11–12). He settled among the great Greek-speaking communities (“Magna Graecia”) of southern Italy, establishing a religious-philosophical sect and political party at Croton, which attracted a large number of followers. He was famous in antiquity for his beliefs about the immortality of souls, for his reputation as a miracle-worker, and for establishing an ascetic way of life based on rigorous diet and self-discipline. Perhaps more than any other figure in this history, however, Pythagoras eludes categorisation and understanding, and invites a wide range of opinions. Some have reasonably wondered if we can say anything about him at all with confidence, while others have attempted to sort truth from fiction in the many contrasting ancient accounts of his life and teachings (see Riedweg 2005; Lloyd 2014). In treating the possible correlation of Pythagorean and Aeschylean thought, therefore, it is essential to distinguish “Pythagoras” from “Pythagoreanism”, and within that distinction to determine whether passages in question reflect or merely resemble Pythagorean ideas. For these reasons, demonstrating Aeschylus’s awareness of and engagement with Pythagoreanism has proven difficult, despite testimonia linking the two (discussed in Seaford 2013, 18): Cicero called Aeschylus “not only a poet but a Pythagorean” (Tusc. Disp. 2.10.23), a claim which some have taken as evidence of an ancient tradition (Guthrie 1962, 234; see discussion in Rösler 1970, 25–26); and several anecdotes connect Aeschylus with Ion of Chios, a tragedian of Sophocles’ generation with known Pythagorean interests (see West 1985, Jennings and Katsatos 2007). One story, preserved by Plutarch (Moralia 79e), describes Aeschylus and Ion sitting together, joking at the Isthmian Games and seems to imply that the two were friends. West (1985, 78 n. 25) has even proposed that Ion may have been source for the story that Aeschylus described his tragedies as “slices from Homer’s great banquet” (Athenaeus 347e). George Thompson’s commentary on the Oresteia (1996) traces possible Pythagorean influences in not fewer than 13 passages (Agamemnon 36–37, 76–82, 179–80, 1001–04, 1232– 34, 1663; Libation Bearers 315–22, 583–85; Eumenides 269–72, 307, 526–31, 650–51, 1045–46). In one example, Thompson connects the Argive Watchman’s memorable phrase, “an ox stands upon my tongue” (Agamemnon 36–37) with the renowned ritual silence of the Pythagoreans. Isocrates (Busiris 29) remarks that “people admire those professing to be [Pythagoras’s] students more when they are silent than they do those with the greatest reputation for eloquence”, and Iambilichus in the later tradition records initiatory vows of



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silence of not less than five years (Life of Pythagoras 72). As we have seen, the phrase resembles a proverbial (perhaps colloquial) expression for keeping silent, associated with religious mysteries (such as those observed at Aeschylus’s native Eleusis; cf. Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus 1050–53, and discussion above). While Thompson’s total may be impressive, critics of this view have remarked that the passages are not individually very compelling (see Rösler 1970, 36–37; Seaford 2012, chapter 17 and 2013, 34 n. 2). A further Pythagorean connection involves the fragmentary play Bassarai, second in the tetralogy about the blasphemous Thracian king, Lycurgus. This play may have dramatised the tension between Pythagoreans and adherents of Dionysus through the story of the death of Orpheus, whom both religious traditions worshipped (see West 1985, 26–50; Seaford 2005; for the Lycurgeia, see Podlecki (Chapter 13) and Sommerstein (Chapter 15) in this volume). Finally, a fragment from the lost play Danaïds has at times been invoked as a “faint echo” of Pythagoreanism: “holy heaven yearns to penetrate the earth, and passionate desire seizes Earth to secure the marriage” (frag. 44 Radt 1985, 159–60; Sommerstein 2008, 40–41). Does this allegorical passage in which Aphrodite offers a sexualised cosmogony reflect a Pythagorean source, as some have suggested (Kirk et al. 1983, 39 n. 2; Allen 2005, 75)? Caution is warranted, and the consensus appears to be on the side of Rösler and Seaford against any clear influence of Pythagoreanism in the plays, even if at times they invoke similar ideas. Xenophanes: Xenophanes (c. 540–450 bce) left Colophon when he was only 25, in the wake of the Persian invasion of Ionia, and travelled for 67 years, joining the Hellenic colony at Elea in Italy and visiting Zancle and Catana in Sicily (Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers 9.18–20; Aristotle Rhetoric 2.23.27). As is characteristic of early Greek philosophers, Xenophanes’ interests appear to have been broad. The surviving fragments contain reflections on popular religion, social criticism, epistemology, and physics. He is famous for his critique of the Homeric/Hesiodic pantheon, as in fragments B11–12 (n.b. Diels and Kranz 1959–60 employs prefixes “A” and “B” to distinguish testimonia from quoted fragments), which complain that the epic poets attribute to their gods all sorts of reproachful and blameworthy behaviour, “theft, adultery, and mutual deception”; and for his diatribe against professional athletes, whom he argues are less deserving of civic recognition than he, “for our wisdom is better than the strength of men or horses” (B2.13–14). Critics have on the whole been more confident in identifying traces of Xenophanes’ views in Aeschylus than they have in proposing links to Pythagoreanism. In one passage from an unidentified tragedy, Achilles’ mother, Thetis berates Apollo for his hypocrisy, describing how at her wedding he sang at length of her good fortune and Achilles’ long, healthy life and then how “the very one who said all these things, he himself killed my boy” (frag. 350, in Radt 1985, 416–18; Sommerstein 2008, 308–11). Plato quotes this passage disapprovingly in Republic, adding that “whenever anyone says such things about the gods, we will treat them harshly and deny them a chorus” (Republic 383b–c). Scholars have drawn attention to Xenophanes’ memorable expressions, verging on monotheistic, of the omnipotence of Zeus, especially fragments B23 (“there is one god, supreme among gods and men, utterly unlike mortals in body and mind”), B24 (“[he] sees as a whole, thinks as a whole, and hears as a whole”), and B25 (“but without effort [he] sets all things in motion, by the purpose of his mind”). Xenophanes’ views have often been compared with passages in Suppliants that describe Zeus’s mind as “unfathomable” (ἄφραστοι, 95) and his work as effortless: “Everything that the gods do is without toil. Sitting upon his hallowed throne he immediately accomplishes somehow his purpose” (πᾶν ἄπονον δαιμονίων. ἥμενος ὃν φρόνημά πως αὐτόθεν ἐξέπραξεν ἔμπας ἑδράνων ἐφ᾽ ἁγνῶν, 100– 03; see Kirk et al. 1983, 167). This view of Zeus recurs in Apollo’s characterisation in Eumenides of the (near) omnipotence of Zeus: while he cannot raise the dead, Apollo

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explains, “he arranges all other things, turning them up and down, and does not even breathe hard from exertion” (τὰ δ’ ἄλλα πάντ᾽ ἄνω τε καὶ κάτω | στρέφων τίθησιν οὐδὲν ἀσθμαίνων μένει, Eumenides 650–51). Seaford (2012, 255–57) has compared these passages to a badly preserved fragment from Carians or Europa, in which Zeus’s rape of Europa is accomplished “without moving and without toil” (frag. 99, in Radt 1985, 217–21; Sommerstein 2008, 112–15). This conception of Zeus, reflecting the abstract power, unaccountability, and unimaginable wealth of tyranny, is consistent with the Ionian experience of tyranny (e.g. in Xenophanes’ native Colophon); but Seaford ultimately cautions against the conclusion that these passages reveal Xenophanes’ influence on Aeschylus. Heraclitus: Apollo’s phrase “all things up and down” (πάντ᾽ ἄνω τε καὶ κάτω, Eumenides 650) may remind readers of the enigmatic axiom attributed to Heraclitus that “the road up and down are one and the same” (ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή, frag. B60). Unlike many of his contemporaries, Heraclitus seems never to have travelled far beyond his native Ephesus and we are even more than usually ignorant of the details of his life (for reconstructions of Heraclitus’s philosophy, see Kahn 1979; Sassi 2018, 98–109). What is so easily assumed in the case of Xenophanes, Empedocles, and the Pythagoreans – that Aeschylus would most likely have encountered them and/or their ideas during his visits to Magna Graecia and Sicily – cannot be used to explain any parallels of thought with this mysterious figure. Known for his obscure, oracular style (Diogenes Laertius Lives 9.6; Cicero De Finibus 2.5), Heraclitus has nevertheless been invoked in discussions of Aeschylean thought, in part because Heraclitus is believed to have been most active in the early years of Aeschylus’s career, during the 69th Olympiad according to Diogenes Laertius (c. 504–01 bce; Lives 9.1) and in part because of their shared reputation for difficult language and style. Rösler (1970, 12–15) made a perfunctory comparison between the Chorus’s incantation to an unknowable Zeus in the parodos of Agamemnon (sc. “Zeus, whosoever he may be…”, 160–66) and Heraclitus’s paradoxical description of “the god” (ὁ θεὸς) as “day night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger” (frag. B67). Concluding on the basis of this single comparison, Rösler unsurprisingly found no compelling justification for Heraclitean influence in Aeschylus. But other similarities between the two cannot be so easily dismissed. For one thing, Aeschylus shared with Heraclitus an interest in etymological wordplay, perhaps informed by the belief (to be explored more fully later by Plato in, e.g., Cratylus) that words and names reveal the true nature of their bearers. In several of Heraclitus’s extant fragments, we find his meaning reinforced by etymologies, puns and wordplays. Fragment B32 (“the one wise thing alone both wishes and does not wish to be spoken as the name of Zeus”) contains a double-entendre in which the form of Zeus’s name (Zēnos) also recalls the verb “to live” (zēn). The same etymological wordplay appears in Aeschylus’s Suppliants in the genealogy of Epaphus, whom the Chorus describes as “this race of lifegiving Zeus” (φυσιζόου γένος τόδε Ζηνός, 584–85). Plato explains that the etymology reflects Zeus preeminence as “the cause and the beginning of life” (αἴτιος…τοῦ ζῆν ἢ ὁ ἄρχων, Cratylus 396a7–8; see Kahn 1979, 270). As others have noted, the choral style of Aeschylus’s Oresteia has “some affinities” with this Heraclitean preoccupation (Kirk et al. 1983, 210 nn. 2–4). A famous example is the play with Helen’s name in Agamemnon: “who could have given a name so entirely true – could someone (unseen by us) have guided with foresight the tongue of the one who named her in the course of destiny? – to that spear-bride, surrounded by strife, Helen? Since, fittingly, she proved a destroyer of ships, men, and cities (ἑλένας, ἕλανδρος, ἑλέπτολις)” (Agamemnon 681–90). The passage exploits the similarity of Helen’s name (Ἑλένη) with the verb “capture, destroy” (ἑλεῖν), linking Helen to her fated role in the war and its outcome. The etymological figure (“paronomasia”) employed in this and other passages has long been associated with Aeschylean style (see Stanford 1942, 72–75; Rutherford, Chapter 19 in this



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volume): similar passages play on the names of Apollo (Agamemnon 1080–83), Dikē (Libation Bearers 948) and Polyneices (Seven against Thebes 577 and 829–30). Apart from resemblances in language and style, several recent studies have drawn attention to parallels between Aeschylus’s and Heraclitus’s thought which, though not clearly a case of influence, nevertheless reveal a shared cultural and intellectual context. The most extensive explorations appear in the work of Richard Seaford, who has compared Heraclitus’s and Aeschylus’s cosmological principles, especially their interest in the unity of opposites (2003, 2012, 2013; cf. Scapin 2020, chapter 2). Throughout the surviving fragments, Heraclitus’s unique concept of “flux” recurs as the process through which a thing over time turns into its opposite. He frequently juxtaposes two opposites in order to suggest a relationship between them, as we observed in fragment B67 (quoted in the preceding paragraph), in which “the god” is described as “day night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger”. Other noteworthy examples of the doctrine appear in fragments B62 (“immortals mortals, mortals immortals, living the death of those, dying the life of those”) and B126 (“the cold things grow hot, hot things grow cold, wet grows dry, dry grows wet”), both of which suggest a circularity of transition and transformation into and back from opposites (Seaford 2012, 241–43). Aeschylus’s richly imagined cycle of violence and revenge in the Oresteia (e.g. “He plunders the plunderer. The killer pays.” Agamemnon 1562; translation in Seaford 2012, 236), involves successive transformations in which family members become enemies (Agamemnon 1374–75, Libation Bearers 993), living characters appear dead and return to life (Libation Bearers 886), and dead characters are aroused and exert powerful influences on the action (e.g. Eumenides 94–139). The never-ending circularity of violence that threatens the Argive community resembles Heraclitus’s cosmic unity of opposites which, “agrees with itself, though being drawn apart, the backward-turning harmony of bow and lyre” (B51). But whereas Heraclitus imagines a harmony that derives from the tension in the ­backward-­bending bow and lyre, Aeschylus characterises his cosmic principle in terms of balance, ­making frequent use of the metaphor of the scales (e.g. Agamemnon 163–66, 436–37; Libation Bearers 61, 240; Eumenides 888; Persians 346, 437, 440; Suppliants 403–05, 605, 823, 982; Seven 21; Seaford 2012, 237 n. 39). Building on these observations, critics of the Oresteia have suggested that the trilogy resolves the Heraclitean tension by appealing to the mediating figure of Zeus, drawn from Pythagoreanism and Orphic mysticism (Seaford 2012, 300–03, 2013, 27–33; Scapin 2020). Anaxagoras: Anaxagoras of Clazomenae is perhaps the most obvious case of an Ionian natural philosopher displaced by the Hellenic wars with Persia. Diogenes Laertius wrote that Anaxagoras was 20 years old at the time of Xerxes’ invasion and began to study philosophy in Athens around that time, eventually becoming a member of Pericles’ inner circle (Plato Phaedrus 270a; Diogenes Laertius Lives 2.3.7; for discussions of some problems with these dates, see Kirk et al. 1983, 352–55; Sider 2005; Graham 2006). This date, if correct, would put him in Athens during the final 20 years of Aeschylus’s career and, more importantly, during the years when all six datable extant tragedies were produced. It is possible that he remained in Athens for over 40 years, well into the 430s bce, when he was charged (most likely, as part of a political attack against Pericles) for Medism and impiety, and fled (Diogenes Laertius Lives 2.12; Plutarch Life of Pericles 32). Anaxagoras’s philosophical interests included cosmology, physics, and metaphysics, and his extant fragments reveal a particular commitment to Eleatic principles such as the belief that “nothing comes into being or is utterly destroyed” (frag. B17.4–5) and that in everything there is a portion of everything” (frag. B11). He was especially famous for his theory that “mind” (nous) was the controlling force in the cosmos, and he attributed to “mind” command not only over the motion and rotation of natural ingredients within the cosmos but also over “all things, both great and small, that

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have life” (frag. B12.14–15; discussion in Kirk et al. 1983, 362–65). One theory that appears to have trickled down to Aeschylus is Anaxagoras’s explanation of the Nile’s summer flooding: “The Nile floods during the summer when waters flow down (καταφερομένων) into it from southern snows” (59 A42.17–18; Kirk et al. 1983, 334 and 380–82). Seneca also attributes to Anaxagoras the view that “melted snows run down (decurrere) from Ethiopia to the Nile” (Natural Questions 4a.2.17), claiming that “all antiquity” (omnis uetustas) shared the same view and citing Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles as examples (but cf. also Herodotus 2.22.1). Two Aeschylean passages in particular appear to draw from this source. The first is in Suppliants when the Chorus recounts Io’s arrival in Egypt, with its “snownourished meadows, which the force and water of the Nile overflow” (559–61). The adjective “snow-nourished” (χιονόβοσκος) is an Aeschylean coinage. The second is among Aeschylus’s unassigned fragments, thought to belong to the lost tragedy Memnon, about the arrival in Troy of the Ethiopian hero, son of Eos (Dawn) and Tithonus, and Achilles’ chief antagonist after the death of Hector (West 2000, 344–45). A lengthy quotation describes Memnon’s country as “land of Ethiopia, from which the seven-channelled (ἑπτάρροος) stream of the Nile tumbles in abundance, where the flaming sun shining intensely melts the snow among the rocks, and all of fertile Egypt, filled with the holy river, brings forth the lifegiving crop of Demeter” (frag. 300 in Radt 1985, 391–94  =  frag. 126a in Sommerstein 2008, 130–31). “Seven-channelled” (ἑπτάρροος), like “snow-nourished”, is a characteristically Aeschylean compound adjective, but the presence of Anaxagorean theory in both these passages – the longest physical descriptions of Egypt among Aeschylus’s extant plays and fragments – suggests its prominence in Aeschylus’s imagination. (For descriptions of Egypt in tragedy, see Vasunia 2001, chapter 1; Anaxagoras’s theory is discussed on p. 376.) Anaxagoras may also be the source for the theory of human conception advanced by Apollo in his defence of Orestes in Eumenides (657–66). In the much-discussed passage, Apollo claims that “the one called ‘mother’ is not the child’s parent, but nourishes the newly sown embryo (κύματος νεοσπόρου); the one who impregnates is the parent, and the other protects the seedling” (on this passage, see the useful note in Sommerstein 1989, ad loc). In the proem to book four of On the Generation of Animals, Aristotle attributes to “Anaxagoras and other writers on nature (φυσιολόγοι)” the view that, “the seed (τὸ σπέρμα) comes from the male, while the female provides the place (τὸν τόπον) [where the seed will germinate]” (763b30–35), and similar doctrines are attributed to later thinkers Hippon (38 A13) and Diogenes of Apollonia (64 A27). Empedocles: If Aeschylus encountered any of the Presocratics on his travels to Sicily, the likeliest candidate is Empedocles, a younger contemporary from Acragas in southern Sicily. Though his precise dates are unknown – the floruit assigned to him by Diogenes Laertius (Lives 8.74) is unreliably based on his alleged visit to the panhellenic colony at Thurii in the 84th Olympiad, 444–41 bce – Empedocles’ hometown of Acragas experienced during his lifetime a transition from tyranny to oligarchy to democracy, just as Aeschylus’s Athens had done a generation earlier. As a result, perhaps, the biographical tradition consistently characterises him as an advocate of democracy (Guthrie 1965, 129–32; Horky 2016). His philosophical works are equally subject to controversy and debate. While it has been standard practice, drawing from Diogenes Laertius’s account (Lives 8.77), to divide his fragments into two poems, On Nature (dealing with the physical composition of the universe) and Purifications (dealing with transmigration and divinity), the order of fragments cannot be determined and editors frequently assign different fragments to different poems (Kirk et al. 1983, 322–23). At least one recent edition casts aside the binary framework altogether, arguing that the balance of evidence favours a single poem (Inwood 2001). In drawing a connection with Aeschylus, it is interesting to note the tradition that Empedocles not only also wrote a poem on the invasion of Xerxes but as many as 43 tragedies (though no fragments of



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these survive and Diogenes questions the authenticity of the latter; Lives 8.57–58). The grammarian Dionysius of Halicarnassus (On Literary Composition 22) acknowledges Empedocles and Aeschylus as masters of the “austere” style of poetry and scholars have noted similarities of thought and style between Empedocles’ materialist theory of cognition and Aeschylus’s vivid descriptions of human suffering and perception (Griffith 2009, 29–30). Fragment B105 for instance, describes the heart as “nourished in seas of pounding blood, where people call it ‘perception’ (νόημα); for the blood around their heart is [the vehicle of their] perception” (discussions in Long 1966, 267–68; Curd 2016). In Agamemnon, the Chorus describe the process by which humans, even unwillingly, are brought to wisdom: “painful memory of suffering drips before the heart in sleep” (179–80); later, reacting to Cassandra’s frightening vision, they feel “a pale drop of blood rushes over my heart” (1121– 23). In Libation Bearers, Electra describes her emotion in examining the lock of Orestes hair as “a ripple of bile against my heart” (183–84; cf. Suppliants 72). While materialist expressions of consciousness and emotion in Aeschylus do bear some resemblance to Empedocles’ doctrine, it is more likely that they both share a common source in the multitude of predisciplinary medical theories and practices beginning to circulate in the middle of the fifth century bce (see Dumortier 1935; Griffith 2009, 30–31; Jouanna 2012, 55–96). For this reason, some have wondered whether this approach to individual thinkers is based on the wrong question, adding that even an unmistakable allusion in Aeschylus to Presocratic thought “would not take us very far” (Seaford 2013, 17). An alternative approach to this diverse material proceeds from the supposition that “philosophy” (in the broad sense of speculation and reflection about natural phenomena and human affairs) was not in Aeschylus’s day a separate genre or discourse whose influence is discernible in the plays. Rather, moments of ethical, political, scientific or religious speculation demonstrate Aeschylus’s skills in characterisation and drama, as well as tragedy’s unique capacities for inquiry, reflection and the production of knowledge. This hypothesis may be understood as complementing treatments of the subject that assume the existence of domains of specialised knowledge (i.e. disciplines) and package Aeschylean thought according to these categories. Solmsen (1975), for instance, focused his study of “intellectual experiments” on argument and persuasion, psychology, aetiology: “Aeschylus knew the agony Agamemnon suffered when his beloved daughter had to be sacrificed; indeed he probably creates the excruciating choice between two evils” (Solmsen 1975, 140; on Aeschylean psychology, see Thalmann 1986). More recently, William Allen also has divided his survey of the evidence into disciplinary categories including cosmology, theology, epistemology, politics and ethics (2005, 75–81). While the plays and fragments have been mined for evidence of evolving trends and doctrines, it must be acknowledged that the intellectual history of the fifth century bce is in large part pre-disciplinary. In other words, so far as we can tell, the categorisation of knowledge into specialised fields – so familiar in our hyperspecialised, modern universities – had not yet taken place. Acknowledging the predisciplinary status in Aeschylus’s day of most areas of speculation and inquiry (e.g. medicine, cosmology, physics) permits us to appreciate his contributions to the history of ideas: for instance, his reconciliation of Pythagorean and Heraclitean cosmologies in the Oresteia using principles derived from Eleusinian religion is, as Seaford’s extensive investigations reveal, a wholly original synthesis (Seaford 2005, 2012, 2013). This chapter has sought to illustrate some of the challenges involved in characterising the “intellectual” milieu of Aeschylean drama. Despite these difficulties, continuing to investigate the existential, ethical, cosmological, political and/or religious contents of Aeschylean tragedy is worth the effort for several reasons. Aeschylus’s extant plays construct their tragic worlds by drawing from a full range of mythopoietic and intellectual sources, unhindered by the compartmentalisation of specialised knowledge that characterises the modern disciplinary

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landscape. In selecting and dramatising episodes from heroic myth, they raise questions about the causes of natural phenomena, the nature and temperaments of the gods, and about the experience of human life. Many of these questions reflect the interests of the early Greek philosophers, the Presocratics, who were Aeschylus’s contemporaries and perhaps (at least, in a few possible instances) his occasional interlocutors. Yet it remains critical to recognise that Aeschylean intellectualism is not an alien, but an integral feature of his dramatic art. Even in those passages where he appears engaged with Presocratic ideas and principles, Aeschylus makes them fully his own, adapting them to his unique manners of characterisation and storytelling. Finally, Aeschylus’s tragedies are the earliest complete texts that survive from Athens’ postwar cultural “boom”. The same years saw the development of tragedy into a popular public genre in Athens and the growth of an intellectual culture of which ensuing generations of Athenians were exceedingly proud. “We cultivate beauty without extravagance and wisdom without delicacy”, boasts Pericles in the oration attributed to him by Thucydides (2.40), before adding, “in sum, I proclaim that the whole city is in every respect a means of educating Hellas” (ξυνελών τε λέγω τήν τε πᾶσαν πόλιν τῆς Ἑλλάδος παίδευσιν εἶναι, 2.41). By the century’s end, authors of tragedy could claim a position alongside Homer and Hesiod as “teachers”, who “made citizens better” (Aristophanes Frogs 1030–56). From this perspective, Aeschylus deserves recognition not only as a founding figure of the Athenian theatre, but an important thinker and intellectual in his own right as well.

FURTHER READING On the history of early Greek philosophy Guthrie 1962, 1965, 1969 remains indispensable, but see also recent treatments by Graham 2006, Laks 2018 and Sassi 2018. The testimonia and fragments of the Presocratics are collected in Diels and Kranz 1959–60 and Kirk et al. 1983. The earliest extensive treatment of Aeschylus and the Presocratics is by Rösler 1970, who addresses theology, ontology, pluralism, and medicine, with separate treatments of Aeschylus’s engagement with Pythagoras and Anaxagoras. For a dissenting view, see Poli Palladini 2001. Allen 2005 takes a multidisciplinary approach (cosmology, theology, epistemology, politics, ethics), which is nicely complemented by Griffith 2009, esp. 26–34, who considers Presocratic discourses among Aeschylus’s multiple traditional contexts. Podlecki 2013 offers a pithy and informative treatment of individual thinkers. Dumortier 1935 documents the shared vocabulary between Aeschylus and early medical (Hippocratic) writers; see also Jouanna 2012, chapters 4–5. No one with interests in Aeschylus and the Presocratics can afford to ignore the work of Richard Seaford (2012, 2013), to which we may now add the valuable intervention of Scapin (2020). For the philosophies of Prometheus Bound, which due to its uncertain dating is outside this chapter’s narrative, see Conacher 1977 and also Ruffell 2012, chapter 3; Chapter 12 in this volume.

REFERENCES Allen, W. (2005). “Tragedy and the Early Greek Philosophical Tradition.” In J. Gregory, ed. A Companion to Greek Tragedy. Malden, MA, 71–82. Anderson, S. (2010). “Journey into Light and Honors in Darkness in Hesiod and Aeschylus.” In M. Christopoulos, E. D. Karakantza and O. Levaniouk, eds. Light and Darkness in Ancient Greek Myth and Religion. Lanham, MD, 142–52. Avery, H. C. (1964). “Dramatic Devices in Aeschylus’ Persians.” American Journal of Philology 85, 173–84.



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Bowie, A. M. (1993). “Religion and Politics in Aeschylus’ Oresteia.” Classical Quarterly 43, 10–31. Burkert, W. (1987). Ancient Mystery Cults. Cambridge, MA. Cairns, D. ed. (2013). Tragedy and Archaic Greek Thought. Swansea. Clinton, K. (2007). “The Mysteries of Demeter and Kore.” In D. Ogden, ed. A Companion to Greek Religion. Malden, MA, 342–56. Conacher, D. J. (1977). “Prometheus as Founder of the Arts.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 18, 189–206. Curd, P. (2016). “Empedocles on Sensation, Perception, and Thought.” History of Philosophy and Logical Analysis 19, 38–57. Davies, J. K. (1993). Democracy and Classical Greece. Second Edition. London. Diels, H. and Kranz, W. (1959–60). Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. 3 vols. Berlin. Dumortier, J. (1935). Le vocabulaire médical d’Eschyle et les écrits Hippocratiques. Paris. Graham, D. W. (2006). Explaining the Cosmos: The Ionian Tradition of Scientific Philosophy. Princeton. Griffith, M. (2009). “The Poetry of Aeschylus (In Its Traditional Contexts).” In J. Jouanna, F. Montanari, and A. P. Hernández, eds. Eschyle à l’aube du théâtre occidental: neuf exposés suivis de discussions. Vandoeuvres-Genéve, 25–29 août 2008. Entretiens sur l’Antiquité classique 55. Geneva, 1–49 (with discussion, 50–55). Guthrie, W. C. K. (1962). A History of Greek Philosophy. Vol. 1. Cambridge. Guthrie, W. C. K. (1965). A History of Greek Philosophy. Vol. 2. Cambridge. Guthrie, W. C. K. (1969). A History of Greek Philosophy. Vol. 3. Cambridge. Herington, C. J. (1985). Poetry into Drama: Early Tragedy and the Greek Poetic Tradition. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Horky, P. S. (2016). “Empedocles Democraticus: Hellenistic Biography at the Intersection of Philosophy and Politics.” In M. Bonazzi and S. Schorn, eds. Bios Philosophos. Philosophy in Ancient Greek Biography. Turnhout, 38–71. Inwood, B. (2001). The Poem of Empedocles. Revised Edition. Toronto. Jennings, V. and Katsaros, A. (2007). The World of Ion of Chios. Leiden. Jouanna, J. (2012). Greek Medicine from Hippocrates to Galen: Selected Papers. Leiden. Kahn, C. H. (1979). The Art and Thought of Heraclitus. Cambridge. Kantzios, I. (2004). “The Politics of Fear in Aeschylus’ Persians.” Classical World 98, 3–19. Kirk, G. S., Raven, J. E. and Schofield, M. (1983). The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with A Selection of Texts. Second Edition. Cambridge. Krikona, E. (2018). “The Memory of the Persian Wars through the Eyes of Aeschylus: Commemorating the Victory of the Power of Democracy.” Akropolis: Journal of Hellenic Studies 2, 85–104. Laks, A. (2018). The Concept of Presocratic Philosophy: Its Origin, Development, and Significance.(trans. G. W. Most.) Princeton. Lloyd, G. (2014). “Pythagoras.” In C. A. Huffman, ed. A History of Pythagoreanism. Cambridge. 1–22. Long, A. A. (1966). “Thinking and Sense-Perception in Empedocles: Mysticism or Materialism?” Classical Quarterly 16, 256–75. Manousakis, N. (2020). Prometheus Bound: A Separate Authorial Trace in the Aeschylean Corpus. Berlin. Moore, C. (2020). Calling Philosophers Names. On the Origin of a Discipline. Princeton. Patera, I. (2010). “Light and Lighting Equipment in the Eleusinian Mysteries: Symbolism and Ritual Use.” In M. Christopoulos, E. D. Karakantza and O. Levaniouk, eds. Light and Darkness in Ancient Greek Myth and Religion. Lanham, MD, 261–75. Podlecki, A. (1966). The Political Background of Aeschylean Tragedy. Ann Arbor. Podlecki, A. (2013). “Aeschylus and the Early Philosophical Tradition.” In H. Roisman, ed. Encyclopedia of Greek Tragedy. Malden, MA, 78–81. Poli Palladini, L. (2001). “Traces of ‘Intellectualism’ in Aeschylus.” Hermes 129, 441–58. Radt, S. L., ed. (1985). Tragicorum Graecorun Fragmenta, Vol.3: Aeschylus. Goettingen.

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Riedweg, C. (2005). Pythagoras: His Life, Teaching, and Influence. (trans. S. Rendall in collaboration with C. Riedweg and A. Schatzmann.) Ithaca, NY. Rösler, W. (1970). Reflexe vorsokratischen Denkens bei Aischylos. Beiträge zur klassischen Philologie 37. Meisenheim am Glan. Ruffell, I. A. (2012). Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound. London. Sansone, D. (2012). Greek Drama and the Invention of Rhetoric. Malden, MA. Sassi, M. M. (2018). The Beginnings of Philosophy in Greece. Princeson. Scapin, N. (2020). Flower of Suffering: Theology, Justice, and the cosmos in Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Presocratic Thought. Berlin and Boston. Seaford, R. (2003). “Aeschylus and the Unity of Opposites.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 123, 141–63. Seaford, R. (2005). “Mystic Light in Aeschylus’ Bassarai.” Classical Quarterly 55, 602–06. Seaford, R. (2012). Cosmology and the Polis. Cambridge. Seaford, R. (2013). “Aeschylus, Herakleitos, and Pythagoreanism.” In Cairns ed. Swansea, 17–38. Sider, D. (2005). The Fragments of Anaxagoras. International pre-Platonic Studies Vol. 4. Sankt Augustin. Simon, E. (1983). Festivals of Attica. An Archaeological Commentary. Madison. Solmsen, F. (1949). Hesiod and Aeschylus. Ithaca, NY. Solmsen, F. (1975). Intellectual Experiments of the Greek Enlightenment. Princeton. Sommerstein, A. H. (1989). Aeschylus: Eumenides. Cambridge. Sommerstein, A. H. (2008). Aeschylus III: Fragments. Cambridge, MA. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010). Aeschylean Tragedy. Second Edition. London. Stanford, W. B. (1942). Aeschylus in his Style. Dublin. Thalmann, W. G. (1986). “Aeschylus’ Physiology of the Emotions.” American Journal of Philology 107, 489–511. Thomson, G. (1996). The Oresteia of Aeschylus. Second Edition, 2 vols. Amsterdam and Prague. Vasunia, P. (2001). The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander. Berkeley and Los Angeles. West, M. L. (1985). “Ion of Chios.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 32, 71–78. West, M. L. (2000). “Iliad and Aethiopis on the Stage: Aeschylus and Son.” Classical Quarterly 50, 338–52. Wilson, P. (2003). “The Politics of Dance: Dithyrambic Contest and Social Order in Ancient Greece.” In D. Phillips and D. Pritchard, eds. Sport and Festival in the Ancient Greek World. Swansea, 163–96.

CHAPTER 5

Aeschylus in Sicily between Tyranny and Democracy Malcolm Bell, III The various and not always reliable sources for the life of Aeschylus tell us that the poet made at least two visits to the Greek cities of Sicily (the anonymous Greek “Life of Aeschylus”, Vita Aeschyli, 9–10; Herington 1967, 75–76). Mention of two plays presented on the island helps establish the chronology of his trips. These were Persai and a lost work probably called Aitnaiai (the title varies), or the Women of Aitna, a play written at the behest of Hieron, Deinomenid tyrant of Syracuse, for the purpose of celebrating the foundation of the new city of Aitna.1 Persai was produced in Athens in 472 bce with the young Perikles as choregos, Aeschylus winning the prize. The Syracusan performance, which also was sponsored by Hieron, probably followed not long afterward (Corbato 1996, 64). Although an earlier date for the Syracusan production of Persai has been argued (Bosher 2012b, 103–07), it would place in Sicily the first performance of a play that described the reception in Persia of the news of the great Athenian victory at Salamis; initial performance of such a play is more probable in Athens (Garvie 2009, liii–liv). Hieron’s defeat of the Etruscans in a sea battle off Kyme in 474 may have drawn him to Aeschylus’s play on the Athenian naval victory at Salamis; his brother Gelon’s land defeat of the Carthaginians at Himera in 480 was also viewed as a Sicilian counterpart – some said exactly contemporaneous – of the same Greek victory at Salamis (Herodotus 7.166.1). As for the city of Aitna, which stood on the sea at the base of the volcano, the most likely foundation date is 475 bce (Luraghi 1994, 336–37). Hieron’s military campaigning in this period, as well as the particular challenges of planning, building and populating a large new city, argue that Aitnaiai was not produced at the time of the foundation, when Aetna was a construction site, but later in the 470s (Cataudella 1964–65, 375). It thus seems probable that Persai and Aitnaiai were staged on the poet’s first visit, at some point after the Athenian production of the former play in 472. In this period the new cultural phenomenon of theatre

1  In addition to Hieron (ruled 478–67 bce), the sons of Deinomenes of Gela were Gelon (tyrant of Syracuse, 485–78), Polyzalos (chariot victor at Delphi, probably in 478, and dedicator of the famous bronze charioteer) and Thrasyboulos (tyrant of Syracuse, 466).

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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was well-established at Syracuse, where Epicharmus and Phormis were active (Bosher 2012a; Stewart 2017, 97–105). Persai was performed there, probably also Aitnaiai. The rock-cut seating of the so-called rectilinear theatre at Syracuse was sufficient for at least 1000 spectators and is probably late archaic in date (Gentili 1952); it was replaced by the adjacent and much larger theatre constructed by Hieron II in the mid-third century. The early dating of the rectilinear monument has, however, been doubted (Marconi 2012, 180, n. 14; 203–04). Although Aeschylus could have set out on the long voyage from Greece as early as the spring of 472, a slightly later date is more probable. Some lapse of time would have been required for his Sicilian patron to hear about the success and subject of Persai and to tender the invitation, which included the commissioning of a new play; the poet needed time to consider the undertaking and then prepare for the trip. He may have travelled the following year. In any case, we know that he was back in Athens in the winter of 468–67, winning in the spring with the four Theban plays that included Seven against Thebes. The evidence thus suggests that Aeschylus visited Sicily for the first time between 472 and 468; a likely date would be 471, when Hieron’s new city could have achieved some physical reality above ground and yet still be considered a recent enough foundation to call for a celebratory event. Pindar’s first Pythian ode of 470 also celebrated the foundation of Aitna, along with Hieron’s chariot victory at Delphi that year. Although some have thought the epinician and dramatic performances were staged on the same occasion (Stewart 2017, 102–03), such coordination is a convenient modern idea not mentioned by the sources; it does not seem likely, given the lively theatrical scene at Syracuse. Of Aeschylus’s first visit we have no other information, although, as we shall see, there is reason to believe that he gained familiarity with the Greek cities and sanctuaries that lay between Syracuse and Aitna (Figure 5.1). Such local knowledge evidently informed the play, which was almost certainly composed in Sicily. As for the massive volcano for which the new city was named, there had been a major eruption not many years earlier (Thucydides 3.116.1–2, 475–74 bce; Vallet 1984); if volcanic activity continued intermittently for a time, as it sometimes does, the poet may have seen fiery flows of lava like those described in Prometheus Bound (363–69) and Pindar’s Pythian 1 (21–28). And, for all we know, an eruption may also have figured in Aitnaiai, which made use of Mt Aitna both as a setting and a source for myths and cults. For a poet the volcano was a boon. Of Aeschylus’s second visit to Sicily we are at least better informed about the date. Not long after his Athenian victory in the spring of 458 with the Oresteia, the poet set sail again for the west (Vita Aeschyli 8–11). His destination was the old city of Gela on the south coast of the island. Aeschylus was then about 67 years of age and at the height of his creative powers. Yet we know almost nothing of the objectives and events of this second visit: only of the poet’s death at Gela, after somewhat more than two years away from Athens (Vita Aeschyli 16). Between Aeschylus’s encounter with Hieron in the late 470s and his return in 458, eastern Sicily had undergone a radical political transformation. The era of domination by the Deinomenid tyranny based in Syracuse had ended with Hieron’s death in 467 and the expulsion a year later of Thrasyboulus, his unloved brother and successor (Luraghi 1994, 370–71). The Syracusan land empire created by the tyrants then dissolved. The Greek and indigenous Sikel cities formerly governed by the Deinomenids and allied autocrats recovered their autonomy, in what appears to have been a widespread inter-ethnic movement toward popular rule (Asheri 1992, 154–65; Robinson 2011, 224–30). We have specific statements to this effect by Diodorus Siculus, the first century bce Sicilian author of a “universal history” (11.68.5, 11.72.2). Additional evidence for the turn to democratic governments is seen in the silver litrai now issued by many Greek and Sikel cities, including Gela. These tiny silver coins (the word litra is of Sikel origin) have been reasonably interpreted as a means of payment for attendance at meetings of city assemblies or for participation on juries – such payment to citizens for active



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Figure 5.1  Eastern Sicily in the era of Aeschylus. Akragas is on the coast, further to the west.

civic involvement being a hallmark of democratic rule (Manganaro 1995, 101–02). The democratic Sicily of the 460s and early 450s was a different place from the authoritarian world that Aeschylus had encountered not long before. In Athens in the spring of 458 he would have known about the political changes in the Sicilian cities to which he was returning. Gela was indeed a special case, for it had been the hearth of Sicilian tyranny and the place of origin of its Deinomenid avatars. Now Gela, too, was under democratic rule, according to Diodorus (11.68.1, 76.4).

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The thoroughgoing rejection of tyranny in the later 460s casts an oblique light on Aeschylus’s earlier engagement with Hieron. In view of the poet’s approving views of citizen participation in civic institutions, as expressed in Suppliants (Ehrenberg 1950; Burian 1974; Sommerstein 2010a, 296, 314–15) and the Oresteia, we should consider the politics of the play that Aeschylus wrote for an authentic tyrant, one who expected his actions to be praised by the poets whom he was paying. In Pythian 1, Pindar obliged in full. Despite the loss of almost all the text of Aitnaiai, just enough information survives about it to suggest that in the commissioned play Aeschylus tried to thread the needle of intellectual consistency (Basta Donzelli 1996, 93). The combined evidence of the surviving plays and Athenian political alignments argues that his sympathies were democratic (Sommerstein 2010a, 294–300). In Aitnaiai, the hired poet was surely expected to interpret and endorse the recent Sicilian political changes that provided the occasion and material for the commission. Hieron’s foundation of Aitna in 475 was the most conspicuous example of an established Deinomenid practice of radical demographic relocation. In the first quarter of the fifth century the ­autocratic rulers of Syracuse had carried out an unparalleled programme of forced population movement based on ethnicity. The Greek cities under their domination were grouped according to the origins of their populations in either Ionian/Chalcidian or Dorian Greece (Figure  5.1). The Chalcidian cities in Sicily lay along the eastern coast (Zankle, Naxos, Katane, Leontinoi), while those of Dorian origin were either in the southeast (Megara Hyblaia, Syracuse and her foundations at Heloros, Akrai, Kasmenai and Kamarina) or on the south coast (Gela and Akragas). On the north coast Himera had a mixed population. Hieron’s brother and predecessor Gelon had seized control of Syracuse in 485 and then transferred to the city large numbers of Sicilian Dorians (Herodotus 7.156.1–3). These included the entire population of Kamarina, more than half that of Gela, and the well-to-do classes of Euboia and Megara. The demos of the two latter cities was sold into slavery. Megara, the site of which was abandoned after 485, was Syracuse’s immediate neighbour to the north; Herodotus recorded Gelon’s view of the demos as a “most unpleasing (acharitatos) neighbour”. Theron of Akragas dealt even more harshly with the Chalcidians of Himera, whose long-standing share in the city’s mixed population he reduced in the mid-470s by putting many to death (Diodorus 11.48.8). Succeeding Gelon as tyrant at Syracuse in 478, Hieron continued the practice of moving around large numbers of people. He soon had concentrated all the Chalcidians of eastern Sicily at one spot, transferring the entire populations of Katane and Naxos to Leontinoi. It was on the now empty and available site of Katane at the foot of the volcano that he founded Dorian Aitna in 475 (Guzzo 2020, 85–87, 93). The city was to be a polis myriandros, a very substantial place with a population of 10 000 (Diodorus 11.49.2; Aristotle Politics 1267b.2). He peopled Aitna with 5000 Syracusans, including Dorians transferred earlier from Gela, Megara and Kamarina, and 5000 new arrivals from the Peloponnesos who are likely to have been mercenaries. Diodorus tells us, in fact, that the city was intended to be a military bulwark of the Syracusan tyranny (11.49.2). To create an adequate chora or territory, farmlands were taken from the neighbouring Greek and Sikel cities. Hieron’s young son Deinomenes was made basileus or king and, as oikist or founder of a polis myriandros, Hieron anticipated for himself the reward of heroic honours, which presumably would have included eventual burial in the new city’s agora. On the tyrant’s death in 467 the plan was carried out (Diodorus 11.66.4). Material remains of Hieron’s Aitna are limited to a remarkable series of silver coins (Figure 5.2). The manifold social and economic consequences of the violent uprooting of many thousands of people from existing cities and their territories must have been traumatic, so too the effects on individuals and families. That this Deinomenid “reorganistion” of eastern Sicily along ethnic lines (Luraghi 1994, 345) was ill-received by the affected local populations is



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Figure 5.2  Tetradrachm of Aitna: head of satyr, obverse; enthroned Zeus Aitnaios, reverse (KBR, Royal Library of Belgium).

shown both by the fate of the tyranny in 466 and by the subsequent undoing of the entire demographic scheme. Diodorus describes the events: the violent Syracusan rebellion against Thrasyboulos, the last Deinomenid, and his local supporters (11. 67.1–4, 68.5–8), the remarkable alliance of Syracusan democrats and indigenous Sikels under their seemingly charismatic leader Douketios (11.76.3), and the eventual common agreement (koinon dogma) to reconstitute the cities as they had been before the Deinomenid interventions (11.76.5). The Dorian settlers at Hieron’s Aitna were finally forced out in 461 and Chalcidian Katane could come back to life. Taking with them the city’s name and the ashes of their founder, the Dorians of Aitna seized a Sikel town on the inland flank of the volcano, where 10 years later they were again defeated by the implacable Douketios (Diodorus 11.91.1). This, then, is the historical context of the short-lived city whose founding Hieron commissioned Aeschylus to celebrate. A reasonable question concerns the nature of his endorsement of the tyrant’s foundation. To what extent was Aitnaiai a work of propaganda? Aeschylus’s Sicilian play might possibly have treated such contemporary events, for he had dealt with recent history in Persai. Wilamowitz and Fraenkel considered Aitnaiai to be a Festspiel, or festival performance, not a drama in the “normal sense” (Fraenkel 1954, 71; WilamowitzMoellendorff 1923, 77); such a work, essentially celebratory, might have allowed a blending of myth and contemporary themes. More recently, however, Letizia Poli Palladini (2001) has argued persuasively that the action of Aitnaiai took place entirely in mythical times; in this reading the play would have been a “normal” tragedy (if any of Aeschylus’s known plays can be so defined). In any case, a consistently followed mythical story would have allowed Aeschylus to distance his play from recent events. Not surprisingly, the very idea of founding a new city appears to have been a major theme of Aitnaiai, perhaps even its chief subject. Argos, Thebes and Athens possessed histories extending deep into a mythical past that Aeschylus exploited in such plays as Suppliants, Seven against Thebes and the Oresteia. The Greek cities in Sicily were to the contrary all relatively recent foundations that had begun life at known historical moments in post-mythical times; they seem to have been quite conscious of their real histories and the circumstances of their foundations (Thucydides 6.3). Heroes like Odysseus and Herakles who travelled in or

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around the island in the age of myth did not go to Syracuse (founded c. 733 bce) or Gela (founded 698 bce), although they could have visited the still unoccupied urban sites – unoccupied, that is, by Greeks, for some places like Leontinoi were already inhabited by Sikels, a circumstance of which Aeschylus seems to have been informed. Seeking out local myths, he found stories that were set in the ethnically diverse world before Greek colonisation. His interest in the ethnic prehistory of the Sicilian Greek cities would later be pursued by the Syracusan historian Antiochos, fragments of whose history indicate detailed knowledge of local legends describing and accounting for pre-Greek settlement in remote times (BNJ 555, F2, F6). The central idea of Aitnaiai may then have been in essence historical: the founding of cities in lands that were already inhabited. That some part of Aitnaiai dealt with local myth and its expression in cult is shown by the four stichomythia verses that have long constituted the only substantial and secure fragment of the text (frag. 6 R.). The chorus appears to be questioned by an unidentified speaker: A. τί δῆτ᾽ἐπ᾽ αὐτοῖς ὄνομα θήσονται βροτοί; B. σεμνοὺς Παλικοὺς Ζεὺς ἐφίεται καλεῖν. A. ἦ καὶ Παλικῶν εὐλόγως μενεῖ φάτις; B. πάλιν γὰρ ἳκους᾽ ἐκ σκότου τόδ’ ἐις φἀος. A. So what name will mortals give them? B. Zeus ordains that they be called the holy Palici. A. And will the name of Palici be appropriate and permanent? B. Yes, for they have come back from the darkness to the realm of light. (trans. Alan H. Sommerstein 2008, 8–9)

These lines are cited by Macrobius, who provides a narrative probably derived from Aeschylus’s play (Saturnalia 5.19.16–24). The Palici are indigenous Sikel heroes or daimones, twin sons of the nymph Thaleia, whom Zeus abducted either on the volcano or the banks of the river Symaithus in the valley below Aitna to the south. To avoid Hera’s anger, Thaleia was hidden in the earth near the river. When her time came she returned and her sons were born in the light – the Palici came back (palin) from the chthonic darkness, in Aeschylus’s characteristic Greek etymology (here of a Sikel word). From the passage we learn that the Palici were named by their father Zeus, whose agency is probable elsewhere in Aitnaiai. The poet’s choice of indigenous mythical material is revealing. For his Greek audience he gives the Sikel demigods comprehensible personae. The Palici had a well-known ­topographical presence not far from Hieron’s new city, where they were worshipped in a sanctuary close by their birthplace, in the southern arm of the valley of Catania. The site was distinguished by two bubbling pools known as Delloi, said to be the brothers of the Palici. Consisting of mofettes – geological vents emitting streams of carbon dioxide – the pools formed part of an extended sanctuary that came to encompass several large buildings. Among these was a hestiatorion of the later fifth century bce in fine Greek style (Maniscalco 2008).2 Writing in the late first century bce, Diodorus (11.89.1–8) reported that, at least in his day, the sanctuary served as a place for swearing solemn oaths and as an asylum for mistreated slaves. The productive excavations conducted by Laura Maniscalco and Brian McConnell have shown that the sanctuary of the Palici originated in the archaic period. It was always considered an indigenous Sikel cult place. When Douketios founded the city of Palike near the sanctuary in the

2 

The carbon dioxide emissions are today captured for infusion into mineral water by an intrusive industrial plant, violating the remarkable natural setting and its historical significance. The pools have long been known as the Lago di Naftia; the sanctuary site at Rocchicella is close by.



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450s, he made it the centre of his alliance of Sikel cities (Diodorus 11.88.6). The sanctuary of the Palici with its geologically active pools is likely to have served as the setting of one scene of Aitnaiai. Our knowledge of the structure of Aeschylus’ play was considerably enhanced in 1952 by the publication of a papyrus document containing the play’s hypothesis (Lobel et al. 1952, POxy 2257, frag. 1 = frag. 451 t R.). From it we gain the surprising information that the setting of the action changed four times, possibly even five. Aitnaiai was immediately recognised as a precedent for the scene changes in Eumenides, where, however, there are just three – the temple of Apollo at Delphi, the acropolis of Athens and the adjacent hill of the Areopagus (Grassi 1956, 209); the parallel with Eumenides may have been noted by the ancient commentator in the hypothesis (Lobel et al. 1952). From the papyrus hypothesis we learn that the action of Aeschylus’s Sicilian play began appropriately at Aitna; given the presumption of mythical subject matter, this would have been the volcano. In the second part, the setting moved to a place called Xouthia; in the third it went “back to Aitna” (the hypothesis specifying that it was again the first setting, thus not the city Aitna). In parts four and five the setting shifted to Leontinoi and Syracuse, the final scene probably also at Syracuse, in the local quarter known as Temenites (following R. Pfeiffer’s proposed reading of POxy 2257, frag. 1, l. 6). The setting of the last two (or three) scenes in real places may have seemed to confirm for Fraenkel the validity of Wilamowitz’s idea of a Festspiel encompassing the mythical past and historical present. If, however, the play is set entirely in mythical times as proposed by Poli Palladini, the final scenes in the two contemporary cities should instead be understood as taking place in the mythical past at the sites of the later cities, and so prophetic of the future foundations. The dramatic coherence of Aitnaiai is enhanced by this reading of the fragments and hypothesis, which also strengthens our guess that a chief subject of the play was the founding of cities. The plot of Aitnaiai is unknown. Neither the few fragments of text nor the hypothesis sheds any light. Even the “women of Aitna” of the title are of uncertain identity; most critics accept that they are the chorus consisting of mountain nymphs, perhaps sisters of Thaleia. Participants in the first scene could then be the gods and figures of myth associated with the Palici, including their parents, Zeus and the nymph Thaleia. Zeus Aitnaios was the chief deity of Hieron’s new city (Lewis 2020, 142–50). In the genealogy probably followed by Aeschylus, Thaleia is the daughter of the nymph Aitna and Hephaestus, a god associated with the volcano by Pindar (Pyth. 1, 25) and later writers. The first scene takes place somewhere on the mountain (perhaps even at the crater?), introducing the chorus and some of the characters who might include the parents or grandparents of the Palici. The second scene yields possible evidence for a plot set in the mythical past. Ancient sources refer to Xouthia as either a polis (Stephanus Byzantinus) or chora (rural district, Diodorus 5.8.2), near the historical city of Leontinoi. For a play that celebrated an urban foundation, we can surmise that Aeschylus would have identified the legendary Xouthia as a polis. The setting also helpfully introduces a possible protagonist for Aitnaiai, as Diodorus tells us that Xouthia was ruled over by Xouthus, one of the several city-founding sons of Aeolus (Diodorus 5.7–8; Poli Palladini 2001, 296–301). As Vincenzo La Rosa suggested, it is probable that the sanctuary of the Palici, not far from Leontinoi, lay in or near Xouthia (La Rosa 1974, 157–63). The second scene may thus have included the arrival of an oikist, Xouthus, who encounters the local gods in the persons of the Palici. Here is opportunity for conflict, to be resolved by the successful foundation of Xouthia. Perhaps the Palici are Aeschylus’s kreissones (frag. 10  R.), “the more powerful ones”. If one of the aims of the Xouthia scene was to describe the mythical background of the setting, we might place here the reference in Aitnaiai to a city called Kronia (frag. 11 R.), presumably founded by Kronos

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in an even more remote past. Evidence from another papyrus document (POxy 2637, frag. 1(a), 3–4) supports the location of Kronia near Leontinoi. Time may then have extended back even farther from the dramatic present. Presently we will come back to Kronia. The inclusion in Aitnaiai of both the Palici twins and Xouthia shows that Aeschylus was aware of the mythical prehistory of the area. That there was indeed a local memory at Leontinoi of a precolonial, indigenous settlement is indicated by Thucydides’ mention of it later in the fifth century (6.3.3). The reality of early habitation at Leontinoi has, in fact, been borne out by the excavation of the remains of a pre-Greek, early Iron Age settlement on the Metapiccola hill, a site that has accordingly been identified as Xouthia (Rizza 1962; Basta Donzelli 1996, 91, n. 76). The close associations of the pottery and other artifacts at Metapiccola with the material culture of the Aeolian islands north of Sicily have also demonstrated that the story of Aeolus and his sons has a kernel of historical truth (Bernabò Brea 1957, 171, 1964–65, 24–33). Although Aeschylus could hardly have known of the protohistoric remains at Leontinoi, he evidently learned from local sources that a precolonial settlement had existed. Some still visible monument might even have survived. If this interpretation of the setting of the second part of Aitnaiai at Xouthia is correct, then, in addition to Kronia, a second urban foundation in the precolonial past played a not unimportant role in the text of Aeschylus’s play. The third part returns to Aitna. If the two following scenes at Leontinoi and Syracuse took place in mythological times at the sites of cities still to be founded, we might guess that the third part “back at Aitna” was similarly set in the remote past, but at the location of the future city that Aeschylus came to Sicily to celebrate. And if the foundation of Hieron’s Aitna was prophesied, the poet could hardly have elided Katane, the Chalcidian city founded on the same site c. 250 years earlier, whose population Hieron had recently moved to Leontinoi. Here Aeschylus would have confronted, and somehow dealt with, the difficult reality of contemporary Sicily. At Aitna in the third scene we would like to place the important Aeschylean fragment preserved on papyrus (POxy 2256, frag. 9 a  =  Aesch., frag. 281a in Sommerstein 2008 III, 278–85) that Fraenkel assigned to Aitnaiai (1954, 64–69). These are the verses belonging to the so-called “Dikē play”, in which the goddess Dikē or Justice, one of the three Horai (with Eirene or Peace, and Eunomia or Good Order), is interrogated by someone, presumably by a chorus (Cipolla 2010); we note that Dikē is the half-sister of the Palici twins. Her father Zeus has sent her “to this land” where she asks to be received (Sommerstein 2008 vol. III. 280–81, lines 12–13). After describing some of her important functions, Dikē claims in memorable if incomplete lines that “no city or people (demos) or individual” would refuse to follow a goddess (?) “who enjoys such a portion from the gods” (Sommerstein 2008, 282–83; reading demos as “people”, not Sommerstein’s “village”). Dikē goes on to describe how once she tamed a wild and violent child who is identified by most critics as Ares. Fraenkel also suggested that a related papyrus fragment might belong to Aitnaiai (POxy 2256, frag. 8 = frag. 451 N R.; inscribed by the same hand as frag. 9). The speaker appears still to be Dikē. She praises her sister Eirene, “who honors a city that sits at rest in a state of quietude, and increases the splendor of its houses, [splendor] which is magnified so that they surpass their neighbors and rivals in prosperity…” (Sommerstein 2008, 338–39, frag. 451 N R., ll. 3–6). If indeed it belongs to the play, this evocation of Eirene should follow the account of the taming of Ares in frag. 281a. If both fragments were indeed spoken by Dikē at the site of the future city, they would form a promise of Zeus’s important gifts of justice and peace to come: concepts of the highest value in a new city – especially, we might think, in one like Aitna that was founded by a tyrant and ruled by a juvenile basileus. In Dikē we would have a major speaking role in Aitnaiai. According to the hypothesis, the final scenes of the play are set at Leontinoi and Syracuse. As proposed by Poli Palladini, these settings would be predictive of the future city foundations.



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By moving directly from Dorian Aitna to Chalcidian Leontinoi, Aeschylus could presumably have noted the two cities’ different ethnic origins without the necessity of overtly endorsing Hieron’s actions. There is little to suggest a narrative. Aside from the chorus, a speaker – a figure like Dikē – is needed. The chief god of Leontinoi was Apollo, who also presided over the Temenites sanctuary at Syracuse where the final scene of the play was probably set. Apollo’s instrumental role in the establishment of Greek cities in Sicily was long established by their founders’ regular consultation of his oracle at Delphi. His prophetic powers would make him an appropriate guide to the sites of the future cities, in these scenes that may have followed the main action of the play. Like Dikē, he could have been an emissary of Zeus Aitnaios. Apollo’s role in the final scenes of Aitnaiai would then be analogous to Athena’s in Eumenides. The playwright’s dramatic lens would then seem to have shifted both backward and forward in time, surveying the landscape of urban myth. In Kronia, established by a god of an earlier generation, Aeschylus may have seen a prototype for later cities both legendary and real; in Xouthia, he appears to have found materials – both a city and its oikist-hero – that could serve the action and purpose of his drama. Xouthia also introduced indigenous myths and cults. Aeschylus evidently incorporated these with the interest and humanity that characterise his treatment of the defeated enemy of Persai. In the fourth scene at Leontinoi and the fifth at Syracuse (possibly also in the preceding scene at Aitna), his focus will have turned to the future. As in the final episode of Eumenides, Aeschylus would seem at the end of Aitnaiai to have arrived at time present (Grassi 1956, 209). Like its later and much grander successor, the rectilinear theatre at Syracuse is located in the urban quarter known as Temenites, after the nearby temenos of Apollo on the limestone hillside of Epipolai. According to the hypothesis, this appears to be where the play ended, at the location of the very theatre whose spectators as representatives of a demos may then have been witnesses to Apollo’s prophecy of their own existence. In such a reading of what we must admit is fragmentary evidence, we might hazard a guess that the play’s real subject was less Hieron’s Aitna than the hopeful idea of founding cities where Dikē and Eirene would be honoured. If indeed the last scenes of Aitnaiai at Leontinoi and Syracuse were set in the mythical past, a character, perhaps Apollo, could have alluded prophetically to landscape features like the island of Ortygia, the fountain of Arethousa and the places and cults that would someday become significant for the Syracusans. The latter would have included the sanctuary of Temenites and perhaps even the adjacent theatre. At Leontinoi, an analogous speech would presumably have begun with the pools of the Palici and extended to the hills on which the Chalcidian city would be founded. Perhaps at some point even vestigial remains of Kronia were sighted. Such allusions to past monuments and an existing physical landscape, as well as the anticipatory if anachronistic glimpses of known features of real cities, would seem to make the final scenes of Aitnaiai the ancestors of Vergil’s famous account in Aeneid, book 8 (306–69), of the topography and monuments of Rome. King Evander shows Aeneas, a prospective oikist, the places of the future city. Like Aeschylus in his reference to Kronia, Vergil also turns back to a more remote urban past when Evander evokes the ruins of Saturnia, the no-longerexisting city founded by Saturn, the Roman Kronos. The site of Saturnia on the Capitoline is pointed out to Aeneas by Evander: haec duo praeterea disiectis oppida muris, reliquias veterumque vides monimenta virorum. hanc Ianus pater, hanc Saturnus condidit arcem, Ianiculum huic, illi fuerat Saturnia nomen. (ll. 355–58) You see moreover two towns with ruined walls, the remains and monuments of ancient men. Father Janus founded one citadel, Saturn the other, One bore the name Janiculum, the other Saturnia.

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Vergil’s account of the site of Rome is set in a mythical past that encompasses an even more ancient time, while describing with the poet’s foreknowledge the familiar topography of the future city. The fragments of Aitnaiai seem to say that at the conclusion of his play Aeschylus did something similar with the sites of Sicilian cities. Yet without the text we cannot say whether he gestured both to the remote past and the future in something like Vergil’s poetic evocation of the continuum of history. We may still wonder whether Vergil knew Aitnaiai and remembered its ending; that he was familiar with the Aeschylean narrative of the birth of the Palici is shown by Aeneid 9.581–85, where the heroes’ sanctuary near the river Symaithos is mentioned. After the success of the Oresteia in Athens in 458, Aeschylus presumably travelled directly to newly democratic Gela (Vita Aeschyli). With the precedent of his earlier reperformance of Persai, we might guess that he would have been asked to present the new plays. No reference, however, either to Sicilian performances of the Oresteia or to any other plays survives; indeed, the record of Aeschylus’s last years in Sicily is sadly empty. Poli Palladini has bravely speculated about possible productions of new works, but without ancient evidence nothing definite can be said (Poli Palladini 2013). Perhaps for later critics, grammarians and historians, democratic Gela as a venue did not have the interest and attraction of a famous patron like Hieron. We may also wonder if written records were lost in the Carthaginian sack of Gela in 405 bce, when any threads of local memory of Aeschylus would also have been broken. The only recorded event of Aeschylus’s stay at Gela was his death. We know nothing of the circumstances. The oft-repeated story of an eagle dropping a tortoise on his bald head, mistaken for a rock, interjects an element of farce into a tragedian’s biography (Burges Watson 2013). With greater verisimilitude we are told that the poet was given the honour of public burial; inscribed on the mnema or monument were elegiac couplets of uncertain authorship (Vita Aeschyli 11). Αἰσχύλον Εὐφορίωνος Ἀθηναῖον τόδε κεύθει μνῆμα καταφθίμενον πυροφόροιο Γέλας. ἀλκὴν δ’ εὐδόκιμον Μαραθώνιον ἄλσος ἂν εἴποι καὶ βαθυχαιτήεις Μῆδος ἐπιστάμενος. This stone marks the grave of Aeschylus, the Athenian, Euphorion’s son, who died at Gela, rich in wheat. The plain of Marathon could speak of his tested valour, and the long-haired Persian knows of it too.

The stirring lines record the poet’s civic virtue, not the fame of his literary achievement. Reflecting the political values of loyalty and participation expressed in his plays, they could have been written by a member of his family – one thinks of his poet son Euphorion – and seem likely to be authentic (Sommerstein 2010b, 195–201). There is not much Sicilian evidence for the posthumous memory of Aeschylus. At his tomb in Gela actors are said to have recited the parts of plays, presumably his own (Vita Aeschyli 11). If not a biographical fiction, such a fitting and devoted commemoration of the poet would have occurred in the second half of the fifth century, but before the Carthaginian sack in 405 bce that shattered Gela’s cultural identity as a polis. Not long after Aeschylus’s stay in Gela, in the neighbouring city of Akragas a remarkable Attic white-ground calyx krater attributed to the Phiale Painter came into the possession of some fortunate individual; the main subject was Perseus and Andromeda (Oakley 1990 19–20, 75, no. 53, pl. 37). We may imagine the Akragantine purchaser’s pleasure on reading the kalos inscription that compliments the beauty of Euaion, “son of Aeschylus”. The poet’s other son, Euaion, was a prominent tragic actor whom the Phiale Painter praised on several vases; perhaps the white-ground krater served as the centrepiece of literary



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symposia. It would accompany its owner into the grave. Another material object connected more directly to the poet was his wooden writing tablet (pyxion). This relic was purchased by the Syracusan tyrant Dionysios I (ruled 405–367 bce), who could have found it in Gela or Syracuse, or more probably at Athens. Dionysios was also a tragedian and it was assumed by some that he wanted the tablet merely as a talisman for inspiration (Lucian, Adversus indoctum 15). A more generous explanation is suggested by the tyrant’s analogous acquisition of the harp and writing implements of Euripides; these literary treasures he dedicated to the Muses, whose Syracusan sanctuary was located above the theatre and close by the sanctuary of Apollo Temenites (Hermippus [FGrH 1026 F84], see Mojsik 2017). If, as seems likely, the writing tablet of Aeschylus was also dedicated in the Syracusan Mouseion, the location at Temenites would have been especially significant: Dionysios certainly knew where the poet himself had produced Persai, and probably Aitnaiai too, almost a century earlier.

FURTHER READING For an historical account of Sicily in the first half of the fifth century bce, see Asheri 1992. The existence of an active theatre scene at Syracuse is discussed by Stewart 2017, 96–116; a fifth-century inscription from Gela or Kamarina indicates some form of theatrical performance on the south coast, in cities that would have been known to Aeschylus (Wilson and Wilson 2007). The question of a tyrant’s patronage of dramatists is discussed by Duncan 2011, 71–76; see also Rehm 1989, 33. Aeschylus’s use of Sicilian Greek words was noted in antiquity (Athenaeus 9.402b); numerous examples were identified by Stanford 1938 – less accepting are Herington 1967, 78–80 and Smith 2017, 9–10. Medieval catalogues refer to spurious and authentic versions of Aitnaiai; these are discussed by Poli Palladini 2001, 309–10 and Ippolito 1997, 8. That Aitnaiai formed part of a trilogy or tetralogy was proposed by Lloyd-Jones 1971, 100–03; the idea is rejected by Poli Palladini 2001, 315–16. In a play with so many settings, the difficult matter of entrances and exits of the chorus (or choruses?) is described by Taplin 1977, 416–18. The material remains of the city Aitna are limited to a series of silver coins; in addition to Aeschylus’s lost play and Pindar’s first Pythian ode, the extraordinary unique tetradrachm in Brussels (Figure 5.2) forms a third remarkable work of art inspired by the foundation (see Caccamo Caltabiano 2009; Boehringer 2014). While there are no known depictions of the Palici twins, the abduction of their mother Thaleia by Zeus in the guise of an eagle is represented on several south Italian red-figure vases; for these, see Kossatz Deissmann 1994 and Roscino 2012. Of particular interest is the recent identification of the first four letters of the name Thaleia on a fine early classical terracotta bust from Grammichele, an ancient Sikel-Greek site not far from the sanctuary of the Palici (the sort of thing that Aeschylus might actually have seen); Manenti 2020. That Aeschylus did see in Sicily vivid terracotta antefixes of Silenoi has been suggested by Marconi (2005).

REFERENCES Asheri, D. (1992). “Sicily, 478–431 B.C.” In D. M. Lewis et al., eds. The Cambridge Ancient History. Second Edition. Vol. V. Cambridge, 147–70. Basta Donzelli, G. (1996). “Katane – Aetna tra Pindaro e Eschilo.” In Gentili ed., 73–95. Bernabò Brea, L. (1957). Sicily before the Greeks. London. Bernabò Brea, L. (1964–65). “Leggende e archeologia nella protostoria siciliana.” Kokalos 11–12, 1964–1965, 24–33. Boehringer, C. (2014). “Eine Litra von Katane und das Aitna-Tetradrachmon.” In R. Lehmann, B. Hamborg, et al., eds. Nub Nefer – Gutes Gold Gedenkschrift für Manfred Gutgesell. Rahden, 101–05. Bosher, K., ed. (2012a). Theater outside Athens. Cambridge. Bosher, K. (2012b). “Hieron’s Aeschylus.” In Bosher ed., 97–111.

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Burges Watson, S. (2013). “Aeschylus: A Guide to Selected Sources.” Living Poets, Durham 2013. https://livingpoets.dur.ac.uk/w/Aeschylus:_A_Guide_to_Selected_Sources. Burian, P. (1974). “Pelasgus and Politics in Aeschylus’ Danaid Trilogy.” Wiener Studien 8, 5–14. Reprinted with an introductory note in M. Lloyd, ed. Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Aeschylus, Oxford 2007, 199–210. Caccamo Caltabiano, M. (2009). “Why is there the Head of a Silenos on the Aitna Tetradrachm?” In S. Drogou, ed. Κερμάτια Φιλίας: Τιμητικός τόμος για τον Ιωάννη Τουράτσογλου. Athens, 97–107. Cataudella, Q. (1964–65). “Tragedie di Eschilo nella Siracusa di Gerone.” Kokalos 10–11, 371–98. Cipolla, P. (2010). “Il ‘frammento di Dike’ (Aesch. F 281a R.): uno ‘status quaestionis’ sui problemi testuali ed esegetici.” Lexis 28, 133–54. Corbato, C. (1996). “Le Etnee di Eschilo.” In Gentili ed., 61–72. Duncan, A. (2011). “Nothing to Do with Athens? Tragedians at the Courts of Tyrants.” In D. M. Carter, ed. Why Athens? A Reappraisal of Tragic Politics. Oxford, 69−84. Ehrenberg, V. (1950). “Origins of Democracy.” Historia 1, 515–48. Fraenkel, E. (1954). “Vermutungen zum Aetna-Festspiel des Aeschylus.” Eranos 52, 61–75. Garvie, A. F. (2009). Aeschylus. Persai. Oxford. Gentili, B., ed. (1996). Catania antica. Atti del Convegno della Società Italiana per lo Studio dell’Antichità Classica, 23–24 maggio 1992. Pisa-Roma. Gentili, G. V. (1952). “Nuovo esempio di ‘theatron’ con gradinata rettilinea a Siracusa.” Dioniso 15, 122–30. Grassi, E. (1956). “Papyrologica.” Parola del Passato 11, 208–09. Guzzo, P. G. (2020). Le città di Magna Grecia e di Sicilia dal VI al I secolo, II. La Sicilia. Rome. Herington, C. J. (1967). “Aeschylus in Sicily.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 87, 74–85. Ippolito, A. (1997). “De Aeschyli deperdita fabula quae Aitnaiai inscribitur.” Latinitas 45, 3–12. Kennedy, R. F., ed. (2017). Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Aeschylus. Leiden and Boston. Kossatz Deissmann, A. (1994). “Thaleia.” In Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae. Vol. 7.1, 896–98. Vol. 7.2, figs. 613–14. Zürich. La Rosa, V. (1974). “Le Etnee di Eschilo e l’identificazione di Xouthia.” Archivio Storico per La Sicilia Orientale 70, 151–64. Lewis, V. M. (2020). Myth, Locality, and Identity in Pindar’s Sicilian Odes. Oxford. Lloyd-Jones, H. (1971). The Justice of Zeus. Berkeley. Lobel, E. et al. (1952). The Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Vol. XX. London, 36–41. Luraghi, N. (1994). Tirannidi arcaiche in Sicilia. Firenze. Manganaro, G. (1995). “Sikelika I.” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica. New Series 49, 93–109. Maniscalco, L., ed. (2008). Il santuario dei Palici. Un centro di culto nella valle del Margi. Palermo. Manenti, A. M. (2020). “Una dedica su un busto di Grammichele?” In L. Grasso, F. Caruso, R. Gigli Patanè, eds. Sikelika hiera. Approcci multidisciplinari allo studio del sacro nella Sicilia greca. Convegno di Studi Catania 11–12 giugno 2010. Catania, 125–133. Marconi, C. 2005. “I ‘Theoroi’ di Eschilo e le antifisse sileniche siceliote.” Sicilia Antiqua 2, 75–93. Marconi, C. 2012, “Between Performance and Identity. The Social Context of Stone Theaters in Late Classical and Hellenistic Sicily.” In Bosher ed., 175–207. Mojsik, T. (2017). “Hermippos FGrH 1026 F84: Dionysios 1, the Theatre and the Cult of the Muses in Syracuse.” Klio 99, 485–512. Oakley, J. H. (1990). The Phiale Painter. Mainz am Rhein. Poli Palladini, L. (2001). “Some Reflections on Aeschylus’ Aetnae(ae).” Rheinisches Museum 144, 287–325. Poli Palladini, L. (2013). Aeschylus at Gela. An Integrated Approach. Alessandria. Rehm, R. (1989). “Aeschylus in Syracuse: The Commerce of Tragedy and Politics.” In B. D. Wescoat, ed. Syracuse, the Fairest Greek City: Ancient Art from the Museo Archeologico Regionale Paolo Orsi. Rome Atlanta, 31–34. Rizza, G. (1962). “Siculi e greci sui colli di Leontini.” Cronache di Archeologia 1, 1–27. Robinson, E. W. (2011). Democracy beyond Athens. Cambridge.



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Roscino, C. (2012). “Zeus e Talia.” In L. Todisco, ed. La ceramica a figure rosse della Magna Grecia e della Sicilia, Vol. II. Roma, 179–80. Smith, D. G. (2017). “The Reception of Aeschylus in Sicily.” In Kennedy ed., 9–53. Sommerstein, A. H. (2008). Aeschylus I–III. Cambridge, MA. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010a). Aeschylean Tragedy. Second Edition. London. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010b). The Tangled Ways of Zeus. Oxford. Stanford, W. B. (1938). “Traces of Sicilian Influence in Aeschylus.” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 44, section C, 229–40. Stewart, E. (2017). Theater on the Move: The Birth of a Panhellenic Art Form. Oxford. Taplin, O. (1977). The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy. Oxford. Vallet, G. (1984). “Pindare et la Sicile.” In G. Vallet, et al., eds. Pindare. Entretiens sur L’Antiquité Classique 31. Geneva, 285–319. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U. (1923). Griechische Tragoedien XIV. Die Griechische Tragödie und ihre drei Dichter. Berlin. Wilson, P. (2007). “Sicilian Choruses.” In P. Wilson, ed. The Greek Theatre and Festivals: Documentary Studies. Oxford, 351–77.

PART II

Aeschylus as Playwright

CHAPTER 6

Persians A. F. Garvie In the middle of the fourth century bce Aristotle declared in his Poetics that the best kind of tragedy is that in which someone who enjoys great good fortune and reputation falls into the opposite unhappy state. He has little to say specifically about the plays of Aeschylus, but it is reasonable to suppose that Aeschylus would have agreed with Aristotle and that, when he chose the subject-matter of Persians for production at the Festival of Dionysus in 472 bce, it was because he could find no more appropriate theme than the defeat at Salamis, eight years earlier, of Xerxes, the mighty King and master of the Persian empire – so great that the Greeks called him not “the King” but simply “King (Basileus)”, the only one that mattered. It was well suited also to the kind of “simple” dramatic plot (the term is Aristotle’s) which begins with success and leads in a more or less straight line to final failure. In making his choice Aeschylus has bequeathed a play that is for us unique in two important respects. Firstly, it is not part of the kind of connected trilogy that constitutes Aeschylus’s other surviving tragedies. Secondly, it is the only surviving play of any tragedian which drew its subjectmatter not from mythology but from a recent historical event. Aeschylus’s older contemporary Phrynichus had produced a play about the capture of Miletus by the Persians in the Ionian Revolt of 494 bce, and he had found himself in deep trouble as a result (Hdt. 6.21.10). His later, more successful, historical drama (probably 476 bce) anticipated Aeschylus in subject and Persian setting, but began with a prologue that announced the defeat at Salamis. Aeschylus was not to know that modern historians would be tempted to treat Persians as if it were primarily a source of information for us about the events of 480 bce. The original audience already knew about them, and indeed many of the spectators would have participated in them. The play is of course a legitimate historical source, but that is not why Aeschylus wrote it and we should use it for that purpose with care. It is dangerous to assume that his account of Salamis must be more reliable than that of the historian Herodotus, on the grounds that his account is the earlier, and that he himself probably took part in the battle, and that those members of the audience who had participated in it would have objected if he had got the facts wrong. No doubt the details of the action would be hotly debated in the streets of Athens, but most would be qualified to speak only about what happened in their own quarter of the battlefield. Herodotus presumably set out to tell the story as accurately as he could, but Aeschylus must have been confident that his audience would understand that the requirements of his plot took priority over historical accuracy. He won first

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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prize in the dramatic competition in the Festival. Instead, then, of worrying about all the things in the play that are perhaps, or probably, or almost certainly, historically wrong, we should use them as clues to what his dramatic requirements were. Persians should be described as a tragedy based on history rather than as a historical tragedy. How could a dramatist turn into a tragedy his own country’s victory over a hated enemy? Few, if any, of Aeschylus’s audience can have failed to rejoice over it. What, then, did it expect as it entered the theatre to watch this play? Would it feel the same way at the end of the play? It was once believed that Persians is not a tragedy at all but a joyous victory celebration; the prolonged lamentation with which it ends has then to be unconvincingly explained away as a ludicrous caricature of Xerxes, with an element of burlesque (Prickard 1879, 120; Haldane 1965, 35 n. 18). For some scholars Aeschylus’s intention was to give serious political advice to his audience: he wrote it in support of one or other politician (despite the fact that not a single Greek name occurs in the play), or to advise Athens against an imperialistic policy based on its sea-power. Hall (1989) (see also Harrison 2000) may be right to argue that the play “marks the beginning of the process by which the Athenian audience learned to define its own values by contrasting itself with the collective barbarian ‘Other’”. We should not, however, infer from this that Aeschylus himself had this in mind when he wrote the play. In this chapter I shall assume that there is nothing in Persians that cannot, or indeed should not, be assessed first and foremost in the light of its contribution to a dramatic plot which presents the fall of a man, and his nation, from exceptional wealth and prosperity to the most abject failure. But in this world it is not only the exceptional people who suffer. By the end of the play Aeschylus will surely have manipulated many, if not all, of his spectators into genuine sympathy towards their hated enemies, who are human beings like themselves. The lamentation with which the play ends is an essential part of the whole. That the plot progresses more or less in a straight line from success to ruin does not mean, however, that there are no surprises along the way. A favourite technique of Aeschylus is to keep his audience in suspense for, or even momentarily forgetting, what it really knows is going to happen. The characters and the Chorus regularly express their confidence, but from the very beginning it turns into a foreboding that the audience shares, as hopes and plans remain unfulfilled. Equally important for the original audience, but generally ignored by modern scholars, is that Persians, like Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and Libation Bearers, Sophocles’ Women of Trachis and the Electra plays of Sophocles and Euripides, belongs to a long tradition of poetry which goes back at least as far as Homer’s Odyssey. In all of them the subject is the long-awaited return (nostos) of a hero from his travels or from war. Sometimes, as in Libation Bearers, but not in Agamemnon or Persians, he returns in disguise. In narrative poetry the return may have a happy ending, but in tragedy it is always disastrous and not at all what the hero expected on his return. Nostos poetry has its own conventional themes and motifs, the significance of which in Persians would certainly be clearly understood by the original audience. (For further information about the nostos theme in epic and tragedy see the Further Reading section at the end of this chapter.) In the very opening lines of the play the Chorus of Persian elders, as they march into the orchestra, tell us, in the anapaestic recitative metre of the first part of their parodos (entrancesong, lines 1–139) that they are waiting for the return (nostos) of Xerxes and his wealthy army. They have been away for too long in Greece and no news of them has reached Persia (14–15). This is historically inaccurate; Herodotus (8.54) tells us that Xerxes sent a courier on horseback to announce the good news of the Persian capture of Athens. It is reasonable to assume that this is an elliptical reference to the elaborate and speedy courier system that Herodotus describes at a dramatically more appropriate moment, when Xerxes sends the bad news of the Persian defeat at Salamis (8. 98). For his own dramatic reasons, of course, Aeschylus has a lone Persian who took part in the battle bring the news to Susa (lines 261,



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266–67). That Aeschylus himself knew of the courier system is clear, at least by the time that he wrote his Agamemnon, in which (line 282) we find the rare technical term that describes it. Still, it is dramatically more effective, and closer to Homer’s technique in the Odyssey, that no news of any success has reached home. The foreboding, then, has already begun. The long list of the names of oriental warriors, some of them genuine, others probably Aeschylus’s invention, who set out to put a yoke of slavery on Greece (the significance of the common metaphor will become apparent later) is meant to raise the hopes of the Chorus, but it is with the trembling of the parents and wives at home that this section of the parodos ends. The second part of the parodos (lines 65–139) is sung in full lyric metres. Confident at first, the Chorus celebrates the skill of Xerxes and the army in building a bridge of boats to enable them to yoke the Hellespont so that they could cross into Greece. The Persian forces, it maintains, are irresistible. It is their divinely appointed destiny to win wars on land, and they have also learned to cross the sea. Then the foreboding suddenly returns. When a man is too successful some god is liable to deceive and lead him into a fatal net. This, the Chorus says, is worrying. If the fall of the most successful man is likely to be the most striking, it is easy to jump to the illogical conclusion that the success must be responsible for the fall. In the absence of any other obvious explanation it may then seem reasonable to assume that some god must have resented the man’s success. We may describe this as an amoral explanation of suffering. This interpretation depends on a transposition made by O. Müller as long ago as 1837. The manuscripts place the stanza about the god’s deceit (93–101) before the two stanzas which deal respectively with the land-wars and the crossing of the sea. Many modern scholars are happy to interpret this as follows: “some god …. ; for it is our destiny to win wars on land, but now we have learnt to cross the sea; this is what worries me”. The Chorus’s fear is, then, quite specific: by crossing the sea and/or by building a bridge of boats, the Persians may, by going too far, have aroused the resentment of the gods. It is very unlikely that this interpretation can be right. This lyric section of the parodos consists of five pairs of stanzas (strophe + antistrophe), plus an isolated stanza (epode) about the god’s deceit. In every pair of strophe and antistrophe the two stanzas, as is normal in Greek poetry, correspond exactly in metrical structure. In four of the pairs they correspond also in thought, as do most of the other odes in this play, and elsewhere in Aeschylus. It is most unlikely that in the third pair alone they provide a contrast between land-wars and crossing the sea. Nor is such an important contrast indicated by the language; the link between strophe and antistrophe is the simple word de, which can, depending on context, mean either “but” or “and”. It certainly cannot bear the weight of “but now”, as the defenders of the transmitted text have to take it. Finally, the transposition corresponds with the metre; Ionic rhythms are used for both stanzas of the third pair that deal with Persian achievements by land and by sea (102–13). The epode should come after this, as it prepares us for the fourth pair in which the metre changes to the trochaics which in Aeschylus often indicate foreboding. On this note the parodos ends, as the Chorus describes the weeping of the married women for their empty beds, in which they are now “yoked all alone”, a splendid oxymoron with yoking used this time as a metaphor for marriage. By way of transition to the first episode the Chorus-leader invites his colleagues to join him in debating what may have happened to Xerxes (140–49). If, as many scholars believe, there was as yet no stage-building (skene) in the theatre of Dionysus, we have to imagine that the play is set in front of a council-building. But the specific reference to “this ancient building” (141) suggests that a building may have been present already in 472 bce. That its central door is not used in Persians (or Seven against Thebes or Suppliant Women) does not prove its non-existence. It would be dramatically effective if the Chorus seemed now to be about to depart through the door (an extremely rare action for a tragic chorus), only to be checked by the arrival of Atossa; this would emphasise more strongly the first occurrence in the play of an intention which remains unfulfilled.

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Atossa is the name of the historic wife of Darius and mother of Xerxes. Historians naturally debate as to whether Aeschylus provides a reliable picture of her role in the Persian royal ­family. It is curious, however, that her name occurs nowhere in the play. The explanation that Aeschylus did not know it would be hard to reconcile with the view that he was familiar with her importance in the court. Rather, we are to envisage her less as a real person than as the female, and often powerful, relative who plays a regular waiting role in a nostos poem or drama. In Persians, while the Chorus is concerned primarily with the tragedy of Persia as a whole, Atossa’s concern is for her son. Now, therefore, she has come, in her splendid chariot, to ask the Chorus for advice because, having had a nightmare, which too is a regular element in a nostos story, she is worried about Xerxes. In the dream she saw two women, one dressed in Persian, the other in Greek, clothes. They quarrelled, and when Xerxes tried to yoke them to his chariot (the metaphor has now taken visible form for Atossa), the Greek woman smashed the yoke, so that Xerxes fell out. Darius then stood beside him, pitying him, and Xerxes tore his clothes. The symbolism foreshadows what will happen later in the play – the appearance of Darius on the stage, and especially the climactic appearance of Xerxes in torn clothes. Atossa’s anxiety is increased by the omen which Atossa sees after she has awakened: an eagle, the emblem of the Persian kings, is pursued by a hawk, a weaker bird, but one associated with the Greek god Apollo (205–10). The Chorus-leader advises Atossa to sacrifice to the gods and say her prayers and reassures her that it will all end happily. Whenever a character says this in Aeschylus, the audience can be sure that disaster lies ahead. Atossa says that she will pray when she gets home, but first in a brief line-by-line dialogue (231–45) she questions the Chorus-leader about the manpower and resources of the Greek army. We should not take this passage out of its dramatic context by using it in support of the theory that Persians is not a tragedy but a patriotic celebration, or a piece of democratic propaganda. Aeschylus’s audience knew that their democracy was superior to despotism. What matters is that Atossa in her anxiety seizes upon the Chorus’s information that the Greek forces were inferior to the Persians in manpower and resources and that, unlike the Persians, they had no master to discipline them. But, when the Chorusleader points out, with two oblique references to Marathon (236 and 244), that already the weak has proved to be superior to the strong, Atossa’s confidence is shattered. The ending of the scene on a note of full foreboding leads immediately to the arrival of the Messenger with the news that it has indeed happened again. The Messenger’s long report (249–514) forms the centrepiece of the play. It begins with a brief summary of the disaster, followed by an exchange in which the Messenger’s two-line spoken couplets are interwoven with sung lyric laments from the Chorus, the first to lament. In this nostos play the Messenger at least has returned home successfully. Aeschylus needs him to prepare us for the eventual arrival of his master, just as in Agamemnon the king’s homecoming is prepared by a herald. In his natural concern for himself he speaks as if he is the only survivor. He is happy, he says, to have seen unexpectedly the light of his return (nostimon phaos, 261), While “to see the light” is a Greek cliché for “to be alive”, the idea of light here introduces what will be perhaps the most important image in the play. With an apology for her silence up till now, Atossa takes over and asks the Messenger, “Who is still alive?” (296–98). The Messenger correctly understands that she refers to Xerxes, always her principal concern, and replies that he is alive and “sees the light” (299). A relieved Atossa rejoices in this good news which has brought “great light to the house and bright day after dark night” (300–01). How long will her joy last? Atossa at this point is the first to give an opinion about who is responsible for the present troubles. It is, she says, the gods, but she does not consider why. Atossa’s second question, which concerns the fate of the other commanders, leads the Messenger to embark upon the first of his four long speeches. Between them passages of dialogue remind us to look out for the reaction of the stage-audience. By dramatic convention



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the Messenger is able to give a comprehensive account of every stage of the battle. In response to Atossa’s question the first speech gives a list of commanders who have died. Some of the names we have already heard in the parodos in the catalogue of the fine young men who set out for battle. They were noble, handsome and courageous, and they did not deserve to die. Aeschylus is already encouraging his audience to sympathise with them. The gods, he says, are responsible, but, like Atossa, he does not explain why. His second speech, the narrative of the sea battle (353–432), is naturally the longest of the four. It begins with an avenging spirit, or some unspecified god, who apparently took the form of Themistocles, commander of the Greek fleet, when he sent a messenger to Xerxes before the battle, in order to trick him into fighting in the narrows, where his heavier ships would be at a disadvantage. Themistocles is not named, but the story of his message would be familiar to Aeschylus’s audience. Xerxes then brings disaster upon himself by his failure to understand the resentment (phthonos) of the gods (for this amoral idea that the gods resent human success see p. 79) and by his general misjudgement. Confident that the Greeks were about to flee, he immediately orders his ships to sail up and down all night to prevent them from doing so. The Persians are thus exhausted before the battle begins. Probably Xerxes really had a longer time than this in which to make his arrangements, but in dramatic time one event naturally follows immediately on the other. Indeed, it is likely (see esp. Kakridis 1975; Pelling 1997), that Aeschylus’s entire description of the battle is based less on historical accuracy than on the imagery of light and darkness. When the sun rises on the morning of the battle it is the Greek fleet that comes into view. When the darkness of night puts an end to the battle (in reality it may have ended earlier), it is also the metaphorical darkness that symbolises the Persian defeat. The light of day belongs to the Greeks, while the darkness of night, which frames the whole narrative, belongs to the Persians. The sounds of the battle have a similar effect. The blare of the Greek trumpet, which inflamed the whole area, as if its vibrations could be seen, accompanies the Persians’ first sight of the Greek ships. The stirring battle-cry from the Greek side is answered only by a confused noise from the Persian tongues. We are perhaps to think of the mixture of languages spoken by the various contingents of the Persian forces, but also of the general confusion in their ranks. The last sound to be heard is that of Persian lamentation, until the darkness puts an end to it. In a brief exchange with Atossa, the Messenger’s warning that there is worse still to come introduces the third long speech (447–71), in which he narrates the deaths of the finest and noblest young Persians on the small island of Psyttaleia. Why does Aeschylus make so much of what, as we know from Herodotus, was actually a very minor episode in the battle? Surely not for political reasons, because he wished to glorify Aristeides, the commander of the Greeks in the fight there. The reason is that, as the play began with the glorification of Persia’s achievements in both land and sea battles, if the disaster is to be complete they have to be defeated on land as well as at sea. Xerxes, who watched it all from his seat on a mainland hill, tore his clothes in his grief, as he did in Atossa’s dream. Immediately he set off in disorderly flight with his land-forces on the journey home through northern Greece. Herodotus says that it was a few days later, but dramatic time again leaves no space between the events. Atossa, having once more blamed some god for the disaster, goes on to say that her son has brought it upon himself in seeking revenge for his father’s defeat at Marathon, one of the few references to that battle in the play (473–77). In response to a question from Atossa the Messenger replies that the remains of the fleet sailed away in disorderly flight. This is consistent with the version of Herodotus that it reached Asia without any further serious mishap. Our full attention can now be turned to the Messenger’s final speech (480–514), which presents the horrors of the land-army’s journey back to the Hellespont. Herodotus and Aeschylus agree that many died on the march, though there are differences between the two accounts. Both probably exaggerate. In Persians there are three stages, the

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third much more fully reported than the first two. Many men died from thirst and perhaps exhaustion (the text is uncertain) in Boeotia, others from thirst and hunger in Achaea and Thessaly, and most of the remainder are drowned when the sun comes up and melts the frozen ice as they attempt to cross the river Strymon in Thrace. Few, if any, scholars now would deny that this final episode was an invention of Aeschylus himself. It is most unlikely that in early November a river would freeze over at that latitude. No other ancient authority mentions it at all. Herodotus tells us that on the outward journey Xerxes had built a bridge over the river (7.24) and his account of the homeward march implies that the bridge was still standing. I have tried to show elsewhere (Garvie 2014) why we can make sense of this ending to the Messenger-scene only by referring to the conventions of nostos poetry, in which the hero regularly reaches home only after a difficult journey, in the Odyssey not until Book 13. The historical Xerxes, having reached Asia safely, spent the winter in Sardis, but dramatic time requires him to come home to Susa by the end of the play. Aeschylus’s audience is waiting for it, but first it has to hear about the journey. Usually the hero returns alone, often having lost all, or almost all, of his companions along the way. The parallels between Persians and the Odyssey are remarkably close. Odysseus’s nine adventures are divided into three groups, each of which itself contains three adventures, the last of which is treated much more fully than the first two. Throughout the first half of the poem, therefore, Odysseus gradually loses all of his ships and their crews until he is left entirely alone. In Persians, with its different scale, the pattern is reduced to a single group of three events. Xerxes loses most, though not quite all, of his men. Odysseus suffers the final loss after his men anger the sun god, Helios, by eating his cattle. Helios is responsible also for Xerxes’ final loss. No reason is given, but we can hardly forget the imagery of light and darkness that dominated the Messenger’s account of the sea battle. The sunlight, as we saw, is on the side of the Greeks. It is impossible to tell whether Aeschylus first conceived the imagery, and then realised how easy it would be to use it for the essential elimination of Xerxes’ companions, or whether he began by modelling the latter on the Odyssey, before conceiving the imagery to fit in with it. The episode ends with the response of Atossa. Having rebuked the Chorus for failing to understand her dream, she will go off now and when she comes back she will bring the sacrificial offerings that the Chorus-leader has advised her to make. It will, in modern terms, be, she understands, like closing the stable door after the horse has fled, but she hopes that it will still do some good – the usual Aeschylean wishful-thinking that is never realised. If Xerxes should arrive before she returns, the Chorus is to comfort him and to escort him home to the palace. Few lines in Persians have caused scholars more trouble than these (529–31). As she will in fact return to the stage before the arrival of Xerxes, what is their point? They have been variously deleted or transposed to later in the play. For Broadhead (1960, xxxvi) the play could have ended after the choral ode that follows, but Aeschylus suddenly realised that he had not yet presented the supposed moral of the play, so he added the Darius scene to rectify the matter. Recognition that this is a nostos play rules out this kind of explanation. The lines provide a useful reminder that Xerxes is to be seen on stage. What the audience does not yet know is that the Ghost of Darius will appear first. This will come as a complete surprise, which will once more keep the audience waiting for what will be the climax of the play. Atossa’s plan is again frustrated. As they begin the expected ode of lamentation the Chorus blames first Zeus, the supreme, and therefore all-purpose, god. As in the parodos we hear of the weeping women and their empty marriage-beds. Xerxes, who, in order to yoke Greece in slavery, built a metaphorical yoke across the Hellespont, has succeeded only in setting free his existing subjects from the yoke of despotism. Some credit is given to the Greeks, but all the emphasis is on the fault of Xerxes. He has ruined everything with both his ships and his land-forces. Why was Darius in his lifetime a commander who never did any harm to his people? The unspoken corollary is



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“when Xerxes has done so much harm”. With this vital question the Chorus introduces the comparison between the two kings which will dominate most of the rest of the play. If the complete failure of Xerxes is to be fully understood, he has to be contrasted with his father’s complete success. This is why Aeschylus has so little to say about Marathon, and nothing at all about the historical Darius’s other failures. When the Chorus-leader cited Marathon just before the entrance of the Messenger, Aeschylus used it only to strengthen the sense of foreboding at that particular point. Atossa’s return to the stage (line 598) is not on the splendid carriage which brought her on her last entry. The pomp and ceremony which symbolised wealth and success are no longer appropriate, and her earlier confidence that things will get better has already left her. She brings with her the offerings and libations which she has promised to bring and invites the Chorus to sing the ritual hymn which will accompany them. For the first time we hear, with some surprise, that their purpose is to call up the Ghost of Darius from the underworld (619–21) and Xerxes’ appearance is thus postponed. The staging of the necromancy that follows is uncertain. One theory is that, if there was a stage-building at the back of the orchestra (see p. 79), it could in some way be used to represent the tomb from which Darius emerges. Others favour some kind of temporary tomb-like construction either at the back of the orchestra or at its centre. This last view might seem to be the most attractive, but it raises the question of how the actor who played Darius got into it without being seen by the audience. Whether the evocation of the ghost is based on oriental or Greek practice, or a mixture of both, is also uncertain. To make contact with the dead requires great care in choosing the correct offerings (hence Atossa’s full description of what she has brought for Darius) and the proper words. Flattery of the deceased is essential. Here it is particularly appropriate in the context of Xerxes’ inferiority to Darius, whom the Chorus call a god, who never made the errors of judgement that led to his people’s destruction in war. The appeals are successful and the Ghost eventually appears above the tomb, his splendid royal tiara and his saffron slippers, and no doubt the rest of his costume, marking his status as the perfect king. Darius first addresses the Chorus, who, however, are too awe-stricken to reply intelligently. Atossa, therefore, takes over, which allows us in this long scene to concentrate particularly on Xerxes and his responsibility for the disaster. Atossa tells Darius what has happened and both Atossa and Darius are strongly critical of Xerxes. The Ghost complicates matters by saying that he has known all along from oracles that it was going to happen, but not when Zeus would make it happen (739–41). He goes on to comment that when a man sets out on a foolish course the god lends a hand. Xerxes was particularly foolish to build his bridge of boats over the Hellespont because Poseidon, the god of the sea, and the other gods would consider an attempt to challenge or usurp their power. This is the first attempt in the play to specify a particular offence of Xerxes and (apart from Zeus earlier) the particular god who resented it. The two principal divine enemies of Odysseus in the Odyssey were Poseidon and Helios and they are also the enemies of Xerxes. Atossa suggests that some of the blame should be attributed to wicked men who criticised him for playing the coward at home and for doing nothing to increase the wealth left to him by his father. This provides the cue for Darius to present us with his distinguished family tree, ending with himself who in his many military expeditions never brought such a disaster on Persia. So far there has been no mention of the 300 000 men whom Xerxes left behind in Greece under Mardonius and who, as the audience knew, would be defeated in the following year at Plataea. The Ghost now prophesies that very few of them will ever get home. They are suffering already, and will suffer much more, for the hybris that the army committed when it destroyed the temples of the gods in Athens on the outward journey (807–09). The term hybris, often wrongly translated by “pride”, is properly behaviour calculated to humiliate

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another person or a god so as to prove one’s own superiority. This is the first time that it has been used in the play and its moral connotation is clearly appropriate here. Much less clear is its second, and final, appearance a few lines later in the same speech, in the familiar context of excessive wealth. Zeus, the Ghost says, punishes those who despise what they already have and seek for more. One can understand why it might be immoral to acquire or to use one’s wealth wrongly, but is it really morally wrong to possess it? Some older editors, believing that the Greek tragedians sought to improve their audience’s behaviour by providing a simple moral, were happy at last to find that moral here: whom, they ask, are we to believe if it is not this godlike figure who has so impressed us by his splendid emergence from the underworld in his tiara and saffron slippers? It is, however, not so easy to put aside the tangle of different reasons for Xerxes’ suffering which have been presented throughout the play. This particular moral has the disadvantage of being manifestly untrue. It is not only the immoral who suffer, and the fact that someone does suffer certainly does not prove that he is immoral. In this play the Chorus has already asked the vital question: why did Darius continue to prosper, while Xerxes failed? In her first words to the Ghost (709), Atossa praised him for having surpassed all mortals in prosperity and success. If that is true, and if it is true also that great success is always punished, he should surely have been the first to suffer. Instead he castigates his son for doing what he did himself with (if we forget Marathon) complete impunity. Even if we treat as an impractical exaggeration Darius’s injunction never to try to improve our present condition at all, and restrict the danger to extreme prosperity and wealth, how are we to know how much we are allowed before it becomes extreme? If Xerxes had not angered Poseidon by building his bridge of boats, or if he had not tried to defeat the Greeks by land as well as by sea, or if he had not tried to conquer Europe as well as Asia – or any of the other “ifs” that have been suggested by scholars – might he have succeeded? How could Xerxes know that he had exceeded the limit until now when he has suffered for it? Can it be only in retrospect that we can discover that we have too much money in the bank? The “moral”, then, is not a very useful one. At 555–56 the Chorus asked why Darius “never did any harm to his people”. But only some 80 lines earlier (473–77) Aeschylus, in one of his few references to Marathon, put into the mouth of Atossa yet another reason for Xerxes’ failure: it was because he wanted to avenge the failure of his father. Is this perhaps a hint to the audience that it should not take too seriously the omniscience that his Ghost claims for himself? Aeschylus doubtless expected his spectators to vary in their own opinions about the reasons for Xerxes’ fall. He suggests questions for them to think about, but he sees no reason to offer them the “right” answers. Why should he? That we are not to take the Ghost’s “moral” too seriously is confirmed by the following ode (852–907), in which the Chorus ignores it completely and instead praises Darius in lavish terms for all the campaigns in which, without stirring himself from Persia, he increased the Persian empire, and ensured that all his men had a safe return home. His conquests included a number of Greek Aegean islands, to reach which his forces must obviously have with impunity crossed by sea from Asia to Europe. We have returned to the mood of triumph with which the play began. As, then, we approach the end of the play, the basic antithesis between success and failure becomes brutally clear-cut. Before the ode Darius ends his long speech by pointing out that, since Xerxes has torn his clothes badly, Atossa must return to the palace to fetch fresh garments and then to go to meet him with them, presumably so that he may be properly dressed before he arrives. Both then depart, the Ghost back to the Underworld, Atossa to the palace. We shall not see either again. It is now that Aeschylus’s reliance on the audience’s understanding of the conventions of nostos poetry becomes particularly crucial. Xerxes enters all alone and on foot (908) and the Chorus are surprised not to see the luxurious wagon on which, according to Herodotus, he travelled on the outward journey, with a retinue behind. Moreover, despite the instructions



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of Darius, Xerxes, far from wearing a tiara and saffron slippers, is still in his rags, the rags that Atossa saw in her dream, and that the Messenger saw in reality at the end of his Psyttaleia speech. It is at last the turn of the Chorus (and the audience) to see them for themselves (1017). Atossa, therefore, has missed her son; not for the first time in this play she has failed to fulfil an intention. In nostos poetry the rehabilitation of the hero in his home and former status is regularly marked by the donning of new clothes, sometimes, though not here, after a bath. Only after the disguised Odysseus has thrown off his beggar’s rags, and bathed, and put on proper clothes, can he successfully claim to be Penelope’s husband and the head of the household and kingdom of Ithaca. In nostos tragedies there is usually a less happy outcome. In Agamemnon the robe is used to entangle the hero in his bath, so that his wife can kill him. In Sophocles’ Trachinian Women the robe sent by Deianeira to welcome her returning husband turns out to be poisoned. The original audience of Persians would surely understand Atossa’s failure to mean that there can be no rehabilitation for Xerxes as the great king whom he might claim to be. I do not understand why scholars are reluctant to accept this conclusion. The idea of Avery (1964, 182–84), that Atossa enters with Xerxes who then changes his clothes on stage, is, in the absence of any verbal reference to it in the text, impossible. And, if we are to suppose that the change will take place after the end of the play inside the palace, why did Darius not simply instruct her to go back to the palace and to wait for her son there with the fresh garments? It may be difficult for most modern readers or audiences to appreciate fully the ritual lamentation with which the play ends. It is not part of our culture and we have lost the original music and the choreography of the Chorus. But we still have the language and the lyric metres in which it is conducted and it should not be so very difficult to imagine the powerful effect that it must have had on its first audience. From confrontation between the Chorus, who at first bitterly blames Xerxes for the nature of his return and Xerxes, who makes no attempt to defend himself, we move via a long catalogue of those who have not returned, to a greater understanding between the two. The double tragedies of Persia and the King, until now kept separate, at last come closer together, a movement probably made visible by their movements in the orchestra, until at the very end they all walk off together with the Chorus escorting the King. We should not mistake this for any kind of rehabilitation – Xerxes is still wearing his rags when we see him go. But they are united now in their grief. For three pairs of longish stanzas (931–1001; for the structure of such stanzas see p. 79) Xerxes leads off each strophe and antistrophe, and the Chorus each time expands on his laments. It all becomes quicker and more agitated in the following four pairs, in which both stanzas are sung in alternate lines by Xerxes and the Chorus. The metres, too, in which they sing become more and more emotional (see Stehle and Weiss, Chapters 17 and 18 in this volume). It is at the beginning of the sixth strophe that Xerxes gives the order to set off for home. At the beginning of the seventh antistrophe he orders the Chorus to tear their robes, the traditional gesture of mourning. So, as they walk off together, they join their king in wearing what in this play is the symbol of failure. The final stanza of the play is not a member of a pair of stanzas. An isolated stanza, an epode, is not uncommon in the lyrics of tragedy, but when it is used for the last words of a play the audience will naturally assume that it is a strophe with the antistrophe still to come. When it does not come there is bound to be a feeling of incompleteness (Scott 1984, 368–69), in this case a sense that the lamentation will continue beyond the end of the play. The last word that the audience hears, perhaps when it only just remains within earshot, is “lamentation”. If this were a “historical” drama or a happy patriotic celebration the play would have ended very differently. But this is a tragedy. The only event that has been specifically predicted for the future is the still greater disaster of Plataea. It is not the time for the audience to rejoice or to laugh.

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It is not surprising that a play which presents the attempt of a despotic Persia to put a yoke of slavery on Greece should have been seen by modern directors and audiences as a model of liberation struggle and anti-imperialism, for example in Europe in the Second World War (see Foley, Chapter 37 in this volume). On 28 October 1940 in Greece Metaxas, when he said Ὄχι (“No”) in response to Mussolini’s ultimatum, quoted the great patriotic cry that was heard throughout the Greek fleet at Salamis. A performance at Epidaurus in 1971 was regarded as an attempt to subvert the Greek Junta (Rosenbloom 2006, 162). What is surprising is the way in which tyrants and despots too have been able to turn the play to their own advantage. Wilhelm Leyhausen was not himself a member of the Nazi Party, but in 1935 his production of Persians was performed in Germany on Hitler’s birthday, and in 1934 in a rehearsal for a performance in the Herodes Atticus Theatre in Athens by a Berlin company of students the chorus was photographed with its arms raised in a Nazi salute (Ioannidou 2013, 329, 343 figure 18.2). The play was restaged also in East Germany in the 1960s. It has often been interpreted as an anti-war play, especially during the Vietnam and the First and Second Gulf Wars. The search for specific political messages in Greek tragedy is sometimes echoed in modern productions. Some scholars have thought that Aeschylus wrote his play to warn his Athenian audience against the danger of maritime expansion and imperialism. Ellen McLaughlin’s adaptation in the Second Gulf War evidently picked up that idea (Rosenbloom 2006, 162–63). The hunt for political messages is in general to be treated with caution. I wonder how many modern anti-imperialist productions have been as successful as Aeschylus himself in persuading his spectators to sympathise with their beaten enemies in their suffering.

FURTHER READING Three editions with the text of the play in Greek and with full English commentary are Broadhead 1960, Hall 1996 with English translation, and Garvie 2009. The Loeb text and translation of Sommerstein (2008) contains fuller notes than is normal in that Series, while the translation of Collard 2008 has very full notes but no Greek text. For helpful books devoted to the general interpretation of Persians see Michelini 1982 and Rosenbloom 2006. On nostos tragedies see Taplin 1977, 124–26, 302, Garvie 1994, 2009, and with fuller bibliography 2014, and Alexopoulou 2009. On the theme of Persian and Oriental culture see Root 1979, Hall 1989, Georges 1994, Brosius 1996, Harrison 2000 and ­McClure 2006. On Salamis through the eyes of historians see Hammond 1956, Hignett 1963, Lazenby 1993 and Green 1996; and, through the eyes of Aeschylus, Kakridis 1975, Vassia 1986, Goldhill 1988, Pelling 1997 and Garvie 2014. For messenger-scenes see Barrett 1995, for ritual lamentation Alexiou 2002 and for the modern Reception of Persians, Hall and Macintosh 2005, Rosenbloom 2006 and Ioannidou 2013.

REFERENCES Alexiou, M. (2002). The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. Second Edition, revised by D. Yiatromanolakis and P. Roilos. Lanham, MD. Alexopoulou, M. (2009). The Theme of Returning Home in Ancient Greek Literature: The Nostos of the Epic Heroes. Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter. Avery, H. C. (1964). “Dramatic Devices in Aeschylus’ Persians.” American Journal of Philology 85, 173–84. Barrett, J. (1995). “Narrative and the Messenger in Aeschylus’ Persians.” American Journal of Philology 116, 539–57.



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Broadhead, H. D. (1960). The Persae of Aeschylus. Cambridge. Brosius, M. (1996). Women in Ancient Persia. Oxford. Collard, C. (2008). Aeschylus Persians and Other Plays. Oxford. Garvie, A. F. (1994). Homer Odyssey VI–VIII. Cambridge. Garvie, A. F. (2009). Aeschylus Persae. Oxford. Garvie, A. F. (2014). “Sunshine over the Strymon.” In E. Vintrò, F.Mestre and P. Gòmez, eds. Som per mirar (1) Estudis de filologio grega oferts a Carles Miralles. Barcelona, 111–39. Georges, P. (1994). Barbarian Asia and the Greek Experience from the Archaic Period to the Age of Xenophon. Baltimore, MD. Goldhill, S. (1988). “Battle Narrative and Politics in Aeschylus’ Persae.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 108, 189–93. Green, P. (1996). The Greco-Persian Wars. Oakland, CA. Haldane, J. A. (1965). “Musical Themes and Imagery in Aeschylus.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 85, 33–41. Hall, E. (1989). Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-definition through Tragedy. Oxford. Hall, E. (1996). Aeschylus Persians. Warminster. Hall, E. and Macintosh, F. (2005). Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660–1914. Oxford. Hammond, N. G. L. (1956). “The Battle of Salamis.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 76, 32–54. Harrison, T. (2000). The Emptiness of Asia: Aeschylus’ Persians and the History of the Fifth Century. London. Hignett, C. (1963). Xerxes’ Invasion of Greece. Oxford. Ioannidou, E. (2013). “Chorus and the Vaterland: Greek Tragedy and the Ideology of Choral Performance in Inter-War Germany.” In J. Billings, F. Budelmann and F. Macintosh, eds. Choruses Ancient and Modern. Oxford, 327–45. Kakridis, J. Th. (1975). “Licht und Finsternis in dem Botenbericht der Perser des Aischylos.” Grazer Beiträge 4, 145–54. Lazenby, J. F. (1993). The Defence of Greece 490–479 BC. Warminster. McClure, L. (2006). “Maternal Authority and Heroic Disgrace in Aeschylus’s Persae.” Transactions of the Philological Association 136, 71–97. Michelini, A. N. (1982). Tradition and Dramatic Form in the Persians of Aeschylus. Leiden. Pelling, C. (1997). “Aeschylus’ Persae and History.” In C. Pelling, ed. Greek Tragedy and the Historian. Oxford, 1–19. Prickard, A. O. (1879). The Persae of Aeschylus. London. Root, M. C. (1979). The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art: Essays on the Creation of an Economy of Empire. Leiden. Rosenbloom, D. (2006). Aeschylus Persians. London. Scott, W. C. (1984). Musical Design in Aeschylean Theater. Hanover and London. Sommerstein, A. H. (2008). Aeschylus I–III. Cambridge, MA. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010). Aeschylean Tragedy. Second Edition. London. Taplin, O. (1977). The Stagecraft of Aeschylus. Oxford. Vassia, V. (1986). “Le immagini ricorrenti nei Persiani di Eschilo: struttura e forma linguistica.” In E. Corsini, ed. La polis e il suo teatro. Padua, 49–73.

CHAPTER 7

Seven against Thebes Isabelle Torrance Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes (Seven) deserves to be better known. First produced in 467 bce, the tetralogy made up of Laius, Oedipus, Seven and the satyr drama Sphinx won first prize at the City Dionysia. Seven dramatises the civil war between the sons of Oedipus (Eteocles and Polynices), whose aftermath has been made famous by Sophocles’ later Antigone. The brief intrusion of Antigone and her sister at the end of Seven is considered spurious by scholars and was probably not part of the original play (see the section “Accompanying Plays and Plot” in this chapter). As the final tragedy in a connected trilogy, whose first two plays have not survived, Seven is concerned with the cost of warfare and with the impact of past crimes on future generations. Long scenes of deliberation interspersed with descriptive songs combine to make Seven challenging for a modern theatre audience. Apart from the Chorus, the drama can be performed with just two actors – one in the role of Eteocles, and one to play the Scout and the Messenger. These factors help to account for Seven’s lean reception history, although several notable adaptations exist and new research has shown how vibrant, terrifying and exhilarating the soundscape of the original play would have been (see the section “Performance and Reception” in this chapter).

7.1  Accompanying Plays and Plot Aeschylus favoured connected tragic trilogies. The three tragedies in most of his sets formed a linear and interconnected plot. His Oresteia is an exquisite and unique surviving example of such a connected trilogy, but Seven was originally also performed with two closely linked companion plays. We know the titles of these plays and can reconstruct a sketchy outline of their plot from scraps of information bolstered by reasonable conjecture (Sommerstein 2008a, 139–49). The first tragedy, Laius, was concerned with the eponymous father of Oedipus. Reference is made in Seven (745–49) to an oracle Laius received three times from Apollo stating that he must die without offspring for the city of Thebes to be saved. The detail that the oracle was decreed “three times” underlines the severity of Laius’s offence to the god, whose oracle he somehow disregarded in “mindless madness” since he fathered Oedipus (756–57). A surviving fragment (frag. 122) references a cooking-pot into which we can surmise that the infant Oedipus was placed and left exposed to die. As in Sophocles’

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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Oedipus the King, however, the child must have been rescued and reared in ignorance of his true parentage. Another fragment (frag. 122a) in which a murderer is said to have tasted and spat out the victim’s blood (an apotropaic measure to avoid blood pollution) probably refers to Oedipus’s murder of Laius, unaware that he has killed his biological father. The second play, Oedipus, will have included the unfolding of events to which the Chorus briefly refers in Seven (720–91): Oedipus’s ill-omened marriage to Jocasta who turns out to be his biological mother, his self-blinding on realising the truth, his curse upon his sons (probably because they neglected him) and a dream that Eteocles has concerning the division of his father’s property. In cursing his sons, Oedipus displays a “damaged mind” (725) and a “maddened heart” (781). Oedipus’s famous feat of solving the riddle of the Sphinx and saving Thebes from her savageries featured in the humorous satyr drama that followed Seven. It seems likely that the Chorus of satyrs played the role of Theban councillors, attempting and failing amusingly to solve the Sphinx’s riddle, perhaps on the point of being eaten when they are saved by Oedipus (Sommerstein 2008b, 238–41). When Seven begins, Oedipus and Jocasta are dead and the city of Thebes is once again in crisis. The exiled Theban prince Polynices has made an alliance with the King of Argos, raised an army and returned to conquer and reclaim Thebes from his brother Eteocles. In the opening scene (prologue 1–77) Eteocles informs his citizens about the impending siege and urges all to come to the city’s defence. A Scout arrives with a report of seven fearsome warriors leading the army, ready to station their troops at each of Thebes’ seven gates, and Eteocles prays that Thebes may survive. As Eteocles makes his exit to attend to military defences, a Chorus of young Theban maidens enters singing in a panic caused by the approaching army and appealing to the gods for salvation (parodos 78–180). Eteocles returns and scolds the young women, accusing them of panic-mongering, with the Chorus eventually consenting to make more auspicious prayers (first episode 181–286), but the Chorus continue to voice fears through song concerning the city’s destruction (first stasimon 287–368). This song is followed by the centrepiece of the play, often referred to as the “shield scene” (second episode 369–719). Featuring seven pairs of speeches, appended with choral comment, each sequence follows the same pattern. The Scout reports the identity of the military leader posted to one of Thebes’ gates and describes the image of his shield. Eteocles interprets the meaning of the image, attempts to neutralise its threatening force and sends an appropriate champion to meet the warrior described. The Chorus give a brief response wishing death to the attacker or success to the defender, and the sequence continues until Eteocles posts himself against his brother at the Seventh Gate. The Chorus members try unsuccessfully to prevent him from this folly. As brother meets brother in battle, the Chorus sings of three generations of transgressions against the gods and of the enigmatic curse Oedipus placed on his sons that a migrant from Scythia (i.e. an iron sword) would distribute their inheritance (second stasimon 720–91). When a Messenger comes with news from the battle, his report is bittersweet: Thebes has been saved but its princes have fallen in mutual slaughter (third episode 792–821). The Chorus sing in lamentation for the cursed house of Oedipus and the dead brothers (third stasimon 822–74), splitting into two groups who sing in response to each other in an antiphonal dirge (875–1004). It is during the third stasimon that the transmitted text includes an announcement of the arrival of Oedipus’s daughters Antigone and Ismene (861–63). Logistically and thematically, however, their appearance is suspicious and may well have been introduced by later interpolators in order to harmonise events of Seven with those of Sophocles’ Antigone as occurs even more obviously in the exodus of Seven. In Seven, it would be “a perverse arrangement” with “no dramatic point’ for the Chorus to lead the lamentation, as they do, if the sisters of Eteocles and Polynices are present (Sommerstein 2010a, 91). Their presence would also raise problems regarding the oracle of Apollo which clearly

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foretold the extinction of the family line in exchange for the salvation of the city. In the transmitted exodus (1005–78) a Herald arrives and clumsily announces that Polynices is to be denied burial, a proposition rejected by Antigone, and the Chorus conclude with further lamentations for the fate of the house of Oedipus. The premise is a preposterously reductive vignette of the plot in Sophocles’ Antigone and the scene itself is reminiscent of a similar episode in Euripides’ Phoenician Women, while the text of the exodus in Seven also shows signs of having been composed by an inferior poet. The transmitted ending, moreover, leaves the audience with an unresolved conclusion quite unlike the model of Eumenides, as the final play in a connected trilogy, would lead us to expect (see e.g. Thalmann 1978, 137–41; Winnington-Ingram 1983, 18–19; Hutchinson 1985, 209–11; Torrance 2007, 19–20; Sommerstein 2010a, 90–93). If the sisters are absent, on the other hand, central themes in the tragedy are resolved with significant clarity. The tensions between polis (city) and genos (family) are reconciled through the confirmation of the primacy of community over individual. Once the salvation of the polis has been confirmed, the Chorus can focus on lamentation for the genos of Oedipus. Similarly, the contrast between the male and female experiences of war have a clear trajectory, represented throughout by the male warriors and the young female Chorus, respectively.

7.2  Ship of State and Cursed Family Two major intertwined concerns of Seven are the legacy of the house of Oedipus, full of violence and incest, and the fate of the city of Thebes under the command of the descendants of Laius. The tension largely revolves around the fact that Eteocles “is always both the ruler of Thebes and the son of Oedipus” (Zeitlin 2009, 15). Both sons of Oedipus are shown to display an unnatural disregard for the bond of kinship, while nautical imagery is exploited to represent Thebes as a ship with Eteocles at the helm, a position through which he abandons his genos (family) when he goes to meet his brother in battle. Seven thus falls into two broad parts, the first primarily concerned with the defence of the city, the second with the family curse, reinvigorated through Oedipus’s specific curse on his sons which seems to drive Eteocles on to meet his brother at the Seventh Gate (Thalmann 1978, 31–81; Torrance 2007, 23–63; Zeitlin 2009, 11–19; Sommerstein 2010a, 80–84). The nautical imagery of the play reflects this shift. Eteocles is introduced as an excellent helmsman of the ship of state (2–3), urging his citizens to take positions on its “upper deck” (32–33) and fortifying the city as “a good ship’s captain” in defence against the “landwave” of the approaching army (62–64), a “wave of men” that “breaks loudly over the city” (114–15). He will not flee from the stern to the bows if his ship is in distress on heavy seas (208–10). Ultimately, however, Eteocles comes to acknowledge before going to battle that he is now consigning his genos to the wind of doom (689–91). Surging waves are said to crash one after another around the stern of the polis once Eteocles goes to face his brother (757–65) but although “much buffeted by the waves, the polis has let no water into her hull” (795–96). The ship has been saved although its helmsman has perished. As predicted in Apollo’s oracle, the destruction of Laius’s progeny has led to the salvation of the city. That progeny’s troubled legacy is also central to the tragedy. Early in the play, Eteocles attaches motherhood to the land of Thebes, who is the “dearest nurse” (16) of her “shieldbearing inhabitants” (19), thus focusing away from his own incestuous parentage and emphasising the common descent of Thebans. Later on, however, the image of mother earth as nurse is applied to the crime of incest through a horrifying metaphor where Oedipus is said to have “sowed the holy field of his mother where he was nourished and suffered a bloodstained race” (753–56). Only when the Messenger comes to report the deaths of the Theban princes is the image restored to its natural context, with the Chorus members addressed as



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“children reared by mothers” (792; see Sommerstein 2008a, 235). The destiny of Oedipus’s “blood-stained race” finds expression in the interdependence of the lives of his sons. When Polynices calls down curses on the city of Thebes and on his brother, he wishes either to kill Eteocles and die beside him, or to banish him as he himself has been banished (631–38). There is no option according to which one brother might die and the other survive. They face each other as equals “ruler against ruler, brother against brother, enemy against enemy” (674–75). The brothers are presented as a unit through the Greek dual, a grammatical form used to designate inseparable pairs. They are a “pair of blood brothers” (681) and a “double pair of generals” (817). The description of their mutual fratricide through compound words suggestive of suicide (681, 734, 805) reflects classical Greek conceptions of kin-killing (Seaford 2012, 149). Who is to blame in bringing these events to their conclusion? Is it Polynices for laying siege to his homeland? The warrior seer Amphiaraus, a man beyond reproach, who fights (reluctantly) in Polynices’ army rebukes him for attacking “his father’s polis”, “his native gods”, “the spring of his mother” and “the land of his father” (582–85). We do not know the context in which Polynices came to banished from the city in Aeschylus’s version, but it is possible that he was the elder of the two brothers in which case the kingdom of Thebes will have belonged to him by primogeniture (Sommerstein 2010b, 82–88). On the other hand, imagery of allotment and inheritance in Seven suggests that this was a theme developed also in the earlier plays and may have been related to contemporary legislative changes which granted equal division of patrimony among sons (Cameron 1971, 14, 56–57; Thalmann 1978, 62–81). Is Eteocles, then, more responsible for generating disaster in posting himself to fight his brother? The Chorus urge him to resist his impulse and remind him that there are plenty of other Theban men to send into battle. The stain of killing in battle can be purified but that of killing a brother cannot (677–82). They beg him to reject “spear-mad delusion” and his “evil desire” (686–88). Eteocles ignores their advice, however, and makes a swift decision to stand at the Seventh Gate. He is thus unlike other Aeschylean characters such as Agamemnon or Orestes, who struggle and hesitate in the face of dire alternatives (SewellRutter 2007, 161; Torrance 2007, 35). Eteocles displays no ambivalence and scholars have debated the extent to which the curse drives his decision. A black squall on the house (699–700), the curse is later described a “destroyer of families”, “a goddess unlike the gods” and an “all-too-true prophet of evil” (720–22), her song “unmelodious” (867). As Eteocles prepares to enter battle he sees her sitting close by him with dry, tearless eyes, saying enigmatically: “The gain comes before the death that comes after” (695–97). Death is certain and gains in battle, whatever they may be, will bring no benefit (Seaford 2012, 169). The Theban prince accepts his doom. He continues to reject choral advice to avoid the Seventh Gate, his concluding words expressing resignation at the inescapability of evil when sent by the gods (702–19). Eteocles may well act under the influence of the curse, but he remains remarkably rational and self-aware. Never bursting into the emotive lyric metres of song during the course of the play, his speech is consistently measured throughout. Recognising himself as the most appropriate match for his brother, he acknowledges his impulse to war-lust and goes into battle in order to avoid delaying the inevitable (Lawrence 2013, 66–67).

7.3  Siege Warfare Eteocles’ climactic decision to fight Polynices comes at the end of the lengthy shield scene, which was mocked by Euripides in his Phoenician Women (751–52) where his Eteocles says: “It would be a great waste of time to report the name of each man, with the enemy encamped under our very walls.” For a modern audience, the scene is challenging, turning as it does on

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paying close attention to language, imagery and semiotics (Zeitlin 2009, 33–113). Nevertheless, the hermeneutic method which Eteocles deploys in attempting to neutralise the threat of the attackers proves effective. We must not forget either that Aeschylus was a war veteran who had experienced the besieging of his city (Athens) in 480 bce and had seen active combat (Torrance 2017, 1–2). A number of key terms from classical Greek warfare, such as “hoplite” and “scaling ladder”, are first recorded in Seven (466) (Echeverría 2017, cf. Berman 2007)). In antiquity, Seven was characterised as a drama “full of Ares” (i.e. “war’” Aristophanes Frogs 1021). The shield scene functions, then, to generate an almost unbearable dramatic tension as it slowly winds up the spring that will send Eteocles off into fatal combat; the methodical analyses of the Theban leader, which are at odds with the sense of urgency, create an ever-deepening sense of anxious anticipation. Each of the besieging champions is distinguished by an individual blazon on his shield, expressing a particular threat to the city. At the first gate (Proetid Gate: 375–421), is Tydeus, one of the most terrifying warriors. He growls and shrieks like a snake, tosses the tall plumes of his helmet and writhes with battle lust. His shield is fitted with bells of beaten bronze that clang dramatically when he moves. On his shield is a full moon surrounded by a blazing firmament of stars. Aligning himself with the moon named “the greatest of the stars” (390), an image that betrays an arrogance soon to be Tydeus’s demise. Even as he screams and raves like a horse impatient for battle, he insults the prophet Amphiaraus. Eteocles turns Tydeus’s symbol against him, suggesting that it prophesises its owner’s doom since the night of death will fall on his eyes. Melanippus is chosen to stand against him, a warrior who hates arrogance and is tied to the land of Thebes. Capaneus is at the second gate (Electran Gate: 422–56), a giant who boasts against Zeus and the gods showing a pride beyond human limits. On his shield is a naked man armed with a blazing torch declaring through a golden inscription “I will burn this city” (434). Eteocles dismisses him with ease. His boasts will be his downfall and the fire of Zeus’s thunderbolts will seek him out. Polyphontes, a warrior of fiery spirit, has been posted as an appropriate match. The attacker at the third gate (Neïstan Gate: 457–85) is the elusive mythological figure Eteoclus, a near homonym for Eteocles. Aeschylus has substituted Eteoclus for Adrastus, the Argive king who traditionally survives the expedition. This allows Aeschylus to present the complete destruction of the attacking force. He may have invented the character or used the name to create a sort of mirror image for Eteocles (Garvie 1978, 72–73; Zeitlin 2009, 52). Eteoclus circles with his horses who are keen to fall on the gate. His shield depicts a fully armed warrior scaling the city walls intending to sack the city. This figure, too, is made to speak through an inscription exclaiming that not even Ares can throw him off the walls. The boast in defiance of an Olympian once more denotes arrogance. Ares, moreover, is connected with Thebes as the father of Harmonia, wife of Thebes’ founder Cadmus. Eteocles announces that Megareus has already been dispatched as an appropriate defender. He is one of the Sown men, sprung from the teeth of Ares’ sacred dragon sown into the earth by Cadmus, and is a man who bears his boast in his hands. Eteocles is not sure if Megareus will prevail, highlighting the arbitrary nature of Ares, but he is a fitting opponent for Eteoclus. Each shield emblem described is more complex than the last and this pattern continues (with the exception of Amphiaraus’s blank shield). At the fourth gate (Gate of Athena Onca: 457–85) is the enormous Hippomedon, a terrifying man brandishing a shield the size of a threshing floor. On his shield is an intricately wrought design: the monster Typhon with his hundred snake heads emitting dark smoke from his fire-breathing lips as snakes coil around the circle of the hollow-bellied shield. Hippomedon rages for war, possessed. Against him Eteocles posts Hyperbius on whose shield sits “Father Zeus, standing with his flaming thunderbolt in his hand” (512–13). If theogonic history repeats itself symbolically, Typhon is doomed to be subdued again by Zeus. The young warrior Parthenopaeus stands at the fifth



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gate (North Gate: 526–67) and is said to display a savage pride beyond his years. He values his spear above the gods, thus conforming to the hubristic attitude of the other attackers. His shield bears a particular insult for Thebes, the Sphinx, called “the city’s disgrace” (539) and the “eater of raw flesh” (541). In her claws, she clutches a Theban man, an ill omen for the defending Thebans who risk hitting one of their own through the clever imagery on this shield. Against Parthenopaeus Eteocles sends Actor, a man of action rather than boasts, attacking Parthenopaeus’s inexperience with the suggestion that Actor will prevent “a tongue with no deeds to its credit from flooding through the gates” (555–56). At the sixth gate (Homoloïd Gate: 568–63) is a threat unlike any other, the seer warrior Amphiaraus. He utters no boasts or threats. He expects to die honourably in battle, knowing that the expedition is doomed to fail. His shield is blank since he desires not to seem the bravest but to be the bravest. Eteocles lauds Amphiaraus as a great prophet and a pious man. Against him is posted “powerful” Lasthenes, “a gatekeeper” and one who “hates foreigners” (621). The combat is thus framed in terms of defending the gate against a foreign invader rather than attacking a pious man. Finally, we come to the Seventh Gate (631–85) where the attacker is at first reported to Eteocles simply as “your own brother” (632). His shield is new and contains the most complex blazon of all: an armed man made of gold is led by a woman who walks ahead of him with a modest gait. An inscription proclaims the woman to be Justice, saying: “I will bring this man back from exile, and he will possess his father’s city and the right to dwell in his home” (643–48). The man in gold is clearly Polynices himself and Eteocles chooses himself as the match trusting that the Justice depicted on Polynices’ shield is false. The sequence in which Eteocles sends off his champions has exercised scholars because of the different tenses used in his speeches (Sommerstein 2010a, 72–74). Eteocles will post Melanippus (407–8); Polyphontes has been posted (447–48); Megareus has been sent (473–74); Hyperbius was chosen (504–5); Actor is the man who will stand (553); Lasthenes shall be posted (620); Eteocles shall go (672). The use of tenses in this scene appears to be deliberate and implies that, through a dramatic conceit, Eteocles has already taken action in the defence of the second, third and fourth gates, making good on his earlier claim to choose six defending champions with himself as the seventh before a messenger comes to cause panic (282–86). On this reading, the shield scene occurs in the midst of preparations for the city’s defence as a prolonged episode crafted to ratchet up the dramatic tension as each strategy is explained carefully but also painfully slowly. There remains, of course, the problematic double identity of Eteocles as defender of the city and representative of a cursed dynasty. That issue is brought to the fore in his pre-battle prayer made after the Scout’s initial report of the invading army’s encampment during the tragedy’s opening scene. There, Eteocles had prayed to Zeus, Earth and the gods who hold the city, a formulaic and normally self-contained triad of divinities (69); but he follows this with a shocking invocation of the “almighty Curse and Fury of my father” (70). He prays that these powers should not let his city be captured or destroyed by its enemies, that the free land of Thebes should never know the yoke of slavery, and that these divine forces may be the city’s defence (71–76). The anomalous appeal to the curse of Oedipus marks the prayer out as uncanny and its utterer as aberrant, though it can be argued that it is precisely through the curse that the city is indeed saved when Eteocles decides to face Polynices. Pre-battle rituals among the attackers take the form of an elaborate oath ceremony (42–51), which includes the slaughter of a bull whose blood is caught in a black-rimmed shield. This too is unusually grim. Ares, Enyo (a minor war deity) and Terror personified are the divine sanctifying witnesses invoked in a unique triad. In a further twist, the attacking champions dip their hands into the gore, a practice paralleled only in homicide trials where participants touched the severed pieces of the slaughtered sacrificial animal as a sanctifying feature of their oaths (Torrance 2007, 50). Together, the seven swear to sack the city or die in the attempt.

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7.4  Gendered Perspectives Reports from the invading army’s camp focus attention on the male sphere of combat, although the oath of the seven attackers was memorable enough to generate a gendered parody in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (185–90) where a group of women “slaughter” a jar of wine and swear to go on a sex strike in order to persuade their husbands to end the war. The experiences of women in war, however, are addressed seriously in Seven and the audience is required to decide whether or not Eteocles’ angry attempts to silence the Chorus are warranted. Scholars disagree on this issue. Some feel that he is justified (e.g. Cameron 1970; Jackson 1988, 290–91; Conacher 1996, 42–47; Sommerstein 2010a, 78), while other find him excessive (e.g. Gagarin 1976, 151–62; Zeitlin 1990, 103; Podlecki 1993, 64–67; Stehle 2005). The young unmarried women who form this Chorus (109, 171) are terrified, all too aware of the rape and enslavement that awaits them should their city fall. The dominant lyric metre of their long opening song (78–181), the dochmiac, expresses heightened emotion and (here) deep distress. The first portion of the song (78–107) is astrophic, meaning that it does not have the orderly structure of pairs of responding stanzas (strophes and antistrophes) which are the norm in tragic choral performance. These begin only in the second half of their song (108–81; Hutchinson 1985, 63–65 argues that the parodos is astrophic until 151). Regardless of precisely where the metrical responsion begins, what this opening song conveys is a sense of desperate panic, which eventually yields to a calmer more regular rhythm. The first portion of the song focuses on the terrifying sights and sounds signalling the onslaught of the approaching army, a great host on horseback pouring forth at a gallop, roaring like a torrent, and kicking up clouds of dust (79–84). The noise comes over the walls, the army’s white shields are visible (89–90), the shields and the spears of the attackers clatter (100, 103), so much so that the young women claim to see the noise (103) in a striking synaesthetic statement. Interspersed throughout these descriptions are prayers to the gods made with increasing frequency (87–88, 95–99, 101–02, 104–07), until the song becomes a series of appeals to the gods of the city (108–10, 166–81), Zeus (116–17), Athena (129–31, 164–65), Poseidon (131–35), Ares (136–37, 162–64), Aphrodite (138–45), Apollo (146–50, 160), Hera (152), Artemis (154), all couched within continuous references to the terrifying evidence of imminent battle. The city is surrounded, bits whine in the horses’ cheeks, warriors brandish spears (120–27). Chariots rattle around the city, the sockets of their heavy-laden axels grinding, and the air is mad with shaking spears (151–55). Stones bombard the battlement and bronzerimmed shields clash at the gates (159–61). The terror experienced by the Chorus is repeatedly referenced (78, 121, 135) and the first word of their song threomai “I cry aloud”, a term used exclusively of women (cf. the entry in the Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek–English Lexicon), marks their perspective as gendered. It is precisely the women’s gender on which Eteocles focuses when he responds in a bluster to their song. Calling them “insufferable creatures”, he asks if it is really the best policy to fall upon the images of the gods and cry and howl in way that should be “loathsome to sensible people” (182–86). Women, declares Eteocles, are trouble, no matter what the circumstances. When a woman is in control her brazenness is unbearable. When she is frightened, she is an even greater bane to the household and the city. So, Eteocles hopes never to share his home with “the female gender” (187–90). He accuses the women of spreading panic and cowardice among the citizens, advancing the enemies’ cause and encouraging the city “to be sacked from within by its own people”. That’s the kind of thing you get, claims Eteocles, when you associate with women (191–95). Even by the standards of fifth-century bce Greek tragedy, the misogyny expressed by Eteocles is extreme. As the product of an incestuous union it is perhaps unsurprising in psychological terms that he should reject women, and it is notable



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that he omits reference to wives in his rallying call to the Thebans to defend their city, altars, children and the Earth their mother (13–15). This contrasts with the more standard cry of the Greek generals reported in Aeschylus’s Persians (402–05), where wives are specifically mentioned (Edmunds 2017, 96–97). There is also the context of war. Is he right to charge the Chorus with a panic-mongering detrimental to the morale of the troops? There may have been sympathy for his position among the experienced war veterans in the audience. At the same time, however, Eteocles’ position seems too extreme when he proclaims: “If anyone fails to heed my ruling, whether man or woman or anything in between, a vote on a sentence of death shall be cast against them and there will be no escape from a fate of being stoned by the people” (196–99). The language of Athenian democracy is here co-opted for absolutist purposes. A “vote” will be cast, but its outcome has been predetermined by Eteocles alone, while the punishment prescribed was one reserved in Athens for the worst crimes of high treason and was rarely enforced (Rosivach 1987). Moreover, the sentence will be passed on man, woman or “anything in between”, whatever that may imply, a strikingly all-encompassing statement of aggression that is not restricted to women. This certainly suggests that Eteocles overreacts to the Chorus women and that his misogyny is deep-seated and personal. External affairs are men’s business, claims Eteocles, while women should offer no opinions on them and stay inside where they can do no harm (200–01). This is not, however, how women are presented in Homer’s Iliad when their own city is under siege, another indication that Eteocles’ position is unreasonable. In Iliad 6 the women of Troy move around the city while the men are fighting at the walls. Hecuba is outside the palace when she meets Hector, who relays instructions regarding prayers and offerings that should be made by the women to the gods. Similarly, when Hector does not find his wife Andromache at home, he surmises that she may be worshipping Athena (376–80). It is appropriate for women to worship the gods in times of war, which is precisely what the Chorus of Seven are engaged in doing. As the exchange between Eteocles and the Chorus continues, they explain their fears and justify their appeals to the gods. They stress the unbridled clamour coming from outside the city walls: the rattle of chariots, the whirling sockets of the wheels, the howling bits of the horses, the blizzard of stones, the din of battle, the neighing of horses, the groaning of the city, the clatter at the gates getting ever louder (204–07, 213, 239, 245, 247, 249). Eteocles accuses the women of behaving imprudently, making a further gendered reference to “slaughtered sacrifices” being the business of men, while they should keep quiet and stay at home (230–32). Technically, Eteocles is correct that the slaughter of pre-battle sacrifices is conducted by men, but the Chorus continue to defend their role in giving honour to the gods who may defend the city. Eteocles insists that the Chorus are causing panic on their own side and works hard to silence them, but he eventually instructs them “to utter a better prayer” and to raise the ololugmos, an auspicious cry of triumph (265–70). Since this cry is normally raised by women, Eteocles implicitly confirms that women do have a role to play outside the home and through their voices. After Eteocles exits, however, the Chorus cannot shake off their terror and their second song (first stasimon: 286–368), though it continues with prayers to the gods, also graphically imagines the fate that awaits them should the city fall, increasingly so as the song progresses. All the women will be taken captive and led away, young and old alike, dragged by their hair like horses, their clothes torn off, while the city cries as it is emptied of this wretched plunder from which rises a mingled clamour (326–32). The Chorus lament the capture of maidens (such as themselves) forced into slavery and into sexual activity before their lawful time, declaring that even the dead fare better (333–37). Bloody screams will rise up from infants fresh from their mother’s breast (348–50), the city’s grain stores will be scattered to the winds (357–62) and slave-girls new to suffering will endure nocturnal consummations with

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their enemy as the summit of their wretched pains (363–68). These fears of the Chorus are very real and serve to highlight the gendered perspectives and experiences of men and women in times of war. Aeschylus thus brings to the fore the fate of non-combatants as collateral damage during periods of warfare in a manner designed to evoke empathy (Meineck 2017). Where male warriors risk death on the battlefield and all male inhabitants can expect to die if their city is captured, the women of a conquered city face the grief of losing their loved ones and their homes as well as the brutalities of rape and a lifetime of slavery. Aeschylus explores these issues through the opposition of Eteocles and the young female Chorus, both of whom could be said to display a greater (and natural) preoccupation for the fate of their own gender during the threat of siege warfare.

7.5  Performance and Reception As we have discussed, the sounds made by the attacking army, their horses, their shields, their men, are repeatedly referenced, and we can expect that some attempt at mimicking these noises will have been made in performance (Edmunds 2002, 108). It is also the case, however, that Seven generally eschews militaristic music in favour of feminine forms of varied lyric expression. These dominate the soundscape of the play in contrast with the constant iambic trimeters of the male characters. Moreover, the content of the choral songs paradoxically represents warfare on stage through the female voice (Griffith 2017). Sound and voice are crucially important in a play which contains little in the way of action. Clusters of alliteration and assonance in the poetic song of the Chorus work to signal destruction and chaos, while the pattern of their tragic verse is crucial to their role in the shield scene where their repeated interventions drive the inevitable progression of the plot (Nooter 2017, 94, 107–15). Statues of the gods, to whom the Chorus offer garlands and prayers during their entry song, will have been arranged in the orchestra, but it is unclear whether or not the palace of Thebes was originally represented as a stage building (Taplin 1977, 452–59 says not; Seaford 2012, 337–38 disagrees). The Theban champions were not present on stage in Aeschylus’s play (Taplin 1977, 149–52), nor do we ever meet the attackers, with the exception of Polynices’ corpse brought back from the battlefield along with that of Eteocles, corpses over which the Chorus lament at the end of the play. Adaptors of Seven, however, have often chosen to represent one or more of the defenders or attackers to varied effect. Cuban playwright Antón Arrufat introduces a confrontation between Polynices and Eteocles (following the model of Euripides’ Phoenician Women) in his Los siete contra Tebas, first performed in 1968. Arrufat’s defending champions have speaking parts and bravely accept their missions. All seven defenders are invested with their gear on stage in a ceremonial manner but without the physical presence of arms. This speaks to the poverty of the Thebans in contrast to the shiny new weapons of the attackers in a thinly veiled allusion to the US-supported Bay of Pigs attack led by Cuban exiles against Castro’s Cuban government in 1961. The defenders win out in spite of their inferior weapons (Torrance 2015). Mario Martone also includes the defenders, along with Antigone, as characters in the production represented in his 1998 film Teatro di Guerra. In the context of civil war in former Yugoslavia, an acting troupe rehearses Seven with an ultimately unsuccessful plan to bring the production to war-torn Sarajevo. Martone uses Aeschylus’s text to create a psychological connection between the cities of Thebes, Sarajevo and violent gangland Naples, where the film is set, demonstrating the power of this tragedy to assist in processing and dealing with contemporary warfare and its attendant trauma (Torrance 2017, 30–48).



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Music and dance are significant elements in a number of other adaptations. Einar Schleef’s 1986 Die Mütter (The Mothers), a version of Seven combined with Euripides’ Suppliant Women, focuses on choral movement to highlight the struggle between language and body in expressing the tension between individual and community concerns (Fischer-Lichte 2004, 355–59). Ellen Stewart’s 2001 production of Seven at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club in New York also included important elements of choreography, including seven duels in exciting theatrical scenes with gigantic props. One warrior drops down from the ceiling, for example, while another jogs inside a nine-foot wheel crushing his rival, and the giant hand of “fate” brings the sons of Oedipus to battle, in a production marked as well for its multiethnic cast and blend of eastern and western musical traditions (Di Martino 2020, 138–45). Will Power’s hip-hop adaptation, The Seven, first performed in San Francisco in 2001, gained international recognition in its revised 2006 (New York) and 2008 (San Diego) productions. Power presents Eteocles and Polynices in an originally harmonious relationship which later degenerates into enmity and violence. Tydeus, another character in Power’s version, is the devoted companion of Polynices in a drama that explores the insidious nature of generational cycles of violence. Oedipus, also a character in Power’s play is an OG (original gangster) who acknowledges his cursed ancestry and ensures that he is not the last generation to be cursed (Meineck 2006, 156). The inherited family curse is thus refocused through the lens of African American gang culture in a clever and powerful musical “mashup” of Aeschylus (Wetmore 2015). These remarkable productions demonstrate the lasting value of the raw material in Seven, a tragedy which deeply influenced Sophocles’ famous Antigone (Else 1976, 16–24, 28, 35–40), even if the play’s formal structure remains challenging for a modern audience.

FURTHER READING Torrance 2007 is a general introductory guide. Thalmann 1978 remains excellent on imagery, while Zeitlin 2009 gives an insightful structuralist reading of the play. Berman 2007 offers a wealth of relevant cultural, topographical and archaeological information, while Echeverría 2017 considers the context of classical military history. Stehle 2005 is a persuasive analysis of the (gendered) interplay of prayer and cursing. Griffith 2017 is an outstanding discussion of the play’s soundscape and its affective value.

REFERENCES Berman, D. (2007) Myth and Culture in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes. Rome. Cameron, H. D. (1970) “The Power of Words in the Seven against Thebes.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 101, 95–118. Cameron, H. D. (1971) Studies on the Seven against Thebes of Aeschylus. The Hague. Conacher, D. J. (1996) Aeschylus: The Earlier Plays and Related Studies. Toronto. Di Martino, G. (2020) Translating and Adapting Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes in America. Verona. Echeverría, F. (2017) “Greek Armies against Towns: Siege Warfare and the Seven against Thebes.” In Torrance ed., 73–90. Edmunds, L. (2002) “Sounds off Stage and on Stage in Aeschylus, Seven against Thebes.” In A. Aloni, E. Berardi, G. Besso and S. Cecchin, eds. I Sette a Tebe: Dal mito alla letteratura. Bologna, 105–15. Edmunds, L. (2017) “Eteocles and Thebes in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes.” In Torrance ed., 91–113. Else, G. F. (1976) The Madness of Antigone. Heidelberg.

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Fischer-Lichte, E. (2004) “Thinking about the Origins of Theatre in the 1970s.” In E. Hall, F. Macintosh and A. Wrigley, eds. Dionysus since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium. Oxford, 329–60. Gagarin, M. (1976) Aeschylean Drama. Berkeley. Garvie, A. (1978) “Aeschylus’ Simple Plots.” In R. D. Dawe, J. Diggle and P. Easterling, eds. Dionysiaca: Nine Studies in Greek Poetry by Former Pupils Presented to Sir Denys Page on His Seventieth Birthday. Cambridge, 63–86. Griffith, M. (2017) “The Music of War in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes.” In Torrance ed., 114–49. Hutchinson, G. (1985) Aeschylus: Seven Against Thebes. Oxford. Jackson, E. (1988) “The Argument of Septem Contra Thebas.” Phoenix 42, 287–303. Lawrence, S. (2013) Moral Awareness in Greek Tragedy. Oxford. Meineck, P. (2006) “Live from New York: Hip Hop Aeschylus and Operatic Aristophanes.” Arion 14, 145–68. Meineck, P. (2017) “Thebes as High-Collateral-Damage Target: Moral Accountability for Killing in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes.” In Torrance ed., 49–69. Nooter, S. (2017) The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus. Cambridge. Podlecki, A. J. (1993) “Kat’ arches gar philaitios leôs: The Concept of Leadership in Aeschylus.” In A. H. Sommerstein, J. Henderson and B. Zimmermann, eds. Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis. Bari, 55–79. Rosivach, V. J. (1987) “Execution by Stoning in Athens.” Classical Antiquity 6, 232–48. Seaford, R. (2012) Cosmology and the Polis: The Social Construction of Space and Time in the Tragedies of Aeschylus. Cambridge. Sewell-Rutter, N. J. (2007) Guilt by Descent: Moral Inheritance and Decision Making in Greek Tragedy. Oxford. Sommerstein, A. H. (2008a) Aeschylus I: Persians, Seven Against Thebes, Suppliants, Prometheus Bound. Cambridge, MA. Sommerstein, A. H. (2008b) Aeschylus III: Fragments. Cambridge, MA. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010a) Aeschylean Tragedy. Second Edition. London. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010b) The Tangled Ways of Zeus, and Other Studies in and around Greek Tragedy. Oxford. Stehle, E. (2005) “Prayer and Curse in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes.” Classical Philology 100, 101–22. Taplin, O. (1977) The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy. Oxford. Thalmann, W. G. (1978) Dramatic Art in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes. New Haven. Torrance, I. (2007) Aeschylus: Seven Against Thebes. London. Torrance, I. (2015) “Brothers at War: Aeschylus in Cuba, 1968 and 2007.” In K. Bosher, F. Macintosh, J. McConnell and P. Rankine, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas. Oxford, 434–53. Torrance, I., ed. (2017) Aeschylus and War: Comparative Perspectives on Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes. Abingdon and New York. Wetmore, K. J. (2015) ““Aeschylus Got Flow!”: Afrosporic Greek Tragedy and Will Power’s the Seven.” In K. Bosher, F. Macintosh, J. McConnell and P. Rankine, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas. Oxford, 543–55. Winnington-Ingram, R. P. (1983) Studies in Aeschylus. Cambridge. Zeitlin, F. I. (1990) “Patterns of Gender in Aeschylean Drama: Seven against Thebes and the Danaid Trilogy.” In M. Griffith and D. J. Mastronarde, eds. Cabinet of the Muses: Essays on Classical and Comparative Literature in Honor of Thomas G. Rosenmeyer. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 103–15. Zeitlin, F. I. (2009) Under the Sign of the Shield: Semiotics and Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes. Second Edition. Lanham, MD.

CHAPTER 8

Fear of Foreign Women in Aeschylus’s Suppliants Rebecca Futo Kennedy Aeschylus’s Suppliants was first performed around 463 bce and tells of the arrival at Argos of a group of refugees from Egypt (the Danaids, daughters of Danaos) who are fleeing marriages with their cousins, the sons of Aegyptus. They claim refuge on the basis of having been descended from an Argive woman named Io. The play enacts them persuading the king and people of Argos that they are “Greek enough” to be admitted to the city. Central to the play are the differences of the Danaids, who are marked physically as black-skinned and of foreign dress but who are able to gain Greek status through their performance of shared cultural rituals. In March of 2019, a student production of Aeschylus’s Suppliants at the Sorbonne in France was closed due to protests over the perceived racism of the costuming (Carpentier 2019). In the climate of a major refugee crisis, this play likely seemed timely. The issue raised by the French staging, however, involved the performers painting their bodies with dark skin paint (something often assumed to have been done in ancient productions), which protesters labelled blackface, a practice with a long racist history in the United States and a colonialist one in France and other parts of Europe. In a statement, the protestors highlighted the racist history of blackface (CRAN 2019), but the performance had defenders. The Sorbonne officially defended it, calling racist associations with blackface an “American problem” (Ministry of Culture, France 2019). Classicists defended the staging, citing Vernant and the tradition of “playing the Other” (Noel 2019), a discourse with its own colonial connotations. Underlying these defences was the assumption that Aeschylus’s Suppliants was empathetic to and created sympathy for refugees and immigrants. This assumption supposedly meant, therefore, that the play could not be used for racist ends. The protestors, however, did view this performance as potentially reflecting xenophobia. Was it only the use of blackface? Or was it something more? The dispute over the play’s staging raises the question of whether this play could be performed without being perceived as racist in postcolonial Europe. This question angered some, especially given previous productions. Ingred Rowland, writing for the New York Review of Books in 2015, emphasised the welcoming and pro-refugee potential of Suppliants, discussing Moni Ovadia’s productions in Sicily in the summer of 2015. Rowland opens her essay with the following: A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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In this summer of shipwrecked refugees and the Greek debt crisis, what could possibly shake institutional Europe back to its senses about our common humanity? The sight of wide-eyed children huddled together on leaky life rafts, after an infernal journey across the Sahara? An elderly Greek man sunk to the ground in front of a half-closed bank in Salonica, weeping from fear and frustration? If only these desperately lost souls knew what a powerful defender they have in an ancient poet of Athens: Aeschylus, nicknamed “the Sicilian,” author of the oldest theatrical works to survive to the present day. (Rowland 2015)

These very different responses to Aeschylus’s Suppliants raise an important question: did the play lend itself to such various interpretations within its ancient context as well. Suppliants has frequently been discussed from the perspective of gender: Seaford explored, for example, marriage and women’s agency (1987) while others have looked at female choral groups (Foley 2003; Murnaghan 2005), among other examples. Froma Zeitlin influentially argued (1992) that Suppliants was both a story of integrating the Danaids into society through marriage and an aetiological myth for founding the Thesmophoria. Building in part upon Zeitlin’s work, scholars have also frequently focused on Suppliants as a play about immigration (Vasunia 2001; Tzanetou 2012, esp. 10–11, 13; Bakewell 2013). Tzanetou (2012), much like Rowland’s and the defenders of the Sorbonne production, reads Aeschylus’s Danaid trilogy, of which Suppliants was the first play, as presenting the idea of Athenian imperialism at its best – taking in refugees, defending them to the death against the threats they had fled, waging war in their defence, and then peacefully integrating them into the city through marriage. A different perspective appears, however, when the play’s themes of hospitality and xenophobia are situated in the context of Athenian discourses about foreign women as threatening or dangerous to the polis. This chapter offers a reading of the play not as a story promoting integration, as modern scholars, performers and audiences often see it, but as one cautioning against it, as those protesting the Sorbonne production interpreted it. I read the play in order to see how it might have been received by audience members in its original context who lacked empathy for refugees and immigrants and who were likely proponents of and voters for a series of new laws restricting foreigners in Athens that were being passed in the decades surrounding this play. This reading differs from my previous interpretation of the play (Kennedy 2014, chapter 2), which argued for integration of foreign women into the citizen body. Suppliants is our first reference to the creation of the formal system for registration of foreigners in Athens (metoikia) and enforcement of the divisions between citizen and foreign that this new system developed (Kennedy 2022, forthcoming). This system represented an increasingly xenophobic, anti-immigrant hostile environment that certainly influenced the audience. My reading does not aim to replace other interpretations but to offer a different perspective that illuminates one perspective from the surely multivalent audience, the point of view of Athenian xenophobes with anti-immigration views, a point of view that is understandably often overlooked. Scholars in the past have considered the way Suppliants reflects and engages “fantasies, sexual anxieties, and societal prejudices” surrounding Egypt and other foreigners (Vasunia 2001, 39). How might this play, in particular, have fuelled those prejudices instead of assuaging them? Hospitality and xenophobia are two sides of the same coin. The words for guest and foreigner, xenos, are the same, an interesting polysemy in the Greek language. Pondering it can help us access some of the ways Greeks in various contexts considered their relationships to their neighbours – as individuals, as communities, as peoples. Guests – strangers – foreigners: the first bleeds into the next, an increasing trajectory of otherness, from friend to potential threat. Like the god Dionysos, in whose honour and at whose festival the play was performed, xenos blurs the boundary between self and other.



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Aeschylus’s Suppliants performs the reinforcing, blurring and transgressing of boundaries. The Danaids blur these boundaries, both as foreigners and kin, as both helpless and simultaneously threatening refugees. The play contains a debate about whether these suppliants should be accepted into or aided by the city, whether the city should fulfil its sacred obligations under xenia and towards suppliants and how that obligation should be fulfilled. Athens had freshly minted anti-immigration policies and more on the horizon. How did this play negotiate the competing interests of sacred obligations and xenophobia? Athens seems to have struggled to reconcile its religious obligations and propaganda as a protector of those in need with its chauvinism and, I would argue, racism towards non-Athenians. As Tzanetou (2012) has demonstrated, the Athenians regularly promoted their openness to refugees in patriotic plays, but those refugees entered into a city that allowed them to be sold into slavery if they transgressed citizen–foreigner boundaries. A form of racism inheres in the institutional oppression foreigners in Athens faced under metoikia (Kennedy 2022, forthcoming) and this racism sat in tension with Athenian propaganda. What can a reading of this play within this context (and what we know of the rest of the trilogy) tell us about this struggle? One thing to consider is whether the pressures of too many xenoi accessing citizen benefits led to Athenians’ xenophobia, as Aristotle (Ath. Pol. 26.4) and others like Plutarch (Pericles 37.3) later suggested. Or whether this idea is a code for deeper issues of embedded ethnocentrism (or even racism). My reading of the Suppliants has of necessity been influenced by the great debates of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries surrounding refugees and immigration, especially within the United States. Other such timely readings exist, like Wohl (2010), who reads Aeschylus’s Suppliants alongside RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) and the US–Afghanistan war. Thinking about this tragedy through such lenses, much like a theatrical restaging, can help us better understand our own world as well as the past.

The Story Suppliants tells of the arrival of Danaos and his 50 daughters to Argos, where they request refuge from King Pelasgos based on their descent from the Argive woman Io. Pelasgos at first resists considering their request, but after they threaten to hang themselves in the temple of Zeus (a sacrilege), he states that he cannot make such a decision himself and therefore asks the Argive assembly to vote. The vote favours the Danaids and the play ends with the women accepted within the city despite threats of war from the Aegyptians’ herald. There has been some controversy since the 1990s regarding the reconstruction of the trilogy (see Garvie 1969, 183–233 for an extended overview of attempted reconstructions). Garvie himself, Bakewell 2013, esp. chapter 2, Papadopoulou 2014, 15–24 and Friis Johanssen and Whittle 1980 are among those who sustain the majority view that Suppliants was the first play, followed by Aegyptians and then Danaids. In 1993 Rösler revived a nineteenth-century theory by arguing for Aegyptians as the first play (Rösler 2007), supported by Sommerstein 2008, 283–86 and 2010, 100–07. The preferred and most likely solution remains that Aegyptians followed Suppliants. In Aegyptians the sons of Aegyptus may have (already) attacked Argos. Pelasgos dies (maybe before the play opens) and Danaos becomes tyrant of the city. He then probably negotiates a peace, which involves the marriage of his daughters to their cousins, but with the plan of killing them on their marriage night. The plan is, it seems, executed, and in the third play, Danaids, the murders are discovered, except for that by Hypermnestra, who did not murder her husband. The play may involve a trial of either Hypermnestra for not obeying her father, or of the

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Danaids and Danaos for the murders. In the end, Danaos himself may also have died, and Lynceus (the one surviving Aegyptid) becomes king. Future Argives, including Herakles, were the descendants of Lynceus and Hypermnestra. Suppliants sets the stage for the rest of the plays by establishing an unresolved tension – the Danaids along with their father Danaos are foreigners who needed to demonstrate sufficient Greekness in order to be considered acceptable to the city. Interestingly, their cousins of the same descent were rejected as “barbarians”. The Danaids are then admitted to the city, but as metics (permanent immigrants or resident foreigners), which comes with stigma (“everyone has an evil tongue at the ready for the metic (μετοίκῳ), and it’s easy somehow to speak abominable things” 994–95).1 The tension does not end with their acceptance into the city, but instead builds as a cloud of impending war hangs over the city. The trilogy ended with the “happy” marriage of Lynceus and Hypermnestra, leading to a likely “refounding” of the city under their rule, followed (most probably) by the purification of and remarriage of the remaining Danaids to Argive husbands. But at what cost? The city lost a war, King Pelasgos died during the fighting, Danaos became tyrant (and then maybe died himself later), his “fierce” daughters married and then murdered their kin, and in the end the city was ruled by a new foreign royal dynasty. All of this was facilitated by accepting women immigrants/refugees into the city. Some scholars argue that the central tragedy of the play concerns young women forced into cruel marriages with “barbarians” who are saved in the end when offered consensual marriages to Argives (Zeitlin 1992; Vasunia 2001, 53–58; Bakewell 2013). Yet I believe many in the original audience would not have found rejecting the Danaids and forcing them to marry their cousins particularly “tragic”. The true tragedy for some watching was perhaps the fall of a Greek city to foreign rule – a tragedy facilitated by accepting foreign women into the city, reinforcing their already existing fears or hatred of “outsiders”.

The Context Although the play is set in the mythical landscape of Argos, it was written, performed and predominantly received by Athenian audiences. Contemporary Athens must contextualise the play. Athens had restrictive laws concerning foreign immigrants and residents that started developing between approximately 470 and 451 bce, the precise period when this play was being performed and its aftermath. These laws reflect the beginning of a victory of xenophobia over hospitality. The first laws created metic status (metoikia) and led to the eventual passage of the Citizenship Law in 451 bce, attributed to Pericles, which restricted citizenship to children born of two Athenian parents. This was a change from previous laws that allowed children born to an Athenian father with a foreign mother to hold citizenship. This law suggests a change in thinking about the relationship between citizens and the foreigners among them. It is unclear if all restrictions on metics beyond the Citizenship Law were in place by 460 bce; some of them certainly were. The most important and earliest restriction required registration with the polemarch, one of the annual magistrates of the city. Those who failed to register could be charged with pretending to be a citizen, the penalty for which was possibly execution or sale into slavery. At some point, metics faced restrictions on owning land and buildings, they required a citizen sponsor (prostates) and they had to pay a special tax (metoikion; 12 drachma per man/family, 6 drachmae for independent metic women and children). Metics who failed to pay could be, if convicted, enslaved. Eventually, marriage was banned between citizens and metic women, though not until the 380s bce; until then, the 1

The Greek text has numerous difficulties. In all cases, I have preferred the Tuebner text by West (1990a, 1990b) with supplements from Friis Johanssen and Whittle 1980.



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children of mixed marriages were considered metics, while after the 380s, they would be nothoi (illegitimate) as well, since they would not be born of a legal marriage (Sosin 2016; Kennedy 2022, forthcoming). The Athenian law treated other Greeks as being just as foreign as Persians, Egyptians, Scythians or other non-Greek “barbarians”. Thus, metic status in Athens, the status to which the Danaids were accepted, was a direct challenge to the idea of a shared Greek identity. A shared Greek identity, however, was the basis for the Danaids’ supplication. The idea of shared Greek identity, panhellenism, was always fraught, rough around the edges, frayed. Athletic competitions, shared language and other customs could not stop Greeks from thinking of themselves as members of their polis first and as Hellenes second, both before and after the Persian Wars (Hall 2002; Kennedy 2022, forthcoming). As early as the seventh century bce, the Athenians had a clear conception of themselves as distinct from other Hellenes, and the creation of the Kleisthenic tribes in 508/7 bce solidified Athenian identity as primary for Athenians and distinct even from their fellow Ionians whose tribal names had been used before the reforms (Lape 2010, 11, 14–15). In Athens, at least, the Persian Wars did little to change their attitude towards fellow Greeks, except to sharpen distinctions. It is within this atmosphere that we should understand the production of Aeschylus’s play, if we want to have a broader picture of audience responses. Many Athenians in the 460s bce seem to have viewed a large numbers of immigrant women entering the city with “strange” behaviours and beliefs as a threat to the polis. Suppliants can help us identify what that perceived threat might have been and why strict anti-immigration policies began to be created and enforced in the 460s.

Figure 8.1  The Danaids as staged in Moni Ovadia’s production of The Suppliants (Sicily, Summer 2015). Photograph courtesy of Peter Burian.

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Identities Identity is a central theme of the play and the identities of the Danaids are integral to their acceptance into the polis. Identity also underlies the Athenian separation of citizen from metic. Who are the Danaids? How do they define themselves? How does Pelasgos define them? What external markers emphasise their identities? And what do their various identities mean in terms of status as insiders and outsiders? As the play opens, the Danaids (see Figure 8.1) tell us they are fleeing Egypt (ἀπὸ προστομίων λεπτομάθων Νείλου,3). They assure the audience that they have committed no crimes, no bloodshed (οὔτιν᾿ ἐφ᾿ αἵματι δημηλασίαν ψήφῳ πόλεως γνωσθεῖσαι, 5–6) but are being forced into an impious marriage (γάμον Αἰγύπτου παίδων ἀσεβῆ, 9). Their destination is Argos because of an ancient kinship (κέλσαι δ᾿ Ἄργους γαῖαν, ὅθεν δὴ γένος ἡμέτερον, 15–16) through Io. It is this kinship that they will emphasise when Pelasgos (Fig. 8.2) arrives on the scene and to which they appeal in order to facilitate their acceptance into the city (40–56; 274– 76). They appeal to a specific panhellenic cultural practice, supplication, that they are

Figure 8.2  Moni Ovadia as King Pelasgos in The Suppliants (Sicily, Summer 2015). Photograph courtesy of Peter Burian.



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coached in by their father (19–22). Their kinship and proper performance of supplication contrasts to their physical appearance, speech and adherence to other Greek cultural and ritual norms. In their opening chorus, they repeatedly refer to their “foreign speech” (καρβᾶνα δ᾿ αὐδὰν; 119, 130) and then to their being of a sun-darkened, black genos (μελανθὲς ἡλιόκτυπον γένος τὸν γάιον; 154–55); καρβᾶνα is typically translated as “barbaric” and is listed in LSJ (Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek–English Lexicon) as a synonym for barbaros. It is a longstanding convention that, though marked as speaking a foreign language, our characters – Greek and Aegyptian alike – are able to understand each other, but their foreign speech is emphasised from the beginning to remind the audience that they are different. Their skin colour reflects ancient environmental theories of physical difference – they call themselves explicitly sun-darkened – though it may also reflect an ideal of proper citizen wives having pale skin, while foreign and lower-class women would be darker (see Derbew, Chapter 24 in this volume and Sassi 2001). Despite the fact they their pleas will be made on the basis of kinship, they position themselves in their ode as of a different genos from the Argives, whom they refer to as “native” (ἔγγαιος, 58) and who may hear their speech as closer to the grievous birdsong of Procne (57–68), a reference to the sexual violence they perceive this marriage threatens. Pelasgos emphasises the same elements upon first seeing them, though he starts with clothing, not speech or skin colour: This group that we address is unhellenic (ἀνελληνόστολον), luxuriating in barbarian finery and delicate cloth (πέπλοισι βαρβάροισι κἀμπυκώμασιν). What country do they come from? The women of Argos, indeed of all Greek lands, do not wear such clothes. It is astonishing that you dare to travel to this land, fearlessly, without heralds, without sponsors (ἀπρόξενοί), without guides. And yet here are the branches of suppliants, laid out according to custom next to you in front of the assembled gods. This alone would assert your belonging to Hellas but would cause confusion if your voice was not here to explain it. (234–45)

It is their clothing and act of supplication that first draw Pelasgos’s attention – and which confuse him. Two different cultural practices – clothing marking them as barbarai and supplication marking them as Greek; two different identities, embodied later in the use of the word ἀστόξενος by Pelasgos (356), a hapax legomenon that Aelian and Hesychius explain as meaning to be related by blood but of foreign birth. Edith Hall (1989, 36–37) views the emphasis on a barbarian identity as the point of Pelasgos’s speech; others disagree (cf. Mitchell 2006, 218; Rose 2009, 277). The contradiction of the Danaids’ behaviour, however, is resolved through appeal to Greek descent: Short and clear is our story: Argive by descent is our claim, offspring of the child-blest cow. I shall confirm the whole truth of this. (274–76)

Pelasgos responds: Strangers/Guests (ὦ ξέναι), what you say is hard to believe, that you are of Argive descent. It is hard to believe because you look rather more like Libyan women (Λιβυστικοῖς) and not at all like women from our lands. The Nile might breed such fruit as you (Νεῖλος ἂν θρέψειε τοιοῦτον φυτόν). Your (Cypriot appearance resembles images made by men stamping the faces of women onto coins). I hear that there are nomadic women of India (Ἰνδῶν τ᾿ ἀκούω νομάδας), dwelling beside the Ethiopians, who ride horse-like camels through the land. If you held bows, I would have compared your appearance rather to the unwed, carnivorous Amazons. But I would better understand this situation if I were instructed how your descent and seed are Argive. (ὅπως γένεθλον σπέρμα τ᾿ Ἀργεῖον τὸ σόν; 277–90)

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The reference to the Aegyptids’ black skin by Danaos later (719–20) and by the Danaids (745) seems to associate them more with blackness than the Danaids, a position taken by Vasunia (2001, 34). Although the initial claim of a genos marks the Danaids as physically “black”, they may still belong to the same genos as Pelasgos, here designated as Argive. They relate their genealogy to Pelasgos (291–324), which shows their skin colour is nothing more than an environmental epiphenomenon; it does not undermine their Greekness and is as surface-level as their clothing. At the end of this initial meeting, Pelasgos accepts the Danaids’ claim of Greekness, despite his own initial confusion over their appearance contrasting with their knowledge of the specific panhellenic practice of supplication, accepting the Danaids’ argument (Danaids: εἰδὼς δ᾿ ἁμὸν ἀρχαῖον γένος πράσσοις ἄν, ὡς Ἀργεῖον ἀνστῆσαι στόλον: seeing our ancient genos you should receive our supplication, this Argive expedition, 323–24). It is odd that they must prove Greekness in order for their supplication to be accepted and grant them protection as refugees – acceptance of supplication by its nature should not be dependent on kinship. It is even more odd given that their genealogy is shared by the Aegyptids, who are not afforded the same Greekness and are readily rejected by the Argives and Pelasgos. Derbew (Chapter 24, this volume) suggests this separation is part of a “sophisticated positionality” that allows the Danaids to alienate themselves from Aegyptianness and enhance their Greekness by emphasising cultural practices, which they understand but the Aegyptids seem not to. For Vasunia (2001, 41), who focuses more forcefully on the blackness of the Aegyptians, it is blackness itself that the Danaids can shake off. Wohl (2010, 417–26) discusses how the Danaids become “assimilable” through the casting of themselves as suppliants. This makes identity for the play a performance, one that some people are more able to act out than others. It also makes identity possible to fake or imitate, a fear embedded explicitly within the laws concerning metics.

Obligations Pelasgos accepts the Argiveness, and thus Greekness, of the Danaids through shared descent and the practice of supplication, but he does not grant them refuge immediately. He looks for excuses in order to reject them despite sacred obligations both of hospitality and supplication. His first question is to ask what they are seeking refuge from. Their answer is forced marriage, which the Danaids equate with enslavement (334–36), but which Pelasgos recognises as just the way marriages are arranged (338) and further emphasises that the Danaids had to have been wronged in some way. Being transferred as property into the hands of their new husbands would not count. They are asking him to risk war to save them from something he sees as normal (341–42). Aside from sacred obligations to suppliants, Pelasgos has other obligations, primarily to Argos and the Argive people. He has accepted that the Danaids have an ancient claim to Argos, but they are not its citizens: May this affair of the “citizen-strangers” (ἀστοξένων) be harmless, and let no strife come about hopeless and unforeseen for the city; for the city has no need of these things. (356–58)

The positioning of the Danaids by Pelasgos here as astoxenoi is intriguing. What does it mean for them to be both of the city and strangers? Friis Johanssen and Whittle (1980) believe that this is likely a “single-word oxymoron” for Aeschylus, intended to embody opposing identities (see also Mitchell 2006, 210–18). In this case, Pelasgos makes clear that this ambiguous status must be decided elsewhere – in Egypt, in fact:



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Look, if the sons of Aegyptus have power over you by the law of your city, saying that they are your nearest kin, who would be willing to oppose that claim? You must plead your case, you see, under the laws of your home, to show that they have no authority over you. (387–91)

In order for Pelasgos to take on the threat of war that comes with protecting the Danaids, he needs their status to be less fuzzy and more legally grounded. Does he have the legal standing and thus the obligation to accept their supplication? Pelasgos’s final attempts to refuse their supplication suggest he does not. When the Danaids ask him again at 359–64 to grant their request, he defers to the people of Argos: You aren’t seated at the hearth of my halls. But if the polis as a whole is to be polluted by them let the people in common concern themselves to work out a remedy. I will not make promises before, but only after, discussing these matters with the whole citizen body. (365–69)

He later reiterates this position with an emphatic assertion of their foreignness through the use of a seemingly proverbial statement: As I said before, I should not act on these things without the people, although I am not without the power to do so, lest sometime later one of the people should say, †if something unfortunate should happen†, “Honouring outsiders, you destroyed the city”. (ἐπήλυδας τιμῶν ἀπώλεσας πόλιν; 398–401)

The use of the term ἔπηλυς (foreigner) emphasises that, though “Greek”, they are still outsiders, still strangers. By the end of the play, they will be accepted into the city as metics (not citizens) and they will most likely marry Argives and so integrate into the city by the end of the trilogy, something that is hinted at in the final scene of the play, where initial rejection of all marriage gives way to rejection only of forced marriage as the Danaids and (most likely) an Argive escort discuss what may be a comprise of sorts around their marriageability (on the problematics of who speaks the exodos, see Bednarowski 2011). But the process of getting to that point emphasises some very important and potentially dangerous differences between these Argive-Aegyptians and the Argives themselves that undermines Danaid Greekness and may be where some audience members would question whether they were “Greek enough”. Their status as astoxenoi is not resolved and some in the audience would have accepted that by honouring immigrants, they did indeed cause harm to the polis.

Dangers For many interpreters of this play, the marriage of the Danaids to Argives at the end of the trilogy signals a resolution to the various tensions derived from both the Danaids rejection of marriage and their initial foreignness. Not knowing precisely how the marriages were resolved, I would like to suggest that we consider these marriages as less resolved than one might hope, at least in the eyes of some in the audience. The Danaids are not embraced as Argives; they only enter the city as metics, signalling a continuation to their separate status. In the Athens of 463 bce (and into the fourth century), metic women could continue to marry into citizen families, with decreasing access for their children to the privileges of citizenship. In 463 bce, their children were still citizens. By 451 bce, they were legitimate, but not citizens. Why this change? I suggest that it was precisely because of the ability of foreign women to marry into the citizen body and to produce citizen children that members of the audience might have viewed this play as increasing anxiety, not resolving it.

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While Pelasgos accepts the Danaids’ Greekness, he rejects that of the Aegyptids (who could make the same claim of Argive heritage through Io), a contrast that suggests a debate between the importance of cultural practice (and thereby mutable forms of identity) and descent (an immutable one). Athens of the 460s bce witnessed a great deal of social upheaval as the democracy went through growing pains – for example, reforms near contemporaneous to the time of the Oresteia opened access to governance positions for non-elite citizens in keeping with the democratic idea of isonomia and a need to create governing structures for their growing hegemony, not to mention ongoing wars with Sparta and Persia. The ability of foreign women to integrate into the polis through marriage and reproduction was precisely what made them dangerous because they brought not only foreign descent, but foreign customs and ideas – even if they might attempt to perform some customs in the proper fashion (Kennedy 2014). The debate between Pelasgos and the Danaids over whether to accept their supplication reveals gaps in their world views that, when contextualised into broader thoughtscapes of the fifth-century bce, signal potentially dangerous divides between the Argive king and these strange, semi-foreign interlopers. I want to emphasise two related gaps in particular. The first involves the Danaids’ response to Pelasgos’s suggestion that protecting them from the Aegyptids was a decision not just for him, but all the citizens. Burian (2007, revisiting his 1974 article on the topic) argues that Pelasgos indeed had the authority to accept the Danaids, but the deferral is intended to highlight the importance of the decision. The Danaids respond: You are the city, you are the sovereign people (σὺ δὲ τὸ δάμιον); a leader, not subject to judgment (πρύτανις ἄκριτος), in charge of the altars, the hearth of the land (ἑστίαν χθονός), by your vote alone (μονοψήφοισι), by your nod (μονοσκήπτροισι), with your single sceptre on your throne, you judge all matters. (370–75)

This response shows clearly that the mechanisms of democracy, or at least a representative voice by the citizens are foreign to them. They emphasise identifying the city and the body politic with the king alone. They emphasise power (κρατύνεις, ἐπικραίνεις) and royal authority (μονοψήφοισι, μονοσκήπτροισι, θρόνοις, νεύμασιν) and his lack of accountability (ἄκριτος). The compounding of the singular σύ and repeated μονο- make it clear that they do not believe he is responsible to any “people”. He is the people (σὺ δὲ τὸ δάμιον). The Danaids also follow up this misunderstanding of the political situation in Argos by threatening to pollute the sanctuary with their suicides within the space (455–67), thereby forcing Pelasgos’s hand to take their request to the people (468–89). This act of sacrilege is in direct violation of the Greek practices they perform to prove their Greekness and makes real the fear of Pelasgos that admitting foreigners would bring harm to the city. Argos has long been understood by scholars as a stand-in for Athens within the play, with the burgeoning democracy and roots among the autochthonous Pelasgians. It would be an easy step for an audience member to respond to the threats of pollution by the Danaids by increasing fears of such pollutions coming from foreign women entering Athens. And this is not yet to mention that Danaos himself has been silent the entire time and presents himself to Pelasgos only after the decision is made (490–99), even though it was he who, as the chorus reminds us, acted as the architect and strategist of their plan (Δαναὸς δὲ πατὴρ καὶ βούλαρχος καὶ στασίαρχος τάδε πεσσονομῶν; Danaos, our father, the adviser of the plan, head of our party, preparing the board for a game of pessoi, 10–11) and even though, if the marriage is forced, it is an affront to his authority as father. Danaos allows Pelasgos to believe that the Aegyptids are the nearest male kin to the Danaids, thereby weakening their claim to refugee status. The Danaids obey their father without question though his motives are unclear – does he really just want to protect them?



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Danaos’s position is odd in this instance. Foley (2001, 122) suggests that the Danaid’s obedience to their father merely shows them staying “within the bounds of proper female behavior”. But he is not presented as a suppliant, which would perhaps explain why he allows his daughters to do all the talking, and he requests a bodyguard (490) when he leaves for the city separately from Pelasgos to help him persuade the Argive assembly to support them even though the logic of the request is odd. Would Athenian audience members, who may have remembered the rule of the Peisistratids, sense hints of tyranny here? And would those fears have not been fulfilled in the second (or third) play of the trilogy? (Vasunia 2001, 143–46; Bakewell 2013, 40–45; Kennedy 2014, 31–32). This hypothesis is not so far-fetched: the Athenians were actively ostracising members of the Peisistratid family and other prominent families as early as 487 bce. The general Themistocles was likely ostracised in the 470s, while Kimon, son of the general Miltiades, had his turn around 461 bce, close to Suppliants. Both men also happened to be the children of foreign women (see Kennedy 2014, 61 n. 23, 24; 2015). I think we often underestimate how much rhetoric surrounding continued Persian (and other foreign) influence on the city and its elites remained in these periods and how much fear of immigrants and foreigners such rhetoric could stir up. An explanation for such fears of foreignness also appears in the play, an answer that we often associate with later periods of Athenian history, but that may have had resonances in 463 bce: autochthony. Pelasgos introduces himself not just as a native to the land, but as born of it: For I am Pelasgos, son of the earth-born Palaechthon (τοῦ γηγενοῦς γάρ εἰμ᾿ ἐγὼ Παλαίχθονος), and ruler of this land. From me, the king, the Pelasgian people, who enjoy the fruits of this land, are wellnamed. And I rule over all the land through which the sacred Strymon runs, toward the setting sun. I mark the borders at the land of the Perraiboi and the country beyond the Pindus, near the Paionians and the Dodonian mountains and the boundary created by the watery sea. (250–59)

He is of the “earth-born people” (τοῦ γηγενοῦς), the Pelasgian genos is as much a fruit of the land as are those who enjoy that fruit. The Pelasgians are referred to by Danaos and his daughters numerous times as ἔγγαιος or its equivalent while the suppliants themselves are xenai (strangers/foreigners), ἐπήλυδες (outsiders, immigrants) and astoxenoi (“citizen-strangers”), who speak a foreign (kardanos) language and show up in barbarian finery. In the end, they are called metoikoi, those who dwell around the land, but who are not part of it. The language of autochthony appears in this play and links the Pelasgian’s indigeneity to democratic practice, a mirror of Athenian ideals. Although it seems the myth of autochthony became central to Athenian identity only starting in 440s, there is evidence of its existence and also of a broader Greek discourse that bound people in various ways to the land they came from much earlier. Although myths of immigrants and travellers founding cities in Greek mythology and city foundation stories were common (Kaplan 2016), the Athenian foundation story was the opposite – indigeneity. And it was not only Athens. Other expressions of it appear as early as Hesiod and in Aeschylus’s near-contemporary Pindar, who almost exclusively links mythical connections to land through descent to the elite classes and not the average person as with Athenian autochthony. The idea reaches its telos in the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, Places (cf. Kennedy 2016 on this idea in the sixth and fifth century). In this play we see distinctions being made regarding the Danaids that match the distinctions made in the Hippocratic text and others concerning environmental impacts on physical appearance and customs, with similar values given them. Thus, we can see that the ideas were already floating around in the 460s and we can assume that the Athenians, at least some of them, believed it to be true. Autochthony was, in many ways, the great democratising myth that transferred what were normally prerogatives and status of wealthy elites to anyone born Athenian (Lape 2010, 27–28, 110–12, 256–62). It allowed all Athenians to position themselves hierarchically against other Greeks in addition to against non-Greeks. How does the play reflect this idea?

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The first example is the black skin of the Danaids. This would have been understood as a function of the climate in Egypt, setting aside Herodotus’s awkward suggestion that black skin is a result of black semen (Hdt. 3.101.2), which Aristotle corrects (Hist. Anim. 3.22/523a17–18). In Greek conceptions of the structure of the earth in the fifth century, the north was cold and its climate caused people to have pale “frost-bitten” skin, while southern climates were hot, leading to “sun-burnt” complexions. Greece, Italy and Persia were in the middle and so were a blend of hot and cold, rendering skin tones brown (Sassi 2001, 19–26). Because skin tone was a product of climate, it is passed over in this play as a non-issue for the Danaids’ Argive identity – they mention it, but Pelasgos does not. Therefore, it is a mark of their foreignness and their origins in a hot climate, but it is not valued as a sign of being a “barbarian” nor as incompatible with being Greek. Again, it suits their status as astogenoi. One other aspect of the environmental theory belongs not only to climate but also to political environment – character and governance. In Asia minor, the Hippocratic author of the Airs, Water, Places suggests that, because of the uniformity of the land and the temperate climate, people of Asia (where Egypt was located in fifth-century maps) are passive (12.6–7) and prefer to live under a king, which results in their souls being “slavish” (αἱ γὰρ ψυχαὶ δεδούλωνται, Airs 23.3; see also 16). If we consider the situation within the play, it is clear that the Argives do have a king, but they also have an assembly of the people to whom the king defers. This is not atypical of the way in which myths in Athens attempt to reconcile the history of a past populated by kings (in Athens and elsewhere) with their projection of democratic institutions backwards into that same past. Vasunia (2001, 48) does not see a connection between the environmental determinism of Airs, Water, Places and Suppliants but does recognise a connection between the “East” and tyranny (143–46). Given the emphasis on the Danaids’ skin colour and their preference for authoritarian rule and the connection of these two things in a variety of other texts, we might expect some in the audience to make the connection. Thus, while Pelasgos insists that the assembly of Argives must vote since they would be bearing the burden of the war that might ensue (and the pollution of the Danaids’ suicide in the temple), members of the audience might see in the Danaids (and Danaos) a representation of an Asian habit of subjection to autocracy. They bring with them “enslaved souls” (αἱ γὰρ ψυχαὶ δεδούλωνται), which manifest in their insistence that Pelasgos alone is the polis and has power, Zeus-like, to make decisions for the entire state. This stereotypical view of differences between Greeks and others might have encouraged some audience members in their fears and anti-immigrant tendencies, especially given how the trilogy later progressed.

Conclusions What can we take away from this examination of the potentially anti-immigrant strands within Aeschylus’s Suppliants and the trilogy to which it belonged? What can we learn about Athens’ process of redefining citizenship in the years before and after the play’s production? What are the potential fears that lived in the hearts of some members of the Athenian audience? What can a pessimistic reading of the play suggest to us about some of the ideas floating around Athens in this period concerning foreign women – refugees and immigrants, in particular? We should first note that the gender dynamics within the play, noted by many previous scholars, usefully points to a major locus of audience anxiety centred around the Danaids’ rejection of marriage, their fierceness and independence. Some in the audience would have seen the integration of the Danaids into the city through marriage as a happy ending in this first play of the trilogy. But audiences are not monoliths. Citizens do not pass anti-immigrant



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legislation, emphasising a “pure” type of citizen that directly impacted metic women almost exclusively without viewing these women as dangerous. We cannot separate their gender from their foreignness and the limited status they are granted even after “proving” their Argive kinship. Their foreignness is what is threatening such that even though they can be “tamed” through marriage to conform to what might be considered appropriate womanly arete, what cannot be erased is the undemocratic, enslaved nature of their souls, a product of their foreign birth. So, we should consider some alternatives to this happy ending scenario as possible audience reactions. Here are the possibilities I have highlighted in this chapter: ● ●

●

Fears of foreign influence, particular in sponsoring anti-democratic tyranny Foreign women as most dangerous because of their ability (regardless of physical appearances) to assimilate and “infiltrate” the citizen body through marriage and bearing children Increased immigration bringing potential political and social conflicts because there are imagined immutable character differences between those born Athenian and those originating elsewhere – even other Greeks.

I am certain there were many different interpretations of this play by its initial audience. I am just as certain that this pessimistic reading was one of them. I do not think it is only modern white supremacists or ethnonationalists who have worried about being replaced by “foreigners” or about their “purity” and superiority to others. Athenian hegemony was premised on Athenian supremacism and the 150 years that the autonomous democracy spanned after the production of Aeschylus’s Suppliants offers us ample evidence of anti-refugee, anti-foreign sentiments within the city (cf. Isocrates Antidosis 293, where Athenians are to other Greeks as Greeks are to barbarians – a chain of hierarchy). All of which should help modern audiences (readers or theatre-goers) understand that tragedies are polyvalent and there will always be varied probable and accurate interpretations in any modern readings or performances of Aeschylus’s Suppliants, as with the Sorbonne and Sicilian productions with which we began this chapter. It is a play about welcoming and integrating immigrants and refugees while also being about the fears one might have of “foreign invasions” – and much more.

FURTHER READING Sommerstein (2008) provide an up-to-date text and a helpfully straightforward prose translation. For a useful general introduction to the play, see Papadopoulou 2014. Those interested in issues of women and gender should start with Zeitlin 1992 and Murnaghan 2005. For immigration and metic status within the play, see Bakewell (2013). Kennedy 2014 places the play within a broader context of the lives of foreign women in Classical Athens. For reflections of Athenian politics in the play, see Burian 2007. Vasunia 2001 discusses the play within the context of the long history of representations of Egypt in the Greek imaginary. Tzanetou 2012 offers an in-depth examination of the place of suppliant plays that follow Aeschylus over the course of the fifth century.

REFERENCES Bakewell, G. (2013). Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women: A Tragedy of Immigration. Madison. Bednarowski, K. P. (2011). “When the Exodos Is Not the End: The Closing Song of Aeschylus’ Suppliants.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 51, 552–78.

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Burian, P. (2007). “Pelasgos and Politics in Aeschylus’ Suppliants.” In M. Lloyd, ed. Oxford Readings in Aeschylus. Oxford, 199–210. Carpentier, L. (2019). “A la Sorbonne, la guerre du ‘blackface’ gagne la tragédie grecque.” Le Monde, March 27, 2019. https://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2019/03/27/a-la-sorbonne-la-guerredu-blackface-gagne-la-tragedie-grecque_5441663_3246.html (last accessed: June 6, 2019). Conseil représentatif des associations noires (CRAN). (2019). “Blackface: propagande coloniale à la Sorbonne.” March 27, 2019. https://le-cran.fr/blackface-propagande-coloniale-a-la-sorbonne (last accessed: June 6, 2019). Foley, H. P. (2001). Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton. Foley, H. P. (2003). “Choral Identity in Greek Tragedy.” Classical Philology 98, 1–30. Friis Johansen, H., and Whittle, E. (1980). Aeschylus: The Suppliants. 3 vols. Copenhagen. Garvie, A. F. (1969). Aeschylus’ Supplices: Play and Trilogy. Cambridge. Hall, E. (1989). Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy. Oxford. Hall, J. (2002). Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture. Chicago. Kaplan, P. 2016. “Location and Dislocation in Early Greek Geography and Ethnography.” In R. F. Kennedy, and M. Jones-Lewis, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds. New York, 299–315. Kennedy, R. F. (2014). Immigrant Women in Athens: Gender, Ethnicity, and Citizenship in the Classical City. New York. Kennedy R. F. (2016). “Airs, Waters, Metals, Earth: People and Environment in Archaic and Classical Greek Thought.” In R. F. Kennedy, and M. Jones-Lewis, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds. New York, 9–28. Kennedy, R. F. (2022, forthcoming). “Race and the Athenian Metic Revisioned.” In V. Manolopoulou, J. Skinner, and C. Tsouparopoulou, eds. Identities in Antiquity. New York. Lape, S. (2010). Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy. Cambridge. Ministry of Culture, France. (2019). “Réaction de Frédérique Vidal et de Franck Riester à la perturbation de la pièce de théâtre Les Suppliantes en Sorbonne.” March 27, 2019. http://www.culture.gouv.fr/ Presse/Communiques-de-presse/Reaction-de-Frederique-VIDAL-et-de-Franck-RIESTER-a-laperturbation-de-la-piece-de-theatre-Les-Suppliantes-en-Sorbonne (last accessed: June 6, 2019). Mitchell, L. G. (2006). “Greeks, Barbarians and Aeschylus’ Suppliants.” Greece & Rome 53, 205–23. Murnaghan, S. (2005). “Women in Groups: Aeschylus’s Suppliants and the Female Choruses of Greek Tragedy.” In V. Pedrick, and S. Oberhelman, eds. The Soul of Tragedy: Essays in Athenian Drama. Chicago, 183–98. Noel, A.-S. (2019). “Non, le masque grec n’est pas un ‘blackface’.” Le Monde, April 2, 2019. https:// w w w. l e m o n d e . f r / i d e e s / a r t i c l e / 2 0 1 9 / 0 3 / 2 9 / n o n - l e - m a s q u e - g r e c - n - e s t - p a s - u n blackface_5443329_3232.html (last accessed: June 6, 2019). Papadopoulou, T. (2014). Aeschylus: Suppliants. Bristol. Rose, P. (2009). “Aeschylus’ Geographic Imagination.” Classica (Brasil) 22.2, 270–80. Rösler,W. (2007). “The End of the Hiketides and Aeschlylus’ Danaid Trilogy.” In M. Lloyd, ed. Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Aeschylus. Oxford. (= “Der Schluss der Hiketiden und die DanaidenTrilogie.” Rheinisches Museum 136 (1993), 1–22). Rowland, I. (2015). “From Aeschylus to the EU.” The New York Review of Books online, July 7, 2016. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/07/07/greek-tragedy-aeschylus-migrants-debt  (last accessed: June 6, 2019). Sassi, M. (2001). The Science of Man in Ancient Greece. Chicago. Seaford, R. (1987). “The Tragic Wedding.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 107, 106–30. Sommerstein, A. H. (2008). Aeschylus I: Persians, Seven against Thebes, Suppliants, Prometheus Bound. Cambridge, MA. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010). Aeschylean Tragedy. Second Edition. London.



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Sosin, J. D. (2016). “A Metic was a Metic.” Historia 65, 2–13. Tzanetou, A. (2012). City of Suppliants: Tragedy and the Athenian Empire. Austin. Vasunia, P. (2001). The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander. Oakland, CA. West, M. L. (1990a). Aeschyli Tragoediae. Stuttgart. West, M. L. (1990b). Studies in Aeschylus. Stuttgart. Wohl, V. (2010). “Suppliant Women and the Democratic State: White Men Saving Brown Women from Brown Men.” In K. Bassi, and J. P. Euben, eds. When Worlds Elide: Classics, Politics, Culture. Lanham, MD, 409–35. Zeitlin, F. (1992). “The Politics of Eros in the Danaid Trilogy of Aeschylus.” In R. Hexter, and D. Selden, eds. Innovations in Antiquity. Abington, 203–52.

CHAPTER 9

Disorder, Resolution and Language: The Oresteia David H. Porter1 Introduction Like the epics of Homer, Vergil, Dante and Milton, or the great tragedies of Shakespeare, the Oresteia of Aeschylus belongs to that small group of works which compel the attention of every generation, yield new secrets on every reading and evoke ever-new interpretations. It is stunning in its magnitude of conception and realisation: a tight-knit trilogy that deals with the central topics of the human condition – tensions between savagery and civilisation; the power of the human mind, whether for good or evil; our perception that we are free, and our discovery of those conditions that limit our freedom; our relationship to powers beyond us. The bulk of this chapter focuses on ways in which Aeschylus evokes in the first two plays and well into the third a world in profound disarray, where humans and gods alike are trapped in a seemingly endless dance of death that produces horror upon horror and shackles our distinctively human capacity of speech. The final section discusses the process by which in the end the gods, working in concert with humans, wrest order from chaos, purgation from disease – a resolution that nonetheless leaves open a tragic gulf between the world as it is and as it might be.

1

We are happy to be able to publish the late David Porter’s final essay on the Oresteia and thank his widow, Helen L. Porter, and her family for their warm approval of its publication as part of the Companion for which he wrote it. As a teacher and scholar, Porter had been engaged with the Oresteia for many years, and this chapter is useful, among much else, for its engagement with a swath of scholarship beginning from the 1950s and 1960s that is no longer as widely consulted as it once was, and proceeding more or less to the end of the last century. As a supplement, we have included in the Further Reading section many of the most important recent studies of the Oresteia in English, (Porter’s own earlier essay from 2005 appears in the list of References.) Additionally, the text that Porter quotes throughout is from a famous translation by the scholar-poet Richmond Lattimore, first published between 1947 and 1953 and very widely used since then in colleges throughout the English-speaking world.

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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Relentless Rhythms: “The Seed Is Stiffened to Ruin” Central to the Oresteia are the workings of the lex talionis, tit-for-tat justice, a theme that may seem limited but is in fact all-encompassing. In Aeschylus’s trilogy this type of justice spawns an endless series of violent acts that negate our humanity, are incompatible with civilised life and transform the cosmos into a blood-soaked wasteland. Aeschylus knew this world well from his participation in the Persian Wars – one thinks, for instance, of the Greeks’ brutal retaliation on the Persians trapped after the battle of Salamis on the island of Psyttaleia, which Aeschylus describes in bloody detail in Persians (454–64). An event closer to the date of the Oresteia, the vendetta-style murder c. 462/1 of Ephialtes, Pericles’ elder colleague, also underscored the issue. The fact that Aeschylus later that same year devoted his trilogy’s final play to the founding of the Areopagus, the court that tries cases of homicide, suggests his wish to emphasise this particular responsibility, which the trilogy portrays as essential to civilisation. The myths Aeschylus chose as basis for his trilogy, the saga of the House of Atreus and the intertwined story of Paris’s seduction of Helen and Agamemnon’s vengeance on Troy, capture the deadly mix of political and personal motives that characterises retributive justice, a mix present throughout the myth’s multi-generational violence, Thyestes’ theft of Atreus’s wife and throne, and Atreus’s savage revenge butchering the children who would have been Thyestes’ heirs and serving them up for him to feast on. The succeeding events provide the foundation blocks for the trilogy: Agamemnon’s taking of Troy and his killing by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, then the revenge of Electra and Orestes on their mother and Aegisthus, and finally the Furies’ quest for Orestes’ blood in retaliation for his matricide. Running throughout the plays are constant allusions, both explicit and implicit, to the font of it all, the vendetta between Atreus and Thyestes. Importantly, Aeschylus winds the gods into his web of primitive justice. In punishment for Paris’s breach of the laws of hospitality, Zeus dispatches Agamemnon and Menelaus to destroy Troy, an action Aeschylus portrays with the same images of predatory animals, of hunters’ nets, that describe the retaliatory acts of his human agents. In response to the tit-fortat morality of Zeus’s justice – the destruction of a city and its citizens for the seduction of one promiscuous woman – Zeus’s daughter Artemis responds by requiring Agamemnon to kill his own daughter if he is to fulfil Zeus’s mission, assuring that blood revenge from Clytemnestra will await Agamemnon upon his return. Apollo deals with Cassandra similarly, granting her the gift of prophecy to seduce her but retaliating for her rejection of him by decreeing that no one will believe her. The same kind of justice still obtains in the trilogy’s final play as the Furies seek blood justice from Orestes for killing his mother. Inherent in the lex talionis is the inexorable rhythm by which each victim of an injustice must seek revenge – and so turn criminal by the very act of exacting “justice”, a sequence that by its nature has no end. Aeschylus not only builds his plays around successive iterations of this sequence but also weaves its pattern into the smaller components of his plays, especially in Agamemnon. As if to underscore its iron-clad grip from the start, Aeschylus reinforces the larger movement of this first play – Agamemnon’s transition from Zeus’s agent of justice to offender ripe for punishment – with repeated variations on it in both odes and episodes. The parodos (choral entry song, 40–254) begins with Agamemnon and Menelaus sent by Zeus to punish Troy for Paris’s crime but ends with Agamemnon as slayer of his daughter, which above all will call down Clytemnestra’s justice upon him. The second ode (355–474) follows the same pattern, beginning with Zeus the avenger who through Agamemnon casts his net on a guilty Troy but concludes with Agamemnon the warrior king as target of divine wrath: “the gods fail not to mark those who have killed many” (461–62). The third ode (681–781) plays variations on the same pattern. Rather than beginning with Zeus and Agamemnon as workers of justice, it starts with Helen as the wrongdoer who drew the avenging Greeks in her wake. And unlike the two

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preceding odes, its final verses do not explicitly cast Agamemnon as criminal. They scarcely need to, for their description of houses where Pride begets sinful daring, of “high halls starred with gold by reeking hands” where “the black-visaged Disasters” are “stamped in the likeness of their fathers” (763–72), not only immediately evokes the House of Atreus but does so just as Agamemnon and his entourage are entering or about to enter the theatre. The first three episodes play similar variations. The opening of the first (258–354) is filled with news of Agamemnon’s victory: Troy is taken, the Greeks victorious. By its end, however, Clytemnestra’s description of the Greeks in Troy suggests less the justice of their victory than the guilt they may have incurred and the threat of the gods’ anger (338–47), and in between these poles the fire that Agamemnon visited upon Troy transmutes into the beacon relay that brings its flame to Argos. Early on, both the second and third episodes explicitly sound the theme of Agamemnon as agent of divine justice upon Troy (508–17, 524-28; 810–22), but by the end of the second the herald is describing the storm sent upon the returning Greeks by the gods (649) and by the end of the third Agamemnon has against his better instincts walked the blood-red carpet and Clytemnestra prays to Zeus to be her partner in revenge (973–74). The analogous movements of this pattern by which Agamemnon repeatedly moves from doer to recipient of justice are deeply worked into the structure of the play, and no doubt Aeschylus as director would have underscored them with blocking and choreography. The successive iterations of this rhythm suggest its inexorable hold on Agamemnon and assure that by the time he enters the palace he is irrevocably cast as the criminal whom we will soon see slain. The very nature of this justice requires of course that Clytemnestra in turn move through the same sequence, and indeed the relentless pattern instantly transfers to her. She enters from the palace proclaiming herself the worker of justice, but by the end of her succeeding exchange with the chorus they have targeted her as guilty and deserving of punishment (1505–12, 1535–36). The same holds for Aegisthus. In his opening speech he vaunts that he and the gods have wrought justice on Agamemnon and Atreus (1577–82, 1604–11), but soon he, too, is on the defensive, attacked as usurper and criminal, with explicit mention of justice to come from Orestes (1646–47, 1667). In the interim between Agamemnon’s entry to the palace and the revelation of Clytemnestra’s revenge, Cassandra reviews the long history of the house with its ubiquitous progression from victim to criminal, and the chorus, in the last stanza of its kommos (sung exchange) with Clytemnestra, explicitly describes the self-perpetuating character of this type of justice (1562–65): The spoiler is robbed; he killed, he has paid. The truth stands ever beside God’s throne eternal: he who has wrought shall pay; that is law. Then who shall tear the curse from their blood? The seed is stiffened to ruin.

An Ox Upon the Tongue”: Words Out of Control That the inner rhythms we have been discussing work largely on the subconscious level if anything adds to their power. As we watch (or read) the play and consciously register the larger workings of the lex talionis – Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes each walking the same path – we unconsciously absorb the subterranean variations on this same pattern. The trilogy’s rich imagery reinforces this same rhythm – and similarly works on both



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conscious and subliminal levels (Lebeck 1971). Even on a first reading or viewing one will consciously note how net imagery punctuates the trilogy’s larger movements. The second ode of Agamemnon begins with Zeus using Agamemnon to cast the net of justice over Troy, a passage that surely springs to mind when Clytemnestra describes how she in turn trapped Agamemnon in her net of robes (355–66, 1382–83). With this image in mind from the first play, we will scarcely miss its recurrence in the next when Orestes speaks of tangling his father’s killers “in the selfsame net” (557–58) and Clytemnestra in Eumenides speaks of the next victim, Orestes, as gone like a fawn from the Furies’ nets (110–11). Again, in Libation Bearers Orestes compares himself and Electra to “the orphaned children of the eagle-father, now that he has died entangled in the binding coils of the deadly viper” (247–49), but subsequently changes roles after he learns of his mother’s dream: “[I]t follows then, that as she nursed this hideous thing of prophecy, she must be cruelly murdered. I turn snake to kill her” (548–50). When at the end of the play Orestes, now the criminal, is pursued by the snake-haired Furies, there is yet a further shift. Aside from such instances, however, the Oresteia’s omnipresent imagery, like its underlying rhythms, affects us largely at a subliminal level. Extending the imagery of snakes and birds, for instance, are constant allusions linking humans to animals – helpless creatures like hares and cattle and sacrificial goats, predatory beasts like lions, wolves, crows, eagles and vultures, Scylla herself. Such language is so ubiquitous, so woven into the texture of the plays, that we scarcely recognise that its cumulative effect is to transform our human world into a world of animals – precisely, of course, what happens when the bloodthirsty, animal-like “justice” of the lex talionis supplants our human capacity to reason, deliberate and communicate through words. The imagery of predatory animals turns literal in the central figures of the final play, the bloodhound Furies who track Orestes, something that happens with other recurrent images as well. When Agamemnon decides to sacrifice Iphigenia, the text describes the “veering of his mind’s wind in a direction that is impious, impure” (219–20), language spawned by the literal winds that oppose him in Aulis and that lead to his decision to sacrifice Iphigenia. In the same way, the trilogy’s imagery of fire and light has its literal counterparts in the altars Clytemnestra sets ablaze at her first appearance, in the beacon-relay flashing through the night, and in the burning of Troy. The recurrent net imagery turns terrifyingly real when we see Agamemnon and Cassandra entangled in the robes which Clytemnestra has, fishermanlike, cast about them – the same “net” that Orestes will produce again at the end of Libation Bearers. The trilogy’s interpenetration of image and reality, and the way the words its characters speak grow out of and return to the diseased reality in which they live, exemplify yet another feature of their dilemma – the degree to which words have lives of their own that are often at odds with their speakers’ wishes. The watchman establishes the pattern. He clearly loves Agamemnon and resents Clytemnestra, but the only words he speaks in his role as herald, his cry that alerts Clytemnestra to his sighting of the beacons, set in motion her killing of his master. Indeed, recognising that his situation prevents him from saying what he so wishes to say, he ends his brief speech with the proverbial “an ox stands huge upon my tongue” and the wish that the house itself might “take tongue”, for it could tell the story “most clearly”. The herald from Troy wants to praise Agamemnon and to portray his expedition as having worked the gods’ will, but in his second and third speeches he describes instead the miseries the army suffered at Troy and the storm sent by the gods upon the returning Greeks; and even in his opening speech he blurts out the damning news that Agamemnon and the army have razed the altars of the gods. Like the watchman, he knows and deplores what he is doing: “It is not well to stain the blessing of this day with speech of evil weight…The

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messenger so freighted with a charge of tears should make his song of triumph at the Furies’ door… How shall I mix my gracious news with foul…?” (636–49). But in the end the best he can hope is that it may “all come out for the best” (674). These last words recall the thrice-repeated refrain of the parodos (“Sing sorrow, sorrow, but good win out in the end”, 121, 139, 159). Indeed, the chorus repeatedly does what the herald does – changes its tune, mixes foul words with fair. For them, too, words defy their speakers’ intention, “slip, slide, perish,/Decay with imprecision, will not stay still”. T. S. Eliot’s familiar lines (from “Burnt Norton”, Eliot 1971, 121) perfectly describe what occurs in each of Agamemnon’s first three odes, and it is instructive to watch it happen. In the parodos the chorus, like the watchman, clearly wants to welcome Agamemnon home as victor and just avenger, but just as clearly they are worried about the “justice” he has worked on Troy, his sacrifice of Iphigenia, the “justice” they suspect Clytemnestra has waiting for him, and Aegisthus’s presence in her house and bed. Three times within the parodos the chorus tries to suppress these anxieties only to fail, and each time we can see their own words lead them astray. They begin by comparing the two sons of Atreus to vultures seeking justice for nests robbed, but their own simile leads them inexorably to Helen, the suspect cause for Agamemnon’s “justice”, and to the dire consequences for Greeks and Trojans alike (62–67): …for one woman’s promiscuous sake the struggling masses, legs tired, knees grinding in dust, spears broken in the onset. Danaans and Trojans they have it alike.

Once these words are spoken, the chorus’s energy and confidence evaporate. Feeling old, impotent, withered, they turn to Clytemnestra for information and advice, thus entrusting themselves to the very woman whose hidden plots they especially fear. Indeed, the very arrival of Clytemnestra (assuming that she is present when they address her at line 83; for a cogent dissent, see Taplin 1977, 278–85) flamboyantly kindling offerings of thanks, seems to shake their confidence. At line 104 the chorus, implicitly realising what has happened, tries to start over, to get it right this time. Shifting to the dactylic metre of prophecy and epic, and stressing that, despite their age, “Still by God’s grace there surges within me singing magic grown to my life and power” (105–06), they move from their earlier simile of the two vultures to the similar omen of the two eagles that attended the departure of the host. But again their chosen subject leads them in directions they had hoped to avoid. Unlike the vultures of their opening simile, who are robbed of their young, the eagles of the omen are feasting on a hare and its unborn young, an image evocative of all the innocent young destroyed in this saga of revenge – the youth of Troy, Iphigenia, Thyestes’ children. Calchas’s reported interpretation, that Artemis “is sick of the eagles’ feasting” (138), a phrase rich in intimations of Thyestes’ horrible meal, carries the chorus still further from the positive associations they had hoped to sound, and Calchas’s closing words, “the terror returns like sickness to lurk in the house; the secret anger remembers the child that shall be avenged” (154–55), suggest Clytemnestra, who on the stage behind the chorus continues to offer triumphant thanks. The literal meaning of these words, “There awaits a recurring, fearsome, treacherous housekeeper, a child-avenging wrath that remembers”, calls Clytemnestra to mind even more vividly. As this second tack inexorably leads them in even more dire directions than the first, the chorus sings for the first time the refrain that captures so well the theme of the whole trilogy: “Sing sorrow, sorrow, but good win out in the end” (159).



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Yet again they change course abruptly, starting as before with a new metre and a new subject (beginning at 160). The new metre is the lecythion, a trochaic measure that Aeschylus will frequently associate with resolution of the trilogy’s evils, and also the struggle to achieve it. (On this metre, and its association with themes of salvation, see Scott 1984, 37, 56, 77, 135; for a different characterisation, see Chiasson 1988.) Their new subject is Zeus, the god of justice with whom they had allied Agamemnon and Menelaus at the start of the parodos, and the divinity they now identify as their one hope. By way of praising Zeus, they recount his triumph over Ouranos and Kronos, a theme that itself carries an implicit reminder all too relevant to the House of Atreus, that victory may come only after generations of violent struggle. The third stanza of their “Zeus Hymn” proves yet more threatening. They mention that learning comes through suffering, a theme that will eventually point the way to salvation but that for now leads to thoughts of their own misery and grief, and of how hard it is to learn wisdom. These topics in turn trigger anxieties that have been pushing towards the surface throughout the ode and the chorus, still singing in the trochaic “metre of resolution”, suddenly address what they have all along strained to suppress, Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia, and their fear of a violent sequel upon his return. The hidden trauma is finally in the open, and just as the chorus began the parodos by explicitly identifying Agamemnon as the agent of justice, so now they speak openly of the events they fear will trigger the next “act of justice”. As they do so, they abandon their trochaics and turn for the first time at 192 to the heavy, ominous cadences of a metre that will recur so frequently in subsequent odes that one might call it the “Agamemnon metre”. This metre is predominantly iambic, often combining the iambic foot with cretics and bacchiacs, its syncopated forms. (For analysis with scansions, see Scott 1984, 30–78.) We cannot here trace in detail the similar process that occurs in the next two odes, but even in translation readers will be able do so for themselves. In the ode that begins at 355 the chorus traces the same pattern twice. Their opening anapaests begin with Zeus and Agamemnon as doers of justice, but when they shift at 367 to the “Agamemnon metre”, for the remainder of the ode, the condemnations they introduce repeatedly suggest less their seeming target, Paris, than Agamemnon – so much so that at 399 they check their course and explicitly name Paris as their subject. As they did twice in the parodos, they abruptly try a different tack, now choosing Helen and her wrongdoing as their focus (403–09). Imagining Helen’s flight leads to imagining Menelaus’s sorrows (410–26), and that in turn to thoughts of the far greater sorrows of all those left behind when the Greek expedition went to Troy (427–36). Once past that crucial pivot, the way is open to the chorus’s powerful evocation of Ares, the war god as “gold-changer of bodies” of the living for those of the dead (437–44), and thence to their condemnation of those who kill many – the Greek leaders – and to the assertion that these are the target of divine wrath. The third ode follows much the same progression as does this second half of the second. It too begins with Helen as wrongdoer, using a pun on her name to dub her “death of ships, death of men and cities” (687–90). Thoughts of Helen lead to musings on how what seems so lovely – Helen, or Paris himself as a loved but cursed child – can prove so deadly, and hence to telling how a fondled lion cub grew into a “priest of destruction” (717–36), a parable that perhaps has its origin in the lion so often associated with Agamemnon in the Iliad. Fatal ambiguities emerge: musings apparently inspired by Helen and Paris prove more evocative of the members of the house of Atreus, each of whom will be specifically associated with lions later in the trilogy: Agamemnon (Agamemnon 825), Agamemnon and Clytemnestra together as lion and lioness (1258–59), Aegisthus (a cowardly lion, 1224) and Orestes (Libation Bearers 938). The chorus tries to regain focus by returning to Helen in the lines that follow, but the lion, so to speak, is out of the bag and, by the end, virtually everything they say in condemnation of arrogant and tarnished royal families suggests Priam’s house far

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less than it does Atreus’s. (On this ode, see Thalmann 1985a for a thorough and perceptive analysis.) This comes as Agamemnon is about enter with Cassandra at his side. As if to confirm their inability to convey the message they intend, the chorus greets Agamemnon with words full of hints as to the dangers that are lurking (788–98, 807–09), words he clearly hears but just as clearly does not take to heart. Agamemnon enters determined to establish himself as the gods’ agent of justice against Troy (811–15). His words, however, contain damning details: a city destroyed, its people dead, “because one woman strayed”; the taking of Troy likened to “a wild and bloody lion… glutting its hunger on the blood of kings” (826–28), words that unwittingly take to himself the parable we have just heard. In response to the chorus’s warnings, the king assures them that he knows how to judge men, speaks of applying medicines, cautery, or amputations to lurking disease, then again thanks the gods and hopes that the good fortune he has found at Troy may attend his homecoming too. His speech is long on rhetoric that suggests his own guilt and full of windy confidence in his invulnerability, thus aptly foreshadowing his ineptness in the ensuing verbal sparring with Clytemnestra. Once Clytemnestra enters and speaks, Agamemnon swiftly becomes a pawn in her hands. Just as the altar flames she kindles early in the play are the counterpart of the beacons that fill her mind, so the robe scene makes visible the imagination that is shaping both her word and deed. The scene is, in effect, a “play within a play” in which she, as director, has Agamemnon, by walking on the robes, act out the hubris that led him to sack a city for one woman’s folly, to destroy the altars of its gods, to return to his wife with his concubine by his side. Above all, she in effect persuades him to reenact the killing of Iphigenia, the deed she most holds against him, for his responses in this scene closely parallel the sequence of his responses at Aulis as described by the chorus in the parodos: initial awareness that the deed is wrong, then attention to arguments marshalled in its favour – there the army’s, here Clytemnestra’s – and finally acquiescence attended by vain regrets and foolish hopes that all may still be well. When his wife orders rich robes spread to lead him into the palace, he at once raises objections: others than my wife should praise me; don’t bow to me as to some Asiatic potentate, or invite actions that will inflame others’ jealousy; don’t urge me, a mortal, to walk on weavings worthy of the gods. But in an exchange of just 13 lines (931–43), Clytemnestra persuades him to accept what he has just rejected: in a moment of might you have vowed this very thing to the gods? Wouldn’t Priam have walked them? To be envied means that you are enviable. And in a conclusion where I imagine her kneeling to him in a manner at once obsequious and seductive, she casts the decision as a moment where he can show his greatness by yielding to his wife. In a response that underscores his folly, Agamemnon prays again that the gods may not strike him down for an act he knows is wrong; directs his wife to give kind welcome to his concubine Cassandra, this choice flower given him by the army; and acknowledges that he has been defeated (944–57). These final lines contrast sharply with his opening identification of himself as conqueror, agent of divine justice and sage judge of human nature. Even as the robe scene replays before our eyes Agamemnon’s failings of mind and deed, it also reveals the degree to which Clytemnestra herself is similarly tainted. Not only will we soon see that the robes onto which she has lured her husband are also the literal net in which she will entrap him, but their rich red colour, puddling out in dark blotches from the palace, also suggests blood spilled on the ground, a connection Clytemnestra herself reinforces at 958–62. In response to Agamemnon’s fear that he may destroy “garments stained from the rich sea” (947, a reference to the precious red dye harvested from the cuttlefish), she assures him that he need not worry (958–62): The sea is there, and who shall drain its yield? It breeds precious as silver, ever of itself renewed,



Disorder, Resolution and Language: The Oresteia 121 the purple ooze wherein our garments shall be dipped. And by God’s grace this house keeps full sufficiency of all. Poverty is a thing beyond its thought.

The sea of blood to which she refers is clearly that of the House of Atreus, in which she will soon dip these very robes when she kills Agamemnon – and, a point she fails to consider, which her own blood and Aegisthus’s will further enrich in the next play. (On the multivalent significance of the robes and the entire scene, scene, see Goheen 1955; Taplin 1977, 310–16.) As we have noted, the chorus repeatedly tries to convey one message in their odes only to find their words turning against them and itself conveying the opposite. As the chorus begin their fourth ode (975–1034), they ask, assailed by doubt and fear why their prophetic heart leads them to keep singing unwanted strains. These words are even more apt for the Cassandra scene that, perhaps unexpectedly, follows. To begin with, Cassandra’s otototoi popoi da at 1072, doubtlessly rendered with blood-chilling power, comes as a jolting coup-de-théâtre, especially for the original audience. Not only was the addition to tragedy of a third speaking actor still a recent innovation, but by now one might well suspect Cassandra would never speak, given the silence that extends from her entry in Agamemnon’s chariot into this episode itself, where both Clytemnestra and the chorus have tried in vain to elicit her response. Clytemnestra, fresh from her verbal victory over Agamemnon, is completely foiled by her enslaved rival in her attempt to communicate with Cassandra and eventually reduced to the absurdity of telling Cassandra to signal with her hand if she cannot understand Clytemnestra’s words (1060–61). Clytemnestra’s frustration is understandable: elsewhere (as we have seen) she breathes dominance and control, especially through her words, but now for the first time she must acknowledge defeat (see Thalmann 1985b, 228–29). When Cassandra proceeds from unintelligible cries to language that is all too clear, the chorus protests her strain as “illomened” and “inappropriate” (1078–79). When she alludes to the killing of Thyestes’ children, they reply, “We want no prophets in this place at all” (1098–99), and soon after they protest that no good has ever come from divination (1132–35). Her song is unwanted also to Cassandra herself, who from the start turns both from the house and from the song that against her will she must sing lamenting the prophetic pain that forces her to tell the horrors of the house (1214–16). Unlike the watchman, the herald and the chorus, whose words defy their true intent, Cassandra, who would love to stanch her flow of words, speaks nothing but the truth. In a different sense, though, “An ox stands huge upon my tongue” describes her best of all, for the cursed Cassandra’s clear meaning cannot reach her listeners. The chorus try to warn the returning Agamemnon but fail to get through and, in turn, his dying cries will elicit from them only vain debate as to what has happened and what they should do. Wherever we look, language moves in its own way, often defying its speaker’s intent. Clytemnestra’s language is even more sinister when she reappears at 1372, standing over her two victims and explicitly identifying the robes, now yet deeper dyed, as the fishing net she has used for the murder, then appropriating language of springtime, fertility and religious ritual as she seeks words to voice the joy she feels in having killed her husband. The very arrogance of her language, however, reveals her as one more human whose words betray her. They confirm that she, too, has undergone that change endemic to the lex talionis, by which each successive victim turns criminal, comes to see murder as good. Like the lion cub of the parable, she, too, has now become animal-like in her savagery, and the mastery of words which in general distinguishes humans from beasts has changed correspondingly. The cruelty of Clytemnestra’s language merits further scrutiny. There is the brazenness of her deception, for example, when at 601–04 she asks the herald, “[W]hat else is light more sweet for woman to behold than this, to spread the gates before her husband home from

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war…?” We hear behind her words not only her anticipation of opening the palace doors for the husband she will soon murder but also a reference to the sexual act and to the quasisexual pleasure she will take in killing him. And when she says, “With no man have I known delight, nor any shame of evil speech, more than I know how to temper bronze” (611–12), we know that she has long been sleeping with Aegisthus and will soon “temper bronze” as she dips her sword in Agamemnon’s blood. The word Clytemnestra uses here of dipping the sword, baphas, is the same word she uses of dipping robes in the “sea” at 1260; in both cases, blood is on her mind. Thalmann (1985b, 226) calls her “manipulation of words” in this passage “splendid and terrifying”. Her welcoming speech to Agamemnon similarly betrays her fixation on the murder she has so long been planning: “Had Agamemnon taken all the wounds the tale whereof was carried home to me, he had been cut full of gashes like a fishing net. If he had died each time that rumour told his death, he must have been some triple-bodied Geryon back from the dead with threefold cloak of earth upon his body” (864–72). Not only does Clytemnestra allude to nets and cloaks, among her murder weapons, but the “triple cloak” matches the three times she will later stab Agamemnon through the robes (1384–87). The images by which she describes what Agamemnon’s return means to her (896–901) are full of like ambiguities: “a father’s single child” recalls Iphigenia, “splendour of daylight shining from the night of storm” and “the running spring a parched wayfarer strays upon” evoke her delight in the beacons and her thirst for Agamemnon’s blood, and blood is clearly on her mind as she tells the servants to spread “a crimson path” to lead him “into the house he never hoped to see, where Justice leads him in” (910–11). These arrogant ambiguities by their very audacity reveal how completely her powerful imagination has become twisted by her obsession. The same twisting is implicit also in the sinister turns she gives to themes usually associated with life and salvation. She links light out of darkness to murder; she alludes to Agamemnon as “the flocks standing” at the altar, “ready for the sacrifice we make to this glad day” (1056–58), and to the spilling of his blood as a libation: “Were it religion to pour wine above the slain, this man deserved…such sacrament” (1395–96). Clothing, which should protect, becomes murderous, as does the bath, which should cleanse, and to her mind the spatter of a husband’s blood evokes the fertilising rains of heaven (1389–92): [A]nd as he died he spattered me with the dark red and violent driven rain of bitter savoured blood to make me glad, as gardens stand among the showers of God in glory at the birthtime of the buds.

Implicit in this last passage is another example of the twisted association of murder with sex. Not only do Clytemnestra’s rains evoke the sexual act, here twisted so that the spurt of a husband’s blood replaces that of his semen, but her language also recalls other aspects of female sexuality – giving birth (“the birthtime of the buds”), nurture and nursing (the “gardens gladdened by the showers”) (see further Betensky 1978, 15–20; Rabinowitz 1981, 197–98; Rose 1992, 218, 230–32). And the conversation that follows between Clytemnestra and the chorus is rich in sexuality gone awry, with Aegisthus “kindl[ing] the fire on [her] hearth” (1435–36) and Cassandra’s murder “a delicate excitement to my bed’s delight” (1447). Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra ranks with the greatest female characters of western tragedy – Euripides’ Medea, Racine’s Phèdre, Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth. Her language resembles the images that fill her mind – rapier-sharp, rich and blood-red in its hues, flashing across the dark night of the play like her beacons, as recrudescent and pathological as the wound to which she likens the House. It is the perfect mirror of a mind as brilliant as it is twisted and



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what gives it – and her character – particular power is that it seems both intentional and out of control, a profligate exhibitionism in which she both flaunts her evil intentions and unknowingly reveals the depth of her perversion. And it fully reveals the degree to which human language itself has become trapped in the same nets as the characters of Aeschylus’s plays. The association of deeds of murder and blood with healthy, joyous images branches out from its centre in Clytemnestra to the language of other characters. Cassandra associates her dark prophecies with lovely images – a bride removing her veil, the sun rising brightly on a white-capped sea (1178–83). The herald describes the sea “flowering with corpses” following the storm sent on the Greek fleet (659) and after Agamemnon’s murder the chorus speaks of the rain of blood, no longer a drizzle, that now beats down upon the house (1533–35). By the time we reach the second play, the land of Argos is “sunless”, with “mists huddl[ing] upon the house” and the ground “caked and hard” through “too much glut of blood drunk” (Libation Bearers 49, 66). The chorus, like Clytemnestra in the first play, describes the murder to come through imagery of fire and light: Orestes “will kindle a flame and light of liberty” (863–64), but after the deed is done they will see “pain flower” in him (1009).

Eumenides: Dissonances Resolved, and Unresolved In the opening line of the Oresteia the watchman asks the gods for “release from toils”, and by the end of Eumenides the gods have played the principal roles in fashioning, albeit at a price, just such a release. Even in Libation Bearers there have been some hopeful signs. Apollo, so unfeeling in his treatment of Cassandra in Agamemnon, promises to be steadfast toward Orestes, a promise he will fulfil in the final play. Orestes is clear-eyed and articulate about the horrendous alternatives he faces (269–96) and more aware of the moral gravity of the murders he must commit than were Atreus, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus about theirs; even as he is about to kill his mother, he ponders once again the horror of this act. Electra prays to be wiser and purer than her mother (140–41) and in her conversation with the chorus at least raises the possibility of a justice that involves judgment and deliberation, not just blood for blood (121). That said, in other respects this second play is even darker than Agamemnon. Its opening chorus is literally filled with blood – nails tearing cheeks (24–25), blood that cannot be washed away (48, 72–74), the vengeful gore caked hard, with swarming infection boiling within (66–70). Blood spilled on the ground still calls for more blood (400–04) and in the play’s first half Electra and Orestes experience the change inherent in the lex talionis: at the start of their kommos with the chorus they shrink from the horror of matricide, but by its end they have become willing, even eager avengers, so much so that the chorus which has spurred them on now feels its flesh crawl and laments the “pain grown into the race and blood-dripping stroke”, the “sickness that fights all remedy” (462–75). Underscoring the progression is the transformation of the children from eaglets threatened by a snake to Orestes as blood-sucking viper. Just as Clytemnestra in the first play, vaunting over the bodies of her victims, pairs lovely images with bloody deeds, so Orestes, standing over Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, vaunts in language rife with similar incongruities. He describes his victims as lovers who, in death, now lie together as they did in life; he spreads out the red robes, murder weapons against his father – and the embodiment of blood spilled on the ground – holding them up to the sun that the chorus has just hailed as emblem of his victory. The “sickening of the mind” progresses yet further with Orestes than it did with Agamemnon and Clytemnestra as he descends into insanity, his language commandeered by

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visions of the Furies he alone can see (1048–50). A similar change occurs at the start of Eumenides, as the Pythia, so articulate and composed in her opening speech, turns into a frenzied animal who struggles like a helpless child or old woman to find words for what she has just seen – the Furies massed on the altar of Apollo (cf. Taplin 1977, 362–63). There is reason to suppose that, in the final plays of his late trilogies at least, Aeschylus worked toward a measure of resolution, usually involving divine interaction and intervention (see especially Herington 1965), and something of this sort occurs in Eumenides as Athena works compromises that do indeed bring an end to what had seemed to be an endless series of bloodlettings. The foundation of the court of the Areopagus also assures that in the future the violent, unthinking workings of the lex talionis will be replaced by a justice that is humane and deliberative, the responsibility of the polis rather than a spur to vendetta within or between families (see e.g. Kitto 1956, 57–66; Gagarin 1976, 83–84; Herington 1986, 144; Rose 1992, 197–98.) Complementing this crucial step on the human plane is a corresponding evolution in the gods themselves. The divinities of Eumenides are scarcely perfect but surely surpass their counterparts in Agamemnon. Athena works by reason and persuasion, and her resolution honours the contrasting priorities of both the male Apollo and the female Furies: for Apollo, the restoration and maintenance of political order, and the sanctity of contracts, marriage among them; for the Furies, the importance of justice, including the fear that attends it, and the sanctity of blood relationships (see e.g. Kitto 1956, 69; Herington 1986, 122; Rose 1992, 236–42). Perhaps most effective and moving is the way Aeschylus in the final 150 lines of Eumenides rights numerous motifs that have been inverted earlier in the trilogy (see e.g. Goheen 1955; Peradotto 1964; Zeitlin 1965; Porter 1986, 23–25; Winnington-Ingram 1983, 166.) Gone are the twisted allusions to religious rite and ritual, to food and drink, to music and dance. The wasteland of the early plays becomes fertile once more, savage winds yield to balmy breezes, sickness and infection to health. Light regains its positive associations as the sun shines on a regenerated earth and the converted Furies light the way to their new dwellings in torchlit procession. And, at the very end, red robes, previously the embodiment of blood spilled endlessly on the ground, are placed on the Furies in recognition of the more enlightened justice they will now protect. As with much of the trilogy’s imagery, the deep-woven righting of these inversions is the more powerful in that its effect on us is largely subliminal. Nonetheless, the conclusion of the Oresteia leaves us also with a strong sense of issues unresolved, of problems inherent in the very resolutions supposedly achieved. Jean-Pierre Vernant suggests that Aeschylus is less conveying “a positive declaration with tranquil conviction” than “expressing a hope, making an appeal that remains full of anxiety even amid the joy of the final apotheosis” (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1988, 33; cf. Rosenmeyer 1982, 368). Philip Vellacott argues that Athena casts her deciding vote not on behalf of justice but in “the interest of a social structure founded on power” (Vellacott 1977, 120; cf. Griffith 1995, who also reads the Oresteia as affirming the existing class- and power-structure). Froma Zeitlin (1978, 150) analyses the trilogy’s complex gender issues and articulates the price at which resolution is achieved: “If Aeschylus is concerned with world-building, the cornerstone of his architecture is the control of women, the social and cultural prerequisite for the construction of civilisation. The Oresteia stands squarely within the misogynistic tradition which pervades Greek thought…” In addition, the resolutions achieved in Eumenides come also at the cost of a progressive diminution of human stature and initiative. This diminution is apparent throughout the final play, which begins with a scene dominated by gods – Apollo, the Furies and possibly Hermes (Eumenides 89–93, and see Sommerstein 1989, 99) – and ends with the confrontation between Athena and the Furies. Yes, Orestes has a speaking part in the trial, and a



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jury of humans plays its god-designated role in moving toward a verdict, but the strong impression left by the trial is of Orestes as a pawn argued over by the divinities who surround him. The Court of the Areopagus, this crowning Athenian achievement, comes into being without a word from an Athenian citizen and the collective impact of the votes cast by its human jurors pales before that of the single vote cast by Athena (a fact only exacerbated if, as some argue, her vote, rather than breaking a 6–6 tie, creates it). As Rocco (1997, 158) comments, “[i]t is Athena, not the legal process, that settles the conflict”. Moreover, Orestes’ final speech (754–77) is scarcely the climactic moment we might have expected. Not only does he bestow full credit for his acquittal on the gods – Athena, Apollo, Zeus the Saviour – without a word about his own contribution or that of his fellow-humans, the Athenian jurors (754–61; on Zeus the Saviour, a frequent and significant motif in the Oresteia, see Burian 1986); as soon as Orestes leaves, we realise that the larger issues at stake in the trial – and the trilogy – remain unresolved. The climax is still to come, and it will come in a scene conducted entirely by divinities and in the absence of Orestes, and what might have been his hero’s climactic triumph is immediately upstaged (cf. Goldhill 1984, 262; Thalmann 1985b, 231) – by a divinity, Athena. This progression is in significant respects positive, since it carries us from the deceitful persuasion by which Clytemnestra lures Agamemnon onto the robes in the first play to that by which Athena wins over the Furies in the third. As John Heath puts it, “The morally debased persuasion of Clytemnestra…give[s] way to the morally responsible rhetoric of Athena” (Heath 1999, 46; cf. McClure 1997; Foley 2001, 207–10). But Heath (1999, 43) also comments that “the Oresteia can be read as a battle for who can speak, who is silenced, who controls the conversation, who is persuaded”. This suggests a problem. Clytemnestra’s persuasion is righted in Eumenides, but only by Athena: unlike the first two plays of the trilogy, humans do little persuading. Orestes’ initial appeal to Athena is a cry for help, not an act of civic persuasion (Eumenides 235–43); during the trial he does little but answer when spoken to, and when he does speak at greater length (443–69), he recounts past history – his own and his family’s – and concludes by placing himself in Athena’s hands (469). Even in his departing comments on how he will deal with the Argives upon his return (762–74), he says nothing about using his persuasive powers. In terms of “who controls the conversation” and “who is persuaded”, in this play gods both do the controlling and, in the end, are the ones persuaded. Speech may be humanity’s “unique endowment” (Heath 1999, 42), but in Eumenides it is not humans who exert this power; indeed, in the trilogy’s final 270 lines, humans are mute. All of this bears directly on a central theme of our previous discussion, the degree to which in much of the Oresteia our distinctively human capacity to communicate through words is muzzled, twisted, negated. In the first play the watchman and the herald comment explicitly on their inability to say what they want to say. The chorus repeatedly tries to convey one message only to find itself conveying its opposite, so much so that in its fourth ode it asks why it is it keeps singing a “strain unwanted”. Agamemnon when he enters tries to praise his exploits but uses words that instead impugn them and, despite his awareness of what is happening, he is unable to find words to counter Clytemnestra’s assault. Clytemnestra, so stunningly adept with language, can scarcely speak a word without revealing the degree to which her mind has turned criminal. Cassandra, also preternaturally gifted with words, is unable to get through to those whom she addresses. Both Electra and Orestes have moments in Libation Bearers when their language cuts to the truth: Electra when she suggests that there may be a form of justice that involves deliberation rather than murder, Orestes when, confronted with his mother’s bared breast, he asks whether he should really commit matricide. It is in keeping with the tenor of the trilogy that in both instances these perspicacious queries are

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immediately rejected: the chorus directs Electra to pray for someone who will render tit-fortat, Pylades reminds Orestes of Apollo’s firm command. And in what follows, Orestes turns first into a gloating murderer, as did Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, then completely loses control of speech as he goes mad before our eyes. Although Eumenides as a whole does much to resolve the philosophical and political issues raised in the Oresteia and in its final 150 lines purges many of the metaphorical inversions that have flooded its language, it fails to address one of its focal issues – the diminishment of humans’ ability to control and use language articulately, persuasively, and for the ends they intend. No human in the final play comes close to attaining the full measure of this capacity. The Pythia is reduced to helplessness in the opening scene. In his first speech Orestes indicates that at Apollo’s behest he is placing himself in Athena’s hands (235–44), in the second that what he says and when is “ordered by my teacher” (278–79). He next speaks in a short interchange with the Furies (beginning at 588), the result of which is to place himself totally in Apollo’s hands (609–14) and the last time he speaks it is to thank Athena and Athens for their assistance and to pledge his and his city’s eternal gratitude (754–77). Although in this valedictory Orestes speaks with genuine feeling, his words fall far short of Clytemnestra’s eloquence, imagination and brilliance: there is no righting here of her perverted and misdirected verbal brilliance. In this final play, the lively debate and discussion of ideas takes place entirely among divinities, and the power of persuasion, in Agamemnon a human capacity, has now migrated to Athena (who, as if to underline the point, was almost certainly played by the same actor who earlier in the trilogy had played Clytemnestra). It has often been suggested that by the time the trilogy ends women have been returned to their “proper places”, their uppitiness tamed to society’s needs. It is not, however, just female forwardness that here is bridled: the final play offers us a world in which no human, male or female, rises to greatness. In addition, while the end of Eumenides, as mentioned before, rights one after another of the images and motifs that are inverted early in the trilogy, the richness of emotion that is present in such twisted – but heaven-storming – form in Clytemnestra is purged rather than restored, leaving us with a universe tamed and at peace, but diminished in the emotional energies that animate the world, and should animate human society. The Oresteia in fact invites us to meditate about the very answers it offers. Aeschylus seems to suggest that the collaborative, institutional resolutions attained in Eumenides may offer the only way to tame the passions that play so powerfully within and among humans; but the poet who created the Clytemnestra of Agamemnon – and the remarkable verbal tapestry of the Oresteia itself – surely understood the irony of a resolution that makes it possible for humans to live together only at the expense of eliminating or subordinating their most precious abilities, among them the verbal mastery so central to human life at every level. That we say farewell to the last speaking human so long before the trilogy’s conclusion – and that for the remainder matters are taken out of human hands – casts its poignant coloration on the concluding festivities, as does the fact that the Orestes we last see is the passive recipient of his salvation rather than its architect – compare the active role he takes in Libation Bearers. The final play offers significant response to the watchman’s opening prayer for a release from toils: the founding of the court frees humans from the treadmill of the lex talionis; the land is purged of blood and disease; light does penetrate the darkness. But the corollary to these advances seems to be that the watchman’s ox still stands huge upon the human tongue.



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FURTHER READING Valuable general introductions to the Oresteia may be found in Sommerstein 2010, 121–212 and Mitchell-Boyask 2018, alongside erudite and accessible treatments of the individual plays by Goward 2006 and Raeburn and Thomas 2011 (Agamemnon), Marshall 2017 (Libation Bearers) and MitchellBoyask 2009 (Eumenides). On the “imagery” of the Oresteia, once a staple of new critical approaches, the most comprehensive treatments are by Lebeck 1971, Dumortier 1935 and Petrounias 1976; see also Rosenmeyer 1982, 119–42 and more recently Rutherford 2012, ch.4 (esp. pp. 128–34). On persuasion and language see Peradotto 1969, Rabinowitz 1981, Buxton 1982, 105–14, Goldhill 1986, 1–56, Heath 1999 and Rynearson 2013. Nooter 2017 offers a new materialist reading of language in the Oresteia with a focus on the aesthetics of voice. For the study of gender issues, Froma Zeitlin’s work (1978, 1988) remains an essential starting point, alongside more recent treatments of Clytemnestra in McClure 1997 and Foley 2001, 202–34; and of Cassandra in Debnar 2010. For the figures of the “Furies” (Erinyes) in Eumenides, see Sewell-Rutter 2007, ch.4 (esp. 104–09). The question of Aeschylean justice in its political context looms large in studies of the Oresteia: see Podlecki 1966, ch.5, Rosenmeyer 1982, 353–68, MacLeod 1982, Schaps 1993, Pelling 2000, 167–77 and Kennedy 2009 (esp. p. 38 with bibliography). The issue of the vote in Eumenides has been much debated: see Kitto 1966, 19–22, Gagarin 1975, Hester 1981, Goldhill 1984, 256–60, Conacher 1987, 164–66, Sommerstein 1989, 222–26, Seaford 1995, 209–12. On the jurors’ role, cf. Griffith 1995, 77–78. On justice and revenge: see Burnett 1998, ch.4 and McHardy 2008, ch.5. A judicious critique of the triumphalist reading of the trilogy’s conclusion appears in Allen 2000, 20–23.

REFERENCES Allen, D. (2000). The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens. Princeton. Betensky, A. (1978). “Aeschylus’ Oresteia: The Power of Clytemnestra.” Ramus 7, 11–24. Burian, P. (1986). “Zeus ΣΩΤΗΡ ΤΡΙΤΟΣ and Some Triads in Aeschylus’ Oresteia.” American Journal of Philology 107, 332–42. Burnett, A. P. (1998). Revenge in Attic and Later Tragedy. Sather Classical Lectures, 62. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Buxton, R. (1982). Persuasion in Greek Tragedy: A Study of Peitho. Cambridge. Chiasson, C. C. (1988). “Lecythia and the Justice of Zeus in Aeschylus’ Oresteia.” Phoenix 42, 1–21. Conacher, D. J. (1987). Aeschylus’ Oresteia: A Literary Commentary. Toronto. Debnar, P. (2010). “The Sexual Status of Aeschylus’ Cassandra.” Classical Philology 105, 129–45. Dumortier, J. (1935). Les Images dans la poésie d’Eschyle. Paris. Eliot, T. S. (1971). The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950. New York. Foley, H. P. (2001). Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton. Gagarin, M. (1975). “The Vote of Athena.” American Journal of Philology 96, 121–127. Gagarin, M. (1976). Aeschylean Drama. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Goheen, R. F. (1955). “Aspects of Dramatic Symbolism: Three Studies in the Oresteia.” American Journal of Philology 76, 113–37. Goldhill, S. (1984). Language, Sexuality, Narrative: The Oresteia. Cambridge. Goldhill, S. (1986). Reading Greek Tragedy. Cambridge. Goward, B. (2006). Aeschylus: Agamemnon. London. Griffith, M. (1995). “Brilliant Dynasts: Power and Politics in the Oresteia.” Classical Antiquity 14, 62–129. Heath, J. (1999). “Disentangling the Beast: Humans and Other Animals in Aeschylus’ Oresteia.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 119, 17–47. Herington, C. J. (1965). “Aeschylus: The Last Phase.” Arion 4, 387–403.

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Herington, C. J. (1986). Aeschylus. New Haven. Hester, D. A. (1981). “The Casting Vote.” American Journal of Philology 102, 265–74. Kennedy, R. F. (2009). Athena’s Justice: Athena, Athens and the Concept of Justice in Greek Tragedy. New York. Kitto, H. D. F. (1956). Form and Meaning in Drama. London. Kitto, H. D. F. (1966). Poiesis. Structure and Thought. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Knox, B. M. W. (1952). “The Lion in the House.” Classical Philology 47, 17–25. Lebeck, A. (1971). The Oresteia. A Study in Language and Structure. Cambridge, MA. Marshall, C. W. (2017). Aeschylus: Libation Bearers. London. McClure, L. (1997). “Clytemnestra’s Binding Spell (Ag. 958–974).” Classical Journal 92, 123–40. McHardy, F. (2008). Revenge in Athenian Culture. London. Mitchell-Boyask, R. (2009). Aeschylus: Eumenides. London. Mitchell-Boyask, R. (2018). “Aeschylus’s Oresteia.” Oxford Bibliographies Online. Oxford. Nooter, S. (2017). The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus. Cambridge. Pelling, C. B. (2000). Literary Texts and the Greek Historian. London. Peradotto, J. J. (1964). “Some Patterns of Nature Imagery in the Oresteia.” American Journal of Philology 85, 378–93. Peradotto, J. J. (1969). “Cledonomancy in the Oresteia.” American Journal of Philology 90, 1–21. Petrounias, E. (1976). Funktion und Thematik der Bilder bei Aischylos. Gottingen. Podlecki, A. (1966). The Political Background of Aeschylean Tragedy. Ann Arbor. Porter, D. H. (1971). “Structural Parallelism in Greek Tragedy: A Preliminary Study.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 102, 465–96. Porter, D. H. (1986). “The Imagery of Greek Tragedy: Three Characteristics.” Symbolae Osloenses 61, 19–42. Porter, D. H. (2005). “Aeschylus’ Eumenides: Some Contrapuntal Lines.” American Journal of Philology 126, 303–31. Rabinowitz, N. S. (1981). “From Force to Persuasion: Aeschylus’ Oresteia as Cosmogonic Myth.” Ramus 10, 159–91. Raeburn, D. and Thomas, O. (2011). The Agamemnon of Aeschylus. A Commentary for Students. Oxford. Rocco, C. (1997). Tragedy and Enlightenment. Athenian Political Thought and the Dilemmas of Modernity. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Rose, P. W. (1992). Sons of the Gods, Children of Earth. Ideology and Literary Form in Ancient Greece. Ithaca, NY. Rosenmeyer, T. G. (1982). The Art of Aeschylus. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Rutherford, R. B. (2012). Greek Tragic Style: Form, Language and Interpretation. Oxford. Rynearson, N. (2013). “Courting the Erinyes: Persuasion, Sacrifice, and Seduction in Aeschylus’s Eumenides.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 143, 1–22. Schaps, D. M. (1993). “Aeschylus’ Politics and the Theme of the Oresteia.” In R. M. Rosen and J. Farrell, eds. Nomodeiktes: Greek Studies in Honor of Martin Ostwald. Ann Arbor, 505–516. Scott, W. C. (1984). Musical Design in Aeschylean Theater. Hanover. Seaford, R. (1995). “Historicizing Tragic Ambivalence: The Vote of Athena.” In B. Goff, ed. History, Tragedy, Theory. Dialogues on Athenian Drama. Austin, 202–21. Sewell-Rutter, N. J. (2007). Guilty by Descent: Moral Inheritance and Decision Making in Greek Tragedy. Oxford. Sommerstein, A. H. (1989). Aeschylus. Eumenides. Cambridge. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010). Aeschylean Tragedy. Second Edition. London. Taplin, O. (1977). The Stagecraft of Aeschylus. Oxford. Thalmann, W. G. (1985a). “Speech and Silence in the Oresteia 1: Agamemnon 1025-1029.” Phoenix 39, 99–109. Thalmann, W. G. (1985b). “Speech and Silence in the Oresteia 2.” Phoenix 39, 221–37.



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Vellacott, P. (1977). “Has Good Prevailed? A Further Study of the Oresteia.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 81, 113–22. Vernant, J.-P. and Vidal-Naquet, P. (1988). Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece. New York. Winnington-Ingram, R. P. (1983). Studies in Aeschylus. Cambridge. Zeitlin, F. I. (1965). “The Motif of the Corrupted Sacrifice in Aeschylus’ Oresteia.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 96, 463–508. Zeitlin, F. I. (1978). “The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia.” Arethusa 11, 149–84. Zeitlin, F. I. (1988). “The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia.” In H. Bloom, ed. Aeschylus’s the Oresteia. New York, 47–72.

CHAPTER 10

Eumenides: Justice, Gender, the Gods and the City Peter Burian Dikē Since the Oresteia enacts a multi-generational story of crime and punishment, it is not surprising that ideas of justice are at its very heart and that the trilogy makes abundant use of dikē, the Greek word regularly translated “justice”. The meaning of the word, however, is not simple or fixed. Indeed, the trilogy is directed towards understanding what justice is both for individuals and for the larger community. Eumenides sharpens the focus of that inquiry and concludes with a myth of the foundation of legal justice as the solution to the destructive consequences of the primordial reign of retributive justice. To understand how the trilogy frames this inquiry, it is important to understand that dikē has meanings more various and much broader in practice than the translation “justice” suggests. The word itself can signify what is right in the most general sense as well as denoting specific legal terms that in English are often quite distinct such as lawsuit, court and punishment. These legal uses of dikē, along with many nouns, adjectives and verbs derived from it, occur with the greatest frequency in Eumenides, but (as Mitchell-Boyask 2009, 99 points out) proleptic uses in the first two plays of the trilogy help prepare the ground for the establishment of the law-court in the third: e.g. Agamemnon 41and 451 (the Trojan War prosecuted with the language of a lawsuit: ἀντίδικος and προδίκοις respectively, both referring to an advocate in court), 1421 (the Chorus as a harsh “judge” of Clytemnestra); Libation Bearers 120–21 (invoking a god as “judge” or as “avenger” [δικήφορον, lit. “bearer of justice/punishment”]), 987–89 (Orestes hoping that Apollo will one day defend him as “witness in a trial”, μάρτυς ἐν δίκῃ). All these uses of dikē, in addition to their specific legal meaning, carry with them an assertion of justice which the speaker and context may reinforce or undercut. (There is a full treatment of the ambiguities surrounding dikē-words in the Oresteia in Goldhill 1986, 33–56. For a critique of his insistence on the complete lack of resolution as to the meaning of the term at the end of the trilogy, see Seaford 1995.)

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Eumenides: Justice, Gender, the Gods and the City 131 Bear in mind as well that the Greeks worshipped Dikē as a deity, and that the broadest definition makes it a kind of cosmic principle of balance, and therefore a necessary principle of order. The most eloquent testimony to this comes in two fragments of the Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus: “One must know that war is common [to everything], that strife [eris] is justice [dikē]” (frag. 80 Diels-Kranz); and “The Sun will not overstep his limits (metra) but if he doesn’t, the Erinyes, handmaids of Dikē, will find him out” (frag. 94 Diels-Kranz). This conception of justice as a necessary rebalancing need not involve violent retribution, but Heraclitus’s equation of dikē with strife suggests that justice by its nature involves, in one form or other, the settling of disputes (Seaford 2012, chapter 14; Bromberg, Chapter 4 in this volume). Retributive justice, the traditional understanding of the eye-for-an-eye violence that runs through the first two plays of the Oresteia, satisfies the victims of injustice by striking down its perpetrator, but in so doing creates new victims who feels equally justified in taking revenge, and so on, if not ad infinitum at least until all those who have reason to exact vengeance have been destroyed. The destructive power of vengeance, however just, is one of the great themes of the trilogy. The way retribution stretches across generations is epitomised in a startling set of metaphors in the second stasimon of Agamemnon (lines 681–809): first, there is the complex parable of the lion cub raised in the house, who, when full grown, returns the loving kindness he has received with horrifying destruction. This seeming injustice, of course, reflects the lion’s true nature and reveals him as a “priest of Ruin sent from god” (ἐκ θεοῦ δ’ ἱερεύς τις Ἄτας, 735–36) – a striking figure for nurturing an unacknowledged wrong within the family that becomes, as it were, its own vengeance. (For a full interpretation of the parable, see Knox 1979; on atē in Aeschylus, see Sommerstein 2013.) Reinforcing this idea, the Chorus of Argive elders provide personifications of “the impious deed (τὸ δυσσεβὲς … ἔργον) that gives birth to more evils just like its parent” (759–60) and “the outrageous arrogance (ὔβρις) of old that gives birth to new young outrage amidst human evils… the unholy insolence (θράσος) of black Ruin for the house” (763–66, 770–71). The crimes of the parents are visited on their children, who in turn become those parents and commit the same crimes. And not only the guilty are caught up in the nets of retribution. Legal justice becomes possible when Athena leads the Athenians to a new model of justice. The law-court that takes dikē, both judgement and punishment, out of the hands of the offended party and gives it to an impartial tribunal using established legal procedures. How convincing is the process by which this comes about? How credible is the solution as embodied in the trial of Orestes? What cultural values and realities underlie the new dispensation? These are all much debated questions that this chapter will address, but before we turn to them we should note how the language of justice is deployed in the opening scenes of the play.

Dikē in Eumenides From early in the play we encounter different ideas of how justice should work in human communities. Eventually and through a long, arduous process, rather than one idea simply ousting another, a new understanding will emerge that involves a kind of synthesis – a balance in line with the nature of dikē, achieved without violence but through argument, compromise and persuasion. In the first part of the play, however, we see only two contrasting and incompatible notions of what justice can mean. The Furies pursue retribution based on the undisputed fact that Orestes killed his mother. For them, the act itself is enough to justify

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hunting him down and subjecting him to the same fate. Apollo takes what we might call a legal view: the mere fact that he did the deed does not condemn him until the circumstances of and reasons for his action have been taken into account. When the Pythia (the oracular priestess at Apollo’s shrine in Delphi, where the first scenes of the play take place) has finished her formal prologue speech, she enters the temple to begin prophesying, but immediately returns, crawling on all fours and in an evident state of shock. She has seen a man supplicating at the omphalos (the sacred navel-stone that was one of the most prominent features of the shrine), holding both the suppliant’s olive branch wreathed in wool and a drawn sword in his blood-drenched hands, and surrounded by sleeping women of almost indescribable ugliness, dressed in black robes not appropriate for a temple (40–56). These are of course Orestes, seeking purification from Apollo, and the Erinyes, intent on punishing him with death for the murder of his mother. What the Pythia sees, although she cannot identify the players, suggests that Orestes faces primordial retributive justice, a “trial” at the hands of the Furies far different from the one that will eventually absolve him. After the Pythia departs, the central doors of the stage building open, so that we see what the Pythia has described, at least in part. It is likely that Orestes, perhaps supplicating at the navel-stone and with the traditional three Furies asleep in chairs, as described by the Pythia (46–47) is brought through the doors on the ekkyklēma, a wheeled platform on which a small tableau can be show as if inside the scene building. (For other staging possibilities see Mitchell-Boyask 2009, 49–51; for staging issues Taplin 1977 remains foundational.) Apollo then appears, either on the roof of the stage building or following Orestes from inside the temple, and promises to protect his suppliant “to the end” (64: διὰ τέλους, i.e. to the fulfilment of Orestes’ goal). He instructs Orestes to go to Athena’s city, sit as a suppliant clasping in his arms her “ancient wooden image”, a much venerated statue kept in the temple of Athena Polias on the Acropolis (79–80). He promises that he will find judges (δικαστάς) and have “enchanting words” (θελκτηρίους μύθους ἔχοντες, 81–82) that will win Orestes’ release from his troubles once and for all. This is our first inkling that a trial will ensue, in Athens and with Apollo as Orestes’ defender. With that the god sends his client on his journey back to human society (93; ὁρμώμενον βροτοῖσιν, literally, setting out for or among mortals). The god returns to his temple. The sense of unrequited wrong is heightened with the appearance of Clytemnestra’s ghost. (For the spectral Clytemnestra, see Shilo, Chapter 22 in this volume, and Shilo 2018 for a detailed and nuanced treatment of the ethical claims of Clytemnestra’s call for vengeance from beyond the grave.) Seeing a group of Furies – presumably those the Pythia described as asleep in chairs, 47 – Clytemnestra repeatedly tries to rouse them from their sleep and send them off like a pack of hounds to hunt Orestes down. She laments that she has no honour in the world below and shows her wounds (just as Orestes had displayed the bloody robes in which she had entrapped Agamemnon, Libation Bearers 980–1017). She reminds the Erinyes of all the sacrifices she has made to them. (The staging here is once again a matter of speculation and again Mitchell-Boyask 2009, 51–52 helpfully lists a number of possibilities; see also Sommerstein 1989, 100–101.) In what is surely the most unusual choral entrance in Greek tragedy, the Erinyes, gods of the generation that ruled before Zeus seized power, moan repeatedly, awaken singly or in small groups and gradually gather on stage to form a chorus while performing their parodos (entry song). They denounce Zeus’s son Apollo for stealing away the man who killed his own mother: would anyone say that was just (δικαίως ἔχειν,154)? They go on to condemn all the younger gods for exercising power “beyond justice” (δίκας πλέον,163). Apollo will not save Orestes, they sing, and he will meet a new avenger in the world below. The Erinyes see Orestes’ punishment as lasting forever. Apollo returns armed with his bow and tries to expel the Furies from his precinct with threats and insults (179–97). Undaunted, the Chorus Leader engages him in a dialogue of

Eumenides: Justice, Gender, the Gods and the City 133 importance to us for its explicit gendering of justice in the case of Erinyes vs. Orestes (198–234). The Erinyes accuse Apollo of giving Orestes an oracle to kill his mother and he admits it; they blame him further for bringing the polluted murderer to his shrine and he says he received him as a suppliant for purification. They object that he has usurped their assigned function: driving from their homes men who kill their mothers. What about women who kill their husbands, he asks. That is not the murder of kin of the same blood, they reply. (One might almost imagine this as the seedbed for Apollo’s desperate claim during Orestes’ trial that the mother is not a blood relative of her child; see the section “Gendered Justice? Biology and Politics”.) Apollo vehemently condemns their contempt for the gods who oversee marriage, Zeus, his wife Hera and Aphrodite. Justice, he adds, is the guardian of the marriage bed. His argument here turns quasi-legal, for he claims that punishing a man for his mother’s murder while ignoring a woman’s killing of her husband constitutes what today we would call selective prosecution: if you let spouses kill each other, don’t look upon this (ἐποπτεύειν) with anger and don’t punish them, it is not just (ἐνδίκως) to drive Orestes from his home (220–21). Apollo then announces that Athena will oversee a trial (δίκας … ἐποπτεύσει, 224) concerning these matters. And we learn that the trial will likely turn on the question of whether men’s or women’s claims for justice are of greater importance. The scene ends with the Erinyes renewing their vow to pursue and punish Orestes: “I will pursue this man for punishment” (δίκας μέτειμι τόνδε φῶτα, 230–31), and Apollo repeating his determination to support and protect his suppliant. Apollo returns to his temple and the Erinyes exit in pursuit of their prey – one of the rare occasions when a chorus leaves the playing area during the drama, leaving it entirely empty.

Orestes, the Erinyes and Athena in Athens After a moment of suspense, Orestes enters in haste and the action takes a new turn. His short speech, addressed to Athena, makes it clear that has arrived in Athens and will remain a suppliant at the venerated image of the goddess to which Apollo had directed him (78–79) awaiting final judgement (“the fulfilment of justice”, τέλος δίκης, 243). Such a scene change is rare in tragedy, too, and here it is not even prepared by a choral interlude to mark the passage of time. How the staging was handled at this point is open to speculation. A plausible suggestion is that a statue of Athena was either already in the orchestra or was put in place just as the scene began, indicating a location (notionally, the temple of Athena Polias on the Acropolis) different from the temple setting in Delphi. The Erinyes arrive in the orchestra at speed, pursuing Orestes like hounds tracking down “a wounded faun by the drip of its blood” (246–47). When they find him, they threaten to suck the blood from his living body – despite his sanctuary in the embrace of Athena’s sacred image – and then to drag him down to the underworld to join those who committed crimes against god, stranger or dear parents, each enduring the punishment justice demands (τῆς δίκης ἐπάξια, 272). They complain that Orestes “wants to be brought to trial for his hands” (ὑπόδικος θέλει γενέσθαι χερῶν, 260: i.e. for hands bloodied by the act of matricide). Orestes replies that the blood is fading from his hands: multiple purifications have washed away the pollution of matricide. He calls out to Athena, wherever she might be, to come to his aid, offering in return himself and the Argive people as allies forever. The Furies tell him once more that he will be their feast, not slaughtered at an altar but eaten alive, and suggest that because of his guilt such punishment shows them as “enforcers of straight justice” (εὐθυδίκα, 312). The Erinyes surround him in preparation for the “binding song” (306) designed to hold him fast for punishment. This choral song is formally the first stasimon of the play but as

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dramatic action and choreography quite exceptional and not always fully appreciated. Its verbal content stresses at the outset the Furies’ function as avengers and Apollo’s attempt to thwart them, and it has seemed to some that this renders the ostensible purpose of the song, the binding of their victim, at best secondary (e.g. Lebeck 1971, 150). The song would thus be a remnant of folkloric magic not strictly related to its moment in the play (as choral songs sometimes are not). But more recent scholarship has made this view untenable. Christopher Faraone (1985) shows the close relationship of this song to a specific kind of curse tablet in active use in fifth-century Athens to try to silence or confuse opponents’ speech in court. And a brilliant essay by Yopie Prins examines the song from a performative perspective as “a curse both enacted and embodied” (Prins 1991, 188) verbally, choreographically and metrically, so that in a passage like the third refrain (372–76), For leaping from a great height I bring the full force of my foot down more heavily down upon him; unseen, I thrust out my leg and even the swiftest runner stumbles and falls down to ruin beyond enduring. (trans. Shapiro and Burian) the movements described in the text express the force of the Erinyes’ attack, and that force is redoubled by simultaneously being mimed in their dance and embodied in the rhythmical (and presumably melodic) structure of the song. By such means, the choral song enters the drama directly, realising in an astounding fashion not only the Furies’ overpowering of their victim but also his complete destruction, their mission from the start. But of course the binding song fails: although Orestes may appear to be paralysed, he is not destroyed. Confronted by the Erinyes, Orestes had called for Athena to come to his aid from wherever she might be, and she now arrives in great haste from the distant Troad (for the purpose of her visit there and its possible political significance, see Sommerstein 1989, 151–52 and Rosenbloom, Chapter 28 in this volume). Athena makes a sudden and apparently spectacular entrance in full armour and wearing her signature aegis, on the run or flying in on the mēchanē, the crane that can swing actors up to the roof of the stage building (hence the deus ex machina) or onto the playing space. Her immediate response to the unexpected sight of the Erinyes surrounding her statue is not the fear felt by the Pythia, but a similar amazement (θαῦμα, 407; cf. θαυμαστὸς λόχος, “amazing band”, 47). Athena engages the Furies in a series of questions that demonstrate her respect for them, while at the same time rejecting their assertion of his guilt based on his refusal to swear an oath of innocence without a further investigation of the conditions surrounding his action. Acceding to her wisdom, they ask Athena to question Orestes and render judgement. In answer to her inquiry, Orestes explains who he is, what he did and why, making Apollo bear a share of the responsibility (κοινῇ … μεταίτιος) because of the god’s threat to punish him should he not avenge his father’s death. That said, Orestes puts himself entirely in Athena’s hands: “You, render judgement whether my deed was done justly or not” (σὺ δ’ εἰ δικαίως εἴτε μή, κρῖνον δίκην, 468). The practical result of the action to this point is that the purifications Orestes repeatedly invokes have not deflected the Erinyes from their pursuit of the man they intend to rip limb from limb, but equally that their violent intentions have been blocked by Athena’s intervention. The question of Orestes’ guilt and fate remains to be settled, and the venue will be the trial in Athens that Apollo has decreed. And yet, having been urged by both sides to be the

Eumenides: Justice, Gender, the Gods and the City 135 final judge of the case, Athena surprisingly demurs: “The matter is too big for any man who thinks he can decide it; it is not even right for me to judge in a trial (δικάζειν … δίκας) for murder that raises such sharp anger…” (470–72). Athena recognises the peril in rejecting a suppliant purified of blood guilt, who threatens no harm and deserves protection, but she also recognises that the Erinyes have a function that demands recognition and who, if they lose, can blight the land forever. In her wisdom, Athena decides that she will gather a group of the best citizens as jurors, returning with them to decide the case. Aeschylus is innovating here. Sommerstein (1989, 1–6) carefully describes two streams of legend that the playwright blended to produce the trial scene of Eumenides: the pursuit of Orestes by the Erinyes and his protection by Apollo, and an apparently earlier version of a trial of Orestes in Athens, said in several sources (including Euripides’ Orestes 1650–52) to have been decided by a jury of gods. A different trial before a jury of gods, which acquitted Ares of killing a son of Poseidon who had raped one of Ares’ daughters, was well established as the foundation-myth for the Areopagus Council. Aeschylus’s great innovation was to turn Orestes’ trial, before a citizen jury, into the occasion for creating Athens’ oldest and most prestigious court. Like King Pelasgus, who faces a similarly dangerous choice in Aeschylus’s Suppliants and makes a similar decision to get the approval of his citizens, Athena underscores the dilemma she and her city face, but after all as a powerful goddess she could impose her will without a second thought. Something else is going on here: Athena’s decision not to decide the case on her own foreshadows a turn in the play’s centre of gravity from the fate of Orestes to a larger consideration of justice, not merely as a function of law, but as recognition of and respect for the many, often conflicting, claims that a well-ordered community must hold in balance. And central to this shift, as we shall see, is the fact that the decision (unlike the Argive assembly’s unanimous show of hands, Suppliants 605–9), is deeply divided, yet nevertheless binding on all. And this process, she says, will establish “an ordinance for all time” (θεσμόν … εἰς ἂπαντ … χρόνον, 485).

The Trial And so we turn to the most discussed – and most disputed – episode of Eumenides: the trial scene itself. Questions have been raised on many fronts – about the legal procedure and its implications for gender, Athenian politics and civic religion. The procedural issues do not need extensive treatment here, since much has been written about them, including Naiden, Chapter 27 in this volume (see also Sommerstein 2010). The trial develops in ways that largely correspond to the patterns familiar to Athenian spectators from their own courts, although the argumentation depends far more than would be expected on the personal outlooks and interests of the participants. But it is unreasonable to scrutinise the trial as though it were meant to portray a fully formed legal system. Gods handle the prosecution and defence in a world that has as yet to provide a body of law designed by humans. The trial of Orestes provides a matrix – a jury that enforces laws by majority rule and whose decisions are respected by all – and a process that allows both prosecution and defence to make their cases. Athena in her wisdom provides that matrix, permitting the gods thereafter to leave the work of making and enforcing law to citizens. It is of course the participation of gods, almost to the exclusion of the citizen jurors, that has seemed most problematic. Athena announces that she will go to empanel “the finest of my citizens” (ἀστῶν τῶν ἐμῶν τὰ βέλτιστα) and come back to decide the matter finally and truly (ἥξω διαιρεῖν τοῦτο πρᾶγμ’ ἐτητύμως, 487–88). Only the best will do for this trial, but at the same time there is a note of ambiguity about judging: Sommerstein 1989 (on 488) says

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categorically that the citizen jurors are the subject of “decide”, but then allows that Athena could also be – and indeed, it will turn out that both are needed. The gods, however, certainly dominate the proceedings. Athens’ finest citizens vote, but do not utter a word during the proceedings. The time it takes for Athena to assemble and return with the jury is marked by a choral song (their second stasimon, 490–565) in which the theme of justice is uppermost. The Furies portray the consequences of Orestes’ acquittal as the imminent destruction of social and moral barriers to murder, especially of parents by children, and chaos resulting from the uncertainty of punishment for violent crime. Although they do not entirely abandon the fierceness of their punishment (503–7), their self-portrayal takes on a very different tone. They are the very embodiment of Justice (invoked by the cry “O Justice! O thrones of the Erinyes!” (ὦ Δίκα, ὦ θρόνοι τ’ Ἐρινύων, 510–11) and it is in this guise that they sing of justice in more philosophical and communal terms, some of which will later be echoed by Athena: without fear who would revere Justice? (517–25; cf. 690–92, 698); neither anarchy nor despotism is best, but rather a middle way (526–30; cf. 696–97). Outrageous behaviour (hubris) is the child of impiety; the altar of Justice must be respected and parents and guests honoured on pain of punishment (534–49). One who is “just without compulsion” (ἀνάγκας ἄτερ δίκαιος ὤν, 550) will prosper; one who is not will lose everything. This new aspect of the Erinyes prepares us for the need to show them respect and accommodate their power in a way that will protect rather than harm the community. The staging of the trial scene is uncertain (again, Mitchell-Boyask 2009, 71–73 offers a helpful survey of possibilities). The acting area will need a chair for Athena, a bench or benches for the jury, and urns for their ballots. Athena leads the jurors in, accompanied by a herald and a trumpeter. One can imagine all of them arrayed on the narrow stage, while the Erinyes stand on one side of the orchestra and Orestes opposite them on the other. Athena opens the proceedings and, as the trumpeter sounds his call and the herald makes his call for silence (unscripted in our text), Apollo enters and takes his stand protectively next to Orestes. Apollo’s arrival, and his subsequent departure, are unannounced, and Athena seems surprised to see him and greets him with a rather unfriendly question about the reason for his presence. He responds by taking responsibility for purifying Orestes from the stain of killing Clytemnestra, and also responsibility for the killing itself, and asks her to open the trial and then “decide the case” herself (σὺ δ’ εἴσαγε … κύρωσον δίκην, 580–81; the singular personal pronoun is emphatic). She, however, opens the case by giving the floor to the prosecution, explaining why that is the proper procedure (as indeed it was in Athenian law courts). Thus begins a lengthy debate between the Erinyes and Apollo, which in the process of bringing about Orestes’ acquittal raises concerns about the patriarchal biases of the court and its decision.

Gendered Justice? Biology and Politics A provocative and influential essay by Froma Zeitlin (Zeitlin 1996) has led to a rich literature on gender issues in the Oresteia, with a particular focus on Eumenides as “a celebration of the erasure from the polis of women’s discourse” (McClure 1999, 111). To evaluate this perspective, I turn to the moment in the play that seems most definitively to denigrate the importance of women and to marginalise them. When in the course of “cross-examining” Apollo, the Furies ask how one who killed his mother can escape punishment, Apollo’s answer is the notorious claim that a mother slain by her son no special standing a case because she is not related by blood to her son, being only the nurse of the fetus that is entirely the product of the paternal seed. Only the father can be called a parent.

Eumenides: Justice, Gender, the Gods and the City 137 Many have seen this extraordinary assertion as the decisive blow, not only for the acquittal of Orestes but also for the defeat of women in the conflict between the sexes that is such a prominent element of the trilogy. A number of factors, however, within the passage itself as well as the in the larger trajectory of Eumenides, make such a conclusion at least premature. First, there is the polemical context surrounding Apollo’s argument. Zeitlin (1996, 106–7) rightly observes that Apollo’s claim is the culmination of a chain of assertions of male superiority throughout the Oresteia, but a closer look makes clear that his argument is not the conclusion of a chain of logical reasoning. Instead, it looks like a rather desperate improvisation of an Apollo put on the ropes by the Erinyes. We can summarise the exchange in lines 640–54 as follows: the Erinyes respond to Apollo’s statement that Zeus takes greater care of the fate of fathers than that of mothers by reminding him that it was Zeus who dethroned and chained his own father. In a response whose language Sommerstein (1989, 204) characterises as unparalleled in tragedy for its vulgarity, Apollo addresses the Furies as loathsome “monsters” (κνώδαλα, 644), a word never used to address any character, human or divine, a usage familiar only in comedy. When Apollo says that chains can be loosed, but for the slain man there is no remedy, not even from Zeus, the Erinyes put Apollo’s back to the wall: then how do you defend Orestes from condemnation, the one who spilled “his mother’s blood, the same as his own” (τὸ μητρὸς αἷμ’ ὅμαιμον)? Apollo, faced with a difficult question, has very few moves at his disposal. The fact that the mother was killed at the hands of her son is indisputable. Apollo could deny that the killing of people of the same blood is not in itself a nefarious act, but that would be a shock to feelings deeply rooted in the moral sensitivity of the jury – and the spectators. The only way out, then, is to deny the consanguinity of mother and child. It is worth noting that Orestes, who had earlier called the mother’s blood shed by him “this blood that we have in common” (τὸδ’ αἷμα κοινόν, Libation Bearers 1038), anticipated Apollo’s idea with a question at line 606 (“Am I in my mother’s blood-line?”, μητρὸς τῆς ἐμῆς ἐν αἵματι), but without any argument. Such a possibility was instantly batted down by Chorus Leader with what would, I submit, have been the obvious reply: How then did she nourish you within her womb? Do you disavow the your mother’s “nearest and dearest blood” (αἷμα φίλτατον, 609). At this point, Orestes turns for his defence to his patron Apollo, who develops the argument. Apollo’s case appears to derive from recent speculation, indeed probably brand new since Aristotle attributes the theory to “Anaxagoras and other physiologists” (De generatione animalium 763b31–33). The dates of Anaxagoras are uncertain, but it can be reasonably inferred that he was active in Athens for about a decade before the performance of the Oresteia in 458 bce. (For the relationship between Anaxagoras and Aeschylus, see Rösler 1970, 56–87; and Bromberg, Chapter 4 in this volume.) A version of this theory was promulgated by Aristotle himself and in this way became orthodox opinion for many centuries. When a great god who declares himself in everything the spokesman of his father Zeus, endorses the idea that the mother only provides the material or nurture for the embryo, when the notion is associated with the myth of Zeus’s motherless procreation of Athena, and deduced by her as the reason for its decision in favour of Orestes, it is all too easy to conclude that Aeschylus presents the theory and his audience welcomes it as definitively valid, at least as far as the trilogy is concerned. Taking into account, however, what we can learn about the notions of reproduction that were in circulation in Athens at the time, Apollo’s biology will turn out to be, if not entirely puzzling to the audience, at least open to question, and in any case less convincing than is often supposed. Our information about the theories of generation held by Presocratic philosophers and early medical writers is often sketchy, sometimes contradictory, and largely late and incomplete, but it allows us to say that the role of the two sexes in procreation was unresolved and a source of controversy. In fact, we are able to follow in the footsteps of a well-known debate

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on this subject between philosophers and doctors at least since the time of Aeschylus himself. For philosophers of the fifth century we have only testimonies and fragments (sometimes contained in Aristotle’s critical comments to his predecessors); somewhat richer are the writings of the Hippocratic corpus, a body of medical treatises difficult to date, but which most experts believe predominantly belong to the late fifth or fourth centuries. In both medical and philosophical sources, the contribution of women to a child’s conception and hereditary endowment is more often supported than denied. (Here, I can only offer a few remarks about the available evidence; for details about our sources and their interpretation, see Burian 2006 with bibliography.) One of the obvious fault-lines in the debate has to do with how the sex of offspring is determined at conception. Aristotle, who as we have seen claimed that the woman acted only as an incubator of the man’s seed, specified that this seed was ready to develop into male or female. Theories that involve the contribution of active seeds from both parents that combine to form the embryo are able to account more easily for sexual difference and other features that diverge from one or the other parent. Our sources indicate that, among the Presocratics active before or during Aeschylus’s life, Parmenides and Empedocles favoured this view. Surviving texts in the Hippocratic Corpus largely support the argument that women produce their own generative seed, and that the emission of this seed plays an essential role in procreation. As suggested above, Hippocratic treatises argue that the presence of both male and female seeds determines, through their relative quantity or strength in a given case, the sex of the unborn child and its similarity to one or other of the parents. Ann Hanson points out that in the Hippocratic treatise Peri Gonēs (“On Generation”), the sexual pleasure of women is also given an important role in reproduction: without orgasm the woman does not emit her seed (Hanson 1990, 314–15). Although the Hippocratic writer expresses a concept of sexual satisfaction modelled on the experience of men and transferred to women, the resulting analogy between the generative role of the female orgasm and that of the male poses a further obstacle to those who believe that the “monogenesis” proposed by Apollo in Eumenides was part of an ideology of reproduction that the Athenian public could easily assimilate and accept. We can say that, at any rate among the philosophers and medical writers of the fifth century, the question of reproduction was a subject of controversy and that the thesis supported by Apollo in Eumenides, and later by Aristotle, did not prevail. For an attempt to understand the possible reactions of the Athenian public to the biological theory supported by Apollo, traditional and popular beliefs might well be more relevant than the philosophical and medical thought of the time. There is no lack of evidence for a prescientific idea of “monogenesis” such as the widespread image of woman as the aroura (furrow) that is ploughed and sown by man (cf. e.g. Theognis 582 and Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus 1257), but on the other hand jurisprudence indicates the persistence of a deeply rooted notion of female fertility as an active ingredient in the generation. The fact that, according to Athenian law, half-brothers could marry half-sisters only if they were descended from different mothers serves as a response to the proclamation of the Aeschylus’s Apollo for which only the father can consider himself a parent (see Halperin 1990, 279). It should also be remembered that the Periclean Citizenship Law, which came into force less than a decade after the performance of the Oresteia, stipulated that an Athenian citizen must be born to an Athenian father and mother. Whatever the reason for Pericles’ proposal and its approval by the Athenian Assembly, it clearly codified the mother’s role to the formation of the child. Moreover, the primitive but imposing “jurisprudence” of the Erinyes follows the logic of consanguinity of mother and son that until this point in the course of the drama had to seem completely intuitive. Apollo’s denial might well have been received by the Athenian public as an arcane idea lifted from the new science and, given Anaxagoras’s long years of residence in

Eumenides: Justice, Gender, the Gods and the City 139 Athens, perhaps associated with him. Many will have known this great friend of Pericles, a leading personality in the spread of scientific and philosophical culture. Some will have been admirers and disciples, but for others his way of investigating the secrets of nature will have aroused discomfort and suspicion. The story reported in later sources that Anaxagoras was tried for asebeia (impiety) and had to flee Athens, although very possibly based on accusations from comedy and fictitious (Filonik 2013, 26–33), bears witness to the controversy that surrounded him. In short, there are abundant reasons to believe that the biology of Eumenides was far from an established and generally accepted doctrine and that the audience who witnessed the performance in 458 would not likely have accepted that view even from the mouth of a great god. Athena sees to it that this dispute is not settled by the gods in a violent confrontation, but by a new institution, the law court, in which a jury of citizens (including herself) votes on Orestes’ fate. And the fact that jury is split down the middle on the question of conviction or acquittal suggests a fundamental reason for Aeschylus’s choice of making the question of consanguinity central to Orestes’ defence: its controversial character. Even if half the jurors disagreed, one side would need to emerge victorious and the decision be accepted by all. The choice of such a new, complicated and counterintuitive argument was likely to divide the spectators, as it did the jury. Aeschylus has chosen not to give Apollo a decisive argument or overwhelming persuasive force, and yet the division of opinion and the divided vote do not prevent the new court from reaching a definitive conclusion. Indeed the outcome is no less certain than if the vote had been unanimous. Athena’s decisive vote can perhaps be understood in this light. It does not depend upon an assessment of the parties’ arguments. Apollo had closed his argument by citing Athena’s birth from her father alone (663–67) and now Athena justifies her decision to vote for Orestes’ acquittal by saying that no mother gave her birth and so she is wholly her father’s child (740–45). This is not offered as a binding reason any more than Apollo’s biology did, but as Athens’ patron, the founder of the court and a voting member of the jury, she has the necessary authority to decide the case whether the human votes are equal, or whether acquittal fell short by one vote. (I deliberately leave aside the vexed question of whether Athena’s vote makes or breaks a tie; Gagarin 1975; Sommerstein 1989, 221–26; Seaford 1995; MitchellBoyask 2009, 78–87 offer a range of possible arguments and solutions.) Quite apart from the controversies surrounding Apollo’s biology and the motivation of Athena’s vote, the question of gender hierarchy pervades the Oresteia. It would be foolish to deny that Aeschylus wrote from within the patriarchy, how indeed could he not? But Eumenides raises legitimate doubts about the idea that the trilogy is simply and everywhere misogynist, an apology for silencing women and excluding them from public life. It is fair to say that Athena uses her enormous power in the service of the patriarchal order, but her role at the end of the play is one designed to elevate fertility, the family and the peaceful settlement of disputes, elements of social life identified with the female even under patriarchal rule. A lot here depends on the lens through which the play is interpreted. For example, in the first eight lines of the play, the Pythia offers a completely new story of how Apollo came to control Delphi, presumably invented by Aeschylus to replace the dominant account, in which Apollo conquered the sanctuary in a bloody battle with the Python, a monstrous and brutal female serpent. According to Aeschylus the possession of Delphi passed peacefully from Gaia to her daughter Themis, then to another daughter, Phoebe. Phoebe gave Delphi to Apollo as a birthday present, hence his cult-name Phoebus. Of this version, Zeitlin (1996, 102) writes that it provides “a direct mythological model for the transference of power from the female to the male”, a myth that differs from the traditional one only in that foreshadows the orderly and peaceful conclusion of the trilogy, while its meaning is more or less unchanged. But, as Peter Rose cogently points out, the point of

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the innovation is precisely to disavow the purely misogynist tradition of male triumph over the very emblem of female danger (Rose 1992, 258). From this point of view, the series of generous and peaceful female figures, the gift of the sanctuary to Apollo by Phoebe, and his adoption of Phoebus as a name in exchange are all omens of a change in the relationship between the sexes from threat to cooperation. The women of Eumenides are not simply women, of course. They are deities, they are powerful, they are androgynous and they and shun the bonds of marriage. Thus, they are allied in important ways with the central female figure of the trilogy, Clytemnestra (see, e.g., Winnington-Ingram 1948). Clytemnestra is the villain of the piece because she defies the patriarchy, acting as a kind of Fury by exacting retribution – but from her own husband. Athena and the Erinyes function in support of the patriarchy, but not by blindly following its precepts and modes of action. The key to understanding this important aspect of the work’s meaning comes in the long lyric dialogue between them after the trial has concluded and Orestes has departed for Argos 778–1020). The first part of this exchange (778–915) is structured in pairs of lyric outbursts by the angry and threatening Erinyes, incensed that their prerogatives have been trampled down and they themselves deeply dishonoured. Each of these outbursts is answered by respectful and measured spoken verses in which Athena invites them, in increasingly specific and alluring terms, to give up their wrath and accept a new home and new honours in Athens. Their anger is such, however, that the simply repeat their laments as if Athena had not spoken, but Athena persists with seemingly endless patience, and after the second of the exchanges, a brief dialogue ensues in which they enquire what the promised home and honours will be. When Athena explains that their central privilege will be that no house will prosper without them, they begin to understand that propitiation by those who revere them will guarantee them great power (893–99) – an unlimited future of honours far greater than those they previously held. As they listen, transformation suddenly appears possible. “It seems you are about to enchant me, and I am standing away from my anger” (θέλξειν μ’ ἔοικας καὶ μεθίσταμαι κότον, 900), the Chorus Leader tells her. Athena’s language cannily uses phrasing drawn from propitiatory sacrifice and amatory persuasion (for this aspect of the final scene, see Rynearson 2013) and the Erinyes respond in kind. The second part of the lyric dialogue (916–1020) enacts the new harmony between the participants by having Athena respond, not in spoken verse, but in song. It is essentially a succession of blessings – for the health of the land and its animals and plants, for marriage, fertility and the well-being of the family, for the absence of civil strife, for unity in the choice of friends and enemies, for deserved prosperity – to which Athena responds with delight at the success of her persuasion and happiness at what she has accomplished for her city. Her most interesting responses, however, make clear that she has no intention to stop the Furies from their earlier pursuit of wrongdoers. If anything her words allow for an expansion of that activity: their function is now to “manage all human affairs” (πάντα … τὰ κατ’ ἀνθρώπους … διέπειν, 930–31), which naturally includes punishment of those whose misdeeds earn their wrath. The Furies are not simply transformed into “Eumenides” (“Kindly Ones”), as is often supposed; they are not even called “Eumenides” in the text we have, though they are once spoken of with the gender-neutral, synonym euphrones (“well-intentioned”, 992). If the world of the Oresteia remains avowedly male, its proper functioning depends on the essential contribution, biological, moral and even political, of the female. In the last analysis, what counts most is the persistence with which Athena pursues reconciliation and conflict resolution over recriminations and violence. She takes the Erinyes and their ancient wisdom seriously (848–49) and her own wisdom gives her the resources she needs to understand their deepest needs, while at the same time she never loses sight of the

Eumenides: Justice, Gender, the Gods and the City 141 needs of the city as a whole. A violent response to the Erinyes’ threats would be easy, but she has no intention of using it: “I am the only one of the gods who knows the keys to the room where the lightning bolt is kept – yet there’s no need of that. But let me persuade you …” (827–29). Unlike the many stories of gods who delight in wielding power to compel obedience, Athena hews to the essentially democratic value of using persuasion to achieve agreement. (See in this regard is Dugdale and Gerstbauer 2017, who argue that the limitations of criminal justice require a post-trial procedure analogous to what we now call restorative justice.) We are now firmly in the realm of the political. The resolution of criminal conduct is not left in the hands of victims seeking retribution nor promulgated by a tyrant whose word is law, but rather stems from legal procedures valid not just for this trial, but for the future (to loipon), as the goddess proclaims at the beginning and end of her charge to the jury (683 and 708). Athena’s institution of legal justice offers a model for the Athenians to resolve on their own even the most difficult disputes, peacefully and in the interest of the democratic polis, in which consent of the citizens, reached in open dialogue and insured by their active participation will give them, in Athena’s words, “a bulwark for the safety of the land and the city such as no people have” (701–2). For decades, the political question scholars have asked of the play is whether it endorses or contests Ephialtes’ reported reform of the Areopagus Council in 462, another question to which scholars have given widely divergent answers, but may not have engaged Aeschylus, who does not seem concerned to offer an opinion (Schaps 1993). The effective endorsement of democratic values and practices for which Eumenides lays a foundation offers the hope of reconciliation and civic cohesion in place of violent retribution, however problematic the beginnings may seem.

Two Endings When the votes are counted and Orestes is acquitted, he gives thanks to the gods he thinks saved him, first and foremost to Athena, then to Apollo, and finally to Zeus “the third, the saviour, who brings all to fulfilment” (759–60; for this Zeus of the third libation and the significance of his several appearances in the trilogy, see Burian 1986). Orestes then promises, as an expression of his gratitude, a military alliance between Argos and Athens that he will continue to enforce from his tomb as a sacred hero (cf. the similar promises by the Theban Oedipus in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, and by the earlier Argive king Eurystheus in Euripides’ Children of Heracles). This is as close as Aeschylus comes in this play to a concrete political comment: a reference to the alliance concluded between Athens and Argos in 462, which – in contrast to his silence about the reforms of Ephialtes – he seems eager to support. (There are two other favourable references to it at 290–91 and 669–73.) That accomplished, Orestes departs for home to claim his father’s throne and his inheritance. The play appears to have reached its end; the arc of the suppliant plot is complete and it comes as a complete surprise that, rather than a hasty departure of the defeated chorus of Erinyes, Athena and the Erinyes begin the remarkable sequence of song (no doubt with dance) and speech that we have just examined. Although the second stasimon (see the section “The Trial” in this chapter) suggested that there was more to the chorus than brutality and bloodlust, nothing pointed beyond the resolution of their struggle with Orestes to their establishment at the heart of a new and powerful cult in Athens. Some in the past lamented this deviation from the apparent trajectory of the play, others deprecated it as a dramatically vacant musical entertainment, but I believe that Aeschylus has made of it a less obvious but far more powerful finale for the entire trilogy.

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The emptying of the playing space, a requisite of any the drama played out in a theatre without a curtain, and in Greek tragedy often rather perfunctory, becomes in Eumenides a particularly rich experience, drawing on the full resources of the theatre of Dionysus and a panoply of civic and religious signifiers. The stage and orchestra are now full: Athena, the chorus, the jurors, the herald and trumpeter and any attendants still on the scene are joined by a group of Athena’s female “servants” (mentioned at 1024; perhaps cult-servants from the nearby temple of Athena Polias), who may be those carrying torches (1005) and purple robes for the Erinyes to wear (1028); and by a sacrificial animal or animals (1006),with attendants. But in no way is this mere pageantry. It enacts a solemn moment in Athens’ civic religion: a procession – evoking the annual Panathenaic procession in honour of Athena illustrated in the Panathenaic frieze on the Parthenon – in which Athenian citizens escort with joyous song an important new cult into the city, deities who will make Athens their new home. At the same time, as has been widely recognised, this stunning exodos provides a symbolic restoration of order to much that in the course of the trilogy had become corrupted and menacing. Thus, the light of the torches evokes lights that seemed repeatedly to offer hope but turned destructive or delusive, most notably the long looked-for beacon fires that signalled the end of the Trojan War but in effect brought the flames that engulfed Troy closer and closer to Argos. The Erinyes’ purple robes evoke the cloth over which Agamemnon walked to his death and the bloody cloths in which his slain body, and later those of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, were displayed; but at the same they time signify the welcome these august deities receive as metics, immigrants who win the right of permanent residence in Athens and who wear such robes during the Panathenaic festival (cf. 1010–11, 1017–20). The sacrificial animal (or animals) restores an essential element in propitiatory ritual to its proper function after many corrupted uses of sacrificial language to describe the slaughter of humans (for this, see Zeitlin 1965). The restitution is more than just symbolic: the distant past elides into the present moment; the torches, robes and animals are there for all to see. After seemingly endless conflict, new blessings and a fresh start.

FURTHER READING Readers of this chapter are invited to peruse the list of further readings in the preceding chapter, Chapter 9. Here, I list only a few works dedicated specifically to Eumenides. I enthusiastically recommend Mitchell-Boyask 2009, an approachable, thoughtful, well-informed and thorough introduction to the play. Readers unfamiliar with topics such as the mythic and religious background of the work or Athenian theatrical practice in Aeschylus’s day will find help; more advanced scholars will find lots to think about in Mitchell-Boyask’s judicious comments. There is a generous guide to further reading and a bibliography of works available in English and mostly suitable for readers who do not know Greek. Additionally, here are a few articles that offer valuable insights. A good starting point is Bacon 2001, who shows how the movement in Eumenides from attention to individual mortals to a chorus of divinities in Athens is a culmination to which the whole trilogy builds. The most comprehensive of several good papers about the Erinyes is Brown 1983; Easterling 2008 is characteristically insightful on the same subject. Of the works mentioned in the further readings in Chapter 9, Rynearson 2013 is particularly illuminating on the multivalent language at the end of the play. MacLeod 1982 has a cogent evaluation of Eumenides as the necessary conclusion of the trilogy and Schaps 1993 puts the question of politics in the trilogy, and particularly in Eumenides, in a useful perspective.

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REFERENCES Bacon, H. H. (2001). “The Furies’ Homecoming.” Classical Philology 96, 48–89. Brown, A. L. (1983). “The Erinyes in the Oresteia: Real Life, the Supernatural, and the Stage.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 103, 13–34. Burian, P. (1986). “Zeus ΣΩΤΗΡ ΤΡΙΤΟΣ and Some Triads in Aeschylus’ Oresteia.” American Journal of Philology 107, 332–42. Burian, P. (2006). “Biologia, democrazia e donne nelle Eumenidi di Eschilo.” Lexis 24, 45–57. Dugdale, E. and Gerstbauer, L. (2017). “Forms of Justice in Aeschylus’ Eumenides.” Polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought 34, 226–50. Easterling, P. (2008). “Theatrical Furies: Thoughts on Eumenides.” In M. Revermann and P. Wilson, eds. Performance, Iconography, Reception: Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin. Oxford, 219–36. Faraone, C. A. (1985). “Aeschylus’ ὕμνος δέσμιος and Attic Judicial Curse Tablets.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 105, 150–54. Filonik, J. (2013). “Athenian Impiety Trials: A Reappraisal.” Dike: Rivista di storia del diritto greco ed ellenistico 16, 11–96. Gagarin, M. (1975). “The Vote of Athena.” American Journal of Philology 96, 121–27. Goldhill, S. (1986). Reading Greek Tragedy. Cambridge. Halperin, D. M. (1990). “Why Is Diotima a Woman?” In Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin eds., 237–308. Halperin, D. M., Winkler, J. J. and Zeitlin, F. I., eds. (1990). Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World. Princeton. Hanson, A. E. (1990). “The Medical Writer’s Woman.” In Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin eds., Before Sexuality, Princeton, 309–38. Knox, B. (1979). “Aeschylus and the Third Actor.” In B. Knox, ed. Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater. Baltimore and London, 39–55. Reprinted from the American Journal of Philology 93 (1972), 104–24. Lebeck, A. (1971). The Oresteia: A Study in Language and Structure. Cambridge, MA. MacLeod, C. W. (1982). “Politics in the Oresteia.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 102, 124–44. Reprinted in Macleod’s (1983) Collected Essays. Oxford, 20–40. McClure, L. (1999). Spoken Like a Woman: Speech and Gender in Athenian Drama.Princeton. Mitchell-Boyask, R. (2009). Aeschylus: Eumenides. London. Prins, Y. (1991). “The Power of the Speech Act: Aeschylus’ Furies and Their Binding Song.” Arethusa 24, 177–95. Rose, P. (1992). Sons of the Gods, Children of Earth: Ideology and Lietrary Form in Ancient Greece. Ithaca, NY. Rösler, W. (1970). Reflexe vorsokratischen Denkens bei Aischylos. Beiträge zur klassischen Philologie 37. Meisenheim am Glan. Rynearson, N. (2013). “Courting the Erinyes: Persuasion, Sacrifice, and Seduction in Aeschylus’s Eumenides.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 143, 1–22. Schaps, D. M. (1993). “Aeschylus’ Politics and the Theme of the Oresteia.” In R. M. Rosen and J. Farrell, eds. Nomodeiktes: Greek Studies in Honor of Martin Ostwald. Ann Arbor, 505–16. Seaford, R. (1995). “Historicizing Tragic Ambivalence: The Vote of Athena.” In B. Goff, ed. History, Tragedy, Theory: Dialogues on Athenian Drama. Austin, 202–21. Seaford, R. (2012) Cosmology and the Polis: The Social Construction of Space and Time in the Tragedies of Aeschylus. Cambridge. Shilo, A. (2018). “The Ghost of Clytemnestra in the Eumenides: Ethical Claims beyond Human Limits.” American Journal of Philology 139, 533–76. Sommerstein, A. H. (1989). Aeschylus: Eumenides. Cambridge. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010). “Orestes’ Trial and Athenian Homicide Procedure.” In E. M. Harris, D. Leão and P. J. Rhodes, eds. Law and Drama in Ancient Greece. London, 25–38.

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Sommerstein, A. H. (2013). “Atē in Aeschylus.” In D. Cairns, ed. Tragedy and Archaic Greek Thought. Swansea, 1–15. Taplin, O. (1977). The Stagecraft of Aeschylus. Oxford. Winnington-Ingram, R. P. (1948). “Clytemnestra and the Vote of Athena.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 68, 130–47. Zeitlin, F. I. (1965). “The Motif of the Corrupted Sacrifice in the Oresteia.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 96, 463–508. Zeitlin, F. I. (1996). “The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia.” In F. I. Zeitlin, ed. Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Chicago, 87–119. Reprinted with revisions from Arethusa 11 (1978), 149–84.

CHAPTER 11

Intertheatricality and Narrative Structure in the Electra Plays Kirk Ormand A passage from Aristophanes’ Frogs indicates that Aeschylus’s tragedies remained well-known in the latter half of the fifth century, long after the playwright had passed on. Compelled to compete with Euripides in Hades, Aristophanes’ fictional Aeschylus complains that the contest is not equal: Euripides’ poetry, the grand master complains, died with him, so he is able to recite it in the underworld (Aristophanes Frogs 865–69). The strong implication is that Aeschylus’s poetry did not die with him and was, at the time of the staging of Frogs in 405, still familiar to the Athenian audience. This passage (along with several other pieces of evidence) has been taken to suggest that Aeschylus’s plays were reperformed at the City Dionysia after his death (see C. W. Marshall, Chapter 30 in this volume). Although such reperformance is far from certain (see Biles 2006–07), it would seem in any case that Aeschylus reached canonical status almost immediately. As a result, for the poets Sophocles and Euripides, whose careers overlapped with one another significantly, Aeschylus must always have been a lurking influence, a recognised virtuoso whose style and theatrical mode had to be acknowledged, even if ultimately rejected or transformed. Given that the mythological material from which Athenian tragedies usually drew was itself somewhat circumscribed, it is not surprising that all three tragedians seem to have written plays on the same, or related, episodes. Both Euripides and Sophocles wrote plays about Hippolytus and Phaedra, for example, though little remains of the fragments of Sophocles’ play. We can only imagine what the relationship was between Aeschylus’s Iphigenia, Sophocles’ Iphigenia and Euripides’ two plays about that heroine; or between Aeschylus’s Bacchae and the surviving play by Euripides. Through the chance happenings of textual survival, however, we have exactly one set of plays in which all three extant tragedians dealt with the same set of material, namely Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers (the middle play of the Oresteia), and Sophocles’ and Euripides’ plays, both titled Electra. This circumstance has inevitably led to careful comparative study of the three plays and speculation on the influence of Aeschylus on the later two, and of Sophocles and Euripides on each other. These comparisons are made more complicated by the fact that there is no scholarly consensus on the relative chronology of Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Electra plays (for a useful summary of

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opinions, see Solmsen 1967, 23–24 and 23 n.1). Perhaps what is most surprising is how different the three plays are; as Zeitlin points out, all three tragedians incorporate three critical elements of the plot: “These consist of nostos (return), anagnoˉrisis (recognition) and mechanēma (the intrigue)” (Zeitlin 2012, 361; see Denniston 1939, xi). Beyond these three plot points, little remains the same. I avoid, for the most part, detailed discussion of the differences between the three plays, which have been well-enumerated elsewhere (e.g. Denniston 1939, ix–xxvi; Solmsen 1967; Kucharski 2004; Finglass 2007, 1–5; Zeitlin 2012). These analyses have focused on a few admittedly important areas: the mode and timing of Orestes’ recognition of Electra; the attitude of the play towards Orestes’ matricide, and the concomitant presence or absence of Clytemnestra’s Furies; the attitude of the characters and chorus towards the gods; the different modes of ending the play; the degree of realism in the play; and the levels of metheatricality and self-awareness in each play. Instead of taking up these issues, central though they are, I intend instead to consider some passages in Euripides’ and Sophocles’ plays that appear to invoke directly (even if only to disavow) their Aeschylean antecedent. A number of scenes contain clear visual or verbal echoes of the Libation Bearers and I believe that both Euripides and Sophocles made use of the Libation Bearers as a kind of originary text in subtle and nuanced ways. For reasons of economy, I focus on the three plot points that Zeitlin isolates (in the paragraph above): the false narrative of the death of Orestes, the recognition scene between Orestes and Electra, and the matricide. Sophocles and Euripides, I find, make similar use of Aeschylus in two critical ways: both playwrights assume the Libation Bearers (and not just the general myth) as the immediate dramatic past to their own plays; and both signal their dependence on Aeschylus’s play by inserting an additional level of narration between their actors and the audience. That is, where Aeschylus’s Electra acts, Sophocles’ Electra both watches (or hears) events that took place in the Libation Bearers and acts as a result; and her participation as a critical spectator of events signals our own relation to Aeschylus’s version, mediated through that of Sophocles (see Allen-Hornblower 2016 for an acute analysis of characters as internal observers and narrators, a perspective that informs my argument throughout). In other words, I plan to elucidate several moments of intertextuality (or, in Mueller’s term, intertheatricality) between Aeschylus and the playwrights who followed him. I begin with the belief that Aeschylus’s plays remained so well known throughout the fifth century that any rewriting of the same plot must contain in it some awareness of the earlier text (see the discussion in Solmsen 1967; Finglass 2007, 4–5; more generally, see Davidson 2012, 40–43; Athenaeus 10.428 presents Sophocles and Aeschylus in friendly rivalry). I also assume, however, that awareness of that text is manifest in Sophocles’ and Euripides’ deliberate distance from it. To take one well-known example, early in Sophocles’ Electra, the audience is teased with the possibility of a recognition scene between Orestes and his sister (Sophocles Electra 82–84): Orestes But perhaps this is the wretched Electra? Do you wish that we wait here and listen to her mourning? Paedagogus Not at all. Nothing before we attempt to do what Apollo ordered, and begin from here, pouring libations for your father. As the play develops, Orestes and the Paedagogus – Orestes’ aged tutor, who accompanies him – leave the stage and the recognition scene (which takes place quite early in Aeschylus’s



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version) is delayed by over a thousand lines, to a degree that even the most appreciative critics have found artificial. As Finglass notes, “the possibility is raised only to be emphatically rejected by the Paedagogus. This decisive intervention… systematically stresses that although Sophocles is using Aeschylean material, his treatment of it will differ from his predecessor’s” (Finglass 2007, 6; see also Ringer 1998, 143). This episode depends for its effect on the audience’s awareness of the Aeschylean plot – and in invoking but rejecting that plot, Sophocles sets his play on a deliberately different course, one that emphasises Electra’s suffering and her eventual despair over a brother whom she will think dead, even while he stands before her. The sort of complex allusion and manipulation described above is typical of the way that both Euripides and Sophocles interact with the text of Aeschylus. The intertheatrical moments between the Libation Bearers and the Electra plays function, in other words, much as Hinds described intertextual readings in Latin poetry: “Every allusion made by a poet, in epigram and epic alike, mobilises its own ad hoc literary historical narrative…” (Hinds 1998, 133). Sophocles and Euripides, in calling up the Aeschylean text, construct the Libation Bearers (or sometimes other plays from the Oresteia) as a literary and dramatic predecessor. They invoke the audience’s recollection of Aeschylus’s famous trilogy in order to emphasise their own awareness of it and their deliberate manipulation of the literary history that it represents. One effect of this textual play is to call attention to the theatrical conventions under which the action of drama takes place. In recent years, critics have paid increased attention to metatheatricality in Greek tragedy, and my reading has been influenced significantly by these readings. In particular, I note that both Euripides and Sophocles engage in deliberate play with their mobilised literary historical narratives. A much celebrated example is Sophocles’ use of the funerary urn in his Electra; the existence of such an urn was suggested briefly by Aeschylus though not seen on stage (Aeschylus Libation Bearers 686–87; see Chaston 2010, 131–78, esp. 138–41, Mueller 2015, 115–18). In Sophocles’ version, the urn becomes a visible presence on the stage, and Electra’s lament over the urn one of the signature moments of the play. Electra’s grief over what she takes to be a sure sign of Orestes’ death leads her to reject the (true) tokens of his return, but also leads, eventually, to Orestes’ recognition of her (see later in this chapter). In this way, a brief mention in Aeschylus is expanded and takes on a life of its own, leading to a literarily complex resolution. That is, Electra recognises that the urn is a fiction at the same moment that she recognises that Orestes is the young man standing before her (Sophocles Electra 1205–29). For the external audience the plot begins to move forward again when the Sophoclean and Aeschylean realities realign. One other point should be made before turning to specific examples. That is, the moment in all three plays that is most clearly intertextual – where nearly all critics see some deliberate interplay between the later playwrights and Aeschylus – is the anagnōrisis between Orestes and Electra. I would like to suggest that this is significant. The act of “recognition” is, of course, a fundamental plot point in many tragedies (as Aristotle recognised: Arist. Poet. 1452a). But as Orestes recognises Electra in the later plays a doubled recognition occurs. On the level of the play, the character of Orestes is recognising his long-lost sister. On the level of intertheatricality, we are also aware that Orestes is recognising that the person in front of him is the established literary character of Electra: in Sophocles’ version, he asks, ἦ σὸν τὸ κλεινὸν εἶδος Ἠλέκτρας τόδε; “Is yours the famous form (or beauty) of Electra?” (Sophocles Electra 1177). Famous, we might ask, from where – if not from the previous literary tradition, which Sophocles here mobilises (Mueller 2015, 124; see Dugdale 2018, 37–38, who emphasises the difference between her identity and her shabby appearance).

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Signs and Recognitions By far the best known and most obvious reference to Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers takes place in Eurpides’ version of the recognition scene. At the opening of Aeschylus’s play, Electra goes to the tomb of Agamemnon (probably visible on stage) to make an offering, on the orders of Clytemenestra. When she arrives at the tomb, however, she is shaken to discover two tokens, which suggest the return of Orestes to Argos: a strand of hair which matches her own, and a set of footprints that seem to be similar in proportion to her own. It is worth noting that Aeschylus does not present these as simple tekmeˉria of Orestes’ return: Electra complains about the ambivalent semantic value of the lock of hair (Solmsen 1967, 5–6; Mueller 2015, 89): Would that it had a thoughtful voice, like a messenger so that I would not falter, being of two minds, but it should tell clearly whether to throw away this lock if it has been cut from a hated head, or, being related to me, it could mourn along with me… (Aeschylus Libation Bearers 195–99) Already in Aeschylus, then, there is some uncertainty about the interpretation of tokens and, in the call for a “messenger”, at least a hint of theatrical self-awareness. In Euripides’ version the old man who rescued Orestes many years ago brings these same tokens to Electra’s attention, but she rejects them outright on rationalist grounds. Of the hair she says, Since how will a lock of hair correspond, one from a well-born man, nourished in the wrestling-ring the other feminine from combing…? (Euripides Electra 527–29) And when it comes to the footprint, she first questions how there could be one at all on rocky ground (534–35) and then declares that the feet of a brother and sister would not, in any case, be “equal” (ἴσος) (535–37). The passage has been much discussed as a critique of Aeschylus (see e.g. Solmsen 1967, 15–17; Kucharski 2004 for strong arguments that the passage is an attack; Garvie 1986, 164–245, denies that it is “serious polemic”). Zeitlin summarises a broader range of scholarly views: Aside from parody, critics have argued for a serious critique of Aeschylus, an interrogation of valid evidentiary criteria, an indictment of character for both Electra and Orestes, an intertextual tour de force, an instance of generic instability, or most recently, an exercise in metapoetics or metatheater. (Zeitlin 2012, 370 n. 24)

Though the passage often strikes modern readers who know the Libation Bearers as funny, I believe that something subtler is going on in this clearly intertheatrical passage. It has frequently been argued that Euripides rejects the Aeschylean tokens in favour of a more “realistic” mode of recognition, a critique of conventionality itself (Denniston 1939, 520– 84; Goldhill 1986, 249). But for all the potential parody of the “conventional” signs of recognition, what happens in the sequel is equally conventional: having rejected the Aeschylean tokens, Electra is eventually convinced that Orestes is her brother by means of a sign borrowed from the genre of epic, a scar on his body. Mueller (2015, 92–94) argues this physical marker is superior to the Aechylean tokens, since it is “…delicately poised between the determinants of nature and culture” (94). It depends, nonetheless, on a



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literary precedent. Readers have rightly seen this recognition-by-scar as a reference to the famous recognition of Odysseus in book 19 of the Odyssey, and one that borders on parody. As Goff points out, Orestes does not fare well in the implicit comparison to Odysseus, since Orestes’ scar is one he received in childhood, in a somewhat childish way, when he was chasing a deer with his sister Electra (Euripides Electra 573–80; Goff 1991). The fact that Electra does not seem to notice this scar – at whose creation she was present – until it is pointed out to her has caused commentators some consternation, but that is part of the point. The scar, much like Odysseus’s scar in the Odyssey, only comes to the audience’s attention, only exists, once it has been narrated. There is no indication in the play of the scar before the old man notices it, and then tells the story of its creation. Like all signs in Greek tragedy, signification is created by the action of observation and recognition comes about by one of the characters metapoetically creating an “ad hoc literary history” of that moment (and see Marshall 1999–2000, 339 for a discussion of the scar’s visible presence (or lack of it) on Orestes’ mask). More important, I believe, is the way that this multi-layered recognition creates an additional layer of narrative and audience response in re-enacting the Aeschylean plot. In the Libation Bearers Electra’s experience with the tokens of recognition is direct. We watch her see the lock of hair and the footprint, and speculate anxiously about what they might mean. Since Orestes opened the play and has just recently stepped off stage, we know what they mean, and we experience a sense of resolution in seeing Electra come to the same state of knowledge that we have. In Euripides, the proposed tokens that Electra rejects are only narrated objects: the old man saw them off stage and proposes them to Electra in the obvious expectation (supported by our knowledge of the Aeschylean play) that she will accept them. In this way, the Aeschylean version becomes a necessary and present subtext against which Electra responds; we cannot avoid being aware that we are watching a second-generation narrative, because we see the earlier dramatic narrative proposed and systematically rejected. When that recognition is replaced with the parodic-Homeric one, the action allows us to experience the expected Aeschylean recognition – the young man on stage is, after all, Orestes – but simultaneously to understand that the rest of this play will go in radically different direction. Orestes’ juvenile scar marks him as less than heroic and the siblings’ response to their act of matricide similarly reveals them to be ill-equipped for the tragic plot in which they find themselves. Euripides both signals his predecessor and distances his plot from the Aeschylean recognition, in a fashion perhaps more literary and less “realistic” than is sometimes suggested. Sophocles similarly replays the Aeschylean recognition scene, though he does so in a different way and with different results (see Dugdale 2018 for a discussion of recognition as a central theme of the play). He shares with his younger colleague, however, the technique of making Electra hear about the tokens of recognition, rather than see them herself. In Sophocles’ version Electra’s sister Chrysothemis (who appears only in Sophocles’ version) reports to Electra that she has seen – offstage – a lock of hair. She takes the lock to be a sign (tekmeˉrion, 904) of Orestes’ return, just as Electra did in Aeschylus’s version. Electra, of course, does not believe that the sign signifies the return of Orestes; but what is more important, Chrysothemis’s logic about the sign closely mirrors that of Electra in the Libation Bearers (see Solmsen 1967, 22). In the earlier play, Electra notes the similarity of the hair to her own (“No one but me could have cut it”, 172), and though she dares not say that she thinks it is Orestes’ hair, she hints hopefully in that direction: …For how can I expect anyone else of the citizens to master this fear?

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Surely the one who killed him did not cut it, my mother… But how can I acknowledge these things outright to be the offerings of Orestes, most beloved of mortals to me? (Aeschylus Libation Bearers 187–93) As Solmsen rightly notes, it is not just the physical similarity of the hair to her own that ­indicates Orestes as the donor, but the fact that nobody else would have dedicated it (Solmsen 1967, 22). Chrysothemis in Sophocles’ version picks up on this same strain of logic: Whom does this concern, except of course me and you? And I didn’t do it, I know that, nor did you; how could you?… But our mother is not inclined to do such things, nor doing them would she be secretive… These grave offerings must be from Orestes… (Sophocles Electra 909–15) Instead of being the observer and narrator of this sign, Electra has become the sceptical listener of, as it were, her own words from the earlier play. The identification of Chrysothemis’s logic in Sophocles with that of Electra in Aeschylus makes it all the more surprising that Electra rejects Chrysothemis’s evidence outright; she refuses to recognise Orestes until he shows her a signet ring some three hundred lines later (1222–23; see Mueller 2015, 86; Dugdale 2018, 34). But the reason for this refusal is, of course, that by the time Chrysothemis comes on stage to announce Orestes’ return, Electra has already heard the Paedagogus’s long story about Orestes’ death (on which see below). In fact, Clytemnestra, after hearing this elaborate story, refers to it obliquely as tekmeˉria, “tokens”, of Orestes’ death (774–75). So in Sophocles’ version Electra does not reject the tekmeˉrion of the lock of hair by way of a rationalist rejection of the conventions of drama, but rather because she has already given her credence to a story that the external audience knows to be a fiction (see Zeitlin 2012, 366–67; Dugdale 2018, 36). As a result of that belief, she pours out a heart-rending lament for her dead brother. In the process, as Kitzinger has shown, Electra’s words take on a hollow ring: however genuine her grief, because the audience knows that she is grieving for a man who is not only alive but on stage at the moment, her lament takes place in a plane of theatrical unreality, distinct from the “real” actions that take place in the drama (Kitzinger 1991, 319). Electra here plays two roles at once, uncomfortably concomitant: she has been the unwitting audience to the Paedagogus’s speech, which she interprets incorrectly; and she acts out a lament (which is witnessed by Orestes as well as the external audience) based on that incorrect understanding of events, including her rejection of the lock of hair as evidence. This doubling of roles – as internal spectator as well as internal and external narrator – signals not only Electra’s relation to the evidence before her, but her relation to the Aeschylean text. Her failure to recognise the Aeschylean lock of hair corresponds to her removal from the stage-reality of the plot that Orestes is constructing, and from the external audience’s knowledge of that stage-reality. Instead of watching Electra recognise the tokens for what they are, the external audience watches her misunderstand them and therefore fail to identify her brother. Again, it is this moment of recognition that repeatedly invites the external audience to perceive the Aeschylean plot in the background.



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Matricide Becomes Electra All three plays must, of course, include a moment of matricide. As is always noted, Sophocles seems to downplay the familial and religious aspects of this act and, in fact, reverses the order of the killings of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, with the effect of minimising the matricide per se (useful discussion in Ringer 1998, 128–29). Allen-Hornblower’s analysis of these scenes is particularly acute: she shows that Sophocles has Orestes and Electra use language that is political rather than familial, and that they carefully avoid looking at their mother’s body after Orestes has killed her, thus erasing the effect of the maternal body (Allen-Hornblower 2016, 204–14). Even so, Sophocles’ version seems to invoke Aeschylus’s Agamemnon several times, conjuring it as a precursor to itself. In this way, Sophocles’ Electra positions itself as a kind of replacement for the Libation Bearers setting itself up as a sequel to the first play of Aeschylus’s famous trilogy and taking that trilogy in a new direction. This manoeuvering and repositioning is most obvious in the killing of Clytemnestra and its aftermath, specifically in that Clytemnestra’s death becomes an echo of Agamemnon’s (see Finglass 2007, on Sophocles Electra 1415–16). In Aeschylus’s trilogy, Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon offstage, in the bath (an event which she will later narrate herself). As the action happens, the chorus wonders ineffectually what to do, and the audience hears cries from within the house (Agamemnon 1343–45): Agamemnon  Chorus  Agamemnon 

Ōmoi, I am struck an effective blow, inside. Be quiet. Who shouts, having been struck an effective blow? Ōmoi, I am struck again a second time.

Clytemnestra’s killing by Orestes in Sophocles’ version seems an uncanny replay Clytemnestra Electra Clytemnestra

Ōmoi, I am struck. Strike twice as hard, if you have the strength. Ōmoi, indeed again.

The verbal parallels are unusually close in Greek. Ringer, in his study of metatheatricality in Sophocles, finds this passage unique: “This passage in the Sophoclean play represents perhaps the only instance in surviving Greek tragedy where one dramatist quotes another play by another author and derives effect from the audience recognising the source” (Ringer 1998, 202). The question is what, exactly, is the effect of this intertheatrical reference? First, and most obviously, Sophocles has set up Clytemnestra’s death as an answer to that of Agamemnon – not, needless to say, in this play (since Agamemnon is long dead at the start of the drama), but in the already canonical version of Aeschylus. In the Libation Bearers to be sure, Orestes kills his mother in an explicit act of revenge, but there the deed is troubled by the spectre of matricide and Furies about to be unleashed. Here, Sophocles rewrites the killing of Clytemnestra as a more purely political act (see Allen-Hornblower 2016, 218), one that structurally and verbally echoes that in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. The other effect, though perhaps incidental, also deserves notice: in the Agamemnon, it is the chorus who interject between Agamemnon’s two cries, and in the famous passage that follows (Aeschylus Agamemnon 1346–71) will flail about ineffectually while Clytemnestra tidies up indoors. In Sophocles, it is Electra – a relatively minor character in Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers – who takes up the role of intervener, seeks to urge her brother on and who

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will, in the next scene with Aegisthus, encourage Orestes in his political control of the situation. That scene, as well, explicitly refers to the “earlier” action of the Agamemnon. Aegisthus, after recognising that the body on stage is not Orestes but Clytemnestra, tries to prevent Orestes from taking him into the house (Sophocles Electra 1493–96): Aegisthus Orestes

Why do you lead me into the house? How, if the deed is noble, does it need darkness, and why are you not ready to kill? Do not give orders. In the place where you killed my father, so may you die in the same place.

As Finglass notes, “At Aesch. Cho. 904–907 Orestes tells Clytemnestra to go inside so he can kill her next to her lover Aegisthus; S. lays greater stress on how the killing constitutes retribution for Agamemnon’s death” (Finglass 2007 on 1495–96). I would take it one step farther: Sophocles’ Orestes creates a death for Aegisthus that is physically parallel to that of Agamemnon in Aeschylus. Here again, Sophocles’ play presupposes Aeschylus’s as the prequel to Orestes’ political solution, a fact that is easy to overlook precisely because the Agamemnon is (and was) so well-known as to be the standard version already. When we look carefully at Euripides’ version of the matricide, we see a similar set of presuppositions, and possibly muted intertextual passages. In Euripides’ Electra, the setting – out in the countryside, probably near the Argive Heraion (sanctuary of Hera) – changes the nature of the intrigue-plot significantly. In this play, Orestes kills Aegisthus first, as Aegisthus is in the process of sacrificing to the nymphs. Once Orestes reunites with Electra, she speaks at length to the corpse of Aegisthus, enumerating his abuses of her. At this point, Orestes seems to experience a moment of self-doubt, questioning whether or not he should kill his mother (Euripides Electra 969, 971, 973). Repeatedly, Electra plays the role taken by Pylades in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, urging her brother to heed the words of Apollo rather than worrying about the ethical problems of matricide (Euripides Electra 970, 972, 974; Nooter 2011, 415; Allen-Hornblower 2016, 229–30). At this point, Clytemnestra arrives at Electra’s humble house on a chariot and descends to speak to her daughter. Visually, the scene could easily have been reminiscent of the carpet-scene in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, in which Clytemnestra convinced her husband to tread on precious tapestries as he descended from his chariot to walk into the house where she would kill him (Aeschylus Agamemnon 810–930; parallel noted by Marshall 1999–2000, 332). And this visual parallel has been set up for us by Electra’s own words: “She marches beautifully into the middle of the net/indeed she preens with chariots and escort” (Euripides Electra 965–66). The imagery of the net here picks up the “enfolding cloths” that Clytemnestra used to entangle Agamemnon in Aeschylus’s play (amphibleˉstron, Aeschylus Agamemnon 1382), and the word that Electra uses here (arktus) is the same word used by Cassandra, predicting Agamemnon’s death, in the Agamemnon (1116) and by Orestes in the Libation Bearers (1000). In several ways, then, the audience is encouraged again to see the killing of Clytemnestra as visually and verbally echoing the death of Agamemnon in the first play of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Whereas Sophocles appears to use this technique in order to emphasise the political retribution that is Orestes’ focus in his Electra, Euripides appears to use the same technique for different ends. As numerous scholars have seen, Orestes and Electra here suffer a psychological breakdown on the realisation that they have killed their mother (Vermeule 1958, 392–93; Allen-Hornblower 2016, 244–45). As Allen-Hornblower has shown, Euripides’ version differs from Sophocles’ in that the children are obsessed with the corpse of Clytemnestra as a mother: “Their reaction centers on precisely what Athena and Apollo had dismissed in the



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trial scene of Aeschylus’s Eumenides: the maternal body, in its concrete physicality, as a giver of life” (Allen-Hornblower 2016, 234). Perhaps the most important technique that Euripides uses in depicting the matricide and its aftermath, then, is that he makes the explicit choice to have Orestes and Electra serve as the messengers who narrate the killing of Clytemnestra (Allen-Hornblower 2016, 225–45). As Allen-Hornblower demonstrates, this places the children, again, in a doubled relationship to the narrative: they are both the actors who perform the killing, and in narrating it after the fact they “become, in effect, spectators to their own deed” (Allen-Hornblower 2016, 225). In structuring the drama in this way, again, Euripides has taken some of the most effective and famous moments of the Libation Bearers and refracted them through the narrating lens of the distraught killers. In the Libation Bearers for example, Orestes and Clytemnestra hold a brief, tense dialogue on stage just before Orestes leads his mother into the house to kill her. At the start of this dialogue, Clytemnestra appeals to Orestes as his mother, baring her breast (896–98): Clytemnestra

Hold, son; respect, child, this breast at which you, many times, while a baby, suckled strong-nourishing milk with your gums.

It is, in fact, this very line that leads Orestes to turn to Pylades and ask if he should kill his own mother. In Euripides’ play, we get a version of this scene, but it takes place after the fact, as part of Orestes’ hesitating, self-questioning narrative of the event (Electra 1206–9): Did you see, how she, wretched, threw open her peplos, showed her breast in the slaughter, ah me, placing the legs that gave birth on the ground? It made me melt! An acted event in Aeschylus becomes a narrated one in Euripides, with the focus squarely placed on the distraught reaction of Orestes as spectator-narrator. Once again, then, we have a reference to the Aeschylean original that also distances that original from the main action on the stage: what we know happened in Aeschylus’s version can, it seems, only be narrated, not shown. I take the form of this particular allusion, moreover, to contain a metatheatrical element as well. Orestes, after all, does not just tell us what happened: he asks the chorus “Did you see…?” We can read this appeal as applying to the external audience as well: did we see how Clytemnestra laid bare her breast? We did not, in the current drama; but perhaps we did, when we watched the Aeschylean version, which serves as an imagined projection for the events that Orestes and Electra suffer on stage. By means of this distancing, by re-enacting Aeschylus in the narrative dialogue of Orestes and Electra, Euripides sets up the psychological conclusion to this sequence of events. For at the end of this play, Orestes is not (as at the end of the Libation Bearers) pursued by Furies that apparently only he can see; rather, the siblings’ psychological torments take the place of the Furies’ arrival (Allen-Hornblower 2016, 244). Those torments are signalled, in part, by Orestes’ anxious question: “Did you see?” He must strive here to reconcile his own action of matricide with the audience’s presumed horror of such an act. In the epilogue to the play, the literal Furies are mentioned, but here again as part of a narrative, the prediction of Orestes’ future sufferings, given by the Dioscuri (Euripides Electra 1252–57). Once more the events of Aeschylus’s drama become offstage narration, invoked as part of the story (and described as inevitable for Orestes) but at one remove of narration from the external audience.

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Madness and Fiction I have been arguing for a complex understanding of the relationship between Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. The later playwrights, I suggest, not only use the same mythic material as Aeschylus, but at key moments signal awareness of their predecessor. At times, they mobilise these references as a kind of imagined background to the action of their own dramas, and at other times they figure the Aeschylean version as a “fiction” against which they project the dramatic “reality” of their own plots. In the final section of this chapter, I would like to propose such a use, one that takes a striking moment from the Libation Bearers and elaborates it into a deliberately deceptive fiction. What follows can only be speculative, but it fits well with the pattern of usage that I have argued for earlier and it adds a level of nuance to the dramatic technique of Sophocles. The deception plot in Sophocles’ Electra is by far the most elaborate,and has the most farreaching dramatic effects of any of the three plays. In the Libation Bearers Orestes claims to be a Phocian man who heard from a stranger than Orestes is dead. This news causes some consternation for Cilissa, Orestes’ childhood nurse and a minor character in the drama, and the fictional story leads to Orestes’ killing of Aegisthus (Aeschylus Libation Bearers 674–890). In Sophocles’ version, the story of Orestes’ death becomes a tour-de-force of internal narrative, delivered by the Paedagogus to Clytemnestra, and overheard by Electra. One of the functions of this elaborate narrative is to create the dramatic irony discussed earlier: Electra pours forth a lament for the dead Orestes, whom we know to be still alive. But the reason for the length and narrative complexity of the Paedagogus’s speech remains something of a mystery and, as Finglass notes, “The Paedagogus’s speech is often passed over in critical discussions of the drama: hailed as a virtuoso display of narrative fireworks, it is then largely ignored…” (Finglass 2007, on 680–763; see, however, the perceptive comments of Kitzinger 1991, 318). I would like to suggest that part of the effect of this speech comes from its intertextual relation to the Libation Bearers, an idea that has been suggested by others but not, to my knowledge, fully developed (see Finglass 2007 on 680–763; Kitzinger 1991, 300 n. 7; Segal 1966, 482 n. 14). Towards the end of the Libation Bearers one of the most striking moments in extant drama takes place: Orestes, uncertain whether he is mad or sane, sees the Furies of his dead mother coming for him, though they are apparently invisible to the Chorus (Aeschylus Libation Bearers 1048–64). Just before this moment of terror, Orestes expresses the onset of madness with a striking image (Sophocles Electra 1021–24): But so that you may know this, for I do not know where it will end, I seem to be driving a chariot, with horses, outside the track; for ungovernable wits carry me defeated, and fear near my heart is ready to sing and dance in wrath. As many have noted, the image perhaps picks up an earlier line in the play, where the Chorus compares Orestes to a horse, “yoked to a chariot of troubles” (794–96). Here, as a metaphor for the apparent loss of his mental faculties, Orestes sees himself as the charioteer, careening out of control. The story that the Paedagogus tells of Orestes’ death takes this metaphor and turns it into a literal, but fictional, event. That is, the Paedagogus tells Clytemnestra that Orestes had gone to Delphi to compete in the games there; on the second day, he competed in a chariot race, which ended in disaster (Sophocles Electra 745–55):



Intertheatricality and Narrative Structure in the Electra Plays 155 He shattered the middle hub of the axle, and slipped from the rails of the chariot; he was wound up in the cut reins; as he fell to the ground, the horses scattered to the middle of the track. When the crowd saw him, fallen out of the chariot, they wailed for the young man, that having done such deeds he should receive such evil lot, tossed first to the ground, then showing his legs to the sky, until the grooms, barely holding back the running horses, released him, bloody …

The description is vivid and, among other things, remarkable for containing an audience response to the fictional event: we are told specifically that the crowd at Delphi wailed for the young Orestes’ unhappy fate. There is, moreover, a further bit of audience association: before Orestes’ crash, we are told that the Athenian charioteer (the word here is heˉniostrophos, which echoes Orestes’ verb heˉniostrophoˉ, “I drive a chariot”, at Libation Bearers 1022) saw the trouble up ahead and reined his horses in. As Ringer notes, “The unknown Athenian driver, in addition to being an audience projection, serves as a subtle dopplegänger for the real Orestes…” (Ringer 1998, 169). As impressive as this all is, it becomes still more compelling as an intertextual reference to the end of the Libation Bearers. There, as we have seen, Orestes characterises his own mental loss of control by a striking metaphor, that of a chariot driven off the course. Here, Sophocles takes that metaphor and turns it into a fictional event, part of the complicated back-story that the Paedagogus tells in order to advance the plot by deceiving Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. Once again, Aeschylus’s earlier version of the play comes back in Sophocles’ text, not, however, as the main plot, but as a fictional past event. We can go even further and suggest that the audience response in the Paedagogus’s story mirrors and recalls the dramatic response to Orestes’ breakdown at the end of the Libation Bearers where the ethical problem is precisely that a young man must now suffer for having taken on the difficult (indeed murderous) restoration of his household: the external audience of the Libation Bearers might well have lamented “that having done such deeds he should receive such evil lot”. In this reading, the audience response to Orestes’ disastrous chariot-race operates as a subtle signal, a reference to the idea that we have seen this “fiction” before, in another version of the drama that continues to unfold. The Athenian audience again has a kind of double-vision: they can identify with the Athenian charioteer, who watches disaster but avoids it; and they can think of both of Orestes’ disasters (in the Paedagogus’s speech and in the Libation Bearers) as fictions external to the reality of the play at hand. As with the other moments of intertextual interaction that we have seen, in other words, Sophocles uses this moment to contain and constrain certain Aeschylean plot points. In this play, unlike in Aeschylus’s, Orestes’ going off the rails is only a fiction; it does not signify his madness and the Furies do not pursue him. The play will be resolved (to the extent that it is) in political terms, with Orestes marching Aegisthus in to meet his death, the corpse of Clytemnestra strewn upon the stage.

Conclusions It is no surprise that Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Electra plays should echo, at times, Aeaschylus’s Libation Bearers. There are, after all, only so many ways to tell the same story, and the level of variation in these three plays is striking – especially given the fact that all three end more

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or less at the same point, with Clytemnestra and Aegisthus dead (or nearly so) and the fate of Orestes and Electra unresolved. The way in which his successors make use of Aeschylus’s play, however, demonstrates a complex awareness of the possibilities of intertheatrical reference. In particular, we should note that at several points in both plays, what was an acted event in the Libation Bearers – Electra recognising the tokens, Orestes facing Clytemnestra, Orestes going mad on stage – becomes in Sophocles’ and Euripides’ versions a narrated event, and often a narrated and then rejected event. The playwrights signal their use of Aeschylus, in other words, by placing those Aeschylean events offstage, by making them into events that the characters must respond to, so that the external audience responds both to the narrated actions and to the characters’ response to them. The intertext, in other words, is marked by narrative distance. Within that general framework, Sophocles and Euripides manipulate such references for different effects. Euripides famously rejects Aeschylean conventions, interjecting a bit of rationalism into his drama. But in the end, he also resorts to literary conventions; his point is not to deconstruct drama, but to push it in a different direction, one in which a psychological breakdown can replace the manifestation of supernatural Furies. Sophocles, if anything, makes even more complex use of the previous text. He repeatedly uses the Aeschylean version as a kind of fictional screen: Electra does not believe the narrated Aeschylean tokens because she has already been taken in by the false story of Orestes’ death – itself a narrated version of an Aeschylean metaphor. The Aeschylean version becomes, as it were, an unrealised alternative to the plot that the audience is watching, contained in narrative, not believed when it should be and believed when it should not. Against this screen, Sophocles creates a more overtly political plot, one that contains without completely banishing Aeschylean concerns over matricide and familial morality.

FURTHER READING Several studies compare the three Electra plays, with particular emphasis on the recognition scene. Of particular interest are Zeitlin 2012, Kucharski 2004 and Solmsen 1967. Commentaries on all three plays inevitably make note of the points of contact and differences; the most useful are Garvie 1986, Finglass 2007, Cropp 2013 and Denniston 1939. Davidson 2012 provides a useful discussion of the interaction of the three playwrights in general. Nooter 2011 provides perceptive comments on Sophocles’ modifications of the Aeschylean plot. Allen-Hornblower 2016 includes a section on the matricide in all three plays, with special attention to the narrative structures that are used. Ringer 1998 is a thorough study of metatheatricality in Sophocles, with a long chapter on the Electra. Marshall 1999–2000 considers metatheatrical moments in Eurpides’s Electra. Mueller 2015 considers the importance of physical props in Greek tragedy, with important sections on the tokens of recognition in all three plays, and of the funerary urn in Sophocles.

REFERENCES Allen-Hornblower, E. (2016). From Agent to Spectator: Witnessing the Aftermath in Ancient Greek Epic and Tragedy. Berlin and Boston. Biles, Z. B. (2006–07). “Aeschylus’ Afterlife Reperformance by Decree in 5th C. Athens?” Illinois Classical Studies 31.32, 206–42. Chaston, C. (2010). Tragic Props and Cognitive Function: Aspects of the Function of Images in Thinking. Leiden and Boston.



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Cropp, M. J. (2013). Euripides: Electra. Second Edition. Oxford. Davidson, J. (2012). “Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.” In K. Ormand, ed. A Companion to Sophocles. Malden, MA, 38–52. Denniston, J. D. (1939). Euripides’ Electra. Oxford. Dugdale, E. (2018). “Of This and That: The Recognition Formula in Sophocles’ Electra.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 147, 27–52. Finglass, P. J. (2007). Sophocles: Electra. Cambridge. Garvie, A. F. (1986). Aeschylus: Choephoroi. Oxford. Goff, B. (1991). “The Sign of the Fall: The Scars of Orestes and Odysseus.” Classical Antiquity 10, 259–67. Goldhill, S. (1986). Reading Greek Tragedy. Cambridge. Hinds, S. (1998). Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry. Cambridge. Kitzinger, R. (1991). “Why Mourning Becomes Elektra.” Classical Antiquity 10, 298–327. Kucharski, J. (2004). “Orestes’ Lock: The Motif of Tomb Rituals in the Oresteia and the Two Electra Plays.” Eos 91, 9–33. Marshall, C. W. (1999–2000). “Theatrical Reference in Euripides’ Electra.” Illinois Classical Studies 24.25, 325–41. Mueller, M. (2015). Objects as Actors: Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy. Chicago. Nooter, S. (2011). “Language, Lamentation, and Power in Sophocles’ Electra.” Classical World 104, 399–417. Ringer, M. (1998). Electra and the Empty Urn. Chapel Hill. Segal, C. (1966). “The Electra of Sophocles.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 97, 473–545. Solmsen, F. (1967). Electra and Orestes: Three Recognitions in Greek Tragedy. Amsterdam Vermeule, E. T. (1958). “‘Electra’, translated with an Introduction.” In D. Grene and R. Lattimore, eds. Euripides V, Chicago, 1–66. Zeitlin, F. I. (2012). “A Study in Form: Recognition Scenes in the Three Electra Plays.” Lexis 30, 361–78.

CHAPTER 12

Prometheus Bound: The Principle of Hope I. A. Ruffell Prometheus Bound is an unusual tragedy. In its progressive stance, political rallying cries and condemnation of established authority, it is uncompromising, radical and optimistic unlike any other fifth-century drama. As such it has proved a perennial favourite for radicals and revolutionaries. In its original context, it offers an insight into the assertive and confident popular democracy of the period between Ephialtes’ revolution (462/1), which swept away the residual formal role for the traditional aristocracy and repudiated its notional alliance with Sparta, and the cataclysm of the Peloponnesian War (432/1), a decades-long conflict between Athens’ growing imperial power and that of Sparta and her allies, a conflict which would draw in most of the Greek world. The play articulates what Ernst Bloch (1986) called the “principle of hope”, a current that, across cultures and particularly in popular genres, reflects on political contexts or spurs ­political action. Prometheus Bound pursues this idea through allegory, aetiology and enactment. It reinterprets a foundational episode in Greek mythology and presents conflict among the gods as prototype for human political struggles. It uses the same mythological reworking to articulate a progressive, materialist model of human society. The presentation of these strands also demonstrates and guarantees the importance of compassion and solidarity for the survival of the human race. For a play set mostly amongst the gods, it is a quintessentially humane drama.

Allegories of Hope: Struggle, Resistance and the End of Tyranny Unlike most Greek tragedies, Prometheus Bound is set mainly among the gods and it has a divine protagonist: Prometheus. His story is foundational in Greek culture and offers a powerful set of ideas to manipulate. The play does not, however, simply reconfigure its symbolic and moral implications, it also creates a multi-stranded allegory which pointed to specific contemporary concerns.

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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The story of Prometheus goes back to Hesiod’s poems, Theogony and Works and Days. These versions have different emphases, but the framework is the same. Prometheus is responsible for the breach between Zeus and humanity. At a banquet, Prometheus engineers an unequal division of animal parts between gods and men. Zeus, according to Hesiod, saw through the trick but accepted it nonetheless, and proceeded to punish humanity, withdrawing fire. Prometheus stole it back and for that was punished by being chained to a pillar and having his liver eternally pecked out by an eagle. Humanity was punished by the creation of Pandora, the first woman, given as a gift to Epimetheus, Prometheus’s brother, who opened Pandora’s jar with all the miseries and diseases of the world. In a rather pregnant, if opaque, observation, the only thing to remain in the jar was hope. Whether this means that there is no hope in the world or that humans hang grimly onto hope is rather unclear, but given Hesiod’s overwhelmingly pessimistic approach to the world, while somehow convinced of the justice of Zeus, the ambiguity is telling. The myth’s reworking in Prometheus Bound distils two elements: the struggle between Prometheus and Zeus, and the element of hope in the face of hardship. Prometheus is no longer the trickster seeking to fool Zeus, with humans as collateral damage. Rather Prometheus is now an erstwhile ally of Zeus and has played an important role in the war of Zeus against the Titans. He is no longer son of the Titan Iapetos, but is a Titan himself, son of Gaia (Earth). Gaia is very pointedly flagged as also being Themis, a goddess who represents “good order” or “judgement”. Prometheus and his mother choose to side with Zeus against the Titans, The nature of the dispute between Prometheus and Zeus is never fully explained, only that Zeus wanted to annihilate humanity and Prometheus intervened to save them. Although it is tempting to use the Hesiodic back-story, neither the five races of men nor the Pandora story quite fit. There is no emphasis on the moral failings of either Prometheus or the human race(s). Instead, humans are presented as innocent victims of Zeus’s caprice. For Zeus is a tyrant. He is a usurper, lately come to power through violence, suspicious of allies and quick to use force to sustain his regime. Prometheus’s provocation was clearly significant, but Zeus has not simply blasted him with his thunderbolt, because Prometheus, through his mother, has knowledge about the future and specifically how Zeus’s rule might end. Thus, in the prologue, Prometheus is nailed to a cliff at the edge of the world. Hephaistos performs the work under the supervision of two of Zeus’s (Hesiodic) henchmen, Kratos (Power) and Bia (Violence). These, not Dikē (Justice) embody Zeus’s regime in the Prometheus Bound. The torture is both punishment for resisting Zeus and an attempt to extract the information. The nature and motivation of the torture are both significantly d ­ ifferent from the Hesiodic version. Of the eagle, there is as yet no mention. Much of the play, from this point on, presents the nature of tyranny and how it might be ended. Already, we see Hephaistos unwillingly complicit in torture. Kratos bluntly articulates the consequences of trying to resist Zeus. As Prometheus remarks shortly afterwards to the chorus, “there is this sickness in a tyranny, not to trust one’s friends” (224–25). The chorus are the daughters of Okeanos, who represents the water surrounding the earth. They have heard Prometheus’s cries as he was tortured and have come to investigate. Their arrival establishes the dynamic of the play, as characters arrive and converse with the pinned Prometheus. Some arrive intentionally – the chorus and their father, and Hermes, Zeus’s messenger in the final scene. Another, the human Io, stumbles across Prometheus by chance. Each set of interactions reveals more about the nature of Zeus’s tyranny; they also gradually reveal more about the information Prometheus holds about Zeus’s future. The unmoving Prometheus is thus the pivot around which the action, narrative and politics all revolve.

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The chorus are told crucial details that distance the play still further from the Hesiodic version. The chorus are sympathetic, but baffled by Prometheus’s stubborn resistance to Zeus, not least that it is because of miserable humanity. They are not political players in the divine order and so there is little tension in their relationship with Prometheus. The same cannot be said of their father, Okeanos, or of Hermes, who develop the explicit political debate. Okeanos is a fellow Titan who has learned to love Zeus. He arrives on a four-legged flying creature (286–87, 395), undoubtedly using the crane (mēkhanē; on the device, see Mastronarde 1990). From this position, he offers consolation, but urges him to make a similar accommodation with the regime. Although their exchanges are initially civil, even warm, the interaction becomes increasingly tense and ends with Prometheus accusing Okeanos, implicitly or explicitly, of cowardice and complicity (340–76, 383, 390). Prometheus dismisses Okeanos (392), who huffily announces that he was going anyway: his mount is eager for home (393–96). Okeanos is a political trimmer, a survivor who has adapted. Hermes, by contrast, is an unabashed partisan of Zeus. Compared with Kratos, Hermes’ persuasion is subtler and more varied. After attempts at cajoling the information out of Prometheus, he resorts to threats, both more dreadful and psychological than Kratos’s brutality. If Prometheus does not reveal how Zeus’s regime will be ended, he will be buried under rock for hundreds of years, then uncovered again and have his liver pecked out eternally. Thus the traditional punishment is repurposed as an element in the armory of the political strongman. By this stage, it is much clearer what is at stake, primarily through the extensive exchange with Io. She is being driven mad through the world, as Hera’s retribution for becoming the focus of Zeus’s sexual attentions. Initially, Io had the hundred-eyed Argos imposed on her, but after he was dispatched (by Hermes), she was part-transformed into a cow and afflicted by a (real or imagined) gadfly. Arriving in acute distress, she calms sufficiently to talk with Prometheus. She tells the first part of her story, before Prometheus contributes a series of narratives that bring their stories together. He predicts her future wanderings, until she arrives in Egypt, encounters Zeus and conceives Epaphos. From him will come ultimately Danaos and his daughters who will return to Greece, objects of another sexual pursuit. Descended from one of the daughters will come Prometheus’s saviour, Herakles. Prometheus reveals that Zeus’s danger relates to a son more powerful than his father. This motif lies behind Hesiod’s succession myth and Zeus’s extraordinary precautions there (Theogony 886– 900, 924–96), but here concerns Thetis, another rape target of Zeus. Given that the danger is averted in Greek mythology by marrying Thetis to the mortal Peleus (producing Achilles), that Herakles is Zeus’s son and that Zeus clearly has not (yet) annihilated humanity, it is often suggested that Prometheus and Zeus will reach some accommodation, even reconciliation. If Prometheus Bound was part of a connected trilogy, as most Aeschylean plays were (Gantz 1980), this would be addressed in a subsequent play. In Prometheus Bound, however, these details are left opaque. Rather, Prometheus’s release and the evident survival of the human race, are the successful outcome of resistance to tyranny. Successful, yes, but hardly triumphant: it will take Prometheus being buried alive and in agony, and Io and her descendants suffering serial sexual violence. (Here I take a view diametrically opposed to that of White (2001), who argues that the wild through which Io travels hints at future of civilisation and justice under Zeus.) The attention returns to Io’s suffering: the gadfly returns and drives her off. This radical reworking of the Hesiodic myth has made many scholars uneasy. The presentation of the story almost entirely on the divine plane is unusual for Greek tragedy generally, and Aeschylus specifically (Taplin 1977), although there are certain other Aeschylean plays that exhibit similar characteristics: Prometheus Unbound, probably a companion piece, and Psychostasia (“The Weighing of Souls”), set in Hades and featuring Zeus as a character. The



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interaction of gods and humans occurs in the Eumenides, in a similarly politicised context and itself a bold reinterpretation of myth and cult. The treatment of Zeus in Prometheus Bound caused critics in the nineteenth and early twentieth century great agonies and spurred a drive to detach the play from Aeschylus (Dodds 1973). The discomfort was part political and part theological, on the mistaken view that Aeschylus presented a highly idealised Zeus (debunked by Lloyd-Jones 1956). Certainly, the divine architecture renders the play (at times) spectacular and amplifies the ideological weight: at stake is the existence of the human race and the divine dispensation under which it continues. Without the resolution, it is a theological blunt instrument, although that has not prevented subsequent writers supplying the one and enlarging on the other, not least Percy Shelley in his Prometheus Unbound. Nonetheless, the particular challenge of this divine representation is overwhelmingly political. Prometheus Bound is perhaps the earliest text to set out at length a negative portrait of the tyrant, maybe even before, and certainly more directly than, the earlier surviving plays of Sophocles, Ajax or Antigone and their representations of the Atreidai and Kreon. The historical context of this account is one where an ideologically charged notion of tyranny was central to public discourse. From its first decade, the Athenian democracy sought to define itself against the Peisistratid tyranny, which it supplanted, with prominent public memorials of a false history that celebrated the supposed Athenian “tyrannicides”, Harmodios and Aristogeiton: the only human statues in the agora at this time, pointedly replaced almost immediately with a new memorial after the Persians looted the original (see, generally, Taylor 1991). The success of this false narrative was a complaint of both Herodotus (5.55–6, 6.109, 123) and Thucydides (1.20, 6.53–9). For the Athenian audience and for many subsequent audiences, the play is an allegory for human resistance to tyranny. The challenge is less that there are gods on stage, or that gods interact with humans, but that the audience is invited to consider itself in Prometheus’s place. That is not a comfortable place to be, either physically or emotionally. He is stubborn, arrogant, even, occasionally, callous. It is not for nothing that Hermes calls him “wilful” (964, 1012, 1034, cf. 1037). Yet in confronting tyranny, is that what it takes?

Aetiologies of Hope: Materialism and Human Progress Prometheus Bound, however, has more to say about human affairs and is even stronger when placed in this ideological context. Prometheus’s explanation of how he saved humans from Zeus’s annihilation is a further innovation. In Hesiod, Zeus hides fire as punishment for mankind’s inadvertent role in Prometheus’s trick: fire is a basic survival tool, for heat and cooking. Symbolically, fire separates humans from animals; it is also implicated in the division of meat between humans and gods in sacrifice (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1990, 183–201). Whether it stands metonymically for crafts in general in Hesiod is questionable. It is otherwise in Prometheus Bound and that association of fire with crafts in general is owed primarily to this play and the great speech of Prometheus that forms its centre. Prometheus’s introduction of the theft of fire, however, comes in his opening interactions with the chorus, and his prefacing of it is striking (248–52): Prometheus Chorus Prometheus Chorus Prometheus

I prevented mortals from foreseeing their own death. By finding what cure for this disease? By installing blind hopes in them. This is a great gift you have given mortals. And what is more, I gave them fire.

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The provision of fire, with its revelation of secrets, might seem to conflict with keeping humans in the dark: humans have swapped one uncertainty for another. This apparent paradox is, however, central to the role of fire in the play and its political and material consequences. Prometheus means that through fire, humans are no longer doomed to a life that is nasty, brutish and, above all, short. Fire and the skills to which it leads allow humans to put off the day of death – not forever, of course, but with open-ended confidence in the future. Through this somewhat startling utterance (death, blindness), Prometheus articulates the principle of hope. This spirit of optimism pervades his great speech. He has rejected Okeanos’s overtures and an accommodation with Zeus. After a choral song, he explains to them what his theft of fire means in practice. This account is a complete reversal of the narratives of moral and material decline that are endemic in archaic Greek thought, including the aetiologies of decline in Hesiod’s Works and Days and the default assumptions of heroic epic. Fire stands metonymically not just for basic survival skills or even obviously related crafts such as metallurgy, but for human technological development in general. Prometheus has sparked off humanity’s ability to improve its circumstances through the discovery and application of new techniques and disciplines: “I made them intelligent (ennous) and possessed of wits (phrenōn epēbolous”, 444). The speech is broken into two sections by a brief comment from the chorus. The first part describes how humans have literally risen from the mud. Prometheus describes humanity’s primordial state, wandering around heedless (“looking but not looking, uselessly, hearing but not hearing”, 448–49). They lived like ants, in caves with no notion of brickmaking or carpentry (451–54), nor did they understand seasons (and  hence agriculture) until Prometheus taught them about rising and setting stars (i.e. practical a­ stronomy, 455–57). He gave them numeracy (458), writing and thus literature (460–01), settled agriculture (462–65), chariot-racing (465–66) and, finally, shipbuilding (467–68). The second part (476–506) proceeds to detail two crafts at more length: medicine (478–83) and augury (484–504). The latter may seem out of place to a modern audience, but for an ancient audience it was a skill, not a superstition, and, like medicine, consists of decoding signs (or symptoms) from bodies to improve human outcomes. This picture of human development follows a shift in Greek thought towards materialism: in metaphysics in the sixth century and in sociology in the fifth. Already, explanation of the world in material terms had led to some scepticism about traditional accounts of the gods (notably in Xenophanes’ poetry) but subsequent thinkers (among the so-called “sophists”) went further and also questioned the basis of human society, laws and ethics. A systematic progressive view of human development is part of these trends. Such accounts are known from Plato’s Protagoras, in a similar (but not identical) Prometheus story and Diodorus Siculus’s Universal History 1.8–1.9, clearly drawing on an earlier source. Whether this progressive view goes back to a single thinker (Cole 1967 suggests Democritus, perhaps optimistically), there were already multiple versions with multiple agendas being explored in the mid- to late fifth century, including in the Prometheus Bound. It is slightly paradoxical that a view of human development that emphasises human skill and ingenuity in improving their lot, and so directly rejects a foundational account of Greek society, is still prompted and guaranteed by a god. This is not such a stretch for Greek tragedy, which happily exhibits such phenomena as democratic kings (as, notably, in Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women), but it is also facilitated by Prometheus’s closeness to humanity and perhaps also by the relatively limited cult for Prometheus. The divine architecture should not obscure the essentially materialistic and autonomous account of human progress, and there is a significant gap between the Aeschylean version of progress and the Platonic/Protagorean version, which does not lead to human happiness. There, humans cannot live together, fight,



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scatter again and are preyed upon by animals, until Zeus takes pity on them and sends Hermes to give them political skill, which enables them to form communities. Protagoras tells this myth to explain why political skill can be taught (by him) and developed in anyone. Prometheus Bound does not take this route. The account of human progress presupposes successful communities in social as well as environmental terms. They are also presupposed by the account of Io’s future descendant, which downplays Herakles’ descent from Zeus, or role as culture hero destroying monsters, and instead focuses on the generations of descent from Io, all of which presupposes human civilisation. Prometheus’s release, in this account, depends on human skill, not divine agency. Prometheus may have stopped humans foreseeing their own death, but this does not eliminate either death or pain – for them, or indeed, for him. As he says to the chorus, following his account of human progress and reflecting on his own future of years of torment, “Craft (technē) is far weaker than Necessity (anankē)” (514). Notwithstanding the inversion of the Hesiodic myths of decline, there are limits to the idealism of the Prometheus Bound: the need for struggle remains.

Embodying Hope: Compassion and Solidarity The exchange between Prometheus and the chorus at the close of the episode encapsulates much of their relationship. The Oceanids are sympathetic to Prometheus, but also puzzled by his steadfastness in defence of humanity (507–10): Please don’t help mortals more than you must while disregarding your own suffering. For I am optimistic that you will be released from these bonds and be no less strong than Zeus. Both these relationships, between Prometheus and the chorus and between Prometheus and humans, constitute a further moral and, indeed, political theme in the play. They contrast starkly with Prometheus’s interaction with the other, divine characters: not only the delight in torture of Kratos, or the menace of Hermes in defence of Zeus’s regime, but also the compromised figures of Hephaestus and Okeanos, one cowed by the regime’s power, the other urging pragmatic accommodation. Despite their bewilderment, the Oceanids offer unconditional solidarity and do so in defiance of authority (unlike Hephaestus) and without self-interest (unlike their father). They persuaded their father to let them go (“persuading my father with difficulty to change his mind”, 130–01), moved by the sound of torture to defy social convention (aidōs, 134). Their first response on seeing Prometheus bound and pierced is to weep tears of sympathy (144–48, cf. 244–45). Prometheus’s fate demands that anyone sympathise (xynaskhalai, 162, 243); they cannot conceive of someone being so outrageously hard-hearted (tlēsikardios, 160) or with a heart like iron (sidērophrōn) or made of stone (242) as to take pleasure in it. Their sympathy is directly weighed against their fear (144, 180–02). The depth of their emotional response to Prometheus’s plight is repeated throughout the play (e.g. 388–401). They are not above rebuking Prometheus, as at 178–89, although not for strategic compromise, but more in response to his adamantine certainty that he will ultimately be released and readiness to wait and suffer. When Prometheus discloses the reasons for his punishment and acknowledges that his aid to humans included the theft of fire, they appear shocked, see it as an offence (as, indeed, does Prometheus) and urge him to find a way out of his predicament (253, 259–62). They return to this point at greater length in the second stasimon

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(526–60), following Prometheus’s great speech and before the arrival of Io, where, as well as reiterating their fear of Zeus, they ask what conceivable help Prometheus is going to receive from humanity. The lack of a reciprocal quid pro quo makes his actions baffling. As they put it, “you cherish mortals to excess” (533–34). Prometheus’s revelation, to Io and to the chorus, of what is to come only increases their anxiety about him and again they recommend bending (936). And yet, as Hermes arrives to threaten Prometheus and extract the precise details of what Prometheus knows, to exchange insults and to spell out the future punishment (as the chorus fear), they do not abandon him. Thus there are some continuities between their response to Prometheus and that of their father, albeit less categorical or touchy, but crucially they stay with Prometheus despite their disagreement, voluntarily and to the end (277–78, 282–83). The final confrontation with Hermes turns on this point. They are consistent, in that they are moved by Hermes’ account of Prometheus’s future punishment to advise some kind of retreat (1036–39). Hermes, they say, is not without point (ouk akairos); Prometheus should let go his pride (authadia) and adopt good sense (euboulia). And they suggest that it is shameful for a clever person (Prometheus) to make a mistake. But Hermes seems to know which side they are on and his last exchange is with them, not Prometheus. He warns them to leave the area (1058–62), in case they are blasted by Zeus’s thunderbolt, addressing them as “sympathisers [or fellow-travellers] in his pain” (pēmonais xynkamnousai). They reject this as an option; they equate it with cowardice (kakotēs, 1066) and treachery (1068), and describe such action as a sickness (nosos, 1069). Hermes departs, reiterating that they have been warned and characterising their stance and its consequences as folly (anoia), just as he accounts Prometheus’s resistance to Zeus a form of mental aberration (see esp. 1055–57). The political implications of this are clear. Not only does Zeus betray friendships, as Prometheus complains, and not only does he treat his erstwhile allies without honour (184–85), but he also lacks sympathy and takes pleasure in cruelty (163). His actions are put in the context of his conflict with the Titans, but the implication is that his rage is in fact boundless and coterminous with his rule (165–67). The point is repeated in the opening strophe (388–405) of the first stasimon (following the Okeanos episode), a song that opens out both the sympathetic response to the fate of Prometheus and the rejection of Zeus’s treatment of the Titans to the whole (human) world. As Hermes sums it up, Zeus does not know ōmoi (980–81). The link between Prometheus’s sympathy for humanity and the chorus’s sympathy for Prometheus is made clear at 237–41: That’s why, I tell you, I am tormented by these pains: painful to endure, pitiful to see; Despite taking particular pity on mortals, I was not thought to deserve to meet with it, but I have been pitilessly racked like this, a spectacle of ill repute to Zeus. Prometheus shows himself thoroughly familiar with traditional aristocratic notions of honour (timē) and reputation (kleos), in which pity and sympathy play little part. However, he makes the latter central to his actions and, as far as the play is concerned, to why he saved humanity from Zeus’s attempt to enact a Year Zero and replace humanity altogether (150–51). Furthermore, as will become clear subsequently, these are also qualities which characterise not only more marginal gods but also humanity itself. The principal vector for this exploration is Io. Although there is a striking visual difference between the effects of their respective trauma – Prometheus pinned and Io driven in violent motion – the language in which their afflictions are described is markedly parallel and equally laid at the door of Zeus (notwithstanding Hera’s role in Io’s suffering). The



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terms in which they express mutual concern and sympathy are also markedly similar. Despite the power imbalance and despite her affliction, enacted through song and dance, Io’s initial response is to ask after the victim on the rocks (561–63) and while expressing her own pain draws parallels between their conditions, both enduring pain as some kind of punishment from Zeus (578, 614), both treated metaphorically like animals – Prometheus’s shackles are bit and bridle (khalinois, 563) and he is gripped like a horse (ōkhmasen, 618); Io is driven on by goads (kentrois, 596); yoked by Zeus (enezeuxas, 579); forced into animal-like movements (skirtēmatōn, 599), but is also being hunted (kynēgetei, 572). Io’s emotional response to Prometheus’s fate emphasises their shared experience (note talas and cognates at 595, 566, 571, 596, 614, 704). Despite her distress and terror, she is still able to find a community of suffering with the Titan (forms of paskhō, at 571, 579, 614, 606, 625, 703). In this community, they both find hope. For their stories are intertwined, particularly in how they will find relief from their trials (again emphasised by verbal parallels at 749–50 and 773). Hope here is not comfortable (physically or spiritually). The chorus, who, while sympathetic to Prometheus, as they are to Io in person (esp. 687–89), preface the latter’s arrival by indicating that they cannot see why Prometheus bothers with humanity in a corporate sense, but they also offer an entirely different interpretation of hope, associated with pleasure and security (537–39): It is a sweet thing to extend a long life in confident hopes, and with clear pleasures nourishing one’s heart… That prospect of comfort and personal growth is far from the rather grimmer hope which drives the dialogue between Prometheus and Io. Io repeatedly demands to know what will happen to her, and particularly whether there is some end to her torment: a means, mēkhar, and a remedy, pharmakon (606). Prometheus is equally insistent that revealing Io’s fate fully would make her lose her mind. Io, however, insists that to know that there will be an end is itself a benefit. Under pressure from Io and the chorus, Prometheus gives way, first revealing that Zeus is destined to lose his despotic rule (tyrannis) and that it will be a descendant of Io, 13 generations hence, that will be responsible. He then goes on to describe in more detail her travel to Egypt and then her transformation back to human by Zeus and impregnation by touch, the production of her son Epaphos, the story of the Danaids and, finally, that it will be a famous archer (i.e. Herakles, 872) who will release him. Thus, by the time that Io leaves, it is clear that both she and Prometheus share a very similar kind of hope that will sustain them through suffering. And just as the Titan can provide some compassionate relief (a mēkhar and pharmakon) through his narrative, it will be a human, and indirectly Io, that will give him the same – and perhaps, although it is not spelled out, on the same compassionate grounds. It is often tempting, when interpreting Prometheus Bound to focus too much on the protagonist and his defiance of the power of Zeus, but to overemphasise that comes at a price. Prometheus matches the hard-hearted Zeus with a stubborn pride that is criticised by friends and foes alike. It is magnificent, yes, and perhaps even necessary, but that can overshadow the equally important elements of generosity and compassion, of solidarity and mutual aid, which are displayed not only by Prometheus but also a range of weaker and more marginal figures in the divine power struggle, and the hope that sustains them all. This is the third progressive leg of the play: to political optimism (an end of tyranny) and technological progress is added this social dimension. These do not necessarily follow from each other, but they are the universal benefit (koinon… ēphelēma) that Prometheus and the Prometheus Bound are presenting.

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The Politics of Hope: A Play for Its Time These are very broad political positions and it is worth asking whether it is possible to see these as having a more specific relevance. Part of the problem here is that we do not know the date of the play (except for a probable allusion to the eruption of Mt Etna in 479 or 475 bce); worse, we do not even know whether the play is by Aeschylus or not. The play is parodied by Aristophanes, probably in Knights (424 bce) and certainly in Birds (414). If Prometheus Unbound belongs with Prometheus Bound then a parody of that play by Cratinus in his Ploutoi (Wealth-Gods) is relevant (usually, but not certainly dated to 429 bce). That is a wide window from which to draw inferences. (Rejecting the link with the Prometheus Unbound and the earlier Aristophanic parodies, with Bees 1993, gives an even wider range, but this is excessive.) The suggestion that the play is not by Aeschylus rests mainly on linguistic and metrical analysis, which suggests affinities with earlier plays of Sophocles (Ajax and Antigone); certainly the choral passages are much more straightforward than the other plays attributed to Aeschylus (see esp. Griffith 1977). There is a difficulty that there are only six other fully extant plays by Aeschylus for comparison, and three are from the same trilogy (the Oresteia). (The dating of Sophocles’ plays is also problematic.) Arguments from theme are less compelling. It is also hard to draw too much information securely from dramaturgy. Critics have had difficulties, notably, with the binding of Prometheus, the entry of the chorus and the supposedly excessive use of spectacle (see the discussion of Taplin 1977), although many of these problems are illusory (Ruffell 2012). The chorus describe themselves as flying (125–35) and in one or more carriage (135, 279–80). There is no satisfactory way for this to be done by the crane (there is no comparable use of the mēkhanē in number or, importantly, weight) and so was probably enacted through the medium of dance. Multiple cranes (West 1979) are absurd. Similarly, the final earthquake that buries Prometheus is described rather than enacted (although there may have been very limited sound effects). Okeanos, however, certainly entered on the crane. Use of the mēkhanē suggests that there was a stage-building (not securely used before the Oresteia of 458) and perhaps a date rather later. Conversely, for every scene apart from the first, only two characters are used and that would suggest an older-style technique. But that may imply no more than (in this respect) an archaising technique, as the lesson of Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women demonstrates – once considered early on stylistic grounds, but now thought likely to date to 463 bce after the discovery of a papyrus hypothesis (see Garvie 2006). Finally, if the play is drawing on contemporary thinking about human development and human society, the dates of Democritus and Protagoras are sufficiently broad to mean that they cannot be decisive. A case can be made on this basis for seeing the play as a relatively late play by Aeschylus (e.g. Herington 1965, 1970) and possibly connected with his final trip to Sicily. Most scholars today see the play as post-Aeschylean, a pastiche or possibly building on an outline by Aeschylus himself. A number of his relatives were tragic playwrights; in particular his son Euphorion is said to have won victories with his father’s plays (and is thus proposed as the author of the play, as first suggested by Robertson 1938; see also Dodds 1973; West 1990, 2000). Euphorion won in 431 (beating Euripides’ Medea), which would be convenient for a parody two years later, but it is far from the case that comic playwrights always parodied recent plays. A date between the break with Sparta and Ephialtes’ reforms (462/1) and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (431) is likely. Although a possibility remains that the play was a monodrama (i.e. part of an unconnected trilogy: see esp. Griffith 1977), it is much more likely that it formed part of a connected trilogy with Prometheus Unbound. Ancient commentators (on 511 and 512) refer to Prometheus



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Unbound as “the next play”. The third (or first) play in that trilogy would be uncertain. One possibility, Prometheus Fire-bringer (Pyrphoros), is barely known beyond the title and it may simply be a doublet for the satyr play Prometheus Pyrkaeus which belonged to the Persians trilogy (Brown 1990). Lloyd-Jones (1983, 95–103) argued for Women of Etna, building on the idea that the Prometheus trilogy related to one of his known visits to Sicily (e.g. Focke 1930), but the Sicilian proposal is forcefully criticised by Griffith 1978).The back-story in Prometheus Bound suggests that we are not missing the first play in the trilogy, but equally it is far from clear what a third play would have contained either (and for this reason Sommerstein 2010 even suggested a dilogy performed at the Lenaia instead of a trilogy at the Dionysia). Our surviving Aeschylean trilogy, the Oresteia takes some very unexpected directions in its third play. So any suggestions about the future direction of the plot are extremely hazardous. Three possible developments would amplify the ideas that have been explored in this chapter. Two hinge on the precise means by which Prometheus and Zeus come to some kind of agreement. Prometheus indicates in Prometheus Bound both that Zeus will fall unless the Titan does something after being released (770) and that Herakles will release him. Herakles may act on Zeus’s orders, but that is, perhaps significantly, not what Prometheus says (and the converse is suggested in 771, cf. Prometheus Unbound frag. 201). Nor is it clear what immediate crisis brings Zeus to the table, and Herakles’ intervention may be the prompt for, rather than the result of, Zeus’s change of stance. Conversely, it is a moot point why Prometheus, even if released, should trust Zeus, either in relation to his own fate or that of humanity. One possible strand of the deal is that the centaur Chiron steps in to take Prometheus’s punishment for him (alluded to at 1026–29). Chiron is suffering from an incurable wound and wishes to die; he achieves this by passing his immortality to Herakles and thus provides protection for the mortal Herakles and relief for Prometheus (Robertson 1951). The theme of sacrifice for others, even if also self-interested, furthers the theme of solidarity that I have explored here. Another possibility has been suggested through the Protagorean narrative of progress. There, the gift of technology does not prove a success: humans fight each other, fail to sustain their communities, scatter and once again become prey to animals. Zeus takes pity on mortals and sends Hermes with the gift of political skill, so that they can live together successfully. In such a bald form, this is inconsistent with Prometheus Bound, where humans obviously are living in communities, but conflict is a regrettably consistent part of both Greek mythology and history and so it is not impossible that there was some kind of deal in that space. In Protagoras’s hands, the story is implicitly a theory of democracy. Even if the motivation is to explain why anyone has the capacity to be taught political skill by him, nonetheless that capacity is universal. Certainly the implicit or even explicit defence of democracy rooted in the social contract would be consistent with the political narratives of the Prometheus Bound. A third element may be the establishment of the cult of Prometheus at Athens. This was a very distinctive cult and not widespread in the Greek world (Kraus and Eckhardt 1957, 654–57; Pisi 1990). It was celebrated by torch-races (for the Prometheia, see Deubner 1962, 211–12; Parke 1977, 171) and seems to have been associated with artisans, especially potters and the potters’ quarter, Kerameikos (the association is doubted by Pisi 1990, but it seems well established). Torch-races may be one possible referent of the play title Prometheus Pyrphoros (Fire-bearer), if it was part of the trilogy. If so, the democratic turn of the play may have become more explicitly class-based than is seen in Prometheus’s aetiology of progress. Even if these developments are far from certain, they are only drawing out implications that are already to be found in Prometheus Bound itself, which are particularly significant for the period after Ephialtes. This is the period of the confident, outward-looking democracy, when the last formal elements of aristocratic control were being swept aside and power was shifting to the dēmos in the sense of ordinary Athenian male citizens, a period that coincided

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with a growth in Athens’ economic power and its role as a cultural centre, which drew ­thinkers from across the Greek world, who were rethinking society, not least in the light of the democratic revolution. All these elements are refracted in the play. Equally, it is also the period when Athenian imperialism accelerated and the Delian League unequivocally became the Athenian empire. This imperialism is also, perhaps, to be witnessed in the play: it is no coincidence that the interest in the Io story, seen both here and in the (probably earlier) Suppliant Women, is in a period where Athenian imperial ambitions stretched as far as Egypt: a significant, large-scale and ill-fated intervention in a rebellion there possibly went back to the late 460s and failed by the mid-450s (Meiggs 1963; Robinson 1999; Kahn 2008). Finally, there is the overweening presence of those two strongmen of mythical history: Zeus and Prometheus. With the trope of tyranny as the polar opposite to democracy, it might be easy enough to finger Kimon as the obstacle to the realisation of the democratic dream (especially if the play is in the earlier part of the time period I have sketched), but, as I have suggested, the play is blunt about the qualities of the figureheads on both sides and a certain continuity in their qualities. It is not irrelevant that the chief allegorising of Zeus in the period that we can see for certain is as Perikles, the notional champion of the dēmos, whose period of preeminence is likened by Thucydides to a monarchy. For all the personal struggle and confrontation in the play, there is no sense of a personality cult. It is a mark of the developing confidence of the dēmos that the play is rooted in social and material development and the solidarity across and in spite of lines of status and power.

Conclusion Overall, then, the play is offering much more than the, admittedly powerful, performance of personal rebellion and resistance, and championing of technological progress. Considered as a whole it presents the articulation of three interlinked progressive agendas: the promotion of democracy and rejection of tyranny; material and social improvements through technology and a rejection of a conservative narratives of decline; and the need for compassion, ­solidarity and mutual aid. This is no rose-tinted vision and the advancement here is founded in struggle and pain and less than perfect leaders. Nonetheless, across all areas, it is sustained by the principle of hope.

FURTHER READING For the myth of Prometheus, including discussion of this play and an account of its reception, see Dougherty 2005. Standard commentaries on Prometheus Bound are by Griffith 1983, keyed to a Greek text, and Podlecki 2005, keyed to a parallel translation. The question of authenticity is much discussed, but fundamental is Griffith 1977; less sceptically by Herington 1970. An attribution to Euphorion is suggested by Robertson 1938 and developed by Dodds 1973 and West 1979, 1990, 2000. For staging, start with Taplin 1977; the crane is discussed fully by Mastronarde 1990. The handling of Zeus and Prometheus’s relationship with him are discussed by Lloyd-Jones 1956, 2002, arguing for continuation of archaic thought, and Saïd 1985; White 2001 argues that Zeus’s future regime is valorised. Strongly progressive views of the play and its trilogy are advanced by Golden 1966 and Thomson 1973. The ­contemporary background to Prometheus’s myth of progress is explored by Cole 1983; see also Conacher 1977 and Irby-Massie 2008. The role of Prometheus within ritual in Athens is explored by Pisi 1990, who is sceptical of the frequently claimed association with potters, and more generally by Kraus and Eckhardt 1957.



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REFERENCES Bees, R. (1993). Zur Datierung des Prometheus Desmotes. Stuttgart. Bloch, E. (1986). The Principle of Hope. (trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice and P. Knight). Oxford. Brown, A. L. (1990). “Prometheus Pyrphoros.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 37, 50–56. Cole, A. T. (1967). Democritus and the Sources of Greek Anthropology. Cleveland. Conacher, D. J. (1977). “Prometheus as Founder of the Arts.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 18, 189–206. Deubner, L. (1962). Attische Feste. Hildesheim. First published in 1932. Dodds, E. R. (1973). “The Prometheus Vinctus and the Progress of Scholarship.” In The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief. Oxford, 26–44. Dougherty, C. (2005). Prometheus. London. Focke, F. (1930). “Aischylos’ Prometheus.” Hermes 65.3, 259–304. Gantz, T. (1980). “The Aischylean Tetralogy: Attested and Conjectured Groups.” American Journal of Philology 101, 133–64. Garvie, A. F. (2006). Aeschylus’ Supplices: Play and Trilogy. Second Edition. Bristol. Golden, L. (1966). In Praise of Prometheus: Humanism and Rationalism in Aeschylean Thought. Chapel Hill. Griffith, M. (1977). The Authenticity of Prometheus Bound. Cambridge. Griffith, M. (1978). “Aeschylus, Sicily and Prometheus.” In R. D. Dawe, J. Diggle and P. E. Easterling, eds. Dionysiaca. Nine Studies in Greek Poetry by Former Pupils, Presented to Denys Page on His Seventieth Birthday. Cambridge, 105–39. Griffith, M. (1983) Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound. Cambridge. Herington, C. J. (1965). “Aeschylus: The Last Phase.” Arion 4.3, 387–403. Herington, C. J. (1970). The Author of the Prometheus Bound. Austin. Irby-Massie, G. L. (2008). “Prometheus Bound and Contemporary Trends in Greek Natural Philosophy.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 48.2, 133–57. Kahn, D. (2008). “Inaros’ Rebellion against Artaxerxes I and the Athenian Disaster in Egypt.” Classical Quarterly 58.2, 424–40. Kraus, W. and Eckhardt, L. (1957). “Prometheus.” Paulys Real-Encylopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft 23, 653–702. Lloyd-Jones, H. (1956). “Zeus in Aeschylus.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 76, 55–67. Lloyd-Jones, H. (1983). The Justice of Zeus. Second Edition. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Lloyd-Jones, H. (2002). “Zeus, Prometheus, and Greek Ethics.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 101, 49–72. Mastronarde, D. J. (1990). “Actors on High: The Skene Roof, the Crane, and the Gods in Attic Drama.” Classical Antiquity 9.2, 247–94. Meiggs, R. (1963). “The Crisis of Athenian Imperialism.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 67, 1–36. Parke, H. W. (1977). Festivals of the Athenians. London. Pisi, P. (1990). Prometeo nel culto attico. Rome. Podlecki, A. J. (2005) Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound. Oxford. Robertson, D. S. (1938). “On the Chronology of Aeschylus.” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 169–71, 9–10. Robertson, D. S. (1951). “Prometheus and Chiron.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 71, 150–55. Robinson, E. W. (1999). “Thucydidean Sieges, Prosopitis, and the Hellenic Disaster in Egypt.” Classical Antiquity 18.1, 132–52. Ruffell, I. A. (2012). Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound. London. Saïd, S. (1985). Sophiste et tyran: le problème du Prométhee enchaîné. Paris. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010). Aeschylean Tragedy. Second Edition. London. Taplin, O. P. (1977) The Stagecraft of Aeschylus. Oxford.

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Taylor, M. W. (1991). The Tyrant Slayers: The Heroic Image in Fifth Century B.C. Athenian Art and Politics. Second Edition. Salem, NH. Thomson, G. (1973). Aeschylus and Athens: A Study in the Social Origins of Drama. Fourth Edition. London. Vernant, J.-P. and Vidal-Naquet, P. (1990). Myth and Society in Ancient Greece. New York. West, M. L. (1979). “The Prometheus Trilogy.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 99, 130–48. West, M. L. (1990). Studies in Aeschylus. Stuttgart. West, M. L. (2000). “Iliad and Aethiopis on the Stage: Aeschylus and Son.” Classical Quarterly 50, 338–52. White, S. (2001). “Io’s World: Intimations of Theodicy in Prometheus Bound.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 121, 107–40.

CHAPTER 13

Slices from Aeschylus’s Feast: The Fragmentary Works Anthony Podlecki In the heterogeneous assortment of information (and informed conjecture) about Aeschylus are two items that will be useful in any discussion of the fragments. First is his reported description of his tragedies as “slices taken from Homer’s mighty dinners” (Athenaeus Deipnosophists 8. 347e, tr. Hadas 1954, 179) and second, the claim that Sophocles discontinued the practice of presenting thematically connected trilogies involving figures from the same “slice” of the mythological tradition (Suda-lexicon s.v. “Sophocles”; Podlecki 2009, 319). The obvious inference to be drawn from the second report is that thematic interconnectedness was a feature of Aeschylean stagecraft (see Sommerstein, Chapter 15 in this volume) and that we should, where possible, group the fragments in this way. The fragments will be examined in four categories: configurations that are (A) certain or virtually certain, (B) highly likely, (C) possible but susceptible to correction on the basis of further evidence such as a papyrus-find, (D) outliers, individual titles whose somewhat unusual features warrant separate treatment. In square brackets following titles the first digit represents the number of citations in Radt 1985, the second the number of complete verses preserved. I use Sommerstein’s numeration (2008), which in turn follows Radt. A. I begin with the tetralogy for which we have a firm date, but which seems not to adhere to the rule of interconnectedness among the component dramas. It was produced in 472 bce and comprised Phineus, Persians, Glaucus (almost certainly G. of Potniae) and – somewhat surprisingly – a satyric Prometheus play, probably Prometheus the Fire-kindler. Not much remains of the first play, Phineus [5, 3]. The title character was a Thracian king who had been blinded because of an offence against a divinity (Poseidon or Helios). The scant remains concern his torment by the Harpies, who would snatch away his food just as he was starting to eat it. His deliverance was a parergon, or “by-work” in the Argonautic saga. The Harpies were killed, probably by Zetes and Calaïs, the winged sons of the North Wind Boreas and Oreithyia. (Their mother was the subject of a lost play by Aeschylus that bears her name, that “has sometimes been thought to have been a satyr drama” [Sommerstein 2008, 277].) In return for the brothers’ favour, Phineus warned the Argonauts of the dangers they would face as they navigated through the Clashing Rocks at the north end of the Bosporus in their quest for the Golden Fleece.

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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As for the third play in the tetralogy, the ancient catalogue of Aeschylus’s works lists two Glaucus plays, but since one, Glaucus of the Sea, appears to have been a satyr play, Glaucus of Potniae (a town just to the south of Thebes) must be the third play in this grouping. From the surviving fragments, many on papyrus scraps [12, 17], the play’s action involved a turning-of-tables on Glaucus who was famous for his stable of race-winning mares, rumoured to have been fed human flesh by their master, ostensibly to increase their speed (another version had it that he got this result by preventing his mares from mating). In a race held as part of the funeral games for Pelias, king of Iolcus (modern Volo) in Thessaly, Glaucus’s chariot crashed and he was devoured by his by then famished horses. From the total transmitted Prometheus titles – an embarras de richesses – the likeliest to have been a satyr play is Prometheus the Fire-kindler [7, 14], to which several papyrus fragments have plausibly been assigned. Frag. 204b appears to come from a choral passage in which the satyrs are taking credit for having persuaded the Nymphs to set up choruses in honour of Prometheus who will be called “bringer of life and the eager giver of gifts to mortals”. Other scattered bits of evidence, including depictions on vases of Prometheus and satyrs, give possible clues to how the story of Prometheus’s gift of fire was handled. The comic version had him bestowing fire, which he had filched from Olympus, not on humans but satyrs. When one of them, overcome with awed fascination, tried to kiss the flame, he was cautioned by Prometheus that he might burn his beard. (Citations and references at Podlecki 2005, 6–7; the ceramic evidence is presented by Beazley 1939.) Of the tetralogy that took first prize in 467 bce, Laïus, Oedipus, Seven against Thebes and Sphinx, only Seven survives. Laïus [3, 0] must have told how Laïus received a Delphic prophecy (three times if the retrospective musings of the chorus in Seven against Thebes are any indication, vv. 744–57), warning him that any offspring of his would be fatal to himself and the city. His defiance of this oracle resulted in the birth of Oedipus, followed by a futile attempt to get rid of the infant (frag. 122 χυτρίζειν “put in a pot”). The report by a traveller or messenger of an encounter at a triple crossroads near Potniae, though classed among the “unattributed” Aeschylean fragments, has been assigned to Oedipus [0] on the basis of a similar description of the fatal encounter between father and son in Sophocles’ version of the story, although the location is different. There is nothing in the sources to indicate how Aeschylus handled Oedipus’s anagnorisis, the realisation that he is guilty of patricide and incest. The most that can be inferred from Seven 772–90 is that, “maddened by grief”, he blinded himself and, out of anger at some mistreatment that he suffered at the hands of his sons, cursed them to “divide their inheritance by the sword”, a curse whose working out forms the action of the surviving play. (See Podlecki 1975, 8–14; Hutchinson (1985, xxiv) suggests that Aeschylus’s Oedipus “dealt with the revelation of Oedipus’s guilt, with his blinding of himself, and with his curse of his sons”.) The fate of Oedipus’s mother/wife in the Aeschylean version is also unclear. Did Epicaste/ Iokasta, overcome with shame and grief, take her own life as in Homer (Odyssey 11. 277–80) and Sophocles? She survives and has an afterlife in Stesichorus and Euripides’ Phoenissae. The meagre remains of the satiric Sphinx [3, 3] give no clues how the story was handled. It is not clear whether Oedipus himself appeared and foiled the Sphinx by solving the famous riddle (“what walks on four ‘feet’ in the morning…?”), or whether Aeschylus was following a less common version which had Silenus posing a rather trite riddle which the Sphinx was unable to solve and in frustration killed herself. (For further discussion of this play, see Podlecki 2005, 7–8; and Shaw, Chapter 14 in this volume.) There can have been little doubt in the minds of the audience as to the content of the satyric Proteus, the only play that does not survive from the Oresteia tetralogy which won first place at the City Dionysia of 458 bce. The messenger from the Greek army in the opening play, Agamemnon, gives a vivid description of the storm at sea in which Menelaus’s ship was



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lost from sight (653–56, with specific mention of Menelaus at 674; Fraenkel 1962 II, 387–88). The audience will perhaps have remembered as well that in his rather rambling reminiscences in Odyssey 4, Menelaus himself relates for Telemachus his experiences on the island of Pharos, off the coast of Egypt near present-day Alexandria. Wilamowitz suggested that the four-word fragment 211 containing the unusual word garos, “fish sauce”, refers to the diet of fish that Menelaus and his men had to content themselves with (Odyssey 4.368–69). Several times in the Homeric narrative, reference is made to the unpleasant odour emitted by Proteus’s seals (vv. 404–06, 441–42, 446). On the advice of Proteus’s daughter Eidothea Menelaus and three of his men disguise themselves by donning sealskins which she has provided. At what point and on what pretext the satyrs made an appearance is anyone’s guess, but obviously a certain amount of comic hijinks were probably occasioned by these odoriferous details and by the virtuoso performance of the Old Man of the Sea who transformed himself in rapid succession into a bearded lion, serpent, leopard, a huge boar, then into flowing water, and finally a tree (“high and leafy” Homer assures us Odyssey 4.458). B. i. The Homeric “banquet” appears to have provided Aeschylus with material for two separate tetralogies (see Finglass, Chapter 2 in this volume). The “Iliadic set”, as it has come to be known, consisted of Myrmidons, Nereids and Phrygians or Ransoming of Hector, with Chamber-Makers as a possible but by no means certain candidate for the satyr play. The presumptive first play, Myrmidons [16, 21], probably opened with the chorus, composed of members of Achilles’ contingent, arriving to try to bestir their leader, urging him to break his silence and come to the assistance of his comrades. Such notorious silences of Aeschylean characters made easy material for Aristophanic mockery (Frogs 911–20, and see below on Niobe). As in the description of the embassy to Achilles in Book 9 of the Iliad, the intervention of his old tutor Phoenix is also rebuffed. To these desperate pleas for help he demurs and tries to justify his absence. Battle is rejoined without him and in the subsequent melee Nestor’s ship is burnt. The critical scene in which Achilles fits out his comrade Patroclus with his own armour and sends him to his death in battle as in Iliad 16 has left no traces in the fragments. Patroclus’s corpse was brought in, probably by Nestor’s son Antilochus, and in several short fragments that do survive, Achilles addressed his dead beloved’s body and lamented his loss in terms of rapturous bereavement (frags. 134–38). Whether this was how the play ended or some further action followed is quite uncertain (Sophocles wrote a now lost satyr play, Achilles’ Lovers [10, 16] in which, as Lloyd-Jones remarks (1996, 58) “clearly the satyrs aspired to be the lovers of Achilles”). As the title suggests, the second play, Nereids [5, 2], had a chorus of sea nymphs, probably accompanied by Achilles’ mother Thetis, who arrived to participate in lamentation for a dead hero, presumably Patroclus, whose corpse is being referred to in frag. 153: “Let fine linen be cast over his body.” It has been assumed also, although there is no direct evidence for the assumption, that as in the Iliad, Thetis arranges with the smithy god Hephaestus to provide a new set of armour which Achilles dons, re-entering the battle and slaying Hector. The third play, Phrygians or Ransoming of Hector [1, 9], probably followed closely the action of book 24 of the Iliad. Hermes warned Achilles that his maltreatment of Hector’s corpse was a crime against justice and called for divine punishment (frag. 266). Hector’s father Priam appeared and brought with him an amount of gold that was the equivalent in weight to Hector’s corpse, and this was weighed out in sight of the audience. The play also made an impression by the unusual and elaborate dance figures of the Phrygians. In a comedy by Aristophanes that does not survive (frag. 696, Henderson 2007, 445) a character remarks, “I remember seeing the Phrygians, when they came in order to join with Priam in ransoming his dead son, how they often danced in many postures, now this way, now that” (trans. Smyth 1983, 471). What satyr play closed the Iliadic tetralogy is uncertain. Escorts (Propompoi) [0] and Chamber-builders [1, 2] have been suggested (cf. Sommerstein 1996, 348).

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Another drama seems to have been conceived as a parergon to the Iliad’s main action. In a lengthy papyrus fragment assigned to Carians or Europa [2, 24], one of Zeus’s paramours, Europa, voices her concern for the third son which she has born to Zeus (in addition to Minos and Rhadamanthys), Sarpedon. She has heard a report of an army composed of the best fighting men from all of Greece mustering for an attack in which, they boast, they will storm and “mightily sack the city of the Trojans” (frag. 99.19). Europa has had a premonition of the mortal danger her son will encounter should he and his contingent of Carian auxiliaries join the Trojan army in the fighting. Her fears, of course, were justified. Although there is no direct evidence of how the action proceeded, the climax probably came with a report of Sarpedon’s death at the hands of Patroclus and the carrying of his body to Lycia by Sleep and Death, as in Iliad 16. B. ii. Three titles look like obvious candidates for inclusion in a tetralogy based on events in the Odyssey, but the order in which they were performed is not at all clear. In Penelope [1, 1], which was probably the middle tragedy, a speaker claims: “I am a Cretan of most ancient lineage” (frag. 187). The speaker will have been a disguised Odysseus who, when he makes his way back to Ithaca, weaves an elaborate tale about his descent from King Minos (Odyssey. 19.165–202). Two titles vie for first and third place. If Psychagogoi, “Ghost-raisers” [7, 19], stood first, the action will have drawn on book 11 of the Odyssey, where Odysseus visits a necromantic sanctuary near a lake or marsh, and holds interviews with various deceased figures conjured from the Underworld, an undertaking facilitated as in Homer by the blind prophet Teiresias. The chorus consisted of devotees of Hermes and the setting was a lake giving access to the Underworld (Sommerstein 2008, 268–69). The longest passage is on a papyrus published in 1980 which probably comes from a scene at the beginning of the play. The chorus of locals greet Odysseus the newcomer and give explicit instructions about the procedure for slitting the throat of a “sacrificial beast” and letting it seep down into the “dim, reedy depths”. He is to offer prayers to the nether gods, Earth, Hermes and Zeus of the Underworld (that is, Hades-Pluto) “to send up the swarm of souls from the night-shrouded mouth of the river” (frag. 273a, trans. Sommerstein), presumably for Odysseus to interview. In the remaining fragments the speaker, probably Teiresias who, as in the Odyssey, is supervising this operation, foretells Odysseus’s own death: a heron will drop on his aged, bald head a sea-creature’s sting ray encased in a lump of dung, and cause a festering, incurable wound (frag. 275). The biographical tradition, which systematically culled authors’ own works for clues to events in their lives, embroidered this item and wove it into a story of how Aeschylus met his death (Life of Aeschylus 10, Radt 1985, 34). If the third play was, as has been suggested, Bone-gatherers (Ostologoi) [2, 8], the action probably involved the collection of the ashes left after the cremation of the corpses of the suitors slain by Odysseus. Ostologia refers specifically to the collection of ashes for burial and, as Sommerstein points out, “it is generally accepted that the play was based on the episode in the Odyssey (24.413ff.) where the families of the suitors collect and bury their bodies” (Sommerstein 2008, 178). In the longer of the surviving fragments, Odysseus appears to be justifying his slaying by describing his maltreatment at the hands of his wife’s suitors. A likely candidate for the satyr play in the sequence is Circe [3, 0], of which, as Sommerstein (2008, 121) wryly comments, “The fragments shed no light on the plot”. A search for possible episodes might reasonably begin with the witch Circe’s transformations in Odyssey 10; perhaps here she transformed – hopefully only temporarily – some of Odysseus’s men into satyrs. B. iii. Early in the “post-Homeric” period, as the Iliad and Odyssey were being prepared for transmission (and they were by now in written form) by the poet(s) themselves or their successors, a continuation of the story of Troy’s fall was composed and attached to the closing lines of Iliad 24. This “Cyclic” short epic, variously referred to as the Memnonis or Aethiopis, has generally been taken as having formed the basis for two of Aeschylus’s



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“post-Iliadic” dramas, Memnon and The Weighing of Souls. The problem is in trying to decide which elements of Memnon’s story were used by Aeschylus to flesh out his two dramas. The scant remains of Memnon [4, 3] tell us nothing of its plot, although scholars generally base their reconstructions on details provided by a late abridgement of the “Cyclic” epics. What can be said with a fair degree of confidence about the Memnon is that it was the first play of its tetralogy. We know more – but not much more – about the play which followed it, Weighing of Souls [3, 0]. Memnon was ruler of the Ethiopians, of whom a large contingent arrived to assist the Trojans in what proved to be a futile defence of their city against the Greek invaders. We learn from a passing remark by Odysseus during his visit to the Underworld that Achilles’ son Neoptolemus was the handsomest man he had ever seen after noble Memnon (Odyssey 11.522). His armour, like that of Achilles, had been fashioned by Hephaestus, and from a joke in Aristophanes we learn that his appearance made a striking impression on the audience, especially for the sound made (or perhaps only reported as having been made) by his horses’ “cheek plates bedecked with bells” (Frogs 963; the Greek word was an extravagant Aristophanic concoction that consisted of eight syllables). Since Memnon was the son of Eos, the goddess of dawn, and Priam’s brother Tithonus, his response to the Trojan call for help might have been dictated, in part at least, by family loyalties. Regarding Weighing of Souls, Plutarch describes a scene where Zeus’s scales (presumably held by Zeus himself, although this has sometimes been denied) were shown with Thetis on one side and the goddess Dawn on the other, “each entreating for their sons who are fighting”, Achilles and Memnon respectively. (To his description of the scene Plutarch appends the somewhat ambiguous comment that Aeschylus “fitted a whole tragedy to this story”, Moralia 17 a.) The staging of this scene must have been spectacular, perhaps unparalleled, for the late writer Pollux reports (4.130) that the contraption we usually refer to as the “crane” was used to show Eos snatching up the body of her son. It is also reported that Eos prevailed upon Zeus to grant Memnon immortality, so this piece of the action might also have occurred on stage. In the fighting which ensued, Achilles slew Memnon and was then himself killed by Paris and Apollo when the Greeks invaded the city. How much of this figured in the Aeschylean treatment of the story may become clearer with the discovery of further papyri or other evidence. It would be pleasant to think that the myth of Zeus’s grant of immortality to Memnon in answer to his mother’s pleas also found a place in Aeschylus’s dramatisation. As Jenny March tells it, “The morning dew is said to be formed from the tears shed by the still inconsolable Eos in grief for her dead son” (March 1998, 310). C. i. Aeschylus also wrote dramas whose titles suggest plots on the periphery of the main action at Troy. Assuming that Iphigeneia [1, 1] anticipated the plot of Euripides’ Iphigeneia at Aulis, the action probably involved the becalming of the Greek fleet at Aulis by the goddess Artemis as punishment for an alleged offence committed by Agamemnon, the remedy for which was a demand conveyed by the expedition’s seer Calchas that Agamemnon sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia to assuage the goddess’s wrath. It is included in a list of plays in which the author allegedly “profaned the Mysteries”. (When hauled into court on a charge of sacrilege he claimed he had done so unknowingly; Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics III.i.17.) The sad tale of Philoctetes, the archetypal “wounded hero”, would have been known to Homeric audiences. He joined the Greek expedition to Troy bringing a contingent of seven ships from Malis in Thessaly. His complicated back story is replete with variegated detail, but in essence it is this. For service rendered to Heracles (soon to be deified and ready to take his place among the gods on Olympus), he was entrusted by him with his bow and told that the weapon was indispensable if Troy was to be captured. On a journey there the troops stopped at an island – variously identified – where Philoctetes was bitten by a snake which was guarding a shrine upon which he had trespassed (again, an array of variant versions). His

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punishment was a wound to his foot which exuded a terrible smell and would not heal, so his fellow Greek commanders, at the prompting of Odysseus, abandoned him on the island of Lemnos. How the Greek leaders at Troy, frustrated by the long drawn-out and bloody siege, set about remedying the situation was the subject of tragedies by the three major Athenian dramatists, of which only the Sophoclean version survives. We are fortunate in possessing a synopsis of these works by Dio Chrysostom, a prolific orator and Stoic philosopher of the first century ce, and thus it is possible to reconstruct Aeschylus’s lost Philoctetes [10, 8] in some detail (see Podlecki 2009, 340–43; when Aeschylus’s version was performed is uncertain, but interestingly and unusually we have firm dates for Euripides’ Philoctetes, 431 bce with the extant Medea, and for Sophocles’ version which survives, 409). It is the 10th year of the war and things are going badly for the Greeks. Achilles has fallen in battle, slain by Paris/ Alexander with Apollo’s aid, and his armour awarded to Odysseus. According to a prophecy delivered by Calchas, the official seer for the Greek army (or alternatively the Trojan soothsayer and Priam’s son Helenus whom the Greeks had captured), the only thing that can turn the tide is the legendary bow of Heracles, currently in the possession of the wounded pariah, Philoctetes. It is a challenging task, which the wily Odysseus, we can suppose, undertook with gusto (in Sophocles’ version it is Achilles’ son Neoptolemus who accompanies Odysseus and the play is as much, or even more, about Neoptolemus as Philoctetes himself). Of the fragments of the Aeschylean version the most substantial is a plaintive lament by Philoctetes: “O death, Paian [Healer], do not refuse to come to me. For you alone are the physician of irremediable ills, and no suffering afflicts a corpse” (frag. 255). At some point in the action Philoctetes describes his ailment as “an ulcer which eats my foot’s flesh” (frag. 253) and explains (Sommerstein suggests to the chorus) how he acquired his wound: “For the serpent did not let go, but fearsomely fixed and embedded its fangs in me so as to maim my foot” (frag. 252). With a nod to the demands of verisimilitude, Euripides more realistically had Odysseus appear in a disguise provided by his protectress Athena, which was not the case in the Aeschylean version. In reporting these details, Dio tries to account for the unlikelihood that Philoctetes would not have recognised the man who was responsible for his abandonment by remarking that Philoctetes’ memory lapse was due to his disease and lonely life. The Euripidean Odysseus appealed to Philoctetes’ sense of loyalty to his erstwhile colleagues, telling him that he, and especially the bow whose overseer he was, were desperately needed because the expedition was on the verge of foundering; Agamemnon was dead – Odysseus was no stranger to some creative embellishment of the truth – and “Odysseus” (for the narrator is still incognito) had been charged with an unspecified shameful act and presumably executed. In Aeschylus as in Euripides the chorus was composed of residents of Lemnos (in Sophocles they are the crew of Odysseus’s ship). Again, it seems extremely unlikely that it took over nine years for the Lemnians to make their first approach to their pitiable and unwilling neighbour. Philoctetes gave his Lemnian visitors an account of his abandonment by the Greek forces and his experiences in general. There is no evidence whatever about how Aeschylus solved the imbroglio in which his characters found themselves. Philoctetes and the wondrous bow left the island with Odysseus (still unrecognised?), Philoctetes perhaps in the end softening his angry aggrievement and responding to appeals made to his instincts of loyalty to his Greek comrades in their hour of need. C. ii. Dionysus and his interactions – not always benign – with his followers and opponents are central to two Aeschylean tetralogies. The Lycurgeia comprised Edonians [12, 17], Bassarai (or Bassarids) [4, 4], Youths [6, 2] and a satyric Lycurgus [3,2]. The general storyline involved the difficulty the youthful upstart Dionysus had in establishing his cult in various places along his route out of Asia to Greece. The opening play told of the god’s rejection by the Thracian king Lycurgus (a version of this face-off was known to Homer, Iliad 6.130–40). The fragments, though relatively numerous, offer few clues as to their context; sometimes



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even who the speaker, or singer, was is unclear. On the basis of what is considered the canonical version of the myth (Apollodorus Library 3.5.1), Sommerstein (2008, 60) reconstructs the action as follows. Dionysus had just arrived in Lycurgus’s kingdom with his cohort of male and female devotees. Lycurgus had the god and his female followers arrested, but they miraculously escaped. As a punishment, Lycurgus was driven mad by the god and he killed his own son Dryas with an axe, believing that he was cutting a vine-branch. Frag. 57 is an interesting (and lexically challenging) account of an ecstatic celebration. “One man holds in his hands a pair of pipes, fashioned on the lathe, and plays out a fingered melody, a loud cry that brings on frenzy, while another crashes the bronze cymbals… and the twang of strings resounds; and terrifying imitators of the voice of bulls bellow in response from somewhere out of sight, and the fearful deep sound of the drum carries to the ear like thunder beneath the earth” (trans. Sommerstein 2008, 63). Lycurgus’s ultimate fate is unclear. Homer had him blinded by Zeus (Iliad 6.139). In another account he was executed by his countrymen who were following the god’s command to perform the execution so that the land could be cured of its sterility. A less bloody version crops up in the fourth stasimon of Sophocles’ Antigone. The heroine has been taken off to her punishment for defying her uncle Creon’s injunction against burial of her brother Polyneices, immurement alive in a cave, and the chorus launch into a series of paradeigmata intending, they must suppose, to palliate her sense of being uniquely so punished. The second of these was Lycurgus who assailed the god with “angry mockery” and “mocking words” and was confined in a rocky prison because he “tried to check the inspired women and the Bacchic fire and provoked the music of their pipes” (Ant. 963–65, trans. Lloyd-Jones 1994, 91). The second play took its name from the foxskin caps worn by the chorus of Thracian bacchanals. Conjecturally, the plot-line was another challenge to Dionysus in his efforts to establish his rituals as the locally dominant ones. Here his opponent is Orpheus, and he triggers Dionysus’s vindictive anger by showing in his worship an ostentatious preference for Apollo, whom he identifies with the sun. As punishment the Bassarids, presumably at Dionysus’s behest, dismember Orpheus and scatter his limbs in the vicinity of the Muses’ haunt, Pieria. Nothing survives of the third play, Youths, to give any indication of who these might have been, or what dramatic events they participated in or commented upon. A popular modern scholarly conjecture is that a reconciliation was effected between Dionysus and Apollo as well as some kind of harmonisation of their cults. A resurrection, if only a theatrical one, was accomplished of the figure of Lycurgus, who gave his name to the satyr play concluding the tetralogy. A cryptic couplet survives, “And after this he drank beer, thinning it with time (?) and made a loud boast and made it (?) a test of his manhood” (frag. 124). Even assuming that the drinker is Lycurgus, it is difficult to guess what might have been portended by this boorish behaviour. Dionysus provided, as Smyth noted (1983, 378), material for as many as five additional plays, Semele or Water-Carriers [4, 0], The Nurses of Dionysus [4, 0], Bacchae [1, 2], WoolCarders [8, 10] and Pentheus [1, 1]. Reconstruction of the action of the individual plays must remain conjectural and it is sometimes argued that Bacchae (which has only one mention with a single quotation) is an alternative name for Bassarids. But, as Sommerstein 2008, 172 points out, Semele, Wool-Carders and Pentheus have often been grouped together as a trilogy, with Nurses of Dionysus as its satyr play. The mythographic evidence combined with the meagre textual remains point in the first play to the arrival at Thebes of Zeus’s jealous wife Hera disguised as a mendicant priestess, who maliciously persuades the pregnant Semele to ask her divine lover to appear in all his splendour, which of course spells disaster for the mother and an eventful future among the Olympians for the embryonic Dionysus, untimely ripped from Semele’s incinerated womb. The second and third plays seem to have been dedicated to the story of Pentheus’s doomed resistance to Dionysus, familiar to us from Euripides’ Bacchae. If Nurses of Dionysus was, as has been suggested, the satyr play, the action takes up from the

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first play, switched rather abruptly to Iolcus, where the witch Medea displayed her skills at rejuvenation by boiling an elderly satyr in a cauldron as an example, and then proceeded to work her magic on Dionysus’s nurses and their husbands. To these plays based on Dionysiac myth, we may also add a satyr play in which the god has a prominent role. This is The Sacred Delegation or At the Isthmian Games, of which almost 100 lines are wholly or partially preserved in Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 2162, in which a chorus of satyrs has rebelled from their master Dionysus to become athletes at the Isthmian games. How the action proceeds we can only guess, but it presumably ends with god and satyrs reconciled. C. iii. From relatively straightforward groupings of what appear to have been thematically connected plays we move now into more speculative, less secure territory. The sequence consisting in Argives [3, 3] Eleusinians [2, 1] and Epigoni, “After-born” [2, 3] and possibly Nemea [0] as the satyr play dealt with the aftermath of the first, unsuccessful, Argive attack on Thebes (the subject of Seven against Thebes). It is not clear whether the chorus of the opening play was male or female, since both genders occur in the sources. The one surviving fragment of which sense can be made refers to Capaneus, one of the attackers, whose “lightning-stricken limbs the thunderbolt left behind” (frag. 17, trans. Sommerstein). In Seven against Thebes Capaneus was the attacker at the second gate and his shield-device was a naked warrior carrying a torch with the inscription “I will burn the city” (Sept. 433–34). The action of the second play, Eleusinians, involved the peaceful settlement (in other versions it required a further battle) of a dispute over where the bodies of the fallen Argive attackers were to be buried. Through the good offices of the Athenian king Theseus, a site for the fallen commanders was chosen at Eleusis to the north of Athens, and this became a noted shrine in the historical period. The only information we have about the third play is provided by its title, “Epigoni”, After-born. It will have dealt with the second Argive expedition against Thebes in which the sons of the Seven accomplished what their fathers had set out to do. A passing comment by Capaneus’s son Sthenelus (Strong-man) in the Iliad (4.407–09) seems to show that the second force of invading Argives were fewer than the first in number, but that Thebes’ wall had been strengthened. On the basis of what appears to be a triple libation calling on the gods to bless newlyweds, Sommerstein (2008, 58–59) suggested that the action involved Alcmeon – son of the seer Amphiaraüs, who foresaw his own demise at the sixth gate, and of Adrastus’s sister Eriphyle – slaying his mother “perhaps for her treachery against Amphiaraüs in sending him to his death at Thebes”. If the fourth play was Nemea and the word signified “Games of Nemea” and not a female name, it may have involved the foundation of those games at a site near Corinth by Adrastus as a side-event to the actual invasion. The basic story of the Argonautic saga was the search by Jason, at the behest of his uncle, the villainous Pelias, king of Iolcus, for the ram with golden fleece in the charge of Aeëtes king of Colchis whose daughter was Medea. After many side trips, changes of route and other divagations the journey ended, more or less, in Athens where Medea had sought asylum with Theseus, who had been one of the original crew, after she had murdered Jason’s new bride and her father, as well as the two sons she had had with Jason. It was known already to Homer (Odyssey 12.69–72) and Pindar (Pythian 4, the longest of his surviving poems). There is also an epic Argonautica in four books by the Alexandrian poet and librarian Apollonius of Rhodes and another by the first-century ce Roman poet Valerius Flaccus, whose reputation has been on the rise of late. One of the stops in the ship Argo’s variegated and often topographically confusing itinerary was the island of Lemnos in the north Aegean, about 75 miles south of Kavalla on the mainland. What transpired there was taken by the Greeks to have been one of the worst atrocities in a repertoire of legendary material where acts of violence were not in short supply. Once upon a time, the Lemnians had impugned the virtue of the goddess Aphrodite, who had then punished the islanders by causing the Lemnian men to



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refuse to have sex with their wives. (An alternative version had it that the men had brought concubines from Thrace whom they preferred to their wives.) The women then retaliated – rather drastically – by murdering their husbands. Only King Thoas survived by the good offices of his daughter Hypsipyle, who in one version of the story hid him and put him out to sea, either in a chest (a favourite mode of transport in stories of this kind) or a boat. When the Argonauts arrived, they found the Lemnian women eager to become their partners; Hypsipyle bore Jason two sons, one of whom, Euneüs, brought to the Greek forces at Troy numerous ships transporting wine from his home city on Lemnos (Iliad 7. 467–75; the generals Agamemnon and Menelaus received special shipments of a presumably superior vintage). Herodotus (6.138) refers briefly to the Argonautic episode as one of the reasons why particularly terrible crimes were dubbed “Lemnian deeds”. In the first choral ode of Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers the chorus of captive women serving in Agamemnon’s palace are sifting through the repertoire of myths, looking for parallels to the heinous crime committed against Agamemnon by his perfidious wife Clytemnestra. After two striking examples they light upon the homicidal women of Lemnos. “In an account of horrible deeds”, they sing, “the Lemnian affair ranks first (πρεσβεύεται)” and they go on to compare Clytemnestra’s murder of her husband to “the Lemnian sufferings” (Libation Bearers 631–34). It is generally agreed that Aeschylus’s Argonautic tetralogy comprised Lemnians (male or female) [2, 0], Hypsipyle [0], Cabeiri [4, 3] and a satyric Argo or Oarsmen [3, 1]. (It should be pointed out that this sequence is not, as it were, fixed in stone. Mette (1959, 15–18) favours the order Argo, Lemnians [male], Hypsipyle and Cabeiri.) What little survives tells us next to nothing about the content of any of the plays. Sommerstein (2008, 126) theorised that the first play, with its female chorus, “dramatised the crime [Argive women murdering their husbands] itself”. If the spiriting away of her father Thoas by Hypsipyle was enacted, this will have been a not unsuitable occasion for it. In second spot Hypsipyle brought the infusion of Argonautic energy to repopulate the island, together with, perhaps, the celebratory games that some sources say she instituted (Pindar Olympian 4. 19–27; Pythian 4. 252–54, “man-slaying Lemnian women”). The title of the third drama, Cabeiri, refers to minor gods whose functions included, among other things, assisting the god Hephaestus in his celebrated role as divine smithy at his forge on Lemnos. The drinking of intoxicants took centre stage (Lemnian wine was celebrated for its high quality). Athenaeus reports (10.428f) that contrary to the widely held view that Euripides was the first dramatist to portray drunken characters on stage (Heracles in Alcestis), it was Aeschylus in this play who brought Jason’s tipsy shipmates before an audience. At some point in the action the Cabeiri, according to Plutarch (Moralia 632f–633a), playfully threatened to “make the house run out of vinegar” (frag. 97). Another feature noted by a now anonymous commentator was that the play contained a catalogue of all the Argonauts; how many they were we are not told, but on my reckoning Apollodorus (Library 1.111–13) names 44, including one female rower, Atalanta. The only solid fact transmitted about Argo or Oarsmen (which some, including myself, have considered as possibly having been the first drama in the sequence) is that someone asked, “Where is Argo’s sacred speaking beam?” (frag. 20) The back story on this must be the report in Apollodorus (1.110) that when the 50-oared ship which Athena had requisitioned was finished, she affixed to the prow a speaking timber from an oak tree at the oracular shrine at Dodona. A tetralogy detailing the story of Perseus, Danaë and the Gorgon Medusa’s head consisted of Phorcides [Daughters of Phorcys aka Graeae (Old Women)] [2, 1], Polydectes [0], an at present unidentifiable third play and the satyric Net-Haulers. Polydectes, King of Seriphus, whose brother Dictys had taken in from the sea a chest containing Danaë and the infant Perseus, the love-child born from a union of his mother and Zeus in the form of a shower of gold, had with the passing of time fallen in love with Danaë. To forestall any attempt by her

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now teenage son to hinder the liaison, Polydectes sent Perseus off on a tour of trials (the similarity with Pelias and Jason is unmistakable) which was to end with a failed attempt (or so Polydectes hoped) to overcome Medusa, the Gorgon whose gaze turned men to stone, and bring her severed head in a bag as a trophy back to Polydectes in Seriphus. Perseus’s first destination was a sunless mountain cave in the Far East, home of the Graeae, the three daughters of Phorcys, creatures formidable as well as ugly. As Prometheus describes them in the surviving play named after him, these were “three ancient maidens, shaped like swans, with a common eye and one tooth” which they used in rotation (Prometheus Bound 794–96). Perseus waited for his chance to snatch the eye, which he threw into the African Lake Tritonis. He managed this adroitly, for in the one preserved citation from the play – a not quite complete line – someone, probably a messenger, says “He (probably Perseus) plunged into the cave like a wild boar” (frag. 261, trans. Sommerstein). There are various accounts of how Perseus profited further after his confrontation with the Graeae, but the likeliest has it that Hephaestus provided him with an adamantine sword and Hermes with winged sandals and a cap which, when worn, rendered him invisible. There is nothing in our sources to show whether or how the decapitation of the Graeae’s renowned sister Medusa was handled in the play, but it must have involved Perseus’s dexterity with a mirror, or, as in one version, a polished shield, since a direct facial gaze from Medusa would have turned him to stone. Since nothing survives of Polydectes we are free to surmise that his petrifaction occurred when Perseus opened the sack in which he had carried Medusa’s head back to Seriphus and flashed it at his nemesis. Papyrological treasure-hunting in back alleys at Oxyrhynchus was rewarded by the discovery and publication in 1941 of a play which was pretty quickly seen to be Aeschylus’s NetHaulers [9, about 69, with uncontroversial supplements by Lloyd-Jones and others]. The satyr drama takes the story back to Perseus’s infancy on Seriphus. The “Net-Haulers” are the chorus of satyrs (before discovery of the papyrus they were thought to be human Seriphians). Two individuals, Silenus and the other probably Diktys, catch sight of a chest floating towards shore. With the help of satyr-choristers, who call on the local townspeople for further assistance, they haul the chest out of the water and it turns out to contain Danaë and her infant son Perseus. The longest passage in the papyrus records an exchange between Danaë and another character, probably Silenus, who offers to be her “protector and supporter”. Danaë utters a plaintive lament in which she threatens to hang herself rather than be put to sea again. There follows a scene which Eduard Fraenkel (1942, 141) called “one of the loveliest pieces of Greek poetry”. The satyrs dance around Silenus as he dandles the infant Perseus, chortling and making clucking noises (poppusmos, line 803) to allay the baby’s fears and calm his whimpering. All ends well, as it must in this kind of play, but there is nothing in the sources to tell us exactly how. D. Finally, I offer a summary account of a half-dozen dramas that I would call “outliers”, works that instantiate myths that were off the main line of the more familiar (to us at least) mythographic cycles that we have been considering, Troy, homecoming of the heroes, Argonautic adventures, etc. The story of Tantalus’s daughter Niobe illustrates – perhaps to excess – the mortal dangers involved in hybris, putting oneself on the level of, or in Niobe’s case, above the gods. Her name and the sin for which she is being punished occur first in surviving Greek literature in Book 24 of the Iliad, where we read a different version of Priam’s bitter venture, different, that is, from the account in Ransoming of Hector (see Section B. i). Here the fallen Hector’s aged father makes his painful journey to the tent of his son’s killer most unwillingly and unaccompanied. He is physically and emotionally drained, but he must swallow his anger and work up the courage and energy to secure his son’s corpse for funeral rites back in Troy. But when he reaches his adversary’s elaborate and well- appointed, albeit temporary,



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dwelling-place, Priam is agreeably surprised. Achilles, having descended from the pinnacle of anger against and a genuine loathing for his nominal superior Agamemnon, has now as the epic ends learnt that he is human and can deal humanely even with former enemies – first with Agamemnon in Book 23 and in the final book with Priam, his victim’s father, who has put aside his fierce anger against his son’s killer and has come, against all probability, to ask for his son’s body. Abashed at his previous bad behaviour and in an effort to make amends Achilles tries to cajole Priam into sharing a meal and in a cautionary tale to get Priam to break his fast he references – somewhat oddly, to modern tastes – the case of Niobe: “Even Niobe ate…” How did Niobe so fatally get on the wrong side of Leto, with whom she had ­previously been on terms of intimate friendship (Λάτω καὶ Νιόβα μάλα μὲν φίλαι ἦσαν ἔταιραι, Sappho 142  L–P, “Leto and Niobe were greatly beloved companions”)? What severed the link? Niobe boasted, on an occasion now unknown, that she was a superior mother because her brood numbered six, or in some versions seven, sons and an equal number of daughters, whereas Leto could claim only one set, Apollo and Aphrodite. Leto could not tolerate such an affront and sicced her pair on Niobe’s brood, Apollo demolishing the boys and Aphrodite the girls. The macabre event was treated dramatically by both Aeschylus and Sophocles. What is of particular interest here is the striking difference in the way the two dramatists handled the story. The Aeschylean Niobe [18, 22] drew the notice, and the mockery, of Aristophanes. The murder of her children had already occurred (this, we shall see, is the major differentiator from Sophocles’ Niobe [12, 5]) and there sits their grieving mother, complains the Aristophanic “Euripides”, “alone, all bundled up, keeping her face hidden and not even muttering this much” (Frogs 911–13, presumably with appropriate noises). Niobe’s father Tantalus appeared and he or someone else reported Zeus as saying that he would “burn the house of Amphion [Niobe’s husband] to ashes with his fire-bearing eagles” (frag. 160). Another unidentified character entered and in a long, now fragmentary, speech remarked, “This is the third day she has sat by this tomb, wailing over her children, the living over the dead.” A few damaged lines later occur the verses quoted by Plato (Republic 380 a) which allowed identification of our passage: “A god causes a fault to grow in mortals, when he is minded utterly to ruin their estate” and, in the following lines, the moral of Niobe’s story: “A mortal must preserve the good fortune which the gods send and not speak overboldly.” It is not clear whether in the Aeschylean version there was any description of how the children died, but in Sophocles it is the central action of the play. There is no direct evidence for how the boys were killed, but it was almost certainly by Apollo’s arrows while they were off hunting on Mt Cithaeron; Artemis despatches the girls onstage. Passages partially preserved in papyri present the gruesome spectacle of Apollo urging his sister on as she showers down arrows on Niobe’s daughters from the palace roof, while the girls in turn beg the goddess for mercy and their mother sorrows over their killing. Clearly the sensibilities of Athenian audiences must have become inured to this sort of gruesome spectacle as the fifth century progressed. It is hard to imagine a figure from Greek mythology less likely to have been susceptible to treatment as a subject of tragedy than Ixion, whose grim career provided material for two lost works, Perrhaebian Women [4, 4] and Ixion [4, 11]. The title of the first identifies the chorus as inhabitants of the district of Perrhaebia in northern Thessaly. Ixion, who was king of the Lapiths, reneged on the bride-price he had promised in order to marry Dia, the daughter of Eïoneus (or Deïonius). Ixion lured his unsuspecting father-in-law to what the latter thought would be a celebratory wedding feast but turned out to be a booby-trap, for when he got him under his power, Ixion flung his hapless victim into a fiery pit. The meagre fragments give no hint of whether or how much of this part of the story was covered in Perrhaebian Women. If, as has been suggested, the unassigned fragment 327 belonged to this play, an unidentified character, addressing Ixion, said that some unspecified event would not happen “until Zeus

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himself has purified you by the stain of a slaughtered young pig’s blood, sprinkling it on your hands” (trans. Sommerstein 2008, 305; cf. West 1990, 280 n. 30). The plot thickened and became more bizarre in the sequel. Ixion, ostensibly overcome with remorse, set off to find someone who would purify him. When none among humans or gods would undertake this noisome task, Zeus stepped up, perhaps motivated by his self-confessed love for Ixion’s wife Dia (Iliad 14.317–18). (He will be an exemplar for Orestes in Aeschylus’s Eumenides, where his name and purification through Zeus’s magnanimity crop up at vv. 441 and 718.) In return, Ixion made a pass at Hera. When she complained to her husband, Zeus fashioned a cloud in Hera’s shape and put it in Hera’s bed. Ixion made the most of his opportunity but was, not surprisingly, caught in the act by the affronted husband, who punished him, crucifying him on an ever-turning fiery wheel, perhaps provided by Athena, and on this wheel “he rolls around everywhere, proclaiming to mortals that they must repay their benefactors with kind deeds in return” (Pindar, Pythian 2.21–24, trans. Sommerstein 2008, 104–05). Again, nothing in the sparse remains of Ixion looks like it has any connection with these macabre events. It is not clear on what basis Aristotle classifies “tragedies about Ixion” (along with those about Ajax) as “tragedies of suffering” (Poetics 1455 b 34; παθητική, trans. Grube 1955, 36, with his note, 37 n. 2). From the Cyclic epic Cypria, which served as a prequel or run-up to the Trojan expedition, Aeschylus drew material for two dramas, Mysians [4, 2] and Telephus [3, 1]. On its way to Troy the Greek army landed in Mysia near Pergamon and attacked it in the mistaken belief that it was Troy. The King, Telephus, son of Heracles and Augê, had come from Tegea in Arcadia at the behest of an oracle in order to discover his parents and had inherited the kingdom. Fighting in defence of his territory, he was wounded in battle by Achilles. Another oracle informed him that his wound could only be healed “by the one who wounded him”. This was effected by Telephus’s return to Argos where, after supplicating Clytemnestra and promising to bring the Greek army to Troy, he was healed by Achilles, who put into the  wound  scrapings from his spear point. Nothing in the exiguous remains of the two Aeschylean works dealing with the story gives any clue as to which if any of these events ­figured in the dramas. In the ancient list of Aeschylean works there are two Sisyphus titles, Sisyphus the Runaway and Sisyphus the Stone-roller [10, 8 for the two plays, undifferentiated]. It was alleged (not by his friends) that Odysseus was the illegitimate son whom his mother Anticleia had borne to Sisyphus and not to her husband Laërtes. In most of the stories in which Sisyphus appears he is a scheming manipulator with the mind of a criminal or, less negatively, an unregenerate trickster. (Aristotle in Poetics 1456 a 22 characterises Sisyphus as “clever but villainous”, σοφὸς…μετὰ πονηρίας). In a very variegated career two episodes stand out as probable candidates for dramatic plot-lines. Sisyphus having incurred Zeus’s anger was handed over by him to Death to be taken down to Hades, but Sisyphus managed to bind Death in sturdy chains so that no one died and Hades was beginning to look underpopulated. Sensing his own death to be near Sisyphus instructed his wife Merope not to make the customary offerings at his tomb, with the result that Hades, feeling himself cheated of what was rightfully his, sent Sisyphus back to the upper world to sort things out with his wife. When he got there he just stayed until he died of old age. When this happened, the shrewd but unprincipled manipulator finally got what was coming to him: he was forced to forever roll a monstrous stone uphill which, just as he reached the top and was about to throw it over the edge, always escaped his grip and rolled back downhill. This was one of the punishments inflicted on outstanding sinners that Odysseus reports having seen in his journey to the netherworld in Odysssey 11 (vv. 593–600). In the not always credible biographical tradition this was the play that got its author into trouble by giving grounds to the authorities for the charge that in it he had revealed secrets from the Eleusinian Mysteries (cf. Section C. iii). If we turn back to the



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content of the two plays in which Sisyphus was the major figure, his frustrating and abortive efforts with the massive rock in Hades stand out clearly as the likely plot-line of the Sisyphus the Stone-roller. With the Sisyphus the Runaway matters become more clouded. Of the total 10 entries in Radt 1985 Sommerstein assigns three to Runaway but only frag. 228 throws any light on what might have been occurring onstage. Someone, presumably Sisyphus, who is returning to the Upperworld says, “I bid goodbye to Zagreus [a chthonic god] and his ever-hospitable (πολυξένῳ, because he receives all who die) father”, i.e. Hades-Pluto. Many, including myself (Podlecki 2005, 13), believe that at least one, or perhaps both Sisyphus plays were satyric, and Gantz (1993, 174) suggested that there was only one satyr play, but with two titles. In conclusion, let us ask what the lost and fragmentary plays of Aeschylus add to our understanding of the poet’s work. First, of course, they remind us of the scale of the oeuvre, of which the surviving dramas represent 10% or less. Beyond that, they give us a sense of the range of myth and legend that Aeschylus found suited to dramatic treatment. The Oresteia, drawn from the Trojan saga, does not depend directly on the Iliad or Odyssey, but can certainly be thought of as deeply embedded in Homer. Fragments, however, show us literal “slices” from Homer: “Iliadic” and “Odyssean” tetralogies, as well as numerous other dramas based on the “cyclic” epics that codified the many tales of the Trojan War, its antecedents and aftermaths. But many other mythic and legendary subjects appear in the fragments: for example, Theban legends fill at least one, and probably two tetralogies; the Argonaut saga, one (as well as Phineus, one of the three plays performed together with Seven against Thebes). The story of Danaë and Perseus is developed in three plays, and the great sinners Ixion and Sisyphus apparently in two each. As we have seen, and unlikely as it may seem, this last figure, famous for his crimes and his punishment in Hades, is the subject not of tragedy, but of satyr drama. Aeschylus was considered the greatest exponent of this genre (see Shaw, Chapter 14 in this volume), and the titles and fragments of lost plays are among the most important sources we have for this aspect of Aeschylus’s art. We are lucky that papyrus finds have given us substantial fragments from a few of them. In particular, the two fragments from Net-Haulers, one from the prologue and another from some 700 lines later, and the long fragment from The Sacred Delegation or At the Isthmian Games, illustrate something of the charm and high spirits of these light-hearted treatments of myth.

FURTHER READING The fundamental resource for this topic is the third volume of Alan Sommerstein’s Loeb Aeschylus 2008, a model of thoroughness and lucidity. I have also consulted with profit the earlier Loeb Aeschylus by Herbert Weir Smyth 1983, with an Appendix by Hugh LloydJones. The guide to Aeschylean fragments by Matthew Wright 2018 offers summary discussions of the lost plays and an up-to-date bibliography.

REFERENCES Beazley, J. D. (1939). “Prometheus Fire-lighter.” American Journal of Archaeology 43, 618–39. Fraenkel, E. (1942). “Aeschylus: New Texts and Old Problems.” Proceedings of the British Academy 28, 237–58. Fraenkel, E. (1962). Aeschylus Agamemnon. Oxford.

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Gantz, T. (1993). Early Greek Myth. A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources. Baltimore. Grube, G. M. A. (1955). Aristotle on Poetry and Style [Poetics]. New York. Hadas, M. (1954). Ancilla to Classical Reading. New York. Henderson, J. (2007). Aristophanes V Fragments. Cambridge, MA. Hutchinson, G. O. (1985). Aeschylus Septem Contra Thebas. Oxford. Kirk, G. S. (1985). The Iliad: A Commentary. Vol. I: Books 1–4. Cambridge. Lloyd-Jones, H. (1994). Sophocles II. Cambridge, MA. Lloyd-Jones, H. (1996). Sophocles III. Cambridge, MA. March, J. (1998). Dictionary of Classical Mythology. Oxford. Mette, H. J. (1959). Die Fragmente der Tragödien des Aischylos. Berlin. Podlecki, A. (1975). “Reconstructing an Aeschylean Trilogy.” Bulletin of the University of London Institute of Classical Studies 22, 1–20. Podlecki, A. (2005). “Aiskhylos satyrikos.” In G. W. M. Harrison, ed. Satyr Drama. Tragedy at Play. Swansea, 1–19. Podlecki, A. (2009). “Aeschylus the Forerunner.” In J. Jouanna, F. Montanari, and A. P. Hernández, eds. Eschyle à l’aube du théâtre occidental: neuf exposés suivis de discussions. Vandoeuvres–Genève, 25–29 août 2008. Entretiens sur l’Antiquité classique 55. Geneva, 319–77. Radt, S. (1985). Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta Vol. 3: Aeschylus. Göttingen. Smyth, H. W. (1983 [1926]). Aeschylus II. Cambridge, MA. Sommerstein, A. H. (1996). Aeschylean Tragedy. Bari. Sommerstein, A. H. (2008). Aeschylus III: Fragments. Cambridge, MA. West, M. L. (1990). Studies in Aeschylus. Stuttgart. Wright, M. (2018). The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy. Volume 2: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. London.

CHAPTER 14

Aeschylean Satyr Drama Carl Shaw During most of the fifth and fourth centuries, spectators at the City Dionysia in Athens had the extraordinary experience of viewing, on three successive days, a whole day of plays by a single tragedian. The tragic contest required each playwright to follow his three tragedies with a satyr play, a humorous performance containing a chorus of ithyphallic half-man, halfhorse creatures. Dozens of poets competed with hundreds of satyr plays over the course of half a millennium, but historical records suggest that Aeschylus was considered the greatest of all. Pausanias (2.13.6), in his discussion of the town of Phlius, notes that “the satyr plays of Aristias and his father Pratinas were the most acclaimed except for those of Aeschylus”, and Diogenes Laertius (2.133) says that the philosopher Menedemus judged Achaeus “second best in satyr drama, granting first place to Aeschylus”. (These and all other unattributed translations are my own, except those from Aeschylus’s satyr plays, which come from Sommerstein 2008.) Aeschylus’s satyr plays, though, are mostly lost and what little remains is extremely fragmentary. Approximately 80 satyric fragments can be attributed to Aeschylus with relative certainty, but many of these were preserved by lexicographers interested in a single word or short phrase. The longest fragments, on the other hand, have been rescued from scraps of papyri and, although they sometimes extend for dozens of verses, are often disjointed, lacunose and difficult to interpret. These very scanty remains make it nearly impossible to understand or fully appreciate, let alone essentialise, Aeschylus’s satyr drama. However, a detailed examination of the fragments and their theatrical context provides a glimpse at what made Aeschylean satyr drama particularly celebrated. He seems to delight in exploring and exploiting the possibilities of the genre, particularly by relating them to his preceding tragedies in inventive ways. He also stages wonderful, imaginative scenes, but his reputation as a satyr dramatist may be attributed to more than just his style and skill. His fame was likely also influenced by his early date in respect to the official formation of satyr drama, by the nature of classicising in the ancient world, and by the trajectory of satyr drama’s development in the later fifth century.

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Aeschylus and Satyr Drama’s Early History When Aeschylus was born, satyr drama had not yet been introduced at the City Dionysia, but satyric performances, in which men dressed up, danced and sang as satyrs, were already a prominent part of festival life in and outside Athens. Satyrs began to appear on vases around 580 bce, becoming particularly prevalent after 560, and although many of these depictions are mythological in context, satyrs also occur in what appear to be representations of actual Dionysiac processions. For example, an Athenian cup from around 550 depicts six men carrying an oversized satyr riding a processional phallus pole (Florence 3897: Soprintendenza alle Antichità). An Attic skyphos from the end of the sixth century also shows a satyric procession, with Dionysus riding in a ship-cart accompanied by a satyr playing the double-aulos (Acr 1281a, National Archaeological Museum, Athens.) In the first example, the satyr is a larger than life decorated “float”, while the satyr in the second may have been an actual pipeplayer dressed in costume and charged with playing music as the ship of Dionysus was pulled through the city. These satyric processions contained many performative elements, and they seem to have developed into official Athenian satyr drama shortly before Aeschylus began competing at the City Dionysia. The abundance of satyr vases from Athens around 500 bce suggests that the genre was initiated near the end of the sixth century, and certain of these vases can be linked closely with performance. The earliest definite example of a performer dressed in what would be considered the customary, classical-age costume of satyr play comes from an Attic redfigure amphora fragment, c. 490–70 (Figure 14.1). If satyr drama was formally introduced around the end of the sixth century, Aeschylus may have been in the audience for the first satyr plays, and he was definitely part of the first wave of “satyr dramatists”. The Byzantine encyclopedia known as the Suda records that he competed against Pratinas, whom many in antiquity claimed was the “first to write satyr plays” (Pratinas T1*): Pratinas, the son of either Pyrronides or Encomius, from Phlius was a tragic poet. He competed against Aeschylus and Choerilus in the seventieth Olympiad (499/96) and was the first to write satyr plays. When he was presenting his plays, the planks on which the spectators stood fell down, and on account of this a theatre was constructed by the Athenians. He staged fifty plays, thirty-two of which were satyric. He won once.

While the Suda’s comments are not entirely trustworthy, the early fifth-century date coincides with ancient visual evidence, and Pratinas was probably, if not the first satyr dramatist, an early author of the genre, perhaps the first to perform satyr plays in Athens. Given Aeschylus’s influence on the trajectory of tragedy and his prominence in the early Athenian theatre, he probably played a significant role in the development of satyr drama as well. And given Aeschylus’s familiarity with the various satyric performances of the previous century, he no doubt had a wide palette of styles to play with and choose from; his main credit, though, may be influencing the genre’s shift toward mythological themes. The only complete, extant satyr play from antiquity, Euripides’ Cyclops, is a late fifthcentury production that dramatises Odysseus’s famous encounter with the Cyclopean monster Polyphemus in Book 9 of Homer’s Odyssey. This sort of mythological storyline was standard for fifth- and fourth-century satyr dramatists, a point that is captured in Francois Lissarrague’s memorable recipe for the genre: “take one myth, add satyrs, observe result” (Lissarrague 1990b, 236). This formula, though, does not adequately characterise the possibilities of early satyr drama (or later satyr drama, for that matter). Our earliest evidence, in fact, seems very “un-satyric” in light of Lissarrague’s dictum. Pratinas’s hyporchema offers a



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Figure 14.1  An Attic amphora fragment by Eucharides Painter. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection, Malibu, California. 86. AE.190.6. Terracotta.

satyric performance that engages less with myth than with contemporary poetic trends. As Athenaeus notes, Pratinas composed this lyric because he was upset that “aulos-players did not play their pipes along with the choruses, as was customary, but instead choruses sang along with aulos-players” (Pratinas frag. 3 = Athenaeus Deipnosophistae 617b–c): What is this noise? What are these dances? What is this outrage at the tumultuous altar of Dionysus? Bromius is mine, mine. It is for me to sing loudly; it is for me to make noise, dancing along the mountains with the Naiads,

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just like a swan leading its dappled-wing melody. The Pierian Muse has determined the queenly song: let the pipe dance the second part. For it is the servant. It can only lead the revel and the brawls of drunk young men fighting in doorways. Strike the one who has the voice of a spotted toad. Burn the spit-wasting reed, that babbling, off-beat, out of tune tool shaped by a drill. Look at me, flinging my hands and feet. Thriambodithyrambus, ivy-crowned lord, listen, listen to my Dorian dance. Dancing with Naiads and calling upon Dionysus, Pratinas’s satyrs allude to their mythological existence, but unlike in Classical satyr drama, they are not interjected into some famous mythological story in which they originally had no role. The content focuses more on contemporary musical trends than mythological history. They even seem to attack the aulosplayer, breaking the fourth wall in a manner uncharacteristic of what we know of the genre. Although scholars have debated the generic origin of this fragment, the simplest solution – considering Pratinas’s reputation as satyr dramatist, his use of a chorus of satyrs and the setting at the thymela of Dionysus (which was set up in the theatre) – is to assign the verses to a choral ode from an early satyr play. The passage gives a sense of the possibilities of satyr drama in the genre’s early stages, before satyr drama’s “recipe” was firmly established. It is not particularly mythological; it includes a meta-theatrical critique of contemporary musical trends; and it includes sexual allusion to the phallus (τρυπάνῳ δέμας πεπλασμένον, the phrase rendered “tool shaped by a drill” above). In short, it exhibits qualities more commonly associated with Old Comedy than classical satyr drama. This can probably be attributed in large part to the fact that comedy was not introduced officially in Athens until 486, as is attested by the Suda (chi 318) and Athenian victory lists (IG II2 2325c = Millis and Olson 2012, 163). The relatively late addition of comedy to the festival means that satyr drama was the sole official humorous drama at the City Dionysia for a couple of decades, which likely encouraged satyr dramatists to employ a wide range of comic styles (cf. Shaw 2014, 79–83). The period during which comedy was instituted and first began to flourish was also the time in which Aeschylus was reaching his peak as a tragedian and satyr dramatist. He performed satyr plays for about 15 years before comedy was established at the City Dionysia. He then staged satyr plays for 30 years after comedy’s introduction. Aeschylus witnessed and participated in satyr drama’s evolution, perhaps even fashioning satyr drama into what we think of as “fifth-century Athenian satyr play”. In particular, if Pratinas’s fragment above is indicative of early satyr drama, Aeschylus may have played an integral role in solidifying the genre’s move to mythological plots. Although titles may be misleading and the number of titles is small, all of Aeschylus’s known satyr plays appear to have mythological plots, while Palaestae (Wrestlers), the only certain title of a satyr play by Pratinas, is a title without immediate mythological associations.



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Aeschylean Satyr Drama: Interrelated Tetralogies and Spectacle In addition to employing myth in his satyr plays, Aeschylus also seems to have been fond of composing satyric productions that were part of a full tetralogy based on the same myth (see Sommerstein, Chapter 15 in this volume). He may even have invented the concept. By the middle of the fifth century, tragedians typically offered four plays that did not have related plots. Aeschylus is, in fact, the only tragedian known to offer interconnected tetralogies: Laius, Oedipus, Seven against Thebes and the satyric Sphinx (467 bce); Suppliants, Aigyptioi, Danaids and the satyric Amymone (460s bce); Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides and satyric Proteus (458 bce); Edonians, Bassarids, Neaniskoi and the satyric Lycurgus (unknown date).1 There is a clear thematic connection between the plays of each tetralogy, with large story arcs woven together from the same mythological fabric. These interconnected tetralogies provide a somewhat clearer picture of the poet’s approach to and influence on the genre. Aeschylus’s Oresteia, the only extant tragic trilogy, comprises a coherent intergenerational story from start to finish, with the second and third play’s action picking up after that of the previous play. But it was not Aeschylus’s trilogy that won first prize at the City Dionysia in 458. It was his tetralogy, including the almost completely lost satyr play, Proteus. Proteus dramatised the nostos of Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus, an event that takes place shortly after Agamemnon’s own homecoming and thus maintains a clear relationship to the preceding tragedies. As Menelaus recounts in Book 4 of Homer’s Odyssey (4.351–80), he was shipwrecked on the island of Pharos off the coast of Egypt. Stranded on the island with his comrades, Menelaus felt helpless as he watched both food and morale dwindling, until one day, when the other sailors were off fishing, the sea-nymph Eidothea (Eido) appeared to him and berated him for his lack of leadership. She ordered him to capture her father, the divine shape-shifting sea-god Proteus, who would be able to instruct Menelaus how to get home and tell him “what has happened in [his] halls, both evil and good” (Homer, Odyssey 4.392). She explains in detail that every day around noon, Proteus swims ashore to sleep among a group of seals in the shade of the caves, and that Menelaus should choose three of his best companions to hide with him under seal pelts on Proteus’s beach. When Proteus falls asleep, they must grab and hold him unflinchingly as he changes his shape to different animals, water and fire; and finally when he returns to his original state, they can release and question him. Only six fragments (totalling 16 words) of Aeschylus’s Proteus remain, so there is much more uncertainty than certainty surrounding this play. If Euripides’ Cyclops can serve as a point of reference, the chorus of satyrs had probably already been shipwrecked and were living with Proteus when Menelaus and his men arrived. Reference is made to fish-sauce (καὶ τὸν ἰχθύων γάρον, “And the garum made of fish” frag. 211), pointing perhaps to the Homeric version in which Menelaus and his men were stranded on a small island with little to eat besides the unheroic diet of fish. It is possible, however, that Aeschylus staged a different version of the myth than that found in the Odyssey. In some accounts, for example, Proteus was the human king of Egypt rather than a divinity on a small Egyptian island, and Helen was shuttled off to Egypt, while Paris brought a phantom (eidolon) of Helen to Troy. (For the alternative version in antiquity, see Stesichorus [Chamaeleon frag. 29 Wehrli = PMG 193], Herodotus 2.112–20, and Euripides’ Helen; cf. Griffith 2002.)

1

Other likely interrelated tetralogies include one connected to Homer’s Odyssey, with Psychogogoi (GhostRaisers), Penelope, Ostologoi (Bone-gatherers) and Circe, and one related to Perseus and Danae, with Polydectes, Phorcides, a third unknown play and Dictyulci. See later in this section for the possibility that there was also a Perseus tetralogy.

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Regardless of the precise rendering of the Proteus myth (and despite the scant evidence), it is clear that Aeschylus’s satyr play is intimately and intricately related to the preceding trilogy of tragedies. For example, Aeschylus appears to have contrasted Agamemnon’s and Menelaus’s homecomings by juxtaposing the stories generically. Agamemnon’s unhappy nostos in tragedy and the subsequent tragic events are placed alongside Menelaus’s happy nostos in satyr play. The Oresteia and Proteus tell a coherent family story, but not in linear fashion, instead moving forward chronologically through the tragedies and then backward in time in the satyr play. Levi (1908, 230–42) was the first to discuss this phenomenon, noting its appearance in other Aeschylean tetralogies, but scholars have not been able to make much of its effect. Sansone (2015) found this chronological shift so confounding that he suggested that our understanding of the City Dionysia was entirely wrong and that satyr plays were performed before the trilogy of tragedies. Coo (2019) suggests that Aeschylus uses his satyr plays to evoke a “nostalgic response”, a “poignant and impossible longing to return to a past moment in time to the way things ‘used to be’”. While nostalgia may play a role in some instances, Aeschylus’s satyric travel backward in time is not always nostalgic. It does, though, always seem to deepen the relationship of the tragedies and the satyr play in a manner that is (apparently) uniquely Aeschylean. Proteus is a clear response to Aeschylus’s first tragedy of the day, Agamemnon. For example, when the chorus and a herald discuss Menelaus’s disappearance on his way back from Troy (Agamemnon 617–33), the herald describes the storm that hit Menelaus’s fleet, but proceeds to say that the king may still have his nostos (Ag. 674–79). Aeschylus’s mention of Helen in Agamemnon also looks forward to the Proteus, which no doubt ended either with Menelaus reuniting with Helen or on his way to reunite with her. This conclusion to the satyr play would also launch the audience back into the world of the preceding tragedies, because we know (in Homer’s version at least) that Menelaus asks Proteus about his brother Agamemnon’s homecoming. If Aeschylus followed Homer, Proteus did not just provide a happy ending. It looked back to a happier past that preceded the tragic future just witnessed by the audience in the preceding trilogy of tragedies. As Coo (2019, 19) notes, Aeschylus creates a “thematic Möbius strip, where the first play’s speculation as to the fate of Menelaus is answered by the content of the final play, and the final play’s enquiry as to the fate of Agamemnon is answered by the events dramatized in the first play”. The Oedipus tetralogy – Laius, Oedipus, Seven against Thebes and Sphinx – with which Aeschylus competed and won at the City Dionysia in 467 bce, further demonstrates the complex nature of the thematic connections between his tragedy and satyr drama. The three tragedies appear to follow three generations of the house of Laius. Very little of Laius, Oedipus and Sphinx remain, but in the extant Seven against Thebes, the chorus gives a sense of the other plays’ plots. The chorus of Theban women sing (743–90) about Laius’s inability to follow the oracle’s prophecy to avoid having children, about Oedipus’s patricide and subsequent marriage to his mother, about Oedipus’s defeat of the Sphinx and about the eventual knowledge of his crimes and ultimate downfall. In other words, Seven against Thebes relates the content of each of Aeschylus’s other plays in the tetralogy and then proceeds to play out Oedipus’s curse on his two sons, concluding with the death of Polynices and Eteocles (see Torrance, Chapter 7 in this volume). Like Proteus, Sphinx returns to earlier elements in the mythic history. Instead of continuing the intergenerational arc of the trilogy’s plot, Aeschylus revisits material chronologically more related to the second tragedy, retelling an aspect of Oedipus’s entrance to the city of Thebes. The play, which is preserved in only three short fragments, presumably began with an announcement that the kingship of Thebes and marriage to the queen, Iocasta, would be the prize for any man who could solve the riddle of the Sphinx and deliver the city from its curse. Responding to this proposition, Silenus and the satyrs would have entered, excited by



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the opportunity to marry the queen. Shortly after this, the satyrs likely sang choral lyrics that included a four-dactyl, Doric verse calling “The Sphinx, the bitch, the ruler of unlucky days”, (Σφίγγα, δυσαμεριᾶν πρύτανιν κύνα, frag. 236). When the Sphinx actually appeared before them, however, the satyrs undoubtedly lost their courage, leaving Oedipus to face the beast and save the day. The scholia to Aristophanes’ Frogs 1287 preserve two verses that probably come from the latter part of the play, when Oedipus, still an unknown foreigner in Thebes, was victorious over the Sphinx and about to receive the crown: “And for the stranger a crown, an ancient garland, the best of bonds according to the word of Prometheus” (τῶι δὲ ξένωι γε στέφανος, ἀρχαῖον †στέφος†,/δεσμῶν ἄριστος ἐκ Προμηθέως λόγου, Aeschylus frag. 235). Erika Simon (1982) has argued convincingly that a vase known as the “Fujita Hydria” represents Aeschylus’s Sphinx (Figure 14.2). The vase depicts five aged satyrs sitting in council before the Sphinx. Each holds a scepter and wears an ornate chiton, the marks perhaps of the council of elder Thebans. If this vase does represent Aeschylus’s play, it appears that the Sphinx was an actual character onstage, since on the far left of the image, an actor seems to be dressed as a lion and perched above the satyrs. The depiction of the satyrs as older figures,

Figure 14.2  Sphinx with Chorus of Satyrs, Athenian Red-figure Hydria. Tokyo, Fujita, ZA20. ©Martin von Wagner Museum der Universität Würzburg, Photo: P. Neckermann.

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rather than young men in their prime, is remarkably different than any other known satyr chorus. This kind of a shift from a group of raucous young satyrs to a group of elderly satyrs would defy the audience’s expectations and demonstrates Aeschylus’s willingness to experiment with the genre. The play itself also offers an example of the complex relationship Aeschylus establishes between his tragedy and satyr play. The primary interpretation of Oedipus’s triumphant satyric return as a young man after his shame-filled tragic performance typically falls in line with Hutchinson’s suggestion (1985, xxx) that the satyr play would have succeeded at “dispelling the accumulated darkness of its predecessors”. But as we saw with the Proteus and Oresteia, the relationship is much more complex than a simple happy ending. By generic convention, the satyric Sphinx ends positively, but the audience has just witnessed (in the preceding two plays) the ruinous results of Oedipus’s successful solution of the riddle; and the return of Oedipus onstage in Sphinx would have naturally evoked the pain and suffering that he had endured in the preceding tragic trilogy. Aeschylus’s Sphinx does not merely look backward to a simpler, more joyous time, before Oedipus realises that he has killed his father and married his mother. It also looks forward in time relative to the mythological chronology, once again interweaving tragedy and satyr play in the fashion of a theatrical Möbius strip. As Nelson (2016, 86) puts it, “Oedipus’s success with the Sphinx leads back into the curse that the trilogy had just dramatized”. Aeschylus’s Amymone and Lycurgus also represent a satyric look back at earlier events, but they do not have the sense of nostalgia that Coo (2019) sees as a crucial part of the satyrictragic relationship. The satyr play Amymone was staged in 463 bce as part of a Danaid tetralogy and relates the myth of Danaus’s daughter, Amymone, venturing into a rural area of the Argolid for water. According to mythological accounts (Apollodorus Bibliotheca 2.1.4; Hyginus Fabulae 169), a satyr began pursuing Amymone and attempted to have sex with her, but Poseidon appeared, chased the satyr away and married her himself. The “satyr” in Aeschylus’s Amymone was most likely played by Silenus, with the chorus acting as excited supporters and hopeful sexual partners. Three fragments remain, one of which clearly alludes to the satyrs’ (probably Silenus’s, in particular) willingness to have sex with anyone or anything: “mounting wild beasts” (θρώισκων κνώδαλα, frag. 15). There is also a line, probably spoken by Poseidon to Amymone, “It is your fate to be wedded and mine to wed” (σοὶ μὲν γαμεῖσθαι μόρσιμον, γαμεῖν δ’ ἐμοί, frag. 13). And when Poseidon was brought onstage, he appears to have been portrayed luxuriously with “powders and perfumes” (κἄγωγε τὰς σὰς βακκάρεις τε καὶ μύρα, frag. 14). Like Proteus and Sphinx, Amymone refers back to the preceding trilogy, but it presents and explores a different mythological trajectory than that presented in the tragedies. In the first play, the extant Suppliants, the 50 daughters of Danaus flee to Argos to avoid marrying their Egyptian cousins. There they receive protection from the king and the Argive people. In the second and third plays, Danaus apparently becomes tyrant of Argos and forces his daughters to marry the Egyptians, but advises them to kill their husbands on their wedding night. Forty-nine of the daughters follow their father’s instructions, but Hypermnestra forges a relationship with her husband, Lynceus, and decides not to murder him. When Danaus threatens to kill Hypermnestra for her defiance, Lynceus slays the tyrant. The satyr drama, the final play in the tetralogy, returns to an alternative version of the trilogy’s myth, in which Danaus orders one of his 50 daughters to bring water back from the countryside, but when she is attacked by a satyr (or a chorus of satyrs), she is saved and wedded by Poseidon. It is fascinating that Amymone is probably not featured in the previous trilogy, but is one of the Danaids. Dowden (1989, 151) calls Amymone “an exceptional Danaid, a named individual who … has nothing to do with the story of the fifty Danaids who flee the Egyptian”.



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Aeschylus ties this satyr play about Amymone into the previous trilogy by highlighting the similarity of her fate with that of Hypermnestra. Just as Danaus had done with Hypermnestra and the rest of his daughters in the preceding tragedies, he places his female offspring, Amymone, in a perilous situation where she is terrorised by the threat of violation by an unwanted suitor. And just as Hypermnestra ended up with a suitable husband in a suitable marriage, Amymone happily marries the god of the sea. In fact, Amymone, which means “blameless”, in many ways is a double for Hypermnestra. Both are blameless in their relations with suitors and both are spared a terrible fate. In this way, the Amymone “reflects in miniature the story of the trilogy” (Caldwell 1993, 99). However, the Amymone also undoes the myth of the 50 Danaids, since the titular character is somehow both a “blameless” wife of Poseidon, but also a murderer of her cousin-suitor. If both Amymone and Hypermnestra are blameless, then there are not 49 guilty Danaids, there are 48. So, instead of presenting a satyr play and tragedy that look forward and backward at each other in the fashion of a Möbius strip, Aeschylus overlays the Amymone myth onto the Hypermnestra myth in a way that simultaneously reinforces and undermines both. Aeschylus exploits the nature of variation in Greek myth to present nearly the same story within the same family twice, but by superimposing the Amymone on top of the preceding trilogy, he undoes the action of his earlier tragedies. The Lycurgus is another distinctive example of a satyr play that connects to the plot of its preceding trilogy, which included Edonoi, Bassarai and Neaniskoi. As with the satyr plays discussed earlier in this chapter, Lycurgus flashes backward in time, in this instance revisiting the exact time, place and story of the trilogy’s first play. In the tragic version of the story, Dionysus’s Bacchants arrive in the territory of Edonia in Thrace, where they are apprehended and imprisoned by the king Lycurgus for their Dionysiac worship. At the end of the play, Dionysus triumphantly frees the women and punishes Lycurgus by making him think that he is chopping a vine with an axe, while he is actually dismembering his own son. In the satyr play, Aeschylus staged an alternative version of the myth, substituting the satyrs for the female worshippers, which resulted in a much different story. Nonnus (Dionysiaca 20.226–27 and 248–50) seems to suggest that in Lycurgus the tyrant attempted to tame the satyrs, cut off their tails and make them sing songs in honour of Ares and Lycurgus instead of Dionysus. Dionysus returns, though, to free his satyric worshipers and to punish the king by driving him mad. Lycurgus undoes the preceding trilogy by reworking the myth of the first tragedy, Edonians. The satyr play takes us back to a point in the story that the audience saw earlier in the day, but changes the chorus of Dionysiac worshippers entirely. Aeschylus’s adaptation does not simply add satyrs to a myth as in Lissarrague’s “recipe”: it takes one myth, substitutes satyrs, and observes result. With Proteus and Sphinx, Aeschylus presents cohesive satyr plays that look backward in the trilogy but forward in the mythological story, while the Amymone and Lycurgus represent disruptive satyr plays that look backward in the trilogy but also unsettle the mythological story of the preceding three tragedies. Aeschylus’s Dictyulci offers another potential example of Aeschylus’s particular brand of satyric-tragic interaction, as well as a glimpse into other qualities that made his satyr plays notable in the ancient world. Scholars have suggested that Aeschylus’s Dictyulci was performed alongside the tragic Polydectes and Phorcides (and a third unknown play), which fits with Aeschylus’s fondness for interconnected tetralogies (see e.g. Goins 1997, 193–210). All three plays centre on Perseus and/or Danae, but the satyr play flashes back to a time within or before the preceding three tragedies. Aeschylus moves back to Perseus’s infancy, relating the happy story of Danae’s and Perseus’s rescue from the ocean by the fisherman Dictys, as summarised by Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 2.4.1–5. Dictyulci opens with Dictys and another person (perhaps Silenus) fishing from the shore, when one of them notices the chest in which king

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Acrisius placed his daughter Danae and grandson Perseus. They see something mysterious in the water (“a whale, a shark or some se[a-monster?]” frag. 46a, 8–10) that is covered with seaweed, and they immediately call for help from farmers, vine-diggers or shepherds, but satyrs answer the call. After pulling the chest ashore, the satyrs and Silenus discuss wedding the woman and adopting the boy, but in the end, Danae is saved by Dictys. Dictyulci winds back the mythological clock and provides a happy ending for characters who in the preceding plays have experienced tragic hardships. In fact, although it is the final play in the tetralogy, the Dictyulci launches directly into the plot of the tragic Polydectes, which presents the titular character attempting to kill Danae’s son Perseus so he can marry the princess. If these plays are from the same tetralogy, Aeschylus once again presents a cohesive Möbius strip, with the satyr play looking back in time relative to the day’s tragedies and forward in time relative to the mythological arc. In addition to presenting a plot woven into the material of the previous tragic trilogy, Dictyulci also demonstrates Aeschylus’s creativity and humour on the satyric stage. Aeschylus seems to revel in the genre’s possibilities, a fact that likely contributed to his reputation as the best satyr dramatist in antiquity. The hauling scene that took place on stage in the Dictyulci must have been a visual tour de force (frag. 46c, 4–7): ὦ τ]ῆ̣σδ[ε] χώρας π̣οντ̣[ίας π]άντες τ’ ἀγρῶσται κα[ὶ βοηδρομεῖτε κ[.]ν[ σ]ε[ι]ρᾶς δὲ μὴ μ̣ε̣θῆ[σθε You [inhabitants] of this sea-girt land, and all you rustics and [. . .], come to our aid . . . [. . .] And don’t let go of the [r]o[p]e! Ancient theatre-goers were, no doubt, expected to use their imaginations more than modern audiences, but the request not to let go of the rope shows that the scene probably took place onstage. It seems likely that the chest was pulled into the orchestra from the parascenium, with the satyrs heaving ropes for humorous effect. In addition, the Dictyulci illustrates Aeschylus’s use of double entendres and obscenity to provoke laughter from the audience (frag. 47a, 786–88): ἰδο]ύ̣, γελ̣ᾶ μου̣ π̣ρ̣οσορῶν ]. . ὁ μικκὸς λιπαρὸν τὸ μ]ι̣λτ̣[ό]πρεπ̣τ̣ο̣ν φαλακ̣ρὸν [Loo]k, [this] little one is laughing as he looks at my sleek smooth dome, picked out in red… Aeschylus makes use of the similar sound between φαλακρόν and φαλλόν, referring to the satyr’s bald head, while at the secondary level making a joke about the satyr’s phallus (for this common joke, see Seaford 1987). Seven lines later, Aeschylus continues the phallic humour when Silenus refers to Perseus as π̣οσθοφιλὴς ὁ νεοσσὸς (“a penis-loving child”). Aeschylus provides a similar sense of wonder and phallic humour in many of his satyr plays. Theoroi or Isthmiastae, for example, contains a number of interesting examples, even if the play’s plot cannot be fully restored. The play is situated at the Isthmian games in front of Poseidon’s temple (frag. 78c, 18, δ̣ῶμα ποντίου σεισίχθο[νος), where, it seems, the satyrs



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have fled from Dionysus to train under the tutelage of some other, unknown character. The plot is unique in that it does not appear to have any particular mythological foundation, but centres on the satyrs, with the chorus serving collectively as the protagonist. Aeschylus does not take a myth and add satyrs in the manner of most authors of classical satyr plays. The satyrs are not peripheral to the plot – they are its primary impetus. Obviously the satyrs’ choice to become athletes opens up a range of humorous possibilities for onstage exploits. The satyrs could run, wrestle and throw as they practised for their athletic competitions, but the satyrs’ exercise regimen brought them in direct conflict with Dionysus by damaging his “property” (Isthmiastae or Theoroi, frag. 78c, 33–35): τοὔρχημα μᾶλλον εἰκὸς ἦν σε ̣ [. . . . .]ε̣ιν· σὺ δ’ ἰσθμ̣ιάζεις καὶ τρόπους και[νοὺς μ]α̣θὼν̣ βραχί̣ο̣[ω’ ἀ]σ̣κ̣εῖς, χρήματα φθείρων ἐμὰ you’d have more likely been [practis]ing dancing; but you’re learning a new way of life, that of Isthmian athletes, exercising your arms and injuring this property of mine Dionysus complains that the satyrs are practising their exercises rather than their dances and is upset that the satyrs are injuring themselves, since the god clearly thinks of them as his property. Perhaps he is even upset about the satyrs’ athletic infibulation, the act of using a string to close the foreskin and tie the penis to one side (Isthmiastae or Theoroi, frag. 78c, 29–31): ὁ̣ρ̣ῶ̣ν̣ μύουρα καὶ βραχέα τὰ̣ ̣[. . . .]α, ὡς ἐξέτριβες Ἰσθμιαστικὴν̣ [. . . .]ν, κοὐκ ἠμέλησας, ἀλλ’ ἐγυμνάζ[ου κα]λῶς. … when I see your [penises] short like a mouse’s tail, that you were polishing up your Isthmian [wrestling], and that you hadn’t neglected it but were in good training. Here Aeschylus’s satyrs forego their usual erect phalloi and wear stage costumes with penises tied up in the manner of athletes. This would have been a hilarious twist on the typical ithyphallic nature of satyrs. In addition to the onstage athletic action and infibulated phalloi, Aeschylus also establishes a certain amount of spectacle with “old look-out dances” (σκωπεύματα, frag. 79). The most delightful and creative scene, however, comes from the satyrs’ encounter with images of themselves (Isthmiastae or Theoroi, frag. 78c, 4–22): ἄκουε δὴ πᾶς· σῖγα, δ̣’ ειθ̣ε̣λ̣ειδ̣ ̣ [ ̣] ἄθ̣ρ̣η̣σ̣ον, εἴ̣ ̣ [ ̣ ̣] ̣ ̣ [ εἴδωλον ε̣ἶναι̣ τ̣ο̣ῦδ’ ἐμῇ μορφῇ πλέον τὸ Δαιδάλου μ[ί]μ̣ημα· φω̣ ν̣ῆς δεῖ μόνον. τάδ’ [ ̣ ̣]  ̣ ει̣ ̣ ̣ ὅρα ̣ [ ̣]  ̣ ( ̣)ρ [ χωρεῖ μά̣λα. ―εὐκταῖα κόσμον ταῦ̣τ̣[α] τῷ θεῶι φέρω, καλλίγραπ̣τ̣ον εὐχά̣ν. ―τῇ μητρὶ τἠμῇ πράγμα̣τ' ἂν παρασχέθοι·

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ἰδοῦσα γάρ νι̣ν̣ ἂν σαφῶς τρέποι̣τ’ ἂν αἰάζοιτό θ’, ὡς δ̣οκοῦσ' ἔμ' εἶναι τὸν ἐξέθρ̣εψε̣ν̣· ο̣ὕτως ἐμφερὴς ὅδ’ ἐστίν. εἶα δή, σκοπεῖτε δ̣ῶμα ποντίου σεισίχθο[νος, κἀπιπασσάλευ’ ἕ̣κ̣αστος τῆς κ[α]λῆς μορφῆς ̣ [ ἄ̣γγελον, κήρυκ’ [ἄ]ναυδον, ἐμπόρων κωλύτορ[α, ὅ̣[ς] γ’̣ ἐπισχήσει κε̣λεύθου τοὺς ξένο[υς] φο̣[β‒ ‒. ̆ χαῖρ’, ἄναξ· χαῖρ’, ὦ Πόσειδον, ἐπίτροπο̣[ς θ’] ὑ̣φ̣[ίστασο.

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Now listen, everyone, and . . . [. . .] in silence! Look and see whether [you] th[ink] at [all] that Daedalus’s models are a closer image of my form than this. All it needs is a voice! [Remains of two lines, including “this” and “see.”] Come on now! [A single voice] I bring these votives to the god to adorn his house – fine paintings to fulfil a vow! [The full chorus] It would cause my mother some problems! If she saw it, I’m quite sure she’d turn about and cry out in horror, because she’d think it was me, the child that she brought up! That’s how like me it is! Ho there! Set your eyes on the house of the Sea-god, the Earth-shaker, and each of you nail up there an [image] of your fair form as a messenger, a voiceless herald, a restrainer of travellers, which will make visitor[s] halt in their path [by the] fear[some look in its eyes]. Hail, lord! Hail, Poseidon, [and] under[take to be our] guardian! The identity of these masks is uncertain, but whatever the precise form, this meta-theatrical moment must have been wondrous to see onstage. Actors dressed in satyr masks hold up satyr masks and wonder at their realism. Like Theoroi or Isthmiastae, Aeschylus’s satyric Prometheus Pyrkaeus, which was performed in 472 bce after Phineus, Persians and Glaucus of Potniae, demonstrates the spectacular and amusing antics that Aeschylus brought onstage in his satyr plays. The plot of the play relates Prometheus’s gift of fire to mankind, and a good deal of the play’s action seems to have focused on the satyrs’ first, hilarious encounter with flames. For example, there was apparently a fear that the satyrs would burn off their own beards (frag. 207): τράγος γένειον ἆρα πενθήσεις σύ γε Then you’ll be mourning for your beard, like a billygoat! And Prometheus appears to warn Silenus or the satyrs about water that has been boiled using the newly invented fire (frag. 206): ἐξευλαβοῦ δὲ σε προσβάλῃ στόμα πέμφιξ· πικρὰ γὰρ †καὶ οὐ διὰ ζωῆς ἀτμοί†



Aeschylean Satyr Drama 197 Take care the round drop doesn’t touch your mouth; it’s bitter and very dangerous to the throat (?).

A line about “Linen plugs and long strips of raw flax” (λινᾶ δὲ πεσσὰ κὠμολίνου μακροὶ τόνοι, frag. 205) also suggests that the satyrs at some point needed to fix a burn. The stage action associated with the satyrs’ first ever encounter with fire and boiling water, along with the ensuing burns, howls, distressed leaping and dancing would have been incredible to see on the stage. After finally understanding the simultaneous appeal and danger of fire, it is probably Silenus who humorously refers to his inability to stop playing with the flames: “I fear I may suffer the very stupid death of a moth” (δέδοικα μῶρον κάρτα πυραύστου μόρον, frag. 288). If all these fragments do come from Aeschylus’s satyr play on Prometheus, they give a sense of the humour audiences witnessed in Aeschylus’s satyr plays. The torch (whether lit or unlit) would have been a crucial prop in the production, and the satyrs’ repeated encounters with fire and hot items would have resulted in nonstop antics, mock pain, loud yelps and gymnastic manoeuvres.

Conclusion As we reflect on why Aeschylus was deemed the best satyr dramatist in antiquity, it is useful to return to Pausanias’s quote, which does not actually refer to Aeschylus or his plays precisely as “the best”. Pausanias says that Aeschylus’s satyr plays were δοκιμώτατοι, a term that means most accepted/approved/welcomed/trustworthy or, even, “most genuine”. The extremely fragmentary evidence makes it difficult, if not impossible, to make definitive statements about Aeschylus’s satyr plays, but the label “most genuine” seems to suit his satyr drama. Aeschylus’s satyr plays were deeply invested in mythological subject matter and they also focus on novelty and spectacle. None of this necessarily stands out from our understanding of Sophoclean or even Euripidean satyr drama; in fact, in many ways Aeschylus appears to be a traditionalist, but this is probably only from the point of view of the late fifth century and beyond. In reality, he was an early innovator, perhaps even serving as the primary impetus behind the genre’s later trends, including obscenity, novelty and mythological plots. Aeschylus’s satyr plays may have had such creative influence that they served as the standard for later generations. In other words, Aeschylus’s satyr plays may not merely fit the recipe for fifth-century satyr drama, they may have served as the recipe for other fifth-century satyr dramatists. Aeschylus was clearly a pioneer of sorts, but he was classicised as a top poet of satyr drama well before Pausanias or Diogenes were writing. He had probably already achieved this status before his plays were distributed as texts, by the time Euripides was staging plays, or perhaps even before his death in 456. As the first dramatist to be awarded with the significant honour of repeat performances (cf. C. W. Marshall, Chapter 30 in this volume) and the honour of being mocked by comic poets, who fed the flames of fandom (cf. Rosen, 2006), Aeschylus was uniquely situated to influence the genre, establish trends and, therefore, be deemed the best. Aeschylus was not the only poet who influenced the development of satyr drama, but he probably played the most important role in the genre’s first half-century of development. And his early place in the canon surely affected his station in the minds of later scholars assessing satyr drama. In a way, Pausanias and Diogenes/Menedemus are no different from the chorus in Aristophanes’ Frogs (1004): Aeschylus was a classic, famed not only as “the first man to build the towering words of tragedy”, but also as the first man to build the words (towering or not) of satyr drama.

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This is not to suggest that Aeschylus does not or did not deserve the reputation that he received. He was no doubt inventive. He brought wondrous scenes onstage and he may have been the driving force behind the genre’s focus on mythological plots, making him a remarkable early innovator. Where Aeschylus is most innovative, though, is also where he was least emulated, in the use of interrelated tetralogies. Whether intensifying the tragic action by flashing back to a time that reintroduces the audience to the preceding tragedies, or undoing the tragic action by rewriting the mythological trajectory of the story, Aeschylus provides a powerfully complex interaction between satyr drama and tragedy that does not seem achievable in a non-connected tetralogy. Unrelated tetralogies became the norm and, while they undoubtedly provided compelling tragic-satyric associations, no random satyr play could launch an audience into a similarly intense and profound exploration of a myth. Through his popularity and his early dates, Aeschylus helped define the genre, but his particular approach gave satyr drama and the entire tetralogic performance a depth of meaning unrivalled by any other tragedian before or after. * Fragments are cited in this chapter by TrGF. number. The source of this now standard numeration is the multi-author compilation of the fragments of tragedy and satyr drama, Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. Entries whose numbers begin with T are testimonia, pieces of relevant information about the author or work in question, whether supplied with a ­fragment or in another source. The fragments of Aeschylus appear in volume 3 of TrGF, edited by S. Radt (Göttingen 1985).

FURTHER READING 1. Aeschylean Satyr Drama: The best places to access the fragments and translations of Aeschylean satyr drama are Krumeich et al. 1999 and Sommerstein 2008. O’Sullivan and Collard 2013 offers a smaller selection of fragments, but the individual discussions and bibliographies are excellent. Setti 1948, 1952, Ussher 1977, Gallo 1981, Di Marco 1991, Slenders 1992, Moreau 2001, Yziquel 2001a, Podlecki 2005 and Sommerstein, 2010, 235–40 present helpful general studies of Aeschylean satyr drama. Yziquel 2001b offers a dated but still useful bibliography of Aeschylean satyr play. For studies of the Aeschylean tetralogy in particular, consult Gantz 1980, Sansone 2015, Di Marco 2016 and Coo 2019. Coo and Uhlig 2019 have edited a special volume of BICS dedicated solely to Aeschylus at Play: Studies in Aeschylean Satyr Drama. 2. Aeschylean Satyr Plays: The following sources should be consulted for specific satyr plays discussed in this chapter. Proteus: Cunningham 1994; Krumeich et al. 1999, 179–81; Yziquel 2001a, 10–13; Griffith 2002; Podlecki 2005, 7; Sommerstein 2008, 220–23; Coo 2019, 17–20. Sphinx: Simon 1981, 1982; Moret 1984; Krumeich et al. 1999, 189–96; Tiverios 2000; Yziquel 2001a, 19–22; Podlecki 2005, 7–8; Sommerstein 2008, 238–43; and Coo 2019, 13–17. Amymone: Krumeich et al. 1999, 91–97; Yziquel 2001a, 13–19; Podlecki 2005, 8–9; Sommerstein 2008, 8–11. Lycurgus: West 1990, 47–48; Krumeich et al. 1999, 164–68; Podlecki 2005, 6; Sommerstein 2008, 126–29. Dictyulci: Halleran 1989; Krumeich et al. 1999, 107–24; Henry and Nünlist 2000, 13–14; Podlecki 2005, 9–11; Sommerstein 2008, 42–57; O’Sullivan and Collard 2013, 254–65; O’Sullivan 2019. Theoroi or Isthmiastae: Di Marco 1992; Krumeich et al. 1999, 131–48; Henry and Nünlist 2000; Krumeich 2000; O’Sullivan 2000; Henry 2001; Marconi 2005; Podlecki 2005, 13–14; Sommerstein 2008, 82–99; O’Sullivan and Collard 2013, 266–71; Thomas 2019.



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Prometheus: There is some confusion about the Prometheus satyr play/plays, since three separate titles are recorded: Prometheus Pyrkaeus, Prometheus Pyrphoros and Prometheus. Brown 1990; Krumeich et al. 1999, 169–78; Yziquel 2001a, esp. 7–10; Podlecki 2005, 6–7. Sommerstein 2008, 210–21. 3. Beyond Aeschylus: To understand Aeschylean satyr drama, we must also understand the context in which he worked. On the early phases of satyr drama and pre-satyric performance, see Shaw 2014, 26–55. For the connection between vases and early satyr plays, see Krumeich et al. 1999, 51–52 and Hedreen 2007, 155–56. O’Sullivan and Collard 2013, 243–45 provides a clear and concise discussion (as well as a comprehensive bibliography) of Aeschylus’s older contemporary Pratinas. As the sole, extant satyr play, Euripides’ Cyclops plays a crucial role in understanding classical satyr drama more broadly; on Cyclops, see Ussher 1978, Seaford 1984, Biehl 1986, O’Sullivan and Collard 2013 and Shaw 2018. For a study of the ancient reception of Aeschylus’s satyr plays, see Touz 2019.

REFERENCES Biehl, W. (1986). Euripides Kyklops. Heidelberg. Brown, A. L. (1990). “Prometheus Pyrphoros.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 37, 50–56. Coo, L. (2019). “Satyric Nostalgia in the Aeschylean Tetralogy.” In L. Coo and A. Uhlig eds., 10–25. Coo, L. and Uhlig, A., eds. (2019). Aeschylus at Play: Studies in Aeschylean Satyr Drama. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 62.2. Di Marco, M. (1991). “Il drama satiresco di Eschilo.” Dioniso 61, 39–61. Di Marco, M. (1992). “Sul finale dei Theoroi di Eschilo (fr. 78 c, 37ss. R.).” Eikasmos 3, 93. Di Marco, M. (2016). “Sulla collocazione del dramma satiresco nella tetralogia drammatica.” Prometheus 42, 3–24. Dowden, K. (1989). Death and the Maiden: Girls’ Initiation Rites in Greek Mythology. London. Gallo, I. (1981). “Ricerche su Eschilo satiresco.” In I. Gallo, ed. Studi Salernitani in memoria di Raffaele Cantarella. Battipaglia, 87–155. Gantz, T. (1980). “The Aischylean Tetralogy: Attested and Conjectured Groups.” American Journal of Philology 101, 133–64. Griffith, M. (2002). “Slaves of Dionysos: Satyrs, Audience, and the Ends of the Oresteia.” Classical Antiquity 21, 195–258. Halleran, M. R. (1989). “The Speaker(s) of Aeschylus, Diktyoulkoi fr. 47a Radt (= P.Oxy.2161) 821–32.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 79, 267–69. Harrison, G. W. M., ed. (2005). Satyr Drama: Tragedy at Play. Swansea. Hedreen, G. M. (2007). “Myths and Rituals in Athenian Vase Paintings of Silens.” In E. Csapo and M. C. Miller, eds. The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond: From Ritual to Drama. Cambridge, 150–95. Henry, W. B. (2001). “Aeschylus, Isthmiastae 77–89 Snell.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 134, 12. Henry, W. B. and Nünlist, R. (2000). “Aeschylus, Dictyulci (fr. 47a Radt) and Isthmiastae (fr. 78a–d).” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 129, 13–16. Krumeich, R. (2000). “Die Weihgeschenke der Satyrn in Aischylos’ ‘Theoroi oder Isthmiastai’.” Philologus 144, 176–92. Krumeich, R., Pechstein, N. and Seidensticker, B. (1999). Das griechische Satyrspiel. Darm stadt. Levi, L. (1908). “Intorno al dramma satirico.” Rivista di storia antica 12, 201–42. Lissarrague, F. (1990b). “Why Satyrs are Good to Represent.” In J. J. Winkler and F. I. Zeitlin, eds. Nothing to Do with Dionysus? Princeton, 228–36. Marconi, C. (2005). “I Teoroi di Eschilo e le antefisse sileniche siceliote.” Sicilia Antiqua 2, 75–93. Millis, W. and Olson, D. (2012). Inscriptional Records for the Dramatic Festivals in Athens. Leiden and Boston. Moreau, A. (2001). “Le drame satyrique eschyléen est-il ‘mauvais genre?’.” Cahiers du groupe interdisciplinaire du théâtre antique 14, 39–62. Moret, J.-M. (1984). Oedipe, la Sphinx, et les Thébains: essai de mythologie iconographique. Rome.

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Nelson, S. (2016). Aristophanes and His Tragic Muse: Comedy, Tragedy and the Polis in 5th Century Athens. Mnemosyne Supplements 390. Leiden and Boston. O’Sullivan, P. (2000). “Satyr and Image in Aeschylus’ Theoroi.” Classical Quarterly  50, 353–66. O’Sullivan, P. (2019). “Aeschylus’ Dictyulci: A Typically Atypical Satyr Play?.” In Coo and Uhlig eds., 44–59. O’Sullivan, P. and Collard, C. (2013). Euripides Cyclops and Major Fragments of Greek Satyric Drama. Oxford. Podlecki, A. J. (2005). “Aischylos Satyrikos.” In Harrison ed. 1–19. Rosen, R. (2006). “Aristophanes, Fandom, and the Classicizing of Greek Tragedy.” In L. Kozak and J. Rich, eds. Playing around Aristophanes: Essays in Celebration of the Completion of the Edition of the Comedies of Aristophanes by Alan Sommerstein. Oxford. 27–47. Sansone, D. (2015). “The Place of the Satyr Play in the Tragic Tetralogy.” Prometheus 41, 3–36. Seaford, R. (1984). Euripides Cyclops. Oxford. Seaford, R. (1987). “Silenus erectus: Euripides, Cyclops 227.” Liverpool Classical Monthly 12.9, 142–43. Setti, A. (1948). “Eschilo satirico.” Annali della Scuola Normale di Pisa, Classe di Lettere e Filosofia 17, 1–36. Setti, A. (1952). “Eschilo satirico II.” Annali della Scuola Normale di Pisa, Classe di Lettere e Filosofia 21, 205–44. Shaw, C. A. (2014). Satyric Play: The Evolution of Greek Comedy and Satyr Drama. Oxford. Shaw, C. A. (2018). Euripides: Cyclops. London. Simon, E. (1981). Das Satyrspiel Sphinx des Aischylos. Heidelberg. Simon, E. (1982). “Satyr-plays on Vases in the Time of Aeschylus.” In D. C. Kurtz and B. A. Sparkes, eds. The Eye of Greece: Studies in the Art of Athens. Cambridge, 123–48. Slenders, W. (1992). “Intentional Ambiguity in Aeschylean Satyr Plays?” Mnemosyne 45, 145–58. Sommerstein, A. H. (2008). Aeschylus III Fragments. Cambridge, MA. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010). Aeschylean Tragedy. Second Edition. London. Thomas, O. (2019). “Representation and Novelty in Aeschylus’ Theoroi.” In Coo and Uhlig eds., 60–71. Tiverios, M. (2000). “The Satyr-play Sphinx of Aeschylus again.” In P. Linant de Bellefonds, ed. Agathos Daimon: mythes et cultes. Études d’ iconographie en l’honneur de Lilly Kahil. Athens, 477–87. Touz, P. (2019). “The Ancient Reception of Aeschylean Satyr Play.” in Coo and Uhlig. eds., 97–117. Ussher, R. G. (1977). “The Other Aeschylus: A Study of the Fragments of Aeschylean Satyr Plays.” Phoenix 31, 287–99. Ussher, R. G. (1978). Cyclops: Introduction and Commentary. Rome. West, M. L. (1990). Studies in Aeschylus. Stuttgart. Yziquel, P. (2001a). “Le drame satyrique eschyléen.” Cahiers du groupe interdisciplinaire du théâtre antique 14, 1–22. Yziquel, P. (2001b). “Bibliographie du Drame Satyrique Eschyléen.” Cahiers du groupe interdisciplinaire du théâtre antique 14, 23–38.

CHAPTER 15

The Tetralogy Alan H. Sommerstein It was a rule of the tragic competition at the City Dionysia that each competitor should present four plays, namely three tragedies and one satyr play. (By 438, as Euripides’ Alcestis shows, the satyr chorus for the fourth play was no longer obligatory; it continued, however, to be usual at least till the end of the century.) Modern scholars sometimes apply the term “tetralogy” to all such four-play sequences, but ancient practice seems to have been to restrict tetralogia (and likewise its pendant trilogia) to the connected sequences discussed in this chapter. In the second half of the fifth century the usual practice was for each of the four plays to be self-contained, and audiences seem not to have looked for any obvious connection between them. Euripides competed in 438 with The Cretan Women, Alcmaeon in Psophis, Telephus and Alcestis, and in 431 with Medea, Philoctetes, Dictys and the satyr play The Reapers. But in Aeschylus’s time the usual, though not the invariable, practice was different. The tendency was to make the three plays of the tragic sequence present successive episodes of a single chain of legend, after which the satyr play would present another story from the same saga complex (though this was not necessarily, and indeed not usually, an actual sequel to what had gone before). Such a connected sequence of plays was called, at least from Aristotle’s time, a “four-plotter”, a tetralogia, and the tighter sequence comprising the three tragedies came to be known as a trilogia. Henceforward in this chapter the terms “tetralogy” and “trilogy” will be used in these senses. We know, from the surviving list of the plays he produced in 472 (Phineus, The Persians, Glaucus of Potniae and Prometheus [the Fire-bearer]), that Aeschylus did not always present tetralogies as above defined – although there is reason to believe that at least the first three plays of the 472 production were in fact thematically connected (see Sommerstein 2012) – and we know that some dramatists after his time occasionally did. Aeschylus’s own nephew, Philocles, composed a tetralogy then or later known as the Pandionis, and an inscription records a victory by Sophocles with a production called the Telepheia. Euripides in 415 competed unsuccessfully with a sequence of plays on episodes in the Trojan saga – Alexandros, Palamedes and The Trojan Women – with connections which, while not so close as in most Aeschylean trilogies, are clearly detectable, followed by a satyr play, Sisyphus, which may also have been linked, Sisyphus being by some accounts the father of Odysseus who had a prominent and discreditable role both in Palamedes and, offstage, in The Trojan Women. He may

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have presented another connected suite of plays in or about 410: Hypsipyle (dramatising an episode in the march of Adrastus and the Seven from Argos to Thebes), The Phoenician Maidens and Antigone (cf. scholia to Aristophanes Frogs 53 where, however, Antigone has been confused, as it often is, with Antiope, a considerably earlier play: see Cropp and Fick 1985, 75–76). Nevertheless, in post-Aeschylean dramaturgy the tetralogy seems to have been very much the exception; in Aeschylus it is going only slightly beyond the evidence to say that the tetralogy is the rule, and it has for long, and rightly, been regarded as a characteristic feature of his work. Not that he necessarily invented it. There is definite evidence that his great older contemporary, Phrynichus, sometimes presented connected sequences of plays. We hear of a play of his called The Egyptians (but set at Argos) and another called The Danaids: there can be little doubt that these two plays were connected and that they dramatised the same legend (though no doubt in a different way) as Aeschylus’s Danaid trilogy. A less clear case is provided by Phrynichus’s play or plays about the Persian War. That his Phoenician Women dealt with this subject is well known. But we know also of another play with three alternative titles – The Just Men, The Persians or The Assessors (Suntho¯koi); and, as was pointed out by Taplin 1977, 63 n. 2, what we are told about the opening of The Phoenician Women, in which a eunuch was preparing chairs for “those who sit with the ruling power”, would actually be far better suited to this other play. It is thus likely that we have again two plays in sequence. The first was set at some Phoenician city, with a chorus of Phoenician women, the wives (by the play’s end, the widows) of men serving in Xerxes’ fleet. Unusually for a female chorus, they are away from their home towns, Sidon and Aradus (Phrynichus frag. 9); perhaps they have come to, say, Tyre in the expectation that the Phoenician component of the Persian fleet will soon be returning there, victorious. The play’s centrepiece can hardly have been other than the arrival of news of Salamis. The second play was set at Susa. The chorus consisted, as in Aeschylus’s Persians, of royal councillors, “those who sit with” Xerxes. We are told that the defeat of Salamis was already known in Susa at the start of the play; perhaps hopes of ultimate success were then revived by the return of the King with news that Mardonius’s army was still in control of most of Greece and poised for a decisive battle – only to be dashed by news of the disaster of Plataea. In each of these two cases we only have evidence for two plays in sequence; but we know so little of Phrynichus’s oeuvre anyway (only about 10 titles are known) that the lack of an identifiable third play is not a suspicious feature. It may be added that in 467 Phrynichus’s son, Polyphrasmon, competed unsuccessfully with a tetralogy which the festival records listed as the Lycurgeia, but Aeschylus’s other rival on this occasion, Aristias, seems to have produced a set of unrelated plays. Four connected tetralogies by Aeschylus are attested in ancient sources, and a further seven can be reconstructed with a high degree of probability. The following discussion owes much to the work of Timothy Gantz (1979, 1980), even where its conclusions are different from, or less cautious than, his. The four securely attested tetralogies are: (1) The Oresteia, produced in 458, comprising Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides and the satyr play Proteus; the first three plays survive virtually complete. (2) The Danaid tetralogy, comprising The Suppliant Maidens (which survives), The Egyptians, The Danaids and the satyr play Amymone. The order of the first two plays is disputed. I have argued elsewhere, developing a proposal by Rösler 1993, that The Egyptians was the first play (see most fully Sommerstein 2010b, 89–117; contra, Sandin 2005, 9–12; Garvie 2006, xviii–xix; Bowen 2013, 8–10, 27–31. Sommerstein 2019b, 12–18 presents arguments on both sides) and the entry for the trilogy in the Appendix to this chapter is arranged on that assumption.



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(3) A tetralogy on the House of Laius, produced in 467, comprising Laius, Oedipus, Seven against Thebes (which survives) and the satyr play The Sphinx. (4) The Lycurgeia, comprising The Edonians, The Bassarids, The Youths and the satyr play Lycurgus; the tetralogy is mentioned in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae (135) and an ancient commentator on the passage lists the four plays. Of the seven reconstructible tetralogies, no less than four are based, as is the Oresteia, on the saga of the Trojan War and its aftermath, and each of the four is based on a different poem of the “epic cycle”: respectively, the Iliad, the Aethiopis, the Little Iliad and the Odyssey (the Oresteia is based on part of a fifth epic, the Nostoi). (5) The Iliadic tetralogy, comprising The Myrmidons, The Nereids, The Phrygians [Phryges] and a satyr play which may have been The Chamber-makers (Sommerstein 2008, iii 80–83; 2010a, 249). (6) The Odyssean tetralogy, comprising The Ghost-raisers, Penelope, The Bone-gatherers and the satyr play Circe. (7) Two plays, Memnon and The Weighing of Souls, can be assigned with confidence to a sequence based on the Aethiopis, the epic sequel to the Iliad. The Weighing of Souls included the famous scene in which Eos (mother of Memnon) and Thetis (mother of Achilles) pleaded for their respective sons’ lives before Zeus, followed by the death of Memnon and the coming of Eos to take away his body. Memnon must therefore clearly have preceded it, and probably presented the arrival of Memnon at Troy and his killing of Antilochus, which doomed him to be the victim of Achilles’ revenge (cf. frag. 300 Radt, which Sommerstein 2008, following M.L. West 2000, 344, prints among the fragments of Memnon and renumbers 126a). What of another play to complete the trilogy? Did it precede or follow the two Memnon plays? The majority opinion (see e.g. Gantz 1980, 147–48) has been that it was the third play of the suite and that its main event was the death of Achilles; the title usually suggested is The Phrygians [Phrygioi, not Phryges; contrast 5 above], but it is not clear how a chorus of male Phrygians (i.e. Trojans) could feature in a play about the death of Achilles, and I have suggested (Sommerstein 1996, 57, reviving a proposal by Bothe 1831, i 13) that the title Phrygioi (which appears in only one source and which in fifth-century Greek was used only as an adjective, not as a noun) is a corruption of Phrygiai (The Phrygian Women), with a chorus of captives who mourned for Achilles as they mourn for Patroclus in Iliad 19.282–302. Another possibility (West 2000, 347–50f) is that Memnon was the second play of the trilogy, the first being The Carians or Europa: Europa was the mother of Sarpedon, another hero of divine parentage who was killed fighting as an ally of the Trojans. West further argued that of the three plays only Memnon was actually by Aeschylus, the other two having been composed by his son Euphorion to serve as its prequel and sequel. He admitted, however, that “the subject of the Europa [is] not closely connected with that of the Memnon plays” (350). At any rate it is likely that the Aeschylean corpus, as known in the late fifth century and thereafter, included a trilogy centred on the fight between Memnon and Achilles. No relevant satyr play can be identified. (8) In the Trojan saga the death of Achilles was followed by the contest for his armour between Odysseus and Ajax, which led to the latter’s suicide. Three plays by Aeschylus were concerned with this story, and they almost certainly formed a trilogy. The Award of the Arms presented the contest itself: Thetis appeared in person to put up the prize for competition, and Ajax (for the first time in Greek literature so far as we know) insultingly called Odysseus the son not of Laertes but of Sisyphus (frag. 175). The Thracian Women included the death of Ajax, which was reported by a messenger (according to the usual tragic convention, which Sophocles in his Ajax ingeniously violated). The other related

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play, if as is likely it was called The Women of Salamis (Salaminiai) rather than The Salaminians (Salaminioi), will have been set in Salamis, not at Troy, and may have dealt with the return home of Ajax’s brother Teucer and his expulsion by his father who blamed him for Ajax’s death – a subject later handled by Sophocles in his Teucer. No relevant satyr play can be identified. (9) There is fairly substantial evidence concerning a group of plays based on the story of Dionysus’s birth at Thebes, his return to Greece from Asia and the death of the Theban king Pentheus, the story whose climax is the subject of Euripides’ Bacchae. I have argued elsewhere (Sommerstein 2013) that this tetralogy also included The Archeresses (whose central character was Actaeon, a cousin both of Pentheus and of Dionysus, all three being grandsons of Cadmus) and that the tetralogy ran more or less as follows. The Archeresses. Actaeon, son of Aristaeus and of Cadmus’s daughter Autonoe, is an enthusiastic and successful hunter both of game and of women (he claims to be able to tell at sight whether a young woman is a virgin or not). He also has aspirations to marry his (presumably youthful) aunt Semele and thereby offends Zeus who has marked out Semele for himself (cf. Hesiod frag. 217A M-W = 161 Most; Stesichorus Poetae Melici Graeci 236 = frag. 285 Davies-Finglass; Acusilaus frag. 33 Fowler). His punishment is fittingly delegated by Zeus to the virgin hunting goddess, Artemis. Possibly she goes to meet him in disguise, as her half-sister goes to meet Anchises in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, and he takes her for a seducible mortal, with disastrous results; at any rate, we soon hear how Artemis turned him into a stag so that he was torn to pieces by his own hounds. Semele or The Water-carriers. The action may be set near the tomb of Actaeon (frag. 221). Semele is pregnant and in a state of daemonic possession. The women of the chorus lay their hands on her belly (a traditional procedure for easing delivery) and become possessed themselves. They have perhaps come bringing water for an offering at the tomb, like the chorus of Libation Bearers; it has often been suggested that the water is for some purpose, ritual or other, connected with the birth of Semele’s baby, but this birth can hardly be supposed imminent, considering that the baby was not yet viable and had to have a second gestation in Zeus’s thigh. Then, as we learn from Plato’s Republic (381d), Hera enters in the guise of a mendicant priestess and, as later versions of the myth indicate, tempts Semele to ask Zeus to visit her in his full divine splendour; the result is her death and, as mortals suppose, the death of her child also. A papyrus fragment (frag. 168 Radt = 220a Sommerstein) gives us part of this scene; Hera’s opening words in it are quoted by one ancient scholar, Asclepiades, as coming from The Woolcarders, but Asclepiades’ citations are notoriously unreliable, and there is no other evidence for Hera having a role in that part of the myth. In fact, however, as the audience will be aware, the infant Dionysus was snatched from the flames by Zeus. Pentheus or The Wool-carders. According to a scholium on Eumenides 26, The Woolcarders had something to do with Pentheus’s death on Mount Cithaeron (frag. 172b) and it is highly likely that this was the play in which the death actually took place (or rather was reported) – for why should the scholiast mention a play which did not include the death while ignoring the play that did? On the other hand, an ancient synopsis of Euripides’ Bacchae states that its basic story is also found in Aeschylus’s Pentheus. The natural inference from these two pieces of evidence is that these two Aeschylean plays were one and the same. There is, to be sure, prima facie evidence against this conclusion, inasmuch as Galen in the same discussion (XVIIa 879–81 Kühn) cites one passage from The Wool-carders (frag. 170) and another from Pentheus (frag. 183); but some of his other citations during this discussion are demonstrably corrupt or incomplete, and he or his source in citing frag. 170 may have originally written Ξαντρίαις. Certainly all



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the other information that we have about these two plays is consistent with the hypothesis that they were in fact one. Pentheus was killed by bacchants on Cithaeron, but these bacchants cannot have been the “wool-carders” of the chorus. Carding wool is a normal female domestic task, so at the beginning of the play the chorus were at or close to home; and they cannot afterwards have left for Cithaeron, since that would leave the play without a chorus. So probably the Theban bacchants were already on the mountain when the play began, and the chorus were a quite different group of women, perhaps palace slaves. Pentheus must have been shown doing something that made his terrible punishment intelligible, perhaps (as in Euripides – and like Lycurgus in Aeschylus’s Edonians) maltreating a disguised Dionysus (who would be the third disguised deity in three plays). He then went to Cithaeron, not as a solitary spy as in Euripides, but at the head of an armed force – perhaps in defiance of a warning not to do so (cf. frag. 183) – as the evidence of fifth-century art indicates (see March 1989); a battle between this force and the bacchants is referred to in Eumenides (25–26) and twice falsely foreshadowed in Euripides’ play (Bacchae 50–52, 780–809). The offstage bacchants will have been brought into the play partly through narrative reports (as in Euripides), and partly through the appearance onstage of Lyssa, the goddess of madness, who (acting at a distance, as gods can) incited and inspired them to tear Pentheus in pieces. It is not clear whether Pentheus’s mother was among his killers. In one sixth-century vase-painting depicting Pentheus’s death (LIMC Pentheus 39/Galene II 1) the leader of the bacchants is named Galene rather than Agaue, but that is long before Aeschylus and it may well have been he who modified the story to conform with tragedy’s obsessive interest in killings within the family. The Nurses of Dionysus. This suggests itself as a possible satyr play for this tetralogy and certainly the reward of Dionysus’s nurses, who were rejuvenated (along with their husbands) by Medea at Dionysus’s request (frag. 246a), would make a pointed contrast with the punishment of Pentheus. The husbands, who are not mentioned in other accounts of this story, were probably no other than the satyrs, who are often associated in poetry and art with the nurture of the young Dionysus. (10) Three plays are known to have dealt with the aftermath of the expedition of the Seven against Thebes. The Eleusinians corresponded closely to Euripides’ Suppliant Women and featured Theseus as a main character, securing from the Thebans the restoration of the bodies of the Seven by persuasion and not (as in Euripides) by force. Since they were apparently buried at Eleusis (Plutarch, Theseus 29.5), The Women of Argos may have preceded The Eleusinians and presented the arrival at Argos of news of the failure of Adrastus’s original expedition, with Capaneus (frag. 17) and the rest of the Seven being mourned in their absence. For a third play the obvious candidate is The Epigoni, on the renewal of war against Thebes by the sons of the Seven. Another play that has been associated with this group is Nemea: no fragment has been preserved, but Aeschylus is known (frag. 149a) to have mentioned somewhere the founding of the Nemean Games “in honour of Archemorus the son of Nemea”, and more than one version of the story of Archemorus (including that of Euripides in Hypsipyle) links him with Adrastus and/ or the Seven against Thebes. Athletics is a favourite theme of satyr plays (Seaford 1984, 39), so this might be the satyr play that followed this “Adrastus trilogy”. (11) Four plays have a connection with Jason and the Argonauts, and they appear to have centred on the Argonauts’ visit to Lemnos, the subject in particular of Hypsipyle which included a reference to the oath exacted from the Argonauts by the Lemnian women to have intercourse with them as soon as they disembarked. The oath itself (taken, we are told, before the ship was allowed to come to land) could hardly have been included in the play and must have been referred to retrospectively. Nothing is directly known of the plot of The Lemnian Women, but it is very likely to have dealt with the episode

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which made “Lemnian deeds” a byword for horrendous crime throughout the Greek world, the murder by the Lemnian women of their husbands (cf. Cho. 631–38); the Argonauts arrived some time after this event, so this play will have preceded Hypsipyle. The Cabeiri – named after a group of minor divinities, worshipped especially on Lemnos and nearby islands, who apparently formed the chorus – included a catalogue of the Argonauts (frag. 97a), at least one of whom at some point in the play appeared drunk, and the Cabeiri, according to Plutarch, “playfully threatened that the house would run short of vinegar”; this might suggest that it was a satyr play, but Athenaeus (Intellectuals at Dinner 10.428f) clearly believed it to be a tragedy. A catalogue of the Argonauts would be surprising if they had appeared previously in the trilogy; so perhaps the order of the plays was The Lemnian Women, The Cabeiri, Hypsipyle, with Hypsipyle maybe centring on Jason’s discovery of the Lemnian women’s crime and his abandonment of Hypsipyle and departure from the island (Gantz 1993, 345–46). Of The Argo, or The Rower(s), we know that there was mention of Iphys or Tiphys, the Argonauts’ helmsman, and of the speaking beam which Athena placed in the Argo’s hull: the context in which frag. 20 is quoted by Philo (That Every Virtuous Man is Free 143) shows that this beam is said to have “groaned aloud” when a slave stepped on board the ship. Since none of the Argonauts was a slave, we may well suspect that this play was a satyr drama in which the satyrs tried to usurp the role of Jason’s crew, as (for example) they appear to have usurped the role of Theban councillors in The Sphinx (to judge by a near-contemporary vase-painting, LIMC Oidipous 72); the play will then probably have been set at the port of departure, Iolcus. In at least three more cases we can see a clear connection between two plays but it is hard to find a third to partner them and the question arises whether we should admit the possibility of a “dilogy” – that is, of a production comprising two linked plays, a third unconnected tragedy and a satyr play which might or might not have a connection with the dilogic pair. Gantz refused to countenance the possibility; and it is certainly true that we have no positive evidence for it. We know of productions whose component tragedies were all related, and productions whose component tragedies were all unrelated; we do not know of productions containing two related tragedies and an odd one out. This lack of evidence may, however, be accidental. After all, out of a total of 60 or 70 four-play productions by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, there are only 12 of which we can identify with fair confidence all the component tragedies. These are tetralogies (1–6) above, together with Aeschylus’s production of 472, Sophocles’ Telepheia, Euripides’ productions of 438, 431 and 415 and the posthumous production of his last plays by the younger Euripides. Since our evidence makes it clear that at least down to 415 tragic dramatists were free to choose between offering one three-play unit and three one-play units, it is arbitrary to deny them the possibility of an intermediate option. We must of course bear in mind that some plays have quite possibly been lost without trace; but if we find a two-play sequence that does seem to be complete with a beginning and end, we should not feel obliged to posit a third play merely to make up a statutory number. Where a dilogy appears to have a satyr play associated with it, we may assume that for the sake of continuity these three plays were put on second, third and fourth in the production sequence, the unrelated play being performed first. (12) In one case a surviving play appears to have been part of a dilogy: for Prometheus Bound and its sequel Prometheus Unbound, see Ruffell, Chapter 12 in this volume. Brown 1990, 56 points out that if these two plays are post-Aeschylean and if (as is not unlikely; cf. West 1979; Sommerstein 2010a, 231–32) they belong to the decade 440–30, they could have been produced as a dilogy at the Lenaea, where tragic poets regularly presented only two plays each.



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(13) Three plays of the Aeschylean corpus are known to have presented phases of the Perseus legend. One, The Net-Haulers, was a satyr play and we now have fairly substantial papyrus fragments of it; it dealt with the arrival at the island of Seriphos of the chest in which Danaë, with her infant son Perseus, had been cast adrift by her father Acrisius. The Phorcides obviously had to do with Perseus’s encounter with the Phorcides or Graeae in his quest for the Gorgon’s head. It is hard to envisage the Graeae appearing on stage in a tragedy in their traditional form – three old women with only one eye and one tooth between them (cf. Prom. 794–97) and it seems likely that Perseus’s encounter with them (together with his subsequent confrontation with Medusa herself) was narrated rather than enacted (cf. frags. 261, 262). Where does this leave the other play in this group, Polydectes? Polydectes was the wicked king of Seriphos, who, desiring to force Danaë into marriage, sent Perseus on a quest intended to be fatal in order to deprive her of her protector and whom Perseus on his return turned to stone by means of the Gorgon’s head. In principle, therefore, Polydectes might either precede or follow The Phorcides. Not one word survives of Polydectes to help us decide. One possibly relevant consideration is the setting of The Phorcides in a remote part of the world. There are unlikely to have been many characters in the play other than Perseus and the chorus. One of these was probably Perseus’s divine patron Athena, near whose birthplace, Lake Tritonis, the play was apparently set; the chorus may have consisted of nymphs of the lake, who figure in some mythographic accounts (e.g. Pherecydes frag. 11 Fowler) and some artistic representations (e.g. LIMC Perseus 88 [sixth century]). Nevertheless, there may have been both scope and need (as in Prometheus Bound) for long speeches by the hero providing information ostensibly for the chorus but really for the audience. This would suggest that The Phorcides was the first play in a connected sequence, and that the opportunity was taken to fill in the antecedents of its action by means of retrospective narrative. The sequence of the production will thus have been: an unconnected opening play, The Phorcides, Polydectes, The Net-Haulers. (14) Finally, two plays are linked by the figure of Telephus: the play which bore his name, and The Mysians which had a chorus of his compatriots. That The Mysians was about Telephus is confirmed by the mention in it of Oeus, a village near Tegea in Arcadia (frag. 145), since it was from Tegea, having killed his maternal uncles there, that Telephus came to Mysia in Asia Minor; being a polluted manslayer, he was forbidden to speak to anyone (cf. Eum. 448–50) and while he probably opened the play with a soliloquy (cf. frag. 143) he may then have remained silent for a considerable time until purified and accepted by the Mysians. The other play, Telephus, seems to have followed The Mysians and to have been set, like Euripides’ Telephus, at Argos, where Telephus came to seek a cure for the wound inflicted on him by Achilles during a Greek attack on his territory; Agamemnon was a character in the play (frag. 238). It has more than once been suggested that Iphigeneia, whose action is presumed to have been set at Aulis and whose mythical “date” is shortly after that of Telephus, was the third play of a Telephus trilogy; but such a trilogy would be very loosely knit: what has Iphigeneia to do with Telephus’s uncles? Rather, we may have here another dilogy: The Mysians may well have contained a substantial narrative of Telephus’s early tribulations in Arcadia, while his visit to Argos, the healing of his wound by Achilles’ own spear and his agreement (in return for this service) to guide the Greek fleet to Troy are normally the effective end of his story. Because of the Oresteia and the Theban trilogy, we tend to think of the trilogy form as typically associated with the tracing of a long series of tragic doings from generation to generation; but our evidence suggests that this may well be an accident of preservation, since of the remaining nine Aeschylean trilogies discussed above, only one (#10) follows this pattern.

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Rather, the typical function of the trilogy is to dramatize an extended action centred on a single person or group. All Greek tragedians faced the problem of fitting the complexities of heroic saga into the limiting framework of the theatre, with its restrictions on length of ­performance and number of actors and its reluctance to countenance a change of scene or a long time interval within a single “play”. The most obvious methods are two. One is to dramatise only the concluding, climactic portion of the story, bringing the rest in by way of retrospect: this technique is favoured by Sophocles, as in The Women of Trachis, Ajax and Oedipus the King. Another is to concentrate on the events of a short period (normally a single day) and make these events highly complex, with many characters involved and many changes of direction; this is Euripides’ practice in several of his latest plays (The Phoenician Maidens, Orestes, Iphigeneia at Aulis) and may have become standard in the fourth century (when comedy, too, was developing in the same direction). This second method, however, is difficult enough even with three actors, and with two it is virtually impossible. In the final scene of Orestes there are seven characters present, four of whom, with speaking roles elsewhere in the play, perforce remain silent. In Aeschylus the normal method of making the action complex is more akin to that of epic. The trilogy, like epic, can stretch out its action. It enables the dramatist to have, if he wishes, three different localities, three different days’ action and three different choruses (for details, so far as known or inferable, of the choruses and dramatic locations of the component plays of Aeschylean trilogies, and the time intervals between their actions, see Appendix to this chapter). It makes possible drama on an entirely different scale to that on which Sophoclean or Euripidean tragedy was conceived. The Oresteia is more than twice as long as the longest other work of Greek drama that survives; in number of lines it is comparable to an average play of Shakespeare and in actual performance, because of the two intervals and the high proportion of sung and danced scenes, it will probably have taken longer. The Aristotelian model of tragedy envisages a single “action” involving a transition from good to bad fortune or the reverse. The trilogy form makes possible a kind of tragedy involving a sequence of partly independent actions with multiple changes of fortune; and it necessitates giving the action a different kind of rhythm, for it will normally be desirable to provide a climactic event for each part of the trilogy, which must nevertheless (except in the third part) not have the effect of a full close. The trilogy form also provides greater opportunities for developing connections through thematic repetitions and variations in plot structure, in language and in all aspects of performance. There does not appear to have been any master plan to which all or even most Aeschylean trilogies were constructed – nor should we expect there to have been. In the past the aesthetically very satisfying zigzag pattern of the Oresteia exercised great influence on conjectural reconstructions of other trilogies, partly because it was aesthetically satisfying but mainly because the Oresteia happened to be available in its entirety. Nevertheless, it is possible to see across quite a few trilogies a movement from more barbaric to more civilised behaviour – to put it in very general terms. The Achilles trilogy (#5) begins with the hero as the slave of his passions – his resentment against Agamemnon, his love for Patroclus and, presently, when Patroclus is killed, his grief and his vengeful hatred of Hector. He continues thus well into the last play, when the repeated motif of his long silence (Aristophanes Frogs 911–15 with scholia) emphasizes that the position is essentially the same as it was at the outset of the trilogy; but in the end – having lost a loved one through his refusal to listen to the persuasion of friends like Phoenix – he listens to the persuasion of an enemy, Priam, who has himself lost a loved one, and gives up for honourable burial the corpse he has been outraging. That development, admittedly, was implicit in the Iliad itself; but then we find Aeschylus (#6) significantly altering the ending of the Odyssey to produce a similar development, and the Odysseus who has massacred the suitors overcomes the anger of their kinsfolk by persuasion (frags. 179, 180).



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In the Danaid trilogy (#2) a dispute between two brothers leads to civil war in Egypt, until one of the brothers flees the country with his daughters. In the surviving Suppliant Maidens, the sons of Aegyptus, or their agents, try to seize the Danaids by force, and Argive support for their victims leads to war being declared between Egypt and Argos. Eventually the Danaids are compelled to submit to marriage against their will, and at the beginning of the third play it is discovered that they have themselves appealed to force and treacherously murdered their bridegrooms – all but one. That one, Lynceus, seems to have won the affection of his bride Hypermestra, and we know that he, the one who used persuasion (cf. Supp. 1040) and not force, became king of Argos and founder of a new royal house. The Oresteia (#1) begins with character after character taking vengeance. In every case the victim of vengeance has deserved punishment, but in every case, too, the avenger’s own motives are impure and the vengeance itself is executed brutally. In the second play Orestes takes a vengeance equally brutal and even more horrific, but at least he can and does truly say, as none of his predecessors could, that he had no reasonable alternative. In the third play the justice of Orestes’ action (in the given circumstances) is recognised, and it is accepted that it would be wrong that he should suffer for it, but recognised too (in the votes of half the jury) is the horror of the act; and the institution of lawcourts, deciding on the basis of argument whether punishment is appropriate, ensures that direct personal vengeance will no longer be needed, while the Erinyes themselves, the very embodiments of wrathful retaliation, are harnessed to the cause of the good order and prosperity of the polis. It is arguable, too (Kitto 1956, 69–86; Sommerstein 2010a, 193–203, 274), that this shift from violence to persuasion takes place not only in the human world but also in the mind of Zeus. All these trilogies include catastrophic events, but all end, as it were, on something of an upbeat, on the establishment or re-establishment of some aspect of a stable social order; so perhaps did the Lycurgus group (#4), if West 19, 46–47 and Seaford 2005 are right to suggest that it ended with a recognition that the cults of Apollo/Helios and of Dionysus, whose rivalry had brought Lycurgus and probably also Orpheus to a catastrophic fate, should not be regarded as mutually exclusive. There is, however, another group which seem to end in the lamentation of unmitigated disaster. The Theban trilogy (#3) is the best attested example, but the Pentheus group (#9) and the Memnon group (#7) seem to have been similar; while in the Ajax group (#8) and the Adrastus group (#10) the action moves not away from, but towards, violence and destruction. The disaster precipitated by Ajax’s reaction to the award of Achilles’ arms to Odysseus does not end with his death: it also engulfs the innocent Teucer whom Ajax can never have wished to harm. In The Women of Argos, Theseus succeeds in persuading the Thebans peaceably to surrender the bodies of the Seven; in The Epigoni a new war breaks out which will end, we know, in the total destruction of Thebes. John Herington (1965, 1970) argued, on the basis of the Oresteia and the Danaid trilogy (and of the Prometheus plays which he regarded as genuine works of Aeschylus), that the more “progressive”, optimistic pattern was typical of Aeschylus’s last years, and recent interpretations of the Lycurgeia, which also appears to be a late work (frag. 58 suggests that a skene was in existence), might seem to confirm his suggestion. The Iliadic trilogy, however, is almost certainly much earlier and it is not safe to posit any sharp chronological division between the two patterns. It may well be idle to seek deep reasons for the creation of the trilogy form, particularly since we do not know who created it or when. Somebody – whether Aeschylus himself, Phrynichus, or another – tried a bold experiment; it was highly successful; the experiment was then repeated and imitated. Essentially it may have been a matter of scale. Aristotle says (Poetics 1449a19–20) that tragedy began with “small plots and ludicrous diction”. The second phrase is highly problematic, but the first, as the context shows, at least includes the idea of shortness. Surviving Aeschylean plays, with the exception of Agamemnon, are indeed

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shorter than even the briefest Sophoclean and Euripidean tragedies. (An exception is Euripides’ Children of Heracles, which, partly for this reason, has often been thought to be incomplete as it now stands – though see Allan 2001, 35–37, 220–27.) To a Greek there was a strong connection between size and importance, and Aeschylus or another may well have felt that to become a major art-form tragedy needed, as it were, an ampler canvas. The reign of the tetralogy lasted, it would seem, for some 20 or 25 years. Then, as we have seen, apart from occasional reversions, it was abandoned. Why? The best approach to an answer is to ask, once again, what a dramatist would gain by the change from a tetralogy to four separate plays, and once the question is asked the answer is obvious: he would gain variety. The tetralogist puts all his eggs in one basket. If he is Aeschylus he probably as a rule gets away with it, but a dramatist without Aeschylus’s assured supremacy might well prefer to hedge his bets. One spectator (or judge) may like a play of one type, another may prefer something different; why not try to please both? By the 450s there was no longer any need to assert the status of tragedy as a major art-form, for it was generally accepted as such; meanwhile, too, the introduction of a third actor had greatly extended the plot possibilities of the single play. And so it was that the tetralogy, more or less, died with Aeschylus.

Appendix: Scenes, Time Intervals and Choruses in Aeschylean Trilogies Table 15.1 gives the following information, so far as it is known or can be inferred with reasonable probability, for each play in each of the 11 trilogies discussed above: (A) the location of the action; (B) the identity of the chorus (italics denote a female chorus); (C) in the case of the second and third plays of a trilogy, the time interval supposed to have elapsed since the action of the preceding play. It will be noted (i) that nearly always at least two of the plays are set in the same place, (ii) that the three choruses are rarely all of the same gender, (iii) that there is some evidence that it is regular for the chorus of the first play to be male and that of the second female, and (iv) that the duration of the action may range from a few days to 20 years or more, but in no case does it span more than one generation-interval (although, as in the Theban trilogy, the principal characters of the three plays may belong to three different generations). Note that the sequence of plays in trilogies #2, #7 and #11 is particularly uncertain.

FURTHER READING This chapter is a revised and updated version of Sommerstein 2010a, 32–44. It appears here by kind permission of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. The fundamental discussions of the Aeschylean tetralogy are Gantz 1979 and 1980. Radt 1985, 111–19 lists all the proposals that had been made, up to that date, for the reconstruction of trilogies and tetralogies. On the Oresteian, Theban and Danaid tetralogies, and the Prometheus plays, see in the first place the relevant chapters in this volume. On other groups of plays mentioned in this chapter, the following studies are of interest: (#4, Lycurgeia) West 1990, 26–50, Jouan 1992, Seaford 2005, Xanthaki-Karamanou 2012, 323–35; (#5, Iliadic group) Moreau 1996, West 2000, 340–43, Michelakis 2002, 22–57, Sommerstein 2010a, 242–49; (#6, Odyssean group) Sommerstein 2010a, 249–52; (#7, Aethiopis group) West 2000, 343–50; (#8, Ajax group) March 1993, 4–7; (#9, Dionysus at Thebes) Dodds 1960: xxix–xxxiii, March 1989, Jouan 1992, Hadjicosti 2006, Xanthaki-Karamanou 2012, 335–38, Sommerstein 2013; (#10,

Table 15.1  A

B

C

1

Agamemnon Argos Argive elders

Libation Bearers Argos Palace slaves 7 years

Eumenides Delphi/Athens Erinyes Few days/few months

2

Egyptians Egypt Egyptian elders?

Suppliant Maidens Argos Danaids About a month?

Danaids Argos Danaids About a month?

3

Laius Thebes Theban elders?

Oedipus Thebes ? 20–25 years

Seven against Thebes Thebes Theban maidens A few months

4

Edonians Edonia Edonian elders?

Bassarids Edonia Edonian bacchants Few days?

Youths Edonia Edonian youths ?

5

Myrmidons Before Troy Myrmidons

Nereids Before Troy Nereids One day

Phrygians Before Troy Priam’s attendants 12 days

6

Ghost-raisers Lake Avernus Local priests

Penelope Ithaca Maidservants? 7 years

Bone-gatherers Ithaca Suitors’ kinsmen One day

7

Carians Caria Carian elders?

Memnon Before Troy Trojans? One or two months?

Weighing of Souls Before Troy Memnon’s soldiers? One day?

8

Award of the Arms Before Troy Greek soldiers?

Thracian Women Before Troy Thracian captives One day?

Women of Salamis Salamis Salaminian women Few months

9

Archeresses Near Thebes Nymphs

Semele Thebes Semele’s maids or friends About a year?

Pentheus or Wool-carders Thebes Palace slaves? About 20 yeara?

10

Women of Argos Argos Argive women

Eleusinians Eleusis Eleusinian men Few days

Epigoni Argos? ? 10 years

11

Lemnian Women Lemnos Lemnian women

Cabeiri Lemnos Cabeiri Few months?

Hypsipyle Lemnos ? Few days?

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Thebes after the Seven) Sommerstein 2019a; (#11, Argonautic group) Deforge 1987; (#13, Perseus group) Goins 1997; (#14, Telephus group) Preiser 2000, 51–59. There have been many attempts to show that the three seemingly unrelated tragedies produced in 472 formed a connected suite; Sommerstein 2012 argues that the first and third plays both contained prophecies of the recent war which was the subject of the second.

REFERENCES Allan, W. (2001). Euripides: The Children of Heracles. Warminster. Bastianini, G. and Casanova, A., eds. (2013). I papiri di Eschilo e di Sofocle. Florence. Bothe, F. H. (1831). Aeschyli tragoediae. Leipzig. Bowen, A. J. (2013). Aeschylus: Suppliant Women. Oxford. Brown, A. L. (1990). “Prometheus Pyrphoros.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 37, 50–56. Cavallo, G. and Medaglia, S. M., eds. (2019). Reinterpretare Eschilo: verso una nuova edizione dei drammi. Rome. Cropp, M. J. and Fick, G. (1985). Resolutions and Chronology in Euripides: The Fragmentary Tragedies. London. Deforge, B. (1987). “Eschyle et la légende des Argonautes.” Revue des Études Grecques 100, 30–44. Dodds, E. R. (1960). Euripides: Bacchae. Second Edition. Oxford. Gantz, T. N. (1979). “The Aeschylean Tetralogy: Prolegomena.” Classical Journal 74, 289–304. Gantz, T. N. (1980). “The Aeschylean Tetralogy: Attested and Conjectured Groups.” American Journal of Philology 101, 133–64. Gantz, T. N. (1993). Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources. Baltimore. Garvie, A. F. (2006). Aeschylus’ Supplices: Play and Trilogy. Second Edition. London. Goins, S. E. (1997). “The Date of Aeschylus’ Perseus Tetralogy.” Rheinisches Museum 140, 193–210. Hadjicosti, J. (2006). “Hera Transformed on Stage: Aeschylus Frag. 168.” Kernos 19, 291–301. Herington, C. J. (1965). “Aeschylus: The Last Phase.” Arion 4, 387–403. Reprinted with minor revisions in Segal ed., 123–37. Herington, C. J. (1970). The Author of the Prometheus Bound. Austin. Jouan, F. (1992). “Dionysos chez Eschyle.” Kernos 5, 71–86. Kitto, H. D. F. (1956). Form and Meaning in Drama. London. March, J. R. (1989). “Euripides’ Bakchai: A Reconsideration in the Light of Vase-paintings.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 36, 33–65. March, J. R. (1993). “Sophocles’ Ajax: The Death and Burial of a Hero.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 38, 1–36. Markantonatos, A. and Bierl, A. F. H., eds. (2012). Crisis on Stage: Tragedy and Comedy in Late FifthCentury Athens. Berlin. Michelakis, P. (2002). Achilles in Greek Tragedy. Cambridge. Moreau, A. M. (1996). “Eschyle et les tranches des repas d’Homère: la trilogie d’Achille.” In Moreau et al. eds. 1996, 3–29. Moreau, A. M., et al. eds. (1996). Panorama du théâtre antique d’Eschyle aux dramaturges d’Amérique latine. Montpellier. Preiser, C. (2000). Euripides: Telephos. Hildesheim. Radt, S. L. (1985). Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (TrGF). Vol. 3: Aeschylus. Göttingen. Rosenbloom, D. and Davidson, J., eds. (2012). Greek Drama IV: Texts, Contexts, Performance. Oxford. Rösler, W. (1993). “Der Schluß der ‘Hiketiden’ und die Danaiden-Trilogie des Aischylos.” Rheinisches Museum 13, 1–22. Sandin, P. (2005). Aeschylus’ Supplices: Introduction and Commentary on vv. 1–523. Corrected Edition. Lund. Seaford, R. (1984). Euripides: Cyclops. Oxford. Seaford, R. (2005). “Mystic Light in Aeschylus’ Bassarai.” Classical Quarterly 55, 602–06. Segal, E., ed. (1983). Oxford Readings in Greek Tragedy. Oxford.



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Sommerstein, A. H. (1996). Aeschylean Tragedy. Bari. Sommerstein, A. H. (2008). Aeschylus I–III. Cambridge, MA. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010a). Aeschylean Tragedy. Second Edition. London. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010b). The Tangled Ways of Zeus, and Other Studies in and around Greek Tragedy. Oxford. Sommerstein, A. H. (2012). “The Persian War Tetralogy of Aeschylus.” In Rosenbloom and Davidson eds., 95–107. Sommerstein, A. H. (2013). “Aeschylus’ Semele and Its Companion Plays.” In Bastianini and Casanova eds., 81–94. Sommerstein, A. H. (2019a). “Aeschylus and the Theban Wars.” In Cavallo and Medaglia eds., 369–81. Sommerstein, A. H. (2019b). Aeschylus: Suppliants. Cambridge. Taplin, O. P. (1977). The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy. Oxford. West, M. L. (1979). “The Prometheus Trilogy.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 99, 130–48. West, M. L. (1990). Studies in Aeschylus. Stuttgart. West, M. L. (2000). “Iliad and Aethiopis on the Stage: Aeschylus and Son.” Classical Quarterly 50, 338–52. Xanthaki-Karamanou, G. (2012). “The ‘Dionysiac’ Plays of Aeschylus and Euripides’ Bacchae: Reaffirming Traditional Cult in Late Fifth Century.” In Markantonatos and Bierl eds., 323–42.

CHAPTER 16

Visualising the Stage A. C. Duncan Before Sophocles introduced stage design to Attic theatre, Aeschylus painted the playing space with words. Such an apothegm oversimplifies the complex business of tragedy’s early development, but it nonetheless contains an important truth. Like the other major Athenian tragedians, each in his own way, Aeschylus was a highly visual playwright. While Sophocles and Euripides composed in an era of elaborate set design and costumes, Aeschylus began his theatrical career with comparatively modest scenic means at his disposal. He, to a degree unmatched by later tragedians, was compelled to make use of verbal means to appeal to his audience’s visual sense. Aeschylus’s intricate imagery and daring stagecraft made a considerable impression on fifth-century Athenian audiences and continue today to awe (and sometimes puzzle) readers and theatregoers alike. Indeed, the playwright worked with such bold strokes that his dramaturgy has, from our earliest evidence, been open to mockery as well as praise. It is hardly surprising that much has been said by critics and comics alike, both ancient and modern, about “the visual” in Aeschylean drama. The visual aspects of Aeschylus’s art have fallen under various critical rubrics through time, but across this wide array of analysis a persistent polarity between verbal and scenic visuality is clear. From Aristotle’s Poetics to the present, critics have tended to separate dramatic poetry from its performance, divorcing literary “imagination” (what ancient tradition called phantasia or eidōlopoiïa) from theatrical “spectacle” (opsis). Comparatively little attention has been given to the ways Aeschylus’s words and materials jointly shape theatregoers visual experience. Objections have occasionally been raised, mostly on phenomenological grounds, that categorical distinctions between poetry and production poorly reflect the composite experience of theatrical performance. Yet such criticisms have typically sought to refine, rather than generate, approaches to the study of ancient drama. Recent advances in the cognitive sciences, however, have offered new critical vocabularies and epistemologies, suggesting ways in which words and materials function as more than complementary halves of a theatrical whole, but are indeed mutually interdependent components which Aeschylus deftly combined in forging his distinctive theatrical “vision”. By placing words and materials in calibrated tension, Aeschylus exploited the sensory modalities of the nascent theatre and the cognitive capacities of his theatregoers to produce a dynamic, multi-layered visual experience. By bringing insights from the cognitive sciences to bear on persistent questions of Aeschylean criticism, this chapter seeks to reframe longstanding discussions of the play-

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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wright’s style. With illustrative examples from Suppliant Women and Libation Bearers, I suggest that “conceptual blending” and “material anchors” – ideas emerging out of studies of metaphor and cognition – together offer a compelling framework through which to understand the interactions between Aeschylean imagery and stagecraft. As close readings will demonstrate, the stabilising presence of physical objects supported some of Aeschylus’s densest symbolic image-systems, resulting in a richly visual experience produced even, if not especially, from simple scenic means. An integrative approach to the metaphorical underpinnings of theatrical vision reveals Aeschylus as not merely a sublime poet or savvy stage manager, but also a professional theatre-maker well attuned to the cognitive potentials of his audience.

Aeschylean Vision, in Words and on Stage The early reception of Aeschylean drama poses something of a paradox. An innovative playwright, frequent winner in civic competitions and favourite of foreign potentates, Aeschylus was a demonstrably – indeed, remarkably – successful tragedian in his own day. Yet already by the late fifth century the playwright had become a byword for cultural conservatism (cf. Aristophanes Frogs 783ff. and passim) and, by the fourth, had fallen out of favour altogether (Hanink 2014, 131 and 205). Aeschylus’s fading popularity was the result of many cultural forces (on Aeschylus’s classical reception, see C. W. Marshall, Chapter 30 in this volume). I would like to suggest here, however, that it was also due in no small part to the sundering of Aeschylus’s words from their original early-fifth-century performance conditions, when the playwright’s expansive verbal metaphors were supported by strategic use of simple scenic materials. One may observe a critical wedge being driven between Aeschylus’s imagery and stagecraft as early as Aristophanes’ Frogs. First produced in 405 bce, roughly half a century after Aeschylus’s death, the play offers our earliest sustained critique of the tragedian’s style. While this comedic send-up naturally exaggerates and distorts, it also credibly reveals that even as Aeschylean drama continued to be restaged (Frogs 868, cf. Acharnians 9–11), the theatrical conventions that made Aeschylus the preeminent tragedian of his day had shifted so considerably that aspects of his stagecraft could be dismissed as rudimentary without objection or further comment (Frogs 909–22). What became an issue of pressing critical concern, however, was the tantalising obscurity of the poet’s verbal imagery. Frogs satirises Aeschylus for penning expressions “unknown to the spectators” (agnōta tois theōmenois, 926), saying “not one thing that is clear” (saphes d’an eipe oude hen, 927) in riddling phrases “not easy to decipher” (ha xumbalein ou rhadi’ ēn, 930; following Dover 1993’s text; all translations my own). Such criticism, of course, cannot fairly be levelled against Aeschylus alone: after all, Sophoclean expressions are often calculatedly ambiguous (see Budelmann 2000) and Euripidean lyric not always pellucid. But Aeschylus’s jarring fusions of concepts pressed the limits of intelligibility to an unmatched and distinctive degree (on this feature of Aeschylean language, see Rutherford, Chapter 19 in this volume). In Frogs, Aeschylus’s poetry is not only epitomised by references to mythical beasts (“goatstags”, “horse-cocks” etc.) but also described as fundamentally chimerical, a language composed of “horse-cragged phrases” (rhēmath’ hippokrēmna, 929). Dionysus, the comedy’s protagonist and the god’s dramatic avatar, claims Aeschylus’s puzzling combinations have kept him up at night as he ponders their meaning (930–32). Horse-cocks and goat-stags were traditional hybrids, but the adjective “horse-cragged” represented, apparently, a novel coinage. Although possibly a comedic fabrication, in genuine Aeschylean fashion the metaphor prompts hearers to grapple with the obscurity of a superficially nonsensical mishmash of

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incommensurable ideas. Scholiasts, later ancient commentators, provided plausible but insipid glosses (e.g. “high”, “harsh”, “greatly rugged”) that fundamentally mistook the core challenge posed by such conceptual fusions: How can the idea of a cliff be mapped onto that of a horse, or vice versa? Furthermore, how can such relationships between physical objects apply to something so abstract as a verbal phrase? Critics since antiquity have registered the stylistic impact of Aeschylus’s metaphorical combinations as part of the “luxuriance, boldness, exuberance… grandiloquence, and often… apparent unintelligibility” of Aeschylus’s distinctive “bulk” (Greek onkos; for the quote, see Garvie 1969, 57). But unlike Frogs, which discusses Aeschylus’s staging and verbal style in close sequence, scholars have for the most part considered these metaphorical phrases absolutely in verbal terms, with little to no connection to staging. This is a mistake. Although Aeschylean verbal metaphors do not depend upon stagecraft in a necessary sense (i.e. mere mention of a “goat-stag” does not require an object on stage), they are nevertheless informed by a theatrical mode that relies fundamentally upon metaphorical thinking. In the theatre, where spectators are asked to “see” one thing (e.g. an actor, a curtained wall) as another (a character, a palace), the imaginative combination of distinct concepts is not simply germane, but fundamentally generative. Even without drawing explicit connections between Aeschylus’s poetry and staging, the structure of Frogs hints at the connections between verbal imagery and the theatre’s imaginative vision. As a theatremaker himself, Aristophanes had reason to be concerned equally with words and stage. Scholars of the academic tradition, however, naturally took a narrower interest in Aeschylus’s striking wordplay. Dense expressions such as a “torrential wreath [of flame]” (plektanēn cheimarroon, frag. 281.3, probably from Aeschylus’s lost Oreithyia) – an Aeschylean phrase singled out for unfavourable comment in the first-century ce treatise, On the Sublime 3.1 – demand considerable unpacking even on their own. But when situated within the wider symbolic networks of complete Aeschylean dramas, such phrases afford nearly endless analysis. The poetic meanings and aesthetic impact of such metaphorical imagery have been explored since antiquity, but the systematisation of literary study at the modern research university helped bring further grist from the rich fields of Aeschylus’s wordplay to a proliferation of new critical mills. Studies of Aeschylean imagery (German Bildersprache) reached their zenith during the era of New Criticism (for an overview, see Garvie 1969, 64–71), contributing much to our understanding (and conceptualisation) of “the visual” in Aeschylus. Studies of Aeschylean image-systems had their limits, however. Notably, much of the “imagery” considered in mid-century studies was not actually visual in a strict sense (see Garvie 1979, 10), with the ironic result that study of the “visual” in Aeschylus became dominated by verbal approaches. Although the impact of Aeschylus’s striking phrases on the imagination was unmistakable, making wider meaning from his imagery proved thorny work. Cultural and conceptual networks were insightfully traced (for a high-water mark, see Lebeck 1971), but as D. W. Lucas (1952) was early to foresee, creating non-arbitrary taxonomies out of Aeschylus’s tangled webs of imagery posed a challenge. Such comprehensive analyses, moreover, tended to overlook the local effects of Aeschylus’s images. As a result, the mechanisms through which verbal imagery shaped theatregoers’ visual experience were left only vaguely theorised, falling outside what was considered the “proper” (logocentric) purview of literary analysis at the time. With the rise of New Historicism, emerging figures in the field such as Alan Sommerstein (1996, 52) urged a change of scholarly tack away from overly fine textual interpretations. In the new millennium, approaches to Aeschylus’s ­language have tended to assess its aggregate impact, registering, for example: how words lose their ­signifying power and become mere “noise” in the inexorable flow of performance (Ford 2002, 167); how audial affect informs dramatic visualisation synaesthetically



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(Gurd  2016, 68–83); or even how the voice itself may be materially imagined (Nooter 2017). Underpinning this variety of theoretical approaches is the implicit consensus that Aeschylus’s challenging verbal imagery is not an aesthetic deficiency (as a superficial reading of Frogs might conclude), but a calculated way of demanding and rewarding heightened engagement. Even so, these literary studies rarely follow Aristophanes’ lead in closely juxtaposing discussion of both page and stage. The scholarly shift away from Aeschylean image systems reflected not only the broader humanistic turn away from New Criticism, but also the local impact of Oliver Taplin’s Stagecraft of Aeschylus (1977) and Greek Tragedy in Action (1985/1978) – two works that radically reoriented classicists’ approach to the visual aspects of ancient drama. Lifting performance from its ancillary status, where it had long been relegated by Aristotle’s disparaging account of theatrical spectacle (Poetics. VI 1450b16–20), these books made staging once again integral to the fuller understanding of Attic drama. Emerging out of the iconographic studies of Greek drama by T. B. L. Webster, Arthur Trendall and Eric Handley – built, in turn, upon the monumental research of Margarete Bieber (1961) and A. W. PickardCambridge (1988 [1953]) – Taplin’s publications ushered in a new and productive era of material-historical study, perhaps most associated today with the work of J. R. Green, Rush Rehm, David Wiles, Peter Wilson and several contributors to this volume. Where the antiquarian scholarship of earlier eras was content simply to present archaeological context alongside philological text, these more modern critics directly confronted a core methodological question of Attic drama: What are the relationships between the ancient stage and the transmitted page? Taplin’s initial focus on entrances and exits lead subsequent studies to elaborate upon the complex interrelations between theatrical actors, objects and space – work that often highlighted architectural differences between the ancient Greek theatre and its modern counterparts. For instance, unlike the constricted, curtained frame of the modern proscenium theatre, the ancient play space was surrounded by an open sky and a comparatively low backing structure (skēnē) situated between two long entrance paths (eisodoi). Entrances and exits from the wings were, as a result, rather lengthy and visually significant affairs. Another architectural difference with substantial performance ramifications was the ancient theatre’s central, circular dancing space (orchēstra). Holding a 12- or 15-member chorus from their arrival (parodos) until the end of the play, the consequences of the orchestra have been theorised to range from the musical (Scott 1984) to the affective (Gruber, 2009). Extended exits and entrances, a central orchestra and a simple backing screen may be presumed from the very earliest Attic drama, but further details of Aeschylus’s early theatre remain much debated, although largely obscure. It is clear, at any rate, that by the end of Aeschylus’s theatrical career in the 450s, Attic tragedians could make use of a more ­sophisticated and specialised theatrical architecture. By this time, the once rudimentary skēnē (the term, which also means “tent”, suggests hung fabric) had become robust and rigid, decorated to establish the play’s specific mise-en-scène after the introduction of “scenepainting” (skēnographia), a development classically, if tenuously, attributed to Sophocles (Aristotle, Poetics IV 1449a18–19). These decorations formed the front a dynamic stage building ­featuring functional doors, a wheeled platform (ekkyklēma) which could expose “interior” scenes and, on top of the structure, a stable roof and moving crane (mēchanē) used to present select characters physically and symbolically above those standing below (see Mastronarde 1990). The practical details of how these sophisticated scenic devices were used in any given play are often frustratingly unclear, since fifth-century dramatic scripts were transmitted without stage directions. Still, much can be inferred by holding words spoken up against the theatrical conventions of the time. By bringing objects and actors’ potential movements to the fore,

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Taplin anticipated the “producible interpretation” advocated by Milhous and Hume that urges “reading with a directorial eye” (1985, 10) as a valid, although not definitive, means of dramatic criticism. Work towards such producible interpretation of Attic tragedy is ongoing (e.g. Marshall 2014) and increasingly in dialogue with the performance of non-dramatic poetry as well (see Uhlig 2019). Such studies continue to use the text to bring the physical considerations of performance to the visual fore, but more remains to be done in combining words and materials within an integrated theory of Aeschylean theatrical vision. In what follows, I suggest ways in which cognitive frameworks may serve as a catalyst for such integration.

Seeing and Thinking with Embodied Minds and Material Anchors Over the past half century, a slow revolution in the study of the human brain has had broad implications for the ways we understand our interactions with language, literature, society and art. It is difficult to summarise concisely this wide-ranging and often quite technical field that still debates some of its central premises. Let it suffice here to state that computational, Cartesian models of human in which a logical yet elusive “ghost in the machine” determines human thought and perception have given way to new paradigms. In particular, the concept of a so-called “embodied mind” – what has emerged as an umbrella term for a variety of aligned cognitive and neuroscientific approaches – has drawn attention to the complex, multi-directional dynamics between the brain and the rest of the body. One may expect continuing scientific debate over details, but a clear upshot for today’s humanists is that the “mind–body divide” has been empirically discredited (see Johnson 2008; Garratt 2016). In the wake of its fall, several closely allied dualisms, including firm distinctions between mental concepts and sensory perception, have come under closer scrutiny, making room for more integrative approaches to theatrical experiences such as vision. Occuring at a complex intersection of sensory modalities and artistic forms, theatrical performance has been at the forefront of cognitive studies in the humanities. Although the scholarship to date has concerned itself mostly with modern performance, which offers more complete data-sets for analysis (cf. e.g. McConachie and Hart, 2006; McConachie, 2006; 2008; 2013; 2015; Blair and Cook 2016, McConachie and Kemp 2018), insights from these studies are being applied to dramatic traditions for which little trace of performance remains beyond the text. Taken together, these new approaches are challenging old orthodoxies and assumptions about the nature of theatrical experience in Shakespearean and ancient Mediterranean drama (on the former, see especially Tribble 2011 and Johnson, Sutton and Tribble, 2014; on the latter, see Meineck 2011; 2016; 2017; 2018; Noel 2018). As awareness of the multi-sensory and multi-modal operations of the mind grows, the concept of metaphor, which at one time might have been considered a niche poetic or rhetorical phenomenon, has emerged as a foundational principle connecting a wide range of sensory experience and mental activity. Over the past several decades, work on the neural bases of metaphor has demonstrated that analogical thinking structures human thought and experience in varied and complex ways. In a book popularising the understanding of metaphor from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) show how common metaphors (e.g. “time is money” which can be “spent”, “wasted” etc.) as well as the novel comparisons more typically associated with poetry (as in Aeschylus frag. 281.3, quoted above in the section “Aeschylean Vision, in Words and on Stage”, in which “flame” is a “wreath”) are facilitated by shared mental structures encoded in language. The



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applicability of such research to non-dramatic Greek literature is already being explored (Hutchinson 2012) and has much to contribute to our understanding of Aeschylean imagery, even considered apart from performance. In the theatre, however, metaphor is hardly limited to the spoken word and a more radical and inclusive understanding of metaphor’s operation is required when offering a fuller account of Aeschylean vision. In another popularising work to emerge out of cognitive linguistics, Giles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (2002) stretch beyond language to postulate a core component of analogical thinking which they call “conceptual integration” (or, more pithily, “blending”), that serves as a “general, basic mental operation with highly elaborate dynamic principles” (37). In an earlier publication, Fauconnier (1997, 150–51) concisely presents conceptual blending as follows (original emphasis): “Blending is in principle a simple operation, but in practice gives rise to myriad possibilities. It operates on two [i]nput mental spaces to yield a third space, the blend. The blend inherits partial structure from the input spaces and has emergent structure of its own.” Fauconnier goes on to explain how the “emergent structure” of the blend is both novel and, through a process he calls “elaboration”, cognitively productive: The blend has emergent structure not provided by the inputs. This happens in three (interrelated) ways: COMPOSITION: Taken together, the projections from the inputs make new relations available that did not exist in the separate inputs. COMPLETION: Knowledge of background frames, cognitive and cultural models, allows the composite structure projected into the blend from the Inputs to be viewed as part of a larger selfcontained structure in the blend. The pattern in the blend triggered by the inherited structures is “completed” into the larger, emergent structure. ELABORATION: The structure in the blend can then be elaborated. This is “running the blend.” It consists in cognitive work performed within the blend, according to its own emergent logic.

Because of the versatility he posits for conceptual integration, Fauconnier’s definition is rather abstract. As instantiated in theatrical experience, however, conceptual integration may be schematised in this way: Partial structures of several inputs (e.g. salient dramatic features of performance, etc.) are composed in theatregoers’ minds in the “self-contained structure” of a consciously experienced dramatic performance. This process is further developed or “completed” by the audience’s background knowledge of cultural and theatrical conventions. The completed blend is then elaborated by theatregoers themselves, whose minds dynamically and selectively combine and recombine elements (e.g. actions, utterances, cultural knowledge) from the blend’s various inputs “according to its own emergent logic”. One profound consequence of applying conceptual blending to drama is that, for theatregoers “running the blend”, a figure onstage is not either an actor or a character, nor is the item he holds either a stage-property or a mythical object. They are all, simultaneously and dynamically both: “blended” actor-characters and prop-objects, salient features of which may be emphasised or downplayed according to the emergent logic of the theatrical experience. Art-historical evidence of such mental processes may be found in the peculiar Classical-era practice of “melting”, whereby vase painters depicted actors’ faces as having features remarkably similar to those represented on the masks they hold (see Wyles 2010, 232–36). Conceptual integration does not supersede one’s perception in the theatre, of course, but it has profound effects on the visual processing of the embodied mind. For many working in performance studies, conceptual integration offers a compelling account for the complexity of the theatrical experience that is more elegant, efficient and flexible than notions of Brechtian “alienation” (Verfremdungseffekt) or Coleridgean “­suspension of disbelief” (see McConachie 2006, 9–24; and 2008, 559–61). Despite the integration’s mental complexity, children from an early age (cf. Aristotle Poetics IV 1448b4–8) are capable

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of understanding and participating in dramatic performance, suggesting that theatre draws upon core capacities of human cognition and social interaction rather than developing a conceptual system de novo. This is not to say, however, that theatrical blends are simple or undemanding. On the contrary, the success of theatre indicates that we, as humans, have a remarkable aptitude for (and attraction to) conceptual blending in the context of embodied performance. The embodied nature of Attic tragedy facilitates not only metaphorical connections between actor and character (cf. Poetics IV 1448b17) but the interpretation of Aeschylus’s imagistic wordplay as well. Metaphors often proceed from the concrete to the abstract without returning to their physical basis. In certain circumstances, however, conceptual integration is facilitated by the presence of so-called “material anchors”, objects whose physical presence offers a stable reference and productive constraint within the creative dynamism of the blend (see Hutchins 2005). Quotidian examples of material anchors range from the bodily (e.g. standing in a line to represent the order of arrival; using hands to reckon numbers and dates) to the technical (a sundial or a slide-rule). As these examples indicate, material anchors are rarely sophisticated or intricate in their design; it is their accessibility, stability and spatial orientation which most facilitates conceptual integration. Ornate costumes and dynamic properties may be taken for granted in today’s theatre, but in tragedy’s earliest days, even simple masks and distinctive costumes were important technologies, part of an array of “mind tools” combined to enable and enhance theatrical experience (see Meineck 2018). In sum, actors and objects onstage served as material anchors for conceptual integrations often further elaborated by dynamic verbal inputs. A closer and contextual consideration of some of these material anchors sheds light on how conceptual integration contributed to the overall visual experience of Aeschylean tragedy.

The Belt as Noose in Suppliant Women A particularly striking example of material anchors facilitating conceptual integration comes from one of Aeschylus’s earlier plays, Suppliant Women. In the play the eponymous daughters of Danaus, fleeing forced marriage to the sons of Aegyptus in North Africa, come to the Greek city of Argos to seek protection from the king Pelasgus, whose kinship they claim through descent from the Argive princess, Io. Arriving with the trappings and tone proper to asylum-seekers (cf. Suppliants 191–203) the Danaids run into the persuasive limits of verbal argument when the king proves hesitant to accept their pleas. Pelasgus, torn between honouring their holy supplication and navigating his own delicate political situation, parries the women’s argumentative thrusts and withstands their moral appeals in a conversation extended across spoken trimeters and, ultimately, sung lyrics (234–437). Once their musical exchange draws to a close, Pelasgus confesses he stands on the razor’s edge of a decision that he expects to bring bloodshed in its wake (438–54). Seizing the opportunity to clinch her appeal, the leader of the Danaids attempts a novel mode of persuasion based in metaphor. As a play-internal addressee, Pelasgus becomes a dramatic proxy for the mental operations of audience members themselves during this communication. In a curious beginning for an urgent plea for asylum, the chorus-leader offers a simple declarative statement: “I have belts and sashes, fasteners for my robes” (echō strophous zōnas te, syllabas peplōn, 457; Garvie 1969’s text used throughout). Pelasgus, perhaps nonplussed by the sudden change in topic or else weary to speak across gender and cultural identities, offers an anodyne response: “These things [sc. belted robes], I suppose, are properly becoming for women” (tach’ an gunaixi tauta sunprepē peploi, 458). Having successfully drawn Pelasgus’s attention to her body and clothing, the chorus-leader next physically



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indicates her belts, a gesture verbally underscored by a demonstrative pronoun, and begins to layer conceptual meanings upon this material anchor. She resumes, “Well, from these, you should know, a fine device” (ek tōnde toinun, isthi, mēchanē kalē, 459), but her speech is interrupted by the impatient Pelasgus, who brusquely demands, “Say what you are going to say” (lexon tin’ audēn tēnde gēruthēis’ esē, 460). Such interruptions are a general feature of the rapid back-and-forth of tragic stichomythia, but in this case the chorus-leader’s imperative that Pelasgus should “know” her not-yet-emergent meaning seems to have put the king in a particularly defensive position. Pelasgus had shown himself an adept interpreter of sartorial signs earlier in their conversation (cf. 234–45, on which see Wyles 2011, 48–50), but now the king loses the thread of the chorus-leader’s meaning and must be guided, step-by-step, through her metaphorical communication. Already the chorus-leader has composed a conceptual blend with two inputs: the physical belt and the abstract concept of a “device” (mēchanē). Further shaping the emergent logic of this blend is the adjective, “fine”. The Greek adjective kalos defies distinction between “beautiful” and “good”, but by emphasising this quality of the device the chorus-leader marks fineness as an essential aspect of the concept’s partial structure within the blend. Since the belted-area of women’s dress was a traditional locus of beauty in Greek culture, the epithet may be understood as transferred to the device from the women themselves – whose beauty, after all, is associated with the forced marriages they flee. The integration is nearing completion, but its full logic remain unclear. Anxious to get to the point of the woman’s speech, Pelasgus asks a pertinent question: “What will a device of belts accomplish for you?” (ti soi peraine mēchanē syzōmatōn, 462). In response the chorus-leader once again gestures – no longer to her clothes, but to the statues of the 12 Olympian gods surrounding them in the sanctuary. Once again, she speaks through metaphor: “To adorn these effigies with strange new images” (neois pinaxi bretea kosmēsai tade, 463). Her words compose two further inputs into blend, first the religious act of devotional offering and adornment (kosmos, itself closely associated with kalos in Greek thought) and secondly, the material input of the effigies themselves, scenic objects that further anchor the integration within dramatic space. At this point the sinister logic of the conceptual blend may well have been evident to an ancient Greek audience. As it was typical to decorate a holy precinct by fastening dedicatory items to statues and columns, the “fine device” of the belts might easily be reimagined as cords for hanging devotional images (for images appended on temples, cf. Aeschylus frag. 78a19). And yet we are expressly told that these images are not typical: as with “fine” (kalē) above, an adjective specifies that these dedications be somehow “new” and “strange” (the Greek word, neos, has broad and not always positive connotations). The conceptual blend is now substantially completed, particularly if one factors in the further knowledge that death by hanging was associated with women in Greek myth generally, and tragedy in particular (see Loraux 1987 [1985]). The chorus-leader’s words, which have gradually involved Pelasgus (and the theatrical audience, by extension) within an increasingly complex conceptual integration, now have emergent meaning – at least for theatregoers. What the chorusleader presents is a thinly veiled threat of mass suicide within the sacred precinct – a highly transgressive act with substantial negative consequences for the entire Argive community. Pelasgus, whether for the sake of dramatic irony or because he is unwilling himself to give voice to his own grim sense of foreboding, protests this use of “riddles” (ainigmatōdes) and demands a “plain” (haplōs, 464) summary. Finally, the chorus-leader replies simply and devastatingly: “That from these gods we should straightaway hang ourselves” (ek tōnde hopōs tachist’ apanxasthai theōn, 465). Shaken by the clarity of this ultimatum, Pelasgus replies, “I hear a speech that is the scourge of my heart” (ēkousa mastiktēra kardias logon, 466). In his commentary on this passage A. J. Bowen (2013, 244–45) notes that, while the chorus-leader speaks consistently in “plain iambics”, Pelasgus’s equation of “speech” and

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“scourge of my heart” presents a “sudden metaphor… after none for 25 lines”. Bowen’s observation, although perfectly sound from a literary perspective, fails to capture the broader communicational dynamics of the scene. Metaphor has not retreated during their interview; rather, it has advanced, shifting into the material and spatial realm of the conceptual blend. Pelasgus’s confused response to the chorus-leader’s “plain” speech is suggestive: the chorusleader uses no ornate phrases such as “horse-cocks” and yet the king is slow to grasp her “enigmas”. Like Dionysus, kept up at night pondering hybrid concepts in Frogs, Pelasgus is both puzzled and engaged by the chorus-leader’s novel conceptual blends. Verbal metaphors resume at 466 and proliferate in the following lines, elaborating upon the chorus-leader’s materially anchored conceptual blend. For example, the chorus-leader reflects: “Now you understand. For I have made you see (literally, outfitted you with eyes) more clearly” (xunēkas: ōmmatōsa gar saphesteron, 467). Properly speaking, it is the “mind’s eye” that the chorusleader has given Pelasgus, who is now outfitted with vision based upon a complex conceptual integration anchored to her gesture, clothing and spatial relations. Metaphors between seeing and knowing, foundational to Greek culture, were explored with particular depth and subtlety by all the major tragedians (e.g. Oedipus the King and Bacchae). It is like a playwright, then, that the chorus-leader has painted a mental image on top of simple materials. And, like a theatregoer, Pelasgus’s vision integrates physical and mental inputs within a cognitively demanding, and ultimately compelling, conceptual blend. Scholars debate when Suppliant Women was first staged, with the result that the theatrical capabilities and conventions under which it was composed remain very much uncertain. While it is possible that the original mise-en-scène was more sumptuous than simple, the script shows a sophisticated handling of basic elements of the stage. This interchange between Pelasgus and the Danaids in particular demonstrates how a close interplay of words and objects within conceptual integration could render Aeschylus’s drama visually interesting in spite of a plain stage. The early Attic theatre made special synergy of its verbal and material components, and the combined force of Aeschylus’s metaphorical systems might well exceed the sum of their parts.

Blended Image and Stage in Libation Bearers In contrast to the obscure staging conditions of Suppliant Women, we may be confident that the Oresteia trilogy of 458 bce – for many, Aeschylus’s crowning dramatic achievement – was produced in a technically advanced theatre. Even while employing novel scenic devices such as the ekkykēlma to produce new forms of dramatic spectacle, Aeschylus continued to use tried-and-true dramatic techniques first developed for a simpler stage. The Oresteia plots a cycle of revenge over three sequential plays, beginning in Agamemnon with the eponymous general’s return from Troy and culminating with the mythical formation of Areopagite Council in Eumenides. Libation Bearers, the core of the trilogy, dramatises the return of Agamemnon’s exiled son, Orestes, his emotional reunion with his sister, Electra, and the siblings’ joint vengeance upon their mother, Clytemnestra, and her co-conspirator, Aegisthus. Much of the ancient and modern response to Libation Bearers has focused on two scenes: the siblings’ recognition (212–509) and Orestes’ speech over the bodies of Aegisthus and his mother (973–1006). Although these moments have already been subject to considerable literary and scenic analysis, still more remains to be said about how words and objects function together through conceptual integration to enhance the scenes’ remarkable impact. Leading a chorus of slave-women with libations to Agamemnon’s tomb, Electra discovers suggestive signs at her father’s gravesite: fresh footprints and a lock of hair that is remarkably



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similar to her own. Electra interprets these items as portending her brother’s imminent return and her eager speculations often land close to the mark. For theatregoers who have just witnessed Orestes and his companion Pylades leaving these grave offerings, this first encounter with Electra – as with Pelasgus in Danaids – reveals the character to be an intelligent reader of signs. Overhearing Electra’s words, Orestes, who hid himself at the women’s arrival, emerges into plain sight. Orestes withholds his true identity for many lines, however, developing the scene’s tension through dramatic irony and bringing Electra’s interpretation of this new information to the fore. At last Orestes announces himself, emphasising his own manifest presence in contrast to the mere signs Electra had so wishfully interpreted. Orestes chides his sister, who is struck with disbelief, to recognise her brother (Libation Bearers 225–31, text following Page 1973): αὐτὸν μὲν οὖν ὁρῶσα δυσμαθεῖς ἐμέ: κουρὰν δ’ ἰδοῦσα τήνδε κηδείου τριχὸς ἰχνοσκοποῦσά τ᾽ ἐν στίβοισι τοῖς ἐμοῖς ἀνεπτερώθης κἀδόκεις ὁρᾶν ἐμέ. σκέψαι τομῇ προσθεῖσα βόστρυχον τριχὸς σαυτῆς ἀδελφοῦ σύμμετρον τὠμῷ κάρᾳ. ἰδοῦ δ’ ὕφασμα τοῦτο, σῆς ἔργον χερός. . . Although you are seeing him [Orestes] in me, you are slow to recognise: but when you saw this lock of hair, offered at the tomb, and scrutinised my footprints like a tracker, you were all aflutter and believed you were looking at me. Notice, as you place your brother’s lock of hair at the place where it was cut, that it matches that on my head. And look at this weaving, your own handiwork. . . The spectatorial dynamics (cf. horōsa dusmatheis, 225) of this recognition scene have long been topics of interest (see Torrance 2011). But the tokens which Orestes proffers to his sister, already loaded with affective and cultural resonances, make poor material anchors which resist further freighting with symbolic meaning. A remarkable shift occurs, however, when Orestes turns next to address Zeus, the play’s spectator par excellence (theōros, 246; cf. 984–85, discussed later in this section). Demanding a far richer and more metaphorical vision from the divinity, Orestes calls the god’s attention to the cosmic networks of meaning which intersect at the siblings’ reunion (246–57): Ζεῦ Ζεῦ, θεωρὸς τῶνδε πραγμάτων γενοῦ · ἰδοῦ δὲ γένναν εὖνιν αἰετοῦ πατρός, θανόντος ἐν πλεκταῖσι καὶ σπειράμασιν δεινῆς ἐχίδνης. τοὺς δ’ ἀπωρφανισμένους νῆστις πιέζει λιμός: οὐ γὰρ ἐντελεῖς   θήραν πατρῴαν προσφέρειν σκηνήμασιν. οὕτω δὲ κἀμὲ τήνδε τ᾽, Ἠλέκτραν λέγω, ἰδεῖν πάρεστί σοι, πατροστερῆ γόνον, ἄμφω φυγὴν ἔχοντε τὴν αὐτὴν δόμων. καὶ τοῦ θυτῆρος καί σε τιμῶντος μέγα   πατρὸς νεοσσοὺς τούσδ’ ἀποφθείρας πόθεν ἕξεις ὁμοίας χειρὸς εὔθοινον γέρας;

250

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Zeus, Zeus! Be an observer to these affairs: Look at the bereft stock of a father eagle, that died in the folds and coils of a terrible viper. They are entirely orphaned, the famine of hunger oppresses them; for they are not full grown to carry their father’s prey to the nest. Thus it depends upon you to behold me and her, I mean Electra here, offspring bereft of their father, jointly experiencing together this exile from our home. If you destroy these nestlings of a father who made sacrifice and held you in great honor, from what hand will you likewise receive a sumptuous reward? In contrast to Electra’s comparatively straightforward sign-interpretation, this passage exemplifies the layered conceptual integration that builds Aeschylus’s metaphorical systems upon the material anchors of the stage. To be sure, some of the symbolic mapping in this speech is in line with the prevailing image systems of the play: Agamemnon, like Zeus, is an “eagle” (aietos, 247) and Clytemnestra, in anticipation of the Erinyes who respond to her instigations in the trilogy’s finale, is a “viper” (echidnē, 249). Orestes and Electra’s symbolic associations, however, are considerably more complex. Not only are the siblings “nestlings” (neossoi, 256), they are also “orphans” (apōrphanismenoi, 249) who are “jointly experiencing exile” (amphōphugen echonte, 254). This multiplicity of concepts requires physical stability, and visual imperatives and deictic pronouns proliferate to reassert the material anchors (the actors’ bodies) supporting the conceptual blend. In addition to the opening demonstrative “Look” (idou, 247), personal and deictic pronouns “me and her” (kame…tēnde, 252) work with a second visual invitation, “it depends upon you to behold” (idein paresti soi, 253), directing Zeus (and, by extension, the theatrical audience) to look upon the actor-characters onstage. Further deictics in the speech (tōnde, 246; tousd’, 256; and just after the printed selection, “this [royal] stock” hode pythmēn, 260) continue to reinforce the characters’ spatial presence on the stage, preventing Aeschylus’s flood of verbal imagery from sending the metaphors into utter confusion. It is hardly coincidental that, of the four characters ­ ­mentioned, only the figures onstage – whose spatial presence is manifest and underscored by deictic expressions – are associated with a multitude of concepts. “Nestlings” participates in ­established zoological networks of meaning, but the concepts of “orphans” and “fugitives” represent novel inputs for the blend and demand integration into its emergent logic. Completing the blend, these words not only reflect Orestes’ past exile, but also anticipate his matricide and subsequent persecution and prosecution (the verb pheugō, cognate with ­phugēn, 254, means both “flee” and “be a legal defendant”). Each of these concepts, moreover, comes with visual associations. Orestes’ prayer to Zeus as “spectator” (theōros, 246) marks his words as particularly salient to theatregoers who, themselves, are tasked with visualising these metaphors with the help of the stage. Material anchors’ ability to support even more dizzying arrays of conceptual inputs may again be observed later in Libation Bearers when Orestes emerges from the palace into the public eye alongside the bodies of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, whom he has just killed. Referring to the corpses, Orestes speaks in lofty but straightforward terms (973–74): ἴδεσθε χώρας τὴν διπλῆν τυραννίδα πατροκτόνους τε δωμάτων πορθήτορας. Behold the dual tyrannies of the land, My father’s killers and destroyers of my house!



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The precise staging at this crucial moment is very much uncertain (for discussion, see Taplin 1977, 357–59). A stable or consistent addressee is difficult to pin down in this scene and Orestes’ imperative, “Behold”, encourages theatregoers to recognise themselves as especially involved interpreters of the tableau on stage. Several lines later, Orestes calls out “Behold” once more, shifting his audience’s focus from the slain bodies to the cloth with which Clytemnestra had previously ensnared her husband. As he does so, Orestes begins to layer a variety concepts onto this material anchor in rapid succession (980–82): ἴδεσθε δ’ αὖτε, τῶνδ’ ἐπήκοοι κακῶν, τὸ μηχάνημα, δεσμὸν ἀθλίω πατρί, πέδας τε χειροῖν καὶ ποδοῖν ξυνωρίδα. Behold again, you who overhear these evils, the device, a bond for my wretched father, shackles for his hands and a coupling for his feet. As in Suppliant Women, a capacious concept, “device” (mēchanēma, 981; cf. mēchanē in Suppliants 459/462) becomes loaded with a gradual accretion of specific concepts, first “bond” (desmon), then “shackles” (pedas) and finally “coupling” (xunōrida). The semantics of these terms substantially overlap, but it is nevertheless suggestive that Orestes cannot settle upon a single term or idea for the object he presents to the audience. Several lines later, Orestes equivocates further over the precise nature of the device (997–1004): τί νιν προσείπω, κἂν τύχω μάλ᾽ εὐστομῶν; ἄγρευμα θηρός, ἢ νεκροῦ ποδένδυτον δροίτης κατασκήνωμα; δίκτυον μὲν οὖν, ἄρκυν τ᾽ ἂν εἴποις καὶ ποδιστῆρας πέπλους. τοιοῦτον ἂν κτήσαιτο φηλήτης ἀνήρ, ξένων ἀπαιόλημα κἀργυροστερῆ βίον νομίζων, τῷδέ τ᾽ ἂν δολώματι πολλοὺς ἀναιρῶν πολλὰ θερμαίνοι φρένα.

1000

What shall I call it, and how may I do so tactfully? A trap for a beast? Or a shroud for a corpse, wrapped around his feet in the bath? No, rather it is a net: you could call it both a hunting net and foot-entangling robes. This is the sort of thing a thief might possess, a deceiver of strangers making his living by stealing, and with this trickery he might seize many men and warm his own heart greatly. Instead of progressing towards conceptual unity, here Orestes parades a series of clearly defined concepts, from “trap” (agreuma, 998) and “shroud” (kataskēnōma, 999) to “nets” of various sorts (diktuon, 999; arkus, 1000) and eventually to robes (peplous, 1000; cf. pharos tod’, 1011) before returning to lexically vague terms, “this sort of thing” (toiouton, 1001) and ultimately “trickery” (dolōma, 1003), with which he caps this vivid definition. By naming so many (lethal) objects in rapid succession, Orestes not only alludes to resonant themes from the trilogy, he also composes a number of inputs (e.g. imprisonment, hunting, mortuary practice, thievery etc.) into the conceptual integration, anchored to the demonstrably present (cf. tōide, 1003) textile now spectacularly unfurled upon the stage. Without a material anchor to support such layering of signs, Aeschylus’s language might well have collapsed under its own weight. Instead, the playwright projects a carousel of verbal images onto the blank

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screen of fabric. At once spectacular and symbolic, stable and dynamic, physical and mental, this remarkable scene illustrates the theatrical power of Aeschylus’s joint use of verbal imagery and simple stagecraft. The number of concepts anchored to a single object in this scene from Libation Bearers is unmatched in surviving Aeschylean drama. However, the basic processes at work – verbally induced conceptual integration facilitated by a material anchor – may be observed across the playwright’s entire corpus as forming an essential aspect of Aeschylus’s theatrical vision.

Conclusion Aeschylus occupies a unique position in the history of Attic tragedy. As an actor, director and playwright during his genre’s highly formative years, Aeschylus was attuned to the ways metaphor spans verbal and material modalities. The playwright’s poetic techniques mirror those of his non-dramatic predecessors and contemporaries in many respects, but the physicality of the theatrical medium enabled particularly complex conceptual integrations anchored to his stage. An exhaustive study of interactions between metaphorical language and material anchors across Attic tragedy would be unwieldy, but the examples considered here suggest a positive correlation. For Greek audiences of the early Classical periods, actors and objects facilitated more complex (and arguably compelling) conceptual integrations than those based upon words alone. If Aeschylus’s imagery towered vertiginously above that of his contemporaries, this was thanks in no small part to the firm foundations of his stage. And yet, from our earliest evidence, the visuality of Aeschylean drama has been subject to separate verbal and scenic analyses – a reflection of established critical traditions rather than the work of the playwright himself, whose theatre routinely integrated words and materials through metaphor. Our growing understanding of metaphor’s pervasive role, however – not only in language but also in human cognition more generally – presents new ways to bridge this longstanding critical divide. Among these, conceptual integration presents an analytical lens through which scenic materials and verbal imagery may be seen as more than mere complements, but mutually interdependent aspects of the visual experience of Aeschylean theatre. In Suppliant Women, the composition of belts and statues on the one hand, and votives and suicide on the other, results in a vivid conceptual integration capable of affecting not only a reluctant political leader but the theatrical audience as well. In Libation Bearers, actors and objects are more than mere theatrical signs, but material anchors for accumulative integrations of culturally rich concepts. Offering a stable physical reference to support the cognitive burden of integration, theatrical actors and objects enable dynamic blends of diverse ideas and images. The result is a composite visual experience in the mind that lies beyond what any costumier or set designer could hope to realise on the stage. By way of closing, I wish to raise (and offer a speculative response to) a question that naturally follows from this study. If complex conceptual integrations supported by material anchors were indeed a successful part of his dramaturgical technique, why were Aeschylus’s bold combinations of imagery and stagecraft not picked up by Sophocles and Euripides, but remained instead a distinctive feature of the early playwright’s style? To be sure, layering objects with symbolic meanings continued to be part of tragedy’s stock-intrade (see e.g. Segal 1980). Even as his successors engaged increasingly with Athens’ flourishing visual and material culture (see Steiner 2001; Stieber 2011), Aeschylus’s influence on tragic vision remained substantial (see esp. Aélion 1983; Zeitlin 1994; Barlow 2008 [1971]). Still, criticisms in Frogs and the tragedian’s waning fourth-century influence suggest the tastes and conventions which had once made Aeschylus Athens’ preeminent playwright had begun to shift. Why did Aeschylean drama come to be seen as verbally obscure and scenically idiosyncratic?



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The technical development of theatrical spectacle over the fifth century (see Wyles 2011 5–33) may offer a partial explanation. Initially useful as material anchors on account of their simplicity, as theatrical costumes and set pieces became ever more sophisticated, these objects began to contribute to, rather than alleviate, the cognitive load of spectators when faced with an increasingly busy stage. The growing wealth of Athens’ leading citizens over the Classical period created an “arms race” of theatrical expenditure under a system of choragic sponsorship that lead to ever more elaborate spectacles (see Wilson 2000). The comparatively sumptuous realisation of its later plays meant that Athenian spectators had not only less need of, but also less mental capacity for, the complex conceptual integrations of Aeschylean drama. Looking back on a remarkable century in the history of theatre, Dionysus in Aristophanes’ Frogs mocks tragedy’s early audiences as “foolish” (ēlithios, 917) for tolerating Aeschylus’s rude staging. On the contrary, the simplicity of Aeschylus’s stagecraft demands and supports substantial mental activity, asking spectators to “see” far more than meets the eye. The strokes of Aeschylus’s verbal imagery remained as bold as ever, but on the ornately decorated stages of the late fifth century and beyond, there was simply little left to paint with words.

FURTHER READING The visual aspects of Aeschylean drama constitute a well worked, although still fertile, field. Thalmann 1978 and Zeitlin 1994 offer classic studies of verbal imagery in Aeschylus’s poetry, usefully distilling (when not superseding) earlier work such as that of Fowler, now most accessible in Lloyd (2007). Lebeck’s (1971) interpretation of image systems in Oresteia, however, remains an accessible guide to the trilogy in particular. Uhlig 2019 draws parallels between Aeschylus and Pindar, particularly with respect to embodied performance and deixis, and Hutchinson 2012 offers a study of epinician imagery broadly similar to that advanced here. Despite important similarities, theatrical spectatorship is distinctive, and the impact of Taplin’s 1977 production-oriented work on discussion of Aeschylus and “the visual” is difficult to overestimate. While it is productive to “read” the stage against the page (and vice versa), such work entails considering a variety of spectatorial and readerly attitudes for which the explorations of Bassi 2005 and Slatkin 2007 offer useful frameworks. Ideas from cognitive theory, including “conceptual metaphor” and “blending” popularised respectively by Lakoff and Johnson 1980 and Fauconnier and Turner 2002, are increasingly being applied to ancient drama. McConachie and Hart 2006 present a broad survey of performance studies near the outset of the “cognitive turn”. For the cognitive sciences’ application to the visual experience of Greek drama in particular, see Meineck 2017 and especially Noel 2018, who uses Aeschylean examples to elucidate the composite experience of dramatic vision.

REFERENCES Aélion, R. (1983). Euripide héritier d’Eschyle. Deuxième Partie: La Mise en œuvre dramatique. Vol. 2. Paris. Barlow, S. A. (2008 [1971]). The Imagery of Euripides: A Study in the Dramatic Use of Pictorial Language. Third Edition. London. Bassi, K. (2005). “Visuality and Temporality: Reading the Tragic Script.” In V. Pedrick and S. M. Oberhelman, eds. The Soul of Tragedy: Essays on Athenian Drama. Chicago, 251–70. Bieber, M. (1961). The History of the Greek and Roman Theater. Second edition. Princeton. Blair, R. and Cook, A. eds. (2016). Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies. London.

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Bowen, A. J. (2013). Aeschylus: Suppliant Women. Oxford. Budelmann, F. (2000). The Language of Sophocles: Communality, Communication and Involvement. Cambridge. Dover, K. J. (1993). Aristophanes: Frogs. Oxford. Fauconnier, G. (1997). Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge. Fauconnier, G. and Turner, M. (2002). The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York. Ford, A. L. (2002). The Origins of Criticism: Literary Culture and Poetic Theory in Classical Greece. Princeton. Fowler, B. H. (2007 [1967]). “The Imagery of Choephoroe.” In Lloyd ed., 302–15. Excerpt reprinted from pages 55–66 of “Aeschylus’ Imagery.” Classica et Mediaevalia 28, 1–74. Garratt, P., ed. (2016). The Cognitive Humanities: Embodied Mind in Literature and Culture. London. Garvie, A. F. (1969). Aeschylus’ Supplices: Play and Trilogy. Cambridge. Garvie, A. F. (1979). “Aeschylean Imagery.” Classical Review 29, 8–10. Goldhill, S. and Osborne, R. (1994). Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture. Cambridge. Gruber, M. A. (2009). Der Chor in Der Tragödien Des Aischylos. Tübingen. Gurd, S. A. (2016). Dissonance: Auditory Aesthetics in Ancient Greece. New York. Hanink, J. (2014). Lycurgan Athens and the Making of Classical Tragedy. Cambridge. Hutchins, E. (2005). “Material Anchors for Conceptual Blends.” Journal of Pragmatics 37, 1555–77. Hutchinson, G. O. (2012). “Image and World in Pindar’s Poetry.” In P. Agócs, C. Carey, and R. Rawls, eds. Reading the Victory Ode. Cambridge, 277–302. Johnson, M. (2008). The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago. Johnson, L., Sutton, J., and Tribble, E. B. eds.(2014). Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Early Modern Body-Mind. New York. Kraus, C., Goldhill, S., Foley, H. P., and Elsner, J., eds. (2007). Visualizing the Tragic: Drama, Myth, and Ritual in Greek Art and Literature: Essays in Honour of Froma Zeitlin. Oxford. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago. Lebeck, A. (1971). The Oresteia: A Study in Language and Structure. Cambridge. Loraux, N. (1987 [1985]). Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman. Cambridge MA. Trans. Anthony Forster from Façons Tragiques De Tuer Une Femme. Paris. Lloyd, M. ed. (2007). Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Aeschylus. Oxford. Lucas, D. W. (1952). “Review: Wiederholungs- und Motivtechnik bei Aischylos by Otto Hiltbrunner.” Classical Review 2, 225–26. Marshall, C. W. (2014). The Structure and Performance of Euripides’ Helen. Cambridge. Mastronarde, D. J. (1990). “Actors on High: The Skene Roof, the Crane, and the Gods in Attic Drama.” Classical Antiquity 9, 247–94. McConachie, B. (2006). “A Cognitive Approach to Brechtian Theatre.” Theatre Symposium: A Journal of the Southeastern Theatre Conference 14, 9–24. McConachie, B. (2008). Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre. New York. McConachie, B. (2013). Theatre & Mind. London. McConachie, B. (2015). Evolution, Cognition, and Performance. Cambridge. McConachie, B. and Elizabeth Hart, F. (2006). Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn. London. McConachie, B. and Kemp, B., eds. (2018). The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance, and Cognitive Science. Abingdon and New York. Meineck, P. (2011). “The Neuroscience of the Tragic Mask.” Arion 19, 113–58. Meineck, P. (2016). “Cognitive Theory and Aeschylus: Translating beyond the Lexicon.” In S. E. Constantinidis, ed. The Reception of Aeschylus’ Plays through Shifting Models and Frontiers. Leiden and Boston, 147–75. Meineck, P. (2017). Theatrocracy: Greek Drama, Cognition, and the Imperative for Theatre. New York.



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Meineck, P. (2018). “Mask as Mind Tool: Methodology of Material Engagement.” In M. Anderson, D. Cairns, and M. Sprevak, eds. Distributed Cognition in Classical Antiquity. Edinburgh, 71–91. Milhous, J. and Hume, R. D. (1985). Producible Interpretation: Eight English Plays 1675–1707. Carbondale, IL. Noel, A.-S. (2018). “What Do We Actually See on Stage? A Cognitive Approach to the Interaction of Visual and Aural Effects in the Performance of Greek Tragedy.” In P. Meineck, W. M. Short, and J. Deveraux, eds. The Routledge Companion to Classics and Cognitive Theory. Abingdon and New York, 297–309. Nooter, S. (2017). The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus. Cambridge. Page, D. (1973). Aeschyli: Septem Quae Supersunt Tragoedias. Oxford. Pickard-Cambridge, A. W. (1988 [1953]). The Dramatic Festivals of Athens. Third Edition revised by John Gould and David M. Lewis. Oxford. Scott, W. C. (1984). Musical Design in Aeschylean Theater. Lebanon, NH. Segal, C. (1980). “Visual Symbolism and Visual Effects in Sophocles.” Classical World 74, 125–42. Slatkin, L. (2007). “Notes on Tragic Visualizing in the Iliad.” In Kraus et al., eds. 19–34. Sommerstein, A. H. (1996). Aeschylean Tragedy. Bari. Steiner, D. (2001). Images in Mind: Statues in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature and Thought. Princeton. Stieber, M. C. (2011). Euripides and the Language of Craft. Leiden and Boston. Taplin, O. (1977). The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy. Oxford. Taplin, O. (1985/1978). Greek Tragedy in Action. Second Edition. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Thalmann, W. G. (1978). Dramatic Art in Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes. New Haven. Torrance, I. (2011). “In the Footprints of Aeschylus: Recognition, Allusion, and Metapoetics in Euripides.” American Journal of Philology 132, 177–204. Tribble, E. B. (2011). Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. New York. Uhlig, A. (2019). Theatrical Reenactment in Pindar and Aeschylus. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Wilson, P. (2000). The Athenian Institution of the Khoregia: The Chorus, the City, and the Stage. Cambridge. Wyles, R. (2010). “The Tragic Costumes.” In O. Taplin and R. Wyles, eds. The Pronomos Vase and Its Context. Oxford, 231–53. Wyles, R. (2011). Costume in Greek Tragedy. London. Zeitlin, F. I. (1994). “The Artful Eye: Vision, Ecphrasis and Spectacle in Euripidean Theatre.” In Goldhill and Osborne eds., 138–96.

CHAPTER 17

The Choruses of Aeschylus Eva Stehle A tragic chorus is the group of singers and dancers – 12 in Aeschylus’s day – who had a generic identity and formed the community within which the action was set. Tragedy alternated between scenes (called stasima, singular stasimon) of choral song and dance to the music of the aulos (double pipes), during which actors were usually absent, and “episodes” dominated by the actors. Very little is known about the style of the dance; later authors describe it as “mimetic” and involving gestures (Golder 1996; Wiles 2000, 136–41). Unlike the processional and circle patterns of other choral genres, tragic choruses reportedly danced in a rectangular formation, although they probably used other formations as well (Wiles 1997, 87–132). Sometimes the chorus “chanted” in anapaestic metre, either as a lead-in to a song or as a heightened form of speaking. The chorus also participated in episodes. The chorus added greatly to the energy and sensory pleasure of drama. Aeschylus in particular had a reputation for staging spectacular choruses, especially the chorus of Furies in Eumenides. In his three earliest extant plays, which did not have a scene-building as a backdrop, the chorus created a location for the action and visually set up the impending crisis. In Persians the chorus of advisors to the Persian king must have been richly dressed in “orientalising” style, evoking the powerful Persian court at the moment of its downfall. In Seven against Thebes, the chorus of women rushes in with frantic song and cries at the sounds of impending attack on the city walls, making vivid the looming danger. In Suppliants the young women, of Greek ancestry but coming from Egypt, were dark-skinned and dressed in exotic garb, illustrating the challenge that their claim to be Greek presented to the city Argos. Yet the tragic chorus often appears to moderns to be ancillary to the main action, its dance an interlude. (For recent overviews of approaches to the dramatic chorus, see Gruber 2009, 1–27; Visvardi 2015.) Some scholars therefore seek a function for it beyond participation in the fiction. Albert Henrichs (1994/5) proposed that whenever the chorus refers to its own dancing it shifts into ritual dance for Dionysus in the audience’s own time. Others (e.g. Nagy 1994/5; Gruber 2009; Calame 2013) have seen any choral self-reference or imitation of a social genre such as lament as a cue for a shift into ritual. Not all scholars accept the premise that the chorus ever detaches itself from the fiction (Wiles 1997, 123–24; Scullion 2002, 118–25; Stehle 2004). Recently a number of scholars (e.g. Gagné and Hopman 2013a; Wiles 2000, 141–44) have adopted the term “mediation” to describe the chorus as creating a continuity in various ways between the fiction and the festival. In the broadest interpretation of

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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mediation the chorus may allude to the audience’s world merely by making temporal references to later times or evoking everyday speech genres such as maxims (Gould 2001 [1996]; Swift 2010; Grethlein 2013). Another current approach to the chorus involves study of its emotional and aesthetic effects on audiences. Textual features like unusual sentence structure, resonant language, vivid imagery, non-verbal cries all contribute to the audience’s sensory experience (Nooter 2017). These effects can intensify emotional reactions by appealing to synesthesia and emphasising the physicality of suffering: the chorus “enacts, triggers, and theorises pity and fear” (Visvardi 2015, 13). Schnyder (1995) focuses on the vocabulary and enactment of anxiety. The chorus’s function on this view is to heighten the audience’s vicarious experience of strong emotions and expand its sympathies. These approaches can stimulate productive readings, but the second reduces the chorus to a megaphone and the first does not sufficiently distinguish the tragic chorus from ritual and celebratory choral genres, which affirmed both political and cosmic “truths” and modelled the harmonious alignment of these two orders (see Schlapbach 2018, 132–42, on the chorus as an image of divine harmony). A ritual chorus could honour a god and request reciprocal favour while presenting the community as flourishing in harmony with the divine. The metrical structure of such ritual/celebratory songs suited this role. A song consisted either of metrically identical stanzas or of repeating triads. A triad had two metrically identical stanzas (“strophe” and “antistrophe”), followed by an “epode”, a stanza with a different metrical pattern. The whole set of three stanzas was then repeated. The rhythmic predictability kinesthetically reinforced the message of cosmic-political harmony. Ritual choruses also generally observed euphēmia (good[-omened] speech). This confident style is not that of tragic choruses. As Murnaghan (2011, 248–51) points out, non-dramatic choral performance is festive, “an emblem and agent of harmony and stability”, whereas the dramatic chorus tends to be in “exile from festivity”. To enact that exile, all tragic choruses deviate from ritual choruses in that they constantly change their rhythm. They sing in paired stanzas, strophe and antistrophe, without an epode (usually). But each successive strophic pair has a new metrical structure, with corresponding shifts in the music and dance. A sequence of strophic pairs could maintain a broadly similar metrical pattern, so that there was continuity along with the shifts, or a strophic pair could be radically different from its predecessor in rhythm and tempo (Stehle 2004; Griffith 2009, 18). Aeschylus’s choruses especially deviate from community-unifying, divine-presence-manifesting choruses. His tragedies depict communities whose political condition has fallen out of harmony with the cosmos. The observation that “conflict in tragedy is never limited to the opposition of individuals; the future of the royal house, the welfare of the community, even the ordering of human life itself may be at stake” (Burian 1997, 182) is especially applicable to them. And Aeschylus made the cosmic level of the community’s crisis perceptible by displaying its effect on the community-representing chorus. In his dramaturgy, the chorus has insight into cosmic forces, a power similar to prophecy but focused on the present. Adrados (1989) points out the prophetic quality of choruses in Agamemnon that use maxims and fables to expose the results of unjust actions, and Revermann (2008, 242) notes that Aeschylus’s choruses possess the greatest experience, wisdom and authority. The chorus may resist acknowledging its perceptions or use its power to call up superhuman forces, but until the end of the drama its effort only exposes the fractured relationship with divinity, however hard it tries to recreate harmony. It strikingly uses rhythmical shifts to represent its struggles. Scott (1984, 29) comments that in Aeschylus’s plays, unlike those of Sophocles or Euripides, choral songs are usually composed of a number of short stanzas, which allows for sequences of strongly

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contrasting metrical sections. Aeschylus further intensified the chorus’s instability at important moments by violating even the minimal regular sequence of strophic pairs. He sometimes drops an antistrophe or adds a “mesode” (a stanza between strophe and antistrophe) or an epode to one or more strophic pairs. (Examples are given below.) A song with no repeating metre, called “astrophic”, sometimes appears. He is the first known poet to use the metrical form called “dochmiac” (u – – u –), where short syllables could be replaced by longs and the longs by double shorts, creating effects such as long runs of short syllables that signal urgency and rushing (Griffith 2009, 26). The metre is our clue to the changes of movement and music that visually and aurally accompanied the chorus’s discontinuities of thought, for the chorus not only articulated but embodied the crisis: “By imposing the vital and physical presence of its own performance, [dance] is able to influence and, as it were, overwrite received cultural knowledge in the most compelling of languages, that of bodily experience, which is shared by both dancer and spectator” (Schlapbach 2018, 20). (Conversely, in their spoken lines, Aeschylus’s chorus members are ordinary characters, usually conventionally loyal to the king or royal household, who sometimes contradict what they have just sung.) The six extant genuine plays, excluding Prometheus Bound, whose authenticity is seriously in doubt (Griffith 1977; Ruffell, Chapter12 in this volume), include two complete sequences, the stand-alone play Persians and the trilogy Oresteia. Seven against Thebes is the last play of its trilogy (the other two being lost), and Suppliants is most probably the first play of its trilogy. (But see Sommerstein 2019, which appeared after this chapter was completed; he argues that it was the second play.) Taken together, the choruses of these plays show that choral contact with the larger cosmos took different forms at different stages of the action. Early on, the chorus senses the negative cosmic disposition towards the political community and its task is an intellectual one: how to reconcile its perception with its desire, qua chorus, to affirm divine approval of the established political order. This task is doomed to failure. In the middle of the action, communication runs the other way: the chorus rouses the dead for help. Here the potency of its voice is clear, but its focus on the past only perpetuates the rift. At the end, the choral voice becomes creative in that it efficaciously redefines the old political order as finished and opens the way for restored harmony with divinity. Aeschylus varies the specific way in which the pattern is manifested is each play. (West 1990 is used for text and scansion.)

Persians As a stand-alone play Persians encompasses all three stages. Elderly councillors of the Persian king Xerxes, left behind when Xerxes departed with his army to conquer Greece, form the chorus. At their entrance (parodos) they chant that no news has come and their “evil-prophesying” (10) spirits are disturbed. Yet when they begin to sing and dance they describe Xerxes as the “ferocious ruler” of Asia, a “mortal equal to a god”; he is “giving the dark glare of a deadly serpent with his eyes” (74–82). They assert the Persians’ godgiven destiny of conquest and boast of the bridge built over the Hellespont for the army’s crossing to Europe (102–13). Their song is based on an uncommon metrical foot, the ionic (uu– –), whose insistent rhythm could sound incantatory, as though it could influence reality, and perhaps “eastern” (Bowen 2013, 346–48; cf. Rutherford, Chapter 19 in this volume). The councillors continue in ionics for what the audience would initially take as strophe four, but their thought veers off: “The crafty-minded deceit of the god what mortal man will avoid? … For the goddess Ruination (Atē), fawning at first in friendly fashion, leads a



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mortal astray into a circle of nets” (93–101).1 A general observation perhaps meant to apply to the Greeks, it suddenly puts Xerxes’ bold successes in a different cosmic light: it turns the consoling rehearsal of Persian power into an omen of disaster, its good fortune into the fawning of Atē. The chorus recognises cosmic reality breaking through into its song, for it abandons its ionics, leaving the strophe hanging with no antistrophe, and begins afresh in a very different, trochaic, metre (114–15): “For this reason, my black-robed mind is clawed with fear.” Its song now envisions the grief that Persian women will feel. The chorus’s moment of acknowledgement is enacted bodily and kinesthetically: dance, rhythm and music all change along with mood. Nonetheless, in the next episode, after the queen-mother relates her ominous dream about her son Xerxes to the chorus members, they reassure her in spoken lines (215–25) that if she performs apotropaic (evil-averting) rituals it will probably end well. When speaking rather than singing, they play the supporting role expected of attendants on a royal figure. After a messenger reports Xerxes’ defeat and the chorus sings its first stasimon, again evoking Persian women’s mourning, the queen-mother asks the chorus to raise the ghost of her husband Darius to give advice. Her main interest is in preserving the stature of her son Xerxes, so she is looking to the past for help. The councillors sing, again in ionics, successfully (Garvie 2009, 257–61). Darius, rising, harshly condemns Xerxes’ actions as hubris, but he advises the queen-mother to clothe Xerxes richly on his return and comfort him (832–38). He offers no strategy for recovering cosmic harmony. When Xerxes appears, the two parties begin to sing half a stanza each for three strophic pairs, Xerxes bemoaning his own fate and the chorus aggressively using “you” and “where?” as they ask about the fates of the other Persian leaders. In the fourth strophe the pattern shifts and speeds up. Dropping his focus on himself, Xerxes cries (1002), “for they have gone …” in response to the chorus’s latest list of names, and in return the chorus echoes his verb. In the antistrophe he says (1008) “we have been struck”. It is Xerxes’ first first-person-plural verb joining himself with the chorus and again it echoes his words in response. Once Xerxes begins to grieve for the army, the councillors position him as chief mourner. He soon commands (1038), “weep, weep for the misery and go toward the house”. He calls for lament gestures like beating the breast and tearing the hair. As they near the exit the lament becomes mere cries (Nooter 2017, 115–21). Demonstrative lament, including beating breasts and tearing hair, was largely women’s role in Greece. Aeschylus here is often said to be making the audience more sympathetic to the Persians and/or presenting the latter as effeminised and immoderate (Swift 2010, 326–35). Commentators have expressed disappointment that the chorus does not accuse Xerxes of hubris (e.g. Parker 2009, 128–29; but cf. Garvie 2009, xxii–xxxii). However, in putting Xerxes in the position of chief mourner his councillors implicitly identify him as a widow, with imperial power as his dead spouse. They arrange that he will be received back into his house without any status (contrary to the queen-mother’s plan) and so make renewed cosmic harmony possible. Garvie (2009 at 1066–77), following on Scott (1984, 157–58), notes that the end of the lament is astrophic and says that the procession just disappears; “there is no closure at all”. But there is closure: Xerxes will join the community of Persian women whose grief the chorus has described and now enacts.

1

 West accepts Müller’s widely adopted transposition of 93–105 to follow the third strophic pair, where they fit with what follows. Garvie (2009), 46–49 surveys editions and justifies the transposition. Editors who do not accept it think it applies to enemies of the Persians. Schnyder (1995), 34–48 sees “unparalleled” (48) oscillation between anxiety and confidence in the parodos with the lines not transposed and argues that Aeschylus intended this effect.

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The Oresteia The choruses of the other complete drama, the trilogy Oresteia, are remarkable in their complexity and vividness but follow the same pattern. Goldhill (1986, 19–30) remarks on the efforts of the Oresteia choruses to find and control meaning. The chorus of the first play, Agamemnon, elders loyal to the king as in Persians, faces a far more profound falling out with cosmic order. The sheer length of the parodos and first two stasima reveals its stamina as it tries to justify Agamemnon’s expedition to Troy in cosmic terms. Entering to a chant, it compares the two kings, Agamemnon and Menelaus, to vultures who have lost their nestlings (47–59); a god hears their cry and sends an Erinys (Fury). The chorus offers this image of divine requital for damage done as its initial view of the Trojan expedition. On reaching the orchestra the elders declare, in epic-toned dactylic metre, their right and power to define cosmic reality through song, then immediately begin to do so: “I have authority to utter the auspicious, moving force of men at their peak – for still from the god my long-arced time of life breathes abroad persuasion, a strong defense consisting of song and dance – how a furious bird-omen sends Greek double-throned power … to Trojan land, the king of birds to the kings of the ships …” (Ag. 104–14; the syntax of the part between dashes is disputed, but the general sense is not). They are referring to the omen of two eagles eating a pregnant hare, which appeared as the army was preparing to depart and which the seer Calchas interpreted as foretelling the fall of Troy. Victory at Troy will prove that the kings have divine support – their point, as the vulture-image at 47–59 shows. Yet they know that victory will not bring an end to sorrows. Adrados (1989, 301–4) points out that whereas four different characters announce the victory at Troy, the chorus consistently expresses anxiety at the larger picture. First, Chalcas’s omen is troubling. The chorus continues: Artemis-Hecate is angry with the eagles for eating the hare and Calchas prays to Apollo to keep her from holding up the ships and seeking “a second sacrifice, unlawful, uneatable, an inborn architect of quarrels, one not fearing men, for there awaits a frightful, reviving, deceitful housekeeper, remembering Anger, avenger of children” (151–55). Calchas here brings together two seemingly separate issues, Artemis’s demanding the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia and the old pollution (Anger) in the house due to (Agamemnon’s father) Atreus’s murdering the children of his brother Thyestes. “Remembering Anger, avenger of children” alludes to the latter, but Calchas implies that it adds force to Artemis’s anger. Now, when the elders repeat Calchas’s prophecy, Agamemnon has sacrificed Iphigenia, so it has fresh meaning in their mouths: by his awful deed he has revived the old Anger and become entangled in it. Indeed, Calchas’s qualification of Anger as the avenger of children is regularly taken to refer to Clytaemestra, and she later identifies herself with it (1497–504). The chorus closes the strophe by noting Calchas’s mixed message (156–57). Then, like the chorus of Persians although less abruptly, the elders drop their train of thought and rhythm, leaving the strophe dangling. The lack of an antistrophe leads editors to call this stanza an “epode” but, as Scott (1984, 42–43) observes, the discontinuity created by disappointing the strong expectation of an antistrophe and moving to a different rhythm underlines musically a break in thought. Shifting to trochaic metre, the elders begin anew (160–66): “Zeus, whoever he is … thus I address him. There is none I can liken him to, weighing all, except Zeus, if one needs truly to throw off the fruitless burden of thought”. This is usually called their ‘Hymn to Zeus”, but it is rather their meditation on how they might shed their duty to represent cosmic-political harmony. Zeus teaches humans to be wise through suffering, they say (176–77), and the thought takes them back to Agamemnon’s decision to sacrifice his daughter and her piteous looks as she is held, gagged, over the altar. Whereas they were present for the omen and Calchas’s speech, they are now envisioning what



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they did not see, for they have choral power to perceive the invisible. But the implications are so threatening that they then stop “seeing”: “what happened next I neither saw nor say” (248). They conclude with an illustration of their mental conflict between choral vision and characterological avoidance: on one hand, Calchas’s skill is proven and justice inclines to teach by causing suffering; on the other hand, one should not worry about the future, for that is to grieve ahead of time. At that moment Clytaemestra appears. After hearing from her that Troy has fallen the chorus embarks on a new route of justification for the expedition in its first stasimon (367–487). By strophe and antistrophe the thought proceeds: (1a) the guilty are punished; (1b) Paris was guilty; (2a) when a wife has gone, the husband suffers longing; (2b) grief comes to houses for soldiers lost; (3a) “the gold-changer of bodies, Ares … sends heavy gold dust, tested by fire, tear-inducing, from Troy to dear ones”; “‘all due to another’s wife’ one mutters quietly”; and “resentment-breeding pain at the prosecutors, the two sons of Atreus, creeps up on (the people)”; (3b) the speech of the people is heavy with resentment, and dark Erinyes wipe out those flourishing without justice; (4a) a swift talk of victory has come, but who knows whether it is true, for women believe too easily, and “rumour proclaimed by a woman perishes, swift-dying”. From Paris’s guilt the elders move (2a) to the suffering husband, quoting vague “interpreters of the houses” who eloquently depict loneliness when a beloved person is gone. They do not name Menelaus, and by the middle of the second antistrophe (2b) Greek households across the land are suffering loss. The third strophic pair describes its experience as vividly as the second evokes the husband’s loss. The chorus has again failed to justify the expedition on the cosmic level; rather, the Erinys that a god sent to punish the wrong-doer in the anapaests of the parodos now threatens the kings, object of the people’s resentment. Again the singers abandon the effort, this time by dismissing the reality of the victory, the very thing that they initially thought would signal divine approval. At the same time, the community for which the chorus speaks has shifted from Agamemnon to the households of his realm, and the figure whose view they find salient moves from Calchas to the “interpreters of the houses” to “one” (tis, 449), an ordinary Argive. In the second stasimon the councillors try once more to justify the expedition by making Helen, evil incarnate, its cause, but their song slips into meditating about hubris generating more hubris and Justice dwelling more likely with the poor than the rich. As Nooter (2017, 172–73) says, “Their voice is in tune with the world’s own discordant harmonies, above and beyond what they as characters know, want, or intend”. By the time Agamemnon appears, along with his war-prize Cassandra (810), the chorus has identified the Argive citizenry as the ones unjustly harmed, by the kings. As loyal retainers, however, they welcome him back, after admitting disapproval of his going to war (799–804). The elders’ struggle to reconcile cosmic knowledge and political loyalty reaches its peak in the third stasimon (975–1034), just after Agamemnon has entered the house. They begin their song: “Why does fear fly constantly in front of my omen-watching heart and my song prophesy unbidden … ?” They want to escape their prophetic power. In the antistrophe they expand on this impasse (988–94): “I perceive his homecoming with my eyes, being a direct witness, yet my spirit within, self-taught, still hymns a dirge of the Erinyes without a lyre, having none of the familiar boldness of hope”. Cassandra soon confirms that the Erinyes created by Atreus’s bloody deed are present and that Clytaemestra is about to strike. The elders, however, are henceforth characters only, reacting to events; they have finally thrown off the “fruitless burden of thought”(165–66). Slave women in the house of Agamemnon are the chorus of the second play, Libation Bearers. Accompanying Electra to Agamemnon’s grave to make apotropaic offerings on behalf of Clytaemestra, they enter black-robed, singing, describing their own violent gestures of lament for their master. They tutor Electra in asking for revenge rather than expiation,

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then at her request as she pours the libations, they sing a dochmiac-dominated astrophic verbal outpouring (153–58), culminating in, “Hear me, majesty, hear, O master, from your shadowy mind”. The next line is “Ototototototoi! Io! What spear-strong man will come, a liberator of the house … ?” They feel Agamemnon responding and receive a vision of Orestes. Marshall (2017, 35–36) observes that the chorus’s “Ototototototoi!” echoes Cassandra’s first utterance in Agamemnon (1072, again 1076), an allusion that confirms both their prophetic power and their entanglement in the past. Immediately afterward, Electra calls the women to come share her find, a lock of hair on the grave that she feels must be Orestes’. After Orestes appears and recounts Apollo’s command to take revenge, the chorus spontaneously initiates the kommos, a lament and call for revenge sung by actors and chorus in turns (306–475). It becomes a very long, intricately patterned sequence of singing (and chanting) voices among the three parties, with the chorus encouraging the two children’s commitment to vengeance (Foley 2001, 333–35) and the children’s songs shifting from complaint to anger and determination. Nooter (2017, 205–22) and Marshall (2017, 65–76) explore its structure, sounds and effect. The slave women are drawing up the force of the subterranean powers, as they say in their final sung words (475): “This is the song of the gods below the earth”. Like the queen-mother in Persians calling on the chorus to raise Darius, this chorus seeks a solution to loss by resurrecting the king, but now for revenge. Its themes and style are infected with the “remembering Anger” of Agamemnon. As it waits for Orestes to knock on the palace door, the chorus sings (649–52): “After an interval the famous, deep-minded Erinys sends the child into the house to pay requital for the pollution of old blood”. “Erinys” is the final word, sung just as Orestes knocks. In Greek as in English the line is ambiguous (Garvie 2009, 223 ad 648–52): is it the house or the child who will pay requital for bloodshed? As Orestes kills Clytaemestra inside, the chorus sings in celebration of justice done (935–71), but the whole ode (barring scattered lines) is in dochmiacs, metre of fear and disturbance. In the third play, Eumenides, the Erinyes, so often mentioned, materialise as the chorus. They are described by the terrified priestess at the temple of Apollo at Delphi (34–59): like wingless Gorgons, totally disgusting, they snore with repellent gasps and from their eyes drip bloody tears. (For their animal-like vocalisation as they awaken see Nooter 2017, 252–65.) These spirits of vengeance, dressed in black and perhaps with horror-inducing masks, challenge Apollo’s authority and appear utterly hostile to any new rapprochement between humans and gods. Groaning and barking when they are awakened by the ghost of Clytaemestra, they trail Orestes to Athens, where they prepare to immobilise him with their “binding song”, which they call a choral dance (308). The magical part of the “binding song” (321–96) inheres in its four refrains, the first one repeated (Prins 1991, 184–89). These have distinctive, very similar metrical schemes dominated by double cretics with the first long resolved (uuu-uuu-). The repeated refrain contains their spell (328–33, 341–46): “For the sacrificial victim this is our song, a sideways-blow, a sideways-impulsion, a minddestroying hymn from the Erinyes, binding the mind, lyreless, a parching for humans”. The last refrain (372–76) must reflect their dance: “for leaping high I bring down from above the heavy-falling vigour of my foot – limbs causing even an intent runner to stumble – a ruination hard to bear”. But before the chorus completes its spell Athena intervenes and, without rejecting the Erinyes, substitutes a court to try Orestes’ case. While she is off collecting jurors the Erinyes sing of the consequences for human society of dethroning them (490–565). Now articulating their claim in terms of community well-being, they argue that fear helps preserve social order and invoke justice. They seem to address the audience directly – appropriately since they are in “Athens” onstage – to advise against either anarchy or despotism, recommend the middle way, warn about wealth leading to hubris, and emphasise that one should revere Justice (526–39). The startling change reflects Athena’s replacing the isolated individual as



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the frame of reference for justice. The Erinyes are already describing a political community in its cosmic setting and their role in it. Athena still must persuade them to remain in Athens as protectors once Orestes is acquitted. Accepting her offer (916) after some resistance, they sing blessings and greetings for Athens like a civic chorus. The exchanges of chairete (greetings, literally rejoice!) between the chorus and Athena are “almost a mantra, with presumably magical effect” (Nooter 2017, 283). A second female chorus arrives to escort them, in new robes, off stage in song with commands – probably addressed to the audience also – to issue cries of good omen and victory. The ritual-like ending both alludes to the Panathenaia (a major city ritual) and looks forward to the honours accorded them as Semnai (chthonic “Reverend Ones”) in a sanctuary near the Acropolis. In this case the compelling attraction of the political order brings the cosmic order into conformity. The Erinyes become a divine female collective supporting the community, while human male individuals control the political process. (For the intricate relations of ritual and civic realities to the dramatic fiction here, see e.g. Murnaghan 2011, 252–67; Revermann 2008, 250–52; Burian, Chapter 10 in this volume.)

Seven against Thebes Rather different is the outcome in Seven against Thebes, the last play of a trilogy on the family of Oedipus. Before it opens Oedipus has cursed his two sons, Eteocles and Polynices, condemning them to destroy each other. Now Eteocles is king of Thebes, while Polynices is mounting an attack on the city on the grounds that he has an equal right to kingship. The chorus consists of Theban women, who rush in and approach the statues of the city gods, singing of the fearful sights and sounds of war in panicky dochmiacs. (See Wiles 1997, 115–19, 197–200 on the use of theatre space.) The women’s song is astrophic at first, an unstructured stream of mixed references to fresh signs of danger, appeal to the gods and questions about who will save them. Yet they slowly impose order on themselves; they begin a focused appeal to the gods, still in dochmiacs, in what turns out to be a strophic pair. The second strophe opens with a cry at fresh clangour but recoups itself in a strophic pair. The third strophic pair is a verbally well-formed prayer with iambics mostly replacing dochmiacs (Stehle 2005; Visvardi 2015, 169–70 on the chorus’s fear for the city). If the staging included crashing sounds off, the audience would feel the more acutely the chorus’s success in disciplining itself to achieve ritual orderliness. At that point the women are interrupted by Eteocles, who castigates them in violent language for spreading fear among the citizens. They reluctantly acquiesce in his demand for their silence. But, as the audience would know from the previous two plays (and the chorus knows; cf. 745–49), Eteocles is as cursed as Polynices; the cosmic choice is between Eteocles’ control of the city and its salvation. The chorus, representative of the city, prays for the latter, but Eteocles makes clear his choice to preserve his power. The women recognise that for they next sing calmly – as though they were resigned to their fate – but plaintively of the gods leaving Thebes and women being taken captive as the city is destroyed (Visvardi 2015, 156– 63). Later, as loyal characters rather than chorus, the women try to persuade Eteocles with a mix of speaking and dochmiacs not to fight Polyneices. They fail, but their earlier prayer is efficacious; the two brothers kill each other, and the city is saved. The chorus’s final task is to lay the brothers to rest in order to restore cosmic-political harmony. It does so with a lament that asserts the absolute moral equivalence of the two brothers. The singers greet the two corpses as they are brought out (849–51): “Double evils of twin sorrows, self-murdering double-death complete are these sufferings. What should I say?” “Twin” translates a grammatical dual, used for natural pairs. Breaking into two halfchoruses, singing in turn and jointly forming stanzas, they begin a formal lament that mirrors the brothers’ unity-in-duality; alliteration and words echo between them over four strophic

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pairs ending in another dual (960): “Having conquered the twin-pair, the daemon has ceased”. The interchanges speed up to half-lines, beginning (961): “Striking, you were struck. And you, killing, died”. This is an abnormal lament (Foley 2001, 49–50), for it bespeaks the fulfilment of the curse, but it also effects the city’s emancipation from it. The ending of the play is lost to rewriting (Hutchinson 1985, xlii–xlv). The last (probably) genuine lines (1002–4) refer to burying the brothers where it is most honourable. Here, as in Persians, lament seals the end of the old political order.

Suppliants In Suppliants, probably the first play of a trilogy, the chorus is the play’s main character. It represents the Danaids, the 50 daughters of Danaus who have fled from Egypt in an effort to avoid marriage with their cousins, the 50 sons of Aegyptus. They are seeking asylum in Argos, home of their ancestress Io, who was raped by Zeus, turned into a cow by Hera then driven to Egypt, and restored by Zeus’s touch, whereupon she gave birth to their son Epaphus. As protagonist, the chorus interacts with individuals in an unusual variety of ways (Taplin 1977, 206–09). The women seek not only to return to ancestral land but also to impose their cosmic vision: Zeus as an absolute ruler who unconditionally supports them. In their first stasimon (524–99) they exotically invoke Zeus as “Lord of lords, most blessed of the blessed, most efficacious power of the efficacious ones, divinely-happy Zeus”. “Lord of lords” was a title of Persian kings and other absolute monarchs (Bowen 2013, 255–56). When Pelasgus, the Argive king, proposes to put the decision about their receiving asylum to a vote of the Argives, they object (370): “You are the city, you are the civic body”. Yet they answer his question about whether the sons of Aegyptus have a legal right to marry them with (392–93), “May I never ever become subject to the power of males!” The Danaids seem non-Greek in other ways too. Apart from dark skin (154–55) and exotic clothing (234–37), they sometimes sound foreign, as in the address to Zeus just quoted and when addressing the Argive land in a repeated passage in their parodos (117–22, 128–33). It begins, “I supplicate hilly Argos”, but Argos is called by an old name, “Apia” (117) and given a non-Attic adjective (bounis) that reportedly means “hilly” but puns on “cow-like”, recalling Io. They add,” You understand my foreign speech well”, using the very rare adjective karban for “foreign” and even rarer verb konneō for “understand” – seriously undermining their assertion. Pelasgus calls them citizen-strangers (astoxenoi, 356). They are hybrid beings yet insist on pure absolutes. They focus on Zeus and Io (and their father Danaus) alone among their forebears and are set on maintaining their own virginity. Although they only explicitly reject marriage to the Egyptian suitors, they imply hostility to all marriage (Visvardi 2015, 128–32), viewing men as their antagonists. This purist stance, however, given their reality, leads them into self-contradiction. Choral performance by young women ready for marriage was a Greek custom and there are many echoes of wedding song in the play (Swift 2010, 279–96). Murnaghan (2005) discusses this chorus against a background of nubile women’s ritual choruses in myth. They appear to be presenting themselves to the Argives as potential brides – an identity that would integrate them into the city – but refuse the implication of their own dancing. When they cannot persuade Pelasgus to risk war in order to save them from marriage, they threaten to pollute the sanctuary by hanging themselves from the statues (455–65) – turning their bodies into polluting objects in order to remain bodily pure. Visvardi (2015, 132–35, 147) emphasises their combination of panic and violence. In this play, then, the chorus embodies cosmic-political discord rather than detecting it (but cf. Kavoulaki 2011 for a different view).



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The play ends with a spectacular dance sequence. While the women are alone on stage, an Egyptian delegation (a secondary chorus) arrives and tries to drag them off. In the ensuing choreography the Danaids elude their pursuers as the male and female choruses sing in turn in short bursts of violent language (for the sounds here, see Nooter 2017, 89–94). Finally, Pelasgus appears and drives the Egyptians off. As the Danaids depart for the city they sing, in very regular ionics, an incantation rejecting marriage. However, another song answers them, sung – most likely – by the young men who escort them. The new voices sing of Aphrodite, recommend marriage and mention fear of war if the Danaids refuse the Egyptians. But the Danaids have the last words (1062–73), including: “May Lord Zeus take away ill-husbanded, hostile marriage … and may he assign power to women”. The plots of the second and third plays are disputed, although the Danaids are forced to marry their cousins and all but one kill their husbands on their wedding night. Yet they were somehow incorporated into the city in the third play, Danaids. Herodotus (2.171) says that the Danaids brought from Egypt the Thesmophoria, a women’s agricultural festival for Demeter. If this detail comes from the play, its chorus founded a new order that restored cosmic-political harmony in a way analogous to the end of Oresteia (Zeitlin 1996 [1992], 147–49, 162–71).

Conclusion The final scenes of Persians, Oresteia, Seven and possibly the trilogy to which Suppliants belonged all represent women as the community that enacts closure to the old order and establishes the conditions for a new one. In Eumenides and Seven a female chorus, and in Persians a female-inspired one, sing one or more figures to rest in the dark – the dark of the earth or Hades or the house – thus opening the way for a different form of civic order. This female community, Aeschylus seems to suggest, is the base on which men build a society. Only in Eumenides is a new political structure founded and male authority restored, although probably the final play of the Suppliants trilogy was similar. The six extant plays are too few to allow for generalisations about Aeschylus’s use of the chorus or the female community it can represent, but it is worth noting that the female chorus of Prometheus Bound engages with the action in an utterly different way.

FURTHER READING Wiles 2000, 128–47, has a good introduction to dramatic choruses. Csapo and Slater 1994, 34–68, give an overview and the ancient evidence for the history and style of performance of dramatic choruses. Griffith 2009 is a good introduction to Aeschylus’s poetic resources and style. Sommerstein 2010 includes attention to the chorus in discussions of the plays and (146–54) a section on metre and music. Nooter 2017, not on the chorus specifically, has excellent analyses of choral odes. Swift 2010 discusses echoes of other genres in the choral songs of Persians and Suppliants; for Persians see also Hopman 2013. Visvardi 2015 considers emotions expressed by the choruses of Eumenides, Suppliants and Seven against Thebes. More generally, the essays in Gagné and Hopman 2013b offer different views of choral mediation. Those in Billings, Budelmann and Macintosh 2013 have a wider range. Foley 2003 is an overview of tragic choruses.

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REFERENCES Adrados, F. R. (1989). “La divination dans les choeurs de l’Agamemnon d’Eschyle.” Revue des Études Grecques 102, 295–307. Billings, J., Budelmann, F., and Macintosh, F., eds. (2013). Choruses, Ancient and Modern. Oxford. Bowen, A. J., ed. (2013). Aeschylus, Suppliant Women. Oxford. Burian, P. (1997). “Myth into Muthos: The Shaping of the Tragic Plot.” In P. E. Easterling, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge, 178–208. Calame, C. (2013). “Choral Polyphony and the Ritual Functions of Tragic Songs.” In Gagné and Hopman eds., 35–57. Csapo, E., and Slater, W. J. (1994). The Context of Ancient Drama. Ann Arbor. Foley, H. P. (2001). “The Politics of Tragic Lamentation.” In H. P. Foley, ed. Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton, 19–55. Foley, H. (2003). “Choral Identity in Greek Tragedy.” Classical Philology 9, 1–30. Gagné, R., and Hopman, M. G. (2013a). “Introduction: The Chorus in the Middle.” In Gagné and Hopman eds., 1–34. Gagné, R., and Hopman, M. G., eds. (2013b). Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy. Cambridge. Garvie, A. F. (2009). Aeschylus. Persae. Oxford. Golder, H. (1996). “Making a Scene: Gesture, Tableau, and the Tragic Chorus.” Arion 4, 1–19. Goldhill, S. (1986). Reading Greek Tragedy. Cambridge. Gould, J. (2001 [1996]). “Tragedy and Collective Experience.” In J. Gould, ed. Myth, Ritual, Memory, and Exchange: Essays in Greek Literature and Culture. Oxford, 378–404. Grethlein, J. (2013). “Choral Intertemporality in the Oresteia.” In Gagné and Hopman, eds. 78–99. Griffith, M. (1977). The Authenticity of Prometheus Bound. Cambridge. Griffith, M. (2009). “The Poetry of Aeschylus (In Its Traditional Contexts).” In J. Jouanna, F. Montanari, and A. P. Hernández, eds. Eschyle à l’aube du théâtre occidental: neuf exposés suivis de discussions. Vandoeuvres–Genève, 25–29 août 2008. Entretiens sur l’Antiquité classique 55. Geneva, 1–49. Gruber, M. A. (2009). Der Chor in den Tragödien des Aischylos. Tübingen. Henrichs, A. (1994/5). “‘Why Should I Dance?’: Choral Self-Referentiality in Greek Tragedy.” Arion 3, 56–111. Hopman, M. G. (2013). “Chorus, Conflict, and Closure in Aeschylus’ Persians.” In Gagné and Hopman, eds. 58–77. Hutchinson, G. O. (1985). Aeschylus Septem contra Thebas. Oxford. Kavoulaki, A. (2011). “Choral Self-awareness: On the Introductory Anapests of Aeschylus’ Supplices.” In L. Athanassaki and E. Bowie, eds. Archaic and Classical Choral Song: Performance, Politics and Dissemination. Berlin, 365–90. Marshall, C. W. (2017). Aeschylus: Libation Bearers. New York. Murnaghan, S. (2005). “Women in Groups: Aeschylus’s Suppliants and the Female Choruses of Greek Tragedy.” In V. Pedrick and S. M. Oberhelman, eds. The Soul of Tragedy: Essays on Athenian Drama. Chicago, 183–98. Murnaghan, S. (2011). “Choroi Achoroi: The Athenian Politics of Tragic Choral Identity.” In D. M. Carter, ed. Why Athens? A Reappraisal of Tragic Politics. Oxford, 245–67. Nagy, G. (1994/5). “Transformations of Choral Lyric Traditions in the Context of Athenian State Theater.” Arion 3, 41–55. Nooter, S. (2017). The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus. Cambridge. Parker, R. (2009). “Aeschylus’ Gods: Drama, Cult, Theology.” In J. Jouanna, F. Montanari, and A. P. Hernández, eds. Eschyle à l’aube du théâtre occidental: neuf exposés suivis de discussions. Vandoeuvres– Genève, 25–29 août 2008. Entretiens sur l’Antiquité classique 55. Geneva, 127–54. Prins, Y. (1991). “The Power of the Speech Act: Aeschylus’ Furies and Their Binding Song.” Arethusa 24, 177–95.



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Revermann, M. (2008). “Aeschylus’ Eumenides, Chronotypes, and the ‘Aetiological Mode’.” In M. Revermann and P. Wilson, eds. Performance, Iconography, Reception: Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin. Oxford, 237–61. Schlapbach, K. (2018). The Anatomy of Dance Discourse: Literary and Philosophical Approaches to Dance in the Later Graeco-Roman World. Oxford. Schnyder, B. (1995). Angst in Szene Gesetzt: Zur Darstellung der Emotionen auf der Bühne des Aischylos. Tübingen. Scott, W. C. (1984). Musical Design in Aeschylean Theater. Hanover. Scullion, S. (2002). “‘Nothing to Do with Dionysus’: Tragedy Misconceived as Ritual.” Classical Quarterly 52, 102–37. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010). Aeschylean Tragedy. Second Edition. London. Sommerstein, A. H. (2019). Aeschylus. Suppliants. Cambridge. Stehle, E. (2004). “Choral Prayer in Greek Tragedy: Euphemia or Aischrologia?” In P. Murray and P. Wilson, eds. Music and the Muses: The Culture of “Mousikê” in the Classical Athenian City. Oxford, 121–55. Stehle, E. (2005). “Prayer and Curse in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes.” Classical Philology 100, 101–22. Swift, L. A. (2010). The Hidden Chorus: Echoes of Genre in Tragic Lyric. Oxford. Taplin, O. (1977). The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy. Oxford. Visvardi, E. (2015). Emotion in Action: Thucydides and the Tragic Chorus. Leiden. West, M. L. (1990). Aeschylus, Tragoediae. Stuttgart. Wiles, D. (1997). Tragedy in Athens: Performance Space and Theatrical Meaning. Cambridge. Wiles, D. (2000). Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction. Cambridge. Zeitlin, F. I. (1996 [1992]). “The Politics of Eros in the Danaid Trilogy of Aeschylus.” In F. I. Zeitlin, ed. Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Chicago, 123–71.

CHAPTER 18

Music, Dance and Metre in Aeschylean Tragedy Naomi Weiss As we read the surviving texts of Greek tragedy, it can be hard for us to remember that this art form was intrinsically a musical one. Tragedy as a genre was originally thought of as primarily choral, defined by the music and movement of its chorus: Aristotle tells us that it developed from the dithyramb, a choral song performed by fifty men or boys in honor of Dionysus to the accompaniment of a pair of pipes called the aulos (1449a10–11); in his Laws Plato presents tragedy as a type of choral dance representing what is “serious” (814e–17d); and the wealthy Athenian who financed a tragic production at a festival was known as a choreˉgos (“chorus leader”). For the fifth-century audiences of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the singing and dancing of the chorus (and occasionally one or more of the actors too), combined with the accompanying tunes of the aulos-player, must have been one of the most memorable parts of every live performance. In the case of Aeschylus, whose plays feature a noticeably higher proportion of choral lyrics than those of the younger tragedians, this aspect of their performance would have been absolutely vital to its success and impact. It is therefore all the more frustrating that none of the melodies or dance moves remains – we are left instead with seemingly silent scripts. And yet we can trace some distinctive characteristics of Aeschylus’s musical style, both from the texts of the plays themselves and thanks to some references to his music and choreography in ancient testimonia. Of the latter, the fullest account is in Aristophanes’ Frogs (405 bce), in which the characters of Aeschylus and Euripides have an extraordinary showdown in Hades that culminates in each parodying the other’s lyrics (1249–1364). The main feature of Aeschylean music highlighted here is the monotonous repetitiveness of his rhythms combined with bombastic language; the parody also riffs on his melodies and choreography. Euripides, in contrast, is the newer, trendier tragedian, mixing together many different rhythms and types of song, giving extensive monodies to professional actors and including a range of melodic tricks. This scene is valuable in giving us a sense of which aspects of these tragedians’ musical styles were best remembered by a late fifth-century audience. There are

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also indications that the choral performances in Aeschylus’s plays had an especially powerful impact on his audiences. Dionysus, who judges the contest, exclaims that all the cries of ieˉ kopon (Ah, beating!) and (we assume) the corresponding beatings of hands and feet have left his kidneys sore (1278–1280) – an allusion to the extensive passages of sung lamentation in several Aeschylean tragedies. We should not, however, take the stark opposition between old and new tragic styles presented here at face value, especially in the case of Aeschylus, who had been dead almost 50 years when Frogs was produced. Though there is evidence that Aeschylus’s tragedies were sometimes reperformed in the fifth century (see C. W. Marshall, Chapter 30 in this volume), Aristophanes and his audience probably had much more recent and plentiful memories of the musical displays of Euripides, whose last plays were produced posthumously, probably also in 405 BCE. We cannot even be sure that Aeschylus’s original music and choreography survived to be performed in Aristophanes’ day in the same way as it was in the author’s original productions. Indeed, other testimonia suggest that Aeschylus was himself a great innovator in music and dance, as well as in other aspects of tragic performance. The anonymous Life of Aeschylus emphasises the choreography of his choruses as one of several areas in which he surpassed his predecessors. He apparently took on an unusually hands-on role as a choreographer: Athenaeus, writing in the late second century CE, records that “[Aeschylus] himself invented many dance-moves and gave them to the chorus members. Chamaeleon [a fourth-century pupil of Aristotle] at least says he was the first to arrange the dance-moves of his choruses himself, without using dance-teachers” (1.21e3–6). A few lines later, Athenaeus quotes from a lost play by Aristophanes in which someone says that in Aeschylus’s Phrygians the chorus “did many dance-moves like this and like that and this over here” (21e12–14 = Aristophanes frag. 696 KA). While we cannot reconstruct such moves (nor should we assume that Aristophanes himself intended a precise reconstruction of the original performance), it is clear that choral dancing was a memorable and significant part of Aeschylean drama. We may assume that the movements of the actors, like those of Cassandra as she sings her frantic prophecies in Agamemnon (1072–1177), could be just as distinctive. There is no reason to doubt that the musical element of these performances – both the chorus’s songs and the instrumental accompaniment – was just as striking as the dance. It is hard, however, to detect in any detail what the music actually entailed. Beyond Aristophanes’ Frogs and a couple of papyri fragments with musical notation on them from two tragedies by Euripides (but postdating their original productions by some two hundred years), we have only some rather general information about the melodies of fifth-century tragedy. Later writers provide some evidence regarding their tunings, which were apparently generally in the enharmonic genus, though Euripides and his younger contemporary Agathon occasionally made use of the chromatic as well (ps. Plutarch, De musica 1137e-f; Plutarch, Quaestiones convivales 645e; Psellus, De tragoedia 5; also the papyrus fragment P. Hib. 13). Ancient Greek musicians used a range of modes or scales (harmoniai). The main ones employed in earlier tragedy are said to have been the Dorian and Mixolydian, though the Ionian and “slack” Lydian were also used; Sophocles is credited with introducing both the Lydian and the Phrygian (ps. Aristotle, Problemata 922a; Aristoxenus fr. 79, 81–82; ps. Plutarch, De musica 1136c, 1136f; Plutarch, De audiendo 46b; Psellus, De tragoedia 5; Heraclides Ponticus fr. 163 = Athenaeus 625b). But such details still do not enable us to reconstruct the tunes of tragic songs or their instrumental accompaniment. Even so, while we know little about Aeschylus’s melodies, we can access some of his music through the rhythms of his lyrics, which need not have been any less innovative than those of

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Euripides. Indeed it seems likely, for example, that Aeschylus invented the dochmiac metre,1 or at least was (one of) the first to use it in the theatre. The difference between the brief appearance of this metre in Persians (472 bce) and the frequency with which it is used in Seven against Thebes (467 bce) and in the majority of Greek tragedies thereafter suggests that he was boldly experimenting with rhythm – and necessarily also melody – even within this five-year period, relatively late in his career. Scholars of ancient Greek music have tended to concentrate on the late fifth to early fourth centuries bce as an especially innovative time in the theatre (especially Csapo 1999–2000, 2004), but there is plenty of evidence of musical revolution(s) occurring much earlier as well. A famous fragment of a satyr play by Pratinas (PMG 708  =  Athenaeus 14.617), for example, in which the chorus complain of suddenly being overwhelmed by the music of the aulos, the instrument that underwent various technical changes and was at the heart of much contemporary debate about new musical trends, is probably to be dated to the early fifth century, when Aeschylus’s career as a playwright was just beginning. We should think of Aeschylus, then, not as a precursor to such developments but as part of a culture of ongoing, rapid experimentation in music in general, as well as in the genre of tragedy itself. This chapter tries to recover something of both the music and dance of Aeschylus’s productions by focusing on the rhythms and language of the tragedies themselves. I begin with a brief overview of some of the metrical patterns of Aeschylean lyrics and the ways in which these could be dramatically effective. I then turn to metamusicality – that is, moments when choruses (and sometimes actors) draw attention to their own music-making, especially in the context of lament, and in doing so shape the audience’s response to their performance. The next section takes a broader view of choral song and dance, examining how they can generate certain patterns of performance across a whole tragedy or even trilogy, establishing a musical narrative alongside and in tandem with the dramatic one. I close by focusing on Aeschylus’s Suppliants, an extraordinarily musical play that demonstrates the powerful role that music and dance – a combination that the Greeks themselves called mousikeˉ – could play in Aeschylean tragedy.

1 

 he most common lyric meters in surviving Aeschylean tragedy are the iambic, trochaic, dactylic, T anapaestic, dochmiac, and ionic. Their basic metrical units (metra, unless otherwise noted), consisting in combinations of long and short syllables, are as follows. Key: ‒  = long syllable (equivalent to two shorts) ⏑  = short syllable ×  = anceps (either long or short) Iambic: × ‒ ⏑ ‒ Syncopated forms in lyric: (×)‒⏑‒ (cretic) and ⏑‒(⏑)‒ (bacchiac) Trochaic: ‒ ⏑ ‒ × Iambo-trochaic cola (metrical phrases): ‒ ⏑ ‒ ⏑ ‒ ⏑ ‒ (lecythion); ‒ ⏑ ‒ ⏑ ‒ ‒ (ithyphallic) Dactylic: ‒ ⏑⏑ or ‒ ‒ (spondaic) Anapaestic: ⏑⏑ ‒   ⏑⏑ ‒ For all syllables the double short and long are interchangeable, so this meter includes a “dactylic” inversion (‒ ⏑⏑  ‒ ⏑⏑). Dochmiac: × ‒ ‒ × ‒ All long syllables may be resolved into two shorts, resulting in many variations. The most common are: ⏑ ‒ ‒ ⏑ ‒; ⏑ ⏑⏑ ‒ ⏑ ‒; ⏑ ‒ ⏑⏑ ⏑ ‒; ‒ ⏑⏑ ‒ ⏑ ‒; ⏑ ⏑⏑ ⏑⏑ ⏑ ‒. Ionic: ⏑ ⏑ ‒ ‒ Common dimeter variation: ⏑ ⏑ ‒ ⏑  ‒ ⏑ ‒ ‒



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Metre, Music, Dance The range of metrical patterns in the surviving plays of Aeschylus, like his use of the dochmiac, suggests a great deal of experimentation in adopting and adapting the traditional rhythms of Greek lyric poetry during the early stages of the development of Athenian tragedy. Indeed, the basic structure of antistrophic songs, whereby pairs of stanzas have matching metres (aa bb cc, etc.) and presumably also matching melodies and dance movements, itself appears to have been a new invention, and one which allowed for much more variation and modulation in mood than was possible in earlier choral or solo lyric, in which we only find either monostrophic stanzas (aaaaaa) or triadic structure (aab aab aab). At the same time, Aeschylus’s predilection for certain metres – and perhaps also certain melodic styles – was sufficiently striking for the character of Euripides in Frogs to claim that he can “trim all his tunes into one” (1262) and then to produce a parodic rendition of his choral lyrics that is overwhelmingly dactylic. And in several of his tragedies (most notably in the parodos of Agamemnon) we do in fact find long dactylic periods, often suggesting the solemnity of prophecy and heroic achievements (Scott 1984, especially pp. 34–36, 135–136). The use of this metre indicates the influence of the dactylic hexameters of epic, as well as the strings of dactylic/dactylic-epitritic cola that we find in the surviving fragments of Stesichorus (especially the Lille Papyrus). When Euripides in Frogs starts singing phlattothrattophlattothrat, he introduces a cretic rhythm to this caricature of Aeschylean song (1283–1295), but this repeated, nonsensical line also appears to mimic the strumming of a lyre, to demonstrate how his lyrics are “fashioned from kitharodic nomes” – that is, from the generally dactylic songs sung to the accompaniment of a large lyre called a kithara. The character of Aeschylus responds by claiming that he added these to his repertoire “so that I wouldn’t be caught plucking from the same sacred meadow of Phrynichus” (1299–1300), thus suggesting both that he took over certain habits from the tragedian Phrynichus and that this was an especially noticeable way in which he modified them. The earlier repetition of ieˉ kopon, mentioned in the opening section of this chapter, also seems to parody the use of a refrain, often an expression of mourning or emotional appeal, at metrically identical points in a song. We find this in several choral odes, ranging from a oneword cry, like that of ˉ e e in the fourth stasimon (that is, the fourth choral song following the parodos, the chorus’ entrance song) of Persians (651, 656), to a single line, as in the parodos of Agamemnon (121, 139, 159), to a whole stanza, as in the “Binding Song” in Eumenides (327–333, 341–346). But even if certain rhythms and rhythmical arrangements are especially pronounced, Aeschylus’s tragedies also contain some extraordinarily complex metrical structures, and none more so than the kommos in Libation Bearers. This dirge-like song, performed by both the chorus and the two actors before the tomb of Agamemnon, exhibits a uniquely intricate interweaving of strophes and antistrophes. The first half of the song (306–422), which includes a wide range of rhythms, has a complicated triadic form: Orestes and Electra sing matching strophes and antistrophes, but between each of their stanzas the chorus, who seem in many respects to be the dominant force in this long invocation, alternate between chanting anapaests – a recitative rhythm halfway between speech and song – and singing their own strophic lyrics. The rest of the song is dominated by iambic rhythms, beginning with a string of three strophes and three antistrophes in the order abccab, with each actor now singing strophically with the chorus (423–455); at the centrepoint of this section Orestes formally takes on himself the act that is to come, namely the killing of his mother, Clytemnestra (434–438). The structural change, whereby the siblings no longer musically respond to each other, reflects the shift in their positions at this moment in the song: having just been reunited, they begin the kommos in a similar state, but their roles diverge as Orestes assumes the task of revenge (Scott 1984, 90–93;

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Garvie 1986, 125). There follows a single strophic pair, each stanza now split among the chorus, Orestes and Electra (456–465), before the chorus finally bring the song to a close with a relatively regular strophe and antistrophe and some concluding anapaests that herald the transition back to spoken dialogue (466–478). The metrical structure of this kommos also demonstrates how skilfully Aeschylus could use different rhythms to reflect and highlight – even generate – relationships between characters and particular points in the action of a play. The dochmiac, a metre with a “curious, irregular, checking movement” that is typically used to express strong emotion, can be especially effective in this respect (Dale 1968, 104). When the chorus of Seven against Thebes first appear on stage, for example, their song, with its predominance of dochmiacs, frequent resolutions (the substitution of two short syllables for one long, often producing a staccato effect from multiple short syllables strung together) and initial lack of strophic structure, communicates their chaotic panic and distress as the Argive army approaches (78–107). It also contrasts starkly with the speech of Eteocles, who urges them to calm down (Scott 1984, 160; Griffith 2017, 125–129). In Agamemnon such a dichotomy between the speaking actor and singing chorus is reversed as Cassandra starts singing her frenzied prophecies and cries of lament in a mostly dochmiac rhythm (1072–1177). The chorus of Argive elders initially respond in iambic trimeters, demonstrating through this sharp contrast their inability to understand her song, as well as the distinction between the wildness of the female foreigner and their own more composed state as Greek men. Soon, however, they become caught up in the wild intensity of her lyrics and start singing dochmiacs of their own, until she suddenly abandons her riddling song and speaks (in iambic trimeters) with chilling clarity. In both these scenes the metre of the music – combined with the melodies, dance movements and accompaniment of the aulos – must have had a powerful impact on the audience, not just on the dramatic characters. In the parodos of Seven against Thebes the chorus produce the cacophony that they simultaneously describe, inundating the audience not just with the excited rhythms of their song but with frequent unmetrical cries and an overload of sound words (Stanford 1983, 55–56; Gurd 2016, 75–76; Griffith 2017, 126–127). The most frequent of these words is ktupos (beat, clatter), which directs our attention to their own percussive movements – clapping hands, stamping feet – all of which, we assume, would have corresponded to some degree with the rhythms of their lyrics. The chorus of Libation Bearers create a similar effect in the kommos when with a marked increase of short syllables (resolved iambics) they sing of their violent gestures of lament (423–428): ἔκοψα κομμὸν Ἄριον ἔν τε Κισσίας ⏑ ‒ ⏑ ‒ ⏑ ⏑⏑ ⏑‒ ⏑‒⏑‒ νόμοις ἰηλεμιστρίας· ⏑ ‒ ⏑ ‒ ⏑ ‒ ⏑ ‒ ἀπρικτόπληκτα πολυπάλακτα δ’ ἦν ἰδεῖν ⏑ ‒ ⏑ ‒ ⏑ ⏑⏑ ⏑ ‒ ⏑ ‒ ⏑ ‒ ἐπασσυτεροτριβῆ τὰ χερὸς ὀρέγματα ⏑ ‒ ⏑ ⏑⏑ ⏑ ‒ ⏑ ⏑⏑ ⏑ ‒ ⏑ ‒ ἄνωθεν ἀνέκαθεν, κτύπῳ δ’ ἐπερρόθει ⏑ ‒ ⏑ ⏑⏑ ⏑ ‒ ⏑ ‒ ⏑ ‒ ⏑ ‒ κροτητὸν ἀμὸν καὶ πανάθλιον κάρα. ⏑ ‒ ⏑ ‒ ‒ ‒ ⏑ ‒ ⏑ ‒ ⏑ ‒ I struck myself with Arian blows and in a Cissian wailing woman’s strains; beating thick and fast, much-beating, my stretched-out arms were there to see, hitting and grasping, from above, from high above, and with the battering sound rang my beaten, wretched head. The combination of rhythm, movement and language in these remarkably self-referential lines helps to stir Orestes to revenge. Like the repeated “beating” of Aeschylean lyric that Dionysus in Aristophanes’ Frogs claims to feel in his kidneys, all these elements of the song



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can also have a physical impact on the audience. As a result, they too are caught up in and corporeally affected by the chorus’s excited music and look toward the bloody act that must follow. A similarly powerful mix of rhythm and sense occurs in the famous “Binding Song” in Eumenides, especially in the chorus’s second mesode (372–376): μάλα γὰρ οὖν ἁλομένα ἀνάκαθεν βαρυπετῆ καταφέρω ποδὸς ἀκμάν, σφαλερὰ ⟨καὶ⟩ τανυδρόμοις κῶλα, δύσφορον ἄταν.

⏑⏑⏑‒ ⏑⏑⏑‒ ⏑⏑⏑‒ ⏑⏑⏑‒ ⏑⏑⏑‒ ⏑⏑⏑‒ ⏑⏑⏑‒ ⏑⏑⏑‒ ‒⏑‒⏑⏑‒‒

For leaping high from above the heavy-falling strike of my foot I bring down, legs (koˉla) to make stumble even those running at full stretch, unendurable ruin. The chorus here enact the movement they describe, not only with their own dancing and stamping of feet, but with the rhythm of their song: the “feet” and “legs” (kōla, a word that also refers to metrical units) allude to the paeonic, “tripping” meter (⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ‒) in lines 372– 375, which “leaps up in three short skips and lands hard on the ictus of the foot…[the] emphasis on the last syllable both represents and is the foot coming down” (Prins 1991, 189). Though the chorus perform this song over Orestes, the mimetic effect of its rhythm, combined with the movement of their 12 dancing bodies, must have exerted a powerful force on the spectators – as it was, the original audience is said to have been so terrified by the chorus in this play that, according to one anecdote, some women even miscarried right there in the theatre (Vita 9; Pollux 4.110).

Metamusicality We have already seen examples of vividly self-referential language in Seven against Thebes, Libation Bearers and Eumenides, when the words of a song draw attention to its musical performance. Such cases of metamusicality, common in both Aeschylus and Euripides (somewhat less so in the surviving tragedies of Sophocles), can intensify the musical impact of tragic lyrics by adding a descriptive layer to the chorus’s song and dance (Weiss 2018). This sort of language is by no means confined to tragedy, and indeed we already find frequent images of music and dance in archaic choral lyric. But in a theatrical genre like tragedy, and especially in the surviving plays of Aeschylus, it can play an important part in defining the character of a chorus within a larger dramatic narrative: the choruses of Suppliants and Libation Bearers perform laments; the Erinyes’ Binding Song epitomises and embodies their ritual identity. Metamusical language therefore befits certain choruses, but it also shapes the audience’s perception of their actual performance. An especially clear example of its use as a framing device occurs in the parodos of Suppliants, when the chorus compare their song to that of the nightingale (58–71): If there happens to be any native nearby skilled in augury who hears my lament, he will think he is hearing a voice like that

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of Tereus’s wife, whose cunning schemes brought her misery, the nightingale whom the hawk pursues, who, shut off from her green river-banks, utters a grieving lament for her familiar haunts and sings the story of her son’s death, how he perished by her own kindred hand, experiencing her unmotherly anger. So I too, fond of lamenting in Ionian strains, rend my soft, sun-baked cheek and my heart unused to tears…. (trans. Sommerstein) The chorus here effectively tell the audience to hear their song as that of the nightingale, the archetypal singer of lament who mourns continuously for her dead son. In addition, we assume, to their movements and melody, their words ensure that we experience the women’s song as a lament – and that we thus feel the vulnerability of their position as they present themselves to us in this first scene of the play as suppliants, coming from Egypt to Argos to escape the aggressive advances of their cousins. After singing of the nightingale they again explicitly liken the bird’s mourning to their own, referring to their gestures of lament (the tearing of their cheeks) and their “Ionian strains [nomoi]”. Since nomos can be both “custom” and “tune”, this expression has a double meaning. On the one hand, it refers to the women’s self-proclaimed Greekness (“Ionian”) even while, with their apparently dark skin (70, 154–155), “barbarian voice” (118), and “Sidonian veil[s]” (121, 132), they seem foreign (see Derbew, Chapter 24 in this volume). On the other hand, it describes the musical style of their song, since “Ionian” was a particular type of harmonia (mode or scale), which, as I mentioned above, was apparently often used in tragedy. This passage also demonstrates how Aeschylus uses metamusical language in performances of lament to create an impression of foreignness (see Rutherford and Derbew, Chapters 19 and 24 respectively in this volume). Following Solon’s restrictions against public displays of mourning in the sixth century, lament in classical Athenian culture was associated with displays of extreme emotion by women and foreigners (Loraux 1986, 1998, 2002; HolstWarhaft 1992, 98–126; McClure 1991, 40–47; Foley 2001, 19–56; Weiss 2017); in Aeschylean and Euripidean tragedy Greek male (nonchoral) characters seldom lament or even sing at all (Hall 1999). Though the chorus of Suppliants emphasise their Greek ancestry, then, the simultaneous reminder of their dark-skinned foreignness also frames their performance as distinctly non-Greek. The chorus of Phrygian women in Libation Bearers similarly remind us of their otherness when they describe their beating gestures as “Arian” and their nomoi as those of a “Cissian wailing woman” (423–424, referring to peoples in the eastern regions of the Persian Empire). In Persians, in which the last 170 lines consist almost entirely in antiphonal lament following the announcement of their defeat at the Battle of Salamis, Xerxes and the chorus also explicitly refer to their movements and cries as eastern: the chorus claim to perform the song of a “Mariandynian dirge-singer” (939); the king tells them to “beat your breasts and cry out the Mysian cry” (1054); both these lines refer to laments sung by peoples of northern Asia Minor. In this play Aeschylus is also clearly experimenting with how both language and song can sound foreign, as the multiple cries of lament (such as ioˉ ioˉ, papai papai, and ototototoi) and frequent, non-syntactical repetition of other short words in the lyrics of Xerxes and the chorus give the impression of incomprehensible language (Hall 1989, 76–79; Weiss 2017). The choreography in this closing scene must have primarily consisted in distraught gestures of mourning. We do not know to what extent the melodies, along with the accompanying tunes of the aulos, also sounded foreign, but certainly Aeschylus ensures such an impression through the combination of verbal effects and metamusical language.



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References to music-making do not always, however, immediately correspond with the live performance of the chorus or actor. We find one of the richest descriptions of music and dance in surviving Aeschylean tragedy in a fragment of Edonians, a play which, like Euripides’ Bacchae, revolved around Dionysus’s revenge on a king – here Lycurgus, king of the Edonians in Thrace – for attempting to suppress his rites (frag. 57 in Radt 1985, 178–180): One man holds in his hands a pair of pipes, fashioned on the lathe, and plays out a fingered melody, a loud cry that brings on frenzy, while another crashes the bronze cymbals …and the twang of strings resounds; and terrifying imitators of the voice of bulls bellow in response from somewhere out of sight, and the fearful deep sound of the drum carries to the ear like thunder beneath the earth. (trans. Sommerstein) The chorus here vividly describe the cultic music being performed for Dionysus and its overwhelming impact on the listener. They emphasise in particular the affective power of the aulos, to which numerous other sources also testify: Aristotle, for example, says that it was an especially exciting instrument, able to produce emotional reactions in its audience (Politics 1342b); in Euripides’ Heracles it is represented as an agent of Lyssa, the personification of madness (894–895). But the chorus of Edonians deliver these lines in anapaests (the recitative rhythm that I mentioned above), perhaps as they first come on stage; they are not themselves fully singing or dancing yet, but relating the musical celebrations of Dionysus’s followers, who have just arrived in Thrace. The focus here, as in the parodos of Seven against Thebes, is on their own terrified response as they hear these sounds. But whereas the chorus of that play simultaneously (re)produce the noise of the approaching army through their own excited song and dance, the chorus of Edonians create a mismatch between their own more restrained anapaestic performance and the one they describe. In doing so, they demonstrate the very problem Dionysus is about to fix – their king’s resistance to his cult – and at the same time, by describing at length the powerful nature of his music, they reveal their own attraction towards it. The audience, watching this performance within a festival for Dionysus, would presumably also start to anticipate excitedly the arrival of the god and his musical rites, which the tune of the aulos, heard as its player started to accompany the chorus’s lyrics, would herald.

Musical Narratives This fragment of Edonians also indicates the important role music and dance could play within the narrative of a play and, indeed, across the dramatic arc of an entire trilogy or even (with the satyr play) tetralogy. All four plays within the Lycurgeia tetralogy (of which Edonians was the first) concerned the arrival of Dionysus in Thrace: in Bassarids, as far as we can tell, Orpheus started worshipping Apollo rather than Dionysus, who then punished him by making the Thracian women (Bassarids) tear him from limb to limb; we know virtually nothing about Neaniskoi or the satyr play, Lycurgus, but both may have involved some sort of reconciliation between the cultic celebrations of Apollo and Dionysus. The sort of music-making described in frag. 57 must, then, have been a central theme in these plays. Though at the start of the tetralogy the Edonians do not participate in such music themselves, clearly as it

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progressed the choruses – especially that of Bassarids – would have produced their own Dionysiac performances, perhaps even holding some of the instruments mentioned in the Edonians fragment (cymbals, drums and bull-roarers). Bassarids in particular must have been an extraordinary musical show, since not only did it have a chorus of Dionysian followers, but the central character, Orpheus, was himself a famous musician who in this drama, it seems, started honouring a different god with different music (West 1990, 26–50; Watson 2015). Solo songs tend to be more prominent in later tragedy, reflecting actors’ professionalization through the second half of the fifth century (Hall 1999, 2002); and Euripides’ later plays in particular include an increasing number of arias. But Aeschylus’s tragedies do include solo singers, most famously Cassandra in Agamemnon. (Io in Prometheus Bound also performs a remarkable solo song, though the extensive use of monody in this play, and correspondingly smaller role of choral lyric, is one of the biggest sources of doubts about its Aeschylean authorship [Griffith 1977, 119–120]). In Bassarids, we can assume that the actor playing Orpheus would have sung several impressive musical numbers as would befit his character. One of the surviving fragments actually appears to consist in two of Orpheus’s own lyrics, as he sings in, rather appositely, a bacchiac meter (with ⏑ ‒ ‒ as the repeated basic unit) of being driven mad by Dionysus (frag. 23 in Radt 1985, 139). In the following fragment, which seems to be part of the same lyric sequence, the chorus describe, also in bacchiacs, how the god “will leap forth upon him” (frag. 23a in Radt 1985, 140). Rather like the Erinyes in the Binding Song in Eumenides, we can imagine the choreuts simultaneously leaping up and stamping down in their dance to reinforce the terrifying violence of this attack. The transition from one type of musical performance to another was presumably especially important in terms of this play’s plot. But variation in mousikē across any tragedy would have been closely connected to the dramatic narrative and played a vital role in guiding the audience’s emotional response at each point in the action, just as the music of a film or television drama does for us today. We have already seen how the performance of the kommos in Libation Bearers both pushes Orestes towards revenge and prompts some excited anticipation in the audience. The song also works as part of a larger musical pattern, setting up a stark contrast between the laments in this play, followed by the terrifying choral performances in Eumenides, and the joyful songs in the final scenes of the trilogy as the Erinyes abandon their anger and become the Semnai Theai. Finally a new chorus of Attic women enter, singing a celebratory paean, with Athena herself as their leader (Eum. 1033–1047). The very last line of the play, “now raise a cry of triumph (ololuxateˉ) with our songs and dances (molpai)”, addressed as much to the audience in the theatre as to the Erinyes/Semnai Theai, picks up on the repeated use of the word ololugeˉ to denote a cry of triumph throughout the trilogy. But whereas it is earlier mentioned in the context of bloodshed and strife, now the ololugeˉ is performed as a sign of “true and lasting victory” (Haldane 1965, 38), emphatically celebrating the unifying and uplifting effects of music and dance. Suppliants provides an especially clear example of the close link between music and plot. Choral song dominates this play: over half of its lines are lyrics and the chorus is not only the main character but active in every scene. As a result, the action of the tragedy and the singing and dancing of its chorus are virtually indistinguishable. Their songs shift from a mix of prayer and lament as they present themselves as suppliants in Argos, to a mix of prayer and hymns in the second stasimon as Pelasgus, the Argive king, agrees to protect them (630–709). Even in this more joyful song, whenever they mention the threat of war that now looms, anxious dochmiacs suddenly overwhelm them. But the last two stanzas have a steady, repetitive rhythm (syncopated iambics), as they call on the Argives to act lawfully and piously (698–709); Danaus, their father, responds by praising their prayers for being soˉphroˉn (“moderate, selfcontrolled”, 710). Then he spots the ships of Aegyptus’s sons, coming to seize them as their



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wives, and the chorus’s style of musical performance changes dramatically: they sing agitated lyrics in dochmiac rhythms as he speaks (an alternation of speech and song called an epirrhematic dialogue), then launch into the third stasimon (776–824). At first the rhythm of their song is extremely regular, but it speeds up with multiple resolutions when they see the Egyptian men approaching. Then the Egyptians themselves enter – a whole new chorus – and each group sings some chaotic, astrophic lyrics, full of shouts and wild, foreign-sounding noises (825–844). When a strophic pattern resumes (846–871), the rhythm of the girls’ singing includes strings of dochmiacs, reflecting their distress as the men try to grab them. We can imagine frantic dance movements accompanying these lyrics, as the one chorus chases the other around the orcheˉstra. Far from being reported in a messenger’s speech, this critical moment of the play is thus brought on stage in and through the choruses’ song and dance. It must have been a very powerful scene for the audience, with 24 chorus members singing, shouting and dancing back and forth all at once (see Stehle, Chapter 17, in this volume). Though we do not have the other two Danaid tragedies (Egyptians, Danaids), we can guess that the music and dance in Suppliants also worked as part of a larger musical pattern across the whole trilogy. Both the foreignness and the violence communicated by the chorus’s song and dance in this play would continue to be important themes and focuses of performance, as Pelasgus and the Argives are defeated by the Egyptians, and as the daughters of Danaus murder the sons of Aegyptus on their wedding night. The chorus may have also continued to evoke certain types of song with powerful dramatic effect. After Pelasgus intervenes and the Egyptians retreat, Suppliants closes with a song praising Argos, now performed with yet another chorus, this one probably made up of Argive men. The closest parallel for this sort of sung (and danced) exchange between two separate choruses is Catullus 62, a poem which purports to be a wedding song (hymenaios); the focus on marriage in the exodos (the men sing of its importance; the girls reject it) also suggests that it is meant to evoke a hymenaios (Swift 2010, 282–290). Though they would presumably feel some relief at the contrast between this performance and the chaotic cries, song and dance preceding it, the audience might also respond with a mix of discomfort and apprehension, knowing that the Danaids’ protestations against marriage here are not merely a hymenaeal trope but a defining part of their character – and one which will result in the slaughter of their bridegrooms. It is also possible that all three tragedies in the trilogy closed with similarly hymenaeal performances: a wedding procession with the girls’ cousins at the end of Egyptians, on the eve of the slaughter, and another one at the end of Danaids, perhaps with a chorus of Argives matching the ones here, this time without the uncomfortable irony of the earlier performances (Winnington-Ingram 1961, 144; Bowen 2013, 348). The success of Aeschylus’s tragedies – and indeed of those of Sophocles and Euripides – therefore in large part relied on the effectiveness of their musical performance. A play like Suppliants demonstrates not only the degree to which this was musical theatre, but also Aeschylus’s extensive experimentation with the dramatic potential of music, dance and rhythm, as well the ways in which language about music-making could interact with the performance itself. This play is unique in having three different choruses, whose lyric numbers both enact crucial stages of the plot and connect to other performances and pivotal actions across the entire trilogy. So while Suppliants appears musically to be an older style of tragedy precisely because of the dominance of the chorus, it also seems to be one of Aeschylus’s most innovative plays. As such, it should prompt us to look beyond the contrast between old and new that Aristophanes sets up in the musical showdown in Frogs, and to appreciate the rapid pace of experimentation in the early period of tragedy’s development as a genre. Aeschylus was just as much an innovator as the younger Euripides, and continued to be remembered and admired for the powerful impact of his plays’ mousikeˉ.

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FURTHER READING The most extensive analysis of music in Aeschylus remains Scott 1984, which is primarily concerned with metrical patterns. The Oresteia trilogy has received the most attention in terms of its musical imagery and (to a lesser extent) performance: see especially Haldane 1965, Fleming 1977 and Wilson and Taplin 1993. Griffith 2013 has a very helpful discussion of the musical elements of the poetic competition in Aristophanes’ Frogs, and of Aeschylus’s reputation as a musician more generally. On the latter see also Griffith 2017, which is focused on the music of Seven against Thebes. Weiss 2018 includes an overview of metamusical language in Aeschylean tragedy, while Gurd 2016, 62–85 discusses some of the acoustic effects at play in his work. The commentary by Bowen 2013 provides many useful notes regarding the metre and performance of Suppliants. For guidance on the lyric metres of tragedy, see Dale 1968, West 1987, and the detailed colometries and discussions in the commentaries of Fraenkel 1950, Friis Johansen and Whittle 1980, Hutchinson 1985, Garvie 1986 and Raeburn and Thomas 2011; also Griffith 1977 and Griffith 1983 for Prometheus Bound. For an introduction to ancient Greek music in general, see West 1992.

REFERENCES Bowen, A. J., ed. (2013). Aeschylus: Suppliants. Oxford. Cropp, M., Lee, K. and Sansone, D., eds. (1999–2000). Euripides and Tragic Theatre in the Late Fifth Century (Illinois Classical Studies 24–25). Champaign, IL. Csapo, E. (1999–2000). “Later Euripidean Music.” In Cropp, Lee, and Sansone eds., 399–426. Csapo, E. (2004). “The Politics of the New Music.” In Murray and Wilson eds., 207–48. Dale, A. M. (1968). The Lyric Metres of Greek Drama. Second Edition. Cambridge. Easterling, P. and Hall, E., eds. (2002). Greek and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession. Cambridge. Fleming, T. (1977). “The Musical Nomos in Aeschylus’s Oresteia.” Classical Journal 72, 222–33. Foley, H. (2001). Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton. Fraenkel, E., ed. (1950). Aeschylus: Agamemnon. Oxford. Friis Johansen, H. and Whittle, E. W., eds. (1980). Aeschylus: Suppliants. Copenhagen. Garvie, A. F., ed. (1986). Aeschylus: Choephoroi. Oxford. Goldhill, S. and Osborne, R., eds. (1999). Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy. Cambridge. Griffith, M. (1977). The Authenticity of Prometheus Bound. Cambridge. Griffith, M., ed. (1983). Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound. Cambridge. Griffith, M. (2013). Aristophanes’ Frogs. Oxford. Griffith, M. (2017). “The Music of War in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes.” In Torrance ed., 114–49. Gurd, S. A. (2016). Dissonance: Auditory Aesthetics in Ancient Greece. New York. Haldane, J. A. (1965). “Musical Themes and Imagery in Aeschylus.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 85, 33–41. Hall, E. (1989). Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-definition through Tragedy. Oxford. Hall, E. (1999). “Actor’s Song in Tragedy.” In Goldhill and Osborne eds., 96–124. Cambridge. Hall, E. (2002). “The Singing Actors of Antiquity.” In Easterling and Hall eds., 3–38. Holst-Warhaft, G. (1992). Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Literature. London. Hutchinson, G. O., ed. (1985). Aeschylus: Seven against Thebes. Oxford. Loraux, N. (1986). The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration and the Classical City. Cambridge, MA. Loraux, N. (1998). Mothers in Mourning. Ithaca, NY. Loraux, N. (2002). The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy. Ithaca, NY. McClure, L. (1991). Spoken like a Woman: Speech and Gender in Athenian Drama. Princeton. Murray, P. and Wilson, P., eds. (2004). Music and the Muses: The Culture of “Mousike ˉ” in the Classical Athenian City. Oxford.



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Prins, Y. (1991). “The Power of the Speech Act: Aeschylus’s Furies and Their Binding Song.” Arethusa 24, 177–95. Radt, S., ed. (1985). Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta Vol. 3: Aeschylus. Göttingen. Raeburn, D. and Thomas, O., eds. (2011). The Agamemnon of Aeschylus: A Commentary for Students. Oxford. Scott, W. C. (1984). Musical Design in Aeschylean Theater. Hanover, NH. Stanford, W. B. (1983). Greek Tragedy and the Emotions. London. Swift, L. (2010). The Hidden Chorus: Echoes of Genre in Tragic Lyric. Oxford. Torrance, I., ed. (2017). Aeschylus and War: Comparative Perspectives on Seven against Thebes. Abingdon and New York. Watson, S. B. (2015). “Mousikeˉ and Mysteries: A Nietzschean Reading of Aeschylus’ Bassarides.” Classical Quarterly 65, 455–75. Weiss, N. A. (2017). “Noise, Music, Speech: The Representation of Lament in Greek Tragedy.” American Journal of Philology 138, 243–66. Weiss, N. A. (2018). The Music of Tragedy: Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Theater. Oakland. West, M. L. (1987). Introduction to Greek Metre. Oxford. West, M. L. (1990). Studies in Aeschylus. Stuttgart. West, M. L. (1992). Ancient Greek Music. Oxford. Wilson, P. and Taplin, O. (1993). “The ‘Aetiology’ of Tragedy in the Oresteia.” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 39, 169–80. Winnington-Ingram, R. P. (1961). “The Danaid Trilogy of Aeschylus.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 81, 141–52.

CHAPTER 19

Aeschylus: Language and Style R.B. Rutherford We have only to pause for a moment and consider, first, the enormous gulf between our ways of life and thought and those of ancient Greece, then the sadly fragmentary nature of our whole tradition, and, finally, the solitary boldness of Aeschylus, to realize that it would be a sign of megalomania if we fancied it to be possible for us fully to understand the words of this poet wherever we have them in their original form. (Fraenkel 1950, 1. ix)

Aeschylus and Style When we study any writer, above all any poet, we are concerned not only with the subject matter but how it is presented. When the writer is a dramatist, this investigation has a number of aspects, which we can loosely divide into questions of performance (theatrical conditions, conventions of acting, etc.) and questions of language. Our knowledge of performance is patchy and largely dependent on the texts, but the evidence for the author’s use of language is more accessible: it consists of the text itself. The poet’s style means the way in which the author uses the available linguistic resources – vocabulary, syntax, figures of speech. Aeschylus’s style is highly individual; it is bold, rich and memorable, but also obscure. The metaphors he himself used to describe the enigma of Zeus’s planning might be applied to some of his own poetry (Suppliants 88, 93–95): Διὸς ἵμερος οὐκ εὐθήρατος ἐτύχθη · δαυλοὶ γὰρ πραπίδων δάσκιοι τε τείνουσιν πόροι κατιδεῖν ἄφραστοι.1

1

The exact sequence of lines and the punctuation of the passage are disputed; I adopt here the text as found in the modern editions of Sommerstein and Johansen-Whittle.

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



Aeschylus: Language and Style 255 though [Zeus’s] desire is hard to track and the paths of his mind stretch shadowed, tangled in thickets where I cannot trace or guess. (trans. P. Burian)

Before turning to Aeschylus himself, we should reflect on the nature of the genre in which he wrote. Ancient criticism tended to see the different categories as forming a hierarchy, with some types of writing (such as epic and tragedy) high on the scale, others lower and often regarded as more trivial, less significant (comedy, pastoral, epigram). “High” genres generally dealt with myths of the heroes and gods of ancient Greece, events of great political or cosmic significance (the Trojan war, the battles of gods and giants, and so forth); “low” genres treated more everyday matters, personal joys and sorrows, the experiences of ordinary people, often of the present day. These generic oppositions also involve the question of seriousness of tone: high genres deal with great events and treat them with the utmost seriousness, whereas low admit more commonplace affairs and treat them often with light-heartedness and good humour (Auerbach 1957, chapter 2). The comparison of tragedy and comedy in the late fifth century illustrates these tendencies with particular clarity (Taplin 1986). The opposition in theme and content is reflected in the contrasting styles of these genres: tragedy sombre, dignified, grandiose, eloquent, formal, where comedy is typically chatty, colloquial, full of puns, parodies, absurd coinages, obscenities, anticlimax and inconsequentiality. Yet the boundaries are not absolute: tragedy can admit some strikingly colloquial touches, as we shall see in this chapter (see also Sommerstein 2002).

Aeschylean Obscurity There is general agreement that Aeschylus is a difficult poet. Some of the reasons are well known: the frailty of the textual tradition, so that in some plays and passages we depend on a single tenth-century manuscript; the loss of so much of his work, which means that two of the surviving dramas belong to unified trilogies but have lost their companion plays; the disappearance of earlier tragedy and most contemporary literature, which deprives us of context and comparisons; the thinness of the ancient commentaries; the massive proportion of the dramas which consist of lyric passages, so much less accessible to the modern theatregoer than the spoken dialogue; and above all the fertility of his verbal imagination, which generated an abundance of new compounds and coinages, or used established words in unfamiliar or unorthodox ways. The view that Aeschylus is an exceptionally difficult poet goes back to antiquity, above all to the extended presentation of his work in Aristophanes’ Frogs, produced in 405 bce, over 50 years after Aeschylus’s death, in which the shades of Aeschylus and Euripides compete in the underworld. Here Euripides criticises his predecessor as an archaic primitive, obscure and ponderous, his style chiefly characterised by a plethora of polysyllables. His words were like ship-timbers, joined together with rivets (824); tragedy in his hands became “an art swollen with boasting and ponderous expressions” (939–40) and he was always composing lines about “shields with beaten bronze griff-eagles and horse-steep phrases, hard to understand” (928). Of course, we must not expect serious criticism from a polemical opponent in a comic drama, but the picture must reflect a possible view of Aeschylus current in the last decade of the fifth century. Like most parodies, the Aristophanic treatment takes certain characteristic features of the model and exaggerates them, producing a caricature. Aeschylus’s style is far more diverse than the Frogs allows us to see. Analysis needs to distinguish between the spoken parts and

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the sung portions (mainly but not exclusively the province of the chorus); there are also distinctions to be drawn between formally differing passages (especially extended set speech or rhesis versus stichomythic dialogue). Certain types of speech, notably the messenger speech, have distinctive styles (messenger speeches tend to include more reminiscence of the narrative of epic). There is also a case for seeing each play as having distinctive features: thus Persians includes a high incidence of unusual cries or exclamations of distress (ἠέ and ὀᾶ are among them): these are evidently intended to have an “oriental” flavour. Finally, there is the question of Aeschylus’s own development. Our evidence hardly suffices to map the evolution of his style in detail, but there is good reason to see his late masterpiece, the Oresteia, as achieving greater density and complexity of style, above all in the extraordinary choral odes of Agamemnon. In other respects, too, his use of language seems to have become more sophisticated: there is more differentiation of character through style in the trilogy than in the earlier plays. If we step back from the frivolity of Aristophanes’ parodic games and ask what the Athenian theatregoer of 405 would have found surprising in Aeschylean drama, whether we imagine a time-travel opportunity or an authentic reperformance, several features are immediately obvious. The earlier drama would have seemed much more static. Partly this is the result of the extensive contributions by the chorus. In the Suppliants over 170 lines, more than 10% of the whole play, elapse before choral song gives way to dialogue; the parodos of the Agamemnon, over 210 lines, is the longest ode in extant drama. Fewer actors were used in Aeschylus’s earlier career (though the Oresteia needs three) and this, together with the dominance of the chorus, limited the number of characters. Seven against Thebes (excluding the spurious parts; see Torrance, Chapter 7 in this volume) has only two speaking characters, the Scout or Herald (who appears twice) and the tragic hero Eteocles. Interaction on stage in the early plays often seems artificial by later standards: an actor will often engage with the chorus rather than with another actor (the silence of Danaus when Pelasgos appears in Suppliants is a notable example). Speeches by actors were often long: the rhesis or extended speech is the norm and stichomythia, while important, is subordinated; more flexible dialogue of the type we find in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is rare in Aeschylus. Other tendencies reinforce the sense of elevation and formality. Aeschylean speeches always end at the end of a line; there is no example in his work of antilabe, the technique by which a line is divided between speakers – a device increasingly exploited by Euripides. In other ways later tragedy relaxed the austerity of Aeschylus – by allowing more frequent resolution in the standard iambic trimeter, by introducing more speaking characters and including more onstage action (physical tussles in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, fits of madness in that play and Euripides’ Orestes), by shortening choral odes (two strophic pairs becomes the norm) and allowing more actor-lyric, and so forth. Formal and structural phenomena of this kind cannot be separated from discussions of style, but it is time to focus more on the verbal texture. One point made emphatically in the Frogs can serve as a starting point. When challenged by “Euripides” to account for the fact that he gave his characters mountainous words rather than using language that could realistically be spoken by human beings, “Aeschylus” responds that “it is essential to create words that are a match for great thoughts and conceptions; and besides, it’s natural that demigods should use words greater than we do, just as their clothes are more magnificent than ours” (Frogs 1058–60). Part of the object of Aeschylean elevation, then, is “defamiliarisation”: such events as tragedy portrays, being part of the heroic age, should be couched in language fit for heroes and gods, a language remote from everyday life. (By contrast “Euripides” in Frogs, and to some extent in reality, was concerned to reduce the gulf between mythological events and more familiar human experience.) We might then expect the language of Aeschylus to have some Homeric colouring, and that is certainly the case (Sideras 1971; Griffith 2009, 7–11), but there is much that cannot be accounted for simply by epic reminiscence.



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The vocabulary of Aeschylus is vast and many words are evidently coined by the dramatist himself. Some of these are absolute hapax legomena, words which are used only once in Aeschylus and never elsewhere. Many of these innovations are compound adjectives, the presence of which is indeed one of the chief indicators of high style (Griffith 1977, 149–50, 268; Podlecki 2006). The solemnity of these formations is heightened when several compounds with the alpha-privative prefix (“not-”, comparable with the English prefixes “in-” or “un-”) are combined. Homer already provided a notable precedent: “at odds with clan, with law, with hearth (ἀφρήτωρ ἀθέμιστος ἀνέστιός) is the man who desires conflict with his own people” (Iliad 9.63), an expression which may evoke curse-formulae directed at such a man (Fraenkel 1950, 2.217). In Agamemnon we find ἀτίμους ἀλοιδόρους ἀλίστους, “without honour, without cursing, without prayer” (412) and ἄμαχον ἀπόλεμον ἀνίερον, “invincible, unfightable, unholy” (769), in Libation Bearers ἄμαχον ἀδάματον ἀπόλεμον, ‘”invincible, unbeatable, unfightable” (55). None of these is exceptional, but elsewhere we find more recherché formations: ἀβουκόλητος (unheeded, lit. given none of the care a cowherd would give his beasts), ἀκριτόφυρτος (indiscriminately mingled), ἀπειρόδακρυς (inexperienced in suffering) – all three absolute hapaxes. The negative prefix remained a favourite device in later tragedy: predictably it is the object of parody in Frogs (838). Greatness and grandeur are well suited to Aeschylean tragedy, but the plays also emphasise the consequences of growing too great, of transgressing human limits. Though older readings in terms of hubris and nemesis often oversimplified Greek tragedy for the sake of a formula, there can be little doubt that the dangers of excess and ambition are central to the Persians and play a part in the more complex thought-world of the Agamemnon. The ghost of Darius pronounces a supernatural verdict on his son’s folly in magisterial terms (Pers. 816–28): τόσος γὰρ ἔσται πέλανος αἱματοσφαγὴς πρὸς γῇ Πλαταιῶν Δωρίδος λόγχης ὕπο · θῖνες νεκρῶν δὲ καὶ τριτοσπόρῳ γονῇ ἄφωνα σημανοῦσιν ὄμμασιν βροτῶν ὡς οὐχ ὐπέρφευ θνητὸν ὄντα χρὴ φρονεῖν. ὕβρις γὰρ ἐξανθοῦσ’ ἐκάρπωσε στάχυν ἄτης, ὅθεν πάγκλαυτον ἐξαμᾷ θέρος. τοιαῦθ’ ὁρῶντες τῶνδε τἀπιτίμια μέμνησθ’ Ἀθηνῶν Ἑλλάδος τε, μηδέ τις ὑπερφρονήσας τὸν παρόντα δαίμονα ἄλλων ἐρασθεὶς ὄλβον ἐκχέῃ μέγαν. Ζεύς τοι κολαστὴς τῶν ὑπερκόμπων ἄγαν φρονημάτων ἔπεστιν, εὔθυνος βαρύς. So great will be the clotted libation of slain men’s blood on the soil of the Plataeans, shed by the Dorian spear. The heaps of corpses will wordlessly proclaim to the eyes of men, even to the third generation, that one who is mortal should not think arrogant thoughts: outrage has blossomed, and has produced a crop of ruin, from which it is reaping a harvest of universal sorrow. Look on the price that is paid for these actions, and remember Athens and Greece: let no one despise the fortune he possesses and through lust for more, let his great prosperity go to waste. Zeus, I tell you, stands over all as a chastiser of pride that boasts to excess, a stern assessor. (trans. Sommerstein, with slight changes) The magnitude of Xerxes’ error in attempting to yoke the sea and add Europe to his Asian domain is brought out by the stress on the numbers of corpses and the suggestion that they

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(perhaps their bones, or their burial mounds?) will remain on the battlefield of Plataea for three generations. The repeated prefix ὑπερ- (820, 825, 827) keeps the idea of excess in our minds. Tragedy’s addiction to compounds combines with the particular fondness of Aeschylus for perverse metaphor in line 816, where πέλανος αἱματοσφαγής (“clotted libation of men’s blood”) distorts the notion of religious offerings by applying it to the slaughter of men in battle. Or again, the language of crops and harvest is applied to the conception of wicked action resulting in retribution and sorrow; yet here it seems that hubris, the crop, both blossoms and reaps: as so often in this poet, abstract terms are given a sinister life (e.g. Peitho, “Persuasion”, daughter of Ruin (Atē) at Ag. 385–86). There are parallels for all these effects elsewhere in Aeschylus. Harder to match is the stern second-person didacticism (823–24 ὁρῶντες … μέμνησθε) with which the dead king addresses his absent son, his courtiers and possibly the audience too, spelling out the moral of Xerxes’ misfortunes and offering a stern warning for the future. The patriotic context perhaps invites a simpler formulation of tragic morality than we find in the mythical dramas.

Religious Language Aeschylus’s dramas draw exceptional power from the exploitation of religious ritual, especially as expressed through song. For some this puts him closer to the true roots of tragedy, but whatever the origins of the genre (Csapo and Miller 2007), by 472, the date of our first extant tragedy, religious language and practice serve dramatic purposes and need not be seen as closely integrated in the festival of Dionysus at which the plays are performed. It remains true that religious song is much more prominent in his work than in that of his successors (see Chapters 17–18 in this volume). A small indicator is his fondness for refrains and repeated passages of song (Moritz 1979), a device singled out for mockery in the Frogs (1264–77). Since religious utterance is often sung (hymns, laments, blessing-songs), the phenomenon is linked with the greater importance of choral lyric in Aeschylus’s oeuvre. Many choral songs have a hymnic element (as in the hymn to Zeus in the parodos of the Agamemnon); prayers for salvation of the city from the enemy are prominent in the Seven against Thebes, blessingsongs for the cities of Argos and Athens in the Suppliants and Eumenides. It has rightly been emphasised that these are not simply adaptations of “stock” prayer types: they undergo transformation to be incorporated in a new generic context, and are framed, sometimes ironically, by that context (Swift 2010). Some examples are purely the work of a strong poetic imagination: no Athenian would have any accurate knowledge of the proper rituals with which Persians might pray to their dead king, far less of rites to summon up his ghost! But however much the settings and situation may be fictional, the emotional effect of these passages depends on their affinity with known religious rituals. Some of the scenes in question involve antiphonal lament, where the speakers echo one another’s words and match their rhythms. This is especially appropriate in Seven against Thebes, where the mourning concerns two brothers who have slain each other in single combat. These lines (915–21) come from a long section originally sung by a divided chorus (it is generally agreed that their ascription to Antigone and Ismene is a later misattribution or a change made for later revivals): ἀχάεις δόμων μάλ’ αὐτοὺς προπέμπει δαϊκτὴρ γόος αὐτόστονος, αὐτοπήμων, δαϊόφρων, οὐ φιλογαθής, ἐτύμως δακρυχέων ἐκ



Aeschylus: Language and Style 259 φρενός, ἃ κλαιομένας μου μινύθει τοῖνδε δυοῖν ἀνάκτοιν. They are accompanied to the grave by the loud-sounding, heart-rending wailing of a house that grieves for itself, that feels its own pain, the wailing of a miserable heart that rejects all joy, truly pouring tears from a heart that withers as I lament over these two princes. (trans. Sommerstein)

Again we see the Aeschylean love of compounds: here the anaphora of αὐτόστονος αὐτοπήμων brings out the self-destructiveness of the royal house. Later in the passage the antiphonal composition becomes more marked, extending to rhyming effects (961–64): — παιθεὶς ἔπαισας — σὺ δ’ ἔθανες κατακτανών. — δορὶ δ’ ἔκανες. — δορὶ δ’ ἔθανες. — μελεοπόνος — μελεοπαθής (A) You struck after you were struck. (B) You died after you killed. (A) With the spear you slew. (B) And with the spear were you slain. (A) Cruelly-striving. (B) Cruelly-suffering. Such exchanges are rare after Aeschylus, and Euripides in particular turned his attention more towards the grief of the actors, often of the individual actor expressed through solo aria (monody). Still more elaborate than these passages is the majestic kommos scene which dominates the first half of the Libation Bearers, a three-cornered lyric sequence of extraordinary complexity involving Orestes, his sister Electra and the chorus, all of whom are invoking the dead Agamemnon at his tomb. Sung and chanted sections, lamentation and appeal for aid, exhortation of the avenging son and stern condemnation of the murderess, imparting of knowledge from the chorus and painful self-pity from Electra – all are combined in a series of exchanges which goes on for 170 lines. The opening lyrics from the chorus and Orestes give some flavour. (Libation Bearers 306–22): Χο.  ἀλλ’ ὦ μεγάλαι Μοῖραι, Διόθεν τῇδε τελευτᾶν, ᾗ τὸ δίκαιον μεταβαίνει. ἀντὶ μὲν ἐχθρᾶς γλώσσης ἐχθρὰ γλῶσσα τελείσθω · τοὐφειλόμενον πράσσουσα Δίκη μέγ’ ἀυτεῖ · ἀντὶ δὲ πληγῆς φονίας φονίαν πληγὴν τινέτω. δράσαντα παθεῖν, τριγέρων μῦθος τάδε φωνεῖ. Ορ.  ὦ πάτερ αἰνόπατερ, τί σοι φάμενος ἢ τί ῥέξας τύχοιμ’ ἂν ἕκαθεν οὐρίσας, ἔνθα σ’ ἔχουσιν εὐναί; σκότῳ φάος ἀντίμοιρον, χάριτες δ’ ὁμοίως κέκληνται γόος εὐκλεὴς προσθοδόμοις Ἀτρείδαις.

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chorus

  Now, you mighty Fates, by Zeus’s will let things end in the way that Justice now pursues! For hostile word let hostile word be paid back – so Justice cries aloud, demanding what is owed. For bloody blow let payment be a bloody blow. The doer suffers, so does the thrice-old saying proclaim.

orestes

  O father, dread father, what am I to say, what am I to do, so as to succeed from far away in reaching you where your place of rest confines you? Darkness has light as its opposite, and glorious lament is honour for the Atreidae lying here before the house.

One major theme of the trilogy (the doer must suffer) is restated with balancing eye-for-aneye determination; and the stress from the start on honouring the dead with their due makes clear that one function of this song-sequence is to pay Agamemnon the royal tribute which his wife denied him (a theme already initiated in the last phase of the preceding play, where the chorus mourned their king). Again we see Aeschylus’s concern to suggest the influence of personified divine powers, here the awesome entity Dikē (“Justice”), central to his concerns – yet the Moirai and Zeus also play a part and other powers, among them Earth and the Curses of the dead, are later invoked. In the second part of the extract, Orestes voices the first of many appeals to his father, who though dead is thought still to have power to aid his living offspring. “O father, dread father” (315) is one possible rendering, but critics justifiably also find a hint of the unhappiness of his fate: thus αἰνο- has the same ambiguities as δυσ-. The light–darkness antithesis in 320 is important throughout the trilogy (from the moment when the fiery beacon illuminates the night for the watchman), but here introduces a parallel (ὁμοίως) with the opposition of lament and honour: lament in many contexts will be a negative thing (like darkness), but here Orestes declares that it can be glorious, as it brings honour to the neglected dead. As Orestes tries to bridge the gap between the living and the dead, so he attempts to see lamentation from his father’s point of view. The pallid imitation in Euripides’ Electra (671–84) is a startling comparison (in general on the relation between the various Electra plays, see Cropp 2013, 20–38 and Ormand, Chapter 11 in this volume). There the later poet creates a three-cornered sequence in stichomythia (a line in turn from brother, sister and the old retainer): not only is the invocation transferred to spoken verse, but the chorus is excluded. After a mere 12 lines Electra cries: “Do you hear us, you who suffered horrors at my mother’s hand?” and the old servant answers “Your father hears all of this, I’m sure; but it’s time to move” (682, 684; but see Boas 2017, 193–204 for arguments concerning the attribution of lines here). The passage amounts to a confession that later tragedy was no longer able or willing to attempt such an ambitious lyric structure.

Imagery Imagery in Aeschylus has attracted an enormous body of discussion. This reflects a recognition by critics that although metaphorical language is typical of tragedy more generally, Aeschylus’s use of such language is especially rich and significant. Several points coincide



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here: (a) Metaphorical language is especially dense and varied in tragic lyric, so that there is more scope for it in his heavily lyrical drama. (b) The survival of the Oresteia, the only complete tragic trilogy, enables us to see how Aeschylus developed the same image, or closely related images, across three plays (to some extent this is paralleled in his use of non-metaphorical themes such as “the doer must suffer”). (c) In certain cases what begins as metaphor becomes eventual reality, as images acquire physical and visible form: thus the hunting image of the Agamemnon was metaphor when the Greeks set out in pursuit of the stolen Helen (they are hunters on the track at Agamemnon 694–95); it becomes reality when the Furies pursue Orestes, seeking vampire-like to drink his blood and destroy him (Eumenides 264–65; they are called bloodthirsty hounds by the ghost of Clytemnestra, Eumenides 132, and Orestes is a hunted fawn in flight at 111, 246). (d) This development of imagery is not just a matter of recurrence, but at least sometimes involves transformation and reversal, with later examples not only enriching but purging the earlier, as positive ousts negative. Both the last two points are well illustrated by the use of the legal metaphor, applied to the attempts by Menelaus and his fellow Greeks to claim their rights (Agamemnon 41, 451, 534) and to the condemnation of the guilty Trojan people by the gods (813–17). These earlier instances represent an imperfect justice, executed by violence and without an independent jury. In Eumenides we see justice administered by a human court: although a goddess (Athena) is present, she does not force their hand, though she uses her casting vote for mercy. The earlier self-defence of Orestes after his matricide, spoken to the chorus and perhaps conceived as heard by the whole people of Argos, represents a transitional phase (Libation Bearers 989–90, 1026–33). In this example the pattern of recurring imagery helps us towards our interpretation of the whole trilogy as it unfolds. Whereas in Aeschylus’s earlier dramas many dominant images were simple and easily grasped (the ship of state in Seven against Thebes; the yoking of his subjects, even of the Hellespont itself, by the despotic king in Persians), the Oresteia seems to load imagery with greater complexity and deeper meaning. Sometimes the audience are challenged to interpret but the symbols seem impenetrable. In the parodos of the Agamemnon simile, omen and interpretation, immediate consequences and fearful anticipation of a dark future are verbally and metaphorically linked by an intricate chain of parallels and differences. First the Atreidae, deprived of Helen, are compared with birds of prey robbed of their young and we are told that gods such as Apollo or Pan or Zeus heed the parental cries and send retribution. Then the omen at Aulis presents a cryptic warning. Twin eagles descend on a pregnant hare and seize her as their prey. Calchas reads the signs: he recognises the Atreidae in the birds of prey, foresees the sack of Troy, but warns of Artemis’s anger: “for holy Artemis, out of pity, bears a grudge against the winged hounds of her father, who slaughtered the trembling hare, litter and all” (134–36). The word “slaughter” here suggests a further metaphor, that of sacrifice, and the prophet goes on to fear that the goddess may demand “another sacrificial slaughter, one without music or feasting, fashioner of strife, bred in the race, not fearing any man…” Within the house there will wait “a Wrath that remembers and avenges a child” (150–55). The ode goes on to narrate the horrifying sacrifice of Iphigenia, child of Agamemnon, again the work of the Atreidae. From metaphorical sacrifice we move to literal, from the death of birds to animals to human beings; and there is a stress throughout on the parent–child relationship (the vultures in the simile had lost their young, not their mates). Calchas’s warning of a future Wrath plainly anticipates the vengeance of the bereaved mother Clytemnestra, the wife who slays her husband to avenge her child and who will in turn refer to her action as a sacrifice (Agamemnon 1432–34). In the initial simile, retribution for an abducted wife was equated with retribution for stolen children; but later episodes of the trilogy will pose as a crucial dilemma whether the marital relationship can be seen as equivalent or of

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comparable importance to the bond between parent and child (e.g. Eumenides 602–08). The parodos gives no prophetic hint of Orestes’ matricidal mission, but the conflicting claims in the third play follow through the implications of these early riddling passages.

Characterisation through Language Language expresses character: stage characters are defined by how they look and what they do, but above all by what they say. Yet interpreters of Aeschylus have often questioned whether he cared about characterisation, or whether his priorities lay elsewhere (Easterling 1973; wider discussion in Pelling 1990). The debate extends to the other dramatists, but it is much easier to identify nuances of character and to see contrasting personality types as important in Sophocles’ Philoctetes or Euripides’ Hippolytus. In the early plays of Aeschylus it is reasonable to claim that the characters are as they are for the sake of the plot: Eteocles is a strong and dedicated ruler with a dark inheritance, but psychological analysis (for instance, diagnosing misogyny in his fierce criticism of the panicking chorus) seems misguided (Hutchinson 1984, xxxiv–viii, 75, 77). Much more can be said of the Oresteia. Again the greater amplitude of the extant trilogy is important, but so is the later date, and the addition by that date of a third actor (Knox 1972). One point which affects linguistic characterisation is status or class. In both Aeschylus and his successors, characters in humbler roles are allowed to speak in less lofty terms and to touch on lesser themes than the royal, heroic principals. The watchman in the Agamemnon and the nurse in the Libation Bearers are excellent examples (so are the guard in Antigone and Phaedra’s nurse in Hippolytus). West (1990a) has detected a number of colloquial touches in the watchman’s speech – all the more striking in the opening scene of so dark and majestic a play. His use of proverbial expressions (esp. Agamemnon 36–37 βοῦς ἐπὶ γλώσσηι μέγας/ βέβηκεν, “a big ox sits on my tongue”), his unfeigned excitement and willingness to dance a jig in joy, are of a piece with his devoted eagerness to clasp his master’s hand on his return (like others who nurse expectations in the play, he will be disappointed). Just as the watchman’s love of his master provides a foil to both the sombre misgivings of the chorus and the concealed hatred of Clytemnestra, so in Libation Bearers the nurse’s genuine distress at Orestes’ supposed demise contrasts with the hypocritical response of the queen, who dreaded her son’s return. Here, too, there are some colloquial touches (754 πῶς γὰρ οὔ; 758 οἴομαι; 767 τί πῶς; – why not?; I guess; what was that?), but the difference between her and her social superiors is chiefly one of tone, especially in the passage where she reminisces about Orestes’ infantile incontinence (755–60). By far the most prominent figure in the trilogy is Clytemnestra (the only character who appears in all three plays) and here Aeschylus’s characterisation is at its richest. The prologue of the first play already struck the keynote in describing her as “man-minded” (Agamemnon 11: see Winnington-Ingram 1948). Throughout she speaks with an authority and eloquence that transcend the supposed limitations of her gender – as in the beacon-speech, the visualisation of the scene at Troy, the boasts of the wealth of the royal house and, above all, the exultant speech over the corpse of her husband (Agamemnon 280–316, 320–54, 958–74, 1372–98). Agamemnon comments on the length of her speech of welcome: the implication is probably that women should be more concise (913). In the first play only she is allowed the conscious use of ironic ambiguity, which becomes typical of “entrapment” scenes in tragedy, as when she calls for the slaves to prepare the path into the house “so that Justice may conduct him [Agamemnon] into his unhoped-for home” (911). Most remarkable of all is the speech in which she gloats over her triumph over the wretched Cassandra, brought back as Agamemnon’s concubine. There is probably no more vicious



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passage of abuse in all of tragedy and it is extraordinary coming from a woman and in the presence of men. It also includes what may be the coarsest expression in tragedy, though one that is hotly disputed (Agamemnon 1438–47; Greek text as in West 1990c): κεῖται γυναικὸς τῆσδε λυμαντήριος͵ Χρυσηίδων μείλιγμα τῶν ὑπ᾽ Ἰλίῳ ἥ τ᾽ αἰχμάλωτος ἥδε, καὶ τερασκόπος καὶ κοινόλεκτρος τοῦδε, θεσφατηλόγος πιστὴ ξύνευνος͵ ναυτίλων δὲ σελμάτων ἱστοτρίβης. ἄτιμα δ’ οὐκ ἐπραξάτην. ὁ μὲν γὰρ οὕτως͵ ἡ δέ τοι κύκνου δίκην τὸν ὕστατον μέλψασα θανάσιμον γόον κεῖται, φιλήτωρ τοῦδ’͵ ἐμοὶ δ’ ἐπήγαγεν †εὐνῆς† παροψώνημα τῆς ἐμῆς χλιδῆς. Here lies the abuser of this woman here, the darling of Chryseis and her kind at Troy, and with him this captive, this soothsayer who shared his bed, the chanter of oracles, the faithful consort, cheap whore of the ship’s benches. But they have not gone without their due reward; he is as he is, while she, after singing, swan-like, her final dirge of death, lies here, his lover, and to me she has brought a choice side-dish for my pleasure (?). Clytemnestra’s own adultery is set aside, as she pours scorn on both her victims. Agamemnon is debased; it is Cassandra who is the “lover”, taking the lead role: the suggestion is that Agamemnon is weak and pliable. Similarly the roles are reversed with Chryseis and her like (insultingly pluralised); we would expect the girl to be a delight to the man, the more so as she is a captive, but it is Agamemnon who is the pet or toyboy. The crux of the speech is the interpretation of 1442–43 and especially the meaning of ἱστοτρίβης. (Fraenkel 1950, 680–83 showed that this is the correct reading, but admitted he could not translate it). Some scholars adopt contorted renderings in an effort to purge Clytemnestra’s words of obscenity (Lloyd-Jones 1978, 58–59; West 1990b, 220–21), while others urge that tragedy could in fact be startlingly explicit (cf. Pulleyn 1997 on 1447; Moles 1979 on 1390–92). ἱστός means anything set upright, including a ship’s mast, so that ἱστοτρίβης could mean ‘mast-grinder’. κοινόλεκτρος and ξύνευνος have already stressed Cassandra’s sexual role. It is hard to dismiss the idea that the term signifies the “pole” or “rod” of the erect penis (cf. Strabo 8.6.20). If so, this is the most obscene utterance in Greek tragedy, but characteristically dressed in the lofty form of a unique compound. Muliple meanings seem to be in play: ἱστός in the sense of “mast” fits the shipboard location, while its association with the loom suits another aspect of the female role. These additional nuances may complicate the picture, or add a further bite to the vicious sneer. In terms of characterisation, the speech gives a startling insight into the queen’s motivations – not just revenge for Iphigenia or passion for Aegisthus, but sexual jealousy or at least possessiveness.

Prometheus Bound – by Aeschylus? In any discussion of Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound needs to be treated as a special case, because of the severe doubts that have been cast on its authenticity (Griffith 1977; see also Ruffell, Chapter 12 in this volume). Some of those doubts concern problems of staging and theology, which are not relevant here; but many features of form and style confirm the

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majority opinion that the play belongs to a period later than the death of Aeschylus. The choral lyric portion of the play is far more limited than in any Aeschylean play (18% compared with 42–61% in the other plays) and these songs are simpler and less thought-provoking than in the authentic plays. The extended speeches of actors seem more “rhetorical”, in the sense that the structure of speeches is more explicitly signalled; there is a fondness for gnomic statements (e.g. 43, 322–24, 377–78) which seems distinct from the “wisdom” style of, for example, Agamemnon 750ff.; stichomythic practice (handling of line for line exchanges) follows different patterns from what is found elsewhere (e.g. the recurrent 2:1 sequence in lines 40–81); the incidence of several common particles, particularly γάρ, goes beyond Aeschylean norms (Griffith 1977, 123, 209f., 141, 202f., 175–81). These points could be multiplied, but the argument that this play is post-Aeschylean does not imply that it lacks some Aeschylean qualities (either it is imitating an Aeschylean model or it is the work of a younger poet completing or improving an unfinished work: West 1979). Thus Hermes mockingly predicts the coming of the eagle that will feed on Prometheus’s liver: “an uninvited dinner-guest that lingers all day long” (1024 ἄκλητος … δαιταλεὺς πανήμερος). The transformation of familiar human behaviour into something horrific or perverse is very much in the Aeschylean manner (cf. Agamemnon 1189–90; Fraenkel 1950 on 437ff., 1391f.).

Coda This chapter has not been much concerned with the moral and theological questions that have dominated much of Aeschylean criticism for a century and more. Although the social and cultural context may be alien, the themes of vengeance and justice, warfare and self-sacrifice, male pride and female passion, still call forth a powerful response from today’s audiences. Yet the linguistic form in which Aeschylus treated these great themes can prove a major obstacle to a sympathetic audience: as we have seen, the Greek text is often obscure or intractable. Literal renderings seem stilted and unnatural; freer versions, though effective or original, may stray far from fidelity to the text. Distinguished poets have attempted to bring Aeschylus to life for a modern audience (Louis MacNeice, Ted Hughes and Tony Harrison are among them), but the difficulties are formidable (for discussion see Roberts, Chapter 32 in this volume; Green 1960; Macintosh et al. 2005; Walton 2006). It may be that the greatest challenge facing Aeschylean studies in the twenty-first century is to find the means to communicate to the Greekless reader something of the richness and complexity of the poet’s stylistic art.

FURTHER READING Stanford 1942, though old-fashioned in approach, remains a useful starting-point for many aspects of Aeschylean style; a fine essay with generous bibliography is Griffith 2009, stressing the diversity of influences on the dramatist. On imagery and its significance, Lebeck 1971 broke fresh ground; her work and that of others is briefly surveyed by Porter 1986. West 1990a considers colloquialism and “naive style” in Aeschylus; Podlecki 2006 discusses “heavy” polysyllabic compounds; Griffith 1977, chapters 8–9 and Garvie 1969, chapter 2 assemble much useful information. I have not referred above to my own book on tragic style (Rutherford 2012), but it provides more detailed discussion of many points (esp. 4–16 on defining style, 109–13 on vocabulary and 119–62 on imagery).



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REFERENCES Auerbach, E. (1957). Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Eng. trans.). Princeton. Boas, E. V. E. (2017). Language and Character in Euripides’ Electra. Oxford. Cropp, M. J. (2013 [1988]). Euripides: Electra. Warminster. Csapo, E., and Miller, M. C., eds. (2007). The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond: From Ritual to Drama. Cambridge. Easterling, P. E. (1973). “Presentation of Character in Aeschylus.” Greece & Rome 20, 3–19. Fraenkel, E. (1950). Aeschylus, Agamemnon. 3 vols. Oxford. Garvie, A. F. (1969). Aeschylus’ Suppliants: Play and Trilogy. Cambridge. Reprinted with new preface, Bristol, 2006. Green, P. (1960). “Some Versions of Aeschylus.” In Essays in Antiquity. London, 185–215. Griffith, M. (1977). The Authenticity of the Prometheus Bound. Cambridge. Griffith, M. (2009). “The Poetry of Aeschylus (In Its Traditional Contexts).” In J. Jouanna, F. Montanari, and A. P. Hernández, eds. Eschyle à l’aube du théâtre occidental: neuf exposés suivis de discussions. Vandoeuvres–Genéve, 25–29 août 2008. Entretiens sur l’Antiquité classique 55. Geneva, 1–49 (with discussion, 50–55). Hutchinson, G. O. (1984). Aeschylus Septem Contra Thebas. Oxford. Knox, B. (1972). “Aeschylus and the Third Actor.” American Journal of Philology 93, 104–24. Reprinted in Knox, Word and Action, Baltimore 1979, 39–55. Lebeck, A. (1971). The Oresteia: A Study in Language and Structure. Washington, DC. Lloyd-Jones, H. (1978). “Ten Notes on Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.” In R. D. Dawe, J. Diggle, and P. E. Easterling, eds. Dionysiaca: Nine Studies in Greek Poetry. Cambridge, 45–61. (reprinted in LloydJones, Academic Papers I, Oxford, 1990, 318–34.) Macintosh, F., Michelakis, P., Hall, E., and Taplin, O., eds. (2005). Agamemnon in Performance, 458 BC to AD 2004. Oxford. Moles, J. L. (1979). “A Neglected Aspect of Agamemnon 1389–92.” Liverpool Classical Monthly 4.9, 179–89. Moritz, H. E. (1979). “Refrain in Aeschylus: Literary Adaptation of Traditional Form.” Classical Philology 74, 187–213. Pelling, C., ed. (1990). Characterization and Individuality in Greek Literature. Oxford. Podlecki, A. J. (2006). “Αἰσχύλος μεγαλοφωνότατος.” In D. Cairns, and V. Liapis, eds. Dionysalexandros: Essays on Aeschylus and His Fellow Tragedians in Honour of A.F.Garvie, Swansea, 11–29. Porter, D. H. (1986). “The Imagery of Greek Tragedy: Three Characteristics.” Symbolae Osloenses 61, 19–42. Pulleyn, S. (1997). “Erotic Undertones in the Language of Clytemnestra.” Classical Quarterly 47, 45–47. Rutherford, R. B. (2012). Greek Tragic Style: Form, Language and Interpretation. Cambridge. Sideras, A. (1971). Aeschylus Homericus. Untersuchungen zu den Homerismen der aischyleischen Sprache. Hypomnemata 31. Göttingen. Sommerstein, A. H. (2002). “Comic Elements in Tragic Language: The Case of Aeschylus’ Oresteia.” In A. Willi, ed. The Language of Greek Comedy, Oxford, 151–68. Stanford, W. B. (1942). Aeschylus in His Style. Dublin. Swift, L. (2010). The Hidden Chorus: Echoes of Genre in Tragic Lyric. Oxford. Taplin, O. (1986). “Fifth-century Tragedy and Comedy: A Synkrisis.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 106, 163–74. Walton, J. M. (2006). Found in Translation: Greek Drama in English. Cambridge. West, M. L. (1979). “The Prometheus Trilogy.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 99, 130–48. (= West 2013, 250–86).

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West, M. L. (1990a). “Colloquialism and Naive Style in Aeschylus.” In E. Craik, ed. Owls to Athens. Essays on Classical Subjects for Sir Kenneth Dover. Oxford. 3–12. (= West, 2013, 203–14). West, M. L. (1990b). Studies in Aeschylus. Stuttgart. West, M. L. (1990c). Aeschyli Tragoediae. Stuttgart. West, M. L. (2013). Hellenica II. Lyric and Drama. Oxford. Winnington-Ingram, R. P. (1948). “Clytemnestra and the Vote of Athena.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 68, 130–47. Revised version in Winnington-Ingram, Studies in Aeschylus (Cambridge 1983) 100–31.

CHAPTER 20

The Long View in Aeschylus: Intergenerational Myth-Making through the “Other” Arum Park What Is Myth? The paucity of extant Archaic Greek texts presents obvious challenges to understanding Aeschylus’s myth-making, not least of which is the difficulty of defining myth. Most simply, a myth is a “traditional tale” (Kirk 1975, 27). It refers to a set of stories preserved in a popular consciousness and perpetuated from one generation to the next through visual, oral and written means. Further, there must be something about a story that warrants its becoming “traditional” – the story and the way it is told bear enough social and cultural significance to be embedded in intergenerational consciousness (Kirk 1975, 28). Such traditional stories are by their very nature manifold, since their tellings and retellings by different voices and for different purposes result in variation. Thanks to its intergenerational transmission, myth is immortal, and it is living in the sense that it is constantly growing and changing. In other words, myth is traditional yet dynamic. It comes from and resides in a collective consciousness, but there is no collective agreement on a “correct” or “official” version. Myth-making, then, “is a form of story-telling” (Kirk 1975, 27). It is a hybrid process of perpetuating a tradition while also contributing to it, shaping and reshaping its contours. Aeschylus’s myth-making is informed by its fifth-century Athenian context as well as by its tragic form, which places limits on time, setting and number of speaking characters. But even with fewer speaking characters than, say, epic, tragedy presents a multiplicity of perspectives, none of which emerges as omniscient or authoritative. Tragedy lacks the Muse-inspired and Muse-authorised narrator of epic. Thus it may sway the sympathies of its audience towards one character or another, but not without some moral confusion. Although tragedy almost always took myth as its basis, we can see myth-making applied in historical material as well. In a fifth-century Athenian democratic context, tragic myth-making is complicated, since the historical present informs how the dramatist presents the past, whether real or mythical. Even though based on a historical event rather than myth, Persians

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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reflects Aeschylean myth-making, for it is a dramatised reformulation of an event that was embedded in popular consciousness. The eight years between the Battle of Salamis in 480 bce and the 472 bce staging of Persians was long enough for the event to become the stuff of tradition and historical memory, but short enough for it to still be vivid and even traumatic in the minds of the audience (cf. Podlecki 1966, 8–9). The context and form of tragic mythmaking result in dramatisations with particular emphases. In the sections that follow I will examine some of these emphases, in particular two tendencies that I see in Aeschylean mythmaking in the extant plays ascribed to him: his amplification of “Other” voices and the contextualisation of these voices within intergenerational narratives.

“Other” Voices Extant Greek tragedy is striking for its foregrounding of characters who would have existed at the margins of fifth-century Athenian society. The public life of Athens, with its particular conception of democracy and its social expectations of participation in that democracy, revolved around the adult male citizen. Participation in Athenian democracy was contingent on Athenian citizenship, which required descent from both an Athenian father and mother (Fantham et al. 1994, 81–82). Although Athenian women could not participate in the political life of Athens, having an Athenian mother was a criterion of Athenian citizenship (Fantham et al. 1994, 81; Rabinowitz 1993, 3). Relatedly, non-Athenians were relegated to the margins of Athenian society as they were not allowed to participate in Athenian political life (Lape 2010, 46–51). Yet the stories that animate Athenian tragedy belie this reality. Female as well as non-Greek characters often take centre stage in scenes representing public spaces and discourse. Tragedy arguably derives its dramatic efficacy from the tension between dramatic representation and the lived reality of women and outsiders in Athens (cf. Wohl 1998, xvii–xviii). Attic tragedians could credibly represent such stories, of course, by relying on mythic material that was not set in Athens. Once the dramatic setting does become Athens, the cast and story become more male-focused. Even when the setting is not Athens, the influences of Athenian democracy and its male-demos-centric practices can be felt. In Aeschylus’s Suppliants, for example, King Pelasgus, even after approving of the Danaids’ case for supplication, must defer to the Argive assembly, a deference that seems to infuse mythic kingship with Athenian democratic ideals (cf. Podlecki 1966, 49–50; see also Burian 1974 on this seeming anachronism).

The Oresteia: Gender and Conflict The complexities of Aeschylean story-telling are often embedded in issues of gender, which can offer either a clarifying lens or a source of moral confusion, or even both – clarity that results from confronting and grappling with confusion. Indeed, Aeschylus’s contributions to the mythic corpus reveal a potential for myth and tragedy to confound and prompt complex empathy. I will start with the Oresteia since it is our only extant tragic trilogy and it has enough literary comparanda to make some suggestive observations about Aeschylean mythmaking and its focus on gender, which presents a lens through which to view the conflicts of the Oresteia. One of the most striking parts of Aeschylus’s Oresteia-myth is his treatment of Clytemnestra, who appears as both more sympathetic and yet more dangerous and terrifying than in Homer. The Odyssey casts Aegisthus, rather than Clytemnestra, as the murderer of



The Long View in Aeschylus: Intergenerational Myth-Making through the “Other” 269 Agamemnon. He is the main culprit who has seduced Clytemnestra and enlisted her as an accomplice to his murderous plans (Odyssey 1.35–36, 3.235, 3.263–72, 3.304, 4.534–35, 11.409–10, 24.96–97; only 24.199–200 has Clytemnestra rather than Aegisthus killing Agamemnon). As primarily a foil for Penelope, the Odyssey’s Clytemnestra is weak-willed and faithless rather than murderous. Further, Homer makes no explicit mention of Iphigenia’s sacrifice, although Agamemnon’s complaint that Calchas always brings bad news may allude to it (Iliad 1.105–8). Homer’s only explicit reference to Iphigenia, however, seems to reflect a variant tradition: she appears by the name Iphianassa and is still alive during the Trojan War, along with her sisters Chrysothemis and Laodice and her brother Orestes (Iliad 9.142–45). By contrast, Clytemnestra and the motivations for her actions are central to Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Though she is not his untarnished hero, Aeschylus’s striking focus on her allows us to share her perspective and (perhaps unwillingly and unwittingly) sympathise with her. His is our earliest extant text to have Agamemnon’s murder performed and proudly claimed by Clytemnestra herself, though an earlier lyric Oresteia by Stesichorus may have offered this version of the killing (see Davies and Finglass 2014, 489). Pindar’s Pythian 11 (composed in 474 or 454 bce) similarly casts Clytemnestra as the murderer of both Agamemnon and Cassandra and deliberates on her possible motivations (19–25; see Herington 1984; Finglass 2007). The Dokimasia Painter’s Boston Krater (c. 460; Boston Museum of Fine Arts FA 63.1246) shows Clytemnestra’s role in Agamemnon’s murder as clearly secondary to that of Aegisthus (Prag 1991, 244; Davies 1987, 68–69; Gantz 1993, 668–76). Aeschylus gives her a more expansive role in his trilogy. Further, Agamemnon is our earliest extant source that explicitly mentions the sacrifice of Iphigenia as one of Clytemnestra’s motives for killing Agamemnon, a sacrifice that captures our attention early in the trilogy with its hauntingly vivid description (Ag. 205–49) and provides a credible premise for Clytesmnestra’s claim to justice (1431–32, 1526–27). In Libation Bearers, her psychology is emphasised just as much as her son’s, as the play details the fearful remorse that prompts her to seek atonement for Agamemnon’s murder. Even after her death, her ghost prods the Furies and impels the movement of the final play of the trilogy. Aeschylus’s foregrounding of Clytemnestra is indicative of his focus on gender conflict in the Oresteia (see Betensky 1978; Winnington-Ingram 1983, 101–31; Zeitlin 1996, 87–119; Wohl 1998, 100–17; McClure 1999, 73–92, 97–100; Foley 2001, 201–34). This focus on Clytemnestra is paralleled by similar attention to Cassandra (1072–1330), who has also generated scholarly discussion for her confusing and unprecedented role (see Mitchell-Boyask 2006, 270 n. 2). She relays the past, present and future of the House of Atreus, a function that is linked to her prophetic ability, which in earlier literature appears quite limited – the Cypria is the only source we know of that mentions it (Proclus, Chrestomathia 1). Aeschylus links her prophetic power to a story-telling role he gives her, by which she does not merely make predictions but instead puts a cohesive shape to the intergenerational myth of the House of Atreus. Indeed, Aeschylus has a habit of channelling stories through female characters, either by foregrounding them as he does with Clytemnestra or by ventriloquising through them, as he does here with Cassandra. He even puts them in charge of their own stories in Suppliants, as I will discuss in the section “Suppliants: Ethnicity and Gender”. The focus on female characters continues through Libation Bearers in which Electra similarly receives an apparently unprecedented role in planning and effecting murder, a role that Aeschylus’s tragic successors Sophocles and Euripides adopt and elaborate in their respective Electra plays (see Ormand, Chapter 11 in this volume). Eumenides also puts a focus on male– female oppostion. The Furies see Orestes’ matricide as worse than Clytemnestra’s crime, thus prioritising a mother’s life over a husband’s. Against this view is Apollo, who pits the

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breaking of a marital oath against the shedding of kindred blood (213–20), even arguing that the mother–child relationship is not based in blood since the mother is merely a protector of the embryo, as evidenced by the motherless Athena, born from her father Zeus alone (658– 64; see Burian, Chapter 10 in this voume). In his vision of the Furies, Aeschylus both nods to and diverges from earlier traditions. The casting of Apollo and Athena as younger than the Furies evokes Hesiodic genealogies (Hesiod, Theogony 185, 886–90, 918–20). But in Hesiod the Furies spring from the blood of Uranus’s severed genitals (178–85), an act instigated by Gaea in retribution for Uranus’s torture of her. This account establishes them early on as personifications of female vengeance for male violence. The Furies’ intent to avenge Clytemnestra’s death in Eumenides echoes their Hesiodic characterisation. But Aeschylus’s Furies also refer several times to “Mother Night” (Eumenides 321–22, 745, 844), thus departing from a Hesiodic genealogy that attaches them specifically to female vengeance. Furthermore, Aeschylus’s Athena lacks the mother she had in Hesiod, the mother whom Zeus impregnates before swallowing whole (Theogony 886–900). These alternating intersections and divergences from the Hesiodic tradition parallel the Oresteia’s alternating depictions of its individual characters, particularly the female ones. The Furies are at once the ruthless, despicable tormenters of Orestes as well as the elder goddesses unjustly slighted and dismissed by younger upstarts, Apollo and Athena. Cassandra is both the innocent victim and the betrayer of Apollo. Clytemnestra is the pitiably bereft mother, yet also the murderous adulteress. Ultimately gender is the lens through which to view the complexities and perplexities of the Oresteia’s conflicts.

Seven against Thebes: Eteocles and the Chorus of Theban Women Seven against Thebes, too, gives gender conflict prominence towards the beginning of the play. The sole female characters of Seven are grouped in a Chorus of Theban Women, united in their single voice, strengthened by their multitude and marked by Eteocles by their female gender. The tension that characterises the anticipation of the Argive army in the first half of the play comes to a head in his heated outburst against them. When the Chorus raise ostentatious prayers for the safety of their city, Eteocles berates them for their excessive, dangerously contagious fear and attributes their behaviour to their female gender (182–202). He thus imports gender and gender difference into a situation that does not automatically prompt such considerations. His hostility towards the Chorus here is at odds with his characterisation in the second half of the play, a discrepancy that can be explained any number of ways (see Gagarin 1976, 151–62; Podlecki 1964, 282–99 esp. 287; Stehle 2005, 103–9; Vellacott 1979–80). The sudden interjection of gender-based castigations reflects the ease with which gender divisions occur during moments of high tension. His outburst illustrates his tense state of mind and the quickness with which he engages in division and divisiveness – perhaps a reflection of his culpability in the fraternal feud.

Suppliants: Ethnicity and Gender The story of the daughters of Danaus was documented in an archaic Danais. Fragment 1 of this lost antiquarian epic (see West 2003, 266–67) describes the Danaids arming themselves by the Nile, and the titles of Phrynichus’s possibly earlier tragedies Aegyptians and Danaids



The Long View in Aeschylus: Intergenerational Myth-Making through the “Other” 271 evoke the same myth (Garvie 1969, 138–39). The Danaid myth is better known from postAeschylean sources (such as Apollodorus’s Library 2.1), which focus on the Danaids’ murder of their Aegyptiad cousin-husbands (with the exception of Hypermnestra, who alone spares her husband Lynceus out of love for him). Their Underworld punishment, too, is familiar to modern readers: they are forced to convey water in leaky jars that make their task impossible and interminable (pseudo-Plato, Axiochus 371e), but this may well be a detail of the Danaids’ myth that post-dates Aeschylus (Winnington-Ingram 1983, 59 and n. 13, citing Garvie 1969, 234–35). Aeschylus’s Suppliants is our earliest extant account of any considerable substance and makes gender and ethnicity the intertwined core of its story-telling. It dramatises what comes before the murders and punishment: the Danaids’ attempt to escape forced marriage to their cousins. Their flight takes them to Argos, where they supplicate King Pelasgus for asylum, ultimately succeed in their quest for Argive assistance, but nonetheless cannot permanently escape the Aegyptiads, whose imminent arrival looms darkly over the ending of Suppliants. Why they reject marriage is a question that has vexed many scholars (e.g. Winnington-Ingram 1983, 59–60 MacKinnon 1978; Turner 2001; Bednarowski 2010), but it seems easiest to view the Danaids as simply opposed to an unwanted marriage, whatever the reasons for its unwantedness (but see the final paragraphs of this section for brief consideration of another possibility). Suppliants prompts us to reconsider the constraints of female gender and non-Greek identity and shows us how such constraints may be partially overcome through the power of story-telling. Aeschylus puts the Danaids in charge of their story and they take this opportunity – as Cassandra does – to situate their current problems within a longer intergenerational history. The aim of their story and story-telling is twofold: to establish Argive origins through their ancestress Io and to lay claim to Zeus’s protection. Both aims are meant to convince the Argives of their ethical duty to help the Danaids, but such aims are not always in concert with one another. The Danaids emphasise their descent from Io (Suppl. 16–17, 41) and take pains to identify their own situation with hers. By detailing their connection to Io early on, they establish their Argive roots and articulate their story as part of a long – and therefore authoritative – tradition. Their first speech, delivered before their father Danaus and the audience, lays the groundwork for the Danaids to make their case later before Pelasgus. Their claim of descent from Io, of course, is intended to establish themselves as Pelasgus’s Argive kin and is based on a premise that ethnic identity is permanent. Their claim rests not only on their descent from Io – this fact alone would give their pursuing Aegyptiad cousins an equal claim to Argive alliance. They also explicitly link her to Zeus, their other ancestor (Suppl. 206), whose protective authority they invoke specifically in his aspect as god of suppliants (385, 402–4, 437). Thus their supplication alternately invokes and side-steps their opposition to marriage. In their exchange with Pelasgus (291–327), the Danaids detail Io’s occupation as priestess of Hera in Argos, her sexual relationship with Zeus, her transformation into a cow and subsequent torment by Hera, her eventual restoration by Zeus and her birthing of a child by him. In this narrative the Danaids elicit sympathy for Io and align themselves with her as similarly beleaguered young women, and the parallels between her story and theirs align Hera (rather than Zeus) with the Aegyptiads as fellow tormenters. They repeat this version of Io and Zeus’s story in a hymn to Zeus (524–99), again casting Zeus as Io’s protector within the context of an affectionate relationship and even calling on Zeus to consider the woman’s perspective (531). For one scholar this appeal to Zeus-via-Io seems “paradoxical” and inconsistent with the Danaids’ “almost hysterical rejection of marriage” (Gantz 1993, 204; cf., 1978). Their rendition of and identification with the Io-Zeus myth requires that they invoke their female gender carefully. They draw parallels between themselves and Io that are rooted in their shared experiences as tormented women, but they also elide Zeus’s culpability for Io’s torment (cf. Zeitlin 1996, 152).

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Aeschylus shows us the fallacy both of ignoring the determinative role of female gender on the Danaids’ circumstances and of equating their female gender with innate righteousness. The Danaids are wrongly targeted, but they ultimately threaten suicide – and thus pollution on Argos – to persuade, even force, Pelasgus to their aid (455–67). The threat is effective, but seems morally questionable at best and has prompted scholarly investigation into the ethical complexity of the Danaids’ actions (e.g. Turner 2001; Bednarowski 2010). Because their supplication is rooted in the constraints of their female gender, the moral ambiguity of their threat colours their supplication and its gendered basis as well. A fragment from the trilogy, usually thought to belong to the final play (frag. 125M), further complicates the validity of the Danaids’ stance regarding marriage and the questions about female gender it provokes. In it Aphrodite speaks about the universality of sex and reproduction in the natural world, for which she takes partial credit. In a widely shared reconstruction, the fragment is part of a trial scene orchestrated and resolved by Aphrodite, who parallels Athena’s role in Eumenides (see e.g. Winnington-Ingram 1983, 58). Assuming the second play dramatises the Danaids’ murder of their husbands and Hypermnestra’s refusal to murder hers, the third presumably reaches some type of satisfactory resolution, whether involving Hypermnestra alone or her sisters or both (Garvie 1969, 204–33; on the order of the plays, see the section “Intergenerational Narratives and Resolution”). It must have been some focus on male–female relations in Danaids that occasioned Aphrodite’s speech and, when read in light of Suppliants, her speech responds to the questioning of marriage that probably permeates the tetralogy (see Sutton 1974 on marriage in the satyr play Amymone). The focus on marriage in Suppliants and in the surviving fragments of its tetralogy-mates parallels the Oresteia’s focus on male-female relations. We can view the Danaids’ apparent inconsistencies as emblematic of a rather nuanced representation of female perspective that at the very least prompts thoughtful consideration of the Danaids’ position and what it points out about female gender, whether or not they have a fully legitimate or sympathetic case. Aeschylus’s Danaids show us the complexities of female identity, situated as it is within a continuing story rife with moral ambiguities.

Persians: Non-Greeks and War What Suppliants reflects is tragedy’s tendency to bring marginalised voices to the centre, as the non-Greek (or only partially Greek) female Danaids tell their story. In Persians we have a similar presentation of non-Greek voices and perspectives, through which we hear the news of Persian defeat at Salamis. Aeschylus manages to shape the legend of Salamis through Persian dialogue and experiences that are, presumably, the product of his imagination. He blends the facts of Salamis with the imagined perspectives of Atossa, the ghost of Darius and Xerxes. The treatment of Persian identity and character shows how tragedy represents alterity as a mirror for its Athenian audience. Atossa claims she has a story to tell that is “in no way my own” (Persians 162). She then relays a dream about two feuding sisters, “one who was allotted the land of Greece, the other, a foreign land” (187) – she speaks of her own land and people as “foreign”. What we know of history-based tragedy seems to bear out the idea that such tragedy performs some kind of mirroring function for its audience: Herodotus tells us of Phrynichus’s Fall of Miletus, which brought its audience to tears and caused them to fine the playwright for reminding them of their personal troubles (6.21; for more on history and tragedy, see Garvie 2009, ix–xxxii; Pelling 1997).



The Long View in Aeschylus: Intergenerational Myth-Making through the “Other” 273 This anecdote coupled with what we see in Persians suggests that dramatisations of historical events bring together individual concerns, larger implications, personal loss and intergenerational context. That these themes resonate so strongly with those of myth-based tragedies reflects the mythification of Salamis that occurs on Aeschylus’s stage. Further, these themes are articulated through non-Greek characters. Aeschylus thus demonstrates the universality of such themes and the capacity for tragic dramatisation to universalise, showing the Greeks a presentation of “self in other” (Pelling 1997, 19) and interrogating distinctions between Greek and “other”. The perspectives of the Queen and her subjects give us “historical” details like the size of the Persian fleet, names of Persian generals, Xerxes’ bridging of the Hellespont, but such details are embedded in emotional laments for the absence of the Persian men from their homeland, and the effects on their wives and children. Much of this myth-making follows gender tropes. Atossa reflects what the Persian defeat means for women, a message that is reinforced by the male Chorus, who repeatedly refer to the bereavement of women and parents from the destruction of the Persian host (286–89, 532–47, 579–83). The characters on stage react to geographically distant events. In a war context, this resonates with a gendered split between the warfront and the homefront and between war and its aftermath. Such a split recalls the Odysseus–Penelope relationship of the Odyssey, as well as Andromache’s scenes in the Iliad (cf. Pelling 1997, 18); Euripides will bring out similar themes in his plays about the Trojan War. Persians, then, presents “history” using poetic and mythic frameworks. We see the same tropes of tragic story-telling in Persians as we do in myth-based tragedies – the focus on a single family, the attribution of fault to multiple causes, perspectives that diverge from an Athenian male one. By channelling the events of Salamis through the experiences of the Persian royal family, Aeschylus hints at larger implications. In Atossa’s eyes Salamis becomes a story of lament, mourning and parental anxiety. It is at once the tale of a tragic family as well as the tale of a tragic empire. When Atossa asks whether it was the Greeks or her son who started the battle, the striking answer from the Messenger is “an avenging spirit or evil deity” (350–54). The outcome of Salamis is variously attributed to Greek mendacity and brutality (355–432, 447–71), Xerxes’ deficiencies (550–52, 800–31, 922–24) and divine forces. Such a multiplicity presents the tragedy as having a personal or individual dimension alongside larger, farther-reaching causes and consequences. The focus vacillates between Xerxes and Persia as a whole, the one representing the other – this is characteristic of poetry, as Aristotle would have it, which, in contrast to history, illustrates universals rather than particulars (Poetics 9.1451a–b).

Intergenerational Narratives and Resolution Such universalising in Aeschylean myth-making is often emphasised by Aeschylus’s use of intergenerational frameworks for his story. Although Persians, as far as we can tell, was not part of a connected trilogy, intergenerational concerns permeate the play. The Chorus contrast Xerxes with Darius (554–57); Darius refers to past Persian leaders (759–86); the implication is that Xerxes’ failures contrast with the success of these previous kings (Schencker 1994, 289). These passages recall the Iliad’s way of referencing the past – e.g. the myths of Meleager, Heracles, Bellerophon, as well as Phoenix’s and Nestor’s memories of their youths – thus infusing Salamis with a mythologised quality, a function of its situation within a longer timeline. The other Aeschylean tragedies, too, share a tendency to construct myths around an intergenerational timeline. Although I have discussed Suppliants as the first of its trilogy as per the

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scholarly consensus, there have been reasonable arguments advanced that it was the second (e.g. Rösler 1993; Sommerstein 2010, 89–117 = Sommerstein 1995). On this hypothesis, Suppliants is preceded by Egyptians, which would have been set in an Egypt ruled by Danaus, who learns of an oracle predicting his downfall if his daughters marry their cousins. In this reconstruction it is Danaus who instigates the flight of his daughters without telling them of the oracle (Sommerstein 2010, 99–104). It is not the consensus, but this reconstruction is worth considering in light of the intergenerational focus that such a plot and trilogy order would reflect. The Danaids’ antipathy to marriage would then be a direct function of their father’s concerns for self-preservation, a concern that colours their actions without their knowledge. Even without accepting the validity of this reconstruction, it is clear that the Danaids themselves view their experiences in the context of a continuing, intergenerational narrative, given their clear identification with Io, as discussed above. Seven against Thebes also presents an intergenerational narrative. It is our earliest extant source of the House of Laius myth that both includes the children of Oedipus and makes reference to their incestuous origins (753–56); Homer mentions the incest (Odyssey 11.271–80), but not the children. The placement of Seven at the conclusion of a tragic trilogy, whose first two plays focus on the preceding two generations, demonstrates Aeschylus’s tendency to conceive of myths as intergenerational stories. Seven does not resolve peacefully and happily; rather, it concludes with lamentation and continuing conflict over the propriety of Polyneices’ burial. The received ending is most likely not original, however. Sophocles’ House of Laius plays inform not only modern receptions of the myth but likely ancient ones as well, affecting what we now have as the ending of Seven: scholars generally agree that the final lines of Seven are almost certainly a later alteration informed by Antigone. The shadow of Sophocles can be felt particularly in 861–74, where Antigone and Ismene enter, and in 1005 through to the end, where the Herald enters announcing the Thebans’ decision to bury Eteocles but not Polyneices, a decision that Antigone then challenges (on the ending of Seven, see Brown 1976; Dawe 1967; Flintoff 1980; Lloyd-Jones 1959; Taplin 1977, 169–91; and Torrance, Chapter 7 in this volume). Problematic ending aside, the play’s striking use of symbol further reinforces the intergenerational narrative. After the messenger describes the six Argive generals’ shields (375–596), he comes to the shield of Polyneices, which depicts a woman proclaiming to be Justice (Dikē). Polyneices uses her, of course, to assert the righteousness of his position, but she signals more generally the repetitive nature of the conflicts that plague his family. Dikē, as in Aeschylus’s other plays, is a complicated phenomenon, which we often translate as “justice”, but it can also designate an action–reaction pattern akin to revenge (on dikē in Aeschylus, see Gagarin 1976, 66–84, 120–23, 129–30, 137–38; Podlecki 1966, 63–78). Polyneices’ deployment of dikē points up the temporal progression that inheres in this pattern. Any claim to dikē is premised on righting a prior wrong. It can thus be deployed indefinitely: actions viewed as just by one party are perceived by another as unjust and obligate corrective reaction, which prompts further action. The Chorus say as much when Eteocles makes his final exit to face his brother and they situate the imminent deaths of the brothers within the continuing story of the House of Laius (720–91).

Prometheus Bound: The Impermanence of Abusive Power The contextualisation of a story as part of a longer narrative appears in Prometheus Bound as well, whose focus is on power and its longevity. Its Aeschylean authorship is in doubt, though for simplicity’s sake, I will use the name Aeschylus as shorthand for the author of this play (on authorship, see Ruffell, Chapter 12 in this volume; Griffith 1977, 1983, 31–35; Herington



The Long View in Aeschylus: Intergenerational Myth-Making through the “Other” 275 1970). Prometheus Bound may have fit into what we consider a typically Aeschylean trilogic or tetralogic structure. It may have been produced with Prometheus Unbound, of which numerous fragments survive (on the date, see Griffith 1983, 31–35). The two have often been held to be part of a tetralogy in which Prometheus Bound was followed by Prometheus Unbound, Prometheus The Fire-Bearer and the satyr play Prometheus the Fire-Kindler, though Fire-Bearer and Fire-Kindler may refer to the same play (Brown 1990; Herington 1986, 172–77; Sommerstein 1996, 319–21). Prometheus Bound dramatises the punishment of Prometheus for giving mankind fire. Opening as Prometheus is being affixed to a rock with bonds crafted by Hephaestus, the play continues with Prometheus’s lamentations to various interlocutors, including the Chorus of Oceanids, Oceanus himself, Io and Hermes. Some type of reconciliation between Prometheus and Zeus may have occurred in Prometheus Unbound or later in the trilogy (on which see Griffith 1977, 13–16; Herington 1970, 125–26). Like the other Aeschylean plays, Prometheus Bound conveys the impression that it is part of a longer story. Each interaction centres on Zeus’s recent rise to power – its questionable legitimacy, its tenuous longevity. Even before Prometheus himself speaks, Hephaestus expresses conflicted feelings about his role in Prometheus’s punishment by Zeus: on the one hand, he resists punishing a god with whom he shares kinship ties (Prometheus, 14–15, 39); on the other, he fears Zeus’s retribution for disobedience (16–17) and understands that Prometheus’s aid to mankind may threaten the divine order (28–34), especially one as recently established as Zeus’s (35). The entrance of the Chorus and, later, Oceanus, occasions further lamentations about the severity of Zeus’s rule and ruminations about its newness. Oceanus also stresses the implications of Zeus’s new rule for all the other gods’ survival and well-being. Power is refracted through a concern for humanity. Prometheus is characterised as its benefactor, a characterisation that appealed to the nineteenth-century European Romantics (Podlecki 2005, 41–68; and see Ziolkowski, Chapter 33 in this volume). He lists the numerous discoveries and inventions he supplied to mankind (436–506), which include architecture, medicine, mathematics, writing, animal domestication and prophecy – in short, not only fire but the very tools necessary for civilisation. The benefits he bestows on humanity are a direct result of his innate love for it: he has earlier attributed his torment by Zeus to his adoption of humanity as its advocate and protector (230–41). The play’s unrelenting focus on Zeus’s tyrannical power reflects the democratic inclinations of its (presumably) fifthcentury Athenian audience. Comparison with the other major source for the Prometheus myth, Hesiod, brings out these inclinations all the more: both poets interrogate Zeus and power, but Aeschylus puts greater focus on Prometheus’s concern for humanity, a reflection of the concerns of the Athenian democratic audience. In the Theogony (507–615) and Works and Days (42–105), Hesiod pairs the Prometheus myth with Pandora’s and characterises him as a trickster figure whose primary motivation is to undermine Zeus rather than to save and serve humanity. His myth provides origin stories for the use of fire, the ritual of sacrifice and the female sex. The main focus of Hesiod’s Prometheus myth is on the fraught relationship between Prometheus and Zeus, each trying to deceive the other, while the benefit or cost to humans is of ancillary concern at most. Prometheus slaughters a cow and divides it into two portions for Zeus to choose between, intending to trick Zeus into selecting the inferior portion. His next encounter with Zeus involves the theft of fire, which Zeus has withheld from humans as a consequence of Prometheus’s attempted deception with the cow; again, Prometheus’s actions are motivated primarily by an intent to deceive above all else. Hesiod’s Prometheus benefits mankind only accidentally, as his main purpose is to outsmart and undermine Zeus. Though the basic skeleton of the Prometheus myth is shared by Hesiod and Aeschylus, Aeschylus’s Prometheus serves humanity first and foremost and his undermining of Zeus is

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the consequence rather than motivation for his actions. Indeed, he claims to have been initially close to Zeus, as he formerly served in an advisory function to Zeus essential to his accumulation of power (216–23). Their relationship sours only after Prometheus alone advises against Zeus’s planned obliteration of mankind (231–41), an objection Zeus perceives as a threat to his supremacy. Their Hesiodic predecessors share no such prior bond – Hesiod’s Zeus and Prometheus were never particularly close. These contrasts demonstrate a fundamental difference between each poet’s conception of the gods. Hesiod’s Prometheus myth reflects a distant relationship between the gods and men, with humanity functioning as the collateral damage or accidental beneficiaries of the conflict between the gods. In Aeschylus, by contrast, concerns for humanity are at the core. Implicit in the conflict between Prometheus and Zeus is the premise that the gods should have a close and beneficial relationship with mortals. In the interrogation of Zeus’s power, humanity serves as the focal point and the gauge by which Zeus’s authority can be morally assessed. Despite his centrality to the plot, Zeus does not appear as a speaking character in Prometheus Bound. The physical being of Zeus is conspicuously absent, even though the idea of Zeus permeates the play. This conspicuous absence serves, again, to put the focus of the play on Zeus’s power and its questionable legitimacy, rather than on the psychology of the tyrant himself. We never see Zeus’s perspective but know of him only through what the other characters say about him or do at his command. What matters is how Zeus’s power negatively affects everyone else. Prometheus’s torments are cast as punishments inflicted unjustly by a tyrant who exists primarily as a looming, demonised concept rather than a psychologised individual. The characterisation of Zeus as a voiceless, disembodied spectre of abusive power pervades the Io episode as well. In Suppliants, Io’s myth was deployed as a reflection of Zeus’s beneficence. She is described by her descendants, who cast her relationship to Zeus as, after her travails, a fulfilling one. By contrast, the Io of Prometheus Bound is a speaking character who recounts her own story as a victim of Zeus’s abuses (640–86). She is still in her bovine form and tormented by the gadfly and the many-eyed monster Argus – the culpability for which she places squarely on Zeus (578–81), though she does mention Hera as the direct fabricator of her torments (600–1). As with Aeschylus’s other plays, Prometheus incorporates gender conflict, here as an explicit interrogation of power. Through the Io episode, furthermore, we learn of Prometheus’s prophetic ability, which reinforces the idea that Prometheus is part of an ongoing story (this detail is absent from Hesiod’s version). Prometheus tells Io that he knows and will tell her future (709–11), which will ultimately blend her story with his, as her descendant Heracles will liberate Prometheus. Aeschylus entwines the Prometheus and Io myths, which both centre on the abuses of Zeus. The Io episode lays the groundwork for the entrance of Hermes, who announces the demand of Zeus for Prometheus to reveal the identity of Zeus’s future usurper (944–52). The episode thus reinforces Prometheus’s indispensability to Zeus’s rule and suggests the potential impermanence of Zeus’s power. Prometheus appears as the sole voice of reasonable dissent, Io as an innocent victim and Zeus as the unequivocally immoral and inhumane tyrant. The play performs an ideological critique of tyranny, but is presumably followed by a play that dramatises the reconciliation of Zeus and Prometheus, perhaps mitigating and stabilising Zeus’s power through its transformation.

The Oresteia: Revenge and Resolution The Oresteia exemplifies Aeschylus’s presentation of stories as continuing narratives. The crimes of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Orestes are contextualised within the intergenerational story of the House of Atreus as part of a series of crimes that catalyse subsequent



The Long View in Aeschylus: Intergenerational Myth-Making through the “Other” 277 crimes, finally resolved in Eumenides. On the surface, this resolution dissipates all conflict happily. With the help of Apollo and Athena Orestes is acquitted, the cycle of violent revenge comes to an end, the Furies are rebranded as the Semnai Theai (“August Goddesses”) and they are given a cult in Athens at the new murder court of the Areopagus. As Kitto notes, “What Athena, Santa Sophia, brings is tolerance, level judgement, inasmuch as she, an Olympian, accepts the valid half of the Erinyes’ case – reason (Peitho, Persuasion), and mercy – inasmuch as equal votes acquit” (Kitto 1971, 94). Concluding his chapter on the Oresteia, however, he articulates the resolution more narrowly: “[The Oresteia] does not end in undiluted optimism but with a conditional assurance: the Eumenides, ex-Erinyes, will give prosperity to a city that reveres Dike, a city that does not will expose itself to their wrath” (Kitto 1971, 95). Eumenides itself admits its resolution is a compromise: as the Furies lament Orestes’ acquittal for the dishonour it represents to them, Athena points out that the votes of the jury were equal, thus acknowledging the equal legitimacy of the Furies’ position (795) before appeasing them with a new cult. Aeschylus’s Eumenides is the earliest extant text questioning the righteousness of Orestes’ revenge-killing, though a second-century ce papyrus fragment, pointing out that the sixthcentury lyric poet Stesichorus served Aeschylus as a source, mentions Orestes’ pursuit by the Furies (frag. 217; see Campbell 1991, 130–31; Gantz 1993, 680). In Homer, Orestes is a model of filial piety that Telemachus would do well to adopt (Odyssey 1.40–47, 3.306–12). These passages focus on Orestes’ killing of Aegisthus and make no mention of Clytemnestra’s death, thus presenting Orestes’ actions with much greater moral clarity. Likewise, Pindar’s Pythian 11, though fairly balanced in its portrayal of Clytemnestra (17–25), ultimately lauds Orestes for his righteous revenge-killings of both her and Aegisthus (36–37). The intergenerational aspect of the Oresteia parallels the gender conflicts as the Furies’ anger stems not only from Orestes’ crime but also from disregard of their seniority by the younger Olympian gods, Apollo and Athena (Eumenides 162–63, 727–28). The Furies’ resentment threatens to linger after the jury acquit Orestes, with Athena’s tie-breaking or tie-making vote (on tie-making: Gagarin 1975; Sommerstein 1989, 221–26; on tie-breaking: Hester 1981; Seaford 1995, 202–21). But it dissipates when Athena establishes a permanent cult to them on the Areopagus, thus integrating the old gods with new systems, shining a light on Athens as the site of the resolution and tying Athenian legal institutions to a mythical past. Aeschylus brings myth into contact with the contemporary institutions of his Athenian audience, blurring the distinction between myth and historical reality and establishing a direct temporal line between them. As Kitto reminds us, however, this ending is a compromise that prompts continued reflection on and reverence for dikē.

Conclusion Though our understanding of Aeschylean myth-making will always be partial, the extant plays suggest some common themes. Aeschylus presents each story as part of an ongoing narrative, conveying the impression that each story he tells is part of a bigger picture. Thus he sometimes constructs his myths to span several generations and extend across multiple plays. Some of his stories end ostensibly in resolution, but even such endings interrogate whether the resolutions are satisfactory. Further, Aeschylus incorporates and even foregrounds female and non-Greek perspectives to illuminate the complexities of justice, power, responsibility and culpability. Foregrounding naturally directs sympathies toward the most prominent characters, but it also shines a light on their morally questionable actions. Aeschylus constructs myths to challenge our deepest assumptions, constantly forcing us to consider divergent points of view, unsettling our allegiances and pushing us to consider the complexities of the stories the characters inhabit and the challenges they face.

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FURTHER READING Kirk 1975 provides an accessible exploration of Greek myth and theories about it. Foley 2001, McClure 1999 and Zeitlin 1996 are crucial for understanding how gender operates in Aeschylean myth-making; Winnington-Ingram 1983 also provides some sensitive treatments of gender in Aeschylus. In addition, see Betensky 1978 and Mitchell-Boyask 2006 for gender in the Oresteia specifically; Bednarowski 2010 and Turner 2001 for gender in Suppliants. On dikē in Aeschylean story-telling, see Gagarin 1976 and Podlecki 1966, and Burian, Chapter 10 in this volume; see Wohl 1998 for how female characters specifically function within tragic reciprocity. On the legal and social status of women in ancient Athens, see Just 1989.

REFERENCES Bednarowski, K. P. (2010). “The Danaids’ Threat: Obscurity, Suspense and the Shedding of Tradition in Aeschylus’ Suppliants.” Classical Journal 105, 193–212. Betensky, A. (1978). “Aeschylus’ Oresteia: The Power of Clytemnestra.” Ramus 7, 11–25. Brown, A. L. (1976). “The End of the Seven against Thebes.” Classical Quarterly 26, 206–19. Brown, A. L. (1990). “Prometheus Pyrphoros.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 37, 50–56. Burian, P. (1974). “Pelasgus and Politics in Aeschylus’ Danaid Trilogy.” Wiener Studien 87, 5–14. Campbell, D. A. (1991). Greek Lyric. Vol. III. Cambridge, MA. Davies, M. (1987). “Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra: Sword or Axe?” Classical Quarterly 37, 65–71. Davies, M. and Finglass, P. J. (2014). Stesichorus: The Poems. Cambridge. Dawe, R. D. (1967). “The End of Seven against Thebes.” Classical Quarterly 17, 16–28. Fantham, E., Foley, H. P., Kampen, N. B., et al., eds. (1994). Women in the Classical World: Image and Text. New York and Oxford. Finglass, P. J. (2007). Pindar: Pythian Eleven. Cambridge. Flintoff, E. (1980). “The Ending of the Seven against Thebes.” Mnemosyne 33, 244–71. Foley, H. P. (2001). Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton. Gagarin, M. (1975). “The Vote of Athena.” American Journal of Philology 96, 121–27. Gagarin, M. (1976). Aeschylean Drama. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Gantz, T. (1978). “Love and Death in the Suppliants of Aischylos.” Phoenix 32, 279–87. Gantz, T. (1993). Early Greek Myth. A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources. Vol. 2. Baltimore and London. Garvie, A. F. (2006 [1969]). Aeschylus’ Supplices: Play and Trilogy. Second Edition. Cambridge. Garvie, A. F. (2009). Aeschylus. Persae. Oxford. Griffith, M. (1977). The Authenticity of Prometheus Bound. Cambridge. Griffith, M. (1983). Aeschylus. Prometheus Bound. Cambridge. Herington, C. J. (1970). The Author of the Prometheus Bound. Austin. Herington, C. J. (1984). “Pindar’s Eleventh Pythian Ode and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.” In D. Gerber, ed. Greek Poetry and Philosophy. Studies in Honor of Leonard Woodbury. Chico, CA, 137–46. Herington, C. J. (1986). Aeschylus. New Haven and London. Hester, D. A. (1981). “The Casting Vote.” American Journal of Philology 102, 265–74. Just, R. (1989). Women in Athenian Law and Life. London. Kirk, G. S. (1975). The Nature of Greek Myths. Woodstock, NY. Kitto, H. D. F. (1971). Greek Tragedy. London. Lape, S. (2010). Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy. Cambridge. Lloyd-Jones, H. (1959). “The End of the Seven against Thebes.” Classical Quarterly 9, 80–115. MacKinnon, J. K. (1978). “The Reason for the Danaids’ Flight.” Classical Quarterly 28, 74–82. McClure, L. (1999). Spoken like a Woman: Speech and Gender in Athenian Drama. Princeton. Mitchell-Boyask, R. (2006). “The Marriage of Cassandra and the Oresteia: Text, Image, Performance.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 136, 269–97. Pelling, C., ed. (1997). Greek Tragedy and the Historian. Oxford.



The Long View in Aeschylus: Intergenerational Myth-Making through the “Other” 279 Podlecki, A. J. (1964). “The Character of Eteocles in Aeschylus’ Septem.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 95, 283–99. Podlecki, A. J. (1966). The Political Background of Aeschylean Tragedy. Ann Arbor. Podlecki, A. J. (2005). Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound. Oxford. Prag, A. J. N. W. (1991). “Clytemnestra’s Weapon Yet Once More.” Classical Quarterly 41, 242–46. Rabinowitz, N. S. (1993). Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women. Ithaca, NY. Rösler, W. (1993). “Der Schluss der ‘Hiketiden’ und die Danaïden-Trilogie des Aischylos.” Rheinisches Museum 136, 1–22. Schencker, D. (1994). “The Queen and Chorus in Aeschylus’ Persae.” Phoenix 48, 283–93. Seaford, R. (1995). “Historicizing Tragic Ambivalence: The Vote of Athena.” In B. Goff, ed. History, Tragedy, Theory: Dialogues on Athenian Drama. Austin, 202–21. Sommerstein, A. H. (1989). Aeschylus: Eumenides. Cambridge. Sommerstein, A. H. (1996). Aeschylean Tragedy. Bari. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010). The Tangled Ways of Zeus, and Other Studies in and around Greek Tragedy. Oxford. Stehle, E. (2005). “Prayer and Curse in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes.” Classical Philology 100, 101–22. Sutton, D. F. (1974). “Aeschylus’ Amymone.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 15, 193–202. Taplin, O. (1977). The Stagecraft of Aeschylus. The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy. Oxford. Turner, C. (2001). “Perverted Supplication and Other Inversions in Aeschylus’ Danaid Trilogy.” Classical Journal 97, 27–50. Vellacott, P. (1979–80). “Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes.” Classical World 73, 211–19. West, M. L., ed. (2003). Greek Epic Fragments. Cambridge, MA. Winnington-Ingram, R. P. (1983). Studies in Aeschylus. Cambridge. Wohl, V. (1998). Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy. Austin. Zeitlin, F. I. (1996). Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Chicago.

PART III

Aeschylus and Greek Society

CHAPTER 21

Aeschylus and Subversion of Ritual Richard Seaford Agamemnon arrives home at Argos from the Trojan War in a chariot which also contains a young female captive, Cassandra. He and then Cassandra are welcomed into his house by his wife, Clytemnestra, who after killing them both emerges to exult in her deeds. This is the central action of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. In her exultation Clytemnestra says that she struck her husband twice, and when he had fallen gave him a third blow, “a welcome prayer-offering for Zeus beneath the earth, Saviour of the dead” (1386–87). She then describes the flow of his blood. Before explaining these words of Clytemnestra we must first raise a basic methodological issue in literary criticism. Readers of literature cannot help making a choice (explicitly or implicitly) of how much – if any – extraneous information they regard as desirable for enhancing their appreciation of the text, extraneous in the sense of not being contained in the text itself. The view that a literary text should be treated as self-contained, in the sense of containing all that is required for its appreciation, will always have great appeal, for three main reasons. Firstly, it clears away scholarly baggage from appreciation of the aesthetic quality of the text. Secondly, by focusing attention on the text itself it encourages close reading, which promotes the identification of its formal features (polarities, analogies, tensions, ironies, ambiguities, etc.). Thirdly, it seems to make the text readily accessible. This view was in the cold war period elaborated and widely disseminated, especially in the US, as a sophisticated theory (though I prefer to call it a strategy) entitled New Criticism. Despite being more appropriate for modern English poems than for ancient Athenian tragedies, New Criticism, and the factors that produced it, did in their time influence approaches to Athenian tragedy. With the subsequent advances of new perspectives (historical, feminist, anthropological, psychological, ritual, etc.), a New Critical approach to Athenian tragedy may now seem jejune. But its spirit lives on in the persistence of the critical mode that privileges (sometimes exclusively) ambiguity, irony, self-referentiality, subversion of closure, multivocality and aporia. My perspective, by contrast, is as far from New Criticism as it is possible to be. The many rituals frequently evoked in Athenian tragedy had for the audience of tragedy everyday currency and powerful emotional and aesthetic associations. Knowledge of them (and of much else) is – despite its inevitable limitations – in my view what makes possible close reading of the texts (for instance, of ambiguities) and immeasurably enriches aesthetic appreciation.

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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With this uncompromising manifesto, I return to the words of Clytemnestra. They represent violent killing in terms of a ritual, the pouring of three libations of which the third was to Zeus Saviour of the dead. This ritual was familiar to much if not all of the audience, as an embodiment of joyful order, especially at the feast. The similarities with the blood shed by Agamemnon are in the flow of liquid and “the dead”, who are in the libation saved by Zeus. This is typical of the tragic representation of ritual. Ancient rituals often differ from modern ones by containing a tension between negative and positive elements: in the wedding, for instance, between the resistance and imagined death of the bride on the one hand, and her joyful incorporation into her new household on the other (Oakley and Sinos 1993); in death ritual between wild expressions of grief on the one hand and on the other hand praise of – and loving intimacy with – the dead, and eventual acceptance of their incorporation into the next world (Alexiou 2002); in animal sacrifice the shock at the bloody killing on the one hand and the ordered processes ending in a joyful meal on the other (Burkert 1983). In actual practice ritual is always designed to end well: any negative element is contained or overcome by the positive conclusion. But tragedy tends to make the negative element prevail, or even transforms the positive element into something negative, with the result that the imagined ritual ends badly, in other words is subverted. In the words of Clytemnestra, the negative element is “the dead”. In actual practice the negative element is contained, the libation is poured to conciliate the “Saviour” of the dead. But the imagination of Clytemnestra turns the saving flow of liquid (libation) into its opposite: it expresses her uncontained hostility to the dead, as the flow of blood maximised by the third blow. This phenomenon of subverted ritual will become clearer as we see how the arrival of Agamemnon and Cassandra is pervaded by it. On entering the house to kill Agamemnon, Clytemnestra says that there are sheep standing at the altar waiting to be sacrificed (1056–57; cf. 1310). This is the sacrifice to which she has just invited Cassandra, “since Zeus, without anger, has made you share in the lustral waters (χέρνιβες) of our house, standing near the altar of Zeus Ktesios among the many slaves” (1036–38). Participation in the χέρνιβες by being sprinkled with them expressed participation in the group, here specifically the incorporation of a newcomer into the household group of slaves. But the sacrificial victim too was sprinkled with the χέρνιβες and, indeed, the killing of Cassandra is described as a sacrifice (1297–98). The positive outcome of sacrifice in actual practice is here subverted by the sacrifice of one of its human participants. This is, like most other instances of the tragic subversion of ritual, missed by the commentators. The murder of Agamemnon is also described as a sacrifice (1118, 1433, 1504), as indeed is murder generally in tragedy. In Homer, Agamemnon was killed at a feast, “as an ox is killed at the manger” (Odyssey 11.411) and later authors preserve a version in which he was killed while a participant in animal sacrifice (Hyginus Fabulae 117; Servius auctus on Aeneid 11.267). We would expect therefore that Aeschylus would have Agamemnon killed at a sacrifice, or at the subsequent feast. But in fact he is killed in his bath. Why? The slightly greater degree of vulnerability (and perhaps of dishonour) attaching to a victim in the bath seems sufficient to explain neither the switch to this unusual and remarkable location nor the manner in which Aeschylus, whether or not he invented the version, returns insistently throughout the trilogy to its details. Fraenkel wrote in his Commentary on the play that “the whole conception of Agamemnon’s murder in the Oresteia rests on premises that are characteristically ‘Homeric’” (Fraenkel 1950, 3.648). Nothing could be further from the truth. In Homer a man is indeed sometimes bathed by women (e.g. maids), but not by his female relatives, who do bathe him in tragedy – but only when he is dead (or, as here, about to be killed). That is why Euripides, who often brings out what is implicit in Aeschylus, uses the phrase λουτρὰ πανύστατα (“very last bath”) twice of Clytemnestra’s bathing of Agamemnon (Electra 157, Orestes 367) and once of bathing that is unambiguously funereal



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(Hecuba 611). The emotional significance of this bathing is, despite being alien to our culture, nevertheless obvious, and is often emphasised in tragedy, sometimes with a focus on the loving intimacy of the handling of the body, for instance when Antigone says that she will be dear to her relatives when she meets them in the underworld because she washed their bodies αὐτόχειρ, “with her own hands” (Sophocles Antigone 900). After bathing the body the women prepared it for burial by wrapping it in a robe. There is pathos in the Greeks killed at Troy having to forgo this: “they were not wrapped with robes in the hands of their wives” (Euripides Trojan Women 377–78). In Clytemnestra’s bathing of her husband all these elements of the ritual are put into reverse. Firstly, the loving handling of the body becomes (in Cassandra’s vision of the bathing as it happens) the handling that prepares to kill it: “hand after hand reaches and stretches out προτείνει δὲ χεὶρ ἐκ χερὸς ὀρέγματα (1110–11)”. Secondly, the robe was normally wrapped all around the dead man (including his hands and feet), an ordered containment that may have expressed finality. Euripides makes Electra, on killing her mother, say (over-optimistically) “we wrap the robes around (ἀμφιβάλλομεν), an ending of great sufferings for the house” (Electra 1232): ritual is in real life always a completion, here embodied in the final containment not only of corpse (by robe) but also of sufferings. But it is this normally positive containment by the robe that in Aeschylus serves to trap Agamemnon: it has no edge past which he escapes, it is a “net of Hades” (Agamemnon 1115), a “limitless ἀμφίβληστρον” (wrap-around, net: Agamemnon 1382), an “unending robe” (Eumenides 635). In the Libation Bearers Orestes regrets that he could not participate in his father’s funeral (8–9), but may now address the funerary covering, which he does not know whether to call “a net or the foot-enclosing covering of a corpse’s bier” (998–99), and says that he is now present to lament for him and praise him (1014). The burial of Agamemnon was unaccompanied by praise or lament (1547–54), but Agamemnon did in a sense receive funerary praise – albeit (again) when he was still alive. In her welcoming speech Clytemnestra praised him with a series of images, most of which are found in the modern Greek lament: if they also occurred in the ancient lament, that would explain why Clytemnestra introduces them by saying that she will speak “with a griefless mind” (ἀπενθήτωι φρένι, 895). The thematic continuity between the ancient and modern lament has been famously demonstrated by Margaret Alexiou (2002, 198–201). For instance, comparison of the dead man to a tree, sometimes a shading tree, has occurred in the Greek lament from antiquity to the present day, as has the idea of death as uprooting. As Agamemnon enters the house, his wife compares his presence there with the living root of a tree shading the house. So far we have been concerned with verbal descriptions (of acts performed within the house). Our third consequence of the transformation of funerary bathing from an ordering into a disordering act was perhaps the most shocking, being visible to the audience. Blood, which may often have been washed from the corpse, was instead caused to flow in the bathing of Agamemnon. With the corpses visible (1414, 1440), the chorus addresses the absent Helen (1455–59) in a passage that is difficult and textually corrupt: now you have put on yourself a (crown of) flowers, completing and πολύμναστος (muchremembering or much-remembered), unwashed (ἄνιπτον) blood.

I follow here the Greek text printed by Fraenkel (1950), whose translation, however, wrongly renders ἄνιπτον, which certainly means “unwashed”, as “not to be washed away”. The general mistranslation of a passage is often instructive, as arising either from a shared cultural preconception (here from Lady Macbeth) or from ignoring a preconception in the

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translated text: in the prothesis (the “laying out” at a funeral), a sight familiar to Aeschylus’s audience, the corpse had been washed and dressed, and so a corpse on display with unwashed blood on its covering is yet another expression of the reversal of the loving intimacy of death ritual, of the transformation of the bathing and dressing from intimate purification (e.g. Euripides Trojan Women 1150–52, Hecuba 609–12) to a means of polluting violence. The crown of flowers implicit in the words of the chorus is primarily (and ironically) the crown obtained by Helen for initiating the sequence of bloodshed, but if the audience could see blood at the corpse’s head (whether or not the head was covered), this would give point to the crown being both “completing” (τελέαν: the normal ritual function of the crown) and yet πολύμναστος – because composed of unavenged blood: the blood staining the textile is shocking enough to be displayed and described years later by Orestes to justify his revenge (Libation Bearers 1010–13). There is evidence that the association of blood with funerary crown was a topos of the lament for a violent death (Seaford 1984, 249). As Clytemnestra stands over the corpses she says that Cassandra was Agamemnon’s bedfellow (ξύνευνος) and now “lies as his lover” (1446). Cassandra in her enigmatic vision of the murder had used ξύνευνος to indicate simultaneously murderous robe-net and murderous wife (1116). These passages evoke an association alien to us but familiar to the audience of Aeschylus: for the bride the wedding was, just like the funeral, centred on an irreversible torchlit procession to an unknown εὐνή (bed). Indeed the event that I have shown to be pervaded by sacrifice and death ritual is also pervaded by wedding ritual. There are in fact two perverted weddings, of Agamemnon (i) with Clytemnestra and (ii) with Cassandra. (i) Not only are Clytemnestra and her lethal robe ξύνευνος, she also describes her killing of Agamemnon in terms of sexual intercourse (1388–92; Seaford 1987, 119–21). In this context it is significant that as her husband enters the house she prays to Zeus the completer (Teleios) to bring her prayers to completion (telos), for Zeus Teleios was also associated with the telos of marriage (e.g. Plutarch Moralia 264b). (ii) In Greek wedding ritual the bride expresses anxious reluctance to make the transition from the only environment she has known to subordination to an unknown male. She is taken from her father’s home, may be imagined as abducted, undergoes imagined death, laments for herself, is compared to an animal newly caught or unwilling to bear the bridle or the yoke, is subjected to persuasion, and arrives in a chariot with her new man at her new home, where they will finally lie together (Seaford 1987, 111). We will say more about these features of the wedding in discussing the Suppliant Women. For now we note that Cassandra experiences all of them, with the difference that her abduction and death are real not imagined. The image with which she expresses the emergence of her clear speech out of deliberate obscurity is of the unveiling of the bride (1178–79). Euripides, once again, may be influenced by Aeschylus when in his Trojan Women he has Cassandra, just assigned to Agamemnon, sing a ghastly wedding song with a torch imagined as both hymeneal and funereal (308–41; cf. 444–61). As with the unwashed blood, we should appreciate, so far as is possible, the visual dimension of the evocation of ritual. Attic vase-paintings show the arrival of the bride with the groom in a chariot at their new home, in front of which sometimes stands a woman (Oakley and Sinos 1993, 26–34). This is what the audience of Agamemnon would have both seen and – given the numerous verbal allusions – associated with the wedding. Critics who have rightly emphasised the visual meaning of ancient drama (e.g. Taplin 1977) have not often recognised the implications of the fact that all seeing involves preconceived, culture-specific associations. To summarise so far, we have seen how the killing of Agamemnon and Cassandra is expressed in terms of rituals that were fundamental to the lives of Athenian citizens: offerings to the gods (libation, sacrifice), death ritual and wedding ritual. This has served to exemplify the dense ellipticality of Aeschylean allusiveness, but is no more than a small sample of the



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implicit and explicit evocations of ritual that pervade the Agamemnon and the whole trilogy (Oresteia). It is also only a small sample of the rituals by which Athenian tragedy is pervaded: my omissions include prayer, the oath, mystic initiation, supplication and purification. Moreover, probably much visual and even verbal evocation of ritual is irrecoverable, to say nothing of the complete loss of any evocations by music and by bodily movements. In what remains I will stay focused on offerings, death ritual and wedding ritual as I select and analyse passages from each of the dramas of Aeschylus that I have not yet mentioned: Eumenides, Suppliant Women, Seven against Thebes and Persians (I omit Prometheus Bound, which I and many others do not regard as Aeschylean). I will end by briefly indicating why there is so much ritual in Aeschylus and why his representation of ritual is so different from the Homeric. The third play of the Oresteia, the Eumenides, dramatises the establishment of a fundamental institution of the polis, the law court, and of a polis-wide cult: the cult of the Furies will, it is made clear, greatly benefit Athens, not least by preventing strife between citizens (976– 1002). In stark contrast to the perverted household rituals in Agamemnon, here at the end of the trilogy is established a communal ritual that does what ritual does in real life: it ends well and creates solidarity. In contrast to the perversion of sacrifice and wedding in Agamemnon, the Furies will receive sacrifices in connection with marriage (835–36). Another communal ritual is evoked as the Furies are about to be escorted off in the finale to their new place of cult: they are called metoikoi (resident aliens, 1011, 1019) and are given purple robes to wear (1028), as were the metoikoi in the procession at the great polis festival of the Panathenaia. Even the perverted third libation to Zeus the Saviour is symbolically restored to its normal positive outcome by the final salvation of Orestes being attributed to “the third, the Saviour, who accomplishes everything” (759–60). The Oresteia moves from the perversion of household rituals by intrafamilial violence to the establishment of ritual that will permanently benefit the whole polis. This pattern is common in extant Athenian tragedy, for instance in the only extant tragedy about Dionysus (Euripides’ Bacchae), which may preserve the earliest theme of tragedy as it emerged within the cult of Dionysus (Seaford 1994).

Suppliant Women The Suppliant Women is the only surviving play of its trilogy, of which it was the first or second play. In it the daughters of Danaus (Danaids) arrive at Argos seeking protection from their cousins the sons of Aegyptus (Aegyptiads), who have pursued them, seeking marriage, all the way from Egypt. The old controversy over the Danaids’ motive for rejecting their suitors, which is important for what may be called Aeschylean sociology, falls outside my scope (see Kennedy, Chapter 8 and Park, Chapter 20 in this volume), although some light is shed on it by what is my concern here – to describe how their resistance to marriage is expressed as an extreme version of the ritualised resistance of the Greek bride to marriage. The correspondence between the Suppliant Women and wedding ritual is in the conjunction of (i) animal and plant imagery with (ii) choral rivalry between the sexes, (iii) bridal self-lamentation in the face of death, (iv) the threat of abduction of the bride, (v) bridal resistance. (i) The unmarried girl or bride is typically compared to a protected young plant or animal. For instance, in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis Deianeira hopes that the chorus of girls will not suffer what marriage has brought her, comparing them as unmarried to a plant or animal that flourishes protected in “places of its own” (141–49), and they subsequently describe her experience as bride to the sudden separation of a “lonely heifer” from her mother (529). In numerous texts the bride is “yoked” or “tamed” like an animal. This imagery was surely a theme of the ancient Greek wedding-song (Seaford 1987, 111), of which alas not much has survived. In Catullus’s Greek-inspired wedding song (62) the

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chorus of girls compares the virgin to a flower that flourishes in a secluded garden and when plucked loses its desirability. In the Suppliant Women the Danaids are compared to blooming plants threatened with plucking (998–99; 663) and call themselves “a heifer (δάμαλιν) pursued by wolves” (351–52): δάμαλις is cognate with δαμάζω, the word used for the taming of the bride, for instance the grieving “tamed bride” (νύμφα δμαθεῖσα) in Theocritus (8.91). The Danaids are like the nightingale (62) or dove (223–26) threatened by the hawk: in the mediaeval and modern Greek wedding song the bride is like a bird (e.g. the partridge) caught by a bird of prey. (ii) According to Plutarch (Moralia 264b) the deities needed by people about to marry are Zeus Teleios, Hera Teleia, Aphrodite, Persuasion (Peitho) and Artemis, all of whom are mentioned (1030–41) in the final song of Suppliant Women. In Catullus 62 the male chorus reverses the complaints of the chorus of girls, for instance by responding to the image of the bride as a plucked flower with the image of the bride as a vine needing the support of an elm. So, too, the final song of Suppliant Women, which is almost certainly divided between the Danaids and their Argive bodyguards, proceeds by the male chorus trying to persuade the females by transforming what they have said. But whereas in Catullus 62 the male persuasion is imagined to be successful, in Aeschylus it is at best partially so. The play ends on a note of anxiety comparable to the ending of Agamemnon or Libation Bearers, except that here the anxiety is enriched by the subtle evocation of a familiar ritualised process which would in life end with the acquiescence and incorporation of the bride. From later in the trilogy we possess a fragment (frag. 43) that mentions young men and young women singing the song traditionally sung at the bridal chamber on the morning after the wedding night, here sung to propitiate the dead bridegrooms. (iii) The Danaids lament for themselves (69–73, etc.). Referring to the Aegyptiads’ “frenzied purpose and inescapable goad (κέντρον ἄφυκτον)” (105–10), they continue “such wretched sufferings I shriek … living I honour myself with laments” (112–16). This lament for themselves as if already dead seems inspired by sexual aggression: κέντρον (“goad”) has sexual meaning and ἄφυκτον (“inescapable”), used elsewhere of death, links sexuality with lament. This would not be lost on an audience familiar with the association of marriage with death, of wedding with funeral. There is good evidence that, as occurred into the modern era, the Greek bride wept (Seaford 1987, 113–14). Marriage and death are both a completion (τέλος) and at the end of the play the Danaids desire the τέλος of this marriage (if inevitable) to be the τέλος of death (1032–33). (iv) Throughout much of the play the Danaids fear violent abduction by their suitors. Certain features of the fifth-century Attic wedding ceremony have been interpreted as a rite of abduction. And in certain Attic vase-paintings the abduction of an obviously reluctant Persephone by Hades in his chariot (Figure 21.1) resembles the wedding scenes in so many respects that it has been suggested that her reluctance reflects a real-life marriage ritual, in which the bride may be imagined as a departing to the underworld (Jenkins 1983). Before an abominated man touches my flesh, sing the Danaids, “may I die and Hades be my lord” (791). Several of our themes combine in epitaphs such as the one from the first century ce (1238 Peek 1955), in which the girl, buried in her wedding attire, was about to leave her father’s house to be wed when “like a rose in a garden flourishing from the dew’s moisture, Hades has suddenly come and snatched me away”. (v) Any resistance from the bride would in the normal wedding be overcome, notably by persuasion, whose personification was one of the deities presiding over the wedding and invoked in the wedding song at the end of the play (Seaford 1987, 114). But in the ­following (lost) play the Danaids were forced to marry their cousins, whom they (except for Hypermestra) slew on the wedding night. The contradiction between on the one hand male desire and the necessity of marriage, and on the other the negative tendency



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Figure 21.1  Hades takes Persephone off to the underworld. (After Tillyard 1923, pl. 33; cf. Jenkins 1983, pl. 18).

that consists in the reluctance of the bride, is in wedding ritual expressed so as to be overcome. But it is characteristic of the “aetiological” myth that explains the existence of ritual to intensify the negativity negotiated in the ritual, not least so as to affirm the necessity of the ritual by expressing the disaster attendant on not negotiating the negativity. For instance, the havoc created by the Furies in the Oresteia is a good reason for performing their cultic appeasement established at the end of the trilogy. The suffering inflicted on Hippolytus for resisting marriage was the aetiological myth for a lament by the girls of Trozen before their wedding (Euripides Hippolytus 1423–30). Another reason for the mythical exaggeration might be to express a ritual meaning that is too extreme to enact: for instance the mythical dismemberment of Dionysus or Pentheus expresses the merely imagined death of the mystic initiate. We do not know how the Danaid trilogy ended. From the little that survives, most substantial (frag. 44) is a description by Aphrodite of the action of sexual desire in uniting heaven and earth and thereby producing the fertility that benefits humankind. This time, in contrast to the ending of Suppliant Women, the persuasion, uttered by the goddess herself, was likely to be as successful in creating reconciliation between the sexes as was the persuasion by Athena in reconciling the Furies at the end of the Oresteia. One suggestion is that the trilogy ended with the establishment of a female festival, the Thesmophoria, which according to Herodotus was brought from Egypt by the Danaids (Robertson 1924). If so, the trilogy would be aetiological of two somewhat contradictory features of the festival, its promotion by the women of agricultural fertility and their hostile exclusion of males. Another possibility is suggested by the remark of Hyginus (273), who in general derives much from tragedy, that games at Argos were founded by Danaus “with song at the marriage of his daughters, whence the word hymenaeus”. The conclusion of the trilogy may have included the establishment of the antiphonal hymenaeal (wedding) song, perhaps in the context of a remarriage of the Danaids. Both Thesmophoria and wedding song are good candidates for tragic aetiology in that they both contain expressions of female resistance that were dramatically intensified in the tragedy but in the ritual are safely contained within traditional limits.

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Seven against Thebes In contrast to the Danaid trilogy, we only possess the final play of Aeschylus’s Theban trilogy, in which the sons of Oedipus, Eteocles and Polynices, slay each other fighting for control of Thebes. As in Suppliant Women, the chorus of maidens employ supplication of divine statues, wedding imagery and self-lamentation in fear of aggressive male intruders, here the besieging army led by Polynices. But king Eteocles tells them to stay at home rather than lament and perform rituals in public space (185–86, 200–01, 223, 230–32, 243; cf. 264–70). As the action proceeds and Eteocles seems doomed to fight in single combat his own brother, he seems to suppress lamentation even within himself: his family is “entirely to be wept for. Alas my father’s curse is being fulfilled. But there should be no weeping or lamentation, lest there be begotten a lamentation harder to bear” (654–56). Even the Curse has “dry unweeping eyes” (696–97). The intrafamilial disorder (violence and incest) that characterises the royal household is expressed in the destructiveness (curse), suppression (lamentation), perversion (wedding ritual, 756–57) and ineffectiveness (purification, 679–82, 734–39) of ritual. But the most shocking ritual failure occurs when the chorus urge the doomed Eteocles to sacrifice to the gods to make “the Fury of the black goatskin (melanaigis) depart from the house” (699–700), advice that he rejects with the words “we are already somehow of no concern to the gods”. The Fury inspires intrafamilial violence, like the Furies who are “hard to send out” of the house in Agamemnon (1190). Melanaigis occurs elsewhere only of Dionysus Melanaigis, who at Eleutherai in Attica – whence came Dionysus Eleuthereus, the patron of tragedy – sent the daughters of Eleuther out of their paternal house in a frenzy (i.e. as maenads) into public space. And so here it evokes the well-known similarity of the Furies to (skin-wearing) maenads. Eteocles, in his refusal to sacrifice, seems to embrace the twin Oedipal catastrophes of (i) intrafamilial violence and (ii) endogamy: for he thereby (i) both allows the Fury to remain in the house to inspire fratricide and symbolically rejects the Dionysiac expulsion of women as maenads, a rejection that in other myths involves the maenads in intrafamilial violence, and (ii) just as earlier he ordered the female chorus to leave public space and stay inside, so too here he aligns himself with the anti-Dionysiac enclosure of women that is in other myths associated with endogamy (Seaford 1990)). After the fratricide “the polis has been saved” (804) and ritual moves from royal perversion, failure and suppression to public performance in public space, and finally the benefit of communal cult. The chorus’s lamentation, which Eteocles earlier banned from public space, is described as maenadic (836), its sound “goes also through the polis” (900), “sends [the dead brothers] forth from the house” (915) and dominates the ending of the play. As transmitted, the play ends with the arrival of a herald prohibiting burial for Polynices, and of Antigone insisting on it, and with the departure of one semichorus taking one brother for burial and of the other semichorus taking the other (1005–78). I believe (with many others) that this scene is an interpolation (though the issue does not make much difference to my argument) and so consider as the final extant lines of the play the following discussion on where to bury the dead brothers (1002–4):   “Oh, where in the earth shall we put them?”   “Oh, where it is most honourable.” semichorus a   “Oh, Oh, a pain to their father, lying next to him.” semichorus a semichorus b

It has been pointed out (Hutchinson 1985, 208) that 1003 (given the absence of a generalising ἄν) refers to a particular place. Six centuries later Pausanias (8.18.3) mentioned sacrifices at tombs of the children of Oedipus outside Thebes, in which the flame (and smoke) divides



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into two. The lines are unlikely to be the original ending the play, for we would expect it to conclude with a departure of the chorus with the bodies for burial (see Torrance, Chapter 7 in this volume). Perhaps the lost conclusion also contained more about the hero-cult clearly implied by “most honourable”. The tragic action – the sufferings of the brothers and the extended lamentation – is a typical aetiology for hero-cult: the awesome sufferings inspire the pity and the need to appease that provide motivation for the continued performance of the communal lamentation that engenders communal solidarity. In moving from intrafamilial conflict expressed in perverted household ritual to the final establishment of polis cult, the Theban trilogy resembles the Oresteia and (probably) the Danaid trilogy.

Persians The finale of Aeschylus’s Persians, like that of Seven against Thebes (Septem), takes the form of lamentation for royalty. But in contrast to the plays we have described so far, the Persians is thematically self-contained, i.e. not part of a thematically coherent trilogy, and it is set in fifth-century Persia, dramatising as it does the reaction at the Persian court to the disasters of their expedition to Greece in 480–79 bce. The unique setting produces a representation of ritual antithetical to what we have seen so far. In Persians, as in the Oresteia and many other tragedies, rituals are performed by royalty. Before the arrival of the bad news from Greece, the chorus recommend to the queen that she perform rituals that include prayer to her dead husband Darius to send from below good things “for you and your son [Xerxes]” (222). After the arrival of the bad news, the queen says that she will bring libations from the house and instructs the chorus to escort Xerxes – should he arrive before her return – into the house so as to prevent him suffering further harm (523–31). On her re-emergence from the house, it turns out that it is for Darius that she brings the libations, which she describes in terms that emphasise their purity. She tells the chorus to accompany the libations with songs summoning Darius from below (609–21). When after a solemn invocation Darius appears, the chorus are too overawed to behold and address him, because of what they call their “old dread” (694–96), that is the dread they felt when he was alive. Darius, acknowledging their “old fear”, converses instead with the queen. He narrates the Persian monarchy from its institution by Zeus to the present and gives instructions for the future. The rituals of libation and invocation are entirely devoted to asserting the continuity of the endangered royal family and its cosmic endorsement – from Zeus above and from the gods below, of which Darius is one (643). Nothing could be further from the ritually expressed self-destruction of Greek ruling families characteristic of Athenian tragedy. Contrast for instance the other great Aeschylean invocation of a dead king, of Agamemnon in the Libation Bearers. Here the libations sent by the queen are intercepted by her enemies and their purpose is transformed from propitiating the dead king to enlisting his support for intrafamilial violence, the murder of the queen and her partner by her children. The invocation is soon resumed, with the same purpose, in an extensive sung lament, in which Agamemnon is felt to be present but without – like Darius – actually appearing. At Athens this lament would have been illegal, for legislation attributed to Solon prohibited various forms of death ritual, including visiting tombs by non-relatives (here the chorus) except at the funeral (Plutarch, Life of Solon 21). The motivation for the legislation may have included restriction of the power of death ritual to arouse the emotions needed for revenge, which is precisely what the lament does in Libation Bearers. The legislation was associated with measures designed to “take away the harsh and the barbaric” from Athenian death rituals (Plutarch, Life of Solon 12). Practices considered

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undesirable, especially if performed by subordinate groups (here women), are often projected onto foreigners (barbarians). But Athenians might hire singers of Carian songs at funerals (Plato, Laws 800e) and the chorus of Libation Bearers are prisoners of war (75–77) whose lament for Agamemnon is “Arian and Kissian” (423). In Persians the entirely barbarian contact with the dead serves to establish the continuous solidarity and power of the ruling family. Such solidarity – especially in powerful families – was inimical to the Athenian polis, which legislated to prevent its expression and confirmation in death ritual. Similarly, weddings might be impressive public displays of connections between powerful families. It is these family-affirming rituals that tragedy transforms into their opposite, into agents of familial disintegration, to the eventual benefit of the polis in the form of communal cult. But in the unique setting of Persians, outside a barbarian palace, death ritual successfully affirms the solidarity of the powerful family. We would expect this polar opposition between Persians and tragedies set in Greece to extend to the ending of Persians, and that is precisely what we find. The play ends with antiphonal lamentation in liturgical style, as does Septem. But whereas Septem probably ended with the chorus taking the dead royal brothers from outside the royal house to their place of burial elsewhere, with the antiphony between semichoruses, the Persians on the other hand ends with the antiphony between chorus and living king, whom they escort into the royal house. Death ritual for a living person occurs elsewhere in tragedy, in Sophocles’ Antigone (806–920) and in Euripides’ Bacchae (857), for instance, and, as we have seen, in Agamemnon. But in those cases it helps to achieve the death, whereas in the ending of Persians it serves, like the other rituals in the play, to affirm the power and continuity of the endangered monarchy. The queen tells the chorus that when Xerxes arrives they are to escort (προπέμπειν) him into the house (530). This refers to normal ritualised practice for the return of a Persian king. But elsewhere in Aeschylus προπέμπειν refers only to a funeral procession. And indeed the escort that the chorus provides for him (he arrives alone) is full of lamentation and of themes and bodily gestures of the lament. At first the chorus are angry, holding the king responsible for the Persian deaths and asking for the whereabouts of dead notables. But as the lament proceeds, the traditional antiphony of the lament is used by the king to reassert his authority, replacing the dead Persians by himself (as the focus of grief) and his lost escort by the chorus. It is by dominating the intersection of private and public space, as well as the division between life and death, that Darius affirms the continuity of the royal dynasty and – in the same space – Xerxes embodies it, by being escorted by lamentation into the house where – every Athenian knew – he will continue to reign. Contrastingly, it was returning from military triumph that Agamemnon entered his house, to images from the lament and like a barbarian king (919–20, 936), but to be killed by his wife. The projection in Persians of the inverted tragic norm onto a foreign monarchy is of course ideological, but not pure fantasy. An escort of inhabitants for a king into the city was a Persian practice. The concern shown by Darius and the queen, before Xerxes’ arrival, that he should have a new robe to replace his rags (832–51), reflects the symbolic power that we know to have inhered in the Persian royal robe, not least for the establishment of a new reign. We also hear of compulsory lamentation for the dead Persian king. And Herodotus (8.99) tells us that at the news of the disaster at Salamis the people of Sousa lamented not for the ships but in fear for Xerxes (Seaford 2012, 214–17).

Conclusion I conclude with two fundamental questions, to which I can here provide only brief indications of answers. Firstly, why is religious ritual so much more important for understanding and appreciating Aeschylus (and Athenian tragedy generally) than it is for later European drama?



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Part of the answer resides in the kind of society that Athens was. In our complex post-industrial societies interpersonal relations have long been mediated by numerous secular technologies, institutions and processes (including money and the state) that tend to marginalise religious rituals. But in small-scale societies that either did not have these secular instruments or had acquired them relatively recently, religious rituals tended to perform the crucial role of visibly and memorably embodying not only interpersonal relations and solidarity but also the fundamental transitions of individuals from birth to beyond the grave. The result is that religious rituals tend to have emotional, social and sometimes even political centrality; and the application to ritual of a high proportion of relatively scarce resources tends to give it a central aesthetic importance. All this contrasts with large-scale post-industrial societies. True, in modernity and postmodernity processes of ritualisation – the meaningful stereotypicalisation of action – are everywhere; but they do not (for instance) have a role for deity, which in ancient Greek religious rituals expresses their social centrality, their power over their participants and the vital necessity of performing them. In Homeric epic, which is often considered a model for the tragedians, animal sacrifice successfully affirms social solidarity and, in general, ritual almost always ends well, as it does in life. Why is the representation of ritual so different in tragedy? Given that Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides are all similar in their use of ritual, the answer cannot reside in the taste of an individual. It resides rather in a basic historical shift. Already crucial, in my view, are the two factors that I singled out in the modern marginalisation of ritual: money and the state. Homeric epic contains neither money nor (on the whole) state institutions, both of which have in the fifth century bce recently pervaded Athenian society (Seaford 2004). Coined money was issued and controlled by the state. Its power, being universal but easily possessed by an individual, facilitated the development of an unprecedented form of centralised state that the Greeks called tyranny. In a wide range of texts, including Herodotus and Plato, the tyrant (turannos) is imagined as doing anything for the power and money that enable the acquisition of each other, even intrafamilial murder and abuse of the sacred (Seaford 2003). To give just one example, Polycrates the turannos of Samos, a contemporary of the Athenian tyranny, coined money, used a religious festival as a stratagem to obtain power (Polyaenus, Strategemata 1.23), killed one brother and exiled another, and was lured to his death in c. 522 bce by a promise of “enough money to rule the whole of Greece” (Herodotus 3.39, 122). Tragic turannoi, for instance Oedipus and Kreon in Sophocles and Pentheus in Euripides, combine obsession with money, perversion or rejection of the sacred, and intrafamilial violence. The Athenian tyranny established itself by means of money (and even by imitating ritual: Herodotus 1.60) and maintained itself by money, notably by funding religious festivals. With its expulsion in 510 bce, the newly centralised (monetised) state was preserved, but transformed into democracy, which remained throughout the fifth century hostile to the idea of tyranny. At its very beginning the democratic polis instituted, at a communal cult, an entirely unprecedented but rapidly developing performance genre that repeatedly adapted a traditional form of aetiological myth (suffering ending in the institution of communal ritual) to dramatise transition from the self-destruction of the tyrannical family, expressed in the perversion of household ritual, to the recuperation of the sacred power of ritual for the whole polis.

FURTHER READING Interest in the shaping of Greek drama by ritual was first created over a century ago for Athenian tragedy by Murray 1912 and for Old Comedy by Cornford 1914, as part of the general attention to ritual as a factor in ancient Greek culture associated with the so-called Cambridge School. This was followed by a general reaction against the approach, with as a notable exception its synthesis with Marxism in the work

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on Aeschylus by George Thomson 1946. Interest in ritual in Aeschylus (and in tragedy in general) reappeared in the 1960s, initially with respect to sacrifice (Zeitlin 1965, Burkert 1966). Subsequently other specific rituals studied in Aeschylus have included libation (Burian 1986), supplication (Gödde 2000) and mystic initiation (Widzisz 2012). In Athenian tragedy as a whole the wedding is studied by Rehm 1994 and ritual aspects of the chorus by Swift 2010. Ritual in Aeschylus in relation to the development of Athens as a whole is studied by Seaford 2012.

REFERENCES Alexiou, M. (2002). The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. Second Edition. Lanham, MD. Burian, P. (1986). “ΣΩΤΗΡ ΤΡΙΤΟΣ and Some Triads in Aeschylus’ Oresteia.” American Journal of Philology 107, 332–42. Burkert, W. (1966). “Greek Tragedy and Sacrificial Ritual.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 7, 87–121. Burkert, W. (1983). Homo Necans. Translation of Homo Necans (de Gruyter, 1972). Berkeley and Los Angeles. Cornford, F. M. (1914). The Origin of Attic Comedy. Cambridge. Fraenkel, E. (1950). Aeschylus Agamemnon. 3 vols. Oxford. Gödde, S. (2000). Das Drama der Hikesie: Ritual und Rhetorik in Aischylos ‘Hiketiden. Münster. Hutchinson, G. (1985). Aeschylus Seven Against Thebes. Oxford. Jenkins, I. (1983). “Is There Life after Marriage? A Study of the Abduction Motif in Vase Paintings of the Athenian Wedding Ceremony.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 30, 137–45. Murray, G. (1912). “Excursus on the Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy.” In J. Harrison, Themis. A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion. First Edition. Cambridge, 340–363. Oakley, J. and Sinos, R. (1993). The Wedding in Ancient Athens. Madison. Peek, W. (1955). Griechische Vers-Inschriften, Vol. I: Grab-Epigramme. Berlin. Rehm, R. (1994). Marriage to Death: The Conflation of Wedding and Funeral Rituals in Greek Tragedy. Princeton. Robertson, D. (1924). “The End of the Supplices Trilogy of Aeschylus.” Classical Review 38, 51–53. Seaford, R. (1984). “The Last Bath of Agamemnon.” Classical Quarterly 34, 247–54. Reprinted in Seaford (2018), 229–41. Seaford, R. (1987). “The Tragic Wedding.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 107, 106–30. Reprinted in Seaford (2018) 257–99. Seaford, R. (1990). “The Imprisonment of Women in Greek Tragedy.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 110, 76–90. Seaford, R. (1994). Reciprocity and Ritual. Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State. Oxford. Seaford, R. (2003). “Tragic Tyranny.” In K. Morgan, ed. Popular Tyranny. Austin, 95–115. Seaford, R. (2004). Money and the Early Greek Mind. Cambridge. Seaford, R. (2012). Cosmology and the Polis. The Social Construction of Space and Time in the Tragedies of Aeschylus. Cambridge. Seaford, R. (2018). Tragedy, Ritual and Money in Ancient Greece. Selected Essays (ed. R. Bostock). Cambridge. Swift, L. (2010). The Hidden Chorus: Echoes of Genre in Tragic Lyric. Oxford. Taplin, O. (1977). The Stagecraft of Aeschylus. Oxford. Thomson, G. (1946). Aeschylus and Athens. Second Edition. London. Tillyard, E. M. W. (1923). The Hope Vases. Cambridge. Widzisz, M. (2012). Chronos on the Threshold: Time, Ritual, and Agency in the Oresteia. Lanham, MD. Zeitlin, F. I. (1965). “The Motif of the Corrupted Sacrifice in Aeschylus’ Oresteia.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 96, 463–508.

CHAPTER 22

Ghosts, Demons and Gods: Supernatural Challenges Amit Shilo Introduction Aeschylus lived in a world shimmering with divinities. Temples and shrines dotted the ancient Greek landscape, religious ceremonies (both private and public) marked time, myths told in song and depicted in art swarmed with supernatural forces. Everything, both good and bad, was somehow connected with the will of powers that ranged from the ghosts of the dead, to minor spirits of nature, to dark forces from below, to the highest Olympians. Thus it is no surprise that in Aeschylus’s tragedies human beings must constantly wrestle with a hazardous array of supernatural influences. At dramatically potent moments the wills of these diverse, generally anthropomorphic forces break into the human world through indirect means: oracles, prophecies, dreams and other signs foretell of destruction or urge violent action. Characters interpret, dispute and sometimes defy these signs – at great peril. Most spectacularly, and oftentimes with elaborate buildup, ghosts, demons and gods themselves manifest as characters on stage. As we will see, each superhuman encounter, either terrifying or sublime, offers rich counterpoints to the usual understanding of human life. This chapter will investigate a few paradigmatic instances and point to others within Aeschylus’s relentlessly complex tragic compositions. Some background concerning Greek polytheism is necessary for modern readers to unpack the web of cultural associations and relevant myths concerning these superhuman figures. The first section thus briefly introduces religious ideas and practices that shaped individual and civic life. It then touches on some influential earlier examples of literary approaches to the divine world. Thereafter, the interpretive sections of this chapter follow a progressive schema from humanity to the highest gods of the Greek pantheon. We begin with the perspectives of human characters on the gods, especially focusing on whether they have any knowledge of divine will. The next section turns to human characters who themselves cross the threshold into the supernatural, as ancestor figures, ghosts and undead heroes. The following sections cover divinities, moving from the chorus of ancient demons, the Erinyes, to ever more powerful Olympians. Throughout, we will see how supernatural speculations and interventions significantly reshape the mythic world constructed within their play, and beyond. At key points divine forces upend societal

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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values in general; at other times they raise issues that were current in classical Athens. Overall, the following discussion will focus on Aeschylean techniques for upsetting his audiences’ conceptions.

Divinities in Greek Religion and Earlier Literature The supernatural figures of ancient Greek myth were generally understood as congruent with the figures of religious cult who shared their names, although with some important differences. Literature and religion attributed to a wide range of divinities control over natural events, such as storms and plagues, and ones that we attribute to political or psychological forces, such as warfare and dreams. Divine beings in this system could be simply personifications of abstract ideas, for example Justice and the Curses. Humans named them in prayers and ascribed potent effects to them, but there are few narratives in literature concerning their personal history. The Olympians and a variety of other divine beings, on the other hand, are the subject of complex mythological narratives in which they experience desires, engage in conflicts and even undergo fundamental transformations. In religion divine beings were treated almost exclusively as abstract and unknowable, superior beings with particular domains of influence. The practices of worship and prayer were embedded in all aspects of life, from the everyday to special events, from domestic dedications to massive yearly festivals. Worship of one divinity was not exclusive of others nor was it territorially delimited outside of the sacred precinct around a shrine: travellers worshipped local divinities and new divinities could be introduced to a community. There were often several temples, both grand and small, to an Olympian divinity within larger communities, each dedicated to a different aspect of that divinity. For instance, throughout the Greek world Athena was worshipped as a virgin warrior (Parthenos, as in the Parthenon sanctuary in Athens) and, relatedly, as the civic guardian (Polias) of Athens, from which city she probably takes her name. But Athena is also a goddess of crafting (Ergane), represented in cult, art and literature with the wool-working spindle (on Athena and Athens, see Loraux 1993). On a smaller scale than temples to Olympians, shrines to minor divinities and local heroes were everywhere. Individuals and groups continually prayed to divinities to avoid evils and obtain blessings for every facet of life. Aeschylus dramatises these types of human–divine relationships often: the Herald of the Agamemnon prays to Hermes as the tutelary divinity of heralds, Cassandra is the prophetess of Apollo, whereas Orestes in the Libation Bearers and Eumenides trusts Apollo as a personal saviour. Politically speaking, the ancient Greeks routinely prayed to divinities for the protection of the state. External oracles were consulted concerning warfare, plagues and the founding of new cities. Yet when Greeks wrote history or recorded their political deliberations they generally avoided claiming direct divine interference in contemporary affairs. Even if specific gods in literature are said to be for or against a particular city (especially in epics about the Trojan War), there is no concrete evidence of war between followers of one cult against those of another. Moreover, in historical Athens there were few theocratic elements. For example, the gods were not said to have established the Athenian laws (unlike the Cretan and Spartan claims to divine law codes, see Plato, Laws 624a–25a). Although the Athenian state financed a number of cults, priests had no say in politics. City-wide festivals dedicated to particular gods included the Athenian Greater Dionysia, to Dionysus, in which tragedy and comedy were first staged. The interplay of this politico-religious context, especially the festival, with the content of tragedies has become ever more prominent in scholarship (e.g. Goldhill 1987; Winkler and Zeitlin 1990).



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Literature demonstrated a different but overlapping concern with the supernatural. In ancient Greece there were neither dogmatic religious texts nor emphasis on belief in a way that is common today. Instead, the stories of the gods in poetry sung both on religious occasions and as entertainment were linked. The works of Homer and Hesiod, though not written as sacred texts, became some of the most important influences on how Greeks saw their supernatural world. Yet they circulated alongside religious hymns and archaic poetry from a variety of authors that all meaningfully diverge from them and each other in their divine stories and perspectives. These works often describe in detail the gods’ actions and intimate motivations, with the claim that these have been revealed by the Muses. Whether one considers this claim to refer to divine inspiration or the passing along of traditional stories (or both), it means that knowledge concerning the divine is available to audiences, if not to the human characters. Resolution of conflict, social reintegration and the maintenance of hierarchies account for much of the treatment of the divine world in archaic literature. Such stability is the overarching idea despite sophisticated literary techniques that complicate every theme and its interpretation. In Homer’s epics, although deeply ironic and violent interactions occur among gods and between gods and humans, the destructive aspects of the gods are often balanced by scenes of immortal feasting, laughter and lovemaking. In the Theogony, Hesiod presents a knowable theological framework of the universe. The work delineates a divine progression from the chaos of creation, through the conflicts among the older generation of divinities, to Zeus’s ordered, eternal sovereignty. In Hesiod’s Works and Days, the harshness of life and tremendous destructive potential of the gods is ever-present, but humans can flourish if they properly follow the divinely guaranteed balance of the world. Hesiod forefronts human labour, the cycles of nature and the hierarchy of relations, especially the subjugation of chaotic female forces, both divine and human. In lyric poetry roughly contemporary with Aeschylus, Pindar balances even the most tragic stories of divine destruction with benefits to deserving humans, understood as aristocrats and victors of prestigious athletic contests. Pindar warns against competing with the gods, but his poems are programmatically structured as eternal praise for human achievement. Aeschylus himself has often been depicted as more “religious” than other dramatists. Even the first mention of him in the historical record has to do with divinities. His younger contemporary Herodotus critiques Aeschylus as having promulgated a story not in any poet before him, but rather taken from Egypt, that Artemis was the daughter of Demeter (Hdt. 2.156.4–6). In early classical scholarship there was an attempt to foist on Aeschylus a “Zeus religion” that prefigured Christianity, a theory that the plays do not at all support (see the critique in LloydJones 1956). As we will see, the ghosts, demons and gods who appear on the Aeschylean stage are not flat, symbolic figures acting out religious allegory. Aeschylus’s divinities make known their individual perspectives, needs and experienced feelings, all of which are sometimes central to the action. Against this background of religion and archaic literature shines more clearly (and darkly) the emphasis in Aeschylean tragedy on humanity’s uncertainty concerning the gods and on the destabilising aspects of encounters with the divine.

Knowledge of the Divine in Aeschylean Tragedy By contrast to archaic Greek literature, in tragedy the lack of a narrator means that all statements about the divine world come from characters’ embedded perspectives. Therefore one must keep in mind that human characters generally lack even indirect knowledge of divine will. The Oresteia contains numerous exclamations of uncertainty about which divinities

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affect particular deeds, the proper phrasing of prayers, the justness of destructive prayers and the expected responses of the gods (Goldhill 2004, 53–54). The exceptions come as ­powerful – often destructive – incursions into human existence: at some points characters become privy to oracles, at others prophets dramatically divulge the future. Yet these glimpses of divine will are never presented as full revelation; they occur in language and thus must be interpreted. Choral songs, which serve as structuring interludes in tragedy, include numerous mythological stories, praise to the gods and oftentimes theologically framed reports of human actions. Concerning the question of whether tragic choruses have privileged access to the divine in their songs, there is a long academic debate (Fletcher 1999; Rosenmeyer 1982, 145–87). A crucial insight is that choral songs never demonstrate any precise knowledge of divinity or the future when compared with the oracles quoted by characters or with the language of staged gods (Parker 2009, 128–32). Aeschylus’s foreign characters, despite sometimes manifesting magical abilities (such as raising the dead in the Persians, 619–842), nevertheless do not seem to understand the gods any better (see later in this chapter). Egyptian and Persian characters rarely name gods but, when they do, use Greek names such as Poseidon and Zeus. Thus the obscurity of divine purpose is cross-cultural and thoroughgoing. The inability of human characters to access the divine schema has wide-ranging consequences for their interpretations of events and human motivations. In the Persians, the Messenger ascribes the defeat of the expedition to conquer Greece to “some avenger or evil spirit, appearing from somewhere” (354). A later passage takes this uncertainty to an extreme: “whoever had before considered the gods as nothing, implored them then with prayers” (497–99). Although scholars tend to deny the possibility that this passage indicates “atheism” (Garvie 2009, 223–24), it is patently a reference to disbelief in, indifference to, or active disrespect of the gods among the Persian soldiers. As such, it seems like an early (perhaps the earliest) analogue of the modern saying “there are no atheists in foxholes”, implying, of course, that there are atheists elsewhere and at other times. Needless to say, those who show contempt for the divine end badly; many of these soldiers drown immediately thereafter, as the sun melts the frozen stream they are crossing. Another paradigm by which human characters attempt to interpret action is that both divine and human reasons compel an action. This “double-motivation” occurs a number of times in Homer, in passages that depict a god motivating an action and subsequently a human acting as though it were their idea (e.g. Odyssey 18.158–65; Pelliccia 2011). Aeschylus uses this technique at key points in a number of his plays, for example in each of the kinmurders in the Oresteia. The most famous passage is found in the choral song depicting Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter. Calchas represents the sacrifice as the demand of Artemis to allow the Greek army to sail to Troy (Agamemnon 198–202). The Chorus sing that Agamemnon shed tears and was internally torn, but finally that “he put on the yoke of necessity” (218). The condensed image captures Agamemnon simultaneously making an active decision and being forced by fate (Lesky 1966). This does not absolve him from responsibility, as they add that Agamemnon’s mind “blew in an impious direction” (219) and Clytemnestra murders him in part for this very act. Examples of this double motivation occur with other interfamilial murderers: Clytemnestra herself claims both that she is responsible for killing Agamemnon (Agamemnon 1404–06) as well as that she is not responsible, but only incarnates the curse of the house (1497–512; Foley 2001, 211–34). Orestes refers to Apollo’s prophecy that urges him to kill his mother (Libation Bearers 269–97) but also claims that even if he disbelieves it (298) he has a host of compelling human reasons (299–304). Eteocles in the Seven against Thebes decides to enter combat against his brother, in a scene filled with invocations of the family curse and gods that drive him to it (653–719). Eteocles, however, conjointly cites personal knowledge of his



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brother’s character and actions since childhood, as well as his right as “ruler against ruler, brother against brother, enemy against enemy” (664–71; Torrance 2007, 38–63). In each of these scenes Aeschylus eschews the direct voice of a divinity. Instead he focuses attention on the extreme difficulties humans face in comprehending divine effects on the world. The examples above concern mythic characters and mythic wars, but the Persians includes speculations about divine will that would have doubtless been far more poignant for the Athenian audience. Aeschylus dramatises the fallout from the sea battle at Salamis (480 bce) from the enemy perspective: after the Persian Messenger blames the loss on unknown gods who kept Athens safe (quoted earlier in this section), he immediately turns to depict specific Greek deceptions and tactics (Persians 355–432). Since the playwright and many of the audience members fought in this existential war against the Persians, it is as though Aeschylus is winking to his audience, hinting that they were actuating divine plans. Yet even here Aeschylus does not let speculation about divine will stand as simple truth. He jars the audience with continual, disconcerting references to double-motivation. An example is the explanation by the Ghost of Darius of why his son’s decision to attack Greece was doomed from the start (Persians 742, 749–50): Nevertheless, when man hastens to his own undoing, the god too participates with him… Mortal though he was, he thought in his folly that he would gain the mastery of all the gods, yes, even over Poseidon.

According to Darius, Xerxes’ hubris consisted of building a bridge across the Hellespont to Europe (the reference behind “mastery…even over Poseidon”) and his subsequent downfall was due to the sea god’s anger at this attempted yoking. In fact, Darius was himself known to have bridged the sea and he, too, lost disastrously to the Greeks (Rosenbloom 2006, 101–03). What kind of responses might audiences have had to this ascribing of the Persian loss to an architectural affront against Poseidon, rather than emphasising the misjudgement of the second attempt by Persians to conquer a well-organised, highly independent Greece? This is not to say that Aeschylus entirely subverts a moral message: an oracle predicts further Persian routs by the Greeks as punishment for their impieties in war (such as burning temples, 800–28). Audience members, who well know the historical outcome, can feel that divine justice has been fulfilled. Nevertheless, such moments are rarities in the Aeschylean corpus. The plays are mostly brimming with human declarations of ignorance and divergent understandings of superhuman influence. This is the fundamental predicament of Aeschylus’s human characters and he implies that the audience shares their illiteracy of divine plans.

Undead Humans A number of Aeschylus’s plays dramatise extensions of human existence beyond death. As in Greek culture more generally, a variety of possible continuations is evident: either as souls in Hades, spirits to whom prayer is made, ghosts, or even heroic figures. In the rare cases when the undead appear on stage, they simultaneously alter the dramatic action and give radically different perspectives on human life. In the Persians, the Queen and the Chorus of Persian Elders raise the former king from the dead in order to somehow alleviate the disastrous defeat by the Greeks (Persians 607–842; Muntz 2011, 257–71). Yet, although the Ghost of Darius claims much influence in the underworld (686–92), he asserts no power to intervene in the living world. The Ghost character has also clearly gained no knowledge after death: he has to be informed of the Persian losses and, when he does speak of the future, it is only to reveal the oracle he heard while alive (739–41).

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Darius’s final lines cause much consternation among commentators, for he sententiously advises the Persian Elders (and thus, in some way, the audience) to “give pleasure to your soul” because wealth is of no use to the dead (841–42). Whereas the Greeks thought of Persians as overly concerned with material goods, and the living characters in the play also emphasise fine clothing and the benefits of wealth, Darius’s supernatural prescription that “you can’t take it with you” seems wildly inappropriate in the context of national calamity (Rosenbloom 2006, 114–15). His reappearance nevertheless puts different frames of reference together for the internal and external audiences: he expands on the Persian catastrophe with the prediction of even greater losses, but also gives a more general perspective on life from the vantage point of the dead (Sourvinou-Inwood 2003, 223–27). Audiences are left to their own devices to understand what such wisdom from the afterlife might mean for the Persians – and for humanity. Similarly, the Ghost of Clytemnestra in the Eumenides continues the discord that the living queen sowed in the first two plays, but also transfigures it. When alive, Clytemnestra deceives Agamemnon with her words; murders him in revenge for his killing their daughter; and takes over the state with her lover. In these acts she subverts Greek ideas about gender, family and a well-ordered state. The Ghost of Clytemnestra returns for vengeance against her own murderer, Orestes, who is both her son and the heir to the throne. Being powerless herself, she must urge the Erinyes (aka the Furies) to act for her. In the Libation Bearers, Orestes presents his murder of Clytemnestra as just vengeance (973–1006), yet in the Eumenides her Ghost character rejects his notion of justice (94–139). The challenge she presents is not restricted to her individual need for vengeance, but shakes the entire patriarchal system. The whole play, in fact, is structured around her ongoing claims, which lead to the confrontation between the Erinyes and Apollo and to the trial of Orestes (Shilo 2018). Through ghost figures and other allusions to the undead Aeschylus questions the evaluation of justice and, by extension, all living decisions: how can one appraise action if its consequences continue to change after death? At the other pole of human afterlife transformations are semi-divine heroes. After Homeric times, shrines to local supernatural beings became associated with dead humans, especially transgressive mythological figures. These were understood to be heroes, who might be more concerned with their locale and its community than the Panhellenic Olympian divinities. In the Oresteia, playing off of the historical worship of Agamemnon as a hero around Sparta, Aeschylus moves Agamemnon’s palace to Argos. Aeschylus thus more easily creates an origin story (etiology) for the contemporary alliance between Argos and Athens and simultaneously reduces Spartan claims to Agamemnon’s supernatural support. However, in the Eumenides Agamemnon is not the focus of heroic power, but rather it is Orestes who rewards his acquittal in Athens with vows for an eternal military alliance (754–77). Orestes’ transformation into a martial hero, however, presents a twofold challenge to audience members: First, they have already witnessed Orestes’ actions on stage, as a young man who never went to war but, instead, murdered his mother. Although heroes were oftentimes those who have done terrible deeds, still Orestes’ military language contrasts greatly with his depiction until that moment. Second, the Athenian alliance with Argos was a historical reality for the audience, but not Orestes’ association with Argos. Aeschylus’s etiology is thus novel and we have no evidence that it was ever taken up thereafter. Overall, Aeschylean plays frame their afterlife scenes in ways that begin with the specific dilemmas of the plot and then expand to themes of societal and political import. We should nevertheless recognise that each encounter with the undead includes deeply subversive elements that prevent us from taking their ostensible message as definitive.



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A Chorus of Curses, the Erinyes The darkest forces of the universe terrifyingly appear in the Eumenides in the form of the Chorus of Erinyes. These ancient divinities, known from Mycenaean times, have only a minor cultic presence in classical Greek religion, but are widespread in the visual arts and archaic literature. They are said to be daughters of the primordial earth goddess, Gaia, and, as far back as the figurines at Mycenae, are generally depicted as snakes. Both these features locate them within the category of the “chthonic”: dark, bloody and deadly forces related to the earth and underworld. In previous literature their functions fall into two loosely related categories: balancing the universe and carrying out familial curses among humans (on their role in art and literature see Sewell-Rutter 2007, 78–109.) Besides the Eumenides, in which they appear as characters, Aeschylean plays only invoke them in speech, but do so often. Each of those other plays also refers exclusively to either one or the other of their previous functions. In the Prometheus Bound, which may not have been written by Aeschylus (see Chapter 12 in this volume), the Erinyes, along with the Moirai (Fates), represent divine necessity, to which even Zeus must bend (515–18). That is, they are impersonal forces of divine balance. On the other hand, in the Seven against Thebes their sole function is enacting familial curses (e.g. 70). This is also the case in the first two plays of the Oresteia: in the Agamemnon they are referred to as part of the family curse (e.g. 1117–20). In the Libation Bearers, once Orestes commits familial murder, the Erinyes appear only to him, driving him mad. The Erinyes in this scene externalise Orestes’ internal guilt and thus ambiguously represent external punishment for blood crime. With theatrical inventiveness, Aeschylus shifts the Erinyes from abstract beings in the Agamemnon to invisible forces at the end of the Libation Bearers, to highly physical ones at the start of the Eumenides. In that final play of the trilogy they appear on stage as horrifying, anthropomorphic beings with gorgon heads: snoring at first, they are roused by the Ghost of Clytemnestra to hunt Orestes like hell-hounds. They claim they will slurp his blood and send him to eternal punishment in Hades (Eumenides 264–75). They enact their duty through obsessively repetitive songs and dances meant to magically bind Orestes. With this multilayered spectacle Aeschylus activates for the audience the Erinyes’ eerie emotional effects. Yet as the Eumenides progresses, the Erinyes transform from one-dimensional, monstrous avengers into layered characters. Like other staged divinities, the Erinyes have their own motivations: they declare that it is their divinely given eternal duty to punish mortals for murder (312–20), a task paradoxically both honourable and polluting (385). This differentiates them from the Olympians, who want nothing to do with blood and punishment (360–66). The Erinyes go further, declaring that their venerable justice cannot be overruled by the newer Olympians (e.g. 155–63). In this case, they deny that Orestes can ever be purified of his mother’s murder except by succumbing to them and even accuse Apollo of defiling sacred Delphi by sheltering a polluted human (165–72). The Erinyes thus weaponise the notion that the spilling of blood causes pollution (Meinel 2015, 119–27). They personify the extreme point of vendetta, continuing it beyond the death of the last human avenger for Iphigeneia and Clytemnestra. One may also read them as championing the claims of blood kinship and femininity against male-dominated politics (Zeitlin 1996, 101–19). A complex interplay emerges between the Erinyes’ universal view of justice and their particularised staging. As characters they are relentless, violent in their language and portrayed as ancient, feminine, monstrous beings. This provides Apollo one angle of attack that he could not use against the abstract notion of retributive justice: in his verbal (and nearly physical) battle with the Erinyes he presents purely negative versions of their justice based on their appearance (192–93). Their very notion of justice, unquestionable as long as the Erinyes

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were distant or invisible, fissures under the stress of cross-examination. Apollo questions their application of law, pointing to their failure to pursue Clytemnestra, the killer of Agamemnon, when she was alive (211–24). The Erinyes – as other tragic characters do when cornered – prevaricate: they claim that their mandate applies exclusively to kindred blood, whereas Agamemnon was only married to his killer (212). Thus the embodiment of these divine forces opens them up to a fierce inquisition, creating the necessary conditions for a revolution of justice in the divine and human realms. Even though the arguments are unsatisfactory on both sides, the Erinyes refuse to abandon their duty (timē, a word that means “honour” as well, 227) and fight back when they feel dishonoured (atimos and related terms, e.g. 780). Their refusal to be bullied by the male god and their protection of Clytemnestra’s rights as a mother cause a conflict too great for Apollo alone to resolve. The resultant trial leads to the culminating reason for staging the Erinyes: after they lose, their transformation in character corresponds to a transformation in justice. Athena’s offer to them of real honour instead of dishonour is contingent on their adding blessing to their punishing aspects. Henceforth, instead of roaming the earth to punish all humankind for transgressions, they settle in one city, Athens, for its sole benefit. They add blessings for milk and dew – liquids of fertility – to their previous singular focus on blood. They become associated with the beneficial goddesses known as Eumenides (literally “Kindly Ones”, the meaning of the play’s title), or Semnai Theai (“Sacred Goddesses”, 1041), an Athenian cult with which the audience would have been familiar. A torchlight procession ends the trilogy, reminiscent of both the festival of Dionysus and the yearly ritual for the Semnai Theai (Sourvinou-Inwood 2003, 238–39). The Erinyes’ unexpected evolution in the Eumenides is just as striking intellectually as their terrifying costume and binding magic is dramatically. There is a dilemma in this alteration that the blessings and ritual ending obscure: the Erinyes, who had an eternal, free-roaming, apolitical mandate of blood vengeance given by Fate (391–93) actually choose to abandon these duties in favour of staying in one city and operating for its political interests against all others. Supernatural change is thus central to the Eumenides. This shift is ostensibly positive. It occurs under the protection of Athena and for the sake of Athens, the city of the audience. Nevertheless, such divine mutability entails the possibility of further reversals in the future. As we will see in the section “Athena for the City; Athena for War”, Aeschylus’s Athena addresses this theological issue with a disturbing, political solution.

Apollo: Violence, Prophecy and Rhetoric Before turning to Athena’s role, however, we must more closely examine the adversary of the Erinyes in the Oresteia, Apollo. The modern, abridged Apollo is the youthful god of light and wisdom. A casual or generalising reading of the Oresteia might see in Apollo only the allgood protector of Orestes and the antagonist of blood-sucking demons. Yet, like other Olympians, he has a long, varied religious and mythic tradition. Some of the important positive attributes of Apollo are healing, prophecy (at Delphi especially), purification and ritual initiation of youths into manhood. His function as the god of disease, however, is the wellestablished counterpart to his function as the healing god. He also has a dual aspect as the prophetic god par excellence, since prophecy must tell of the future, whether favourable or ruinous (Roberts 1984, 60–72). Yet one should not end the analysis of tragic representations of the gods at the notion of ambiguity. Instead, this elementary Greek religious and dramatic dynamic ought to be the starting point of a deeper interpretation.



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In the Oresteia the baneful aspects of Apollo precede his healing functions, thus deeply problematising his later characterisation as both saviour of Orestes and mouthpiece of Zeus. Apollo’s possible role in the vengeance against Troy (Agamemnon 55–59) and his arrows of plague shot at the Greek army (509–13) are some of the first mentions of the god. It is his prophet, Calchas, who demands the sacrifice of Iphigeneia to Artemis, despite calling on Apollo as healer (146). In the Cassandra scene, too, the main emphasis is on Apollo’s violence. From the start, Cassandra, the Trojan priestess of Apollo, blames him for bringing her to her doom and laments her fate by assimilating his name (Apollōn) to a Greek verb for destruction (apollōn 1080–81). In a confession whose savage aspects still receive too little emphasis, Cassandra tells of the god sexually assaulting her: “he came to me as a wrestler” (1206), a simile used elsewhere by Aeschylus of warfare and rarely used in Greek for love (Denniston and Page 1957, ad loc.). She continues that after “assenting” to his advances she somehow “cheated him” (1208), although the exact meaning of each of these terms is never made clear. Oftentimes in myth – and in previous Aeschylean plays – the sexual aggression of a divinity against a human results in a divinely blessed child (e.g. Zeus and Io in the Suppliants), which seems to bring some resolution within each story (although it is imperative for modern readers to question precisely such resolutions). This is not the case here. Instead, Cassandra’s sexual encounter with Apollo leads to him cursing her, which is why her prophecies are always disbelieved (1212). Corresponding to Cassandra’s prophetic-destructive connection to Apollo is Orestes’ own (Morgan 1994). In the Libation Bearers, Apollo’s prophecies drive Orestes to murder his mother on threat of terrible punishments brought on by the Erinyes (283). The act itself nevertheless leads to pursuit by the Erinyes. We see that in the first two plays it is (often gendered) violence and prophetic destructiveness that characterise Apollo’s interventions in the human world. In the Eumenides Apollo appears on stage – perhaps in a dazzling costume – as the champion of Orestes. Yet alternating with characterisations of him as a non-violent saviour connected to Zeus are his sometimes brutal, sometimes deceptive speeches and the accusations brought against him. The play begins at his temple in Delphi, where his priestess gives a new, pointedly non-violent aetiology for Apollo’s takeover of the sanctuary: instead of having slain the monstrous Python, as in previous myth, in this version Apollo receives Delphi as a birthday gift from a succession of female goddesses tracing back to Mother Earth (1–8). The disparity between Apollo’s behaviour and this description is evident once he confronts the Erinyes on stage in an extraordinarily aggressive manner, insulting and threatening them with his arrows all the way to the end of the trial. They, in turn, accuse him of overturning divine justice, of polluting his sanctuary with blood and even of getting the Fates drunk so he can subvert the natural order (723–28), a further aggression against female divinities. These dissonances in the divine and human realm banish any easy reconciliation of the positive and negative aspects of the divinity. Apollo’s rhetoric within the trial of Orestes further undermines the idea that the god acts in line with absolute justice, as he claims. Apollo declares that his prophecy is directly from Zeus (614–20), yet his arguments during the trial have long drawn suspicion: First, he offers blessings and an alliance to Athens if the jurors acquit Orestes, unrelated to the issue of his guilt (665–73). Second, he states that the jurors should ignore their oaths (621), which Athena’s instructions later explicitly contradict (709–10). Third, Apollo infamously claims that a mother is not biologically necessary for reproduction: he declares that while the father plants his seed, a mother is merely a stranger to her son (657–61). This startling declaration is used to support Apollo’s arguments that killing a mother is less problematic than killing a father and king. The passage has generated much debate, but there is no evidence that such a biological theory was generally accepted by the audience. It is not even the position of Clytemnestra’s children within the play. Their repeated references to her as mother force

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them to confront the difficulty of killing her, by contrast to their ease at dispatching her co-conspirator, Aegisthus. Some scholars have therefore identified Apollo as the preeminent proponent of a larger pattern of misogyny within the Oresteia (Zeitlin 1996, 107–12). The god buttresses his assertion with an example, but, crucially, his choice is neither human nor a precise fit: he refers to Athena herself, who sprang from Zeus’s head after he swallowed her mother (662–66). The appeal to the goddess is pointed, for she not only presides over the case, but casts what is likely the decisive vote. This draws attention to Apollo’s devious forensic techniques (such as those with which the audience would have been familiar from human trials and public deliberation): he offers political gifts to the jurors, attacks his opponents, appeals to the voting judge and uses suspect arguments. In sum, Apollo’s depiction in the Oresteia blends claims for his non-violence, Zeus-supported truthfulness and calm deliverance of Orestes with his numerous prophecies of bloodshed, personally violent acts (especially against females) and manipulative justifications.

Athena for the City; Athena for War Athena in the Eumenides acts on the grand canvas of politics, warfare and universal human– divine relations. Through her, Aeschylus cultivates every device at his disposal to give the trilogy a sense of satisfying closure after the uncertainty and violence that haunted all previous scenes of the Oresteia. She is central to the dramatic reversals, patriotic promises and religious rituals of the ending. Athena’s divine intervention also correlates with a spatial shift to the city of the audience: after the first two plays occur in Argos, the Eumenides opens in Delphi, then unexpectedly relocates to Athens. Further, Aeschylus links the mythic time of the play to contemporary Athens by dramatising Athena “founding” the Areopagus, which was a living institution for the audience. With Athena at the helm of the city, victory, profit and persuasion seem to become all-positive terms, the earlier rhetoric of darkness turns into that of light, and the gods are said to bless Athens forever. For these reasons the end of the trilogy continues to be understood by many readers and scholars as Athenian propaganda (Kennedy 2009, 32–35). Yet whereas this is the dominant strain of Athena’s language and the dramatic structure of the ending, it also invites a series of subversive questions: how, precisely, does Athena achieve closure in a violent, uncertain world? On what political model is her favoured city-state to operate? If Athens is the eternal victor, what happens to the rest of humanity? The particulars of Athena’s actions and rhetoric lead to unexpected and little-discussed answers. Her approach to resolving conflict is unique in the trilogy and some have labelled it entirely positive. First, she reverses Apollo’s strategy: whereas he attacks the Erinyes, Athena treats them respectfully, allowing them to entrust her with judging their case against Orestes. Second, she listens to both sides in what amounts to a “pre-trial hearing” and grants each a turn in the trial. Athena asserts that neither a divinity nor humans can judge the case of continuing vengeance alone, without instigating further violence. Consequently, she chooses the wisest Athenians to be jurors alongside her as vote-casting judge. Her court seems to be a model of humans and divinities working together. Because it involves human voting, it has often also been understood as a template for democracy (Meier 1993, 112–13). Violence is brought near in Athena’s scenes, yet always seems to retreat. One must keep in mind that the “first trial for bloodshed” (Eumenides 682) is a matter of life and death for Orestes. Once the case is decided, Athena focuses on alleviating the resultant conflict by placating the losing party. Yet an attentive audience might notice her rhetorical legerdemain: Athena declares that “the defendant wins (nikā) even if the vote is equal (isopsēphos)” (741). After the Erinyes become incensed, however, she uses the same Greek terms for



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winning (nikaō) and an equal vote (isopsēphos) to try to convince them that they have not actually lost: “you have not been defeated (nenikēsth’), but the case truly resulted in an equal vote (isopsēphos)” (795–96). Similarly, once the Erinyes threaten Athens for contravening their allotted function, Athena alludes to her capacity for violence even against divinities, through Zeus’s thunderbolt (827–29). She raises this option only to dismiss it, in favour of repeatedly offering the Erinyes honoured places in Athens. When she succeeds, Athena declares that this was a victory of the goddess Peithō (“Persuasion”) and Zeus of the Assemblies (970–75). Athena compiles an array of divine allies for Athens: the heroised Orestes, the reformed Erinyes, herself and even the highest powers, Zeus and Fate (1045– 46). She consistently declares that her promises are eternal (e.g. 898–99). Athena’s orchestration of the resolution thus gives the impression that the Oresteia is intended to teach humanity a lesson: building relationships and influencing through rhetoric is more positive and effective than violence. However, to better understand Athena’s “founding of the new law” in context, it is important to know that Aeschylus is innovating, and with politically torrid material. Concerning the trial of Orestes, our evidence suggests that previous myths depicted the jury as composed exclusively either of gods or of humans, not the hybrid model in the Oresteia (Sommerstein 1989, 4–5). Additionally, the ancient institution of the Areopagus was probably inherited from pre-democratic times as either a governmental council or a homicide court; we have no other legends of its divine establishment. As far as we can tell, over time the Areopagus became an aristocratic bastion that had its power reduced by a democratic reformer, Ephialtes, in order to increase the power of the people, only a few years before the Oresteia was staged (Zelnik-Abramovitz 2011, 104–11). The evidence implies that aristocratic reactionaries subsequently killed Ephialtes as part of widespread civil strife between the two factions (Cartledge 2016, 85–86). In this context, Athena’s divine warning against ever altering the laws (681–95) is ambiguously related to the contemporary turmoil: is Aeschylus speaking through her against Ephialtes’ changes or against reversing those changes? Scholars have argued both sides (see further, Chapter 1 in this volume). Rather than promoting a specific political agenda, such phrasing merely indicates that the goddess is concerned with protecting institutions and preserving the city from internal violence (Sommerstein 2010b). Yet such warding off of civil strife is not, in the divine ending of the Oresteia, at all a peaceful process. Athena’s emphasis on persuasion glosses over the details of a new world order in large part predicated on violence. First, Athena’s focus is solely on Athenian flourishing, not that of any other city or state; the point of the Areopagus is that it will give her favoured city an advantage over all others (700–04) and the heroic power of Orestes explicitly serves to guarantee Athenian military invincibility (776–77). Second, the “cure” for the disease of civic violence is “plenty of foreign war” (864). Last, Athena and the Erinyes bless Athens with “victory without evil” (903). Athena’s character on stage is a confluence of systems of closure: she resolves the human plot, gains divine allies, brings blessings to her city and arranges the religious procession at the end. She insists that convincing and consensus-building are her favoured tools. Yet the corollary of internal peace is the encouragement and justification of constant external bloodshed. Athena claims that the approval of Athenian hegemony is universal, supported by a network of divinities all the way up to Zeus and the Fates. Her emphasis on eternity allows no future divine transformations. Could Athenian audience members accept this divinely condoned jingoism unquestioningly? We cannot tell their range of reactions. Modern readers may compare both the Oresteia’s own depictions of the horrors of warfare and the fate of Athens itself after its period of successful conquests in order to reflect on the pernicious aspects of such an emphasis.

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The Absent Zeus Zeus is the central node of both Greek religion and myth. Despite being neither the first god nor the creator god he is understood as the father and the dominant figure of the Greek pantheon. Thus in the Eumenides, Apollo’s many claims that his prophecy is dependent on Zeus rely on treating Zeus as the unquestionable epitome of divine power, truth and fulfillment. Zeus is also the source of truth when Athena explains the verdict (797–99). It seems from these claims that a foundation for eternal good can be built on “Zeus the Saviour”, the cult title by which he is referred to several times in Aeschylus (Libation Bearers 244–45, Eumenides 759–60; Burian 1986). Yet Aeschylean tragedy never takes such a one-sided approach even to this god. Simultaneous with praise of Zeus we find repeated insistence on his inscrutability. The Daughters of Danaus, for example, sing an ode to Zeus’s sovereignty and righteousness and claim his will is always effortlessly and completely fulfilled (Suppliants 91–103). Yet even they emphasise that mortals cannot perceive the tangled paths of his shadowy mind (86–90). In the Agamemnon the Chorus sings that Zeus is the source of all events, but that his intentions remain, nevertheless, mysterious to men (Agamemnon 160–83 is known as the hymn to Zeus; Lebeck 1971, 35–36). A further telling clue to the treatment of Zeus is how rarely, if ever, he appears as a character: the lost plays Prometheus Unbound and Weighing of Souls could conceivably have been exceptions, but as it stands, nowhere in the Aeschylean corpus do we find lines attributed to a staged Zeus (Sommerstein 2010a, 226). This absence at the heart of the divine structure implicitly haunts all references to Zeus’s will. Beyond the theme of human ignorance and divine absence, the numerous references to negative aspects of Zeus undercut his unquestioned authority (Goldhill 2000, 53–54). These critiques are most striking from the mouth of divinities. The Prometheus Bound from first to last characterises Zeus as an autocrat: not only Prometheus, whom Zeus is punishing, but Hephaistos, who is Zeus’s son, and other divine characters critique his coercion and abuses of power (e.g. 14–35). Zeus’s sexual violence plays a significant role in a number of tragedies: in the Prometheus Bound his rape of Io is the back story for her crazed arrival on stage, fleeing the requitals of Hera. The same act against Io is normalised as the background of the Suppliants, in which nevertheless the Daughters of Danaus beg throughout the play to be spared from analogous sexual violence by their human pursuers. Last, the Erinyes in the Eumenides refer to the well-known myth of Zeus gaining the throne by violently deposing his own father (640–42). Characterisations of Zeus have cosmic repercussions. As mentioned, the Eumenides ends with a procession that appeals to Zeus and the Fates. The implication is that in tandem they will prevent further divine changes. Yet in the Prometheus Bound the Fates are more powerful than Zeus, according to Prometheus (515–18), and have a plan about which he knows nothing. Zeus’s sexual pursuit of Thetis is fated to lead to his overthrow if he consummates it (908–15). Even if Prometheus Bound was not by Aeschylus, both it and the negative stories in the Eumenides demonstrate that tragic representations of Zeus at some points emphasise his violence and potential error. He is sometimes characterised with similar hubris and appetites to human autocrats. Zeus is also subject to forces beyond his control; he is susceptible to a tragic fall, like human characters. Although the dethroning of Zeus is incommensurate with the audience’s religious system, making that possibility a focal point of the Prometheus Bound exemplifies tragedy’s unrestricted provocations. Aeschylean tragedies conjoin the theme of Zeus as the source of blessings and good rule with his absence, autocracy, violence and potential fallibility. They thus destabilise human and even divine justifications that are based on Zeus’s will.



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Conclusions Throughout Aeschylean tragedy interactions with the supernatural warp individual lives and ideas about life in general. They sometimes upend the most significant systems of human society: kinship, justice and political structures. Aeschylus does, at times, represent divine care for humanity and punishment of transgressions; conversely, he often emphasises the negative aspects of each divinity. These contradictions play out on stage and characters must deal with their consequences. We began by examining some of the numerous expressions of ignorance concerning divine will, which characterise humanity as trapped in a world of unknowable polytheistic conflicts. The anxiety such uncertainties cause may even extend to the world of the original audience, as when Aeschylus dramatises events or social structures connected to Athens. His representations of the will of the gods in history swerve unexpectedly from others we know about, as in the Persian speculations about divine causation or Athena’s creation of the Areopagus. In those instances it appears Aeschylus is inviting his audience to reconsider their own history and political structures. Aeschylean narratives of existence after death and returns from the dead twist human life in another, more individual manner: the continuation of Darius, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Orestes as powerful beings after their death demonstrates that humans can be “rewritten”, but not necessarily in a way commensurate with their lives. Darius the conqueror becomes a sage figure chastising his son for the hubris of invading Greece, which he himself had once attempted. Agamemnon, the bellicose king and child murderer, is reduced from his political past to, ironically, become merely a protector of his family. Orestes, who has never been to war, becomes an afterlife hero-figure overseeing military expeditions. Clytemnestra, however, remains unredeemed. Aeschylus thus reopens questions about values: if the final accounting is beyond one’s control, what does that say about one’s living goals and actions? Aeschylus dramatises divinities as individuals, not easily unified. The very nature of Greek polytheism means that divine will is split and is not to be understood as supporting only one set of people, cities or values. Each divinity staged in Aeschylean tragedy both represents a node in a network of supernatural forces and also speaks from an individual perspective. They have their own characteristics, needs, honours and motivations, which often cause friction with other divinities. Aeschylus thematises such conflicts, especially in the Oresteia, as a collision of values. The anthropomorphic staging of divinities also draws attention to sometimes negative aspects of their corporality. In the Eumenides Apollo is physically and verbally aggressive towards the Erinyes, echoing his earlier violence against Cassandra. Apollo’s attacks on females and his collusion with Athena to unconditionally privilege the male, father and king raise society-shaking questions: can such gendered violence truly be justified? What does it mean for human families and society if the intimate connection between children and mothers is permanently severed? Conversely, Athena’s divine super-body (unbeatable in war, immortal, born of no mother, refusing intimate contact) is implicitly linked with her focus on the civic super-body: she transforms the emphasis from individual human beings (where it was for the majority of the trilogy) to the collectivity of Athens in the ending. However, her promises of civic harmony are predicated on encouraging eternal warfare rather than the pacific means that Athena represents herself as employing. Divinities, through their eternal embodiment, also alter the human perspective on time: Prometheus in the Prometheus Bound might suffer for untold ages – until at some future point he simply ceases to. There is no mention of continuing trauma or disability; except for the rarest of circumstances, divinities are permanently able-bodied. Analogously, Apollo and Athena in the Oresteia can speak in terms of eternity, making the death of individuals – so prominent from a human perspective – become infinitesimally small. These are just a selection

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of the vast shifts in the conception of individual life and society that Aeschylean encounters with the divine may prompt. Finally, with the direct interventions of divinities Aeschylus radically transforms political notions. The participation of the gods in the Trojan War stories is one background element for understanding warfare in the Oresteia. Athena and the Erinyes’ emphasis on total war as a unifying path towards eternal blessings must be understood with this destruction in mind and – by modern readers – with the destruction that Athens suffered in the wars that followed the staging of the trilogy. Here one should sound a last interpretive warning: whatever one thinks about the perspective of the Persians on divine interventions or the political, theological resolutions that the Oresteia offers, these plays were artistic, bounded encroachments into the world of the Athenian audience. They occurred in the context of a civic religious festival, were funded by the city and spoke to the masses of the voting population, to influential aristocrats and possibly to their allies. Yet the plays take place in a parallel, mostly mythic-literary world. Aeschylean representations of divinities, innovative foundation myths and fictional civic structures were neither congruent with Athenian experience nor picked up thereafter. Instead, to audience members and modern readers, Aeschylus’s representations of the supernatural world present diverse intellectual incitements to rethink fundamental issues.

FURTHER READING For a classic overview of Greek religion, see Burkert 1985. More Athens-focused is Parker 2005. A cognitive approach to Greek religious belief and practice is found in Larson 2016. An important and incisive perspective on the role of religion for tragedy is Sourvinou-Inwood 2003. Giving the background necessary for interpreting Aeschylus is the accessible and wide-ranging Sommerstein 2010a. A contrasting set of more theoretical approaches is offered by Goldhill 2004, a sophisticated student edition of the Oresteia.

REFERENCES Burian, P. (1986). “Zeus σωτὴρ τρίτος and some triads in Aeschylus’ Oresteia.” American Journal of Philology 107, 332–42. Burkert, W. (1985). Greek Religion. Cambridge, MA. Cartledge, P. (2016). Democracy: A Life. Oxford. Denniston, J. D. and Page, D. L. (1957). Aeschylus: Agamemnon. Oxford. Fletcher, J. (1999). “Choral Voice and Narrative in the First Stasimon of Aeschylus Agamemnon.” Phoenix 53, 29–49. Foley, H. P. (2001). Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton. Garvie, A. F. (2009). Aeschylus: Persae. Oxford. Goldhill, S. (1987). “The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 107, 58–76. Goldhill, S. (2000). “Civic Ideology and the Problem of Difference: The Politics of Aeschylean Tragedy, Once Again.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 120, 34–56. Goldhill, S. (2004). Aeschylus: The Oresteia. Second Edition. Cambridge. Kennedy, R. F. (2009). Athena’s Justice: Athena, Athens and the Concept of Justice in Greek Tragedy. New York. Larson, J. (2016). Understanding Greek Religion: A Cognitive Approach. London. Lebeck, A. (1971). The Oresteia: A Study in Language and Structure. Washington, DC. Lesky, A. (1966). “Decision and Responsibility in the Tragedy of Aeschylus.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 86, 78–85.



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Lloyd-Jones, H. (1956). “Zeus in Aeschylus.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 76, 55–67. Loraux, N. (1993). The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division between the Sexes. Princeton. Meier, C. (1993). The Political Art of Greek Tragedy. Baltimore. Meinel, F. (2015). Pollution and Crisis in Greek Tragedy. Cambridge. Morgan, K. A. (1994). “Apollo’s Favorites.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 35, 121–43. Muntz, C. E. (2011). “The Invocation of Darius in Aeschylus’ Persae.” Classical Journal 106, 257–71. Parker, R. (2005). Polytheism and Society at Athens. Oxford. Parker, R. (2009). “Aeschylus’ Gods: Drama, Cult, Theology.” In J. Jouanna, F. Montanari, and A. P. Hernández, eds. Eschyle à l’aube du théâtre occidental: neuf exposés suivis de discussions. Vandoeuvres– Genève, 25–29 août 2008. Entretiens sur l’Antiquité classique 55. Geneva, 127–54 (with discussion, 155–164). Pelliccia, H. (2011). “Double Motivation.” In M. Finkelberg, ed. The Homer Encyclopedia. Malden, MA, I 218–19. Roberts, D. H. (1984). Apollo and His Oracle in the Oresteia. Göttingen. Rosenbloom, D. (2006). Aeschylus: Persians. London. Rosenmeyer, T. G. (1982). The Art of Aeschylus. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Sewell-Rutter, N. J. (2007). Guilt by Descent: Moral Inheritance and Decision Making in Greek Tragedy. Oxford. Shilo, A. (2018). “The Ghost of Clytemnestra in the Eumenides: Ethical Claims beyond Human Limits.” American Journal of Philology 139, 533–76. Sommerstein, A. H. (1989). Aeschylus: Eumenides. Cambridge. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010a). Aeschylean Tragedy. Second Edition. London. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010b). “Sleeping Safe in Our Beds: Stasis, Assassination and the Oresteia.” In The Tangled Ways of Zeus, and Other Studies in and around Greek Tragedy. Oxford, 143–63. Sourvinou-Inwood, C. (2003). Tragedy and Athenian Religion. Lanham, MD. Torrance, I. C. (2007). Aeschylus: Seven Against Thebes. London. Winkler, J. and Zeitlin, F. I., eds. (1990). Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context. Princeton. Zeitlin, F. I. (1996). “The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia.” In F. I. Zeitlin, ed. Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Chicago, 87–119. Zelnik-Abramovitz, R. (2011). “The Guardian of the Land: The Areopagus Council as a Symbol of Stability.” In G. Herman, ed. Stability and Crisis in the Athenian Democracy. Stuttgart, 103–26.

CHAPTER 23

Inscribing Justice in Aeschylean Drama Sarah Nooter Despite the title, this chapter is not an overview of the idea of justice (dikē) in the tragedies of Aeschylus and intersects only tangentially with discussions of the idea and institution of justice in ancient Greece. My concerns here have much to do rather with the materials of metaphor, how they are related to time, and how both are related to justice, that is: the material and temporal means by which Aeschylus allows justice to be imagined, as well as what material realities of justice are occluded by this imagining. My argument begins with a recognition of Aeschylus’s repeated attention to the written word – indeed, the inscribed word – in his representations of justice. I use the word “inscribed” because even in the cases in this chapter where I use the term “written”, writing should be understood as the outcome of a deliberate and sometimes laborious act, one that has left marks or indentations on a surface, some of which, some of the time, could be considered indelible. This is not necessarily what writing means in this day and age, when most of it involves the movement of digital particles across a screen. But writing in the age of Aeschylus was an intrinsically physical activity, especially when it took the form of inscription on stone. It was enacted by corporeal effort upon a substance, hardly less so than sculpting. The meaning and implications of writing thus are all connected to its physicality and degree of visibility in the world. Indeed it is the physicality of written texts that places them into space in a way that also raises the question of whether they will endure through time. And if there is one thing that justice requires, at least justice in its desirable form, it is time, particularly a sense of a reasonably predictable future or futurity. The possibility of such a future allows for an idea of justice as abstract and disinterested. Thus one important use of inscription from the classical period was the incising of laws for public display, particularly in Athens (see Gagarin 2008). Such highly visible inscriptions disconnected law and justice from the personhood of the basileis and made laws into promises. There was perhaps the additional connection of inscribed, public laws to another form of justice, namely, trial by jury, which “empowered and instructed citizens” to “perform justice according to a new script” (Farenga 2006, 265). Laws that are visible and lasting through inscription, after all, are available to be widely and fairly applied by any competent party.

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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My claim, then, is that Aeschylus uses the idea and material image of writing to articulate a concept of futurity that is necessary to the concept of desirable justice that he articulates. Of particular salience to this conglomeration of concepts is the image of “writing in the mind”, a metaphor that was a cultural touchstone, even a cliché, by the end of the fifth century. In this light, it has been dismissed as flat and uninteresting, and yet it can have starkly different and interesting implications depending on how it is used. It is, for example, an image with which Plato later illustrates the instability of memory: memory in the Theaetatus is imagined as markings on a wax mould or lump (κήρινον ἐκμαγεῖον [191c]) that can be imprinted but easily wiped away. In the Philebus, Plato suggests the soul is like a “book” (βιβλίῳ [38e]) in which “memory” and “feelings” work together like a “writer” (γραμματεύς [39a]) to inscribe words, but words that can be true or false depending on the character of the writer. In both cases, Plato is tying the image of writing to a specific physical form – a wax surface or a book – and highlighting the activity of imprinting upon this form so to point to the volatility and capriciousness of memory. Regarding Aeschylus, I am suggesting a very different interpretative thrust to his use of such an image, involving not just memory, but a divine sort of memory, the memory of the gods. Through images of writing that emanates from a divine mind, Aeschylus is able to vaunt memory as a figure for a particularly predictive sense of futurity and, with it, a mode of accountability. Before I discuss the use of the image of writing as it relates to justice, I begin with a few more straightforward examples of how it relates simply to time and memory. David Sansone noticed several decades ago that the image of writing is “the only metaphor Aeschylus uses in his extant work to refer to ‘memory’” (Sansone 1975, 59). To this important observation, it is worth adding how often this reference to memory in Aeschylean drama is a memory of, as it were, the future. One example of how this metaphor is used for the memory of futurity is found in Prometheus Bound (a play that is Aeschylean in our tradition whether or not it is by Aeschylus himself). Here, Prometheus is revving up to tell Io, the afflicted cow-maiden, what sort of wandering and suffering are yet to come for her, and also when and what sort of relief will finally arrive. Before he launches into a rather extended speech on topic, he instructs her to “engrave [the wandering] in the remembering tablets of your mind” (ἣν ἐγγράφου σὺ μνήμοσιν δέλτοις φρενῶν [Prometheus Bound 789]; cf. Torrance 2010, 215; Segal 1986, 84.) He then delivers to her a detailed prediction of her journey to come, peppered with topographical specifics, which ends with the assertion that the sea she crosses will come to be called “Ionian” for time hereafter (χρόνον δὲ τὸν μέλλοντα, 839) and that this eponymous naming will be a mnēma, or memorial, of Io for all men. Here Prometheus closes his tale, assuring his cow-maiden audience that this mnēma – or perhaps the whole complex prediction – should be accepted as “signs of my mind” (σημεῖά σοι τάδ’ ἐστὶ τῆς ἐμῆς φρενός [842]) or perhaps, as “signs from my mind”, depending on what Prometheus is trying to prove. Prometheus is performing a tour de force of prediction such as only a divinity can, with no act of divining required. The events he tells are thus not, as in most narrated tales, events from the past, but ones that are meant to have the same sense of inevitability as the events of the past. These particular events are ultimately intended to have permanence in the future as well, inasmuch as these future events will be memorialised (through a mnēma) as past events for future men, including of course the original audience in the theatre, for whom this tale derives from their mythical past. In other words, Prometheus’s vision of the future is meant to be as solid and durable as the audience’s past. It is in this light that Prometheus starts by telling Io to engrave the tale in “the remembering tablets of her mind” and ends by telling her that he has delivered the signs (sēmeia) from his own mind. The image of his inscribing his mind’s signs on her mind’s tablets undergirds the dependability of his prediction as stable futurity.

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It is tempting to connect another very similar use of the image of the tablets of the mind to this particular scene of Prometheus. In the Suppliant Women, Danaus tells his daughters (descendants of Io) what he predicts will happen to them now that they have landed in Argos. Before doing so, he too prefaces his own remarks with an exhortation that they remember them (178–79): καὶ τἀπὶ χέρσου νῦν προμηθίαν λαβὼν αἰνῶ φυλάξαι τἄμ’ ἔπη δελτουμένας. And now, having taken some foresight [promēthian] regarding matters on land, I advise you to guard these words, putting them in your tablets. Danaus uses a verbal form to suggest “putting in tablets” but the phrase is widely translated as “putting in tablets of the mind”, under the assumption that the maidens are not expected by their father to pull out actual writing tablets but that, rather, the metaphor of writing on the mind was so common and probable for such an instance that it could be referred to by shorthand language. Like Prometheus’s statement in Prometheus Bound, this one aims to make stable and secure words related to future events and to do so by reference to Prometheus himself through the sonic echo of the word “foresight” (promēthian), as though Danaus is literally suggesting that he has absorbed the divine ability to establish secure futurity. It is critically important when considering Aeschylus’s images of writing to take account of the diversity of the material and social contexts in which writing was being produced and put to use at this time. On the one hand, there is an important and rather basic dichotomy to take account of between writing inscribed on stone, which was intended to be fundamentally public and enduring, and writing scratched on a tablet or in a book, which was understood as changeable, concealable and private in ways considered potentially problematic. (Other possibilities, like writing on bronze or on wood, are also in play; see Thomas 1992, 82.) The questions of whether a piece of writing is public or private and whether it is permanent or disposable are both in play when conceptualising the implications of the metaphorical use of writing, particularly when considering the central questions of justice from the point of view of a person who requires it: that is, can it be attained? If it is not attained immediately, is there hope that it will be achieved later, even much later, despite the strength of one’s enemies or the weakness of one’s own position? Desirable justice, as such, should serve as a corrective to unfair imbalances of power, but what assurance is there that such imbalance can be addressed when there is no “justice system”, as we call it now, to impose an equality of laws, at least ideally, on all members of society? I suggest here that Aeschylus imagines a path to such a system by using images of writing to chart a course into the future, an axis along which justice might function. I first look at the imagery that attends on justice in the three tragedies of the Oresteia and then at the configuration of justice in passages from three other extant plays by Aeschylus to see how the matter of justice gets ever more intricate as its material shifts. I conclude by considering other materialities of justice that might be obscured by the imagery of writing.

Agamemnon Justice equals revenge in the Agamemnon. The time between a deed and retribution for it is measured out by opportunity and individual memory, the memory of Clytemnestra by and large, but also that of Aegisthus. When is justice obtained by these characters? At the next available opening. In keeping with this simple formula of retribution, there is a simple equation of punishment: death is punished with equal death, and other troubling equations of



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equivalence play out through the choral odes of the tragedy, often between metaphor and meaning, such as when lost hatchlings are equated with the lost Helen, the fetus of a hare is equated with the city of Troy and the city of Troy is paid for by the loss of Iphigenia. The quick slippages between individuals, their characters and culpability, act as a thematic undertow to the play, as when descriptions of Paris threaten to implicate Agamemnon (367–474) and lines that seem to refer to Helen turn out to suggest a Fury (737–49). The form of justice that this equation reveals is deeply unsettling and leads to tyranny. It is standard to report that this disruptive form of vengeful justice will be replayed in Libation Bearers and then replaced in Eumenides (see, for example, Herington 1965, 391). The incapacity of such justice to exist in any lasting or restorative sense and its inability to do any more than disrupt the present are signalled in material terms in two places: the first is the chorus’s brief image of a wrongdoer “kicking the great altar of Justice into invisibility” (λακτίσαντι μέγαν Δίκας/βωμὸν εἰς ἀφάνειαν [383–84]), an image that represents justice through a metonymic object (the altar) only to have the altar vanish into immateriality. The second such signal is Cassandra’s final image. Most of Cassandra’s scene consists of mournful song and ominous prediction, as well as of uncovering some of the past injustices that have brought the present crisis to a head. Her penultimate statement includes a final expression of mourning, as she describes herself as ­ “bewailing” (κωκύσουσ’ [1313]) her fate. Here she also predicts the framework of Libation Bearers, announcing the coming deaths of “a woman for the sake of a woman” and “a man for the sake of a man” (γυνὴ γυναικὸς ἀντ’, ἀνήρ…ἀντ’ ἀνδρὸς [1318–19]), that is, Clytemnestra for her and Aegisthus for Agamemnon. In her ultimate speech, she changes tacks to take a long view. Proclaiming that she will deliver a “statement” instead of a dirge (ῥῆσιν ἢ θρῆνον [1322]), she ends her scene and life with both an exclamation and an image (1327–30): ἰὼ βρότεια πράγματ’· εὐτυχοῦντα μὲν σκιᾶι τις ἂν πρέψειεν, εἰ δὲ δυστυχῆι, βολαῖς ὑγρώσσων σπόγγος ὤλεσεν γραφήν. καὶ ταῦτ’ ἐκείνων μᾶλλον οἰκτίρω πολύ. Oh mortal deeds! Someone doing well can be likened to a shadow, but if someone is faring badly wetting with [just a few] strokes, a sponge destroys the painting. And these things I pity much more than those. This is an image of two parts: one relates to shadow and the other to a wet sponge. The first points toward similar images that we find in Pindar of ephemeral man as a “shadow of a dream” (Pythian 8.95–97) and to a passage in Sophocles’ Ajax, a later play, that calls man an “empty shadow” (Ajax 126). Man-as-shadow might be said to be a trope, whereby insubstantiality stands in for vulnerability. The second image, however, is more pointed for the purposes of my argument. In this image, the man designated by just the word for “faring badly” (δυστυχῆι) is apparently a “painting” (graphē) in the figurative image. The word graphē also connotes writing but, in this context, it seems sensible to take the word as “painting” or “drawing”, not least because of an earlier and apropos image along these lines. The earlier image derives from the chorus’s portrait of Iphigenia just before she is slaughtered, where the girl is described as “conspicuous, as if in a picture” (πρέπουσά θ’ ὡς ἐν γραφαῖς [242]). This parallel to Cassandra’s image is significant inasmuch as Cassandra herself mirrors and pays for the death of Iphigenia, but it is also meaningful because of how Cassandra’s own image reuses, if in a jumbled way, the wording of the chorus on Iphigenia’s death, with both the idea of “standing out as” (prepein) and becoming a “painting” (graphē) reappearing: a material image that stresses the immateriality of a life unjustly snuffed out. Cassandra effectively completes the tale of Iphigenia’s slaughter in a way that the chorus

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refuses to do. A sort of “sponge” has wiped away Iphigenia and its impact on Cassandra now is a logical extension of the fragility that makes these maidens into victims. As opposed to an inscription or etching, painting is a superficial imposition and thus lends itself to being wiped away. But the only sort of justice Cassandra can imagine is yet another sponge-like force that will wipe away yet another image of a life.

Libation Bearers In Libation Bearers, the second play of the Oresteia, the imagery of justice has evolved somewhat. Here we have the first of two instances in the trilogy of “writing in the mind”, sung in an attempt to motivate memory towards an end that is presumably just. The image comes in the midst of the long, complex song during which Electra and the chorus incite Orestes to kill his mother to avenge the death of his father, thus urging him to participate in bringing about justice as they understand it. As the song nears its end, Electra adds a coda to the tale of her father’s death about her own personal sufferings, after which she and the chorus successively bid that Orestes “write” her suffering and that of his dead father in his mind (444–52): Ηλ. Χο. electra



chorus







λέγεις πατρῶιον μόρον· ἐγὼ δ’ ἀπεστάτουν ἄτιμος, οὐδὲν ἀξία, μυχῶι δ’ ἄφερκτος πολυσινοῦς κυνὸς δίκαν ἑτοιμότερα γέλωτος ἀνέφερον λίβη χέουσα πολύδακρυν γόον κεκρυμμένα. τοιαῦτ’ ἀκούωνἐν φρεσὶν γράφου. , δι’ ὤτων δὲ συντέτραινε μῦθον ἡσύχωι φρενῶν βάσει. You speak of [our] father’s death. But I was set apart dishonoured, worth nothing, fenced off in the inner chambers like a dangerous dog more ready for weeping than laughter, I poured out streams of teary lament, hidden away. Hearing such things, write [them] in your mind. , let it pierce through your ears to the quiet base of your mind.

If the text is correctly amended here (see Garvie 1986, 166 on the controversial colometry of the manuscripts), the image of writing in the mind comes up twice in quick succession. Attention is demanded for Electra’s affective experience by way of the “writing in the mind” process of memory, and a particularly material form of it. For contrast we can glance at the first such image of “writing on the mind” from the classical period, in Olympian 10.1–3 of Pindar, where we also see the very first occurrence of the verb anagignōskein for “read” (on which, see Woodard 2014, 271–72): Τὸν Ὀλυμπιονίκαν ἀνάγνωτέ μοι Ἀρχεστράτου παῖδα, πόθι φρενός ἐμᾶς γέγραπται·. Read me the Olympian victor, child of Archestratos, where in my mind it has been written.



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Here the force of written permanence is meant to counteract the poet’s own previous error of memory. The poet-speaker invokes the spectre of writing to halt the deleterious effect of time’s passage on the memory of the victory. The notion that the victor’s name has been correctively written in the poet’s mind at last is meant to generate an assurance of permanence, both for the ode and for the glory (kleos) that this ode is intended to produce on behalf of the victor. The assertion of writing in the mind as an act of inscription also allows the speaker to demand the witnessing of the Muse to protect him from the further shaming critique of the future (Olympian 10.8–9). Pindar’s speaker simply says that there is a name written in his thoughts (his φρήν), which is more or less just what Electra sings in the Libation Bearers. But when the chorus join in to support Electra’s point, they suggest a rather more embodied process of remembering that involves a violent, “piercing” (451–52) entry into Orestes’ actual ears and also a locale upon which to write within his mind – a “quiet base”, which could refer to the base of a monument. Aeschylus’s images of writing, unlike Pindar’s, involve specific materials of both the body and writing: they picture the engraving of embodied suffering into the embodied mentality of Orestes. They suggest that the idea of “writing in the mind” is used here as an intermediary step in the process of justice’s reconfiguration from being merely revenge to attaining something better. Agamemnon will receive justice, even if it comes late, but it will not be the abstracted form of justice yet to come.

Eumenides In Eumenides, the third play of the Oresteia, the image of writing on the mind appears again, but the context, stakes and implications of the image have changed. Here the Furies pronounce a principle of immutable justice that depends upon a “writing tablet” in the mind of Hades (269–75): ὄψηι δὲ κεἴ τις ἄλλος ἤλιτεν βροτῶν ἢ θεὸν ἢ ξένον τιν’ ἀσεβῶν ἢ τοκέας φίλους, ἔχονθ’ ἕκαστον τῆς δίκης ἐπάξια. μέγας γὰρ Ἅιδης ἐστὶν εὔθυνος βροτῶν ἔνερθε χθονός, δελτογράφωι δὲ πάντ’ ἐπωπᾶι φρενί. And you will also see that if any other mortal man transgressed, profaning either a god or some friend or his own parents, each one bears the worthy returns of justice. For great Hades is a corrector of mortals beneath the earth, and sees all things in the writing tablet [of] his mind. There are a number of features that set this image apart from the one in Libation Bearers. One is the sort of information that is being written down in the image: whereas Electra in Libation Bearers is urging that her particular sufferings be recorded, the Furies in Eumenides are explaining an apparently universal system for all men, a general principle of justice, and are perhaps also evoking the image of the judicial curse tablet, on which they might efficaciously affix the name of their opponent (Faraone 1985, 154). The time-frames in the two examples also differ. In Libation Bearers, Electra and the chorus want their experiences and words

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recorded in Orestes’ mind for only as long as needed to stir Orestes to vengeful activity. The Furies have a much lengthier time-frame in mind. Inasmuch as they are laying out a universal system of justice, their reference to Hades is actually a promise of justice after death; theirs is basically a vision of an afterlife wherein people pay for their crimes. The significance of these crimes’ being written down is by and large located in the capability of written things to endure a protracted delay, unlike voiced utterances which vanish as soon as they are said. The Furies, in contrast to Electra, are doing something very ambitious with their image of writing: they are promising that a system of futurity exists in which crimes are punished and justice is restored. There is a third significant difference between these two instances of “writing in the mind” and this lies in how the two images interact with the idea of the “hidden”. When Electra asks Orestes to write her account of her experience in his mind, she specifies that she had “hidden” this experience away; in effect, she is now unveiling it for him and asking him to help make her experience meaningful through his actions. By contrast, for the Furies it is the very potential for a deltos to be hidden away that is critical; hence a scholiast on this passage explains that Hades’ deltos is a “private” one (τῆι ἰδίαι δέλτωι). In the scenario of justice that is written but delayed, it is the hidden quality of the writing that explains why evil-doers can seem to prosper for so long, unpunished. Writing can be kept into perpetuity, unseen, and this makes it an ideal image to display how justice could exist, even when it is also unseen. From two examples of this image of inscription, then, as well as in the violence of the image of a sponge on a painting, we can see that the metaphor of graphē in Aeschylus is as malleable as the corporeal contexts of actual writing (and painting) were diverse. Greater and lesser ambitions for both time and justice can be encoded in the material of this image. I return to the ambitions of justice in the Eumenides at the end of this chapter. Here, I explore other instances that show the malleability and meanings of Aeschylus’s image of writing.

Suppliants A passage from Aeschylus’s Suppliants makes clear his acute awareness of the material circumstances of writing. Here the Argive king Pelasgus has just announced to an Egyptian herald that Argos has voted to offer protection to the Danaïd maidens in defiance of their Egyptian cousins (942–49): τοιάδε δημόπρακτος ἐκ πόλεως μία ψῆφος κέκρανται, μήποτ’ ἐκδοῦναι βίαι στόλον γυναικῶν· τῶνδ’ ἐφήλωται τορῶς γόμφος διαμπὰξ ὡς μένειν ἀραρότως. ταῦτ’ οὐ πίναξίν ἐστιν ἐγγεγραμμένα οὐδ’ ἐν πτυχαῖς βύβλων κατεσφραγισμένα, σαφῆ δ’ ἀκούεις ἐξ ἐλευθεροστόμου γλώσσης. Such is the democratic single vote enacted by the city, never to give away perforce this group of women. Of these things the bolt has been driven in clearly, visibly, so as to remain fixed. These things have not been written in pinaxes nor sealed in folds of rolled pages, but you hear them clearly from a free-mouthed tongue.



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Pelasgus suggests that decisions written in private writing-tablets, pinaxes, or in books have sinister implications: inasmuch as they are folded or rolled up, they are hidden, insinuating and untrustworthy. In his view, writing in one of these private and hidden contexts would be both autocratic and an unwise way to enact a plan in the present, let alone to secure futurity, for which public visibility is required. (Scholars debate whether Pelasgus is either saying that the “decision” of the people has been vocally announced from a “free-mouthed tongue” and that this makes it public and also fixed just like a decree bolted to a wall, or if he is suggesting that a public decree has literally been “bolted” in an open and visible place, like a public inscription in wood or stone. An ancient commentator endorses the first reading; Bowen 2013, 330 and Steiner 1994, 168 argue for the second.) This embracing of public visibility as a form of enacting law seems directly drawn from the actual realpolitik of archaic and classical Greece. As Vincent Farenga explains, “statute law emerged in the middle decades of the seventh century in the form of written laws inscribed on surfaces like stone (on temple walls and stelai) and wood (on boards or panels); and these inscribed laws were always displayed in the state’s most public spaces” (Farenga 2006, 263; and see Gagarin 2008). The visibility of Pelasgus’s inscribed decision, then, has far-reaching implications in regard to how justice is otherwise performed. Pelasgus thus claims that the matter of writing really does matter, especially in contexts where writing is posed as pointing toward a conceptualisation of the future. Other Greek literature backs him up. As is well known, Homeric poetry presents writing as a highly problematic tool, starting with the example of Bellerophon in Iliad 6. Here Bellerophon carries the message of his own death sentence from one king to another on a pinax that is folded (πτυκτῷ) and inscribed with, “baneful signs…many and life-destroying” (σήματα λυγρὰ/… θυμοφθόρα πολλά [Il. 6.169–70]). Bellerophon has been falsely accused and unwittingly sent to his own potential destruction, thanks to the secrecy that private writing allows. Writing in this story is thereby shown to serve the purpose of treacherous deceit. There are other pointed examples from literature, particularly in Greek tragedy, of the deceptive and destructive powers of the written word, as in Sophocles’ Trachiniae and Euripides’ Hippolytus. In each of these cases, the writing in question is a riddling or deceitful message imprinted on a private writing-tablet that carries harmful consequences. That very quality of privacy – the lack of witnesses to the writing – is an important part of the problem. The most salient material feature of the written word in these stories is its smallness, silence and potential invisibility. To be more literal, it is not the form of the writing itself – the words scratched or painted – that is an issue here, so much as the material on which the writing is written. At this stage, however, there is a leap of synecdoche between writing and its canvas, and the two are not thought of as distinct. This is writing that lacks the ongoing audience of an inscription. Without such an audience, the technology of writing loses its particular power of accountability. Although deceitful writing may have played a role in Aeschylus’s lost Palamedes (Torrance 2010, 215), the use of writing to miscommunicate is not at issue in extant Aeschylean tragedy.

Seven against Thebes It is particularly Aeschylus’s commitment to the materials of his metaphors, including those that involve writing, that summons but also tests simple and perhaps comforting equations such as that writing in the mind lends fixity or futurity. Indeed, there are times when images of writing in Aeschylean drama allow us to see not just how the concept of writing makes certain potentialities seem attainable, but also how critical thinking about these possibilities has become available. This critical capacity can be said to come into play in one of the most

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tangible configurations of writing and justice, which is in Seven against Thebes (Torrance 2010, 216; Steiner 1994; Zeitlin 1982). This comes near the end of the famous scene of the shields, in which a messenger explains the imagery of the shields of the seven challengers to Thebes, and Eteocles does battle with them as signs, or sēmata, through signs of his own that are meant to outdo his opponents’ vaunts. All seems to go well in this fashion, until at last Eteocles and the chorus are told about the final shield, that of Eteocles’ brother, Polyneices, which carries an image of Justice incarnate (646–48): Δίκη δ’ ἄρ’ εἶναί φησιν, ὡς τὰ γράμματα λέγει· “κατάξω δ’ ἄνδρα τόνδε, καὶ πόλιν ἕξει πατρώιαν δωμάτων τ’ ἐπιστροφάς”. Indeed she claims to be Justice, as her letters say: “I will lead this man back, and he will have his ancestral city and free movement in his home.” Justice is pictured here as a goddess who is actually speaking, but she speaks through inscribed letters, grammata, or rather, the grammata speak. This is not the same kind of image as the others I have discussed: in this case, Justice is not being imagined through the use of a material image but is itself the material image; nor is justice inscribed so much as understood to take on a voice in an act of ventriloquism that points to the voice of Polyneices, the author of the shield. Polyneices has attempted to claim futurity and the predictive powers of Prometheus by his use of the power of the inscribed word; hence his Justice speaks confidently in the future tense. But this Justice remains particular to him instead of taking on the universal mode of abstraction. There are several reasons that we, like Eteocles (658–72), can understand this image as less effective than the writing-in-the-mind image I have been discussing, but one may have something to do with the imagining of the incarnation, in corporeal form, not of inscription alone but of Justice herself. In the various other examples I have covered, the very fact that inscription is a material thing is what allows for justice to be imagined as a convincing abstraction of memory and futurity. But what happens to the comforting abstraction of a “justice system” when Justice has a persona, along with a potentially fallible body and false voice? (Nooter 2017, 123–26.) Aeschylus gives us one more place to look for an answer to this question.

The Justice Fragment My final example of how Aeschylus uses the image of writing-in-the-mind to explore justice and futurity also happens to be a portrait of a fully embodied and personified Justice. This comes from a papyrus fragment published in 1952 that has never been firmly assigned to any play, though it is thought that it may derive from a satyr play. (See also Justice’s vocal role at Libation Bearers 310–14.) One of its two speakers is divine Justice (Dikē), who helpfully introduces herself and explains her relationship to Zeus. At the moment I have excerpted below, she seems to be speaking to the chorus leader and promising support to his city, just as, she asserts, she supports good men and punishes bad men in general. Rather than simply accept this good news, the chorus leader interrogates Justice as to her methods of accomplishing these punishments (POxy. 2256.9a.17–23, Ramelli 2009, 517): Δι.   το]ῖ̣ς̣ μὲν δ[ι]καίοις̣ ἔνδι̣κο̣ ν τείνω βίο[ν. Χο.   καλόν γε θ]εῖσα θέ̣[σ]μ̣[ι]ο̣ν̣ τ̣όδ̣ ’̣ ἐν β̣ρο̣ τ̣ο[̣ ῖς.



Inscribing Justice in Aeschylean Drama 319 Δι. Χο. Δι. Χο. Δι.

  τοῖς δ’ αὖ μα]ταίοις τ[ὰ]ς [μάτας ὀρθῶ] φ̣ρ[ενῶν.   πειθοῦς ἐ]πῳδαῖ̣ς ἢ κατ’ ἰσχύος τρόπο̣[ν];   γράφουσα] τ̣ἀμ ̣ π̣λακ̣ήματ’ ἐ̣ν δέλτῳ Διό̣[ς.   ποίωι χρό]νωι̣ δ̣ὲ̣ πίνακ’ ἀναπτύσσει̣[ς] κακ[οῖς;   ἧι γ᾽ ἂν διδ]ῶι σφιν ἡμέρα[ι] τὸ κύριον

Justice   To the just, I extend a righteous life. Chorus leader  law, this one, among men. Justice  , on the other hand, in their thoughts. Chorus leader   By chants or by force? Justice   the crimes in the deltos of Zeus. Chorus leader  do you unfurl the pinax with evils? Justice   On whatever day authority grants it. Justice’s reference to “writing crimes in the deltos of Zeus” closely resembles the way the Furies in Eumenides picture “all things” as seen on the “writing-tablet” of Hades’ mind, suggesting a similar notion of how justice works: this is a dependable but opaque justice. In the terms of the Suppliants, it could be seen as autocratic given that it is hidden away. Two further points are relevant to this discussion: first, Justice brings up this writing-tablet by way of evading giving a direct answer to a direct question – that is, how does she make unjust men go straight? The options offered by the chorus leader are literal and corporeal: does she use chants or force? The reply offered by Justice – that she writes crimes in the writing-tablet of Zeus – is delivered in the form of a metaphor, even an allegory, that allows her to obfuscate the finer points of her procedure. The image of writing-in-the-mind, then, can obfuscate both through the terms of the metaphor and by being a metaphor, a figurative rather than literal way of speaking. My second point is that the other question that Justice’s interlocutor wants answered is about time: when will justice do her work of finally unfurling hidden truths? Justice’s reply, which is now rather hard to decipher, is also tautologically vague and essentially uninformative: she seems to say she will unfurl the pinax when the time is right for unfurling the pinax. The very vagueness of this reply reveals what a fifth-century Greek person might have suspected: that the ability to see into the future, let alone control it, rests on an authority (τὸ κύριον) that men do not have. The elusiveness of this vision of justice begs a further question, namely: what is obscured by the use of the figurative in Justice’s replies? Justice’s assertion that she “corrects (ὀρθῶ) the vanities> in the thoughts” of vain or misguided men could be considered to have an ominous or minatory ring to it and, in fact, we do not really know if the verb for “correct”, orthō, was the one used here or if something more directly punitive might have been said, since this phrase in the text is corrupt. Justice’s interlocutor presses on this point without success: rather than hearing the specifics of this punitive or corrective system of justice, we are carried elsewhere by language of the figurative and divine. What warrants attention here is the very act of replacing a potentially unpleasant set of methods – what might be understood as a truly embodied process of punishment or coercion – with the authoritative discourse of the engraved deltos, a conversational change that echoes an important shift in how justice is construed in the Oresteia. Recall that for the first half of the Eumenides, the Furies are pursuing Orestes with the claim of just revenge for killing his mother and proclaiming their intention to drink his blood. This would be embodied punishment enough, but we get additional and more realistic details of punishment from Apollo as well on the methods of the Furies’ form of justice. He angrily enumerates Furies-approved approaches to torturing and destroying young men, which include

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beheading, eye-gouging, castration, mutilation, stoning and impaling (Eumenides 185–90). In the end, as we know, Orestes is cleared of the charge of murdering his blood-relative by various sleights of hand, including creative constructions of parenthood, the personal preferences and (we might say) gender identification of the goddess Athena and some oddities in the counting of jurists’ votes. As a result, the outcome of the trial delivers the message that, thanks to the dispassionate procedures of the newly founded juridical system, Orestes is free to go. In a mode of humble appreciation, he bids a fond farewell to Athens, promising an alliance with Argos for all time. A triumph for justice. It would be useful, however, to imagine (with Euripides, perhaps) a scenario in which Orestes had been found guilty of the charge of killing a blood-relative, which is plausible, since the fact that he killed his mother Clytemnestra is not itself in question; it is merely the classification of the murder that is up for grabs. It is made clear at several points that the Furies are waiting with bated breath to collect their prey so as to apply the blood-draining punishment and perhaps some of the other physical impositions outlined by Apollo: some eye-gouging? an impaling? Who knows. Moreover, the ultimate appeasement of the furious Furies happens by promising them the right not only to bless the land of Athens and its good people but also to continue to punish the wicked. To be clear, then, punishment is not ­forsworn or denied as part of the new juridical system at the end of the Oresteia, but its role is occluded in an important way by the near accident of Orestes’ acquittal and the joyous institution of the new system of (desirable) justice. The occlusion of the violence of punishment that we see in this process is rather like the conversational switch we also see in the fragmentary interchange between Justice and her interlocutor: both instances distract from the materiality of bodily punishment, though such punishment still awaits those found guilty. It is worth briefly interrogating the role of figurative materiality – the inscribed mind of Zeus in one case and Hades in the other – in this obscuring of a much less figurative and more violent kind of materiality: the infliction, even inscription, of “justice” on the bodies of the condemned. Revenge after all looks ugly and punitive, but desirable justice, as we have seen, should not. In this, it resembles a construction of justice hammered out in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in parts of Europe and described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish. He traces a process whereby spectacles of torture and execution gradually come to be obscured from public view, concluding his description here: Punishment, then, will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process. This has several consequences; it leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness; its effectiveness is seen as resulting from its inevitability, not from its visible intensity; it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime; the exemplary mechanics of punishment changes its mechanisms. As a result, justice no longer takes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice. (Foucault 1977, 9)

This set of thoughts takes us somewhat far from the territory I have been outlining in Aeschylus, of course, but I want to close with a suggestion about what may be at stake in couching the idea of justice in such highly metaphorical and material terms, which is the use of the visible, impersonal form of inscription to substitute materially for the spectacle of violence. Elizabeth Grosz has argued that bodies and things are “correlates: both…[are] artificial or conventional, pragmatic conceptions, cuttings, disconnections, that create a unity, continuity and cohesion out of the plethora of interconnections that constitute the world” (Grosz 2005, 142–43). Grosz argues here that the connections between bodies and things provide “stability and ongoing existence”, each to the other, but I end with the final reference to the material of writing in Aeschylus to suggest that stability is not always the



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outcome of relating bodies to things. I return to the Suppliants. As the desperate Danaïd maidens lose hope of being saved by Pelasgus, they level a threat, but frame it first in “enigmatic”, or metaphorical, terms that he does not initially understand (460–67): Χο.  εἰ μή τι πιστὸν τῶιδ’ ὑποστήσεις στόλωι Βα.   τί σοι περαίνει μηχανὴ συζωμάτων; Χο.   νέοις πίναξιν βρέτεα κοσμῆσαι τάδε. Βα.   αἰνιγματῶδες τοὖπος· ἀλλ’ ἁπλῶς φράσον. Χο.   ἐκ τῶνδ’ ὅπως τάχιστ’ ἀπάγξασθαι θεῶν. Βα.   ἤκουσα μαστικτῆρα καρδίας λόγον. Χο.   ξυνῆκας· ὠμμάτωσα γὰρ σαφέστερον. chorus leader  

    pelasgus   chorus leader   pelasgus   chorus leader   pelasgus

chorus leader

If you cannot extend some promise to this group – What means would your dress ties be to you? To adorn the statues of the gods with new pinaxes. An enigmatic word! Speak frankly. From these we will hang as soon as possible from the gods. I have heard speech that stabs me at the heart. You have understood. For I have vowed this most clearly.

The image of the women’s bodies hanging like pinaxes that so stabs at the heart of Pelasgus brings the body into view as we rarely see it shown on stage, and certainly not in images of writing in the mind. I suggest at the start of this chapter that images framed by the materiality of inscription help provide the conceptual and temporal framework needed to imagine an abstract system of justice. In closing, I would urge consideration of the material aspects of justice that are not imagined, not pictured and not revealed by such imagery: what truths of justice’s relation to the body does imagery of inscription hide away? To borrow an insight from Plato, perhaps there is a sōma buried in this s ēma (Cratylus 400c), or a body buried in these signs.

FURTHER READING On justice in Aeschylean tragedy as it relates to religion, politics, laws and morals, see Bowie 1993, Chiasson 1988, Cohen 1986, Dodds 1960, Griffith 1995, Lloyd-Jones 1956 and Lloyd-Jones 1983, Raphael 2001, Robertson 1939, Wilson 2006 and Winnington-Ingram 1948. On materiality and tragedy, see Butler 2015, Gurd 2016, Mueller 2016, Nooter 2017 and Telò and Mueller 2018. On writing from a (somewhat) literary angle in the ancient Greece, see Steiner 1994, Thomas 1992 and Woodard 2014. On writing as it relates particularly to tragedy, see Torrance 2010, Wise 2000 and Zeitlin 1982.

REFERENCES Bowen, A. J., ed. (2013). Aeschylus, Suppliant Women. Oxford. Bowie, A. M., (1993). “Religion and Politics in Aeschylus’ Oresteia.” Classical Quarterly 43, 10–31. Butler, S. (2015). The Ancient Phonograph. New York. Chiasson, C. C., (1988). “Lecythia and the Justice of Zeus in Aeschylus ‘Oresteia’.” Phoenix 42, 1–21.

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Cohen, D. (1986). “The Theodicy of Aeschylus: Justice and Tyranny in the ‘Oresteia’.” Greece & Rome Second Series 33, 129–41. Dodds, E. R. (1960). “Morals and Politics in the Oresteia.” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 6, 19–31. Faraone, C. A., (1985). “Aeschylus’ ὕμνος δέσμος (Eum. 306) and Attic Judicial Curse Tablets.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 105, 150–54. Farenga, V. (2006). Citizen and Self in Ancient Greece: Individuals Performing Justice and the Law. Cambridge. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. (trans. A. Sheridan). New York. Gagarin, M. (2008). Writing Greek Law. Cambridge. Garvie, A. F. (1986). Aeschylus: Choephori. Oxford. Griffith, M. (1995). “Brilliant Dynasts: Power and Politics in the Oresteia.” Classical Antiquity 14.1, 62–129. Grosz, E. (2005). Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham, NC. Gurd, S. (2016). Dissonance: Auditory Aesthetics in Ancient Greece. New York. Herington, C. J., (1965). “Aeschylus: The Last Phase.” Arion 4, 387–403. Lloyd-Jones, H., (1956). “Zeus in Aeschylus.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 76, 55–67. Lloyd-Jones, H. (1983). The Justice of Zeus. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Mueller, M. (2016). Objects as Actors: Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy. Chicago. Nooter, S. (2017). The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus. Cambridge. Ramelli, I. (2009). Tutti I Frammenti: Eschilo. Milan. Raphael, D. D. (2001). Concepts of Justice. Oxford. Robertson, H. G. (1939). “Legal Expressions and Ideas of Justice in Aeschylus.” Classical Philology 34, 209–19. Sansone, D. (1975). Aeschylean Metaphors for Intellectual Activity. Wiesbaden. Segal, C. (1986). Interpreting Greek Tragedy: Myth, Poetry, Text. Ithaca, NY. Steiner, D. (1994). The Tyrant’s Writ: Myths and Images of Writing in Ancient Greece. Princeton. Telò, M., and Mueller, M. (2018). The Materialities of Greek Tragedy: Objects and Affect in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. London. Thomas, R. (1992). Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece. Cambridge. Torrance, I. (2010). “Writing and Self-Conscious Mythopoiēsis in Euripides.” Cambridge Classical Journal 56, 213–58. Wilson, P. (2006). “Diken in the Oresteia of Aeschylus.” In J. Davidson et al., eds. Greek Drama III: Essays in Honour of Kevin Lee. London, 187–201. Winnington-Ingram, R. P., (1948). “Clytemnestra and the Vote of Athens.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 68, 130–47. Wise, J. (2000). Dionysus Writes: The Invention of Theatre in Ancient Greece. Ithaca, NY. Woodard, R. (2014). The Textualization of the Greek Alphabet. Cambridge. Zeitlin, F. I. (1982). Under the Sign of the Shield; Semiotics and Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes. Rome.

CHAPTER 24

Race in Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women and Persians Sarah Derbew What is race (other than genetic imagination) and why does it matter? Once its parameters are known [and] defined (if at all possible), what behavior does it demand/encourage? Race is the classification of a species, and we are the human race, period. Then what is this other thing—the hostility, the social racism, the Othering? (Morrison 2017, 15)

In her inquiry of race’s illusory elements, Toni Morrison emphasises its all-encompassing definition. Her broad commentary combines a generic definition of race (“genetic imagination”) with race’s practically unlimited parameters. At the same time, she points out a juxtaposition between race’s pseudo-scientific flimsiness and its vast power. Inspired by Morrison’s porous approach to race, this chapter appraises Aeschylus’s expansive treatment of race in Suppliant Women and Persians. Mindful of “this other thing”, i.e. the historically derived hierarchy of skin colour that threatens to overpower any discussion of race, this chapter rejects the widespread importing of a contemporary phenomenon into the past. Simply put, race in Greek antiquity was not limited to skin colour. Denise McCoskey’s salient critique underscores the need for revamped studies of race as it applies to the ancient Greco-Roman world: Recognizing rightly that ancient Greeks and Romans did not base identities on skin color, classicists have not asked instead whether racial identities were based on other criteria, but have instead dismissed the term “race” altogether. (McCoskey 2003, 104–5; see also 2012, 27–34)

My inclusion of the charged term “race” counteracts broad erasure with contextualised analysis. In this vein, I define “race” as an outward-facing category that allows people to classify others. An emphasis on race’s visual aspect, specifically attire in Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women and Persians, extends the ancient conception of race to encompass more than its modern counterpart. Skin colour was one, and only one, feature of race in ancient Greek tragedy. Alongside the intersubjective nature of “race”, “identity” is another product of social relations. Unlike race which is subject to interpretation without the input of the racialised person, people’s identity is self-determined. These two overlapping terms invite readers to delve

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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into a world in which the collision of assigned and chosen categories interact with the labels of foreigner and Greek. Running parallel to this investigation, geography propels characters to reconcile questions of their race in relation to their identity and vice versa. In ancient Greek tragedy, clothes enable characters to manipulate their identities with a mere change of dress (Wyles 2011, 4). Characters utilise their attire both to construct visual components of their moral qualities and to obfuscate their identities. In turn, their audiences undergo the complex process of reading clothes as a semiotic marker of race. Clothes also indicate fluctuating power dynamics, as Agamemnon demonstrates when he returns home after the Trojan war (Agamemnon, 458 bce). His reaction to the purple clothes that Clytemnestra prepared for him belies his authority. That is, the domineering ruler berates Clytemnestra for laying these clothes (εἵμασι, εἱμάτων, Ag. 921, 963) at his feet because it likens him to a god, yet he acquiesces to her request (Ag. 905–72). My rendering of εἵμασι (Ag. 921) and εἱμάτων (Ag. 963) as “clothes”, rather than the popular translation “carpet”, intensifies this sartorial encounter. Aeschylus’s use of clothes as a negotiable indicator of difference extends to his earlier ­tragedies. In Suppliant Women (463 bce) and Persians (472 bce), the Danaids and Atossa, respectively, reject a singular characterisation of attire. Instead, they both point out the unstable link between visual appearance and country of origin. A closer look at these encounters illustrates the diverse treatment of race in Aeschylean tragedy. Two case studies guide this chapter: the Argive ruler Pelasgus’s initial assessment of the Danaids questions the efficacy of using clothes alongside skin colour as sole determinants of the Danaids’ race (Suppl. 234–46, 277–90), and Atossa’s dream world destabilises the relationship between race and attire (Pers. 181–96). An examination of blackness beyond skin colour, religion and geography offers a final commentary on the slipperiness of race within Suppliant Women and Persians.

Suppliant Women In the first play of a tetralogy about the fate of Danaus and his daughters, Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women (463 bce) follows the journey of the Danaids who travel from Egypt to Argos in order to escape a pending marriage to their Egyptian cousins (cf. Kennedy, Chapter 8 in this volume). Aeschylus’s Egypt is the immediate homeland of the Danaids, a dynamic group of women who complicate perceived differences between appearance and identity. In particular, their unGreek attire and black skin jostle against their claims of Greek identity. Despite numerous challenges, these women wield their assertions of Argive ancestry and employ bold threats as tools that help them successfully convince the Argive ruler Pelasgus that they are kinswomen in need of refuge. Before scrutinising the Danaids’ shrewd tactics, a brief note on nomenclature is in order. My use of “black” refers to people with black skin in ancient Greek literature, while “Black” indicates a contemporary, socially constructed group of people. Fragments of other Greek tragedies feature black characters: in Sophocles’s Inachos (frag. 269a, 53–54), Zeus appears in the guise of a black stranger; Euripides’s Archelaus (frag. 1, 3–4) refers to black Aithiopians and his Phaethon (line 4, Diggle) includes Merops, king of the black people who live in the East (Hall 1989, 140). Nevertheless, as the sole case study featuring characters who explicitly reflect on their blackness, Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women is a rich point of departure from which to examine the interaction between clothes and skin colour. In their lengthy opening speech, the Danaids manipulate prejudicial judgements by revealing their Egyptian status (Suppliants 3–4) and descent from the Argives (15–16). They use colour self-referentially in their description of themselves as black and sun-tanned people (μελανθὲς ἡλιόκτυπον γένος, 154–55) with cheeks struck by the summer sun (δάπτω τὰν ἁπαλὰν εἱλοθερῆ παρειὰν, 70–71). Their comments evoke the popular climate theory which



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divides the world into north and south zones, the latter of which are hot and sunny (Kennedy 2016). Furthermore, the use of sun-related vocabulary (ἡλιόκτυπον, εἱλοθερῆ) links the Danaids, a people from the south who have travelled north, to Helios, a god who flits from the east to the west. The Danaids’ invocation of the Sun god’s rays that bring salvation (αὐγὰς Ἡλίου σωτηρίους, Suppl. 213) further supports this pairing. In addition, this environmental referent draws a linguistic connection to Aithiopia, a country whose etymology is closely associated with the sun (aithoˉ = “I blaze”, cf. Odyssey 1.23–24). Their physical presence confounds Pelasgus as he tries to determine their land of origin (234–46. All translations are my own.): ΠΕΛΑΣΓΟΣ

ΧΟΡΟΣ

ποδαπὸν ὅμιλον τόνδ’ ἀνελληνόστολον πέπλοισι βαρβάροισι κἀμπυκώμασι χλίοντα προσφωνοῦμεν; οὐ γα` ρ Ἀργολὶς ἐσθὴς γυναικῶν οὐδ’ ἀφ’ Ἑλλάδος τόπων. ὅπως δὲ χώραν οὔτε κηρύκων ὕπο ἀπρόξενοί τε νόσφιν ἡγητῶν μολεῖν ἔτλητ’ ἀτρέστως, τοῦτο θαυμαστὸν πέλει. κλάδοι γε μὲν δὴ κατὰ νόμους ἀφικτόρων κεῖνται παρ’ ὑμῶν πρὸς θεοῖς ἀγωνίοις · μόνον τόδ’ Ἑλλὰς χθὼν συνοίσεται στόχωι καὶ τἄλλα πόλλ’ ἐπεικάσαι δίκαιον ἦν, εἰ μὴ παρόντι φθόγγος ἦν ὁ σημανῶν.

235

240

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pelasgus

From what country is this company whom I address, [this company] wearing unGreek clothes and flaunting foreign robes and headbands? The clothes of these women are not Argive, and they are not from any place in Greece. This is a marvel, how you all have fearlessly dared to come to this land, although you were neither presented by the heralds nor a sponsor, and you came without any guides. Yet the boughs, according to the law of the suppliants, are certainly arranged beside you before the gods in assembly. It is a reasonable guess that your land is Greece in respect to this alone. And for the other matters, it would be customary to guess many things still if there were not a voice informing me as I stand beside you. chorus

You have spoken a true speech about our clothes.

Pelasgus initially focuses on the Danaids’ clothes as a sign of their alterity. When he describes them as women who luxuriate in foreign clothes (Suppl. 234–36), he discerns certain hubristic emotions that align with fifth-century Greeks’ view of other foreigners. He seems puzzled at the Danaids’ unGreek attire alongside their familiarity with Greek religion and supplication rites (234–36, 241–42. NB: my translation of ἀνελληνόστολον as “unGreek” aims to capture this hapax legomenon in English). As it stands, he is stuck in an intersectional dilemma. In critical race theory, an intersectional dilemma is a situation in which one is unable to prove discrimination due to the intersecting nature of the bias (Crenshaw 1989). Pelasgus is unable to fit the Danaids into his schema of “Greek people” because they have foreign attire and they

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boldly entered the city without guards and they are suspiciously familiar with Greek religious rites. These various layers threaten to overwhelm him during his inquiry. Pelasgus’s invocation of the hapax legomenon ἀνελληνόστολον evokes the confining boundaries in which Pelasgus’s language exists. The Danaids are either Greek or not Greek; a hybrid race is not an option. He simultaneously mobilises a broader Hellenic identity by fusing the single polis of Argos with the entire Hellenic world and positions the Danaids at variance (expressed with the alpha-privative ἀν-) with his people. Furthermore, the etymology of ἀνελληνόστολον highlights one criterion that Pelasgus uses to determine other people’s race: scrutiny of their clothes (-στολον). Nonetheless, the Danaids complicate this shorthand when they appear in linen garments from Sidon, a Levantine port city (120–21), and a reversible fabric headband (431–42) rather than the traditional Greek wool garment (Thucydides 1.6). In fact, their clothes coincide with that of Persian women in Aeschylus’s Persians (Pers. 125). Alongside this sartorial presentation, Pelasgus’s description of the Danaids luxuriating in their clothes (χλίοντα, Suppl. 236) draws Egyptians and Persians closer together. The chiasmus of negations (alpha-privatives and negative enclitics) that Pelasgus sprinkles throughout his speech (ἀνελληνόστολον, οὐ, οὐδ’, οὔτε, ἀπρόξενοί, Suppl. 234–39) results in a twofold outcome: they distance the Danaids from Pelasgus and foreground the limitations of his own knowledge. Although his repeated negations may initially suggest that Argos and Greece are separate locations (οὐ γὰρ Ἀργολὶς … οὐδ’ ἀφ’ Ἑλλάδος τόπων, Suppl. 236–37), Pelasgus emphasises the cohesion of Greek customs which he contrasts with the notional foreignness of the Danaids. His fixed Hellenocentric lens does not allow him to explore the possibility of the Danaids’ dual identities as Egyptian and Greek. The Danaids complicate any simple attribution further when they demonstrate their knowledge about Greek religious rites. They disregard Pelasgus’s fixed conception when they merely acknowledge his observation that their clothes are not Greek and avoid immediately answering any of his questions (Suppl. 246). After they subversively confront Pelasgus’s binary assessment of them with their use of the alpha-privative in ἀψευδῆ (246), they momentarily distract Pelasgus from his queries by encouraging him to indulge in a recounting of his lineage (Suppl. 249–73). Only after he has finished a lengthy account of his family line do they provide reticent answers about their own fatherland (274–76). Responding to the Danaids’ continued insistence that they are Argive Greek women, Pelasgus has difficulty determining their land of origin (277–90): ΠΕΛΑΣΓΟΣ

ἄπιστα μυθεῖσθ’, ὦ ξέναι, κλυεῖν ἐμοί, ὅπως τόδ’ ὑμῖν ἐστιν Ἀργεῖον γένος. Λιβυστικοῖς γὰρ μᾶλλον ἐμφερέστεραι γυναιξίν ἐστε κοὐδαμῶς ἐγχωρίοις · 280 καὶ Νεῖλος ἂν θρέψειε τοιοῦτον φυτόν [εἰκὼς χαρακτήρ τ’ ἐν γυναικείοις τύποις Κυπρίοις πέπληκται τεκτόνων πρὸς ἀρσένων ·] Ἰνδάς τ’ ἀκούω νομάδας ἱπποβάμοσιν εἶναι καμήλοις ἀστραβιζούσας χθόνα 285 παρ’ Αἰθίοψιν ἀστυγειτονουμένας · καὶ τὰς ἀνάνδρους κρεοβότους τ’ Ἀμαζόνας, εἰ τοξοτευχεῖς ἦστε, κάρτ’ ἂν ᾔκασα ὑμᾶς διδαχθεὶς δ’ ἂν τόδ’ εἰδείην πλέον, ὅπως γένεθλον σπέρμα τ’ Ἀργεῖον τὸ σόν. 290

pelasgus

You all are uttering incredible words for me to hear, strangers, How you all are the Argive people.



Race in Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women and Persians 327 Rather, you resemble Libyan people More than our native women in any way, And the Nile might have borne such a crop (like you). [The impressed mark of Cyprus has been similarly struck On womanly dies by male craftsmen] I hear that there are Indian nomads who ride over lands while saddled on camels that resemble horses and live in the town neighbouring the Aithiopians. And if you all were arrow-shooters, I would liken you to the meat-eating man-hating Amazons. If I were taught further, I would know this, Namely how your people and seed are Argive.

As he rewrites the Danaids’ history, Pelasgus lumps together various groups of women who live far from the Greek polis and places these groups in proximity to each other (Λιβυστικοῖς … Νεῖλος … Ἰνδάς … παρ’ Αἰθίοψιν… καὶ τὰς ἀνάνδρους κρεοβότους τ’ Ἀμαζόνας, 279–87). Such a quick succession of options (Libyans, Nilotic people, Indians and Amazons) spans the limits of the known Greek world and blurs any line of separation between these groups (Hall 1989, 2). In fact, Pelasgus’s speculations create a counter-clockwise journey around Argos that frames the boundaries of fifth-century mainland Greece: Libya in the southwest, the Nile in the south, India in the east and Themiscyra (the home of Amazons in Pontic Asia Minor) in the northeast (Johansen and Whittle 1980 II, 220, 230; Bacon 1961, 47). With this list, Pelasgus reveals an uneasy dependency on the categories of local and foreign. His subsuming of many countries into one entity echoes the trend among some of Aeschylus’s contemporary fifth-century bce Greeks to group all foreigners into “the straitjacket of the great ‘Other’” (Miller 2000, 441). In addition to highlighting the limitations of his ethnographic gaze, Pelasgus again highlights the restrictions of his own language as he uses the hapax legomenon ἀστραβιζούσας (Suppl. 285) to describe the ways that Indians ride their camels (for more on the oddity of this form, see Johansen and Whittle 1980 II, 227). Pelasgus’s inclusion of the Nile (Suppl. 281) and Aithiopia’s neighbour India (Suppl. 284–86) offers fleeting references to the Danaids’ black skin colour. A quick intertextual foray into Herodotus’s Histories helps to expound on this point. Herodotus’s overlapping accounts of the Nile, Aithiopia and India connects the three regions. Herodotus describes the Nile as an integral part of the Egyptian landscape (Herodotus 2.10–18), he remarks upon the proximity of Egypt and Aithiopia (3.17–26) and he pairs the people of Aithiopia and India (7.70). The parallel between Aithiopians and Indians extends to the sexual realm, via the black colour of their sperm (3.101). Furthermore, Herodotus insists that black people live in each of these countries (2.57, 3.101). Herodotus’s convergence of Egypt, Aithiopia and India creates a pluralistic map of the world that denies any country complete separation from its neighbours. This is an important lesson that Pelasgus has yet to learn, as any attempt to pinpoint one homeland for the Danaids is a futile task. Pelasgus can only succeed in his guesses if he discards his essentialist point of view that puts his fellow Argive Greeks in opposition to everyone else. Pelasgus’s rigid distrust of black skin alongside Egyptian heritage is further tested when the Danaids’ black-limbed and white-clothed Egyptian cousins appear (ἄνδρες..μελαγχίμοις γυίοισι λευκῶν ἐκ πεπλωμάτων, Suppl. 719–20, cf. Pers. 116, 301). Rather than imply any anachronistic colour dynamics such as the Black–White paradigm that inaccurately simplifies all people into the categories of “Black” or “White”, Aeschylus’s vivid description draws attention to the visual world of the tragedy. Aeschylus’s contrasting colour scheme ensures the men’s visibility, which is of the utmost importance to the Danaids because they desperately hope that the Argives can see and thereafter apprehend their cousins. In addition, the

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shared black skin colour between the Danaids and their cousins underscores the Danaids’ sophisticated positionality. The Danaids shrewdly carve out an identity for themselves that does not correlate with their violent relatives (μελαγχίμῳ ξὺν στρατῷ, 745) when they refer to their colour as an after-effect of direct sunlight (ἡλιόκτυπον, 155). This environmental factor does not apply to their cousins’ skin colour. In the case of the Egyptian men, their black skin mirrors that of their ship (κυανώπιδας νῆας, 743–44), and their white clothes resemble the colour of their ship’s sails (cf. 154–55, 334). The conflation of the men’s occupation and colour palette alongside the Danaids’ unique appearance highlights the capaciousness of race even when some elements of race, such as skin colour, overlap.

Persians Produced in 472 bce as part of a loosely connected tetralogy, Aeschylus’s Persians examines the aftermath of the Battle of Salamis (cf. Garvie, Chapter 6 and Baragwanath, Chapter 26 in this volume). Based on the naval battle occurring in 480 bce, in which an outnumbered Greek fleet defeated Persian naval forces, this tragedy hints at underlying ideological tensions in fifth-century bce Athens. Despite the fact that both Athenians and Persians used comparable tactics to maintain power, the Athenian victory ushered in a national narrative that transformed Athenians into valiant heroes of democracy and Persians into arrogant despots (Harrison 2000). In this vein, Aeschylus’s Persians simultaneously delighted Athenian victors and served as a negative example of what an unchecked Athens could become (Rosenbloom 2006). Nevertheless, more than a blank slate onto which Athenians painted their anxieties about others, Persia was a conduit for a real place. Athenians’ increasing fascination with Persia coexisted with their growing political dominance in the fifth century. Moreover, Aeschylus’s military record (he fought at the Battle of Salamis, Ion of Chios 392 F7 Jacoby [Katsaros 2009]) and family ties (his brother, Cynegirus, died in the Battle of Marathon in 490, Herodotus 6. 114) suggest an intimate connection with the Persian empire. In Aeschylus’s Persians, a chorus of Persian elders strive to comfort their queen Atossa who bemoans the fate awaiting her son Xerxes upon his return to Susa. By portraying Atossa sympathetically, Aeschylus reworks the simple categories of virtuous Greek and cruel Persian (cf. Gruen 2012, 10–11 with notes 4–7). His manipulation of clothes further illuminates this composite stratagem. Specifically, clothes resonate beyond the visual realm, and attire stands in for an entire nation. For instance, the rich fabrics and splendid clothes worn by Persian women (Pers. 125, 543, 607–9) reflect the ostentatiousness and wealth that Greeks associated with the Eastern empire. When Atossa first appears, her luxurious outfit mirrors her prideful position as Queen of Persia (159). Before even uttering a word, her attire provides a vivid marker of her race, i.e. her audience is able to identify her as Persian because of her clothes. Her clothes also provide clues about the state of Persia. Namely, when she first appears, her lavish attire reinforces the might of the Persian empire. During her second appearance, however, the lack of sartorial details foreshadows Persia’s downfall (598). As the Persian empire crumbles, so do the descriptions of Atossa’s finery. Through this synecdoche, Aeschylus presents his audience with a visual manifestation of Atossa’s mental state. The condition of her mind is grafted onto her clothes and her country, and instability in any one of these realms (internal, external and national) eventually leads to a collective disruption. The link between clothes and homeland applies to Atossa’s son as well. When Xerxes tears his clothes, his ripped outfit amplifies the magnitude of his humiliating defeat at the hands of the Greeks (199, 468, 834–36, 1017; cf. 1060 in which Xerxes tells the chorus to tear their robes in grief; Thalmann 1980, 268–69; Schenker 1994, 288–91). These acts of sartorial



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destruction disturb his parents and drive them to action. Darius urges Atossa to bring fresh clothes for his son (832–36), and Atossa bemoans Xerxes’ ripped clothes (845–48, cf. 1036). Their concern for their son’s attire encompasses more than his corporeal needs. In addition to providing protection from the elements, a new outfit illuminates the royal family’s desired restoration of their family line and empire. An early instance of clothes’ dynamic symbolism appears when Atossa recounts a recent dream in which a violent chariot ride portends Xerxes’s downfall. At this point in Persians, Aeschylus’s audience knows the outcome of the Battle of Salamis while Atossa and the Persian elders remains ignorant of this information. The elders mine Atossa’s dream for clues about their country’s survival. A fitting site for allegory, the dream world provides an artificial setting where Atossa can question the efficacy of clothes in constructing people’s race (181–96): ΒΑΣΙΛΕΙΑ

ἐδοξάτην μοι δύο γυναῖκ’ εὐείμονε, ἡ μὲν πέπλοισι Περσικοῖς ἠσκημένη, ἡ δ’ αὖτε Δωρικοῖσιν, εἰς ὄψιν μολεῖν, μεγέθει τε τῶν νῦν ἐκπρεπεστάτα πολὺ κάλλει τ’ ἀμώμω, καὶ κασιγνήτα γένους ταὐτοῦ, πάτραν δ’ ἔναιον ἡ μὲν Ἑλλάδα κλήρωι λαχοῦσα γαῖαν, ἡ δὲ βάρβαρον · τούτω στάσιν τιν’, ὡς ἐγὼ’δόκουν ὁρᾶν, τεύχειν ἐν ἀλλήλησι, παῖς δ’ ἐμὸς μαθὼν κατεῖχε κἀπράυνεν, ἅρμασιν δ’ ὕπο ζεύγνυσιν αὐτὼ καὶ λέπαδν’ ὑπ’ αὐχένων τίθησι · χἠ μὲν τῆιδ’ ἐπυργοῦτο στολῆι ἐν ἡνίαισί τ’ εἶχεν εὔαρκτον στόμα, ἡ δ’ ἐσφάδαιζε καὶ χεροῖν ἔντη δίφρου διασπαράσσει καὶ ξυναρπάζει βίαι ἄνευ χαλινῶν καὶ ζυγὸν θραύει μέσον.

185

190

195

queen atossa

A pair of well-dressed women seemed to approach, one wearing Persian robes, the other one wearing Dorian robes, in regards to their size, both were most remarkable among their contemporaries by far, in regards to their beauty, both were flawless and sisters of the same lineage. But they were living in different homelands; one obtained a Greek homeland by lot, the other a foreign homeland. The pair had some argument with each other, as it seemed to me. When my son learned of this, he tried to restrain and tame them, and he yoked them both beneath his chariot and placed straps beneath their necks. One stood proudly with her attire, and she put her obedient mouth on the reins; the other tried to struggle and tore the harness with her hands, and she forcefully seized it without the bit and shattered the yoke in the middle.

In this passage, Atossa introduces a pair of sisters whose well dressed (εὐείμονε, Pers. 181) comportment correlates with their physical excellence. Atossa enumerates various traits that define these women’s race: their shared height and beauty shortens the distance between them, while their distinct outfits and varied homelands mark them as distinct. In spite of their

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divergences, these women coexist peacefully until a quarrel renders their aesthetic similarities unimportant. Atossa’s language underscores the conundrum that these women present as a cohesive unit and a fragmented pair. Vocabulary and syntax bring these women together: their familial association (κασιγνήτα γένους ταὐτοῦ, Pers. 185–86) and the extended use of the dual number (ἐδοξάτην… δύο γυναῖκ’ εὐείμονε, ἐκπρεπεστάτα, κασιγνήτα, τούτω, αὐτὼ, Pers. 181, 184, 185, 188, 191) creates a running motif of solidarity. Although the sisters’ clothes initially unify them (εὐείμονε, 181), factors outside of their control (κλήρωι, Pers. 187) eventually undermine their sisterhood. In addition, Aeschylus’s repetition of correlative conjunctions reinforces the notion that each sister is part of a shared unit (ἡ μὲν/ἡ δ’, ἡ μὲν/ἡ δὲ, χἠ μὲν/ἡ δ’, 182–83, 186–87, 192–94). Another point of contact lies in the parallel word constructions that accompany the first two correlative groupings: one participle governs both women (ἡ μὲν… ἠσκημένη … ἡ δ’, ἡ μὲν … λαχοῦσα… ἡ δὲ, 182–83, 186–87). Xerxes’ intrusion exacerbates the quarrel between the two sisters. Each woman’s reaction to Xerxes’ yoking heightens the divisive split: the woman wearing Persian robes breaks away from her sister and flaunts her own attire (στολῆι, Pers. 192), while the Dorian-clad woman weaponises her hands, a dual entity belonging solely to her, to free herself from Xerxes’ domination (χεροῖν, 194; cf. Garvie 2009, 115–16). This reshuffling results in the harmonious coexistence of Xerxes and the Persian-clad woman. Conversely, the woman wearing Dorian robes stands completely untethered from her sister and her charioteer. Nevertheless, a glance outside of Atossa’s dream world grants the Dorian-clad woman a compatriot. That is, the lone sister’s violent refusal to withstand Xerxes’ control likens her the Greek forces who oppose Persian aggression. The sisters’ varied outfits foreshadow the broken alliance that emerges by the end of Atossa’s dream. In fact, their clothes are a better indicator of their behaviour than their shared bloodline. Moreover, Atossa’s use of Dorian dress as a stand-in for Greece potentially reveals her knowledge that the Spartan style of dress became prevalent throughout Greece (Herodotus 5.87–88). Her description of Persia as a foreign land (βάρβαρον, 187) also suggests a momentary Hellenocentric reorientation of her world map. These insights contrast her earlier (178) and later (231–57) bouts of ignorance about Greek geography. Nonetheless, clothes resume their powerful role as a synecdoche for nations when the sisters transform into countries. Their sartorial alterity foreshadows divergent actions such as the literal and figurative breaking of their sisterly bond (ζυγὸν θραύει μέσον, 196). Although they are confined to Atossa’s dream world, they complement the dynamism of attire as an indicator of race in Atossa’s lived reality.

Race as Colour, Religion and/or Geography The Danaids’ and Atossa’s supple handling of race as attire speaks to multiple audiences. In regards to the intersection of race and blackness in Suppliant Women and Persians, Aeschylus’s deft descriptions of this color evoke numerous interpretations. Namely, blackness illustrates powerful emotions among distraught characters. For instance, upon receiving news of their cousins’ arrival, the Danaids are filled with black fear (κελαινόχρων..φίλον κέαρ, Suppl. 785). Their innermost emotions threaten to consume them as they negotiate between two blacktinged outcomes: submission to their black cousins or descent into Hades, the land of eternal darkness (787–91). The presence of blackness in this scene, both explicit and implied, heightens the Danaids’ emotional turmoil. This coding of colour also resonates among Aeschylus’s Persians. When the Persian elders preemptively mourn the outcome of the Battle of Salamis, they mirror the Danaids’ ability to conjoin emotions with colour (μελαγχίτων φρὴν … φόβῳ, Pers. 116, cf. 1052). The striking imagery of the black-clothed mind



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highlights clothes’ capacity to alter both physical and metaphorical bodies. Blackness continues to color poignant moments in Persians: the gloom of a black night amplifies Atossa’s distraught state as she waits to find out whether Xerxes survived the battle (νυκτὸς ἐκ μελαγχίμου, Pers. 301), and the pervasiveness of black grief haunts the Persian elders as they wallow in a dark cloud of mourning (πένθει δνοφερῷ κατέκρυψας, 536, cf. 357). These meteorological metaphors illustrate the wide-ranging capacity of grief-laden blackness. It looms over everyone with whom it comes into contact. Altogether, through its vivid illustration of intensely fraught moments, blackness enriches the visual and emotional landscape of these tragedies. In line with Aeschylus’s broad rendering of blackness, religion affords the tragedian another opportunity to unsettle the categorisation of others (i.e. race). Namely, the intertwined relationship between Atossa and the Danaids deepens as they both appeal to Greek gods to rescue them from imminent danger. After Atossa recounts her frightening dream, she prepares to pray to gods at the altar of Apollo (ἀποτρόποισι δαίμοσιν… ἐσχάραν Φοίβου, Pers. 203, 205– 06). Her Persian identity does not limit her choice of suppliant god; rather, she transcends her assigned alterity to embrace Greek divinities as her own. Rejecting the non-Greek label initially attributed to them, the Danaids echo Atossa’s worship with their repeated prayers to Zeus (Suppl. 625–709). In their opening speech (1–175) alone, they refer to Zeus 13 times. As they replace their worship of the Nile with a complete embrace of Greek religious rites, they draw closer to their distant Argive ancestors instead of their immediate Egyptian relatives (1024–29). Taken together, Atossa’s and the Danaids’ heterogeneous reverence muddles the distinction between Persia, Egypt and Greece on the world map. Aeschylus further incorporates the trope of mutable geography into Persians and Suppliant Women. Atossa and the Danaids stand in for Persia and Egypt, countries which can symbolise the extremes of humankind as the homeland of hubris and the birthplace of brutal men, according to some Greek tragedians. Yet these countries are not uniformly negative. For Atossa, Persia is the centre of a great empire despite its foreign status in relation to Greece (Pers. 187). She redefines what constitutes foreignness when she places Athens in the westernmost parts of the world (232). Opting for a smaller-scale project, the Danaids are invested in reshaping one person’s stubborn outlook on Argive identity. They seek to convince Pelasgus that they can locally descend from the banks of the Nile and globally hail from Argos. In fact, they reconcile Io’s meandering journey by returning to their ancestor’s homeland. Such creative reworkings of geography reinforce the flexible relationship between location and race. Aeschylus’s characters encompass more than their geographically-based labels.

Conclusion …The manner in which the Akan wears his native toga is exactly the way in which the ancient Romans wore theirs. How is that possible? Did the Romans penetrate this far before the days of Christ? Or did Negroes get as far as Rome? Or did the two peoples evolve the same kind of dress independently, without coming in [sic] contact with each other? No one really knows. It might well be that people in ancient times had much more social intercourse than we now suspect, that they were much less conscious of “race” than we are. (Wright 2008 [1954], 293–94)

Noting the sartorial parallels between contemporary Akan people and ancient Romans during his sojourn in the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), Richard Wright puzzles over the points of contact between the two (Gilroy 1993, 146–86; Dunbar 2008). Clothes grant him a tangible point of entry into an ancient heterogeneous world in which “race”, presumably

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related to chromatic distinctions, did not govern all interactions. As an alternate signifier of race, togas provide historical insight without retrojecting colour biases into Roman antiquity or fossilising them in the twentieth century. Rather, diverse interactions in Wright’s imagined past challenge an oversimplistic view of the ancient world. Taking cues from Wright’s astute observations, this chapter has foregrounded the need for an expansive understanding of race in ancient Greek tragedy. A binary framework that reduces the world into Greeks and nonGreeks insufficiently addresses Aeschylus’s representation of Persians and Egyptians. Through reciprocal analyses that upend monolithic renderings of people who live outside of Greece, Aeschylus has punctured notions of Greek cultural chauvinism in the fifth century bce. His characters have illuminated the complex exteriority of race, thereby subverting a unidimensional approach to race in ancient Greek literature.

FURTHER READING There is a voluminous literature about identity in the ancient Greco-Roman world. In relation to Greek identity, Hall 1997 pairs Greek identity with ethnicity, Whitmarsh 2010 examines its local permutations, Hartog 1988 [1980] and Hall 1989 assert that a binary model governs its construction in Greek history and tragedy, respectively. Scholars have examined Roman identity in relation to Roman neighbours in the west (Johnston 2017), east (Andrade 2013), north (Mullen 2013) and south (Mattingly 2011). For more on Persia as part of the Athenian imagination, see Hall 1989 (6); a similar argument can be made for Egypt (Vasunia 2001, 73–78, 288). Mudimbe 1994 (167 ff.) and Said [1978] 1995 elaborate on the idea of a foreign country as a blank slate. Shapiro 2009 and Harrison 2011 provide a general overview of Persia in Greek literature; Vasunia 2001 offers a thorough account of Egypt in Greek tragedy. Harris 2009 analyses dreams in Greek antiquity. Dihle 1964, Schneider 2004 and Vasunia 2016 (36–39) discuss the deeply rooted relationship between India and Aithiopia in ancient sources. For an examination of India and Aithiopia as part of a coherent whole that reflects the unity of the Indian Ocean, see Schneider 2015.

REFERENCES Andrade, N. J. (2013). Syrian Identity in the Greco-Roman World. Cambridge. Bacon, H. H. (1961). Barbarians in Greek Tragedy. New Haven and London. Crenshaw, K. (1989). “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 139–67. Dihle, A. (1964). “The Conception of India in Hellenistic and Roman Literature.” Cambridge Classical Journal 10, 15–23. Dunbar, E. (2008). “The Multiple Frames for a Dynamic Diaspora in Richard Wright’s Black Power.” Papers on Language & Literature 44, 354–64. Garvie, A. F. (2009). Aeschylus Persae. Oxford. Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA. Gruen, E. (2012). Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (Martin Classical Lectures). Princeton. [First published by the Trustees of Oberlin College in 2011.] Hall, E. (1989). Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy. Oxford. Hall, J. (1997). Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity. Cambridge. Harris, W. (2009). Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity. Cambridge, MA. Harrison, T. (2000). The Emptiness of Asia: Aeschylus’ “Persians” and the History of the Fifth Century. London.



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Harrison, T. (2011). Writing Ancient Persia. London. Hartog, F. (1988 [1980]). The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History. (trans. J. Lloyd). Berkeley and Los Angeles. Johansen, H. F., and Whittle, E. W. (1980). Aeschylus Supplices, Vols I–III. Copenhagen. Johnston, A. (2017). The Sons of Remus: Identity in Roman Gaul and Spain. Cambridge, MA. Katsaros, A. (2009). “Ion of Chios (392).” In I. Worthington, ed. Jacoby Online. Brill's New Jacoby, Part III. Leiden. Kennedy, R. F. (2016). “Airs, Waters, Metals, Earth: People and Environment in Archaic and Classical Greek Thought.” In R. F. Kennedy, and M. Jones-Lewis, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds. London, 9–28. Mattingly, D. J. (2011). Imperialism, Power, and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire. Princeton. McCoskey, D. E. (2003). “By Any Other Name? Ethnicity and the Study of Ancient Identity.” Classical Bulletin 79, 93–109. McCoskey, D. E. (2012). Race: Antiquity and Its Legacy. Oxford. Miller, M. C. (2000). “The Myth of Bousiris: Ethnicity and Art.” In B. Cohen, ed. Not the Classical Ideal: Athens and the Construction of the Other in Greek Art. Leiden and Boston, 413–42. Morrison, T. (2017). The Origin of Others. Cambridge, MA. Mudimbe, V. Y. (1994). The Idea of Africa. Bloomington. Mullen, A. (2013). Southern Gaul and the Mediterranean: Multilingualism and Multiple Identities in the Iron Age and Roman Periods. Cambridge. Rosenbloom, D. (2006). Aeschylus, Persians. London. Said, E. W. (1995 [1978]). Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. New York. Schenker, D. (1994). “The Queen and the Chorus in Aeschylus’ Persae.” Phoenix 48, 283–93. Schneider, P. (2004). L’Éthiopie et l’Inde: Interférences et confusions aux extrémités du monde antique (Viiie siècle avant J. C. - VIe siècle apres J.-C.). Collections de l’École française de Rome 335, Rome. Schneider, P. (2015). “The So-called Confusion between India and Ethiopia: The Eastern and Southern Edges of the Inhabited World from the Greco-Roman Perspective.” In S. Bianchetti, M. R. Cataudella, and H. J. Gehrke, eds. Brill’s Companion to Ancient Geography: The Inhabited World in Greek and Roman Tradition. Leiden and Boston, 184–202. Shapiro, H. A. (2009). “The Invention of Persia in Classical Athens.” In M. Eliav-Feldon, B. Isaac and J. Ziegler, eds. The Origins of Racism in the West. Cambridge, 57–87. Thalmann, W. G. (1980). “Xerxes’ Rags: Some Problems in Aeschylus’ Persians.” American Journal of Philology 101, 260–82. Vasunia, P. (2001). Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Vasunia, P. (2016). “Ethiopia and India: Fusion and Confusion in British Orientalism.” Les Cahiers d’Afrique de l’Est: Special Issue on Global History, East Africa and the Classical Traditions 51, 21–44. Whitmarsh, T. (2010). Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World. Cambridge. Wright, R. (2008 [1954]). Black Power (Three Books from Exile: Black Power; the Color Curtain; and White Man, Listen!). New York. Wyles, R. (2011). Costume in Greek Tragedy. London.

CHAPTER 25

Aeschylus’s Persians and the “Just War” Sydnor Roy Introduction Just war theory has a long history and provides a useful tool for examining all accounts of violent conflict, among them Aeschylus’s Persians. We can expand on the analyses of this play already offered by political theorists by considering not only ancient views of the just war but also modern ones. Aeschylus in general responds to the literary tradition of warfare we see in Homer; the historical context of The Persians supports this reading. His work, however, can and should also be situated as well in modern theory of just war. From our earliest works of Greek literature, we see evidence of how the Greeks thought about the effects of war. The Odyssey offers a perspective on how the war was experienced by those left at home and also provides glimpses of how the war has affected Odysseus. In a striking simile, Odysseus responds to hearing the story of the fall of Troy by melting into tears like a Trojan woman whose husband has just died protecting her, their city and their children (8.521–31). The simile demands that the listener understand the pain of those affected by war and connect the pain experienced to both the defeated and the victor alike. The pain of war is the same, in the end, for everyone involved. Homer’s poems provide a basic picture of the expectations of behaviour in warfare on both sides. Victors are allowed to strip their enemies of their armour, but not to defile their bodies, and there is a general expectation of the right to eventually reclaim and bury the dead. Heralds between the armies are respected and the right to shift from combatant to suppliant (i.e. to surrender in the expectation of ransom) is accepted. While these rules are broken by Achilles, his behaviour seems to prove the rule, rather than complicating it. In addition, there is an acknowledged cause of the war, but also a recognition of the right to defend one’s home. What we find in Homer are the rudimentary foundations of just war theory – which can be understood as a set of expectations and rules on how war should be carried out. The Greeks, in their earliest literature, imagined a proper way to prosecute a war. The expectation of rules in warfare is easy when one is fighting a known enemy who shares similar cultural values and attitudes. The Trojans perhaps come to be an “other” in the Greek imagination, but their differences from the Greeks are not heavily emphasised in the Homeric

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Epics (see Skinner 2012 for a recent discussion). There are differences in social organisation of course – the Trojans are unified under a monarch with a multi-ethnic alliance in support, while the Greeks are a loosely unified band of independent kings – but few differences exist in language or religion. Up until the Ionian Revolt in 499 bce and the Persian Invasions (and afterward as well), the Greeks were most likely to fight each other, or, in their confrontations with non-Greek powers, to act as individual poleis. There was no need to think about or theorise the proper behaviour in war, because the Greeks, unified culturally as warrior societies with shared traditions, were not confronted with that need. The Ionian Revolt and the Persian Invasions changed the calculus of behaviour in warfare, because the Greeks were confronting a people (or groups of peoples) whose cultures were different. The successful defeat of the invading Persian army opened up a new space for thinking about the proper prosecution of war. The battle of Salamis also created a need to think about the nature and effects of a new form of warfare: the naval battle. Aeschylus’s Persians offers our first example of theorising about warfare after this watershed event and, as I will argue, is an important early contribution to the just war tradition.

Political Theorising in the Persians and Just War Theory The presence of political theorising in Aeschylus is not a new proposition. It is almost universally acknowledged that the Persians provides a space for reflection on the nature of the Athenian democracy and its nascent power (Euben 1986; Goldhill 1988). There is, however, significant debate over whether the tone of the Persians is patriotic and celebratory (Harrison 2000; Hall 2006) or shows pity for the defeated Persians (Rosenbloom 2006; Haywood 2017), which I will discuss in detail below. The praise of the democracy comes about in part by the contrast with the Persian monarchy; the weaknesses of the structure of Persian government are revealed in its defeat (Harrison 2000; Forsdyke 2001). In addition, the play considers the nature of empire and how it can overstretch its boundaries (Kennedy 2013). Scholars readily recognise these elements but hotly debate their effects upon the audience and their possible nuances. For Lockwood (2017) and Haywood (2017), this aporia is the intention of the play. Only by presenting tensions does the play provide a space for the political theorising of the audience. It is in this spirit that I will pursue my investigation of how war, and specifically “just” war, is presented for consideration in this play. Prior work by political theorists on Aeschylus’s Persians has focused upon the effect of the victory by the Greeks (and of course the Athenians) on their understanding of democracy as opposed to monarchy or tyranny. Euben (1986) posits that the victory creates a space for acknowledging the strength of a democracy with a greater level of citizen enfranchisement. While Marathon was a hoplite and, therefore, largely aristocratic victory, the naval victory at Salamis required the involvement of the poorer members of the Athenian citizenry. Victory there set the stage for Athens’s increasing enfranchisement of its citizens (Raaflaub 1998). Borowiak, in his exploration of accountability as the central feature of non-tyrannical government, argues that the Persians, along with the Prometheus Bound, shows why accountable government is necessary: “Unaccountability allows despotism to undermine the public good, and it allows incompetence to rule unchecked” (2011, 82). While one may quibble over how to interpret the Persian Queen’s claim that Xerxes is unaccountable (211–14) or how specifically one should apply this concept to democracy alone, Borowiak’s interpretation highlights a common focus of political theorists of democracy – that is, that Aeschylus’s play and the battle of Salamis contributed to how the Athenians thought about themselves and their new government in contrast to the Persians.

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Rather than exploring how the Athenians develop in their consideration and understanding of their democracy and the theoretical underpinnings of that form of government, I focus upon how the Athenians thought about this war and, consequently, war in general. The deep cultural, historical, political and personal factors that influence the cause, prosecution, outcome and analysis of any war mark it as a rich space for any theoretical effort. Aspects of this exploration will make use of the trends well laid out by modern political philosophers, most notably in the questions of just causes for war, the proper authority to wage war, the responsibility that comes with that, and the right attitude of the victor towards the defeated. By establishing Xerxes as the only actor with authority in Persia and noting that he does not have accountability, the play suggests that the responsibility for the war rests on him and thus that the Athenians could hold differing attitudes towards the Persian king and towards the Persian people. Therefore, the Persian people, and their subjects, should be recognised as people without authority and hence worthy of pity. Looking at Aeschylus’s Persians with a focus upon the war itself – and in particular the attitude towards war fostered by the play – provides an opportunity to resolve some of the play’s tensions and ambiguities. Before going into my discussion of just war concepts operative in Aeschylus’s Persians, I will provide a brief history of the tradition as generally understood and its main tenets. While most scholars acknowledge that there are some earlier hints at cross-cultural and cross-historical standards about the proper way to initiate, wage and end wars present in Plato (Laws), Aristotle (Politics, Nicomachean Ethics) and Cicero (On Duties, Republic), St Augustine (City of God) is generally pointed to as the initiator of the just war tradition and Aquinas (Summa Theologiae, Secunda Pars) as its first systematic theorist. The framework for just war established by Aquinas still forms the backbone of most modern approaches to just war theory, as discussed in Walzer 1977, whose Just and Unjust Wars stands as the foundational work of the modern philosophical discipline, as opposed to the long-standing practical work of diplomacy now encompassed by International Relations and the tradition of considering just behaviour in war without explicitly theorising it. Recently, however, scholars of just war theory have begun to challenge this narrative. O’Driscoll 2015 has argued for a more systematic consideration of multiple texts from Greece and Rome that would have influenced Augustine and Aquinas and later significant figures in the theory of war such as Hugo Grotius. Sorabji and Rodin have argued for serious consideration of comparative just war theory – that is, considering the tradition from the perspective of the society as a complete cultural unit. They urge not just looking for preceding ideas that may have caught the eye of later readers, but for understanding those ideas in their cultural context. Their recent volume, Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions (2013), takes into account Islamic, Jewish, Indian, Graeco-Roman and modern attempts at global just war thinking in their search for new solutions to the old problem of war. One of the significant goals for both O’Driscoll and Sorabji and Rodin is to separate the just war tradition from its strong association with its medieval Christian foundations and the perception that it is primarily a “western” or European tradition. They argue that this strong association has created tension and even push-back from the many nations outside this tradition, whose cultural history developed outside of or in competition with European or “western” traditions (O’Driscoll 2015, 1–2). In addition, they believe that a broad historical worldview can enliven elements of debate in just war theory and perhaps offer solutions to new problems. In part, this chapter is my attempt to participate in this new direction of thinking within the just war tradition. So far, aside from gestures towards Homer’s Iliad and more in-depth analyses of Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon and Cicero, there has not been much more than a cursory engagement with the full range of literature from the ancient world. This chapter, through close analysis of an intentionally literary rather than philosophical or simply historical text, provides an opening for how to bring texts in to the discourse of just war.



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It is not the aim of the chapter to produce proof of a consistent theory of just war in the ancient world or in Aeschylus. Rather, I will use the generally recognised, present-day tenets of just war theory as a guideline to uncover some aspects of similar or related rules and attitudes apparent in Aeschylus’s Persians. These form part of a broader understanding of attitudes towards war in Ancient Greece. The just war tradition typically divides the rules of war into three categories with tenets within each that sometimes overlap. Ius ad bellum (the just way to begin war) focuses primarily on what are necessary and sufficient reasons to go to war that make the war just or permissible. The society must have just cause and right intention, legitimate authority, a reasonable prospect of success, lack of other options (i.e. war must be a last resort) and proportionality of response. These precepts apply to both sides participating in the war. In the Persian Wars, the Greeks have just cause because they are defending themselves against aggression. Whether or not the Persians have just cause is debatable, as Aeschylus’s presentation of the multiple layers of causality for both the invasion and the defeat indicates (Haywood 2017). Right intention suggests that there is a properly foreseen purpose to the war. For the Greeks, this is the avoidance of enslavement; for the Persians, the problem of right intention maps onto the problem of just cause – are they invading for the purpose of conquest or to avenge their loss at Marathon and Athens’ role in the Ionian revolt? Authority lies in the power structures of each society – Xerxes as king has the authority to take his people to war and the leaders of the several Greek states have the right to lead the resistance. The Persians believe that they have a reasonable chance of success, which is enforced by the large army they send. The Greeks, and the Athenians in particular, are less certain, but the necessity of their resistance overrides the need for evaluating them for whether they have a reasonable chance at success. While we have patchy evidence of multiple embassies between the various Greek states and the Persian Empire (Miller 2004) which could indicate attempts at diplomacy before invasion, this element of ius ad bellum is not strongly at play in the Persian Wars. A damning factor for the Persians is their lack of proportionality. In the logic of the play, the invasion that brought about the battle of Marathon represents a suitable force to send in response to Athenian involvement in the Ionian Revolt; Xerxes’ large-scale invasion, with himself at the head of the army, suggests an extreme response. The size of the army reinforces the idea that the invasion was motivated by the desire for conquest rather than a desire for vengeance. Wars of conquest are not uncommon in Greece and in the wider world of the eastern Mediterranean; the general tendency of actors to find a cause for the invasion suggests that conquest alone was not viewed as a just cause for war. Low 2007 discusses how Greek states sought justifiable reasons for conquest and intervention. The proper way of carrying out a war, or ius in bello, also includes the idea of proportionality and necessity, as well as the idea of discrimination. Discrimination is generally most focused upon the need to avoid civilian casualties. It can also be understood in terms of individuals with immunity and sanctuary or safe spaces in war. For the ancient Greeks, the inviolability of heralds and the generally acknowledged safety granted to those who take sanctuary in temples and those who act as suppliants (i.e. those who surrender and assume, but are not guaranteed, protection) are examples of discrimination. The final category of just war theory is the question of ius post bellum, or proper behaviour after a war, although this area still remains undertheorised by modern just war theorists (Orend 2007) with many scholars still offering foundational framings (see Clifford 2012; Klein 2020 for overviews). As with ius ad bellum and ius in bello, the tenets of establishing responsibility and practicing proportionality and discrimination are foremost – in many cases, this means keeping in mind who was responsible for the conflict or injury and thus not blaming or excessively punishing non-combatants or the disenfranchised. A final principal of ius post bellum is the need for respect for the traditions and rights of the enemy, which one could

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also call “right attitude” or “keeping faith with the enemy” (see Grotius 1625). This aspect, which remains to this day rather poorly defined, generally calls for an appropriate appreciation of the experience and perspective of the defeated enemy, or as one might put it, a desire to win the peace as much as one has won the war. It is much easier to apply “right attitude” when a war has a decisive ending; the Persian invasion and subsequent retreat creates a debate among the Greeks. The Athenians wish to continue the war on the offensive; several other Greek states choose to view the defeat of the Persians as the end of the war. It is in this period of debate that Aeschylus writes his play, which reveals a strong element, a tradition as old as Homer, of respecting the enemy or even empathising with them. In what follows, I will explore how Aeschylus’s Persians contributes to our understanding of how the Greeks thought about their enemy in war and, in particular, consideration of the enemy after a victory. I will also indicate how discussions in the play take part in other elements of just war theory, including, notably, just cause, proportionality, necessity and discrimination. The hope is that this exploration will provide a greater understanding of thinking about war from a political, social and military point of view, with a particular focus on the importance of pity in the prosecution and resolution of a just war.

War in Aeschylus: Cause, Right Attitude and Responsibility Just Cause The Persians offers several explanations for the defeats the Persians suffer (Haywood 2017), some of which address whether the Persians had just cause in the first place. That the Greeks had a just reason to resist the Persians is not left in doubt for the audience, as is made clear in the Messenger’s report of the shout the Greeks gave before engaging at Salamis: “O sons of Greeks, come, free your homeland, free your children, your wives, the shrines of your homeland’s gods, and the graves of your ancestors; now the struggle is for all of them” (402–05). This exclamation of Panhellenic identity, reflected later in the Athenians’ explanation of shared Hellenic identity in Herodotus 8.144, rousingly states their just cause in the war. The Persians’ cause is much less clearly represented in the play. While expressing fear for the outcome of the invasion, neither the Chorus nor the Queen challenges Xerxes’ decision to go to Greece before they get news of the defeat (Haywood 2017, 41). The Persians’ cultural tradition of conquest, as imagined by the Greeks, is noted (753–58; 780–81); Darius’s negative description of Xerxes’ invasion suggests that it is not a sufficient cause for warfare (“was it by land or by sea that this wretched man made his foolish attempt”, 719). The Queen’s response upon learning of the defeat is to cry: “My son has found his vengeance against the famous Athenians to be bitter, and those of the barbarians whom Marathon destroyed before were not sufficient; for whom, my son, thinking to gain a requital, has brought on a great quantity of miseries” (πικρὰν δὲ παῖς ἐμὸς τιμωρίαν/κλεινῶν Ἀθηνῶν ηὗρε, κοὐκ ἀπήρκεσαν/οὓς πρόσθε Μαραθὼν βαρβάρων ἀπώλεσεν:/ὧν ἀντίποινα παῖς ἐμὸς πράξειν δοκῶν/τοσόνδε πλῆθος πημάτων ἐπέσπασεν, 473–477). The interpretation of the passage hinges on whether we understand κλεινῶν Ἀθηνῶν to be a subjective or objective genitive. If objective, as just translated, the “bitter vengeance” would refer to Xerxes’ failed attempt to punish the Athenians; if subjective, it would refer to the punishment visited on the Persian forces by Athens. The second phrase, best translated as “those of the barbarians whom Marathon destroyed before did not suffice”, presents an ambiguity in how to interpret βαρβάρων. While the term may refer to Athenians, it is more likely that Atossa is here referring to Persians, in which case she is focalising, perhaps ironically, through an Athenian perspective (Hall 1996; Garvie 2009). If it is the vengeance of the



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Athenians, it suggests that they wanted to kill more Persians after Marathon. If the vengeance is against the Athenians, then perhaps those Persians killed at Marathon should have been enough of a sign to stop seeking vengeance against Athens. But, as the last phrase indicates, Xerxes came hoping for requital for the Persians who died at Marathon and the earlier wrong done by the Athenians and his desire for revenge caused the present troubles. This suggests that the genitive κλεινῶν Ἀθηνῶν is objective (“against the famous Athenians”, contra LSJ v. τιμωρία) and that vengeance is Xerxes’ ultimate goal. But it also reminds us that vengeance for Marathon was not the only goal; Xerxes, like Darius before him, had reasons from earlier events to seek vengeance against Athens. The play’s omission of the Ionian Rebellion, and the Persians’ seemingly wilful forgetfulness about Marathon has sparked debate (see, most recently, Sampson 2015). The Queen must be reminded of who the Athenians are and about the battle of Marathon by the chorus (230–45) and the Chorus’s praise of Darius as a king who did not cause the death of his men (652–53) must have struck an Athenian audience as odd. Darius offers a more moderate version of their praise when he claims that neither he nor his predecessors ever incurred such evil for his city (781). When the Chorus asks his advice for next steps, he says that there should not be any further invasion of Greece (790). Sampson (2015) has argued that this overlooking of Marathon is part of how the Persians employ selective memory to reinforce their ideology. Kennedy (2013) claims that the focus on Darius’s success is in keeping both with Darius’s own imperial propaganda and the image of Darius presented in the play. It could also be, however, that the downplaying of Marathon and its cause, the Ionian revolt, heightens blame for Xerxes in his invasion. The Ionian revolt is subtly alluded to only once, or perhaps twice, in the play. The Chorus lists the many islands and poleis of Ionian Greeks brought under Darius’s rule (879–900) and makes a brief reference to their mother city (ματρόπολις 895–96) as the present cause of groaning. Herodotus, writing much later, explicitly connects the Athenians’ involvement in the Ionian Revolt with both Marathon and Xerxes’ later invasion (5.97.3). Darius also enjoins the chorus to “remember the Athenians and Greece” (μέμνησθ᾽ Ἀθηνῶν Ἑλλάδος τε, 824). Lockwood (2017) suggests briefly that this should call to mind the sacking of Sardis, which prompted Darius, in Herodotus, to order a servant to tell him three times a day to “remember the Athenians” (μέμνεο τῶν Ἀθηναίων, 5.105.2). Darius perhaps further alludes to this when he chastises the Persians who remain in Greece for violating temples (807–15), as the Athenians allegedly did in Sardis. What it suggests is that Darius may have responded justly to the sacking of Sardis and that the Athenians defended themselves at Marathon justly; no further action was needed and no harm came to Darius or his power in attempting to extract vengeance from the Athenians and failing. Xerxes’ mistake was to revive the old cause and add Marathon to it in his quest for vengeance, and in addition to react out of proportion to the harm. In this way, Darius can be both an aggressor against the Athenians and yet still a good king; Xerxes, feeling the pressure of his kingship, used his authority to pursue a war without proper consideration or proportion and thereby created an untenable situation for his people at home.

Right Attitude and Responsibility In his analysis of the battle of Salamis as a watershed moment for Athenian democracy and political theory, Euben suggests that “the point of the play is not that the Persians should remember Athens but that Athens should remember Persia, for both its political dissimilarities and its human similarities” (1986, 365). This play calls on its audience to think about these ideas not just in the context of the politics of the Persians as an enemy “other”, but in the context of war with the Persian people as fellow sufferers:

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For an Athenian audience watching the suffering of a dignified enemy, the Persae unites loss and gain in a single instant, bringing to the victors in their exultation a wisdom borne of suffering and loss. The play does indeed celebrate Greek power and freedom. But it also warns that sustaining such freedom and power requires the observance of those boundaries of life, place, and action violated by Xerxes. (Euben 1986, 365)

Many of the Chorus’s lines are dedicated to worrying about and then grieving the loss of their fighting men and its effects upon those left at home. We see the sorrow of those left at home in the repeated emphasis upon parents bereft of children and wives lying on empty beds. The Queen’s character personalises those losses through her focus on her son not only as king but as an individual, perhaps in need of new clothes (see Schenker 1994, 288–89). A second emphasis on feeling occurs after we learn of the defeat at Salamis – the wretchedness of those who lost their lives at sea and were left unburied in the waters (272–79). The repeated lists of those lost (notably at 302–31 and 925–27) heightens the sense of catastrophe, while the strangeness of the names reinforces the otherness of the Persians. In treating the play’s complicated reception, some scholars (most notably, Hall 1989) argue that the otherness of the Persians and their role as invaders means that the emphasis on fear, loss and pain is meant to heighten the Athenians’ pleasure in their victory and satisfaction with their new democracy. Others, however, see the emphasis on loss and pain as intended to encourage identification with the Persians so that the Athenians can safely relive the tragedy of war or even consider how they compare with the Persian Empire. Lockwood (2017) suggests that the twin elements of othering distance and pitiable similarity are meant to be in unresolved tension throughout the play, and that that lack of resolution is what makes the Persians a work of political theorising. In order to explore the purpose of this tension further, I will focus on the implications of how pity is directed towards the Persian people and soldiers and on whom the responsibility for these losses is laid. The setting in Persia recreates the feeling of a distanced past, which can encourage identification with the actors and chorus (Kitto 1961; Hopman 2009; Grethlein 2010), but Aeschylus must be careful to allow space for the exultation of victory as well. The Chorus begins by listing individual Persians who have left Persia (21–58) and explains the effect of their absence: “The whole land of Asia which nurtured them groans from soft regret, and parents and wives, tremble at time as it stretches day by day” (61–64). They then shift their focus specifically to the wives of those who are gone: “Marriage beds are filled with tears of desire for their husbands; the Persian women are deeply sad; each one, full of desire for her well-loved man, has sent forth her fearsome, spear-bearing husband and so is left alone in the marriage yoke” (133–39). When the Queen then appears, the Chorus characterises her as someone who has already lost a husband and who fears for her son (155–59). She makes clear that the focus of her concern (and thus doubles the emphasis laid upon her as mother worrying for her son) is Xerxes, the “light of the house” (167). The heavy emphasis upon families worrying and separated sets the stage for the news of the loss. It also shapes how we should interpret what the Queen later says about the effect on Xerxes of the military loss. After the Queen shares her dream and the omen she witnessed, she comments on how different possible outcomes will affect her son: “If my son should succeed, he would become an admired man, but if he does badly – he would not be accountable to the polis. If he is safe, he would still rule this land as he has” (211–14). The Queen’s assessment of Xerxes’ position politically allows her to grieve for him personally, since she does not have to worry about his political fate. Her freedom from care on this front is a strong political statement in and of itself: the king is not accountable. Accountability is perhaps the defining feature of democracy as conceived in the fifth century (Herodotus 3.80) and remains so to this day (Borowiak 2011). The Queen’s remark reduces all elements of loss to a personal experience of it, including that of Xerxes. This is only possible because of the nature of the monarchy and Xerxes’ reign in



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particular as the Queen perceives them, although as Schenker (1994, 291) points out, the Queen’s image of Xerxes is not consistent with how he acts once on stage. Her cross-examination of the chorus about Athens and its military power, wealth and government serves to reinforce how the Queen understands political power to be based in a central authority, a strong and numerous military force and money. The Chorus, which understands Athens well enough and remembers Marathon, gently corrects her understanding (233–44). The initial scenes of the play establish the personal nature of the Persians’ grief, including the luxury that the Queen has to make her grief personal rather than political, since she believes that Xerxes’ monarchy is accountable to none. In essence, the Queen shows the dark side of monarchy – lack of accountability, indeed, but as we will come to see, the play combines this concept with the concept of responsibility, as Darius, the Chorus and even Xerxes himself all eventually agree that Xerxes is to blame. The Queen’s understanding of how accountability works is thus not quite consistent with how monarchical power is represented in the play. Her words offer a starting point for understanding, but ignore for the moment the separate but related idea of responsibility. The lack of accountability defines the autocrat in opposition to a democracy. What it also does is make clear where responsibility lies in a monarchical society – with the autocrat alone. Before discussing this, however, I want to turn to the other aspect of pity invoked in this play: pity for the dead lost at sea. As Athens, Corinth and Corcyra developed their navies extensively, the nature of naval battles (as opposed to land battles) came into increasing focus. The dead are, generally, recoverable from a loss on land; this is much less likely in a naval battle. Aeschylus emphasises this aspect of sea battles repeatedly once news of the loss at Salamis comes. When the Messenger first reports on the battle and the dead at sea, the Chorus responds: “Otototoi! You say that the dead bodies of our loved ones, still in their clothes, are borne around, tossed about the sea, repeatedly drowned, and lost” (274–77). As the Queen and the Chorus become increasingly emotional in their laments, they blame Xerxes and even the ships themselves (558–63). The Chorus eventually brings together loss and pity: “They are mangled in the whirlpools, alas, torn by the voiceless children, ah!, of the clear waters, oh woe, and homes deprived of a husband mourn, and parents now childless and aged, alas, weep for their heaven-sent sorrow” (576–82). Here Aeschylus directs the pity of the audience towards two aspects of the Persian loss: those who are bereaved at home and those who died at sea (doubly mourned because of the lack of a body to bury). The chorus attunes the audience to the most pitiable aspects of the Persian loss, which his Greek audience could easily understand. This focus on pity speaks to a significant element of just war theory, especially ius post bellum, the “right attitude” towards the defeated enemy. As the Persians provides a chance for the Athenians to think about the implications of their victory, it also reminds them to think about the nature of their enemy’s loss (as well as their own). As Athens grows as a naval power, the sorrow of loss of lives and bodies at sea will become increasingly relevant to the Athenians at home. Thus, the Persians’ suffering calls for great consideration from those responsible for making military decisions of their own. A key element of the play that underscores its endorsement of “right attitude” is its focus on both accountability and responsibility. The Queen has claimed that Xerxes will not be accountable, but that does not mean that he is not responsible for how he uses his (so-called) unaccountable power. Accountability is a way of understanding how power within a society is controlled. It allows for a diffusion of power in a democracy. A consequence of this is responsibility – for those who make decisions and for those on whom blame is laid when the decisions go badly. Xerxes’ apparent lack of accountability puts full responsibility for the war, and the loss, on him. Thus the play, building off the Queen’s claim that Xerxes is unaccountable, explicates how unaccountable power is logically followed by sole responsibility, through the statements of the Chorus, Darius and Xerxes himself.

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In the course of the Messenger’s description of the battle, he explains that Xerxes was tricked and did not understand that the gods were against him (361–62). This presents Xerxes as the leader of the battle and reveals one of the dangers of autocratic power – the reliance on the opinion of one individual. After the defeats at Salamis and Psytalleia, “Xerxes wailed aloud at the depth of this terrible outcome. For he had a seat in full view of the entire army, a high bank near the salt sea. He ripped his clothes and shouted shrilly, and immediately gave orders to his land army and sent them further in disorderly retreat” (465–70). Xerxes shows a proper emotional response to loss and, as pointed out by Haywood (2017, 53) and Taplin (1977, 121–27), he tears his robes not because of Darius’s pity for him, as he does in the Queen’s dream, but because of the loss of his forces. The Chorus go on to blame Xerxes and renew their desire to call on Darius: “for he never destroyed our men in war-wasting ruin. He was called godlike in counsel by the Persians, and he was godlike in counsel, since he led the army well, alas” (652–56). This claim is untrue, as is much of what follows. After Darius gives a rather peculiar account of the succession of Persian kings, he ends by saying “my child Xerxes, since he is young, thinks young thoughts and does not remember my commands. Know this plainly and well, friends and agemates: All of us who have had this authority would not have appeared to have brought about so many calamities” (782–86). Darius’s claim is also difficult to believe, but the Chorus accepts it. Sampson (2015) argues that this acceptance is part of willful forgetfulness; Schenker (1994, 289) suggests that it reflects the knowledge that Persia will recover; and Haywood (2017, 57–58) sees this as a wilful blindness to the damaging effects of imperial propaganda (and how that might have affected Xerxes). Further hints appear when the Chorus describes life under Darius: “O popoi, we met with great and good life of civil law, when old, all powerful, well-intentioned, undefeated king Darius, equal to a god, was ruling the land. First, we showed off our rightly famous armies, and tower-like institutions guided everything well. The aftermath of wars bought men home who, having performed well, were unharmed and without suffering” (852–63). Because Darius is remembered as successful, his rule is remembered as accountable. As Kennedy (2013) has argued, Aeschylus’s Persians presents two different kinds of kingship – Darius as the good king and Xerxes as the tyrannical one. This emerges most clearly in the attitude of the speakers towards each king. Darius suffered losses, but he was a popular king, who made the people feel that they lived under the rule of law (i.e. that he was an accountable monarch). Although the Chorus is clearly forgetting defeats (including the Battle of Marathon, which they have mentioned many times), their attitude towards those defeats and their dead king indicate a different kind of ruler, and a different attitude towards the military campaigns he led his people on from what we see of their thoughts about Xerxes’ invasion of Greece. By the time Xerxes arrives, the Chorus has an evolved understanding: unaccountable power leads to sole responsibility. Xerxes enters and announces the pain he feels for himself and his people. The Chorus explicitly blames him. Xerxes bemoans his own loss and encourages everyone to lament as well. The Chorus reminds him of who has died. Xerxes, in acknowledgement of the special danger of losing the dead at sea, laments that he left them behind (962–65). The Chorus recalls even more dead and Xerxes continues to respond with both self-pity and lament for his people. As Schenker (1994, 293) has noted, Xerxes and the Chorus eventually come together in their lament; rather than shouting at cross-purposes, they cry together. The Chorus has successfully laid blame upon Xerxes and he has taken on the responsibility. He shifts from a personal perspective on the loss to a recognition of shared loss, and so is reintegrated into the Persian world. Xerxes, as king, may not be accountable to the people, but he comes to accept responsibility for his actions. This does not render him sympathetic, as Lockwood claims (2017, 394), or savage, as Kennedy suggests (2013, 80), but rather as an autocrat coming to terms with the nature of his power. This is especially important when considering the nature of accountability



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and responsibility. Democratic Athens has a government held accountable by the people, and thus a people responsible for the government’s actions. Xerxes has no accountability and so the responsibility for his actions lies on him alone. The play names many individual Persians by name, but not a single Greek. This underpins the idea that in a democracy there is corporate responsibility for war and victory, in an autocracy, there are only private, individual losses. Schenker (1994) argues that his acceptance of responsibility marks him as a spokesman for Persian suffering, but I disagree. He comes to recognise it, but his suffering is decidedly different from that of his people. Assigning responsibility in a war is a significant element of ius post bellum, in that it dictates how one should think about punishment of the defeated and ongoing attitudes towards their society. The Athenians can feel pity for the Persian people because they had no agency. This play, with its heavy emphasis upon democratic power, raises for the audience an important question and holds before them an important warning as well. If a democracy means that everyone is responsible (and everyone shares in the victory), then does a monarchy mean that only one is responsible and, if so, what is a “right attitude” towards the people under a monarchy? This question, and its potential answer, allows the Athenians to pity the Persian people even more. By removing responsibility for the war from everyone except for Xerxes, the Persian people, and especially the non-combatants, are even more open for pity and the Athenian navy even more open for praise. There is a twofold warning, however, for Athens. That Xerxes accepts responsibility indicates that Xerxes may be moving towards a stronger position as king (Schenker 1994, 284), which in turn means that Xerxes will still be there and still in full control. The loss hurt the Persians, but not as clearly as the Greeks may have hoped. The Persians under Xerxes still remain a formidable enemy: “The play subtly posits, through its characterisation of Persian ideology, the persistence of the Persian threat” (Sampson 2015, 38). The Persians are pitiable, but their king makes Persia dangerous. As the Athenians debate waging offensive wars against Persia and others, Athens would do well to remember the nature of Persian monarchy, both its strengths and weaknesses. Aeschylus effectively instructs his audience in the dangers of the Persians, but also, as I have shown, in the implications of the Persian power structure, to help guide their future decisions in prosecuting the war.

Conclusions Aeschylus’s Persians does not offer a coherent vision of just war theory, but it does provide a part of the picture of how the Athenians were thinking about war at a significant moment in their history, and thus contributes to the just war tradition. Three core elements emerge from Aeschylus’s play: just cause and intention, right attitude towards the enemy and the proper assigning of responsibility. It is never in question that the Greeks were right to defend themselves against the Persian invasion; the multiple layers, however, of Xerxes’ intentions – foremost being vengeance and conquest – suggest that Aeschylus, at least, recognises that history, cultural traditions and individual needs can form a tapestry that push a society to war. Just war theory urges societies to have a just cause for war, but it also recognises that just causes are sometimes deeply complicated or compromised. The twofold pity inspired by the play – for those bereft at home and those who died at sea – reflects a tradition that calls on the Athenians and the Greeks in general to humanise their enemies, even ones who seem as culturally “other” as the Persians sometimes do. As a group of city-states consistently engaged in warfare and shifting alliances with each other, this attitude towards the defeated is unsurprising. That right attitude may change and fluctuate over time is

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also unsurprising, as new alliances and goals appear on the horizon. We should not conclude that the Greeks always had pity for the defeated, but rather that they considered possible responses to the defeated, and that pity was one real possibility. In this play, the pity inspired towards the dead and the non-combatants is made permissible because of the identification of who was a responsible in the war. By claiming that Xerxes has no accountability, the Chorus and other characters place responsibility upon him. The consideration of who is responsible for a war, in particular a war of aggression, has affected and still does affect how victorious parties respond to the defeated, either in demanding reparations or in choosing to conduct an offensive war of retaliation. Aeschylus’s play shows us that these considerations have deeper roots than has been heretofore supposed, even if the questions raised lack clear answers. Thus, in the modern search for more universally applicable tenets or explanations of just war theory, Aeschylus’s Persians may have some insights to offer. The play explicitly causes its audience to consider the effects of war and loss on a cultural and political “other”. While some moralising is present in the explanation of the Persians’ defeat, the questions of causes, intention, right attitude and responsibility are left for open consideration among the victors. These principles, and the realisation that they are not always easy to determine or justify, would have value on the modern global stage. While this study has focused on our one surviving historical drama, further exploration of Aeschylean tragedy may yield rich fruits for the field of just war theory. In Agamemnon, one could explore the effects of war at home (as voiced by the Chorus) and the causes and conduct of war, as discussed and debated by Clytemnestra and the Chorus. Suppliants portrays a city preparing for and justifying war, and Seven against Thebes presents a city under siege by one of its own leading a foreign army. More remains to be said about just and unjust war in Aeschylus.

FURTHER READING For further reading into the modern iteration of just war theory, see Walzer 1977 for a foundational overview and O’Driscoll 2015, 2018 for initial explorations into its applicability to ancient texts. Euben 1986, Forsdyke 2001 and Lockwood 2017 offer models for analysing and developing political theory from Aeschylus’s Persians more generally. The scholarship on Ancient Persia and Ancient Athenian perspectives on Persia is vast; Kennedy 2013 and Llewellyn-Jones 2013 offer helpful overviews and interpretations of the ideology of Persian kingship. For studies on how the reception of historical events and figures changed over time, see Sampson 2015 and Yates 2019.

REFERENCES Borowiak, C. T. (2011). Accountability and Democracy: The Pitfalls and Promise of Popular Control. New York and Oxford. Boedeker, D. D., and Raaflaub, K. A. eds. (1998). Democracy, Empire, and the Arts in Fifth-century Athens. Cambridge, MA. Clifford III, G. M. (2012). “Jus Post Bellum: Foundational Principles and a Proposed Model.” Journal of Military Ethics 11, 42–57. Euben, J. P. (1986). “The Battle of Salamis and the Origins of Political Theory.” Political Theory 14, 359–90. Forsdyke, S. (2001). “Athenian Democratic Ideology and Herodotus’ Histories.” American Journal of Philology 122, 329–58. Garvie, A. F. (2009). Aeschylus: Persae. Oxford.



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Goldhill, S. (1988). “Battle Narrative and Politics in Aeschylus’ Persae.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 108, 189–93. Grethlein, J. (2010). The Greeks and Their Past: Poetry, Oratory and History in the Fifth Century BCE. Cambridge. Grotius, H. (1625). De Iure Belli Ac Pacis [On the Law of War and Peace]. Paris. Gruen, E. S. (2012). Rethinking the Other in Antiquity. Princeton. Hall, E. (1989). Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-definition through Tragedy. Oxford. Hall, E. (1996). Aeschylus: Persians. Warminster. Hall, E. (2006). The Theatrical Cast of Athens: Interactions between Ancient Greek Drama and Society. Oxford. Harrison, T. (2000). The Emptiness of Asia: Aeschylus’ Persians and the History of the Fifth Century. London. Haywood, J. (2017). “Character and Motivation in Aeschylus’ Persae.” Syllecta Classica 27, 29–63. Hopman, M. G. (2009). “Layered Stories in Aeschylus’ Persians: Reading the Content of the Form.” In J. Grethlein and A. Rengakos, eds. Narratology and Interpretation: Reading the Content of the Form. Berlin and New York, 357–376. Kennedy, R. F. (2013). “A Tale of Two Kings: Competing Aspects of Power in Aeschylus’ Persians.” Ramus 42, 64–88. Kitto, H. D. F. (1961). Greek Tragedy. London. Klein, A. W. (2020). “Attaining Post-Conflict Peace Using the Jus Post Bellum Concept.” Religions 11. doi:10.3390/rel11040173. Llewellyn-Jones, L. (2013). King and Court in Ancient Persia 559 to 331 BCE. Edinburgh. Lockwood, T. (2017). “The Political Theorizing of Aeschylus’s Persians.” Interpretations 43, 383–402. Low, P. (2007). Interstate Relations in Classical Greece: Morality and Power. Cambridge. Miller, M. C. (2004). Athens and Persia in the Fifth Century BC: A Study in Cultural Receptivity. Cambridge. O’Driscoll, C. (2015). “Rewriting the Just War Tradition: Just War in Classical Greek Political Thought and Practice.” International Studies Quarterly 59, 1–10. O’Driscoll, C. (2018). “Keeping Tradition Alive: Just War and Historical Imagination.” Journal of Global Security Studies 3, 234–47. Orend, B. (2007). “Jus Post Bellum: The Perspective of a Just-War Theorist.” Leiden Journal of International Law 20, 571–91. Rosenbloom, D. (2006). Aeschylus, Persians. London. Sampson, C. M. (2015). “Aeschylus on Darius and Persian Memory.” Phoenix 69, 24–42. Schenker, D. (1994). “The Queen and the Chorus in Aeschylus’ Persae.” Phoenix 48, 283–93. Skinner, J. E. (2012). The Invention of Greek Ethnography: From Homer to Herodotus. Oxford. Sorabji, R., and Rodin, D. (2013). Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions. Aldershot. Taplin, O. (1977). The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy. Oxford. Walzer, M. (1977). Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. New York. Yates, D. C. (2019). States of Memory: The Polis, Panhellenism, and the Persian War. Oxford.

CHAPTER 26

Aeschylus and History Emily Baragwanath Introduction Aeschylean tragedy possesses several levels of historical dimension. They relate to the author, reflecting the individual genius of the man himself, but also his response – filtered through tragedy’s lens – to his historical context: to his city’s political and cultural milieu, and to intellectual trends of the wider Greek world. His tragedy responds to and reflects the ethos of its original audience: the political and cultural world of theatregoers of increasingly democratic Athens of the later sixth to the mid-fifth century. And occasionally it may be “historical” in a stronger sense, reflecting more specific contemporary events and circumstances. Recent scholarship has acknowledged greater obscurity in each of these areas than was once supposed. Attempts to uncover the author’s intended “message” or agenda in relation to his political stance (as democrat or conservative), or to specific contemporary circumstances or individuals, have given way to awareness of complexity: the same plays have elicited manifold and contradictory responses to such questions on the part of successive generations of interpreters and mixed responses were likely already from the original audience (Bowie 1993; Pelling 1997a, 17; Hall 2006, 197–202; Griffith 2007, 98–100). For instance, the reperformance of Persians very early on in its reception history, at the court of the tyrant Hiero of Syracuse (Stella 1994, 16–17), confounds the assumption that that play bore an exclusively Athenian, anti-tyrant and pro-democracy message. The fact that Aeschylean plays are capable of eliciting opposite responses to questions framed in terms of messages or the author’s intent has prompted a reframing of the debate: to focus on a play’s ways of communicating ideas, the “matrices of interpretation” it offers its audience for thinking about the world and events (Bowie 1993, 1997). These matrices (supplied, for example, by Athenian myths and rituals and by Homeric story patterns) served as filters of recent events, and so can point to a range of responses a play may have evoked in the audience. More generally in relating tragedy and history, we have been invited to focus less on what author and audience thought and more on what they found interesting to think about and with (Pelling 1997a, 2000). So, in considering a play’s reflection of the world, more fruitful than seeking specific references to recent events can be the investigation of a play’s ideologies.

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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Hunting for historical allusions is an especially fraught activity. The question whether the trial scene and dénouement of Eumenides, for example, alludes to recent developments regarding the Areopagus court is much debated (for some discussion and references see Gagarin 1976, 105–18; Bowie 1993; Goldhill 2000, 42–43, 47–56; Carter 2007, 60–63; Mitchell-Boyask 2009, 102–07). The temptation to look for allusions to aspects of contemporary Athenian democracy and politics is checked by the striking extent to which tragedy avoids such direct references and maintains its construction of a generic heroic world (Easterling 1985). So Aeschylus commonly avoids the specialised terminology that might have pressed a reference to contemporary Athens (Easterling 1985; Burian 2007, 207–08) and carefully integrates the political themes of his tragedies (Macleod 1982; Pelling 2000, 171–72 regarding the Oresteia). We may compare how the tension between themes of ­barbarity and civilisation of the Parthenon’s architectural sculpture was part of an earlier-­ established repertoire. The lack of straightforward depictions of Greeks and Persians is worth noting: to reinvent the Gigantomachy, for instance, as an analogy for the Persian Wars was “by no means a ready transition” (Arafat 1997, 100). A more sustained focus on general themes of the mythical world perhaps befit Athena Parthenos’s cult statue. As in certain contexts on the Acropolis, so in the Theatre of Dionysus on its south slope, there were advantages in evading explicit historical reference. Tragedy’s dramatic effect required preservation of dramatic illusion and of the distance from the here-and-now that facilitated the production in spectators of appropriate measures of pity and fear (Aristotle Rhet. 2.8.6, Konstan 2001, 27–104). The mythical world was, in any case, in itself rich and good to think of, and with. This chapter considers Aeschylus and history in relation to Suppliants and Persians, since in addition to raising specific questions about historical context, both plays align themselves with larger questions related to trends and issues in fifth-century Greek thought.

Suppliants One needs no specific historical referent, such as Themistocles’ supplication of the King of Persia, to explain Aeschylus’s dramatisation in the 460s of a play on the theme of the Danaid maidens’ flight from Egypt to Argos in Greece (Garvie 2006, 155). Some audience members might be reminded of Themistocles, recent foreign visitor to Argos (cf. Podlecki 1966, 52–57, 61–62), and for those involved in Athens’ increased interest in Egypt in these years (Mitchell 2006, 220–22 on this and other historical contexts) the play would resonate with the issue of whether or not to help Inaros foment revolt in Egypt against Persian rule (Thuc. 1.104), and related questions about the relationship between Greece and Egypt and more broadly about Hellenic identity. Others might bring to the play unease about increasing immigration and the novel institution of metoikia (Bakewell 2013). The complexities of the present would inform and enrich each viewer’s engagement with the play. One level of historical reference is contemporary interest in different lands, peoples and customs and in different constitutional forms (cf. Hdt. 3.80–82, Pindar Pyth. 2.86–88, Lloyd 1979, 242–46; Stella 1994, 36) (which had a practical dimension in the drafting of constitutions), and in the effect of these in explaining character and behaviour. Over the course of the fifth century this interest crystallises in the debate on nomos (law, custom) and physis (nature). Current knowledge of the foreign and exotic contributes to the play’s dramatic milieu, as in the evocation in choral song of the Nile’s flooding because of snow (Suppl. 559), reflecting (or coinciding with) a theory of Anaximander (Diels-Kranz K 59 A91). Environmental determinism may inform Danaos’s comment that “the Nile does not breed a race resembling that of the Inachos”, Argos’s river (Suppl. 497–98; for the Nile and

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its procreative powers in the play see Vasunia 2001, 42–47). Contemporary reflection on connections between environmental and cultural factors (food, drink) enhances the depiction of character and speech in the Argive king Pelasgos’s deprecations of Egyptian martial weakness: “We don’t drink barley beer here!” (953), “Wheat (i.e. bread) is stronger than papyrus-fruit!” (761). In seeking to contextualise the strange-looking Danaids – Egyptian princesses who have recently arrived on the shores of Greece to supplicate for refuge from marriage to their hated Aegyptiad cousins – the king stretches his imagination into the domain of ethnographers, from the more familiar Libyan women and Cypriot women, to the camel-riding nomadic Indian women dwelling beyond Ethiopia and the “man spurning, meat eating” Amazons about which he has only heard (ἀκούω, “I hear”, 284). The continental polarity of Europe/Asia (reflected in Hecataeus’s subtitles, and of ongoing interest to the natural scientists and doctors) serves as the play’s background (Mitchell 2006, 212). Egypt – a focus of Suppliants and the implied background of part of the Danaid trilogy and of the fragmentary Proteus – in itself represents a charged locus for exploration of questions of Hellenicity and foreign identity: beyond the genealogical connections with Greece that Suppliants takes up explicitly (Aeschylus thus intervened in the sixth- and fifth-century debate on cultural origins: Vasunia 2001, 37), the continental status of the Nile Delta – in relation to a two- or three-continent (Europe, Asia, Libya) division of the world – was contested in fifth-century scientific discussion (cf. Hdt. 2.15–16, Thomas 2000, 80–81). Changing attitudes and increasing contestation of the Greek/barbarian polarity in the mid-fifth century were likely responsible for creating the “ideological space” required for Suppliants to open up the sorts of questions that it raises about the nature of barbarism (Mitchell 2006). Obliqueness in historical reference allowed a diverse audience including non-Athenians to infuse the play with specific personal resonances to contemporary matters, civic (political, military, religious) as well as individual, with “heroic vagueness” offering “something for everyone in the audience” (Easterling 1997, 25). Thus the issues of leadership and of individual/collective power implicit in the presentation of the Argive assembly in their relationship with Pelasgos, being of perennial relevance, could be inflected more or less specifically – so that they would have especial relevance to Athenians reminded of their own democracy, but also engage Athenians and others reflecting more generally on problematics of government. Suppliants stages a dramatic confrontation of Greek and Egyptian perspectives and nomoi in the encounter of the Argive king Pelasgos and his citizens with the chorus of Danaids. The central movement of the play is that of the overcoming of superficial differences through successful communication, with the recognition and acknowledgement, on the part of Pelasgos and the Argives, of a connection with the Egyptian other. There thereby results the dissolution of the initially staged opposition of Greek versus non-Greek (Danaids as both Greek and Egyptian, outsiders and insiders: Zeitlin 1992, 205; Thomas 1998; Vasunia 2001, 40–43; Mitchell 2006, 214–17). The play sets up a shifting of perspectives, highlighting mutual wonder and incomprehension. The foreign perspective is centre-stage in the opening scene, where in a lengthy song the maidens outline their situation, invoking their barbarian speech and foreign appearance (with “sun-baked cheeks” and veils of Sidonian linen (121–22, 131–33), doubtless emphasised in the costuming; see Bacon 1961, 24–27; Hall 1989, 139; Vasunia 2001, 48; Bakewell 2013, 21–22). The chorus’s unusual role in this play – they serve as protagonist and their lyrics take up about 50% of the lines – accentuates their foreign aspect, through this remarkable choral dominance as well as the exotic and animalistic imagery and sound of their song (Bacon 1961, 15–16; Taplin 1977, 774–75; Nooter 2017, 86–94; also Bakewell 2013, 35–36). Their foreign viewpoint is highlighted by their father’s explanations and instructions about Greek custom (cf. 220, “here too is Hermes, according to the Hellenic custom”, τοῖσιν Ἑλλήνων



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νόμοις) and later by Pelasgos’s instructions as to how to address the assembly of Argives (the Argive polis “does not love lengthy discourse”, 273). The centre of perspective shifts with the arrival of the Greek king, who gazes with wonder on these strange-looking women. Initially he focuses on the appearance of this “unhellenic company” (ὅμιλον τόνδ’ ἀνελληνόστολον 234, Mitchell 2006, 212). Τheir closely woven foreign (βαρβάροισι) attire (235) and dark skin, features in which they “resemble Libyan women, rather than women of this country”, make him sceptical about the possibility of the family connection they allege (278–80). He ponders both on the (universal) elements that he as a Greek can understand (the boughs they carry “according to the custom of suppliants”, κατὰ νόμους ἀφικτόρων, 241) and other elements that forestall recognition by providing no ready point of reference. The Danaids in turn are puzzled at Pelasgos’s appearance (unable to judge from his clothing whether he is a herald or a king, 247–48) and perplexed by his position vis-à-vis the Argive assembly (much like the Queen of Persians, see the section “Persians” later in this chapter), they have difficulty grasping the fact that he does not possess absolute power in the manner of the monarchs to which they are accustomed (370–75). Yet by skilfully prompting the king to share in recounting the story of Io, the maidens finally persuade him of the genealogical connection between Argives and Danaids. Their fear of being mistreated as strangers – a fear constantly articulated, by themselves, their father Danaus and even Pelasgos – thus ultimately founders with the Argive assembly’s firm resolution in their favour. At the end of the play, the Argives stand in defence of the Danaids as war with the Aegyptioi threatens. The royal line of Argos will be refounded from the marriage of the one Danaid who marries rather than murder her Aegyptiad husband (Mitchell 2007, 69–70 on readings of this). Aeschylus, like Herodotus (Thomas 2001), here rejects any notion of inherent Hellenism. “The barbarian” proves to be a product of the Egyptian and Argives’ mutual incomprehension (as in a famous fragment of Antiphon, On Truth, 22a  =  Papyrus Oxyrhynchus XI 1364) and this is succeeded by recognition of connection. Beyond just describing difference, Suppliants explores the problematics of communicating across cultures and confounds the binary opposition of Greek versus other by exposing the recognition of self in other – the move from concern with surface appearances (visual and aural) to awareness of deeper connections and affiliations. Herodotus stages a similar movement in his account of Egypt, from the tour-de-force opening (2.35–36) that figures Egyptians as diametrically opposed to Greeks (and to all other human communities) – “just as the Nile is different in nature from all other rivers, so they have made their customs and laws (nomoi) opposite in all respects to all other men” (2.35.2) – to the naturalisation and familiarisation of Egypt that follows in the recognition that much of importance to Greece has been learned from Egypt (see Thomas 2000, 112; Pelling 2019, 38–39, 90). Perhaps Herodotus’s accusation that Aeschylus “stole” (ἥρπασε) from an Egyptian logos the notion that Artemis is daughter of Demeter (2.156) implicitly compliments Aeschylus for recognising Egypt as a fount of wisdom, especially in religious matters. Io is herself one of three maidens Herodotus uses right at the outset of his work to introduce “the theme of radical ethnic transformation in which the Same unexpectedly becomes the Other and the Other the Same”: Io, Europa and Medea, each the king’s daughter in her natal country, all “become cultural icons of the countries of their eventual appropriation. They are thus both metaphors for and the embodiments of the potential instability of race and culture” (both quotations from Dewald 1990, 221; cf. also Thomas 2000, 123 and chapter 4). In Suppliants, the response of Pelasgos, who – persuaded by their common ancestry and the sense that he is obliged to defend them by a universal law of Zeus god of Suppliants – overcomes his initial sense of distance from the foreign women, is available as a model for Aeschylus’s audience: this strand of the play might prompt identification with the Egyptian Danaids and sympathy for their predicament. The depiction of the negotiations over identity that occur within

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competing discourses (colour, gender, ethnicity) ultimately suggests “the radical instability of cultural givens” (Thomas 1998, quote from p. ii). The emphasis on the role of rhetoric further confounds the play’s original binary oppositions and the possibility for simplistic judgmental evaluations. Suppliants opens up its questions about Greek identity in a frame of reflection upon the very possibility of knowledge and communication, across cultures; and questions about the capacity and effects of rhetoric – the main skill the sophists professed to teach. We have seen how Suppliants reflects on the difficulty of getting at truth beneath deceptive appearances, and the inadequacy of visual or aural signs in the absence of an interpreter. If only these girls brandished bows, Pelasgos would certainly guess (κάρτ’ ἄν ᾔκασα, 288) that they were Amazons; as it is, he needs the girls to interpret for him, to “teach him” (cf. διδαχθείς, 289) what their circumstances really are. But here logos introduces further complication; for the Danaids, when they speak, do not do so openly and straightforwardly but with conspicuous disingenuousness, having been instructed in detail by their father (194–203). Suppliants indeed engages deeply with the problem of rhetoric, of persuasion – “the charmer to whom nothing is denied” (1039–40; cf. Zeitlin 1992, 213–18; Buxton 1982, 67–90; Bakewell 2013, 34–49). By staging the use of binaries in distinctly rhetorical ways, so that that the audience may recognise these uses as being rhetorical, Aeschylus presents a further challenge to straightforward acceptance of them. The rhetorical dimension diminishes one’s access to certain truth (see Thalmann 1985; Pelling 2005, 92–93, 95–99 on Aeschylus on rhetoric). Whereas earlier in the play, the Danaids were conscious that their female identity might work against them and praised the Argives for the fact that “They didn’t spurn a woman’s battle to vote with men” (and at 817 ff. they envisage the Aegyptiads’ pursuit as that of “the race of men”), later they put their female identity to rhetorical use vis-à-vis Danaos: “Don’t leave me alone, I beg you, father! – A woman left alone is nothing” (746–47). The binaries are not simply being assumed, but being manipulated. Likewise in regard to ethnicity, the maidens’ initial anxiety about being mistreated as foreigners for their foreign appearance is replaced by their own use of the ethnic criterion – their emphasis on the fact of ethnic difference – in constructing a negative image of the Aegyptiads that aims at cementing the Argives’ support: “a black nightmare” pursues them (887); and the imagery of their lyrics contributes too, with their evocation of the Aegyptiads’ “blackbenched ship” (530). Their rhetorical manipulativeness is reflected also in “the strange shifts they seem to make from specific to general misandry” (Zeitlin 1992, 217, suggesting that the Danaids’ tendency to think in terms of binary oppositions helps explain these shifts). The role of rhetoric thus points to one means by which Aeschylus challenges thinking in terms of rigid binaries, whether regarding ethnicity or gender. By highlighting the Danaids’ rhetorical manoeuverings Aeschylus also invites his audience to assess the women’s assertions about the Aegyptiads (the expectation of whose violent coercion is a main grounds for their supplication) and reflect on whether or not their testimony can be taken as entirely trustworthy – especially in view of their evasion of Pelasgos’s question about the relevance to their case of “local Egyptian law” (390). Pelasgos’s hypothetical law “is almost certainly an invention of the dramatist designed to show that legally the Danaids are not entitled to reject marriage with their cousins, as these are by virtue of their relationship their κύριοι” (Johansen and Whittle 1980 on ll. 387–91). The notion of such a local Egyptian law allows comprehension of the Aegyptiads’ belief that right is on their side (853) and their herald’s astonishment at the charge that he has not acted in accordance with justice: “How so? I am just recovering lost property” (919–20, trans. Burian 1991). The possible validity of Egyptian law infuses a perspective on events that adds a further matrix of interpretation, informing and complicating audience response, by opening up the possibility that the Aegyptiads’ action in reclaiming the Danaids has justification. Pelasgos had earlier expressed concern about the justice of the Danaids’ cause, asking clarification as



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to whether “something wrongful” (τὸ μὴ θέμις) provokes their flight (rather than – and a more solid justification than – personal hatred); they did not respond directly, instead expressing their dislike of buying masters in husbands (in a process that accorded reasonably closely with Greek practice). To their assertion that Justice stands by the side of those who fight for her he appended a key qualification: if (εἴπερ γ’, 344) she has been on their side from the beginning; and here again, they avoided responding directly, reiterating the justice of accepting suppliants (345) rather than making the case that their suit is just. On this issue (unlike that of shared genealogy) no common ground is reached between the king and the maidens, but rather it remains (at least in this play of the trilogy) unresolved and is profoundly destabilising in its effect. This uncertainty – this clash of the idea of a universal nomos to which the girls appeal with that of specific, local nomoi, of the justice of (the Greek) Zeus god of Suppliants (to whom the Danaids appeal and whose shrine they occupy for much of the play) with justice deriving from local Egyptian law – deepens and enriches the crux of the play, complicating Pelasgos’s dilemma as to whether or not to accept the women’s supplication and introducing the possibility that in doing so he may be transgressing a different sort of law. The predicament is further heightened by certain strands of the play bringing into question the Danaids’ wholly negative portrayal of the Aegyptiads (confounding the possibility of a stable assessment even of them). The distinctly narrow perspective of the girls is frequently apparent, as when Pelasgos’s acute awareness of the wider ramifications for the city of what he says and does is juxtaposed with their narrow focus on themselves (512, cf. Buxton 1982, 87, the final scene showcases their “biased and one-sided” attitude). Such narrowness might remind us that thus far in the trilogy we have heard almost exclusively from the maidens themselves, whose fearful songs have evoked the Aegyptiads’ hybris and violence (the play does not display actual violence: cf. Taplin 1977, 216–17). Ever accessible is the unspoken datum that the Aegyptiads are no less connected with the Argives via Io than are the Danaids. There are suggestions that the girls’ opposition to marriage with the Egyptians may be excessive, given Danaos’s observations (996–1005) on the naturalness of male desire for females, and the suggestion of the demi-chorus (whether maids or Argive soldiers) of a reconciliation of the two sides. Indeed, equally applicable to the Egyptian men in the eyes of the audience could be Danaos’s advice that “an unknown company will be proved by time” (993). Conversely, already in this play the Danaids have proven problematic for men, in threatening pollution on Argos; and as far as we can conjecture about the rest of this fragmentary trilogy, in slaying their Aegyptiad husbands they will defy the rapprochement of the two sides which Suppliants’ final scene invites (Buxton 1982, 87–88), acting wholly contrary to the spirit of Aphrodite’s exquisite hymn to the delight and naturalness of marriage (Danaides frag. 44). Indeed, they will display the very violence for which they professed to fear the Aegyptiad “race of men” (Mitchell 2006, 213 n. 23 with text), acting much like the “man-less” Amazons whom Pelasgos invoked in his initial attempts to understand them, proving in truth to be as alien as he had initially supposed. The Danaid trilogy appears, then, to have probed even more problematic aspects of the issue of identity/recognition of the foreign than are evident in Suppliants alone. The topic relates also to the broader, more abstract problem of “seeming” and “reality” (on Aeschylus’ interest in this contemporary philosophical theme in Seven against Thebes, see Stella 1994, 58–59 (and 77–79 on Oresteia) and Poli-Palladini 2001, 451–55). But while in his treatment of the theme Aeschylus engages closely with fifth-century intellectual currents, this historical dimension is entirely at the service of dramatic ends: above all it gives further weight to Pelasgos’s terrible dilemma (Taplin 1977, 202), bringing out all the more vividly the problematic nature of his and the Argives’ resolution to accept the Danaids’ supplication.

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Persians A decade or so earlier Aeschylus had already treated issues of keen interest to the fifth-century Athenian audience while also engaging with broader intellectual discussions. Persians is unique among surviving Greek tragedies in taking as its subject not an episode of myth, but an event of recent history that occurred just eight years before the production of the play: Xerxes’ invasion of Greece and the battle of Salamis of 480 bce. Yet even in this play, the relationship of text and world is oblique. The distance in space substitutes for the temporal distance elsewhere supplied by myth (Calame 1995, 113; Sourvinou-Inwood 2003, 15–17) and Aeschylus’s treatment is in crucial respects ahistorical. The Persian Empire lies in ruins at the play’s end – ruins expressed in the spectacle of Xerxes’ rags (Saïd 2007, 90–92) – whereas in historical actuality it remained a force to be reckoned with throughout the following decades. (Indeed the Athenians in 472 may have been getting wind already of Persian preparations for the battle of Eurymedon: Pelling 1997a, 12). Aeschylus thereby avoided staging “troubles close to home” – the oikeia kaka for which 20 years previously Phrynichus had been charged a large fine in relation to the Capture of Miletus, which recounted Persia’s destruction just a year or two earlier of the famous Ionian Greek city and reduced the Athenian audience to tears (Hdt. 6.21). It is not simply that Aeschylus unlike Phrynichus recounts a Persian defeat (many Greeks had lost their lives at Salamis), but also that the danger is presented as having passed (for a different view: Rosenbloom 1993, 2006). Aeschylus’s concern is not to provide a historical account, but to produce an intelligible and convincing dramatic world. Thus the stark contrast Persians draws between Darius and Xerxes in their respective characters, careers and military objectives – with the omission of Darius’s failed Scythian expedition (into Europe) and of how Xerxes’ campaign represented the continuation of his father’s policy vis-à-vis Greece – well serves Aeschylus’s dramatic aims. The course of events from Salamis to Plataea is reduced to its bare bones in the ghost Darius’s account (803–08, cf. 8.96–9.58 in Herodotus), as is fitting for such an oracular glance to the future, with the victory belonging to the “Dorian spear” (816 – so paring down to Sparta alone what was in historical actuality a victory of several Greek contingents). Even in the account of the battle of Salamis – where it has seemed reasonable to expect that Aeschylus, probably an eye-witness addressing eye-witnesses in his audience, would deliver a good measure of accurate information – dramatic licence looms large, as in the broad tragic framework of hubris and ate, and the juxtaposition of dark and light that moulds the account (Pelling 1997a, 2–6). Such literary topoi and motifs are also at home in the historians’ accounts, but there they are accompanied by a methodological discourse that probes conflicting sources, admits incomplete knowledge and explicitly prioritises the objective of discovering and representing historical truth. Though it lacks the historian’s authorial commitment to veracity, Persians is nonetheless an important historical document of “the Athenian collective imagination” (Hall 1996, 5) – at least as filtered through the author. At issue here is the relationship of author to tragic audience, author to contemporary issue: whether a play affirms and validates the view of the majority, or instead confronts and challenges its audience, questioning their assumptions and prejudices. At issue, too, is whether tragedy is so shaped that its audience may readily cast moral judgements (either approving and identifying with, or criticising, represented positions and behaviours), or whether it presents (in Pelling’s formulation, 2000, 182) what will be most absorbing and morally most poised and difficult to decide. Aristophanes’ Aeschylus famously asserts that with Persians he “taught the Athenians to desire always to defeat the enemy” (Frogs 1026). Aeschylean drama, on this view, is straightforwardly affirmative: Persians a work of Athenian “self-definition and self-praise” (Hall 1989, 100) that reflects and promotes the sort of triumphalism accompanied by commitment to the binary



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oppositions of Greek (manly, courageous, virtuous, orderly, free) versus barbarian (effeminate, cowardly, disorderly, stupid, slavish) (other views: Hall 1989, 69, Gagarin 1976, 29–56; Rosenbloom 2006, 139–63 surveys modern responses). But the Aeschylus of Old Comedy is as likely to steal a laugh through absurd simplification to appeal to the lowest common denominator of his audience’s response. He is also the product of a later period: of the closing years of the fifth century. Greece’s sustained and complex relationship with Persia from the late sixth century and through the fifth should give us pause before assuming that Greek victories had bred already in Aeschylus’s day monolithic scorn and self-congratulation (Miller 1997; Vlassopoulos 2013 on the plurality of models of thinking about Greeks and barbarians from the archaic period on). Nor does military conflict inevitably induce contempt for one’s opponent. The military victories at Marathon and Salamis more likely only gradually accrued symbolic value in terms of the oppositional discourse of Greek/barbarian, which strengthened over the course of the fifth century in part in response to Athenian internal anxieties (see Miller 1997, 258; Isaac 2004, 257–83; Mitchell 2007, 124). The propagandistic public art of the succeeding decades – in particular the famous mid-fifth-century painting in the Stoa Poikile, associated with Cimon, which equated Persians with Trojans and Amazons – “doubtless served to shape subsequent understanding of the action” and entrench the opposition of Greek and Persian which becomes ever more apparent as the century wears on (Miller 1997, 6 [my italics]). Perhaps we can understand in these terms the intriguing absence from Aeschylus’s Persians of Athena (whose non-appearance has been found surprising in a play that aims to eulogise the Athenians), who by contrast would indeed preside over the battle of Marathon depicted in the Stoa Poikile, granting the Athenians divine aid. Persians obscures any such clear-cut message. Much as in Suppliants, so too in Persians, Aeschylus stages non-Greek perspectives, highlights contrasting nomoi and conveys foreigners’ commitment to their own customs as well as their wonderment and incomprehension at those of the Greeks. Building up persuasive “other” perspectives is an important means by which he confounds simplistic negative responses. In all these respects Aeschylus anticipates, and perhaps indeed was an influence on, Herodotus, who famously shifts the perspective of his narrative (and with it the centre from which to cast moral judgements) away from Greece (see e.g. 1.134, 2.158, 3.38, with Pelling 1997b; Thomas 2000, 102–34; Munson 2001; Rood 2006; Gruen 2011, 10–52 (juxtaposing Aeschylean and Herodotean perceptions on Persia); Pelling 2019, esp. 142–45, 163–98: “What Persia offered was the clarity of extremes: a prism for examining what happens when power is concentrated to the highest degree” (144)). Persians shifts the centre of perspective wholesale to the court at Susa, where the Greek audience hears of Xerxes’ expedition via the anxious song of the Persian elders (whose lament at the destruction of Xerxes’ army also closes the play) and the successive voices of the Persian Queen, the Persian messenger returned from Salamis, Darius’s ghost and finally Xerxes himself. Aeschylus undercuts audience expectations to highlight unexpected and distinctly Persian perspectives: the “doubly heavy disaster” (cf. 436–37) after Salamis the Messenger recalls is not Plataea but Psyttaleia (Sommerstein 1996, 82–83). With the Persian Wars still a subject of intense contemporary resonance – with families still grieving, the Acropolis still in a state of ruin – Aeschylus makes the surprising move of presenting Salamis not as a Greek victory but as a tragedy of Persian defeat. Central to the play is the contrast of Greek and Persian constitutions (political nomoi), of Greek democracy over Persian tyranny, liberty over slavery (Goldhill 1988), which is crystallised in the encounter of the Queen with the Persian messenger (beginning with her opening inquiry at 231: “Where in the world do they say that Athens is situated?”). In framing her questions about the Greeks the Queen works on the assumption of autocratic rule (241: “And who is the shepherd, who is the master of their army?”) and wonders how – if the Greeks are not slaves – they could possibly resist an

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invading enemy (243). The encounter has provoked scholarly puzzlement (how can she not know this information already?), but it is strikingly effective in conveying the conflict of perspectives and encapsulating the themes of freedom/democracy versus despotism that infuse the whole play, and in highlighting the Queen’s commitment to the Persian way. Working against the common view that the encounter simply glorifies Athens, it also recalls the topos of the encounter of Greek with non-Greek, with the pithy expression of a surprising and unconventional perspective that nonetheless captures a measure of truth – as in Cyrus’s reported encounter with a Spartan herald in Herodotus, warning him away from the Eastern Greeks after the capture of Sardis. Cyrus asked first who and how many were these Spartans and then observed about the Greek market place: “I never yet feared men who have a space in the middle of the city where they gather for swearing false oaths and cheating one another” (Hdt. 1.153). The Queen’s question as to how one can fight without a single ruler (the same question Xerxes asks Demaratus at Hdt. 7.103) likewise contains a measure of truth: it was only thanks to the cunning Themistocles, acting alone, that the Greeks at Salamis remained and fought, rather than scattering each to their own cities. The topos dramatises the difference of the other, but at the same time invites self-reflection, even if most audience members might not align with the perspective. The contrast that surfaces in Persians between Athenian democracy and Persian autocracy has often been felt to redound necessarily to a negative judgement against the latter and to entail implications of broader moral weakness (Hall 1989, 1995, 1996 (some qualification in 2006), Harrison 2000, Georges 1994. Rebuttal: Isaac 2004 (esp. 274–77), Gruen 2011, 9–21. Qualifications: Mitchell 2007, 185–87. Persians as transcending political systems, the disaster to Persians anticipating that awaiting Athenian imperialism: Rosenbloom 2006). Yet as Griffith (2007, 104) has observed, “brilliant dynasts” like Hippias, Themistocles, Miltiades, Pausanias, were a familiar feature of the Greek world, and Athenian men acted as autocrats on their estates in Thrace (not to mention at home). The idea of autocracy was naturalised and thinkable in certain contexts and did not inevitably attract moral censure (Griffith 2007; Mitchell 2007). Democracy even more than monarchy was the subject of Athenian intellectuals’ critique (cf. e.g. Isaac 2004, 270–72), while the demos could be compliant to the charismatic “Big Men” of Athens, admiring their “tyrannical” social transgressions and accepting their undemocratic political leanings – a phenomenon engaged with in fifth-century tragedy and reflected in the very institution of the choregia (Wilson 1997, 2000). The reperformance of Persians at a tyrant’s court (see Bell, Chapter 5 in this volume) suggests it need not be read as denigrating tyranny; indeed it may be that the tyranny/democracy opposition (along with that of barbaros/Greek) came to be especially charged with moralising freight only later in the fifth century, perhaps as the Athenian democracy extended its scope in the years after the Eurymedon victory (cf. Isaac 2004, 257–83). In Persians the description of autocratic rule conspicuously avoids Greek pejorative terminology (such as tyrannos or “tyrant” – which never occurs, nor indeed does “the hated proskun- word” (denoting obeisance; see Griffith 2007, 107)) and insists instead on its foreign character (by means of such terms as tagein, ballen, along with neutral expressions like ἡγεμὼν στρατοῦ [“leader of the army”], 765), thus perhaps deflecting the Greek audience’s reflex to map it directly on to (more negative) Greek understandings of “tyranny”. Aeschylus could expect the comparison to Sparta to assist Athenians in conceptualising Persia’s key political nomos of strict (slave-like) obedience – in Persia’s case to the King; in Sparta’s case, to all authority figures (see e.g. Xenophon Rep. Lac. 8). Again, perhaps for Aeschylus as for Herodotus, the drive “to power, to conquest, even to brutality is … not limited to Persia nor to tyranny; nor are the dangers that come with it … What Persia offered was the clarity of extremes” (Pelling 2019, 144).



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The interest in political nomoi that infuses Persians should perhaps be viewed not so much against the background of the binary opposition of democracy versus (barbarian) tyranny, as against the broader background of contemporary Greek reflection on a variety of constitutional forms. An anecdote attached to the most famous commander of Aeschylus’s generation and victor of Salamis transfers Herodotus’s point about the importance of mutual respect of others’ customs (3.38) specifically to the context of Athenian (and Spartan) and Persian political nomoi. The story goes that when Themistocles took refuge at the Persian court, Artabanus coached him in the fact that customs differ among men, different ones seeming good to different people; and that whereas Greeks most admire liberty (ἐλευθερία) and equality (ἰσότης), for Persians the finest of all fine customs is to honour the Great King and perform proskynesis (Plut. Themistocles 27). The reference is to “Greek” nomos, but reference to freedom and political equality respectively recall Athenian democracy and the Spartan Equals in particular. Certain aspects of Aeschylus’s presentation work counter to the critical reflex we might expect on the part of the democratic Athenian audience and encourage a more complex response, akin to that invited by Herodotus (Baragwanath 2008; Pelling 2019). Aeschylus conspicuously avoids presenting this Persian nomos – monarchy – as the explanation for Xerxes’ fall, which lies rather in his failure to follow Persian custom (as epitomised in the righteous and authoritative figure of Darius). In fact it was Zeus himself who granted the honour (τιμὴν … τήνδ’ ὤπασεν) that one man should rule (ταγεῖν) all of Asia (762–64). For Aeschylus, Xerxes is an aberrant case, youthful and reckless, who has let down the noble tradition of preceding kings (cf. 765–81; contrasted with Darius at 552–57, 780–81), prompted to such an excessive undertaking as chaining the divine Hellespont (745) after being deluded (the Queen and Darius suppose) by a daimon (724–25). And it is Darius who – in a reaction that “map(s) closely on to natural Greek assumptions” – censures Xerxes for his hybristic and godless behaviour in yoking Asia and Greece (749–50, 808, Pelling 1997a, 14–16; quote at 15, Momigliano 1975, 130; cf. Rosenbloom 2006, 108–111: Darius speaks in the voice of the Greek poetic tradition). Associations of monarchy and (to Greeks) effeminate habrotes (luxury, softness) pervade the imagery of Persians, with female qualities and lamentation serving to convey the otherness of the chorus of Theban elders (Hall 1989, 1996), and yet this is not emphasised as an explanatory factor for the Persian defeat: Aeschylus does not locate the explanation for Xerxes’ failed campaign either in Greek valour, or in Persian military cowardice (Gruen 2011, 9–21). The previous track record of Persian martial victory is several times recalled (cf. 765–81, 859–904), with Persian autocracy figured as conducive to military success. So far from taking advantage of the opportunity to celebrate Greek martial virtue, the account of Salamis is brief and moderate in its presentation of the Greeks’ role (the victors are “not only anonymous, but also curiously colorless” (Griffith 2007, 127)), explaining the defeat as the work of a daimon – an explanation a Greek could take on board without casting moral censure. We may compare the way in which Herodotus, so far from presenting it as natural, highlights the contingency of the Greek victory – the astonishment at Greek success that so easily might not have been – with Salamis won by trickery rather than greater measures of Greek valour, more Greeks medising than not, and the Persians at Plataea proving tough fighters compromised only by their inferior armour (9.62–63, cf. Pelling 1997b, 2019, 167–68; Baragwanath 2013). Even the natural imagery that in Persians attaches to the Persian army (e.g. ἄνθος: 59, 252, 925) must be complex and ambivalent in its effect rather than straightforwardly naturalising and validating the Persian defeat at the hands of the Greeks (so Hall 1995, 124–25): for Greek armies, too, could be characterised by language and imagery from the natural world. In Athenian and Homeric traditions the anthos is connected with warriors’ deaths in war (Dué 2006, 64–69) and Gelon warns that the Greek army will be deprived of its “spring”

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(ἔαρ) in the absence of his forces as a result of Spartan intransigence (Hdt. 7.162). The image of the Greeks destroying Persians “like a shoal of tuna-fish”, as much as presenting the Persians as “defenceless creatures of nature” (Hall 1995, 125), underlines the terrible violence of the Greeks – in suggestive parallel indeed to the tyrant Peisistratos, held to have been advised by the seer Amphilytos to catch in his net like tuna fish (which fishermen clubbed to death) the unwitting Athenians (Hdt. 1.62). Such powerful imagery might evoke a measure of pity for the Persian dead, which would work against any sense of naturalisation and legitimation of those deaths. Again, rather than necessarily indicating softness or weakness, Aeschylus’s emphasis on Persia’s wealth (gold and silver) and other resources conveys the immense power of Xerxes’ army (cf. Isaac 2004, 275) and highlights a distinctly Persian emphasis on qualitative strength (cf. Goldhill 1988, 190). As with the chorus’s “female” lamentations (cf. Dué 2006, 57–61), this “othering” need not imply negative moral judgement. Similarly Herodotus’s Histories certainly uses the polarities of softness (habrotes) versus toughness/strength, highlighting the Persians’ luxurious dress, but ultimately their clothing has only a literal explanatory effect (the Persians are “lightly-clad men fighting hoplites”: 9.63) and is conspicuously not emblematic in a wider sense of weakness or effeminacy (Pelling 1997b, 2019, 163–98 on the complexity of the Herodotean explanation of Greek victory, Gruen 2011, 27–28 on the complexity of the luxury/softness motif). Aeschylus’s matrices of interpretation familiarise aspects of the non-Greek otherness of the Persians and even promote identification with aspects of the Greek or Athenian self. Comparable in Herodotus’s story of Darius’s experiment on Greek and Indian responses to others’ treatment of the dead (Hdt. 3.38) is how all parties, Greek, Indian and Persian (for it is Darius who has set up the experiment), are shown to be working on the shared assumption of the importance of honouring parents and of funerary customs (and committed to their own); to this extent Herodotus’s presentation familiarises Indians and Persians for his Greek readers. In Persians, Greece and Persia appear as sisters in the Queen’s dream: the difference between them is thus figured as limited to (political) nomos (with one of the sisters compliant to the yoke of tyranny, the other struggling to wrestle it away), rather than being a matter of (deeper) nature or genealogy (see Mitchell 2006, 205 n. 1 with text; Gruen 2011, 19–20; Vlassopoulos 2013, 195); and (implicitly) a result of the different characters of land each obtained by lot (Pers. 187), so environmentally determined (Mitchell 2007, 186–87). By figuring Xerxes as wayward son, Aeschylus evokes an issue that was salient for at least the aristocratic sector of Aeschylus’s audience (Griffith 2007) and might promote a sense of recognition. Nor were the laments of the Persian Elders – which have seemed such an exotic feature of the play – necessarily alien to a Greek audience, since they evoke the Greek tradition of female lament (Dué 2006, 57–90). Such laments may have been an expected part of tragic performance, wherein Greek men also mourned (Griffith 2007, 109), in which case even associations of effeminacy were not inevitable. Again, far from being portrayed as thoroughly independent, all-powerful and vengeful (as in the tradition of later Greek sensationalist writers like Ctesias), the Queen (unnamed, perhaps in suggestive accordance with the Athenian oratorical convention of avoiding naming respectable women? Schaps 1977) calls on her dead husband Darius for advice, is motherly in her sympathy for and devotion to Xerxes, exacts no punishment on the advisors who interpreted her dream “too lightly” (520) and never proposes exacting vengeance against Greece for the disaster. Along with the Persians in general she is devout in her attention to the gods. Like Darius (at 706–07), she sets her own fears against the background of what is true of all mortals (293–94, 598–602). Aeschylus’s familiarisation of the Persians contributes to an important strand of the play that indeed invites Xerxes’ disaster to be viewed in terms of broader (Greek or universal) human predicaments, particularly by conveying the universality of human experience of the divine (Mitchell 2007, 185–57; cf. Sommerstein 1996, Rosenbloom 2006).



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Connected with the promotion of identification of Greek and non-Greek, and complicating a straightforwardly triumphalist response, are strands of the play that invite pity and empathy on the part of the Athenian audience. As Pelasgos advises the Danaids in Suppliants, “everyone bears goodwill towards the weak” (489). The persistent reminders of the mourning Persian wives and parents (63, 245, 576–83), in the Elders’ song and more generally in the play’s female imagery, invite pity far more than would a reminder of the Persian warriors responsible for Athenian casualties just eight years previously. This emphasis on the noncombatants affected by the defeat – rather than the aim of feminising Asia through Orientalist discourse – may help explain Aeschylus’s presentation. Aeschylus’s technique of presenting the mourning women through the filter of the old men’s sympathetic perspective invites audience empathy (and they in their old age – also innocent victims – may be objects of pity as well). By the same token, by keeping the women out of literal view (not bringing them on stage as Phrynichus had in his chorus of Phoenician women in Phoenissai), Aeschylus refrained from exploiting to the full their female sensuousness and exoticism. (Nor did he suggest the effeminacy of the Persian court in Greek eyes by bringing eunuchs on stage, as Phrynichus famously had in his very opening scene.) The maidens are not made direct objects of our voyeurism, so what Hall has termed the “topos of sexual deprivation” (1995, 126) may more plausibly be understood as a more general topos of loss. The aim is perhaps to disturb the unmindful collective memory accruing to the Great War already in 472 (an impulse that would again parallel Herodotus’s). Favorini compares Peter Sellars’s 1993 production of Persians with Aeschylus’s, “if Sellars’s intention was to disturb and distort the unmindful, American collective memory accruing to the Gulf War” (2003, 110–11).

Conclusion Scholars have focused on tragedy’s civic and political context in addressing the capacity of Aeschylean tragedy to reflect (and construct) the Athenian collective imagination. A further aspect of the historical interest of Aeschylean drama resides in its awareness of and even anticipation of important features of wider intellectual discussion and shifting cultural perspectives. A sophos who travelled beyond the confines of Athens, sojourning at the bustling intellectual centre that was the court of Hieron tyrant of Syracuse (Stella 1994) and whose work displays the influence of eclectic intellectualism (Poli-Palladini 2001), Aeschylus engaged with broader intellectual trends, several of which go against the grain of absolutist, binary conceptions. Key among these was a heightened awareness of pluralism (of different possible ways of viewing and understanding the world (Buxton 1982, 8)), in combination with an acute sense that the truth may elude human sensory capacities. The complex matrices of interpretation that Aeschylean tragedy sets forth were likely to invite a complex response in at least some of its contemporary viewers and to absorb them in reflecting on difficult questions about such issues as Hellenicity. The remarkable shifting of the centre of perspective in these plays away from the Greek, with the staging and even privileging of a foreign point of view, is a facet of a more general characteristic of Aeschylean tragedy: its presentation of different perspectives in such a way as to complicate moral judgment (e.g. regarding justice, in the Oresteia trilogy: Burian 2003, 6–12, cf. Gagarin 1976, 54, connecting the typically Aeschylean “comprehension of complementary, opposed viewpoints within a single play” with Heraclitus) and critique Athenian assumptions. In this Aeschylus is closer in the sophistication and nuance of his approach to the historian Herodotus than he is to the stereotypes reflected in contemporary Athenian cultural production – vases, wall-paintings, statues, epigrams (on which see Hall 1995) – that celebrated the Greek victory in the decades after the Persian Wars.

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Acknowledgement I would like to thank Philip Stadter (a great friend and colleague to whose memory I dedicate this essay), Hyun Jin Kim, my colleagues at UNC-Chapel Hill and the Editors for valuable feedback that helped me improve this chapter.

FURTHER READING Historical tragedy: Hall 1996, 6–9, Bowie 1997, 40–45 and Sourvinou-Inwood 2003, 15–66. For the capacity of tragedy to reflect history see especially the essays collected in Pelling 1997c (with Pelling’s “Conclusion”, 213–35). Aeschylus and history: brief overview (with references) of Eastern influence on archaic and classical Greek culture (through travelling, trade, warfare, colonies): Mitchell 2007, 113–23. Drews 1973 chapters 1– 2 for Aeschylus’s predecessors and contemporaries among Greek writers of Eastern history including Persika. Aeschylus’ engagement with preceding and contemporary intellectual trends: For a succinct sketch of the philosophical background (Presocratics and sophists) see Guthrie 1971, 14–26 and Lloyd 1979, 234–67. Allan 2005 offers an overview of reflections of and responses to Early Greek philosophy (Presocratics and sophists understood) in Greek tragedy. Aeschylus’s affinities with Presocratic thought: Rösler 1970, Seaford 2003, 2012 (Heracleitus, 240–57, Pythagoreanism, 293–315), 2013; with contemporary philosophical thought (Anaxagoras, Xenophanes): Stella 1994. Poli-Palladini 2001 reviews traces of “intellectualism” in Aeschylus, with emphasis on his psychological realism, rationalism and the lack of theology, underscoring the presence in Aeschylus of sophistic views more often associated with the later fifth century. Bowie 2009 examines the endorsement of human-centred processes in the structures of the Oresteia. Greeks and barbarians in Aeschylus and Herodotus: Momigliano 975, 129–32, Isaac 2004, 257–83 and Gruen 2011, 9–52.

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Buxton, R. G. A. (1982). Persuasion in Greek Tragedy: A Study of Peitho. Cambridge. Calame, C. (1995). The Craft of Poetic Speech in Ancient Greece. (trans. J. Orion) Ithaca, NY. Carter, D. M. (2007). The Politics of Greek Tragedy. Bristol. Dewald, C. (1990). Review of F. Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History. Classical Philology 85, 217–24. Drews, R. (1973). The Greek Accounts of Eastern History. Washington, DC. Dué, C. (2006). The Captive Woman’s Lament in Greek Tragedy. Austin. Easterling, P. E. (1985). “Anachronism in Greek Tragedy.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 105, 1–10. Easterling, P. E. (1997). “Constructing the Heroic.” In Pelling ed., 21–37. Favorini, A. (2003). “History, Collective Memory, and Aeschylus’ The Persians.” Theatre Journal 55 n.1 Special issue on Ancient Theatre, 99–111. Gagarin, M. (1976). Aeschylean Drama. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Garvie, A. F. (2006 (1969)). Aeschylus’ Supplices. Play and Trilogy. Updated Edition. Exeter. Georges, P. (1994). Barbarian Asia and the Greek Experience: From the Archaic Period to the Age of Xenophon. Baltimore. Goldhill, S. (1988). “Battle Narrative and Politics in Aeschylus’ Persae.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 108, 189–93. Goldhill, S. (2000). “Civic Ideology and the Problem of Difference: The Politics of Aeschylean Tragedy, once Again.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 120, 34–56. Griffith, M. (2007). “The King and Eye: The Rule of the Father in Aischylos’ Persians.” In M. Lloyd, ed. Oxford Readings in Aeschylus. Oxford, 93–140 (= (unabridged version) “The king and eye: the rule of the father in Greek tragedy”, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 44, 1988: 20–84). Gruen, E. S. (2011). Rethinking the Other in Antiquity. Princeton. Guthrie, W. K. C. (1971). The Sophists. Cambridge. Hall, E. (1989). Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-definition through Tragedy. Oxford. Hall, E. (1995). “Asia Unmanned: Images of Victory in Classical Athens.” In J. Rich and G. Shipley, eds. War and Society in the Greek World. New York, 108–33. Hall, E. (1996). Aeschylus: Persians. Warminster. Hall, E. (2006). “Recasting the Barbarian.” In The Theatrical Cast of Athens. Oxford, 184–224. Harrison, T. (2000). The Emptiness of Asia: Aeschylus’ Persians and the History of the Fifth Century. London. Isaac, B. (2004). The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity. Princeton. Johansen, H. R. and Whittle, E. W. (1980). Aeschylus: The Suppliants. Vol. 2. Copenhagen. Konstan, D. (2001). Pity Transformed. London. Lloyd, G. E. R. (1979). Magic, Reason, and Experience. Cambridge. Macleod, C. W. (1982). “Politics and the Oresteia.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 102, 124–44. Reprinted in Collected Essays. Oxford, 1983, 20–40. Miller, M. C. (1997). Athens and Persia in the Fifth Century B.C.: A Study in Cultural Receptivity. Cambridge. Mitchell, L. G. (2006). “Greeks, Barbarians and Aeschylus’ Suppliants.” Greece & Rome 53.2, 205–23. Mitchell, L. G. (2007). Panhellenism and the Barbarian in Archaic and Classical Greece. Swansea. Mitchell-Boyask, R. (2009). Aeschylus: Eumenides. London. Momigliano, A. (1975). Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization. Cambridge. Munson, R. V. (2001). Telling Wonders: Ethnographic and Political Discourse in the Work of Herodotus. Ann Arbor. Munson, R. V. (2005). Black Doves Speak: Herodotus and the Languages of Barbarians. Cambridge, MA and Washington, DC. Nooter, S. (2017). The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus. Cambridge. Pelling, C. (1997a). “Aeschylus” Persae and History.” In Pelling ed., 1–19. Pelling, C. (1997b). “East Is East and West Is West – Or are They?” Histos 1, electronic publication. Pelling, C. ed. (1997c) Greek Tragedy and the Historian. Oxford.

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Pelling, C. (2000). Literary Texts and the Greek Historian. London. Pelling, C. (2005). “Tragedy, Rhetoric, and Performance Culture.” In J. Gregory, ed. A Companion to Greek Tragedy. Malden, MA, 83–102. Pelling, C. (2019). Herodotus and the Question Why. Austin. Podlecki, A. J. (1966). The Political Background of Aeschylean Tragedy. Ann Arbor. Poli-Palladini, L. (2001). “Traces of ‘Intellectualism’ in Aeschylus.” Hermes 129, 441–58. Rood, T. (2006). “Herodotus and Foreign Lands.” In C. Dewald and J. Marincola, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus. Cambridge, 290–305. Rosenbloom, D. (1993). “Shouting ‘Fire’ in a Crowded Theater: Phrynichus’ Capture of Miletus and the Politics of Fear in Early Attic Tragedy.” Philologus 137, 159–96. Rosenbloom, D. (2006). Aeschylus: Persians. London. Rösler, W. (1970). Reflexe vorsokratischen Denkens bei Aischylos. Meisenheim am Glan. Saïd, S. (2007). “Tragedy and Reversal: The Example of the Persians.” trans. M. Lloyd. In M. Lloyd, ed. Readings in Aeschylus, Oxford, 70–92 (= “Tragédie et renversement: l’exemple des Perses.” Métis 3, 1988, 321–41). Schaps, D. (1977). “The Woman Least Mentioned: Etiquette and Women’s Names.” Classical Quarterly 27, 323–30. Seaford, R. (2003). “Aeschylus and the Unity of Opposites.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 123, 141–63. Seaford, R. (2012). Cosmology and the Polis: The Social Construction of Space and Time in the Tragedies of Aeschylus. Cambridge. Seaford, R. (2013). “Aeschylus, Herakleitos, and Pythagoreanism.” In D. Cairns, ed. Tragedy and Archaic Greek Thought. Swansea, 17–38. Sommerstein, A. H. (1996). Aeschylean Tragedy. Bari. Sourvinou-Inwood, C. (2003). Tragedy and Athenian Religion. Lanham, MD. Stella, L. A. (1994). Eschilo e la cultura del suo tempo. Alessandria. Taplin, O. (1977). The Stagecraft of Aeschylus. Oxford. Thalmann, W. G. (1985). “Speech and Silence in the Oresteia 2.” Phoenix 39, 220–37. Thomas, B. M. (1998). Negotiable Identities: The Interpretation of Color, Gender, and Ethnicity in Aeschylus’. Doctoral dissertation, The Ohio State University. Thomas, R. (2000). Herodotus in Context. Cambridge. Thomas, R. (2001). “Ethnicity, Genealogy, and Hellenism in Herodotus.” In I. Malkin, ed. Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity. Washington, D.C., 213–33. Vasunia, P. (2001). The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Vlassopoulos, K. (2013). Greeks and Barbarians. Cambridge. Wilson, P. (1997). “Leading the Tragic Khoros: Tragic Prestige in the Democratic City.” In Pelling ed., 81–108. Wilson, P. (2000). The Athenian Institution of the Khoregia. Cambridge. Zeitlin, F. I. (1992). “The Politics of Eros in the Danaid Trilogy of Aeschylus.” In R. Hexter and D. Selden, eds. Innovations of Antiquity. New York, 202–52. Reprinted in F. I. Zeitlin, ed., Playing the Other. Gender and Society in Classical Greek Legend. Chicago, 1996, 123–71.

CHAPTER 27

Aeschylus and Athenian Law F. S. Naiden Like other aspects of fifth-century Athenian life, the law found its way into the work of the canonical tragedians. The average Athenian who saw the plays of Aeschylus had probably served as a juror, and possibly as a magistrate. He almost surely attended meetings of the assembly and council. He evidently worshipped in communal shrines that operated under laws posted in the shrines themselves. When he went to the Acropolis, hundreds of legal and legislative records inscribed on stone, or stelai, crowded in on him, from honorary decrees to lists of persons banned from the premises. Legal terms and procedures were familiar to him, and familiar to the playwrights, who were fellow citizens. The lawyerly (or litigious) Athenian was not unique. Citizens of Argos or Corinth did much of what Athenians did, and even Spartans did some. These men, however, did not attend tragedies staged at an annual fifth-century festival. Tragedy set Athens apart. Two of the many legal matters familiar to fifth-century Athenians and their Greek counterparts were supplication and murder. Besides being an immemorial custom, supplication in Classical Athens was a procedure regulated by the polis, as was true in other poleis as well. All poleis evidently had murder trials, even if Athens is the one place for which we know the wording of the law, the procedures and a few verdicts. We should not be surprised that Aeschylus wrote a play entitled the Suppliants, or that he wrote a trilogy about a mythical murder culminating in a trial in the most famous of Athenian homicide courts. Besides handling legal subjects, Aeschylus described the ostensible ancient history of the laws of supplication and laws of murder. Aeschylus is the legal historian among playwrights, the one who ventures back to the time when, as Prometheus Bound says, “Zeus was new”, meaning that the god of supplication and law courts was new to power, or to the time when, as Aeschylus himself would have it, there was no murder court in Athens and Athena created one. Aeschylus the legal historian has long attracted classicists and lawyers. E. R. Dodds (1951, 40) thought that the Oresteia revealed Aeschylus as a prophet of a rational, Western legal order. The Marxist classicist George Thomson (1941) thought Aeschylus was the first of the bourgeois revolutionaries. Recent American lawyers and legal scholars have preferred Dodds to Thomson, but wondered about the role of gender in the Oresteia, as at Gewirtz (1988). This chapter will not attempt to resolve these disputes about legal history, but instead will describe what fifth-century Athenian laws, especially the laws of supplication and murder, add to our understanding of Aeschylus’s Suppliants and the Eumenides.

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Aeschylus fixed on supplication and trials because these procedures and institutions were inherently dramatic. In any act of supplication, the suppliant made a request of some sort, but the party he approached, the “supplicandus”, was not obliged to grant it. The suppliant had to plead. The longer that took, the greater the suspense. At a murder trial, the accused played the part of the suppliant and the jury played the part of the supplicandus. The one made a plea of innocence, but the other was not obliged to accept it – another occasion for suspense. If the supplication was accepted, the supplicandus had to make a pledge to help the suppliant. Would the supplicandus be able to fulfil his pledge? If the accused was convicted, he would supplicate again, in the separate, penalty phase of a Greek trial, and throw himself on the mercy of the court. Would they spare him? Euripides and Sophocles wrote supplication plays for the same reason and Euripides wrote a trial play, the Orestes, but Aeschylus differed from his successors thanks to his historical perspective and also thanks to his interest in a third legal question, the status of resident aliens, or metics. The Suppliants deals with Egyptian aliens and the Eumenides turns underworld goddesses, the Eumenides, into metics contributing to the operation of Athenian courts.

Suppliants Greek supplication was a quasi-legal practice with four steps: first, the suppliant’s approach; second, introductory words and/or gestures used by the suppliant; third, his requests and arguments; and fourth, evaluation and decision by the supplicandus. Some acts were personal, meaning that the suppliant directed himself to a supplicandus who was an individual, and these acts may be described as customary rather than legal. Others were collective, directed by one or more suppliants to a supplicandus who was ostensibly a god approached by way of an altar in a communal shrine, but who was actually a polis controlling the shrine. These acts were subject to polis law. Acts of both kinds, eight in all, occur in Aeschylus (Naiden 2009, 302). In fifth-century Athens, acts of the second kind were regulated throughout. Suppose that a slave in Athens wished to flee his master and find protection elsewhere by supplicating. If he went to the Theseum, where slave refuge was traditional, the priest of the shrine would hear the suppliant’s case. Meanwhile, the sanctity of the shrine would protect the suppliant. But now suppose that he went instead to the shrine of Athena Polias. A nomos passed by the Assembly prevented him from even entering the shrine, let alone taking refuge (Naiden 2009, 373–74, 184). At the next step, the suppliant’s gesture, the very common gesture of placing a bough on an altar was regulated, as reported by the orator Andocides (1.116). This orator was accused of placing a bough on the altar of the Athenian Eleusinium at an unlawful, time, the Mysteries. At the third step, the supplicandus (meaning the Assembly) heard the suppliant’s request. It required that the request be ennomon, i.e. in accordance with polis law. In particular, no suppliant should request that a decision in a court of Athenian law be overturned, the principle known to the Romans as res judicata (Demosthenes 24.51–52). Corresponding to this requirement was a rhetorical norm that affected arguments the suppliant would make on his own behalf. He ought to say that he was axios, or “deserving”. In the first place, this meant legally innocent. This is not to say that all worthy suppliants were innocent of crime; many were fugitive murderers. They were, however, innocent of crimes against the supplicandus as opposed to other persons. At the fourth and last step, where the supplicandus evaluated the suppliant and decided either to accept or reject his request, the Athenian assembly would often characterise the suppliant’s request as ennoma and the suppliant as ennomos. Then the Assembly gave their



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response legal form, passing a decree that often gave honours to the suppliant. In a second kind of supplication, made in a court room and not an assembly, the jury accepted the suppliant’s plea of innocence and acquitted him (Naiden 2009, chapters 2–4, passim). Athenian acceptance of a suppliant had a distinctive, if not unique, feature. At the fourth step, two bodies participated. The Council of 500 evaluated the suppliant and then sent him to the Assembly, which evaluated him also. This method rendered supplications similar to other public business vetted by the Council on the Assembly’s behalf. Similar to this double evaluation was giving priests or magistrates the right to act in the Assembly’s name. At the Theseum, the priest did so. If the assembly decided to reject a suppliant’s request, it voted against passing a decree and often gave reasons for its decision. One of these cases concerns Naucratite merchants mentioned in Demosthenes’ Against Timocrates. When these merchants went to the council altar and supplicated for the return of captured goods, they failed, he explains, “because the assembly voted that the goods should be regarded as unfriendly (i.e. enemy) property” (24.12). The Naucratites were enemies, and thus unworthy. They met with the same fate as suppliants that Achilles rejected on the Homeric battlefield, but unlike the Trojans, they received due process and were rejected according to polis law. Crucial to this highly regulated, often highly political, procedure was the role of the gods. Zeus hikesios (patron deity of hiketeia, or supplication) endorsed the procedure and expected the parties to an act of supplication to obey regulations and norms. The god of the shrine where the suppliant put his bough took an interest in the integrity of the procedure as well. The pledge that the supplicandus made after accepting a suppliant interested the gods most of all. As Plato says, this pledge or homologia was solemn. Tradition held that the gods punished violators of these pledges (Naiden 2009, 122–29). To understand how Aeschylus applies Athenian law in Suppliants, we should begin with the fundamentals: the suppliants, the supplicandus and the place of supplication. The suppliants are Danaus, the son of Belus, the ruler of a large Near Eastern kingdom, and the Danaids, the 50 daughters who are his only children. Danaus, who ruled the province of Libya, quarrelled with his brother Aegyptus, who ruled Egypt and Arabia. A marriage alliance was to unite the two, with each of the 50 Danaids to marry one of the 50 sons of Aegyptus. Aegyptus regarded this endogamous marriage as due to his sons as a matter of right (Suppliants 387– 91). Unwilling to allow the marriage, Danaus brought his daughters with him to Argos, where they supplicated at a seaside shrine and asked the Argives for refuge. The position of the supplicandus is no less complicated. Just as the suppliant girls have a sponsor, Danaus, the people of Argos have a king, or royal magistrate, Pelasgus. A kind of Greek counterpart to Belus, Pelasgus rules a large Greek kingdom centred on Argos, a polis with an assembly of its own and with its own shrines for suppliants to use. For the Egyptians arriving in Argos, the mise en scène is challenging. The shrine they enter belongs to the polis, not the king, as it might in Egypt. The suppliants must learn Greek norms and use Greek terms and, oddest of all, must make their case twice, for after the King hears them, the assembly will – a procedure Aeschylus apparently models on the double evaluation of suppliants in Classical Athens. Lastly, the fleet of the angry Aegyptus is bearing down on Argos, seeking to seize them, no matter what the Argives do. Even for the audience of Aeschylus, let alone later times, the kingdoms of Belus and Pelasgus are sketchy and a war between Egypt and Argos is an exercise in historical imagination. Yet the supplicatory basics are true to Greek as well as Athenian law. In the fifth century, the Argive monarchy still existed, unlike the Athenian one, and the king served as a magistrate with religious responsibilities that may well have included evaluating suppliants who came to extramural polis shrines (Tomlinson 1972, 192–93). Other details reflect Athenian procedure. When the suppliants arrive at the shrine, they invoke gods and heroes, as a Greek would, and show enough acumen to mention the supplicandus, the polis (Suppliants 25–28):

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City, Earth, and clear Water, gods of heaven and of vengeance, gods who hold the tombs in the earth, and, third of all, Zeus the Saviour, who watches over the homes of righteous men, receive this band of suppliant women …

Mentioning only one Olympian by name, Zeus, might suggest a certain lack of local knowledge, but focuses attention on the legal situation, one of interest to Zeus hikesios (the patron of supplication, hikesia) as well as Zeus sōtēr (saviour of those in need). Next, the Danaids need to use a bough, as in Andocides, and they do, taking the second step in a civic supplication. The third step, the presentation of a request and arguments, deserves some comment, for complications arise, not with the unexceptionable request, which is for protection, but with the arguments. First, the Danaids establish their worth, saying at the very beginning that they are not murderers and are thus innocent in this minimal sense. Second, they refer to family ties with the Argives, a common reason to be considered worthy. They recite a family tree, a Homeric alternative to the Classical Athenian norm of citing a polis decree or summoning witnesses at an enrolment ceremony. They use the very term, ennomos, that appears in Athenian supplication. First, they say that supplication should be ennomos (401c04): Look to the watchman on high, the guardian for mortals with many troubles who come and supplicate their neighbours and do not obtain justice that is ennomos.

The Danaids also say that the participants in supplication should be ennomoi (381–84): In these matters, our relative Zeus holds the scales and watches over both sides, and reasonably metes out injustice to the wicked, and just dealings to the ennomoi.

So far, it would so seem, so good, but the apparent use of the term ennomoi to refer not only to suppliants, but also to supplicandi, has no parallel in Athenian examples and perhaps shows the Danaids to be unusually aggressive – a trait soon to reappear. Now comes the rub: the most important argument for accepting the Danaids is that they are entitled to refuse to marry the sons of Aegyptus. Pelasgus questions this argument. Without using the term epiklēros, Pelasgus compares the Danaids to women who are epiklēroi, or unmarried daughters of a father with no sons. Under Athenian law, here applied to Argos, they would be obliged to marry someone within the family once their father dies. That would preserve the family line. Pelasgus concludes (387–89): According to the law of the polis, the sons of Aegyptus may prevail in this case. They are your nearest kin. How can anyone argue against them?

Pelasgus’s tacit comparison between the Danaids and epiklēroi is only partly right. The Danaids have not lost their father and so the house of Danaus does not yet need preserving. The Argive king has overstated the similarity between the Athenian law of the epiklēros and the very different custom of endogamous marriage among Egyptian royalty. The cardinal feature of this exchange, however, is not the difference of opinion about marriage law, but Pelasgus’s citing “the law of the polis” when he evaluates the suppliants. They must be worthy in Argive, legal terms, not general, customary terms, or Egyptian terms. And Argive terms are largely Athenian. The issue of marriage law soon gives way to another, as the Danaids shift from making arguments to making threats. As soon as the King tells them that he will resolve his doubts by consulting the assembly (397), they threaten to commit suicide if rejected (455–65). This



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threat is abnormal, for no historically attested Greek suppliant ever threatens to commit suicide. One group of suppliants, Athenian delegates to Delphi in Herodotus (7.141.2), threaten to stay in the shrine and starve until the oracle gives them a second reply in lieu of the first, which they disapprove of, but even these suppliants do not threaten to commit suicide. Moreover, the delegates have obtained advice from a local expert. So long as the staff removes them before they die, they will cause no pollution. The Danaids, in contrast, are precipitate, unadvised and a potential source of pollution. One aspect of this threat, which is doing the deed at an altar, is especially rare. Only two suppliants make this threat, both in tragedies: the Danaids and the Menelaus of Euripides’ Helen (980–87). Menelaus is soon accepted, so only the Danaids persist in their attitude. The threat made by the Danaids proves fruitless. As Pelasgus explains, he cannot accept them. Only the Assembly can, a point he makes before the threat and again afterwards (368–69, 481–89). The suicide threat proves to be an aberration and the procedure goes forward, but with new doubts about the suppliants. Can they be worthy while also being uninformed, argumentative and threatening? Now one more complication, a fundamental one. Pelasgus decides that so far as the Assembly is concerned, the suppliant is Danaus, who will make the case to the Argives. After all their voluble, melodramatic effort, the girls must stay behind. So far Aeschylus has squeezed 600 lines of suspense from their predicament. Then the Assembly takes command, hearing Danaus and promptly rendering judgement. As Pelasgus reports (600–1, 605), The residents’ response is favourable; binding resolutions of the people have been duly passed …. So the Argives resolved, unanimously.

With this action, we come not only to the decision by the supplicandus, but also to the ensuing pledge, one which takes the form of a resolution granting honours, as in Athens. The resolution is even said to be inscribed on a figurative plaque and bolted fast for all to see (944–45). This plaque resembles stelai commemorating grants to Athenian suppliants. Like a stele, it serves as a permanent record, but one inscribed in the hearts of the Assemblymen and transmitted as the “plain speech of a free tongue” (948–49). The Argive pledge leads to an example of the second kind of dramatic tension that can occur in an act of supplication. Will the supplicandi do their duty? The herald of Aegyptus arrives on the scene, answering, “No, they do not dare”. If the Argives try, Egypt will attack them. In Classical Athens and other poleis, similar situations sometimes arose. The earliest historical example appears in Herodotus, when an exile fleeing Cyrus the Great, Pactyes, arrived in Ionia. When he came to Cymae, the Assembly accepted his request for refuge, but since Cyrus threatened Cymae, they changed front and told the suppliant to leave. Without surrendering him to Cyrus, they declined to give him permanent rather than temporary help (Naiden 2009, 168–69). Once again, a debate occurs between Pelasgus and foreigners, but this time he faces the herald of the king of Egypt and not the princesses or Danaus. The herald justifies his demand to be given the Danaids by speaking of them as though they were property: “I find my lost property and so I am taking it” (918). All disputes about marriage law aside, the herald assumes that the Danaids are no different from runaway slaves and he also assumes that no god will protect a runaway slave from his master. Pelasgus and the Argives remain unmoved by this claim. Under Athenian law, once again taken to be Argive law (and perhaps rightly so), a slave who ran away to a temple would be interviewed by the priest, or conceivably by some other representative of the polis. The master

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of the runaway was entitled to demand the return of his property, but he was not entitled to take it until the shrine personnel considered the circumstances. They might arrange for the sale of runaway to a new master. Even if the master recovered his runaway slave, he could not seize the slave merely by virtue of his rights as the owner of human property (Naiden 2009, 373–74). If the master was a foreigner, another complication arose, one mentioned by Pelasgus when he says to the herald, “When you say this, what proxenoi (local representatives) do you have in mind?” (919) The king is referring to the Athenian (and perhaps Argive) procedure whereby a foreigner must act alongside a proxenos, a member of the community assigned to protect foreigners’ interests. As Pelasgus says, the herald is a foreigner, or xenos, not a dignitary somehow exempt from this requirement of polis law (914). In the event, these legal issues will lead to a war between Argos and Egypt, one that takes place before or during the lost second play of the trilogy. In this play, the king of Egypt doubtless insists on his marriage or ownership rights. To keep the pledge made to the suppliants and to preserve the integrity of polis law, Pelasgus refuses to yield and dies, presumably in battle. Danaus becomes king in his stead. He gives way to Egypt and the unwanted marriages take place, but with unexpected consequences. The daughters, still violently inclined, kill almost all their husbands. First supplication, then legal issues, then a diplomatic incident, then war, and then a catastrophe: Aeschylus grasped the dramatic potential of supplication. This potential arose from the dynamics of supplication in Classical Athens. Suppliant and supplicandus engaged in a kind of agōn, but a regulated one that could have both legislative and diplomatic consequences. Scholars have not seen the play in this light. Martin Ostwald saw a conflict between divine law, embodied by the claims of the Danaids, and the law of the polis, represented by the reluctant Pelasgus (1969, 141–45). John Gould saw a conflict between the demands of ritual, represented by what he saw as the requirement to help the Danaids, and the conflicting demands of political necessity, which required that Argos avoid war with Egypt (1973, p. 83). Ostwald’s contrast between divine and human is overdrawn. The Athenian procedures followed in Argos were religiously sanctioned, yet enforced by the polis. Gould’s contrast between ritual and expediency rests on a misunderstanding of supplication. The supplicandus was not obliged to say “yes”. As many Athenian examples show, he might say “no”. The situation in the Suppliants, like that in many historical acts of supplication, was three-sided, like a trial. When the supplicandus or jury found the suppliant, or defendant, innocent, the prosecutor, which is to say, those pursuing the suppliant, might well refuse to accept the verdict. Aeschylus gives this act of refusal a cultural twist. The Egyptians, foreigners under the rule of a despot, refuse to accept Athenian democratic procedures in a Panhellenic Argos. Another legal issue in the Suppliants is the treatment of metics, or resident aliens. Once Argos decides to welcome the suppliants, the Danaids achieve this status. As Danaus explains to them (609–14), We have the right to reside here…with protection from seizure by any person. No one, inhabitant or foreigner, may lay hands upon us. If violence is done to us, any citizen who fails to come to our aid shall lose his civil rights and be driven into exile from the community.

This grant of rights corresponds to the treatment of metics provided by Classical Athenian law, for which see MacDowell (1978, 76–79). Danaus, however, has not dealt with issue of where the new metics will reside and Aeschylus’s handling of this issue has legal aspects. Pelasgus offers them a choice between his palace and lodgings elsewhere in the city. The reason he cannot leave their lodgings up to them is partly that they, like the herald, lack a proxenos to represent them. In addition,



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Athenian law (and perhaps Argive law) made it impossible for foreigners to buy land or erect houses. The Assembly might grant an exception to this law, but Danaus does not ask them to and so the king ends up arranging for them to stay in the palace (1010–11). The issue of how to treat metics arises in the Eumenides, too, and once again involves an unusual group of female visitors – not Egyptian princesses, but underworld goddesses.

Eumenides The Athenian law of murder needs a briefer introduction than the practice of supplication. There were four main kinds of homicide in Athens: deliberate homicide, or phonos ek pronoias; planning or plotting to commit deliberate homicide, or bouleusis; unintentional homicide, phonos akousios; and justifiable homicide, phonos dikaios. Deliberate homicide resembled first degree murder in the United States, but sometimes included intentional but unplanned homicide. Unintentional homicide resembled second-degree manslaughter. Justifiable homicide covered various situations and so it was a bigger category than the modern justification of self-defence. Each of the four had a peculiar venue, jury and procedure. The venue was always in the open air, to avoid pollution due to the presence of the accused, yet all trials took place in shrines, signalling the interest of the gods in seeing justice done. The jurors were either the ephetai, a select group of 51, or the Areopagites, all former magistrates. The procedure was by far the longest in Athenian law. Preliminary hearings took three months; the use of oaths by all parties was elaborate; and each side made two speeches, not one, the prosecutor speaking first in each of two rounds. At the end of the first round the defendant could chose to go into exile and thus avoid punishment. At the end of the second round, the jury voted. Only a majority was needed to convict. If the procedure was lengthy, the punishments were correspondingly severe. For deliberate homicide, the penalty was death, with additional dishonour for the murderer if the crime was one of parricide. For unintentional homicide, the penalty was exile. The family of the victim could pardon the defendant convicted of unintentional homicide and thus cancel the verdict. For deliberate homicide there was no pardon. Like other trials, homicide trials were surely the occasion of magical rites intended to influence the outcome, especially by invoking ghosts or demons (Gager 1992, 116–17; although no extant spell or curse tablet manifestly deals with a murder trial). The role of the gods went beyond the use of shrines for trials, just as it went beyond the use of shrines in acts of supplication. The gods established the first, unwritten laws against murder. They had even ordained the homicide laws of Athens. Demosthenes specifies that either gods or heroes established a murder defendant’s right to flee after making his first speech (Antiphon 4.1.2, 5.10, Demosthenes 23.81, 23.70, discussed in Naiden, 2020). For the Eumenides, the first of the four kinds of homicide, phonos ek pronoias, is the most important. This crime was the province of the Areopagus, which had been an influential body in the first few centuries after Athens abolished its monarchy. At the time when the Eumenides premiered, however, jurisdiction over deliberate homicide was the most important power that remained to the Areopagus. This court ranked as the most sober-minded of Athenian courts (among other sources, Plutarch Life of Solon 19, Demosthenes 23.65–66). The law that it enforced, one unchanged since Draco, was likewise revered (Antiphon 5.14). As to the origin of the court, Aeschylus’s interest, the best-known account said that the Areopagus originated when the gods put one of their own, Ares, on trial there for killing a

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son of Poseidon (Demosthenes, see above). Another account attributed the court to Solon (Plutarch, see above). Neither of these accounts was suitable for Aeschylus. His paradigmatic trial would need to have a human, not a divine, defendant and it would need to be legendary and not date from the time of Solon. Two legendary murderers were likely candidates – Orestes and Aegisthus. The crime of Orestes, parricide, was the worst sort of deliberate homicide. It drew the attention not only of Zeus and other gods who abhorred murder, but also of the Eumenides, or Furies, avengers of parricide. The Eumenides would make a dramatic addition to the cast and they had another attractive feature: when Orestes came to Athens to be tried, he happened to be a suppliant whom the Eumenides were pursuing. By picking Orestes, Aeschylus would add an element of suspense due to the goddesses’ pursuit of their quarry. The question of who would protect the suppliant would reinforce the question of who would put him on trial. In contrast, the crime of Aegisthus had no connection to Athens. It occurred in, and Aegisthus was punished in, Mycenae. In sum, a play about murder law and the Eumenides would require getting Orestes from the place and time of the murder to the Athenian Areopagus, or “hill of Ares.” The Oresteia provides this particular itinerary. In Agamemnon, Clytemnestra kills her husband in the palace at Mycenae without any decisive help from Aegisthus. In the next play, the Libation Bearers, Apollo’s oracle commands Orestes take vengeance on the guilty, who of course include his mother, and provides the killer with a defence at any future trial. By proceeding to kill his mother, Orestes provokes the Eumenides. Although in other plays these goddesses do not confine themselves to pursuing matricides (and thus Aegisthus feels entitled to invoke them at Ag. 1578–80 in support of the slaying of Agamemnon), they do confine themselves to matricides in the play named after them and so they provide a foil to Apollo, for they object to the very sort of killing that the god has enjoined upon Orestes. They pursue him when he goes to Athens to supplicate Athena, as Apollo directs. Commentators have noticed how jerky this itinerary is. At the start of the Eumenides, Orestes turns up in Delphi to get marching orders from Apollo. Next, he appears in Athens at the shrine of Athena, and last he appears at the Areopagus. Yet the itinerary is not arbitrary. It allows the play to focus on the law of deliberate homicide in Athens and on the Eumenides. As for Aeschylus’s emphasis on these goddesses, scholars have explained it according to various intellectual fashions. For both Dodd and Thomson, the Eumenides represent the general principle of the lex talionis, or “an eye for an eye”. Aeschylus wishes to replace this principle with a larger sense of justice, dikeˉ, a word used by all concerned, but now c­ hannelled through a new, judicial procedure. These interpretations implicitly favour Apollo, who pleads the winning case, and Athena, who arranges the trial, and so other scholars have objected to such interpretations as being biased. Wilamowitz called Apollo “an arrogant Junker” and Lloyd-Jones called Zeus, on whom Athena relies in her dealings with the Eumenides, a strongman. Rather than represent dikeˉ or justice, these gods represent the opposite (Wilamowitz-Moellendorf 1914, 625; Lloyd-Jones 1956). If we judge the play by the standards of an Athenian murder trial, we discover Athena acting as a routine trial magistrate. To be sure, this requires an odd effort on her part, for once Orestes and the Eumenides arrive in the shrine and demand to be heard she must present herself and stand next to her own statue – a scene without parallels in Greek art and literature. As a magistrate should, she speaks first to the prosecuting Eumenides, then to the defendant Orestes. This scene corresponds to the three months of preliminary hearings in an Athenian homicide trial, but proceeds without the customary oaths. At the conclusion of these hundred or so lines, she decides to summon a jury of Athenian citizens. To justify this step, Aeschylus is careful to remove other ways of dealing with the dispute. One way would be for Orestes to flee, as accused murderers do in Homer, but the Eumenides



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refuse to permit it. Another would be for Orestes to pay wergild, a second Homeric response to crime, but implausible because nothing in Greek literature suggests that patricide or matricide could be laid to rest by any kind of payment. A third way would be an oath-challenge, but both Athena and Orestes disapprove of this Homeric expedient (Eumenides 429–30). Orestes proposes a fourth, not found in Homer: Athena herself should judge him. In that case the act of supplication would take the place of any trial. Athena demurs. Although she is willing to accept Orestes’ supplication, the Eumenides will remain unappeased. The goddess must somehow accommodate them, a conclusion reinforced by a choral song in which the Eumenides describe Orestes’ crime as an attack on justice in general. Just as supplication in the Suppliants must lead to an Assembly meeting, in this play it must lead to a trial. The jury for the ensuing trial, chosen from among the “best citizens” and not by lot, reflects the practice of appointing former magistrates to the Areopagus. The panel does not swear an oath, but under the circumstances, this oath is superfluous, for it would have invoked the Eumenides, as the oaths of prosecutors and defendants always did (Pausanias 1.28.6, scholia to Aeschines 3.188), and in this case the Eumenides are present. The trial begins with a herald’s announcement, as in Athens. Next, the Eumenides, acting as prosecutors, ask the defendant whether, how and at whose prompting he committed the crime. These questions were surely standard at preliminary hearings, if not during a trial. Orestes’ answer, saying that he acted at Apollo’s bidding, introduces the heart of his defence: the killing of Clytemnestra was a justifiable homicide, for a god commanded it. Here Aeschylus innovates, since naturally nothing in Athenian homicide law allowed for justifiable killing on divine command. Confronted with the Eumenides’ strong case against Orestes and with Orestes’ confession, Apollo, acting as Orestes’ sunēgoros, or courtroom supporter, chooses to argue the law rather than the facts. He claims that killing a murderous mother is defensible, provided she has killed the father, whereas the Eumenides hold that such a killing is indefensible, no matter what the mother’s misdeeds. Scholars have long looked for patriarchal or philosophical explanations for this debate (such as Thomson, loc. cit., with bibliography for the view that the debate comes to Pythagorean conclusions about male superiority). From a legal perspective, the crucial feature of the debate is the attitude of Athena, the presiding magistrate. As she says, being a child with a father yet not a mother makes her “all for the father” (Eumenides 738) and thus favours Orestes. For his part, Orestes would be glad for intervention from any supernatural source. Like many a Greek defendant, he is hoping for help from a ghost – his father’s (600–01). Clytemnestra’s ghost has already intervened on the side of the prosecution. Now comes another celebrated crux in the play. The jury returns either tied or favouring conviction by one vote. No matter which, Athena votes for Orestes and so she either creates a tie or breaks one (733–34). Since the Athenian rule was that a tie meant acquittal, Orestes is acquitted either way. (As before, scholars who are sceptical of any laudatory legal interpretation of the play prefer the grimmer view, which is that Athena created the tie, e.g. Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, 1914, 183–85). Now free to go, Orestes departs for home and the play turns from murder to metics, the Athenian class of resident aliens. Athena pacifies the dissatisfied Eumenides by inviting them to take up residence in Athens, at the Areopagus in particular, where they will protect the city and in return receive worship. They will not, however, be metics of the same sort as the Danaids in Argos. Rather than receive lodgings, they will receive an Athenian home and become gamoroi, a term used in the Suppliants for the citizens of Argos as opposed to the new arrivals (Eumenides 890 vs. Suppliants 613). More important than the blessings the goddesses will confer on Athens, it seems, is the attitude that they will encourage – one of fear of the law and of the legal authorities. The

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Eumenides themselves will have a legal power very much to be feared – the power to punish the wayward (948–55). On these terms, Athena continues, Zeus Agoraios will prevail. In other words, the city’s courts, markets and government will flourish (968–75). This resolution of the play’s conflicts echoes remarks made by the Eumenides and Athena during the trial. Fear, the Eumenides say, is a watchman who is always on duty; without him, Justice will not be revered. Fear and Justice, they explain, correspond to a sensible, middle path in law and politics, a path avoiding anarchy on the one hand and despotism on the other (516–31). Athena agrees, saying (696–702), I advise the townspeople not to establish or revere either anarchy or despotism. Don’t throw fear entirely out of the community. If a man fears nothing, how can he be just? By feeling this sort of awe, dread, and reverence you will have protection for your country and salvation for your community.

Having lost the legal case, the Eumenides have won a larger point about the emotional and religious basis for the legal system. These statements, indeed, have little to do with the trial of Orestes. This defendant did not wish to establish anarchy or despotism; on the contrary, he wished to become king of Argos by hereditary right. Nor did Orestes act out of misguided fearlessness. He did as Apollo bade him. Far from disregarding the Eumenides, he feared lest they pursue him for not killing his mother (Libation Bearers 278–83). Apollo himself told Orestes the Eumenides would pursue him if he did not kill her. Orestes could not have expected that they would pursue him if he did. This statement of Apollo’s was not the god’s only mistake. He told Orestes to defend himself by saying that a god ordered him to kill, a claim of justifiable homicide. Athena ignores this claim and lets the Eumenides accuse Orestes of deliberate homicide. Another complication in the play’s rhetoric is the treatment of the concept of talio, or retribution. The Eumenides want talio, but that is not all. For them, kin-killing is a more important concern than is talio. For Apollo, and for Orestes, a successful purification should exempt a killer from the consequences of talio. For Athena, an acceptable suppliant might well be exempt from these consequences – but on second thought she turns her suppliant over to a jury. To extract from the play some evolution from vengeance to a generous notion of dikê is thus problematic. As Simon Goldhill (2000) says, a new court has been born, but not some new and seamless world of legal language and concepts. After speaking of “the protection you [Athenians] will have” through the Eumenides, Athena goes on to say that the Athenians will surpass all others in this respect, even the Scythians and “the regions [of] Pelops” (703). Both Scythia and Sparta, if not the Peloponnesus, were famed for their good laws, or eunomia, as noticed by Alan Sommerstein (1989, 219). This boast of Athena’s deserves brief notice. The one extensive, fifth-century source for the nomoi of the Scythians, Herodotus, describes them as being divided between two groups, the “royal” Scythians and the rest, who are slaves to the former. Nomarchs, or provincial governors, administer the country. To judge from Herodotus, however, the Scythians do not have courts as opposed to popular assemblies. Diviners, and not any judges or jury, evaluate those who commit perjury and find them innocent or guilty by the use of divination, or manteia (Hdt. 4.68). The king may put men to death without a hearing (4.69). If Scythia was the opposite of a city-state like Athens, Sparta was a rival. Herodotus and later writers praised the Spartans for their eunomia. (Hdt. 1.65–66), but various sources point to the same conclusion as for Scythia: Sparta had no courts of law distinct from its two deliberative bodies, the assembly and the Gerousia, the second of which heard murder charges (MacDowell 1986, 127–49).



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This lack of courts, and in particular a court for murder, is not remarkable. Aristotle reports that Solon established the first courts in Athens (Aristotle Constitution of Athens 9.1). Before this time, the Areopagus heard some lawsuits (Aristotle Constitution of Athens 3.6), but apparently did not have any special procedure for them. Even if Aristotle is wrong about Solon, he shows that a polis without courts was not thought to be an historical freak. Even after Solon, the Athenian assembly often took the place of a court. According to Euripides’ Orestes, an assembly, and not a court, heard murder charges in early Argos. To sum up, a court devoted to murder, especially an ancient one, was far from being a commonplace institution in the world known to Aeschylus and his audience. Scythia apparently did not have one, Sparta did not and Athens had one only thanks to Solon – or to the Athena of Aeschylus. Perhaps no tragedy has inspired more speculation about the playwright’s political, philosophical, or religious views than the Eumenides. This chapter has preferred to show how contemporary Athenian legal procedure informs this play as well as the Suppliants. In both works, Aeschylus presented legendary or aetiological legal proceedings that, on the one hand, substantially resemble what his audience knew first-hand, but, on the other hand, reveal latent ironies. The Danaids, no murderers, will prove to be just that. The Eumenides, goddesses of terror and vengeance, lose their case but win their point. As Peter Euben has observed, the play resembles the findings made by modern truth and reconciliation commissions given the delicate political task of honouring the side that the commission chooses to reject and disappoint (1990, 81).

Conclusion The study of these two plays does not exhaust the topic of law in Aeschylus. Prometheus Bound, whether or not by Aeschylus, may be said to put Zeus on trial in a fashion anticipated by the Eumenides’ criticisms of two Olympians, Apollo and Athena. Justice – Dikê – is a prominent theme in Seven against Thebes, where it figures on combatants’ shields and in their rhetoric. The Suppliants, however, has the value of showing how Aeschylus used the regulation of supplication in a different fashion from Sophocles and Euripides, not just by choosing a very distant, exotic example, but also by having the chorus play the part of the suppliant, linking supplicatory procedure to the very structure of the play. The Oresteia explores murder from start to finish, beginning with an antecedent crime and ending with a permanent, institutional response to murder, again linking legal developments to dramatic structure. As dramatisations of legal procedures, these two plays may be unique. No play of Marlowe or Shakespeare is virtually co-extensive with a trial or other legal procedure, no play of Racine or Corneille, no play of the Golden Age of Spanish drama, or of Shaw, O’Neill, Beckett or Pinter. And we have only six or seven plays of Aeschylus. He wrote at least 60 more. A loss to Athenian drama, these plays are also likely to be a considerable loss to Athenian legal history.

FURTHER READING For sundry essays on drama and Athenian law, see Harris et al. 2010. This volume includes two specifically on Aeschylus; see especially that of Sommerstein (2010). For a short history of the use made of Greek tragedy by legal scholars, see Allen 2005. The fullest account of supplication and Greek law is Naiden 2009, Chapter 4. The fullest account of Athenian homicide law is MacDowell 1963; for metics in Aeschylus, see Bakewell 2013; for proxeny, see Mack 2015.

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REFERENCES Allen, D. (2005). “Greek Tragedy and Law.” In M. Gagarin and D. Cohen, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law. Cambridge, 374–94. Bakewell, G. (2013). The Suppliants of Aeschylus: A Tragedy of Immigration. Madison. Dodds, E. R. (1951). The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Euben, P. (1990). The Tragedy of Political Theory. Princeton. Gager, J. (1992). Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World. Oxford. Gewirtz, P. (1988). “Aeschylus’ Law.” Harvard Law Review 101, 1043–55. Goldhill, S. (2000). “Civic Ideology and the Problem of Difference: The Politics of Aeschylean Tragedy, once Again.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 120, 34–56. Gould, J. (1973). “Hiketeia.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 93, 74–103. Harris, E., Rhodes, P. and Delão, D. F., eds. (2010). Law and Drama in Ancient Greece. London. Lloyd-Jones, H. (1956). “Zeus in Aeschylus.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 76, 55–67. MacDowell, D. (1963). Athenian Homicide Law in the Age of the Orators. Manchester. MacDowell, D. (1978). The Law in Classical Athens. London. MacDowell, D. (1986). Spartan Law. Edinburgh. Mack, W. (2015). Proxeny and Polis: Institutional Networks in the Ancient Greek World. Naiden, F. S. (2009). Ancient Supplication. Oxford. Naiden, F. S. (2020). “Law, Legitimacy, and Religion in the Greek Poleis.” In M. Canevaro and E. Harris, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Law. Oxford Handbooks Online. Oxford. Ostwald, M. (1969). Nomos and the Beginnings of Athenian Democracy. Oxford. Sommerstein, A. H. (1989). Aeschylus: Eumenides. Cambridge. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010). “Orestes’ Trial and Athenian Homicide Procedure.” In Harris et al. eds., 25–39. Thomson, G. (1941). Aeschylus and Athens: A Study of Athenian Drama and Democracy. London. Tomlinson, R. A. (1972). Argos and the Argolid from the End of the Bronze Age to the Roman Occupation. London. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U. von. (1914). Aischylos. Interpretationen. Berlin.

CHAPTER 28

Aeschylus’s Athens between Hegemony and Empire David Rosenbloom Tragedy is overtly about “other people’s sufferings”. The disastrous reception of Phrynichus’s Capture of Miletos sometime in the late 490s bce ensured this. Phrynichus presented a tragedy about the Persian destruction of Miletos in 494 at the conclusion of an unsuccessful five-year revolt from the Persian empire. According to Herodotus, the Athenians in the theatre broke down in tears, fined the playwright 1000 drachmae for “reminding them of their own sufferings” and decreed that the play never be presented again (6.21.2). The Athenian reaction to Phrynichus’s tragedy resulted from the play’s dramatisation of the lamentable sack of a kindred Ionian and allied city that the Athenians themselves had aided early in the revolt; the play may have envisioned the Persian fire that engulfed Miletos was also headed to Athens (Rosenbloom 1993). The alienation of Athens from tragic suffering resulted in the projection of markers of Athenian collective identity onto non-Athenian subjects of tragedy to effect the presentation of the self in the guise of the other. Athenian identity and trauma could be inscribed in a tragedy only as a palimpsestic underlay, erased and overwritten by the identities and sufferings of other cities and peoples. Persian fire consumed Athens in 480/79 as the culmination of Xerxes’ massive land and sea invasion of Greece. The Athenians as a community experienced two evacuations of their territory and witnessed from a distance the Persian dismantling, demolition and incineration of their city (Herodotus 8.51–55, 9.3, 13.2; Garland 2017, 61–104). The Athenians consciously avoided rebuilding temples destroyed on the Acropolis and elsewhere, keeping the ruins as reminders of the “impiety” (asebeia) of the barbarian (Lycurg. 1.81; cf. Rhodes and Osborne 2003, 88.21–46, pp. 446–48). Herodotus’s Athenians proclaim that they could never come to terms with Xerxes: “he had no regard (opin) for the gods and heroes whose temples and statues he burned” (8.143.2). Rather, the Athenians were compelled to avenge to the maximum “the statues and temples of the gods burned and demolished” (8.144.2). The rubble symbolised the collective Athenian imperative to achieve compensatory vengeance. The Persians appears to deny that the Persians sacked Athens. The messenger reports to the Queen, “the gods keep the city of the goddess Pallas safe” (347) and that Athens is “unsacked because where there are men, the rampart is secure” (349; Garvie 2009, 180–81). The denial

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probably refers to the Delphic oracle prophesying that Zeus grants to Athena “that the wooden wall alone be unsacked” (Herodotus 7.141.3) – referring to the fleet. This denial covers glimpses of the trauma elsewhere in the drama. The chorus of the play describes the “the citysacking (perseptolis) royal army” as having marched across the Hellespont on pontoon bridges and boasts of city-sacking and driving out settling populations as the Persian portion from the gods (87–107). The repeated naming of “Persians” (Persai, 140, 171, 255, 258, 267, 682; Couch 1931) itself underscores the reality of Athens’ affliction. The word is homonymous with the aorist active infinitive of the verb “to sack” which describes Xerxes’ intention in invading Greece in the play: “to sack (persai) the land of the Ionians” (177–8). Darius openly describes and decries the Persian looting, uprooting and burning of Greek temples, the destruction of altars and the theft of statues as “hybris and godless intentions” (803–12). This crime (drama), he asserts, will result in no less suffering (pathos) for the perpetrators (813–14). He prophesies that Persians slaughtered at Plataea will exude a “bloody paste” (pelanos; cf. 204, 524), a phrase that suggests their deaths are sacrificial offerings made by the “Dorian spear” – Sparta – to divinities of the earth (816–17). The Persian dead at Plataea will remain unlamented and unburied (Herodotus 9.83.2); putrefied “mounds of their corpses will signify in silence to the eyes of mortals even to the third generation that it is not right for a mortal to think beyond his nature” (818–20). This pile of bones is a memorial of Xerxes’ striving beyond the boundaries of his humanity to enslave and violate humans and gods alike and a reminder of its disastrous consequences. Darius’s final warning to the Persians specifies the causal sequence of action in the play (820–23): For hybris, when comes to full blossom, bears the crop of calamity (atē) from which it reaps a harvest of tears. Seeing such punishments for these things, remember Athens and Greece, and let no one, holding his present fortune in contempt, waste his great prosperity (olbos) desiring others’.

There are three interrelated dimensions to Xerxes’ hybris. Transgressing boundaries that demarcate mortals and immortals is symptomatic of it, for in order to “put the yoke of slavery on Greece” (50), enslaving humans by exacting tribute and military manpower from them as imperial subjects (584–90), Xerxes “puts a yoke on the neck of sea” (65–80). Darius excoriates his son for this disastrous delusion: “He expected he would control the flowing Hellespont like a sacred slave in chains…and he tried to change its course….Being mortal, he thought he would dominate all the gods, especially Poseidon. How in this did a disease of the mind not take hold of my son?” (745–51). Images of imperialist domination, the yoke and chains of slavery, delineate Xerxes’ hybris and his attempt to dominate the gods. This constitutes his “disease of the mind”. Xerxes’ attempt to transcend humanity is built on the demotion of humans to animals and of gods to humans. Hesiod in the Works and Days lists disasters that Zeus inflicts on poleis as punishment for hybris – even of a single citizen – exacting punishment by causing famine and plague, barrenness of women, decimation of households, destruction of a large army, city wall or fleet (238–47). It is axiomatic that hybris destroys cities (Theognis 603–04, 1103–04; Fisher 1992, 213–14). And while no Asian city literally falls in the Persians, the messenger who reports the catastrophe evokes the genre of laments for fallen cities to highlight the enormity of the disaster for Persia and its empire (Alexiou 2002, 83–85; cf. Bachvarova and Dutsch 2016, 79–85), announcing defeat at Salamis as “O cities of the entire land of Asia, o Persian land and great harbour of wealth, how in a single blow great happiness in prosperity (olbos) has been destroyed, the flower of the Persians is gone, fallen in battle…for the whole army of the barbarians has perished” (249–55). Imperialism is an insatiable pursuit of wealth and status – olbos – that eventuates in the loss of that very thing (cf. Thalmann 1980). The aim of such



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domination is to increase the royal household’s “ancestral prosperity” (patrˉoios olbos) by conquest, expropriation and tribute exaction (Persians 753–6; cf. 161–4). The play’s kommos stages the “harvest of tears” that fulfils the hybris and atē of Persian imperialism. The Persians makes visible as spectacle the crime (drama) of the Persian invasion in lament for its suffering (pathos). As Xerxes commands the chorus to reenact them in mourning “for the marine catastrophes of loved ones” (1037) inflicted at Salamis. The chorus earlier lamented the fall of the empire as a result of the naval defeat (584–97). That Xerxes imperiously seizes control as despotic chorus leader in the kommos – the old men address him as “master” (despota, 1049) and pay him tribute (“gift”, 1041), which he demands as a “favour” (1046) – makes clear that the fulfilment of empire is insatiable lament, a payment of tribute to the fallen king in a reenactment of defeat. Ordered to “row”, the old men of the chorus employ the motion to deliver blows (plēgai) to their heads and chests as the Persian fleet received at Salamis (1046–55; 249–52, 903–07, 1008–15). Xerxes then commands the old men to “sack” or “ravage” (perthe  =  “sack”) their white beards with clenched hands (1056), as Xerxes sacked Athens and his empire was “sacked” in return (714). Next he orders the old men to tear their robes in sorrow and shame, as Xerxes’ mother had dreamed he would do when the yoke of empire was shattered (197–9) and as he is reported to have done after witnessing the debacles at Salamis and Psyttalia (465–71). Xerxes confessed that he had performed this gesture earlier in the kommos (1030). Tearing garments in grief, sorrow and shame is the paramount gesture of self-directed aggression described throughout the play as the Persian reflexive response to the naval defeat (114–25, 537–40). The kommos enacts this gesture as spectacle before the eyes of the audience as Xerxes commands the chorus to “tear the folds of your robes with your finger nails” (1060). Darius ordered the Queen to bring Xerxes a new ornamental robe (kosmos, 832–38). But this does not happen. Instead, as the Queen had feared earlier in the drama, Xerxes compounds his woes in unrestrained lament (529–31; Devereux 1976, 14) and imposes his condition on the chorus (1029–30, 1060). Finally, Xerxes commands the old men of the chorus to “pluck” their hair as an archer plucks a bowstring when discharging an arrow, reenacting in a gesture of self-mutilation the futility of the countless Persian arrows and boundless money expended in a failed effort to enslave Greece (1062; 26–32, 53–55, 147–49, 239–42, 278–79, 554–57, 925–27). As was the case when the old men tore their robes, they reenact a previous moment of the kommos – Xerxes’ revelation of his empty quiver, “a treasure trove of arrows” (1016–24). Self-aggression in mourning is the fulfilment of imperialist hybris; and its pathos mirrors in a different register the drama it inflicts on others. The Persians represents imperialism as hybristic enslavement, enrichment and fundamental boundary transgression in antithesis to the character and conduct of Athens in defence of Greek freedom (Rosenbloom 2011, 361–64). The play’s warning against hybris and spectacular presentation of the Persian pathos as a recapitulation of its drama suggest that the tragedy seeks to establish the Persian defeat and loss of empire as an exemplum for the increasingly imperialist audience of the play. Readings of the Persians as a tragedy for Persia but triumph for Athens encounter a problem (e.g. Harrison 2000). Such a reading disrespects Persian laments in the play, which are attempts to honour their wretched dead (546–47, 944–49). The attitude is inconsistent with the fear and reverence that Aeschylus makes definitive of the Athenian character (see below). The desolation of the city was followed by a rapid and collective rebuilding of walls, private houses and fortification of the Piraeus as an instrument of empire (Thucydides 1.89.3–93; Garland 2001, 14–22). After the Greeks reversed Persian aggression along the Anatolian littoral, the Athenians engineered the removal of the Spartans from leadership of the war in the Aegean (Thucydides 1.94–96.1; cf. Herodotus 5.32). In 478/77, the Athenians imposed a tribute of 460 talents a year on those city-states in the Aegean that had abetted the Persians

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as a permanent indemnity (Thucydides 1.96), seizing the western fringe of the Persian empire and assessing a tribute roughly equal to what the region previously paid to Persia (Meritt et al. 1939–1952, 3.234; cf. Persians 852–907). The Athenians called this payment phoros (Thucydides 1.96.2; [Aristotle] Constitution of the Athenians 23.4–5) and instituted officials, “treasurers of Hellas” to receive and administer it. The conveyance of the payment to the imperial centre itself ceremonialises the submission and subordination of the payer to the payee. During Aeschylus’s lifetime, these funds were brought to the island of Delos (Meiggs 1972, 43–51). At the same time, this organisation included a smaller number of ship-providing allies that had fought with the Greeks at Salamis or joined the counter-offensive against the Persians in 479, most notably, Samos, Chios, Lesbos, Thasos and Naxos (Persians 880– 88, omits only Thasos; [Aristotle] Constitution of the Athenians 24.2). Athens proclaimed itself the inventor of a new kind of siege technique – starving the enemy into submission (Page 1981, XL 9–10, Rosenbloom 2006b, 265) and leveraged this capacity throughout Aeschylus’s lifetime and after to compel cities throughout the Aegean to pay tribute, either as new entrants into the empire (Thucydides 1.98.3; Diodorus Siculus 11.60.1–4; Plutarch Life of Cimon 12.1–4) or as former allies forced to remain in the empire as tributaries (Naxos: Thucydides 1.98.4; dated ca. 470 by Fornara and Samons 1991, 149 and cf. 86–87; ca. 467 by Meiggs 1972, 81; Thasos: 465–463, Thucydides 1.100.2, 101.3; Kallet 2013, 46–50). The war against the Persian empire culminated in Athens’ victories against Persian land and naval forces at the Eurymedon river ca. 466. The Athenian general Cimon and his forces destroyed 200 ships and took an exceptionally large haul of booty, effectively blocking Persia from the Aegean (Page 1981, XLVI; Thucydides 1.100.1; Diodorus Siculus 11.60.5–62; Plutarch Cimon 12.5–13). In 460, a force of 200 Athenian and allied triremes shifted rapidly from Cyprus to the Nile to aid the Libyan king Inaros in a revolt of Egypt from the Persian empire (Thucydides 1.104, 109–10; Diodorus Siculus 11.71, 74–75, 77; Briant 1996/2002, 573–77). Egypt paid 700 talents a year in silver to the Persian empire (Herodotus 3.91.2–3) in addition to some 240 talents in levies on fish from Lake Moeris (2.149.5). The Egyptian campaign, which lasted from 460 until 454, ended in disaster (Thucydides 1.109–10). Aeschylus sharpened the warning against yearning for prosperity as blessedness (olbos) through violent dispossession of others in Agamemnon, which dramatises the corruption of an exemplum, the Trojan War, by imperialist violence that reduces humans to animals and entices Agamemnon to accept honours intended for gods. In the Greek and Athenian imagination of the 470s, the Trojan War conjured up the war against the Persians (Boedeker 1998; Kowerski 2005; 64–67, 104–07; Rosenbloom 2006a, 27–33). The Trojan War served as a mythical filter which shaped understanding of the Persian war and vice versa; it was the lynchpin of the culture of celebration that formed around the repulse and counter-offensive against the Persians, but is absent from the Persians (cf. Taplin 2006). In Agamemnon, Argos bears identifiers of Athens’ collective identity as naval leader against the barbarian, preeminent siege power, defender of the honour of the Greeks, punisher of the hybris of the barbarian and tyrant-slayer. Like Athens, Argos returns its cremated war dead to the city for burial. The play depicts the intermixing of Greek hegemony and barbarian culture, both Trojan and Persian. The Oresteia disambiguates Athens and Argos in Eumenides. The sacrifice that consecrates Agamemnon’s hegemony of the alliance against Troy precipitates the corrupt sacrifices of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, while reactivating Atreus’s perverted sacrifice and feast of Thyestes’ children. The sack of Troy itself is likened to two eagles devouring a pregnant hare and her embryos in a bird omen (Agamemnon 108–21). The seer Calchas prophesies that the omen portends the violent liquidation “of all the people’s great herds before the walls” of Troy (128–30). Both omen and liquidation arouse Artemis’s envy and malice (131–45). As mistress of animals and guardian of mother–child nurture in the animal kingdom, Artemis “hates the feast of the eagles” (138). She pins the invading fleet in



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Aulis with savage Thracian winds and demands the sacrifice of a virgin as pre-payment for the impending atrocity (131–204). Agamemnon is loath to pollute his hands with his daughter’s blood, but decides to commit the act, asking, “How can I become a deserter of the fleet, losing my alliance?” (symmachias, 212–13). Dressed in her wedding garb, bound and gagged, the virgin is sacrificed, “just like a she-goat over an altar” (232). For Agamemnon, the sacrifice of a human is not out of the question; deserting and losing his alliance is. Framing the necessity in these terms, the play directly echoes anxieties of contemporary Athenian naval imperialism. Athens exacted tribute, conscripted troops and held political and legal authority over an “alliance” or “allied land” (symmachid[a, Osborne and Rhodes 2017, 121.31; 450s). According to Thucydides, desertion was the leading cause of city-states’ ceasing to contribute ships as allies and falling into political slavery as tributepayers (Thucydides 1.99.1, 6.76.3). Agamemnon justifies his transgression as adherence to a strictness very much like Athens’ insistence on allied contributions and tribute payments. The play decries the act (Rosenbloom 1995, 107–08; otherwise, Dover 1973, 66). The chorus censures Agamemnon’s change of mind in the strongest possible terms as “impious, impure, unholy” (218–27, 799–804). The Oresteia emphatically stresses Agamemnon’s specific identity as naval leader (Agamemnon 184–85, 1227; Libation Bearers 723–24; Eumenides 456, 637). The Atridae receive the omen from Zeus’s eagles, “the king of birds”, as “the kings of ships” (Agamemnon 114–16). The reference to contemporary Athenian naval imperialism is unmistakable. Argive rituals of lamenting and honouring the war dead are another mark of Athenian collective identity in the play; this ritual was complementary to the city’s naval imperialism and programmed to represent it as hegemony, a benign form of leadership that vindicates the moral and religious order for the benefit of the allies and Greece and not for material exploitation (Loraux 1986 [1981], 79–98; cf. Aristotle Politics 1333b27–43). Most Athenian military operations were conducted far from Athenian soil, frequently as naval battles in adversaries’ waters followed by blockades around their harbours and walls to force surrender. The Athenians conveyed the ashes of their war dead back to the polis to be displayed by tribe on biers and honoured them with speeches (Thucydides 2.34; Loraux 1981/1986, 17–42; Clairmont 1983). At Athens, these speeches ennobled the war dead, honouring them and consoling their families with ageless praise and gratitude for contributing to the sublime glory of Athens, which the speeches depict as a morally superior kind of leader (e.g. Thucydides 2.40.4). One aim of speech is to foster love for the power of city and the desire to die for it (Thucydides 2.43.1–4; Wohl 2002, 30–72). Agamemnon demystifies this ritual by substituting Helen for the power of the polis as the object of desire. Praises of individual warriors at Argive public funerals fail to appease their audience (Agamemnon 433–51). They are reminded of their loved-ones’ lives wasted “for another man’s wife” and turn their “malicious grief”, the very emotion the ritual is designed to avert, against the Atridae (445–51). Helen, a woman “of many husbands”, is the reason warriors become “preliminary sacrifices” (60–67) and a father sacrifices his virgin daughter (224–47). True to her name as “hell for ships, for men, for cities” (helenaus, helandros, heleptolis, 683–97), Helen circulates from one royal household and polis to another, leaving in her wake warfare to citizens, but bringing to her destination death as her dowry (403–6). At Troy, she turns marriage hymns into laments for the dead (700–16). Like a lion cub taken into a home, she is a delight to nurture (720) and arouses soft and gentle pangs of desire, “an ornament of wealth” when the Trojans take her in; but she causes the house to seethe with blood as a priestess of atē and swerves at Troy to become “a weeping bride, an Erinys” (744–49). Helen embodies the very object of imperialist desire, an elusive and dream-like phantom and figure of coercive seduction (385–98, 404–26), “a great mass-murderous bane” (734), even as possession of her differentiates master from slave, Greek from barbarian (Rosenbloom 2006b, 250–59).

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In Argos, the funeral ritual is part of a transaction that converts the ashes of the dead into the wealth that is the real objective of the fighting, both in the Trojan war and at Athens, where warfare frequently involved sieges designed to force cities into paying tribute to Athens and to disposses former allies, like Thasos, which was compelled to surrender its mining interests to Athens (Thucydides 1.101.3). “Ares, the money-changer of bodies and holder of the balance in the battle of the spear” (433–44) converts living men into charred ash stuffed into urns for their families to mourn and orators to praise (Bakewell 2007). The chorus reports the curse of the people against the Atridae and fears that the Erinyes mark out mass killers for reversal. Such a man is “fortunate without justice”, a situation so perilous that he is liable to punishment after death (459–67). This fear materialises when Clytemnestra mutilates Agamemnon’s corpse to render him powerless to avenge himself (Libation Bearers 439–44). The chorus of Agamemnon warns that Agamemnon’s glory as a city-sacker attracts the envious gaze of Zeus. The chorus prefers “prosperity (olbos) without envy” and prays for middle ground: “may I not be a city-sacker nor myself, captured, look at life under others’ power” (468–74; cf. Eumenides 526–65). As in the Persians, the acquisition of olbos through violent dispossession provides only a mirage of prosperity. Clytemnestra exploits the Argive invaders’ greed to effect their transgression by employing divination by opposites (Rosenbloom 2020, 141–42), asserting as a real condition what she desires to be counterfactual: “if they are now treating with reverence the gods who hold the city, the conquerors will not be conquered in turn” (339–40). She follows this with an expression of fear that “desire (erˉos) to sack what it is not right to sack might infect the army, conquered by greed (kerdos)” (338–40). The Herald confirms Clytemnestra’s “fear” and indicates the likelihood that the pain of the dead might be awakened, as Clytemnestra hoped it would (346–47). The Herald declares that the suffering of the siege is over “so that the dead are not concerned to rise again and for us survivors, profit (kerdos) is victor and pain does not counterbalance it” (567–74). The living need not grieve or feel pain over “a malignant fate” or count “those who have been spent” (570–71). The dead are the transaction costs of the invasion; they barely detract from its profit. Rather, the Herald would forget the dead by rejoicing and boasting of victory (572–82). But he is unable to do so. For only Agamemnon’s ship has returned from Troy. The rest were dashed to pieces by a storm at sea “not without the anger of the gods” (648–49; cf. 635). The seaborne invader loses virtually his entire force as unlamented and unburied corpses. In Xerxes’ case, nature punishes his hybris and “yoking the neck of the sea”. The Strymon River freezes unseasonably, forming a bridge of ice for the army to cross, prompting even atheists to beseech the gods and bow down to heaven and earth (Persians 495–99). But the sun melts the ice during the day while the Persians cross the river; they fall over each other and drown (500–07). In Agamemnon’ case, previously sworn enemies, fire and water, conspire to destroy the fleet (Agamemnon 650–52) and the Thracian winds, assuaged by the sacrifice of Iphigenia, return to dash to pieces the remnant of the invading fleet (654–60). Clytemnestra frames the play’s dramatisation of the Herald’s and Agamemnon’s blind rapacity and boasts, which misrepresent greed and brutality as glory, justice and piety. The Herald tries to convince the divinities before the house of Atreus to receive Agamemnon with proper honour (kosmˉoi, 521–23). That he portrays Agamemnon as “razing Troy with the mattock of justice-bringing Zeus, by which he has cultivated the plain – the altars are invisible and the temples of the gods and the seed of the entire land is destroyed” (524–28) ensures the failure of his case. He delineates the annihilation of Troy as tantamount to Xerxes’ most egregious transgression against Athens and Greece but inverts its moral-religious meaning. For the Herald, Agamemnon, “after he put such a yoke on Troy, has arrived as a blessed man, the most worthy of mortals of today of being honoured” (529–32). He depicts Agamemnon as



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defending the religious, moral and legal order by committing the same acts as Xerxes, but attaining justice: “neither Paris nor the city that paid tribute with him boasts that the drama is more than the pathos” and “having lost his case for abduction and theft, he lost both the stolen property and mowed down his ancestral home and land in total destruction with it” (532–36). The depiction of the sack of Troy as equivalent to the sack of Athens and an act of righteous justice plainly exhibits the moral blindness of the “victor” as a prelude to his crushing defeat. Despite the Herald’s and Agamemnon’s declarations (800–17) of justice achieved in the law court of the gods, Dikē’s (Justice’s) disgust at wealth stained by bloodshed is the cue for Agamemnon’s arrival on stage and the script for his impending death. The chorus sings that Dikē “departs from dwellings gold-spangled with filthy hands; with eyes averted, she goes to holy houses, not honouring wealth falsely stamped by praise; and she guides everything to its end” (776–81). The sixth-century Athenian poet and law-giver Solon stressed the connection between hybris, atē and the unjust acquisition of wealth: “The wealth men honour comes by hybris, not properly (ou kata kosmon), but in obedience to unjust acts; it does not follow willingly, but is quickly mixed up with disaster” (atē, frag. 13.11–13). Such wealth is not only short-lived, but attracts Zeus’s punishment, a raging source of sorrow (13–25). Punishment can strike immediately or late; and if perpetrators escape punishment, their children or more distant descendants will pay the penalty on their behalf (26–32). Darius stressed the nexus of hybris and atē, warning against risking one’s own prosperity by yearning to dispossess others (cf. Herodotus 7.16a2). The Erinyes will warn the audience directly in the Eumenides, promoting “much prayed-for prosperity (olbos)” that results from “the health of the mind” rather than from hybris and impiety, which they will punish (Eumenides 526–65). In the Agamemnon, the audience sees a symbol of blood-soaked wealth – crimson-dyed tapestries – strewn on the stage and trampled in the “Carpet Scene”. The scene reenacts Agamemnon’s narrated crimes (dramata) – his sacrifice of Iphigenia, looting and destruction of Trojan temples, toppling of altars and annihilation of Troy – in the act of trampling the tapestries. At the same time, the scene enacts his seduction: his conquering and being conquered in turn, adopting the identity of his barbarian adversary, accepting excessive and dangerous glory, cultivating popular and divine envy, placing himself on the level of the gods (914–49). Agamemnon symbolically reenacts his hybris in the blindness of “disastrous delusion” (atē), a prelude to his objective calamity (atē), which Cassandra foresees before its fulfilment (1114–24, 1225–29; for atē, cf. Sommerstein 2013). The scene envisions the anatomy of hybris and atē in spectacle. The Agamemnon’s tableau of murderer and corpses presents in word and image the essential properties of Agamemnon’s dramata – his sacrifice of Iphigenia and annihilation of Troy – in the form of his pathos. The sacrificer of Iphigenia is sacrificed; the bride cheated of her marriage in now avenged by an ecstatically corrupted hieros gamos, as Clytemnestra exalts in her sacrificial victim’s spurting blood as “sown wheat rejoices in Zeus-given rain at the birth of buds” (Agamemnon 1388–92; cf. Danaids frag. 44; Herington 1986). The girl who sang the paean at the triple libation offered between meal and wine-drinking (240–47) is avenged by three blows imagined as libations of blood and a death described as the victim’s draining a wine-bowl of evils (1395–98). Clytemnestra’s vengeance against Agamemnon recapitulates his enslavement of Troy and its profit motive. The chorus sang that Night put a “covering net over the walls of Troy, so that neither adult nor any of the young could leap over the great net of slavery, all-capturing ruin” (355–60). Clytemnestra explains that her single focus in planning Agamemnon’s murder was how “nets could fence off a height greater than could be overleaped” (1374–6). She continues, “I surrounded him with a boundless net, just as for fish, the evil wealth of garments” (1382–3; cf. 1580, 1611). Clytemnestra immobilises her husband for sacrifice with the ­inexhaustible wealth of the house (958–62). The chorus sees the death of Agamemnon as an instantiation of

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Zeus’s law, just as it interpreted the fall of Troy: “the pillager is pillaged, the killer pays the price; it remains that the doer suffers while Zeus is on the throne; it is the law” (1560–64). The kommos of the Persians and the spectacle of corpses in the Agamemnon both make the relationship between drama and pathos, hybris and atē, visible. Each is the catastrophic outcome of fulfilment of imperialist invasion and acquisition. That the annihilation of Troy is the hybris for which even Agamemnon’s descendants pay is evident in the role the image of desolated Troy continues to play in the affliction of the city-sacker’s oikos and polis after his death. The Libation Bearers transfers attributes of a sacked city to the house of Atreus and Argos, now polluted by the unavenged murder of Agamemnon and ruled by tyrants, whom Orestes describes as “killers of my father and sackers/pillagers (porthētoras) of my house” (974). The house of Atreus is “razed” like Troy (50; cf. Agamemnon 525 and regularly of Troy in tragedy) and “sunless darkness hated by humans obscures the house because of the deaths of the masters” Libation Bearers 49–54; cf. Persians 668–70). Clytemnestra’s false lament when she hears of the death of Orestes, “Alas, you say that we are sacked from top to bottom”, an expression applied to Troy (Homer Iliad 13.772–73), unwittingly expresses the point of Orestes’ return: the pillagers of the oikos will be pillaged. Like Iphigenia and Troy, the house of Atreus wears the bit-chain of subjection (Libation Bearers 961–62; Agamemnon 131–3, 231–8). The Eumenides definitively differentiates Argos from Athens by indebting and subordinating Orestes to Athens as a hoplite ally. The play purifies hybris and imperialist desire from Athens, restores its hegemonic identity in the act of aiding a suppliant, founding its preeminent institution, the Areopagus, and incorporating the cult of the Semnai Theai as agents of fertility and justice. In this way, the play renews Athens’ collective identity in a time of crisis. The implied critique of Athenian imperialism in the Agamemnon may now appear as an evolution of Greek hegemony under uniquely worthy and just Athenian leadership. And while the play treats the poetry, song and spectacle of the previous two plays as intertexts, the subtext of the Eumenides is Solon (frag. 4.1–8): Our city will never be destroyed according to the fate of Zeus and the minds of the blessed i­ mmortal gods, for such a great-spirited overseer, Pallas Athena daughter of a mighty father, holds her hands above it. But the citizens, persuaded by money, themselves want to destroy it, as does the unjust mind of the leaders of the people, who are ready to suffer much grief from great hybris.

The play dramatises Athena holding her hand over the city to protect it. Gone are human leaders of any kind, apart from “the best of my citizens” comprising the Areopagus (Eumenides 487–88). The goddess of warfare and wisdom presides over a citizen body composed of an army summoned by battle trumpet (566–69, 683–84). Athena is the agent of the salvation of the house of Atreus (754–61) and of Athens from the obliteration that was Troy’s fate. The action of the trilogy progresses from Agamemnon’s destruction of “the seed of the entire land” of Troy (Agamemnon 528) to the possible extinction of the “seed” of the house of Atreus (Libation Bearers 235–36; cf. 201–4, 503–7), which Orestes’ acquittal obviates. Yet Orestes’ vindication triggers a crisis for Athens. The Erinyes threaten to spew poison from their heart, a fungus that causes infertility of the land, flocks and people and spreads contagion over the land (Eumenides 780–87 = 810–17; cf. 800–3, 824–31). The Oresteia links the fates of Troy and the House of Atreus to that of Athens. Naval hegemon in a two-decade war against Persia predicated on its discovery of a siege technique that induced starvation in recalcitrant foes (Page 1981, XL 7–10), Athens confronts in the Eumenides the legacy of Agamemnon’s naval hegemony in the annihilation of Troy. By changing the Erinyes into blessings and curses, the Eumenides seeks to transform the lush growth of hybris (Michelini 1978; Dué 2006, 70–87) that brought desolation to Troy and



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the house of Atreus into the lavish fertility of Athenian hegemony and justice. The continued warnings against hybris directed at the Athenians in the play indicate Argos’s role as both double and foil for Athens. Athenian military power is not needed for the task of the Eumenides. Athena’s reverence for Peitho over force is the extraordinary feature of the play (Buxton 1982, 110–14). Athena’s uncanny act of persuasion in response to the Erinyes’ destructive rage exemplifies Athenian hegemony as a practice of negotiation and positive reciprocity that achieves mutual selfinterest: “doing favours, experiencing favours, being honoured well, to have a share of this land most beloved by god” (Eumenides 867–69; cf. Thucydides 2.40.4). Athena’s rhetoric consoles and palliates the Erinyes’ anger, assures them of their value and esteem (794–99, 824, 881–4), prohibits their poisoning of Athens (800–3, 824–5, 829–32, 886–9) and promises them cult offerings and a place of honour in a righteous land (805–7, 855–7, 867–9, 890–1): first-fruit offerings, sacrifice before childbirth and marriage (833–6); no Athenian household can thrive without them (895). This ensemble of honours, with its prospects of great power for good, convinces the Erinyes (896). The play celebrates reverence, especially for Peitho: “If you have pure reverence for Peitho and the propitiation and charm of my tongue”, Athena propositions the Erinyes, “please stay” (885–86). When it turns out that they do, the Erinyes are transformed so as to include their opposite: topplers of houses (354–55), they ensure their prosperity (895–99); curses (416–17) and figures of internecine strife, they sing blessings of fertility and group solidarity (922–87); bringers of blight, they promise exuberant fertility (903–26, 938–49). As the Erinyes shower Athens in the blessings of fecundity, Athena declares “I look fondly on the eyes of Peitho – they looked upon my tongue and mouth against these [goddesses] savagely rejecting me. Zeus of the agora won, and our struggle for good wins always” (970–5). The Erinyes describe themselves as “remembering evils, august (semnai), hard for mortals to persuade” (381–84). Athena calls them “hard to please” (928). Projecting the pure ethos of Athens’ hegemony, Athena concludes an impossible deal with the Erinyes. Her victory is one of the agora, of persuasive public speech; and it makes possible the elevation of the Athenian Acropolis to Panhellenic status. When the Erinyes accept residence and cult in the city, they designate Athens’ Acropolis the religious bastion of Greece and Athens the polis “which Zeus the all-dominating and Ares consider the altar-protecting glory (agalma) of Greek divinities” (Eumenides 916–20; Rosenbloom 2011, 364–6). The Erinyes’ linkage of Zeus and Ares ties the guardian function of the Areopagus within Athens to the Panhellenic guardianship of the Athenian Acropolis, to which the Erinyes’ residence and cult “near the temple of Erechtheus” lends solemnity (854–7). Athens’ status as the Acropolis of Greece complements the city’s entitlement to the land of Troy as a gift of honour from the chieftains of the Achaeans to the goddess Athena (397–402). In the epic cycle, the only poetic tradition for the Iliupersis, as well as in contemporary vase painting (Anderson 1997, 97–101, 234–45) and mural painting (Pausanias 10.27–9; Ferrari 2000, 123–4), Theseus’s sons came to Troy to rescue their grandmother Aethra from servitude to Helen (cf. Homer Iliad 3.143–4) and “received none of the spoils from Troy” (Iliupersis frag. 6, Bernabé 1996). Rather, Agamemnon bestowed a gift on them and on Menestheus (cf. Little Iliad frag. 20; Cypria frag. 13). This gift is unknown, but Athena may refer to it as the gift of the Trojan plain, claiming it was made to her it before becoming a possession of the Athenian polis. The Eumenides would then designate Athens the protector of altars of the Greek gods and overseer of heroic shrines and symbolic values attached to Troy as warranted by the city’s role as the “saviour of Greece” against Persia (Herodotus 7.139.5; cf. 9.116–20). Athens’ custodial function is free from the taint of Troy’s violation.

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As a suppliant play, the Eumenides dramatises the character of Athenian hegemony (Tzanetou 2012, 33–34). The Areopagus is connected to Athenian hegemony. The location and name of the Areopagus are inseparable from the military defence of Athens and Greece in myth and history. When the Amazons invaded Athens “in envy of Theseus” (686), they encamped there and sacrificed to Ares (689). The Athenian defence of the city against the Amazons was among the narratives employed to assert Athens’ entitlement to hegemony (Herodotus 9.27.4; cf. [Lysias] 2.4–6; Isocrates 4.68–70). Like the Amazon attack, the Persian siege and desolation of the Athenian Acropolis was conducted from the Areopagus (Herodotus 8.52.1). The cult statue of Athena Polias (bretas, 80, 242, et pass.) that Orestes supplicates in the play was among the few cult statues, if not the only one, to survive the Persian sack; it was relocated to a small shrine where the Erechtheum was later built (Meyer 2020, 100–07). The bretas symbolised salvation from the Persian atrocity and the rapid rebirth of the city in the aftermath (cf. Herodotus 8.55). Military victory and glory continue to be core Athenian values in the Eumenides. This is Athena’s province (Eumenides 903–15). Athena insists that her city win honour as a victor in “glorious martial contests” (913–15). At one point, she discloses the obliterating force at her disposal – Zeus’s thunderbolt – only to declare its use unnecessary (826–29; cf. Herodotus 8.111.2–3). Combating the scourge of civil war is a main concern of the play (858–69). The Erinyes pray for a cure to this disease in shared objects of affection and hatred among citizens (976–87). This threat plainly existed at Athens at the time of the drama. The murderer of Ephialtes, who was assassinated in political violence after his reforms of the Areopagus in 462/1, was still at large (Antiphon 5.68; cf. [Aristotle] Constitution of the Athenians 25.3). The sepsis and barrenness which the Erinyes threaten is also the peril that an unavenged victim of murder or unpunished murderer poses to a polis (Antiphon 2.1.10; 2.2.11; Herodotus 6.139.1; cf. Parker 2009, 149). Dual threats of pollution and civil war loom in the background of the play. Athena commands the Erinyes, recipients of Clytemnestra’s “wineless offerings” (106–09, cf. 499–502), “not to cast on my places, raving with wineless rage, bloody goads to anger, the bane of young hearts” causing civil war in Athens (858–63). Rather, she insists, “let there be war on the outside, present with no difficulty (ou molis), in which there will be some terrible desire for glory. I mean no war of the dunghill cock” (864–66). Athena welcomes war against external enemies that presents no difficulties over civil war. The three uses of the phrase ou molis in extant Greek literature all mean “easily” or “without difficulty” (Agamemnon 1082; Euripides Helen 334) rather than “plenty of it” (Sommerstein 2010, 285, 298). Cassandra in the Agamemnon laments to Apollo that “you have killed me easily a second time” (Denniston and Page 1957 on Agamemnon 1082). Apollo does not kill her “a lot”. In the Eumenides, the phrase expresses conventional wisdom about external war in relation to civil war: war is better than civil war by as much as peace is better than war (Herodotus 8.3.1). Athena distinguishes Athenian warfare from that of the Trojan War, which was made exceptionally difficult in every possible way. The Areopagus’s location and symbolic meaning support Athens’ hegemonic claim. As an institution in which “citizens’ respect (sebas) and kindred fear (phobos) of wrongdoing will hold day and night alike” (Eumenides 690–92), the Areopagus surpasses the power of a murder court. The institution personifies the emotions, phobos and sebas, that restrain Athenian citizens from impiety, hybris and injustice, ensuring the morality and piety of the city’s military and political leadership. Athena warns the Athenians not to change the character of the institution she founded, for “once you pollute clear water with bad influxes and filth, you will never find it drinkable” (694–95). The warning’s degrading language denounces alterations to the Areopagus’s power and prestige and shows disgust with attempts to curtail its authority. The original power of the Areopagus was “guardianship of the law” or “oversight of the constitution” ([Aristotle] Constitution of the Athenians 8.4). This same source claims that the



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Areopagus exercised accrued powers of “guardianship of the constitution” after the battle of Salamis because it dispersed eight-drachmae payments to each Athenian to row in the fleet, a contention most historians reject, and that these powers were removed during Ephialtes’ reforms (Constitution of the Athenians 23, 25.2; cf. Aristotle Politics 1304a17–21; Wallace 1989, 78). This account should be rejected (Harris 2019). Ephialtes prosecuted ex-Archons as they entered the body for malfeasance as Archons ([Aristotle] Constitution of the Athenians 25.2), discrediting the institution. Whether that was sufficient to remove the council’s authority over the constitution or whether separate measures were introduced to the assembly to achieve this, is an open question. That Ephialtes was assassinated and that the oligarchs who took over in 404/3 undid his reforms ([Aristotle] Constitution of the Athenians 35.2) indicate that they happened (pace Harris 2019). Athena extols the body as if it controls the constitution, admonishing her citizens to maintain “reverence for neither anarchy nor despotism” and not “to cast terror (to deinon) completely from the polis” (696–8). “If you justly fear such an object of reverence”, she continues, “you would have a safeguard of the land and salvation of the polis such as no people have, not in places of the Scythians nor in the Peloponnese” (700–3). Athena concludes: “I establish this council as a waking guard on behalf of the sleeping, untouched by greed, respected, quick to anger” (704–6). The Areopagus operates on behalf of the citizen body outside its awareness and exercises oversight while citizens sleep; it is a repository of citizens’ fear and reverence and is also owed their fear and reverence; it is a defence and salvation of the land. Athena’s institution is a “guardian of the constitution”, a bulwark between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy, and a murder court (cf. Dodds 1960, 21–2). The Areopagus and the cult of the Semnai Theai perform a unified function in the polis to ensure citizens’ moderation and justice. The Erinyes’ precepts underpin Athena’s insistence on the Areopagus’s fixed form. In her foundation of the Areopagus (696–7), Athena quotes the Erinyes, who had warned “do not assent to a life of anarchy or of despotic rule” (526–9). The Erinyes gave further justification for their dictum, asserting that “god puts kratos (victory/power/domination) in every middle position” and added “an expression that fits with this: hybris is the true child of impiety (dyssebeia); the prosperity (olbos) that is dear to all and prayed for comes from the health of the mind” (533–7; cf. Persians 744–52; Rosenbloom 2006a, 92–93). When the Erinyes’ warn the audience to “respect the altar of Dikē and do not dishonour it by trampling it with a godless foot out of a desire for profit; for punishment will follow” (538–44), they recall the spectacle of Agamemnon’s trampling precious textiles before entering his house and what it symbolically reenacted: the sacrifice of Iphigenia (Agamemnon 228–47), the looting and desolation of Troy’s temples and destruction of its altars (338–342, 518–32) and other cases of “sacking what it is not right to sack conquered by greed” (342). They also recall Paris’s crime, “kicking the great altar of Dikē into invisibility” (381–4) which Agamemnon’s crimes mirror in the act of retribution. Raising the issue of hybris and olbos, the Erinyes touch the raw nerve of imperialism: the profit motive. Describing how they punish hybristic violators, the Erinyes employ the image of seaborne plunder to epitomise the transgression they punish with complete destruction. A ship carrying plunder “all mixed up without justice” will have its yard-arm shattered and sails brought down in a storm and the captain himself, “a hot man”, will encounter deaf and delighted gods as he drowns in a whirlpool. The gods watch the man suffering woes beyond his expectation as he crashes into the reef of Dikē and loses whatever prosperity (olbos) was his in the past; he perishes “unwept, unseen” (Eumenides 550–65). The Erinyes refer to the previous narratives and spectacle: the Herald’s narrative of the storm at sea whipped up by the rage of the gods that destroyed Agamemnon’s fleet (Agamemnon 634–70), Agamemnon’s return and death and the kommos over the tomb of his mutilated and unlamented corpse

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(Libation Bearers 306–477, 1014–15; cf. Agamemnon 1551–59). Both the Herald and Agamemnon conspicuously performed gestures of piety to ingratiate themselves with the gods (503–37, 572–83, 810–29); but the outcome makes it clear that they were not listening. The Persian example of disastrous imperialist invasion contains the theme of death at sea and “corpses unwept, unseen” in amplified form (e.g. Persians 272–77, 302–10, 576–78). The Semnai Theai convey these messages directly to the Athenian audience. Athena reiterates their meaning. She emphasises that the Erinyes’ residency in Athens is a blessing for fertility and internal harmony but also a deterrent to Athenian impulses towards hybris, impiety and transgression; they have the power to punish violators (Eumenides 927–37, 948–55; Seaford 2012, 274, thinks Athenians only have ritual responsibility). While the Erinyes pour blessings on city, Athena praises their capacity to harm Athenian transgressors: “Whoever encounters these grievous goddesses does not know the source of the blows to his life. Transgressions by his forebears lead the victim away to these goddesses; and silent destruction pulverises even the loud mouth with inimical rage” (931–37). Descendants will continue to suffer for their forebears’ transgressions (Solon frag. 13.26–32; Sommerstein 1989 on 934–37, thinks this a remnant of the past). The negative cycle of drama and pathos, crime and punishment, demonstrated in the Persians and throughout the Oresteia, continues in force to ensure the cycle of positive reciprocity in Athens. After the Erinyes pray for the absence of disease and scorching heat, rapid multiplication of flocks and new finds of mineral wealth (938–47), Athena urges the Areopagites to understand the power of the Erinyes to accomplish what they say, “providing songs of praise for some, but for others in turn, a blurry life of tears” (950–5). Athena asserts that “profit”, which motivated transgression in the Agamemnon, now derives from “these frightening faces” of the Erinyes (990–95), who warn against unjust and hybristic acquisition of wealth in terms that implicate naval imperialism. The Erinyes confirm the power of their speech-acts when they bid farewell to the Athenians, telling them “rejoice amid proper shares of wealth” – wealth produced by Attic soil which their blessings have rendered bounteous. The Erinyes are finally charged with “holding down what is disastrous (atēron) in the earth, and sending what is advantageous (kerdaleon) for victory” (1007–9; cf. Persians 215–25). The Semnai Theai activate chthonic forces that bestow wealth and suppress those that bring disaster. At Argos, “those beneath the earth wrathfully blaming and enraged at their killers” brought atē (Libation Bearers 39–41; Agamemnon 345–47, 460–67, 567–71, 1331–42). This was Agamemnon’s liability (460–67, 1331–42), as it might well be for the Athenians, who “bringing burning hunger and chill Ares, were the first to invent the utter helplessness of their enemies” (Page 1981, XL.9–10). The Athenians quickly and ruthlessly filled the void in the Aegean left by the withdrawal of Persian naval power with a form of imperialism modelled on Persia’s but predatory on it, coaxing and compelling Persia’s former Greek, Carian, Lydian and Pamphylian subjects to pay tribute. Echoing the poets of an earlier age, Aeschylus warned the city against the hybris intrinsic to the enterprise. The Persians dramatises the horrific end of Persia’s tribute-collecting naval imperialism, relating hybris to atē and drama to pathos with spectacular clarity. The Agamemnon dramatises a message allied to that of the Persians, including explicit markers of Athenian identity before disambiguating Athens and Argos and envisioning a remedy for hybris in sebas and phobos as embodied in the Areopagus and cult of the Semnai Theai. Aeschylus’s was a voice for the ascendancy of Athenian persuasion. In the aftermath of the Persian Wars, Athens promulgated images of itself as a novel kind of leader, taking risks to defend the weak and victimised against hybris and impiety, and leveraging the emotions and self-interest of the defiant to achieve justice rather than imposing it by force (Bacchylides 17; Mills 1997, 43–86). Aeschylus’s Eleusinians, probably presented between 475 and 470, seems to have been unique in its depiction of the avoidance of war between Athens and



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Thebes over the burial of Argive Seven, indicating the high premium the playwright put on non-violent conflict resolution. Later narratives of this episode, which became a standard component of the funeral oration, portray Theseus as compelled to use military force against the Thebans to gain possession of the corpses of the Argive Seven for burial (Herodotus 9.27.3; Euripides Suppliants 641–730; [Lysias] 2.7–10; Isocrates 4.54–58, 10.31; Loraux 1981/1986, esp. 132–71). However, as the archaic poets and Aeschylus recognised, the calamitous nature of hybris is something humans learn only by suffering (Hesiod Works and Days 218; Agamemnon 176–81; Eumenides 516–25).

FURTHER READING The question of tragedy as complex form of political communication has created controversy and generated a wide spectrum of opinion; nothing approaching a consensus exists today. Seaford 1994, 2012 stresses tragedy as the artform of a monetised, equitably organised Greek polis tracing and affirming its evolution from the deleterious rule of a single household by converting dead monarchs into objects of hero cult. Griffith 1995, 1998 explores Aeschylus’ conservation of outmoded forms of paternalism, kingship and aristocracy to achieve “solidarity without consensus”. Traditional readings of Aeschylus stress his adherence to the political programs of Themistocles (Podlecki 1999 [1966]) or of Themistocles and Pericles (Sommerstein 2010). Historians believe that Phrynichus’ Capture of Miletus supported Themistocles by blaming the Athenians for abandoning the Ionian revolt and was fined for reminding them of this blunder (Podlecki 1999 [1966]; cf. Ostwald 1988). Roisman 1988 explains the Athenian response to the play by arguing that it was performed after the Persian sack of Athens in 480/79. More recently, scholars have downplayed Aeschylus’ support for particular leaders. Lazenby 1993 and Green 1996 [1970] are fine guides to the Persian wars. Briant 2002 [1996] seeks to write the wars from a Persian perspective. Thompson 1981, Shear 1993, Hurwitt 2004, 49–5 and Stewart 2008 analyse the archaeological evidence for the Persian destruction of Athens. Kousser 2009 esp. 264–68, describes the violence inflicted on statues as symbolic action against the Athenians. Rung 2016, 171–75 scrutinises the literary evidence for Persia’s destruction of temples in Greece. Harrison 2000 reads the Persians as a confident projection of Athenian imperialism; Pelling 1997 and Rehm 2002 argue that triumphalism is muted by humane response to Persian laments for their debacle. For development in general of the Greek/barbarian dichotomy as an ideological trope and tragedy as a source of its cultural authority, see Hall 1989. Mills 1997 examines Theseus in tragedy and elsewhere as an idealised personification of the Athenian empire as an agent of civilisation; historians of art such as Castriota 1992 stress this dimension of Theseus. Garland 1992 and Walker 1995 are more critical of Theseus’s image. Tzanetou 2012 reads tragic dramatisations of Athens’ exemplary treatment of suppliants as part of the Athenian project of representing empire as hegemony, both as a model and as a corrective. These studies do not examine how tragedy puts elements of the Athenian identity in dialogue with “other people’s pains”. Vernant 1988 [1972] argues that tragedy turned the city into a problem, “By depicting itself as rent and divided against itself…”; a version of this thesis underlies the argument of this chapter. For tragic Argos and Thebes in relation to Athens, the seminal work is Zeitlin 1986, which views Thebes and Argos as topoi for displacement of issues involving Athenian self and society. Thebes is the antithetical other; Argos is the middle term, capable of salvation and redemption. Saïd 1993 interprets Argos as a blank slate for tragic action. Rosenbloom 2013a, 2013b, 2013c offers concise discussions of the representation of these city-states in tragedy. For criticism of tragedy as an interrogative genre, see Griffin 1998 and the rejoinder of Goldhill 2000. Balot 2001 is a fine-grained study of the history of greed in classical Athens. On hybris generally, Cairns 1996 counterbalances Fisher 1992, whose Aristotelian orientation is occasionally problematic. For hybris specifically in Aeschylus, see Helm 2004; for atē, see Sommerstein 2013. Taplin 1977, 1978 remain indispensable for issues of spectacle and visual meaning in Aeschylus.

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Harris, E. (2019). “Aeschylus’ Eumenides: The Role of the Areopagus, the Rule of Law and Political Discourse in Attic Tragedy.” In A. Markantonatos and E. Volonaki, eds. Poet and Orator: A Symbiotic Relationship in Democratic Athens. Berlin, 389–419. Harrison, T. (2000). The Emptiness of Asia: Aeschylus’ Persians and the History of the Fifth Century. London. Helm, J. (2004). “Aeschylus’ Genealogy of Morals.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 134, 23–54. Herington, J. (1986). “The Marriage of Earth and Sky in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 1388–92.” In M. Cropp, E. Fantham and S. E. Scully, eds. Greek Tragedy and Its Legacy: Essays Presented to D.J. Conacher. Calgary, 27–33. Hurwitt, J. (2004). The Acropolis in the Age of Pericles. New York. Kallet, L. (2013). “The Origins of the Athenian Economic Arche.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 133, 43–60. Kousser, R. (2009). “Destruction and Memory on the Athenian Acropolis.” The Art Bulletin 91, 263–82. Kowerski, L. (2005). Simonides on the Persian Wars: A Study of the Elegiac Verses of the “New Simonides”. London. Lazenby, J. (1993). The Defence of Greece: 490–479 BC. Warminster. Loraux, N. (1986 [1981]). The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City. (trans. R. Sheridan). Cambridge, MA. Originally published as L’invention d’ Athènes: Histoire de l’oraison funèbre dans la “cité classique.” Paris. Meiggs, R. (1972). The Athenian Empire. Oxford. Meritt, B., Wade-Gery, H. T. and McGregor, M. F., eds. (1939–52). The Athenian Tribute Lists. Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA. Vols. 2–4, Princeton. Meyer, M. (2020). “The Acropolis Burning! Reactions to Collective Trauma in the Years after 480/79.” In A. Karanika and V. Panoussi, eds. Emotional Trauma in Greece and Rome: Representations and Reactions. London, 95–110. Michelini, A. (1978). “ὙΒΡΙΣ and Plants.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 82, 35–44. Mills, S. (1997). Theseus, Tragedy, and the Athenian Empire. Oxford. Osborne, R. and Rhodes, P. J., eds. (2017). Greek Historical Inscriptions 478–404 BC. Oxford. Ostwald, M. (1988). “The Reform of the Athenian State by Cleisthenes.” In J. Boardman, N. G. L. Hammond, D. M. Lewis and M. Ostwald, eds. The Cambridge Ancient History, Volume IV: Persia, Greece and the Western Mediterranean C. 525–479. Second Edition. Cambridge, 303–346. Page, D., ed. (1981). Further Greek Epigrams. Cambridge. Parker, R. (2009). “Aeschylus’ Gods: Drama, Cult, Theology.” In J. Jouanna, F. Montanari, and A. P. Hernández, eds. Eschyle à l’aube du théâtre occidental: neuf exposés suivis de discussions. Vandoeuvres–Genève, 25–29 août 2008. Entretiens sur l’Antiquité classique 55. Geneva, 127–154 (with discussion, 155–164). Pelling, C. (1997). “Aeschylus’ Persae and History.” In C. Pelling, ed. Greek Tragedy and the Historian. Oxford, 1–19. Podlecki, A. (1999 [1966]). The Political Background of Aeschylean Tragedy. Second Edition. London. Rehm, R. (2002). The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in Greek Tragedy. Princeton. Roisman, J. (1988). “On Phrynichos’ Sack of Miletos and the Phoinissai.” Eranos 86, 15–23. Rosenbloom, D. (1993). “Shouting ‘Fire’ in a Crowded Theater: Phrynichos’s Capture of Miletos and the Politics of Fear in Early Attic Tragedy.” Philologus 137, 159–96. Rosenbloom, D. (1995). “Myth, Memory, and Hegemony in Aeschylus.” In B. Goff, ed. History, Tragedy, Theory: Dialogues on Athenian Drama. Austin, 91–131. Rosenbloom, D. (2006a). Aeschylus Persians. London. Rosenbloom, D. (2006b). “Empire and Its Discontents: Trojan Women, Birds, and the Symbolic Economy of Athenian Imperialism.” In J. Davidson, F. Muecke and P. Wilson, eds. Greek Drama III: Studies in Honour of Kevin Lee. London, 245–71. Rosenbloom, D. (2011). “The Panhellenism of Athenian Tragedy.” In D. Carter, ed. Why Athens: A Reappraisal of Tragic Politics. Oxford, 353–81.

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Rosenbloom, D. (2013a). “Argos.” In H. Roisman, ed. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Greek Tragedy. Malden, MA, I 127–28. Rosenbloom, D. (2013b). “Athens.” In H. Roisman, ed. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Greek Tragedy. Malden, MA, I 163–67. Rosenbloom, D. (2013c). “Thebes.” In H. Roisman, ed. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Greek Tragedy. Malden, MA, III 1390–92. Rosenbloom, D. (2020). “The Rhetoric and Theatrics of the Unspeakable in Tragedy.” In E. Papadodima, ed. The Faces of Silence in Greek Literature. Berlin, 113–56. Rung, E. (2016). “The Burning of Greek Temples by the Persians and Greek War-Propaganda.” In K. Ulanowski, ed. The Religious Aspects of War in the near East, Greece, and Rome. Leiden and Boston, 166–79. Saïd, S. (1993). “Tragic Argos.” In A. H. Sommerstein et al., eds. Tragedy, Comedy, and the Polis. Bari, 167–89. Seaford, R. (1994). Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State. Oxford. Seaford, R. (2012). Cosmology and the Polis: The Social Construction of Space and Time in the Tragedies of Aeschylus. Cambridge. Shear, T. L. (1993). “The Persian Destruction of Athens: Evidence from the Agora Deposits.” Hesperia 62, 383–482. Sommerstein, A. H. (1989). Aeschylus Eumenides. Cambridge. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010). Aeschylean Tragedy. Second Edition. London. Sommerstein, A. H. (2013). “Atē in Aeschylus.” In D. Cairns, ed. Tragedy and Archaic Greek Thought. Swansea, 1–16. Stewart, A. (2008). “The Persian and Carthaginian Invasions of 480 B.C.E. and the Beginning of the Classical Style: Part 1, the Stratigraphy, Chronology, and Significance of the Acropolis Deposits.” American Journal of Philology 112, 377–412. Taplin, O. (1977). The Stagecraft of Aeschylus. Oxford. Taplin, O. (1978). Greek Tragedy in Action. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Taplin, O. (2006). “Aeschylus’ Persai – The Entry of Tragedy into the Celebration Culture of the 470s?” In D. Cairns and V. Liapis, eds. Dionysalexandros: Essays on Aeschylus and His Fellow Tragedians in Honour of Alexander F. Garvie. Swansea, 1–10. Thalmann, W. G. (1980). “Xerxes’ Rags: Some Problems in Aeschylus’ Persians.” American Journal of Philology 101, 260–82. Thompson, H. (1981). “Athens Faces Adversity.” Hesperia 50, 343–55. Tzanetou, A. (2012). City of Suppliants: Tragedy and the Athenian Empire. Austin. Vernant, J.-P. (1988 [1972]). “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy.” In J.-P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece. New York, 29–48. Originally published in C. Singleton ed., Interpretation: Theory and Practice. Baltimore, 105–21. Walker, H. (1995). Theseus and Athens. New York. Wallace, R. W. (1989). The Areopagus Council to 307 B.C. Baltimore. Wohl, V. (2002). Love among the Ruins: The Erotics of Democracy in Classical Athens. Princeton. Zeitlin, F. I. (1986). “Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama.” In J. P. Euben, ed. Tragedy and Political Theory. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 101–41.

PART IV

The Influence of Aeschylus

CHAPTER 29

Critical Approaches to Aeschylus, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present Mark Griffith In this chapter, I outline 20 critical approaches or currents that can be identified and to some degree distinguished from one another – within the modern era, an era in which Aeschylus emerged from the shadows and cobwebs as not just the crude, bombastic and primitive “father” of tragedy, but as one of its most powerful and unsurpassed geniuses. Some of these approaches are chronologically distinct and/or opposed to one another, others co-existent and mutually compatible. All of them, in my opinion, are worth taking into account as ways of understanding and appreciating both Aeschylus’s achievement as a dramatist and the reception of his work in the modern era. (I do not discuss here approaches to Aeschylus’s satyr plays; for that topic, see Shaw, Chapter 14 in this volume.)

Preface: From the Fifth Century bce to c. 1780 For discussion of Aeschylus’s critical reception in antiquity, see C. W. Marshall and for the transmission of the text of his plays in antiquity and up to the first printed editions, see McCall (Chapters 30 and 31 in this volume). For approaches to Greek tragedy during the Renaissance and Enlightenment (periods during which Aeschylus’s plays were almost unknown and largely unread) see Lurie 2012. For the major critical developments of German Idealism and Romanticism, see Behler 1985, Billings 2014 and Lecznar, Chapter 34 in this volume.

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Twenty Critical Approaches to Aeschylus, c. 1800 – the Present I: Moralistic, character-focused, didactic Ever since antiquity, critics – and ordinary readers and theatregoers – are regularly found expressing the view that plays and other works of art and literature should provide positive ethical lessons and models for their audiences, viewers and readers: the author should be a beneficial “teacher” of his/her community. Sometimes such views have been accompanied by direct or indirect censorship aimed at punishing or suppressing supposedly immoral, impious, unpatriotic, or socially disruptive works of art (Barish 1981). For Plato’s Socrates, tragedians provide undesirable social and educational effects because their plays present too much immoral – and untrue – material, including divine misbehaviour and excessive displays of human emotion and impiety: Aeschylus’s Niobe is quoted as one of the prime offenders (e.g. Rep. 2.379e–383b), as Socrates complains about the lines, “A god engenders a cause-of-blame (aitian) in mortals/whenever s/he wants to ruin a household completely” (Aeschylus frag. 154a 15–16). (Plato in fact shows a much greater degree of interest in Aeschylus than do Aristotle and other post-fifth-century critics.) This type of prejudice against tragedy’s perceived immorality and untruthfulness persists intermittently and in varying degrees throughout antiquity, and from the Middle Ages onwards merges with Christian suspicions of pagan literature in general and of drama in particular (Barish 1981; Lurie 2012). In a more positive spirit, moralistic interpretations of tragedy tend to focus above all on individual characters and on the just or unjust, pious or impious, altruistic or selfish decisions that they make; also on the degree to which the human suffering portrayed in a play is deserved. Often such readings thus overlap with “religious” (Approach II) or “existential” (Approach III) or “affective/emotional” (Approach VIII) interpretations. The notion of “poetic justice” has often been invoked, explicitly (first by Thomas Rymer in 1678) or implicitly, with the expectation that a tragic hero should be represented as experiencing a deserved downfall caused by their own excessive ambition, arrogance or self-confidence, or even sheer criminality; or else a more impersonal dynamic (the “wheel of fortune” or “the uncertainty and slippery instability of temporal things”) may be invoked as the mechanism that brings about the “fall of princes” (Lurie 2012). The downfall of these mighty individuals then serves as an example from which others may learn (e.g. Giovanni Boccaccio De casibus virorum illustrium (composed c. 1355–75); John Lydgate Fall of Princes (1431–38); Philip Sidney Defence of Poesy (1595), all of them drawing heavily from the Classical Greek and Latin canon – especially Horace’s Art of Poetry – though not directly from Aeschylus). The expectation that a tragic hero must be of high birth/status largely faded during the twentieth century. But the impulse to look for a pattern in which a central character (“hero”) aims too high and becomes excessively proud and arrogant, consequently falling to ruin and/ or death, largely through their own fault, but perhaps with the gods’ assistance as well, has continued to be popular among readers and viewers of Greek tragedy – though not so much among professional critics or full-time Classicists in recent decades. (Such readings often involve mistranslations and misunderstandings of such Greek terms as hybris and Aristotle’s hamartia, in terms of “pride” and “character flaw”; see Lurie 2012.) Most modern critics, however, regard the desire for such moral neatness and reassurance as running contrary to the spirit of the best tragedies (e.g. Nietzsche 1872; Bradley 1904; Steiner 1961) and the notion of “the tragic” (not itself really a Greek concept at all: see e.g. Judet de La Combe 2010; Leonard 2012) is often contrasted by modern critics with the worlds of melodrama,



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tragi-comedy and romance (and Hollywood). Thus Greek (including Aeschylean) tragedy is seen by many modern critics as being characterised by moral uncertainty and conflicting claims, with relatively few simple answers or “lessons”; and this thickly textured moral complexity is regarded as one of its chief sources of artistic value (e.g. Nussbaum 1986/2013; Goldhill 1989; Williams 1993). In some cases such a “tragic worldview” may verge on the nihilistic and absurd (see Approach III) – but usually it is Sophocles’ plays, not Aeschylus’s, that are made the focus of such “pessimistic” interpretations (Lurie 2012; cf. Steiner 1961, Judet de La Combe 2010). An audience may find itself sometimes conflicted as to how much sympathy or moral (dis-) approval they (should) feel for a particular tragic character: e.g. Agamemnon’s decision to sacrifice his daughter (Ag. 103–257), along with the rest of his characterisation in this play, as compared with the character and decisions of his son in the other two plays of the trilogy. Is Orestes essentially a more morally sensitive character than his father or mother (thus e.g. Kuhns 1962; Peradotto 1964)? Or should we focus instead on the objective circumstances of his choices and the sociopolitical results of his actions, rather than on his character (thus e.g. Jones 1962)? Likewise, audiences and critics do not all respond in the same way to Eteocles’ mixed motives in deciding to go out and face his brother in combat (Seven against Thebes), or to the terrible dilemma imposed on Pelasgus by the chorus’s threat of suicide in the Suppliants.

II: Religious/philosophical Many critics over the years have seen Aeschylus as above all a religious poet, designing his plays so as to enlighten his Athenian community about the nature of the gods and of divine justice. Most of these critics have emphasised Aeschylus’s piety and commitment to an overarching vision of Zeus’s wisdom, justice and (ultimately) benevolent concern for human beings, though a few have proposed a more sceptical and ironic outlook (Vellacott 1984; Cohen 1986; cf. Millett 1970). In its most clichéd form, critics have presented a trajectory in which the primitive, earnest Aeschylus piously “believes” in the traditional gods (especially Olympian Zeus) and is deeply invested in excavating and explaining the benevolence of their rule over human existence, while Sophocles revels in the elusive and problematic mysteries of the divine, inaccessible to mortal understanding… and the upstart rationalist Euripides ends up turning everything upside down with his irreverent, iconoclastic, innovative questioning and intellectualist mannerisms… This venerable paradigm of ripening, maturity and decadence of the genre of tragedy, has been told and retold over the decades, with mixed results in terms of illumination or plausibility. Scholars have noted the common features of the theodicies presented by Hesiod, Solon and Aeschylus (Solmsen 1949), and some have seen all three as sharing essentially the same “archaic” worldview, one in which the “doer must suffer” (drasanta pathein), even if justice sometimes may be slow to arrive – with guilt sometimes even being passed down from generation to generation (as e.g. in the case of Atreus’s crime being paid for by Agamemnon, or Laius’s and Jocasta’s by Oedipus and Eteocles) and with a whole community sometimes having to pay for one individual’s heinous actions (e.g. Paris-Alexander’s Troy, or Xerxes’ Persia). Within this harsh worldview, punishment may come by means of a curse or a divinely sent madness or an unforgetting, avenging spirit that waits patiently for the moment to strike; and the victims may be oblivious until too late. But some critics have emphasised instead passages in which an Aeschylean chorus refers to the “learning that comes through suffering” (e.g. Ag. 176–78 pathei mathos, cf. 181), the superiority of Zeus’s wisdom and the greater stability of his power as compared with his predecessors (Ouranos, Kronos) and

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his long-term ability to see things through to their optimal conclusion – his cult titles include teleios (completer/perfecter) and sōtēr (saviour). Above all, Zeus is revered as guarantor of justice – indeed, Dikē is his “daughter” – (hence his conduct in Prometheus Bound has caused many critics great puzzlement, if this play is Aeschylean). The “progressive” view of Aeschylus’s Zeus often emphasises the contrast between Olympian gods and chthonian powers – most obviously between Apollo and Athena versus the Furies in Eumenides; but also, for example, the city gods of Thebes versus the Furies and Oedipus’s paternal curse in the Seven – emphasising the importance of rational debate, calculation and persuasion, as against purely automatic retaliation and blood/kin-feud. The richly figurative language in which Aeschylus’s choruses address and describe Zeus’s power and wisdom (e.g. Supp. 86–111, Ag. 160–83, Eum. 996–1002) has reminded some critics of passages in the Hebrew Bible (West 1997; Sommerstein 2010; Ready 2012) and others of such Presocratic thinkers as Xenophanes and Heraclitus (Thomson 1946/1966; Seaford 2012; cf. Parker 2009). Some have even found a message like that of the New Testament in his work (Knight 1935). Other critics have focused instead on Aeschylus’s richly poetic language for describing the tortured emotions and convoluted thought-processes of humans in the throes of tragic planning, anticipating, fearing, hating, doubting, wondering, dreaming and remembering (De Romilly 1958; Sansone 1975; Thalmann 1986; Padel 1992), sometimes comparing these with the evidence of medical and scientific writers of the sixth and fifth centuries (Dumortier 1935; Rösler 1970; Guardasole 2000; cf. Onians 1951). Does Aeschylus’s Zeus learn to be wiser and more merciful with the passage of time? The (very fragmentary) remains of the rest of the Prometheus-trilogy and the ending of the Oresteia can both be read this way (e.g. Herington 1965; Sommerstein 1989, 2010); also the Suppliants-trilogy (cf. Danaids frag. 44). Some have even suggested that Aeschylus himself invented the trilogic form specifically in order to be able more fully to convey this sense of an evolving divine/cosmic order (Murray 1940; Kitto 1956; Herington 1965). Others have preferred to see Zeus not as evolving but as manifesting different aspects of his nature according to the changing circumstances of the sociopolitical realities (Reinhardt 1949; LloydJones 1971; White 2001). Whichever view is taken, almost all readers of Aeschylus stand in awe of the complex, richly associative language in which Zeus’s intentions and operations are described, suggesting a divine essence that must ultimately remain incomparable and beyond description (Ready 2012). As for the issue of Aeschylus’s alleged devotion to the Eleusinian Mysteries and perhaps (also) to some form of Pythagoreanism, see Seaford, Chapter 21 in this volume.

III: Existential/humanistic: individual responsibility versus cosmic necessity Closely related in some respects to both the ethical, character-focused Approach I and to the religious focus of Approach II are approaches that emphasise the more cosmic, even existential, issues presented by the prospect of tragic protagonists facing dreadful choices that are not of their own making and that appear to be the result of some deeply complex, perhaps incomprehensible, pattern of human existence. In some cases, such critical explorations may involve discussion of specifically Greek religious beliefs and customs (as in Approach II); but often they entail instead a less culturally specific, more universalising, notion of “the tragic” itself and of the place of human beings within a larger cosmos that is not of their own making and not under their control: ideas – usually pessimistic – of an impersonal “fate” (moira, to peprōmenon) or “necessity” (anankē) may loom large. This type of approach first began to be formulated among the German Idealists and Romantics of the late eighteenth and early



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nineteenth centuries (see Lecznar, Chapter 34 in this volume; also Judet de La Combe 2009; Lurie 2012; Billings 2014); and it has continued ever since, as attempts to define and evaluate “the tragic” persist (Billings and Leonard 2015). Critics and audiences are fascinated by the notion of an individual confronting a choice of action – or responding to pain, loss, suffering and frustration, while attempting to find meaning and justification in it all – amidst circumstances imposed on him or her (usually him) by external forces that are unseen yet universally recognisable. The existential/humanistic implications of such a choice or response dominate many discussions of “the tragic”. Sometimes this tragic individual may be presented as extraordinary, sometimes as typical of the “human condition”: the figures of Hamlet and Oedipus constantly recur in such discussions; but sometimes the critical focus widens to include Aeschylean characters such as Orestes and Electra, or Agamemnon at Aulis, or Prometheus, or Eteocles. Sophocles (whose heroes and heroines are especially remarkable; Knox 1966) and Euripides invariably loom larger in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discussions than Aeschylus; but Prometheus Bound stands out as an unrivalled dramatic presentation of cosmic-scale defiance and suffering – one that ostentatiously pits human existence and aspirations, as represented by the larger-than-life stage figure of Prometheus himself, a Christ-like divine hero suffering for his “love of humans” (PB 11, 119–23, 612 philanthrōpia), against the commands of a despotic divine ruler. This dramatic opposition appealed strongly, though in different ways, to such respondents as Percy Bysshe Shelley, J. W. Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx (see Ziolkowski, Chapter 33 in this volume). Many of the studies of Greek tragedy that have been written from this critical perspective have concentrated above all on the issue of the protagonist’s moment of decision or his/her “tragic choice”. Aeschylus’s Eteocles, Pelasgus, Agamemnon and Orestes stand in the forefront of a succession of tragic heroes and heroines, from antiquity to the present, who have to make up their minds to act, in more or less full awareness of the conflicting cosmic, divine and human pressures that are bearing down upon them (Snell 1928, 1953; Von Fritz 1962; Williams 1993). The Athenian dramatists, following Aeschylus’s lead, explored with all the linguistic and technical resources available to them the various dimensions of such decisionmaking and shades of moral awareness or blindness, with debate- and persuasion-scenes (agōn), line-for-line questioning and argument (stichomythia), lengthy self-reflective soliloquies (Schadewaldt 1926), choral speculations, divine epiphanies and more. Some critics have insisted that both Agamemnon and Orestes – and also Eteocles and Pelasgus – are in the grip of a “necessity” that cannot be escaped (Lesky 1966; Rivier 1968; Lloyd-Jones 1971), whether as the result of an ancestral curse or because of some large-scale divine plan within which they have become trapped, without personally being (entirely) responsible for their predicament. Others have argued that in each case the hero does make a personal choice out of understandable human motives and is therefore fully responsible for the terrible consequences, even while there was no trouble-free alternative available. Sometimes the notion of “double determination” is invoked, whereby the same choice and same set of actions are to be understood simultaneously as being caused by divine and by human agency (Dodds 1951; Lesky 1966; Williams 1993). Some critics contrast, for example, Pelasgus’s and Orestes’ greater degree of self-consciousness and hesitation as compared with the impetuosity and rage of Eteocles (Seven 653–719) and the oblivious arrogance of Agamemnon (Ag. 914–74). In Britain, especially influential for several decades was the work of A. C. Bradley on Shakespeare’s tragic heroes (Bradley 1904), emphasising not only the sense of inevitability attached to their suffering, along with the hero’s own responsibility and mistaken choices (Othello, Hamlet, Antony, Macbeth, Lear…), but also the impressive, almost majestic nature of their downfall and the sense of loss and waste that is experienced by an audience in

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witnessing it – all of these being processes that can be found also in several Sophoclean heroes (Knox 1966). By contrast, John Jones and others have emphasised that Aeschylean drama (especially) is not so much built around individual heroes and their choices or character-traits as around/out of the momentous actions that they are involved in, actions rooted more in structures of the family and of the polis than in individual character (Jones 1962).

IV: Dialectical/sociopolitical Ever since G. W. F. Hegel’s theory of dialectical conflict and resolution as the key components of tragedy (and of historical social progress) entered the critical mainstream, Aeschylus’s plays have been recognised as prime specimens. Though Sophocles’ Antigone was Hegel’s favourite example of the tragic collision between competing sociopolitical forces, Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Seven against Thebes obviously also fit the model well; and Aeschylus’s preferred trilogic structure itself invites analysis in terms of a dialectic of thesis/ antithesis/synthesis. Thus Agamemnon at Aulis is caught between the demands of militarypolitical duty/ambition and those of family obligations/propriety; Clytemnestra and Orestes continue the oppositional conflict, until the Athenian court, including Athena herself, produces a “higher” ethical resolution. Eteocles likewise faces a conflict of obligations, as he seeks to protect his city as commander-in-chief even while recognising the grip on him of his father’s curse and his own fraternal hatred; and Pelasgus balances the sacred obligation towards suppliant refugees against the risk this poses to his city and to his own political authority. In each case, the clash between these opposing sociopolitical forces, each of them valid and important, generates death and suffering for at least one major character in the drama, even while the final outcome may be said to produce some degree of renewed security and even prosperity for the larger community and perhaps an increased level of understanding, too, on the part of the audience. Those who see Aeschylus as a “progressive” in these terms can point especially to the trilogic dynamic of the Oresteia and of the Danaid-trilogy (with its culmination in the happy marriage of Hypermestra and Lynceus); also of course the Prometheus-trilogy (e.g. Kuhns 1962; Kitto 1956; Sommerstein 2010). They can also point to the positive image of Athens and its democracy presented by Persians and Eumenides – and also by Suppliants, if we think of Pelasgus’s Argos as a quasi-Athens (see Approach XV) – confirming the picture of Aeschylean drama as celebrating the development of human (or specifically Western) civilisation from family-focused structures to more politically-organised and communal ones (Thomson 1946/1966; Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1972/1988; Meier 1988/1993; Heath 1999). But the ending of Seven does not fit comfortably with such a progressive and universalising trilogic worldview and some scholars have emphasised instead Aeschylus’s more specific, conflicted and historically embedded engagement with contemporary Athenian politics: see Approaches XV and XVI.

V: Marxist: Class-based social analysis A distinct kind of sociopolitical interpretation related to the Hegelian approach (IV) is advanced by critics who have applied a more specifically Marxist analysis of family and class dynamics and of the various social and economic pressures that were at work within every Greek polis. The adaptation by fifth-century Athenian playwrights of traditional stories set far back in the Bronze Age, i.e. in a (largely imaginary) world of semi-divine heroes, hereditary monarchies and clan blood-lines, into dramas that would speak directly to an audience of



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voting polis-dwellers, involved delving deep into the oppositional dynamics of traditional versus new, monarchical/aristocratic versus populist and family-based versus polis-based assumptions and interests (see, too, Approach XVI). Karl Marx himself, who read and re-read Aeschylus’s plays in the original Greek throughout his life, regarded the Aeschylean Prometheus (along with Goethe’s) as “the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar”, seeing his resistance to Zeus’s regime as an inspiring model for the future of the industrialised working classes and the overthrow of organised religion. Subsequent critics have been struck too by the elements within (especially) the Oresteia that appear to follow an orthodox Marxist trajectory, as outlined by F. Engels and others, according to which a matriarchal, pre-urban form of social organisation was historically succeeded by a newer patriarchal system of property-ownership and governance (Bachofen 1861; Morgan 1871; Engels 1884/1892/1942; Thomson 1946/1966; see Approach XII). Others reject this model of matriarchy-to-patriarchy as a fiction/fantasy, but focus instead on the tensions explored within the trilogy between (older) family-based, aristocratic/clan structures of power and (newer) citizen/polis-centred, increasingly democratic (and, at Athens at least, male-dominated) allegiances and practices (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1972/1988; Rose 1992; Seaford 1994; Griffith 1995; cf. Rhodes 2003; Carter 2007). These critics show a similar split as those in (IV), although expressed in more overtly Marxist class terms, between a majority who see Aeschylus as consistently progressive in his pro-polis and pro-democratic point of view and disapproving of the excesses and abuses of aristocratic/monarchical rule and behaviours, and a minority who trace a more ambivalent mixture of audience sympathies between the central, decision-making elite characters (including divinities such as Zeus, Apollo and Athena, who often enjoy close personal and familial relationships to the human characters) and the more dependent and anonymous minor characters and choruses who more typically represent the communities at large.

VI: Nietzschean and Dionysian/ritualistic In many respects the views of Friedrich Nietzsche on tragedy (and music) constituted a radically different approach to those of Hegel or Marx (Nietzsche 1872; Porter 2010; Lurie 2012), though in due course the two currents began to merge (see Approach VII and Lecznar, Chapter 34 in this volume). Nietzsche was strongly influenced in his early years by the music and theories of Richard Wagner and these placed Aeschylus’s plays, with their combination of music, dance, costume, words and live-action, right in the forefront of the history of Western drama (Ewans 1982). Nietzsche’s emphasis on the collective aspects of theatre-making and theatre-going (as represented both by the chorus with its dance and song, and by the large, anonymous audience), as well as his insistence on the irrational and exhilarating experience of “losing” one’s self in the emotional and aesthetic excitement and uplift of performance (the “Dionysian” effect – as distinct from the cooler, more reflective and judgemental processes of individual (“Apollinian”) contemplation and analysis), has suggested to many critics a view of “tragedy as Dionysian ritual”, i.e. as a social process analogous, or even identical, to other forms of choral celebration and ceremony (see Approach VII); and some have suggested that such “playing” (the art of tragic mimesis and group performance) may provide a kind of psychotherapy for the audience (and for performers as well). The masks of the actors and chorus enable them to lose their own identities, while the large-scale context of the audience’s witnessing of the (violent, traumatic – but fictional) events brings about a collective emotionalaesthetic experience involving horror mixed-with/followed-by relief. Some critics like to merge this approach with Aristotle’s notion of katharsis (e.g. Frye 1957; cf. Schechner 1985), or else to connect it to anthropological theories that situate the origins of Greek tragedy in

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rituals performed around a goat-sacrifice (e.g. Burkert 1966) or hero-cult (Ridgeway 1910; cf. too Turner 1969). Nietzsche himself opposed the notion that tragedy served any didactic or ethical purpose and scorned interpretations that sought poetic justice and moral reassurance; and he had no particular interest in the particularities of Greek sacrificial ritual. He valued instead the direct confrontation that these plays provided with a simulated enactment of violence and more or less arbitrary suffering and saw the role of art as being the creation of order and beauty out of the chaotic elements of a godless, inhumane and unfeeling world, thus curing the “nausea” of human consciousness of living in such a world. Music, song and choral dance (all “Dionysian” elements) were seen by Nietzsche and other ritualists as being as crucial to the affective impact of Greek tragedy, as to that of Wagner’s opera. (By contrast, these critics often followed Nietzsche in expressing disapproval of Euripides’ supposed “rationalism”, i.e. his indulgence in talky, sophisticated debate-scenes, his characters’ critiques of divine misconduct and generally his plays’ more mundane language – all of which Nietzsche semi-humorously attributed to the influence of Socrates.)

VII: Anthropological-ritual Out of this same concern for the ritual “origins” and ritualistic functions of Greek tragedy there arose in the early twentieth century, especially in Britain and Germany, a major strand of dramatic criticism associated with a group that came to be referred to as the “Cambridge Ritualists” (James Frazer, Jane Harrison, Gilbert Murray, Francis Cornford; see Calder 1991; Ackerman 1991). Influenced to some degree by Nietzsche and also by Emile Durkheim’s theories of the community-building function of collective religious activity, these critics saw the ritualised suffering and death of a fictional “hero” as a form of sacrifice (symbolic killing) that serves as a means of social restoration, reintegration and reinvigoration. Thus, for example, Eteocles may be discussed as an example of “Opfertod” (“death-as-sacrifice”, performed on behalf of his city); Pelasgus chooses a just and pious course of action that will result in his own death; Prometheus is sentenced to agonising punishment but has saved humankind from extinction (Murray 1940; Havelock 1950; Von Fritz 1962). Extending the notion of a symbolic “sacrifice”, Northrop Frye in his influential Anatomy of Criticism explained the death-cycle of “tragedy” in terms of an imaginary “winter” that precedes the rebirth of a comic “spring” in an archetypical and cyclical pattern of myths and genres (Frye 1957), while René Girard sees stage tragedy as supplying an act of mimetic violence directed at a specially chosen (usually fictitious) individual – the “scapegoat” – as a means of averting the “sacrificial crisis” endemic to all human societies, i.e. the impulse towards socially disruptive violence and internal antagonisms. The expulsion (torment, death, humiliation, exile – whatever form it may take) of this scapegoat/hero provides a symbolic purification and restoration for the community – another adaptation of Aristotle’s notion of katharsis (Girard 1972/1977). In many of these discussions, Aeschylus’s Orestes emerges as a positive example of a tragic individual who, unlike Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Pelasgus or Eteocles, succeeds in himself weathering the storm of violence, expulsion and suffering, and (thereby) is purified of the blood that stains his hands and threatens to pollute his community. His sufferings and eventual restoration to power and social health thus embody the supposed tragic experience at its most complete (whereas e.g. Sophocles’ Oedipus is usually cited as the more standard case, of the individual who himself is shattered by the tragic process, even while he brings about salvation for others; likewise Eteocles, Pentheus, Ajax and other tragic hero/victims). In a different, more optimistic dynamic, the festive and restorative character of the closing scenes of the Eumenides, like Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (and perhaps the ending of the Prometheus trilogy) have also encouraged readings that emphasise ritual cleansing and sublimation of suffering.



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In terms of the possible ritual origins for Greek drama, Aeschylus, as the oldest surviving tragedian, has always attracted close attention. Up until the early 1960s, most scholars and critics believed Aeschylus’s Suppliants to be a very early composition, given the exceptionally large amount of choral music and dance in the play and the striking prominence of the chorus in the stage action. The play was accordingly seen as a specimen of early, highly musical, “ritual drama”. Once it came to be demonstrated, however, that this play actually dates from c. 463 bce (see esp. Garvie 1969), i.e. close to the time of the Oresteia, such notions had to be abandoned, or at least significantly adjusted. Nonetheless Aeschylus’s relatively extensive deployment of choral lyric throughout all his plays (Prometheus Bound is in this, as in other respects, completely anomalous), together with the pervasive use of scenes featuring mimetic religious language, song structures and behaviours (Kranz 1933; Hölzle 1934; Citti 1962; Prins 1991; Griffith 2009), has led many scholars – and theatre-makers – to emphasise that Aeschylus’s plays were essentially sacred rituals, performed in the sanctuary of Dionysus at a specific festival in his honour (SourvinouInwood 2003; Seaford 1994; and see Csapo and Miller 2007 and Approach II). Increased critical attention to satyr drama has also brought with it fresh angles on the Dionysian experience (see Shaw, Chapter 14 in this volume). In general, for the specifically Dionysian character of his plays, see further Seaford, Chapter 21 in this volume.

VIII: Affective/aesthetic – the pleasures of theatrical art for the art’s sake In contrast, sometimes even contradiction, to religious, political and ethical approaches to Greek tragedy, a separate branch of criticism, emanating in part from a Nietzschean perspective, but also sometimes invoking Aristotle’s Poetics and/or explicitly formalist criteria (see Approach IX), has insisted instead on the sheer affective impact and excitement that a wellconstructed and technically adept drama can produce in an audience – i.e. the pleasure of emotional/imaginative stimulation and identification, whether in the form of sympathetic pity, empathetic fear and mood-altering pathos of all kinds, or as a kind of heightened aesthetic tension/release and satisfaction such as one might experience in listening to a string quartet or following a well-played chess game, or even gazing at a mountain peak or thunderstorm. Influential exponents of such an approach (in addition, arguably, to Aristotle) have been Schadewaldt 1955; Heath 1987; Ford 1995; Ferrari 1999; and it can also be related to notions of the “sublime” (“Longinus”, Kant et al: see Porter 2016). Critical approaches of this kind tend to focus on structural tensions and climaxes, linguistic and imagistic patterns, and the audience’s actual or implicit responses to these, e.g. the build-up to the moment in Seven when Eteocles makes his decision to face his brother and the Chorus respond in dismay, or Agamemnon’s arrival and the “carpet-scene” in Agamemnon, or the ritual invocation at the tomb in Libation Bearers. These are moments of brilliant, chilling “theatre”, regardless of our moral/intellectual assessment of the guilt or innocence of each of the main characters involved. Some would say that such aesthetic/emotional effects are Aeschylus’s prime aim as a playwright (Denniston and Page 1957), in much the same way that a composer of (wordless) symphonies aims to provide sensory and cognitive stimulus, tension, build-up and release through his/her artistic arrangement of tones, timbres and rhythms (Meyer 1956). In recent years, performance criticism and affect theory have often engaged with some of these issues as well (see Approaches XVII and XX), and empirical assessment of neurological responses to the embodied theatrical experience, e.g. watching masked actors, observing particular dancing bodies, or listening to particular types of music, has also begun to be attempted, and we can expect more in the future (see e.g. Juslin and Sloboda 2001; Meineck 2011, 2017; Mueller and Telò 2018 and Approach XX).

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IX: Formalist/New Critical Not unrelated to the previous approach is that of the more explicitly formalist “New Critics” (as they were once called). Borrowing interpretive strategies developed primarily in the study of English and American literature by I. A. Richards, William Empson, Cleanth Brooks, W. K. Wimsatt and others (esp. Brower 1951), Classicists began in the 1950s and 1960s to analyse the text of Aeschylus’s plays in terms of structural “unity”, patterns of verbal imagery, foreshadowing, irony and other compositional elements contributing to a work’s overall artistic complexity and coherence. Aeschylus’s habits of suggestive ambiguity, multiple signification and partially hidden threads of meaning running beneath the surface of each text led these critics to extensive collection and analysis of metaphors and ironic counterpoints. Sometimes significant discrepancies or tensions can be found between surface and underlying meanings, whose resolution – or its lack – may constitute much of the play’s (or trilogy’s) “meaning”; sometimes, the effects of ambiguity and multivalence are found to be cumulative and complementary, amounting almost to a “worldview”. Eduard Fraenkel had drawn attention to Aeschylus’s habit of introducing a theme at first in highly allusive or ambiguous and imagistic terms, and then gradually (guttatim, i.e. “drop by drop”) clarifying and developing it in more concrete and literal terms as the trilogy proceeds (Fraenkel 1951: II 2), and several articles and monographs expanded fruitfully upon this remark with detailed discussion of images of animals and hunting, corrupted sacrifices, disease, fire, nets/robes, blood etc. (e.g. Knox 1952/1979; Peradotto 1964; Zeitlin 1965; Lebeck 1971; Petrounias 1976; Heath 1999). Aeschylus’s deployment of recurrent phrases and images has been compared with Wagner’s Leitmotive (Ewans 1982), while his arrangement of particular recurrent metrical (and presumably musical) patterns in his lyrics reveals a corresponding logic and aesthetic (Scott 1984).

X: Formalist/generic/developmental A different kind of “formalist” criticism has been applied fruitfully to Aeschylean tragedy by scholars who analyse the verbal, metrical and dramatic building-blocks (in German, Bauformen) out of which each play is built, comparing the techniques of each of the three great tragedians and often tracing diachronic development in the art of tragedy-composition. The volume edited by Walter Jens 1971 is fundamental; cf. too Kranz 1933; Garvie 1969; Conacher 1974; Rosenmeyer 1982. Once again, we find Aeschylus displaying “early” techniques that come to be refined and developed by his successors: e.g. the growing complexity and sophistication of stichomythia (including the deployment of a third speaking actor in the Oresteia; the occasional use of trochaic tetrameter rather than iambic trimeter in dialogue scenes (Michelini 1982); the evolution of soliloquy and actor’s song, whether epirrhematic or monodic (Schadewaldt 1926). Further studies have illuminated Aeschylus’s use of ritual language and prayer forms (Hölzle 1934; Citti 1962; see Approach VII); his limited but skilful techniques of characterisation (Easterling 1973; Seidensticker 2009, van Emde Boas in Temmerman and Van Emde Boas 2018); his use of objects as stage props (Taplin 1978; Mueller 2016; see Approach XVII); and of course his bold and varied vocabulary, phraseology and poetic “style” in general (Stanford 1942; Sideras 1971; Petrounias 1976; Ieranò 1999; Griffith 2009; Rutherford 2012 and in this volume; cf., too, many of the commentators). Aeschylus’s style in his satyr plays has also received renewed attention (Krumeich, Pechstein and Seidensticker 1999; Lämmle 2013; Griffith 2015; and see Shaw, Chapter 14 in this volume).



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XI: Structuralist Structuralist approaches to Greek tragedy were pioneered mainly in France by the school led by J.-P. Vernant in the 1960s and 1970s (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1972/1988). Analysing tragic texts as semiotic systems organised in terms of key binary oppositions such as divine/ animal (with “human” somewhere in-between), oikos/polis, endogamy/exogamy, aristocratic/ democratic, female/male, same/other, inside/outside, etc., these critics traced the processes of conflict, confusion, transgression and (sometimes) resolution between these oppositions within the plays of Aeschylus and (above all) Sophocles. The ideas of Hegel, Marx and also Marcel Mauss, George Thomson and Louis Gernet provided the underpinnings and background for much of this work, while the “structuralist” framework itself stemmed originally from linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson) and anthropology (Claude Levi-Strauss). Some structuralist critics focused particularly on linguistic binaries and the semiotic ambiguities, alternations and discrepancies of signifier and signified (e.g. Zeitlin 1982/2009 on Seven; Goldhill 1984 on Oresteia), while others emphasised sacrificial and other ritual behaviours, tribal affiliations and associations. Thus, for example, in terms of rites of passage (Vidal-Naquet 1977; Winkler 1990), the youthful figures of Orestes, Eteocles and even Xerxes were considered as ephebes attempting (successfully, or unsuccessfully) to negotiate the liminal transition from adolescence to adulthood by undergoing their specific “tests”, while the virgin daughters of Danaus (Suppliants) and even their forebear Io (Prometheus Bound) could be seen as facing an equivalent challenge in their attempts to avoid marriage. Gender oppositions also obviously may be framed in structuralist terms – as Approach XII notes.

XII: Feminist For decades, scholars cheerfully analysed the Oresteia in terms of its apparently progressive religious and sociopolitical dynamics (from chthonic to Olympian divinities, from family to polis values etc.), without dwelling on the fact that the adulterous, tyrannical Clytemnestra along with the wild demons of her revenge (the fatherless Furies, descended from Mother Earth and Night) are all female, while the chief representatives of sociopolitical order are entirely male (including not only Orestes, Apollo and the Areopagite jury, but also Athena, by her own admission and, above all, Zeus: Eum. 736–38). This gender discrepancy seemed to escape notice, or at least not to require any commentary, as it corresponded to the patriarchal assumptions held by almost all Classicists and other critics who wrote about the trilogy. The first strong feminist push-back against such assumptions, geared specifically to the Oresteia, came from Simone de Beauvoir in her classic study The Second Sex (published in French in 1949; partially translated into English in 1953, but not completely until 2009!). A short, but more vehement and populist, reiteration of this position regarding the Oresteia was presented by Kate Millett (1970; cf. Case 1985) and since the 1970s the recognition that Aeschylus’s magnum opus, the foundation-stone of Western drama, is centred on gender conflict and patriarchal repression, has come to be accepted by even the most mainstream critics. Orthodox Marxism (see Approach V) outlined an actual (pre-)historical progression within human societies from matriarchy to patriarchy, as a stage in the evolution of the nuclear family and laws of marriage and private property (Engels 1884/1892/1942). Some Aeschylean scholars such as Thomson 1946/1966 took Aeschylus to be in effect re-imagining and reenacting this process of evolution within the mythical sequence of actions of the Oresteia itself: thus the actions – and acquittal – of Orestes can be seen not only as reinforcing the final subordination of female/maternal rule, but also as re-enacting/reimagining a historical

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transition from family-based dispensation of blood-feuds to the development of a civic process of homicide law. But a majority of critics nowadays have preferred to understand the notion of an “original” matriarchy, like the stories of the Lemnian Women or the Amazons referred to in the Oresteia (Libation Bearers 631–39, Eum. 685–90), as being imaginary projections, invoked by the dominant culture to justify patriarchy and the status quo (Bamberger 1974; Zeitlin 1978/1996). The idea that there once had been a time when women (or a particular woman such as Clytemnestra) had ruled and men had been suppressed or even killed, lurks in the collective Greek imagination as a touchstone for the “normalcy” of male rule, so that the restoration of “order” necessarily will include (the return of) male domination over female. On the other hand, Aeschylus’s trilogy, however blatant the patriarchal bias of its conclusion, includes some powerful and unsettling scenes and phrases in which female voices are heard indignantly protesting their fate and – quite justifiably – accusing members of the patriarchy of injustice, double standards and abuse: Cassandra, Clytemnestra and the Furies are all highly articulate in their complaints; and even the male chorus of Agamemnon presents a shocking picture of the gagged Iphigenia attempting to reproach her father for his brutal act of sacrifice (Ag. 218–47). Female perspectives recur repeatedly, often in very sympathetic ways (e.g. in the words of Electra in Libation Bearers, of the Queen in Persians and of Io in Prometheus Bound); and the same is obviously true of the female choruses of Seven, Libation Bearers and Suppliants (Winnington-Ingram 1983; Zeitlin 1990; Foley 2001). Thus, according to Winnington-Ingram’s reading, Aeschylus creates in Clytemnestra a disturbingly articulate woman (“man-planning”, Ag. 11) who can voice the inequities, resentments and repressed desires of Athenian mothers and wives, and can put her resentment into decisive action, even while, as author, Aeschylus ends up silencing this voice by means of the verdict produced and enforced by his equally strong and even more “masculine” (yet technically female) character, Athena (cf. Zeitlin 1978/1995; McClure 1999). Others who have picked up and extended Aeschylus’s extraordinary portrayal of a victimised and retaliatory wifemother-politician include dance- and theatre-practitioners Martha Graham, in her arresting dance-piece Clytemnestra (1958), Suzuki Tadashi in his disturbing – and more Euripidean than Aeschylean – East–West Clytemnestra (1970s-present) and Ariane Mnouchkine (see Chapter 36 in this volume); likewise Aeschylus’s timid-yet-fearsome, asylum-seeking maidens in the Suppliants trilogy, at first suicidal, later murderous and finally reconciled in marriage (cf. Danaids frag. 44), have been memorably re-imagined by Charles Mee and gorily realised onstage by director Les Waters (Big Love, 2000).

XIII: Psychoanalytic Freudian and related psychoanalytic approaches to Greek tragedy (and also e.g. to Shakespeare) have been intermittent since the 1930s; and opinions continue to differ as to how illuminating and convincing they have been. In their crudest form, they have often involved treating individual characters in the plays as if they were real people suffering from particular traumas and neuroses. Straightforwardly Freudian readings of Aeschylean characters have been undertaken in particular by Caldwell 1973, focusing especially on Eteocles’ shrill denunciations of the Theban women’s chorus along with his fraternal rivalry, and by Devereux 1976, analysing the dreams of Clytemnestra and of the Persian Queen in terms of penis envy. More convincing has been, on the one hand, the less doctrinaire approach of Winnington-Ingram 1983, tracing elements of sexual repression and maternal rage in Clytemnestra (see Approach XII); also Green 1969/1979 and French feminist writers discussed by Leonard 2012), and on the other hand, a series of critics who have built on a seminal essay on Orestes by Melanie Klein



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(Klein 1963): thus e.g. Loraux 1984 illuminates Orestes’ confrontation with his mother’s breast (Libation Bearers) in light of Greek ideas about Medusa and other female monstrosities. Wohl 1998 deploys both Kleinian and Lacanian models in her reading of Cassandra and Clytemnestra. From a different more or less psychoanalytic and psychosocial angle, Griffith looks at father–son rivalry and the mother–son bond as they are manifested in Xerxes and Darius in Persians, employing Janet Adelman’s Kleinian notion of “suffocating mothers” (Adelman 1992; Griffith 1998/2006). Studies of the so-called “Electra complex” – involving a daughter’s intense fixation on her father, her rivalry/hatred and even sexual jealousy of her mother, and her identity-formation in relation to her brother – have mostly looked more to Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Electra plays than to Aeschylus: but seeds/traces of such a complex are not entirely absent from the Libation Bearers, as several modern playwrights and choreographers have noted (e.g. O’Neill, Jeffers, Graham, Suzuki, Farber, Icke; and see further e.g. Trousdell 2008). Likewise the traumatic effects of grief, loss, anger and resentment on the psyche of different family members, or of combat veterans and rape victims, are intensely “psychologised” by all three of the Greek tragedians (Meineck and Konstan 2012; very differently, Telò 2020) and theatrical performances (whether watching or performing) may themselves be recognised as an effective form of psychotherapy.

XIV: Deconstructive Deconstructive modes of reading Aeschylus arrived in the 1980s and 1990s: thus, for example, Goldhill 1984; Porter 1990 both, in their different ways, invert the approach to reading and decoding ambiguous imagery employed by e.g. Lebeck (who in turn was reconfiguring the observations of e.g. Eduard Fraenkel; see Approach IX). In a deconstructive reading, the semiotic gaps between signification and meaning and between metaphorical language and “reality” never quite get to be closed and resolution is indefinitely postponed. In such readings – which may be quite compatible with, for example, feminist or anthropological readings – the split jury’s acquittal of Orestes and the attempted incorporation of the Furies into the social fabric of Athens at the end of Eumenides can be seen as not entirely decisive or final: an attentive audience/reader will be aware that the suppressed voices and bodies of the violated dead and the temporarily defeated spirits of vengeance will return and can never be fully quieted. Ambiguities and contradictions may persist and we should not push too hard to resolve them or to explain them away.

XV: Historicist and New Historicist (part I) As the only Athenian author of the first half of the fifth century whose work survives to us in any quantity, Aeschylus obviously provides vitally relevant evidence about events, institutions and attitudes of that period – a period that witnessed the Persian Wars along with the growing power and self-awareness of Athens as a pioneering democratic – and imperialist – city-state. Historians have mined his plays in minute detail, e.g. for his account of the Battle of Salamis in Persians, for his deployment (for the first time in extant Greek literature) of the term “democracy” (Supp. 604 dēmou kratousa cheir = “the ruling hand [sc. votes] of the people”), for his presentation of the imaginary founding and character of the Court of the Areopagus, and more (Podlecki 1966), as well as for his references to the constituencies of the Persian Empire (Persians), or the iconography of Greek shield-devices (Seven); and of course the geographical excursuses of Prometheus Bound have been debated at length. Some scholars have read Aeschylus’s plays as providing direct political allegory concerning recent political events and have sought to determine what position Aeschylus is taking in

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Persians and the Oresteia, or even Seven against Thebes and Prometheus Bound, vis-à-vis Themistocles, Cimon, Pericles and their respective policies (e.g. Post 1950; see discussions – mostly sceptical – of Dover 1957; Costa 1962; Podlecki 1966; Garvie 1969, 141–42; Kennedy 2006). Eumenides has been discussed frequently for its relationship to the recent civil disturbances in Athens following the reforms of Ephialtes and Pericles (461 bce). Some have read Persians or the Oresteia as critiques of Athens’ growing imperialist designs and self-image as cultural leader of Greece (Rosenbloom 1995; Kennedy 2006). Even apart from direct allegories, is it appropriate to view Aeschylus as designing his plays in order to present political commentary? If so, is he pro-democrat and enthusiastic about the new order? Or, as a wealthy member of an old aristocratic family, is he disapproving of the Areopagus’s loss of privileges and eager to buttress its remaining prestige? Or is he perhaps relatively neutral on these issues, intending his plays rather to promote compromise and fellow-feeling among all the Athenians? To what degree are “morals” and “politics” even to be distinguished – and should we focus instead as critics on dramatic unity and resolution within the trilogy, rather than a coherent political message? Influential in particular within these discussions have been the clearly focused essays of Dodds 1960 and Macleod 1982. In recent years, readings of Greek tragedy as direct political/contemporary allegory or commentary have been less in fashion, and his plays have been understood instead as explorations of social conflict itself (as in Approaches IV and V), or, in postcolonial terms (especially in the case of Persians), as an early specimen of Western orientalist attitudes (Hall 1989, 2007), rather than as recommending particular policies to solve specific problems (see in general Pelling 1997). Scholars have also explored the tradition that Aeschylus had some of his plays (re)performed in Sicily at the request of Hieron and have sought distinguishing marks of that environment and context (Herington 1965; Duncan 2011; see Bell, Chapter 5 in this volume).

XVI: Cultural Materialist and New Historicist (part II) Since the 1980s, historicist approaches to Greek tragedy have tended to focus more on the dynamics of class, status and gender relations, and on the ways in which ideologically grounded behaviours, discursive practices and rituals from the social world outside the theatre are reinforced or inverted in the plays, than on their more overtly “political” aspects. Sometimes such readings have explored the clash or interface between the values of a dominant group and those of a marginalised or subaltern group or individual, and tragedy has been seen as giving voices and visible embodiment to characters and ideas that would normally be suppressed (e.g. wives, concubines and other captives of war, Furies, rape victims, refugees, immigrants and foreigners: Hall 1999a) and/or as exploring states of abjection and trauma that society usually prefers to ignore or hide. Is such a theatrical process normative? or transgressive? Does watching an Aeschylean tragedy serve to reinforce cultural norms, or to open up an audience’s mind and spirit to new and potentially better/broader possibilities? Critics have adopted differing positions. Clearly, though, the young male Athenians who “played” the various character-roles and choruses were experimenting with different identities and thereby providing fantastic and disturbing – but pleasurably exciting and thought-provoking – models of proper and improper humanity for their peers among the audience to contemplate and respond to (Winkler and Zeitlin 1990; Hall 1989, 1996; Zeitlin 1996; Roselli 2011; Nooter 2017). On the macro-scale, critics have also focused on the various ways in which Athenian identity is presented in the plays, directly or indirectly, e.g. with mythical “Argos” and Agamemnon’s expedition against Troy standing-in implicitly for historical/imperial Athens (Rosenbloom 1995; Grethlein 2003; Bakewell 2013).



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XVII: Performance criticism: ancient theatre and staging Theatre-makers and critics interested in the history of theatre-making have naturally focused closely on Aeschylus’s dramaturgy and his use of the conventions and facilities of the Theater of Dionysus at Athens. Performance criticism can take the form of analysis of the texts with a view to determining how the stage action must originally have been executed (costuming, style of masks, casting of the three speaking actors, blocking, entrances and exits, music and dance, stage machinery etc.) and it can thus amount to a parallel kind of commentary to the verbal explication of the text (Taplin 1977, 1978; Ewans 1995; Meineck 2011, 2017; Mueller 2016; see C.W. Marshall, Chapter 30 in this volume; also Mastronarde 1979). In such analyses, opinions have shifted back and forth as to how elaborate or simple, how realistic or stylised, Aeschylean performances originally were: the tapestry scene of Agamemnon, the possible use of the ekkuklēma in all three plays of the Oresteia and the apparent aerial entrances in Prometheus Bound have been vigorously discussed. Often critics have sought to trace a development of ancient Greek stagecraft, from a simpler and more static Aeschylus to a more fluid Sophocles and a naturalistic and character-based Euripides, with the Frogs once again providing much fuel for critical extrapolation. Growing intricacy in metrical and melodic composition is also traceable through the course of the fifth century, especially in the solo arias given to actors (Dale 1968; Jens 1971, Hall 1999b; Hall and Csapo in Easterling and Hall 2002); yet the elaborate musicality of Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers and of Suppliants and Persians is also striking. Study of the voice and vocality, and of musical and other sound effects in antiquity, is also burgeoning in recent years (Gurd 2016; Nooter 2017; Butler and Nooter 2018). Archaeological study of the Theater of Dionysus itself has gone through several distinct phases in the modern era and scholars have accordingly based their interpretations of the stage action of Greek tragedy on quite different premises as to the size and shape of the theater (Goette 2007; Papastamati-Von Moock 2015) and the degree of stylisation versus naturalism in acting styles (Easterling and Hall 2002), including the issue of acting with masks (Wiles 2007 vs Meineck 2011). See further Duncan, Chapter 16 in this volume.

XVIII: Reception and later history of performance Reception studies have flourished in recent years. This volume devotes a section to various aspects of it and there is now an entire Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Aeschylus, edited by R. Futo Kennedy 2018. The history of performance of the plays has been well covered by Walton 1987; MacIntosh et al. 2005; The Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama a research project at the University of Oxford (www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk); and others; see, too, Constantinides 2017. In this volume, see H. R. Marshall (Chapter 36), Foley (Chapter 37), and Meineck (Chapter 38).

XIX: Adaptation Adaptation (including translation), like actual reperformance, can constitute one of the most telling and influential modes of criticism – indeed, it can often be almost meaningless to try to distinguish between a “production” and an “adaptation” of a particular drama. For the history of adaptation of Aeschylus’s plays, from the fifth century bce onwards (including of course Euripides), see Aélien 1983, Torrance 2013, G. Harrison 2018 and others in Kennedy 2018; and in this volume, Chapter 30 by C. W. Marshall. For the twentieth and twenty-first centuries

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in particular (including Eliot, O’Neill, Jeffers, Sartre, Suzuki, Farber etc.), see the chapters in this volume by Roberts (Chapter 32), Ziolkowski (Chapter 33), Liapis (Chapter 35) and H. R. Marshall (Chapter 36). Of the three great tragedians, Aeschylus’s extensive use of lyric and choral elements has lent itself especially well to experiments from directors, writers, composers and choreographers who have engaged whole-heartedly, in one way or another, with the musicality of Greek tragedy: thus such very different productions as, for example, Martha Graham’s Clytemnestra (1958), Charles Mee’s Big Love (first directed by Les Waters 2000), Will Power’s The Seven (2006) and Yael Farber’s Molora (2008), all derive much of their dramatic power from their distinctive musicality and the corporeality of the stage action.

XX: What’s new? Postcolonialist, post-humanist… Materialist … Affective … Other…? Brief and passing mention has been made in the previous 19 sections of cognitive studies (e.g. discussion of “affect” and neurological – including visual and acoustic – analysis of responses to theatre-going); of “ecological” approaches and the “new materialism” (e.g. studies of objects/props and explorations of bodies and bodily processes, some of which may be regarded as specimens of “post-humanist” criticism); and of postcolonial critique. We may expect each of those approaches to yield further fruits in the years to come, along with others as yet unimagined. Aeschylus’s plays continue to offer an inexhaustible supply of dramatic and literary possibilities.

Acknowledgement I am very grateful to Seth Schein and to the editors of this volume for helpful comments and constructive advice.

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Trousdell, R. (2008). “Tragedy and Transformation: The Oresteia of Aeschylus.” Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche 2, 5–38. Turner, V. W. (1969). The Ritual Process. Chicago. Vellacott, P. (1984). The Logic of Tragedy: Morals and Integrity in Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Durham, NC. Vernant, J.-P. and Vidal-Naquet, P., eds. (1972/1988). Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (trans. J. Lloyd). New York. Vidal-Naquet, P. (1977). “The Black Hunter and the Origin of the Athenian Ephebeia.” English trans. in R. Gordon, ed. Myth, Religion and Society. Cambridge. Von Fritz, K. (1962). Antike und moderne Tragödie. Berlin. Walton, J. M. (1987). Living Greek Theatre. A Handbook of Classical Performance and Modern Production. Ann Arbor. West, M. L. (1997). The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth. Oxford. White, S. (2001). “Io’s World: Intimations of Theodicy in Prometheus Bound.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 121, 107–40. Wiles, D. (2007). Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy: From Ancient Festival to Modern Experimentation. Cambridge. Williams, B. (1993). Shame and Necessity. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Winkler, J. J. (1990). “The Ephebes’ Song”. In Winkler and Zeitlin eds., 20–62. Winkler, J. J. and Zeitlin, F. I. eds. (1990). Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Princeton. Winnington-Ingram, R. P. (1983). Studies in Aeschylus. Cambridge. Wohl, V. (1998). Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy. Austin. Zeitlin, F. I. (1965). “The Motif of the Corrupted Sacrifice in the Oresteia.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 96, 463–508. Zeitlin, F. I. (1978/1996). “The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Myth-making in the Oresteia.” Arethusa 11, 149–84. (reprinted with revisions in Zeitlin 1996, 87–119). Zeitlin, F. I. (1982/2009). Under the Sign of the Shield: Semiotics and Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes. Second Edition. Lanham, MD. Zeitlin, F. I. (1990). “Patterns of Gender in Aeschylean Drama: Seven against Thebes and the Danaid Trilogy.” In Griffith and Mastronarde eds., 103–15. Zeitlin, F. I. (1996). Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Chicago.

CHAPTER 30

The Reception of Aeschylus in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries C. W. Marshall Even in his lifetime, the works of Aeschylus enjoyed repeat performances. From shortly after his death in 456 bce, reperformance of Aeschylus in Athens seems to have been considered a likely event and the impact of his plays can be perceived in vase-painting and the work of other playwrights, both comic and tragic. By 386, the City Dionysia had instituted opportunities for reperforming the work of other playwrights as well. Aeschylus continued to be staged in the later fourth century in Athens and abroad. Though he was not as popular as Euripides within the reperformance canon, his works did influence the wider theatrical culture; as a result, Lycurgus erected his statue alongside Euripides and Sophocles in the sanctuary of Dionysos Eleutherios c. 330. This chapter summarises the early reception of Aeschylus, focusing on the impact of reperformance. The conclusions offered are substantially different now (in 2020) than they would have been a decade ago: much has been learned as scholarly perceptions have shifted away from tragedy as an exclusively Athenian cultural product. At the same time, the evidence is never as conclusive as may be desired and there remains much to be done on the reception of dramatists in antiquity.

Sicily The “Life of Aeschylus” (vita Aeschyli) is an anonymous and undatable biography included in some Aeschylean manuscripts, and it is thoroughly unreliable. Supposed facts in the biographical tradition generally emerge from inferences made using the authors’ plays and how they were represented in comedy (Lefkowitz 2012 [1981], 70–77, with translation at 147–49). Scholars nevertheless do trust certain details and these include journeys by Aeschylus to Sicily and the court of the tyrant Hieron (see also Bell, Chapter 5 in this volume): Having gone to Sicily when Hieron founded Aetna [476/5], he presented [epideixato] Aitnaiai [Women of Aetna], with view to an auspicious good life for the inhabitants of the city. (Vita Aeschyli 9)

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



The Reception of Aeschylus in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries 413 Exceedingly honoured by tyrant Hieron and the Geloans, he died an old man, in his third year living there. (Vita Aeschyli 10) They say that having been honoured by Hieron, he remounted [anadidaxai] Persians in Sicily and he was very popular. (Vita Aeschyli 18)

These claims can be corroborated to an extent, showing that the connection between Aeschylus and Sicily was known in the Hellenistic period. When Persians is mentioned at Aristophanes’ Frogs 1028, a scholion records: “This Persians seems to have been directed [dedidachthai] by Aeschylus in Syracuse, since Hieron was supportive, as Eratosthenes [of Cyrene, frag. 109 Streckler] says in On Comedy.” The Parian Marble (early third century, BNJ [= Brill’s New Jacoby, ed. I Worthington] 239F A59) records Aeschylus’s death at Gela in Sicily in 456/5, at the age of 69 (Smith 2018, 11–13). A straightforward reading of this material suggests at least two visits to Sicily arising from Aeschylus’s theatrical reputation in Athens (see Hanink and Uhlig 2017, 53–59; Csapo and Wilson 2020, 355–64). The first of these journeys occurred soon after the founding of Aetna in 476/5 (Diodorus Siculus 11.49.1–2); the second immediately after the performance of the Oresteia at the Dionysia in 458, allowing him up to three years before he died in Gela. The performance of Persians (produced in Athens in 472) can be accommodated into either journey, but for the earlier occasion it would seem to separate the first journey from the founding of the city by a few years. In response to this, Bosher (2012, 102–08) boldly revived E. J. Kiehl’s proposal (1852; and see Herington 1967) that Persians was first performed in Sicily, during Aeschylus’s initial visit in the mid-470s, and only subsequently staged as part of a tetralogy in Athens. For her, this explains a number of unusual features of Persians, including the lack of integration of Persians into the 472 tetralogy, the absence of Athenian names, and the stagecraft of the raising of Darius’s ghost. She suggests that the Syracusan theatre had “Charonian steps”, an underground passage beneath the orcheˉstra allowing the surprise appearance of an underworld figure, which did not exist in Athens (Bosher 2012, 104–05). She further notes that Women of Aetna, frag. 6 Radt (Macrobius, Saturnalia 5.19.24) describes the Palici, sons of Hephaestus’s daughter Thalia, emerging from the dark into the light. This all is suggestive, and if correct, provides a context in which both Women of Aetna and Persians could be performed in the mid-470s. Many, however, prefer the debut of Persians to be in Athens (cf. Bell, Chapter 5 in this volume) and the commemoration of Aetna to be a few years after its founding (both of these are preferable to imagining a third trip to Sicily). Bosher also observes that the inaccurate description of Persians in Aristophanes, Frogs 1026–27 points to a second text (2012, 101). If this were so, I note that it would be the Sicilian text that has been preserved in the manuscripts, and not the Athenian one known to Aristophanes’ viewers. Some of these arguments are, perhaps inevitably, circular. The presence of Doric or even specifically Sicilian vocabulary in Aeschylean plays can be taken as evidence of the influence of his time spent in Syracuse, but if we did not have the biographcal detail other explanations could be adduced. Similarly, a fragment of a lost play on Glaucus mentions Sicilian Himera (frag. 25a Radt, from a scholion to Pindar, Pythian 1.79) and there are two Aeschylean titles (or, possibly, two versions of the same play) to which it could belong. The fact that Glaucus of Potniae was part of the 472 tetralogy with Persians invites speculation that it too was performed in Sicily (Smith 2018, 33–36). The Sicilian Aeschylus can be challenged as a biographical fiction, invented because the playwright had written Women of Aetna, for production in Athens, in response either to the city’s foundation or the volcano’s eruption. This sceptical position is argued by Smith 2018, who resists some of the trends in looking for a wider geographical range for early tragedy (Lamari 2017, 23–35). While there is no contemporary indication that Aeschylus spent time

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in Sicily, there is enough to suggest that some connection exists, “Aeschylus was also in contact with a long-standing Sicilian poetic tradition” (Smith 2018, 37) that included Steischorus, whose Oresteia and other works were very influential on Aeschylus (Finglass 2018; see also Finglass, Chapter 2 in this volume). “Aeschylus was interwoven into the intellectual and poetic fabric of his contemporary Sicily” (Smith 2018, 38) and on this point an allusion to Aeschylus in the Sicilian poet Epicharmus is hard to explain without some meaningful contact (Stewart 2017, 98–99). The institution of competitive theatre in Sicily soon after Aeschylus’s death and the tradition that he was treated as a hero (a deceased man who could receive cult worship) seem hard to doubt. Polli Palladini (2013, 285–9) describes the hero cult in Sicily and the west and Bakola 2018 connects this tradition with the presentation of Aeschylus in comedy. Decades later, Dionysius I in the fourth century supposedly sought to acquire Aeschylus’s writing desk (Lucian, Adversus indoctum 15), which implies the association between Aeschylus and Sicily was still seen as important then.

Initial Reperformances Following the death of Aeschylus, significant changes occurred that shaped the performance of tragedy in Athens (Polli Palladini 2013, 308–16, Lamari 2015, 191–202). As the acting profession developed, a contest for tragic actors was introduced c. 449 at the principal dramatic festival of the City Dionysia and dramatic contests were introduced also at the Lenaea, for both comedy and tragedy (c. 442, with actor contests introduced perhaps by 432; Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 93–94). In addition, we know that some of the Rural Dionysia, celebrated in the demes, also had dramatic competitions at this time (Csapo and Wilson 2020, 2–274, with a summary on 7–8, describes the development of deme performances in the fifth and fourth centuries; see also Vahtikari 2014, 91–97). There were then more opportunities for a playwright to distinguish himself, always with the view of winning the competition and always funded by the wealthy through liturgies. Alongside these changes, it seems that under certain circumstances one could apply to remount the plays of Aeschylus. There had been posthumous productions previously and Pratinas’s plays had been directed in 467 by his son Aristeas (Snell 1971, 44 [DID C 4a] and see Lamari 2017, 19–20); but to restage plays already performed in Attica seems to be new. Though it is often assumed that individual plays could be tried out at a deme festival before “transferring” to a major urban competition, the evidence for this is lacking and it is possible that all festivals (whether plays were presented singly, in pairs, or as part of a tetralogy) prized novelty. This opportunity to remount Aeschylus was therefore exceptional. Our understanding of this licence, unfortunately, comes from the anonymous Life: The Athenians liked Aeschylus so much that they voted after his death to award a golden crown to whoever was willing to put on one of his dramas. … He won more than a few victories after his death. (Vita Aeschyli 12, 13)

In his Life of Apolllonius of Tyre 6.11, Philostratus, a Roman-era author writing in Greek, corroborates the claim that these posthumous productions won victories, and the orator Quintilian suggests that the reperformed texts could include changes (10.1.66 fabulas…correctas). Given the existence of a reperformance culture, one realises that the purpose of textual criticism might not be to recover the first performed version of a play, but the one performed at a particular festival, in a given year. Evidence might not allow an answer to be isolated, but the existence of the question is important in itself (see Revermann 2006, 66–95).



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Additional evidence for the reperformance of Aeschylus as a unique honour is provided by Aristophanes, Acharnians 10, which sees the character Dicaeopolis awaiting an announcement of Aeschylus’s name on the festival program, presumably at the proagoˉn, the preliminary announcements for the Dionysia that took place in the Odeion. This shows that in 425 bce the possibility of Aeschylus being restaged was familiar. A scholion to this passage expands our understanding further: “Aeschylus received the greatest honour from the Athenians, and only his [monou autou] plays were mounted [edidasketo] even after his death, according to a common decree [pseˉphismati koinoˉi].” Lamari 2015 argues that monou autou refers to the decree, that the popular vote was only for him, but others were reproduced under other circumstances, and so this is implausible. Twenty years later in 405, Aristophanes can have his character Aeschylus proclaim that he is at a disadvantage in a literary contest in the underworld because “My poetry did not die with me” (Frogs 868), i.e. it remained alive through reperformance, and for this to be funny the exceptionality of Aeschylean reproduction has to be widely understood. Biles 2007 challenges the existence of a “decree” that anyone wishing to produce plays of Aeschylus be granted a chorus automatically, suggesting it was a biographical fiction. He denies “that Aeschylean drama was regularly reperformed in competition in Athens and was victorious” or that his plays “were a regular feature of the City Dionysia” (Biles 2007, 230, 232). It’s a subtle argument, but I feel he places a lot of interpretative weight on regularity, which is not crucial for the impact described here. With the additional possibilities of performances at other dramatic festivals, and vectors that favour elite and selective reception of tragedy such as recitations at symposia and through the education system, there are several means by which Aeschylus could become known, at least to some. But it is the prominence of direct allusion to the Oresteia beginning in the mid-420s which suggests to me that a reperformed Oresteia had the greatest influence on theater later in the fifth century. This is a hypothesis, but it does provide a concise explanation for the sudden, precise focus on the Oresteia, which begins to appear. Before this hypothesised Oresteia reperformance, reference to Aeschylus was of course still possible. A handful of vases from the third quarter of the fifth century demonstrates an awareness of Aeschylean drama, even if we accept that vase-painters were in no way constrained to represent dramatic details accurately. Simas 2020, building on Prag 1985 and others, describes the depiction of Erinyes, where the consistent representation in situations echoing Aeschylus’s Eumenides is best explained by presuming theatrical influence. A redfigure bell crater dating c. 440 by the Lykaon Painter (Boston Museum of Fine Arts 00.346, ARV3 1045.7) shows Actaeon, with the name Euaion written above it. Since Aeschylus’s son Euaion was an actor, this vase has been connected with a performance of his father’s Toxotides (Women Archers; see Vahtikari 2014, 233–34; Lamari 2017, 112–13, describes other Euaion vases). Also from c. 440 is a red-figure kalpis, in which Clytemnestra sits on an altar grabbing her breast and beseeching Orestes, who approaches menacingly (Nauplia 11609/180, ARV 1061.154). Though the vase is damaged, so that Clytemnestra’s face and Orestes’ sword are no longer extant, the evocation of Libation Bearers 896–99 is nevertheless unmistakeable (Prag 1985, 40–41; Marshall 2017, 121–22, 133–34). While these vases might be inspired by reperformances, they are close enough to a living Aeschylus that the painter might be evoking lived memories of the original performances. This can also explain literary references from this period. Though the date of Sophocles’ Ajax is uncertain, the scholiast to line 815 indicates indebtedness to Aeschylus’s Thracian Women (Easterling 2005, 27). Similarly, structural and verbal parallels exist between Sophocles’ Women of Trachis and Agamemnon (Garner 1990, 100–10), which likely pre-date an Oresteia reperformance. The question is not whether a playwright or vase-painter possessed the resources to be inspired by Aeschylus. He clearly did, or at least could. The question is rather for whom such

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a reference would be meaningful and interpretable. The restricted viewership of any red-figure vase allows for some self-selection among cognoscenti (or those who would aspire to be such), whereas theatrical allusion that depends on recognising a previous passage, in a play performed before the Athenian populace, clearly seeks some broad recognition, even allowing for audience heterogeneity. Not everyone accepts the need for such a reperformance. Rosenbloom is willing to accept the possibility that “Aristophanes and his audience may have seen reperformances of the Persians, Niobe, Myrmidonians, Phrygians and Psychostasia” (2018, 64, and see 61–64) by the end of the fifth century, but he does not include the Oresteia. I suggest the scale of the evidence argues forcefully for an Oresteia reperformance at the Dionysia, followed by other Aeschylean restagings at a variety of venues. At the same time, Aeschylus is being used as a school text for elite young men and consequently specific purple passages from other plays can become touchstones independent of knowledge of a given play (Marshall 1996). For example, when in Euripides’ Hecuba (424–21 bce), the chorus of captive Trojan women recall the night Troy was sacked, the attacking Greeks re-use a war-cry from Aeschylus’s Persians to inspire themselves: ὦ παῖδες Ἑλλάνων… (“O sons of Greeks…” Persians 402, Hecuba 930). This is a deft touch for those who appreciate the allusion, but it does not depend on a recent reperformance of Persians for it to have its meaning communicated. At the same time, reference to the daughters of Danaus (Hecuba 885–87) is in no way dependent upon the audience knowing Aeschylus’s Suppliants. The nature of allusion to the Oresteia in Hecuba is fundamentally different from this.

Tragedy When the Thracian king Polymestor is blinded in Euripides’ Hecuba, his offstage cries from within Agamemnon’s tent evoke those made by Agamemnon in the first play of the Oresteia (Meridor 1975; compare Ag. 1343 ὤμοι, πέπληγμαι…, “Oh me, I am struck…”, with Hec. 1035 ὤμοι, τυφλοῦμαι…, “Oh me, I am blinded…”). In the satyr play Cyclops (408 bce?), Euripides returns to this moment again with humorous expansion at the blinding of the Polyphemus (Cyc. 663 ὤμοι, κατηνθρακώμεθ᾽ …, “Oh me, I am incinerated…”). This example of literary allusion (which could be extended to other backstage cries; see Easterling 2005, 27, 30–31) is used to intensify the pain in one and to mock the victim in another. It generates a meaningful resonance for the audience, whereby the association with Agamemnon provides information that can inform a spectator’s interpretation of the Euripidean scene. Further, as Polymestor is being led offstage, he prophecies the events of Agamemnon to the Greek king, who is told the plot of the play that is in the character’s future, but is in the past for the audience members who perceive the literary echo: he will be killed with Cassandra, by Clytemnestra, with an axe, in Argos, in a bath (Hec. 1275–81). These details are specific to Aeschylus and are not found in earlier versions of the myth. The Oresteia had debuted more than 30 years before Hecuba, however, and any overlap between those audiences would be minimal. The detail of the axe is particularly telling, since Clytemnestra’s weapon is not clear from the text of Agamemnon, but Sophocles and Euripides, perhaps inspired by Libation Bearers 889, are agreed that the weapon is an axe and this points to the stage property used in the reperformance (Marshall 2001). The detail is not new: Easterling 2005 (34–36) describes a cup by the Marlay Painter from c. 430 (Ferrara T 264, ARV2 1280–64) depicting the death of Cassandra with an axe, which may be drawing on an Oresteia; and the reperformance may also be influenced by Merope’s use of an axe in Euripides’ Cresphontes (420s bce; see also Torrance 2013, 73–74). Given this, a reperformed Oresteia, in the years immediately before Hecuba, must be seen as an economical explanation for the many Oresteia allusions that soon appear.



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Beginning apparently with Hecuba, several extant Euripidean plays demonstrate deep and sustained engagement with the Oresteia. These references range from verbal allusion to situational parallels to engaged and sustained parody and are found not only in Hecuba (Marshall 1992, 65–90; Thalmann 1993), but also in Electra (perhaps 420–17; Solmsen 1967; Segal 1985; Davies 1998, answering Bain 1977 and Kovacs 1989; Zeitlin 2012; Torrance 2013, 14–33), Iphigeneia among the Taurians (mid-410s; Zeitlin 2006; Torrance 2013, 33–45), Helen (412; Marshall 2014, 79–95), Orestes (408; Zeitlin 1980; Torrance 2013, 45–61) Bacchae (produced 405; Johnston 2020); and Iphigeneia in Aulis (produced 405; Sorum 1992, 536–42; Radding 2015, 837–46). Even this does not represent the full degree of Euripides’ engagement with Aeschylus. Trojan Women (415 bce) also demonstrates this influence. The structure of the play sees the conquered Hecuba, queen of Troy, encountering three other women after the sack of the city: her daughter Cassandra, her daughter-in-law Andromache and the Greek woman Helen, the notional cause of the war. The resonance with the last books of the Iliad is palpable throughout, but the presentation is also mediated through Aeschylus’s Oresteia. The appearance of Cassandra seems designed to evoke her appearance in Agamemnon, where her surprise ululation inaugurates a spectacular musical scene in which she sings, dances and speaks before an uncomprehending chorus as she reluctantly is drawn to her death inside the palace (Ag. 1072–1330). Easterling (2005, 31–33; cf. Garner 1990, 165–67) has described how the Euripidean character’s movements echo those of the Aeschylean Cassandra, and her use of a flaming firebrand potentially resonates additionally with the torches at the end of Eumenides. When Andromache is brought onstage in a wagon in Trojan Women, the wagon is laden with trophies including Hector’s armour (i.e. presumably Achilles’ armour, which he removed from Patroclus’s corpse, if the play is understood to be true to the Iliad); she clutches her son Astyanax beside her (568–76). While the details of the staging of such a scene can only be imagined, it seems probable to me that whatever the audience sees, this entry is meant to evoke the grand chariot precession as Cassandra enters with Agamemnon with spoils from Troy (Agamemnon 783). Both are spectacular entrances, with live animals pulling a vehicle: indeed, the hypothesis summarising the plot that precedes the play in the manuscripts, suggests there were two chariots, which Taplin 1977 (304–05; and see Easterling 2005, 25–26) argued may reflect a Hellenistic reperformance. The contrast reflects both the humility of this conveyance in relationship to Agamemnon and allows for a spectator, who has seen Agamemnon in reperformance, to compare the representation of spoils and to gain a sense of foreboding for Astyanax’s coming death. While we cannot know where the vehicle stopped in the performance area – near the centre of the orcheˉstra, presumably – I would suggest it was at or near where the Aeschylean chariot had stopped, creating a visual echo. Such associations could exist without the need for further textual support. Helen’s appearance, too, is potentially spectacular: though possibly understated in the light of the two preceding major encounters, her costume (not torn), mask (with a full head of hair, not shorn like the other captives) and proud bearing all serve to create a powerful and alluring visual spectacle. Helen had appeared previously in comedy and satyr drama, including almost certainly in Proteus, the lost satyr play of the Oresteia, but her tragic appearances previous to Trojan Women, if any, will have been very few (Marshall 2014, 64–74). I have hypothesised that Euripides’ extended focus on Aeschylus emerged partly because the reperformance of the Oresteia in the 420s was part of the dramatic competition in a year Euripides was competing (Marshall 2020, 95–99). While this can’t be proved, the suggestion in some measure explains the degree of focus on the Aeschylean tetralogy within the playwright’s work over two decades. Sophocles similarly engages directly with the Oresteia in Electra (perhaps late 410s; Winnington-Ingram 1980, 217–47, though Finglass 2007, 5–6 is right to stress the significant differences between the ways the two plays treat the myth). Direct

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comparisons of the three Electra plays is by now a hoary topic for student essays, and one can discuss these separate works without a focus on literary dependence (compare, e.g. Solmsen 1967; Garner 1990, 117–27; Bakogianni 2012, 13–72). The existence of the Sophoclean and Euripidean Electra plays, however, is due to the influence exerted by Aeschylus. Euripides’ engagement with Aeschylus in the last quarter of the century is not restricted to the Oresteia, however. Phoenician Women (411–09 bce) offers rich, nuanced engagement with Seven against Thebes (Burian 2009; Torrance 2013, 113–29) that appears to presume detailed knowledge of Aeschylus by Euripides’ audience. Lech (2008) attempts to narrow down a possible date on a reperformance of Seven against Thebes (possibly as a single play separated from its original tetralogy, possibly alongside Persians) and suggests this occurred after Lysistrata (411) but before Frogs (405). If it were additionally after Phoenician Women, there would even be a performance opportunity for the apparently revised ending (Hutchinson 1985, 209–11; but see Hanink and Uhlig 2017, 68–69), which has been added for a reperformance. I have suggested that a reperformance of Libation Bearers and Eumenides as a dilogy (a set of two plays, presented at the Lenaia festival) in the years before Frogs best explains the way that the name “Oresteia” is used at Frogs 1124 (Marshall 2017, 51); Vahtikari 2014 (86) believes Persians was also reperformed in Attica around this time.

Comedy Comedy also foregrounds the influence of the Oresteia. A series of studies has built up an appreciation of how extensive this influence is, looking at Clouds (423 bce, but partially rewritten later; Newiger 1961, 427–30; Telò 2016, 125–56; Rogers 2020); Wasps (422 bce; Wyles 2020) and Frogs (405 bce; Marshall 2020, 72, 76, 87–88, 95–99). These studies corroborate the picture assembled from tragedy concerning the possibility of an Oresteia reproduction in the mid-420s, but it has less independent evidentiary value because Aristophanes’ extant plays also begin in 425. One consequence of humour in comedies is that it creates a heterogeneous response among an audience, establishing inside and outside groups. Consequently, when Peace 1177 (421 bce) alludes to Myrmidons frag. 134, or the chorus of Birds 1555 (414 bce) echoes Aeschylus’s Soul-Raisers (Psychagogoi, frag. 273a), there may be advantages for the competing poet if only some of the audience recognise the allusion. Literary allusion, particularly in comedy, creates a momentary joy of recognition for those spectators who perceive the reference, letting them feel clever. It does so without alienating those that do not perceive it, who might nevertheless detect the feel of tragedy (without knowing the specific source) or those who remain unaware of the reference, waiting for the next joke. In addition to its extended engagement with the “prologue” to the Oresteia (Frogs 1124–76, actually the lost opening lines of Libation Bearers), Frogs draws attention to the so-called “Aeschylean silences” in Niobe and Myrmidons (and possibly Phrygians; see Frogs 907–35 and Taplin 1972) and mentions both Persians and Seven against Thebes by name as individual plays (Frogs 1019–29). Frogs also presents Aeschylus as a character, in the underworld holding a throne of tragedy and seated beside Plouton. Dionysus has descended to the underworld to bring back the recently deceased Euripides, for whom he developed a yearning (pothos) when reading the play Andromeda. He encounters Aeschylus and Euripides in a contest for possession of the throne, a situation that is without direct precedent, but draws on other dramatic katabases (in Eupolis’s Demes, Aristophanes’ Gerytades, and the lost tragedy Pirithous by Euripides or perhaps Critias). In Frogs, the two tragedians, representatives of separate generations, are characterised as opposites, which Rosenbloom (2012, 431–41) positions within a larger rhetorical discourse of chrēstoi (useful, good, noble citizens) and ponēroi (base, useless, inauthentic citizens).



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Aeschylus is a magnificent part, exhibiting great range through the second half of the play: he is a man of monstrous and elemental passions, who possesses qualities of Achilles (Tarkow 1982) and yet is filled with bombast (Frogs 909, 919). Rosenbloom characterises Aeschylus as “a sour, primitive, obsolete, ranting braggart (alazōn)” (2018, 56, and see 54–60). At the same time, he is shown consistently to win round after round of the literary contest and is able to improvise show-stopping musical numbers excoriating the newfangled style of Euripides (Frogs 1301–64; see Marshall 2020, 78–80). This is followed by a scene where individual poetic lines are weighed in an oversized set of balance scales, which visually evoked Aeschylus The Weighing of Souls (Psychostasia; Frogs 1365–413). Aeschylus had earlier appeared as a character in Pherecrates’ Shiners (Krapataloi), a title that plays both on the little fish and its use as a currency in the underworld. The character of Aeschylus speaks frag. 100, which elevates both the playwright and the genre of tragedy: “I who constructed and handed onto them [i.e. future tragedians?] a great craft [technēn megalēn]” (trans. Storey 2011, 2. 464–65). While the play cannot be dated precisely, sometime in the 420s or 410s seems likely, which demonstrates Frogs was not the first play to dramatise Aeschylus, either in or returned from the underworld – and, significantly, defending his contribution to the technē of tragedy. Aristophanes frag. 696 possibly from Aristophanes’ Gerytades (or Pherecrates? see Rosenbloom 2018, 55) has someone claiming to have watched Phrygians. Cratinus’s lost comedy Wealth Gods (Ploutoi, 429 bce) also seems to draw heavily on the presentation of the Erinyes in Eumenides (Bakola 2010, 135–38) and indeed Bakola argues that Cratinus’s self-presentation generally was as an “Aeschylean” playwright. If so, he was associating his own importance to the genre of comedy on par with its pre-eminent practitioner as understood in the fifth century (Bakola 2010, 24–29). It is possible there was also a comedy by Cratinus called Eumenides (Bakola 2010, 174–77; the title Eumenides has been emended into existence for frags. 69 and 70). If this is a separate play (and the fragments do not belong to The Sons of Euneus [Euneidae], frags. 71–72, or, possibly, Wealth Gods) then an allusion to Aeschylus would be certain. It does not follow, however, that it would more likely be an early play of Cratinus, close to 458 (Storey 2011, 1. 303): since Cratinus is producing plays as late as 422, it could very well date to a period after the proposed reperformance and still be current. Persians is alluded to in Eupolis’s Marikas (frag. 207, 421 bce) and in the comic poet Platon (frag. 226); Seven against Thebes in Eupolis frag. 231. The composite picture that emerges from this survey of literary evidence is substantial and it indicates a number of reperformances of Aeschylus as probable or plausible, beginning approximately 30 years after Aeschylus’s death. While the poet was not forgotten, his reputation was secure and there was an appetite to see his plays once again, using modern actors in an increasingly professionalised theatrical world. At a minimum, I would suggest the following reperformances in Athens are strongly indicated: 1. A reperformance of the Oresteia tetralogy, at the City Dionysia in the 420s. 2. A production of Persians before 421 (Marikas). 3. A production of Seven against Thebes before c. 409 (the year of Phoenissae) and another production between 411 (Lysistrata) and 405 (Frogs). If these were the same production (e.g. in 410), then another production, after Phoenissae but possibly in the fourth century, is needed. 4. A performance of Libation Bearers and Eumenides, at the Lenaia in the years before 405. In addition, there are possible performances of Myrmidons, Phrygians and Soul-Raisers before 421 (West 2000, 340–47 associates these with Euphorion, another son of Aeschylus), whose productions could easily extend back into the 430s. Possibly The Weighing of Souls (Farioli 2004) and Niobe (based on Frogs 907–26, 1392–94) are familiar in the years immediately

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before 405, but this knowledge could come from non-theatrical contexts such as vase-painting or theatrical anecdotes that preserve a detail from an earlier performance. When restaged, plays could be presented independent of their original tetralogies, allowing for new associations to develop in the spectators, for whom these become living works of theatre. Some of these may have been showcase performances, separate from the competition, though I believe the first Oresteia reproduction was part of the competition.

Prometheus None of the foregoing has mentioned Prometheus Bound, a play preserved in the Aeschylean manuscripts but almost certainly not by him and not produced before the 430s (see Ruffell, Chapter 12 in this volume and Hanink and Uhlig 2017, 66–67). This play also had an impact on subsequent drama, as later playwrights allude to it in ways similar to their use of Aeschylus. Podlecki (2009, 83–91) describes the resonances of the plot of Prometheus on Euripides’ Andromeda (412 bce), stressing the binding and unbinding of the title character. Flintoff 1983 traces the play’s influence in extant comedy, with a focus on Knights (424 bce) and Birds (414 bce), with a passing reference to line 994 at Peace 319–20 (420 bce). Cratinus’s Ploutoi (429 bce) engages with the lost Prometheus Unbound (Bakola 2010, 122–34, 139–41). Additional references in fragments to Prometheus do not need to refer to a dramatic presentation: Aelian, On the Nature of Animals 6.51, ascribes a fable of an ass fighting a snake after Prometheus stole fire to several fifth-century dramatists; Lucian, You Are A Prometheus in Words 2, quotes a line claiming Cleon the Athenian demagogue in the 420s was a Prometheus (unattributed frag. 461; see Storey 2011, 3. 378–79). None of these, however, constitutes an argument for Aeschylean authenticity. Rather, they demonstrate that other playwrights too were part of the dynamic, competitive, theatrical culture. Arguably, the fact that Ploutoi draws on both Eumenides and Prometheus Unbound could point to some shared origin, possibly with Aeschylus’s son Euphronius (West 1990, 51–72, esp. 67–72). The Prometheus plays seem also to have been known in Sicily and South Italy in the fourth century (Vahtikari 2014, 84–86, 246; Nervegna 2014, 186).

A Fourth-Century Classic The fourth century was a period of continued development and growth for the performance of tragedy, as it increasingly left the confines of Attica and became a cultural export, particularly to Sicily and South Italy. Aeschylus was part of this journey. The licence that had been allowed to the remounting of Aeschylean plays was expanded in the year 387/6, when for the first time the Dionysia included a performance of “Old [palaia] Tragedy” (Lamari 2017, 60–62; Le Guen 2019, 167–73; Griffith 2019, 233–41). In time this came to mean the reperformance of any previously staged play, but it clearly benefited remountings of single plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. This performance was not part of the dramatic contest, but was a showcase opportunity and served to help establish the canon of the three tragedians. By 342/1 this had become an annual event, alongside the ongoing competitions already in place, here and at other venues. Several other theatrical innovations c. 340 affect the context for any understanding of reperformance in Athens. Efforts to consolidate an authoritative text of the same three tragedians under Lycurgus elevated the playwrights’ status further (Scodel 2007; Hanink 2014, 60–74). One consequence of this process was to establish a literary monument at a time when Athens’ political authority was waning (Duncan and Liapis 2019; 188–90) and



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it may also have served to discourage further histrionic interpolations. The report stresses that they became a public resource in some way (en koinoˉi, suggesting public accountability or stored in a city archive: [Plutarch] On the Ten Ancient Orators 841f). Associated with this process was the erection of the Monument of the Three Tragedians (Papastamati-von Moock 2007, 312–26; 2014, 35–40; Hanink 2014, 74–83). Additionally, the theatre itself was redesigned. As non-Athenian artists became increasingly involved in theatre production, an expanded seating area and modified skēnē building emerged to better highlight the aspects of performance of greatest interest (Goette 2007; Papastamati-von Moock 2014, esp. 70–75). It is not clear to what extent Aeschylus’s plays enjoyed this renaissance. Sophocles and Euripides were clearly part of the repertoire into the Hellenistic period, but it may be that Aeschylus’s presence was not matched by a proportional number of reproductions. Evidence of any kind is indirect, such as the material added to the end of Seven against Thebes, which might pre-date the introduction of Old Tragedy in 387/6 (Nervegna 2014, 166–72), and the almost complete absence of records of actors performing Aeschylean plays (though see Alciphron 3.12 and Nervegna 2007, 18). In his survey of South Italian vases inspired by tragedy, Taplin (2007, 48–87) notes the emphasis on representations of Libation Bearers and Eumenides, but additionally Edonians, Europa (or Carians), Niobe, Phrygians and possibly Phineus (see Nervegna 2014, 172–76; Vahtikari 2014, 233–43 adds the possibility of Callisto; Lamari 2017, 151–56, 191–93 adds Women of Aetna). Vahtikari 2014 (153–63) identifies a total of 59 South Italian vases ­possibly inspired by Libation Bearers (compared to three Attic vases) and 43 inspired by Eumenides (compared to seven Attic vases). These numbers are staggering and it would be hard to explain the continuity of imagery across vases and regions were the artists were not drawing on – and selling to an audience familiar with – local performances. These vase-paintings also demonstrate continuities with fifth-century Athenian imagery (Stewart 2017, 156–57). The reception of Aeschylus continued into the Hellenistic and Roman periods as well. Our evidence is scant, and he clearly did not have the same ongoing popularity as Euripides enjoyed. Part of this diminishing reputation may emerge directly from Frogs, leading to an impression that he was an obscure and antiquated poet, whose poetry was becoming perceived as forbiddingly difficult. Among the Republican tragedians, it may be that Naevius’s Lycurgus is a version of Aeschylus’s Edonians, and Ennius wrote a Eumenides. In the Neronian period, Seneca’s Agamemnon is modelled on Aeschylus’s play. Seven plays entered the manuscript tradition under Aeschylus’s name and for the most part this selection was governed by the plays that had been reperformed earliest and had caught the attention of Aristophanes in Frogs. Consequently, it was in the first 50 years after his death that Aeschylus’s influence was most deeply felt.

FURTHER READING The study of the reception of Aeschylus in antiquity is relatively new and methodological approaches have developed significantly over recent decades. Other surveys of this evidence, with different parameters, include Easterling 2005, Lamari 2015, Hanink and Uhlig 2017 and Rosenbloom 2018. Three earlier works deserve mention: the massive study by Aélion 1983 is undermined by the zeal with which literary allusions are optimistically identified; Prag 1985 is an important study that was not properly taken up in subsequent scholarship; Garner 1990 identifies a large number of verbal parallels on a playby-play basis, but leaves larger interpretations to be inferred. Opposing views on the Sicilian Aeschylus are found in Bosher 2012 and Smith 2018. Biles 2007 offers the most forceful critique of Aeschylean reperformances in the second half of the fifth century. Zeitlin 1980 is a ground-breaking and influential

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study of Euripidean allusion to Aeschylus, which has inspired many successors, and Davies 1998 offers a clear-headed, ground-clearing discussion on the recognition scene in Electra (and see also Ormand, Chapter 11 in this volume). Le Guen 2019 offers a nuanced introduction to the reperformance culture that developed in the fourth century. For those interested in the fate of Aeschylus in antiquity beyond the fourth century, Nervegna 2018 offers useful discussion and bibliography on the Hellenistic period, as Harrison 2018 does for the Roman Imperial period.

REFERENCES Aélion, R. (1983). Euripide, héritier d’Eschyle. 2 vols. Paris. Bain, D. (1977). “[Euripides], Electra 518–544.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 24, 104–16. Bakogianni, A. (2012). Electra Ancient and Modern. London. Bakola, E. (2010). Cratinus and the Art of Comedy. Oxford. Bakola, E. (2018). “Earth, Nature, and the Cult of the Tomb: The Posthumous Reception of Aeschylus Heros.” In N. Goldschmidt and B. Graziosi, eds. Tombs of the Ancient Poets: Between Literary Reception and Material Culture. Oxford, 123–44. Biles, Z. (2007). “Aeschylus’ Afterlife: Reperformance by Decree in 5th C. Athens?” Illinois Classical Studies 31–32, 206–42. Bosher, K. (2012). “Hieron’s Aeschylus.” In K. Bosher, ed. Theater outside Athens: Drama in Greek Sicily and South Italy. Cambridge, 97–111. Burian, P. (2009). “City Farewell! Genos, Polis, and Gender in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes and Euripides’ Phoenician Women.” In D. E. McCoskey and E. Zakin, eds. Bound by the City. Albany, 15–45. Csapo, E., Goette, H. R., Green, J. R. and Wilson, P., eds. (2014). Greek Theatre in the Fourth Century B.C. Berlin. Csapo, E. and Wilson, P. (2020). A Social and Economic History of the Theatre to 300 BC. Vol. II: Theatre beyond Athens. Cambridge. Davies, M. (1998). “Euripides’ Electra: The Recognition Scene Again.” Classical Quarterly 48, 389–403. Duncan, A. and Liapis, V. (2019). “Theatre Performance after the Fifth Century” In Liapis and Petridis eds., 180–203. Easterling, P. (2005). “Agamemnon for the Ancients.” In F. Macintosh, P. Mikelachis, E. Hall and O. Taplin, eds. Agamemnon in Performance 458 BC to AD 2004. Oxford, 23–36. Farioli, M. (2004). “Due parodie comiche della psychostasia: Ar. Ran. 1364–1413 E Frag. 504 K.-A.” Lexis 22, 251–67. Finglass, P. J. (2007). Sophocles: Electra. Cambridge. Finglass, P. J. (2018). “Stesichorus and Greek Tragedy.” In R. Andújar, T. Coward and T. A. Hadjimichael, eds. Paths of Song. The Lyric Dimension of Greek Tragedy. Berlin, 19–37. Flintoff, E. (1983). “Aristophanes and the Prometheus Bound.” Classical Quarterly 33, 1–5. Garner, R. (1990). From Homer to Tragedy: The Art of Allusion in Greek Poetry. London. Goette, H. R. (2007). “An Archaeological Appendix.” In P. Wilson, ed. The Greek Theatre and Festivals: Documentary Studies. Oxford, 116–21. Griffith, M. (2019), “Music and Dance in Tragedy after the Fifth Century.” In Liapis and Petridis eds., 204–42. Hanink, J. (2014). Lycurgan Athens and the Making of Classical Tragedy. Cambridge. Hanink, J. and Uhlig, A. S. (2017). “Aeschylus and His Afterlife in the Classical Period: ‘My Poetry Did Not Die with Me’.” In S. E. Constantinidis, ed. The Reception of Aeschylus’ Plays through Shifting Models and Frontiers. Leiden and Boston, 51–79. Harrison, G. W. M. (2018). “Aeschylus in the Roman Empire.” In Kennedy ed., 129–78. Herington, C. J. (1967). “Aeschylus in Sicily.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 87, 74–85. Hutchinson, G. O. (1985). Aeschylus: Septem Contra Thebas. Oxford.



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Johnston, P. G. (2020). “The Women of Thebes as Aeschylean Erinyes: The First Messenger Speech of Euripides’ Bacchae.” In Marshall and Marshall eds., 161–71. Kennedy, R. F., ed. (2018). Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Aeschylus. Leiden. Kiehl, E. J. (1852). “Aeschyli Vita.” Mnemosyne 1, 361–74. Kovacs, D. (1989). “Euripides’ Electra 518–44: Further Doubts about Genuineness.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 36, 67–78. Lamari, A. (2015). “Aeschylus and the Beginnings of Tragic Reperformance.” Trends in Classics 7.2, 189–206. Lamari, A. (2017). Reperforming Greek Tragedy: Theater, Politics, and Cultural Mobility in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BC. Berlin. Le Guen, B. (2019). “Beyond Athens: The Expansion of Greek Tragedy from the Fourth Century Onwards.” In Liapis and Petridis eds., 149–79. Lech, M. L. (2008). “A Possible Date of the Revival of Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes.” Classical Quarterly 58, 661–64. Lefkowitz, M. (2012 [1981]). The Lives of the Greek Poets. Second Edition. Baltimore. Liapis, V. and Petridis, A. K., eds. (2019). Greek Tragedy after the Fifth Century: A Survey from Ca. 400 BC to Ca. AD 400. Cambridge. Marshall, C. W. (1992), A Commentary on Euripides’ Hecuba 658–1295, with an Introduction to the Play as A Whole. Doctoral dissertation, University of Edinburgh. Marshall, C. W. (1996). “Literary Awareness in Euripides and His Audience.” In I. Worthington, ed. Voice into Text. Mnemosyne Supplement 157. Leiden and Boston, 81–98. Marshall, C. W. (2001). “The Next Time Agamemnon Died.” Classical World 95, 59–63. Marshall, C. W. (2014). The Structure and Performance of Euripides’ Helen. Cambridge. Marshall, C. W. (2017). Aeschylus: Libation Bearers. London. Marshall, C. W. (2020). Aristophanes: Frogs. London. Marshall, H. and Marshall, C. W., eds. (2020), Greek Drama V: Studies in the Theatre of the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BCE. London. Meridor, R. (1975). “Eur. Hec. 1035–38.” American Journal of Philology 96, 5–6. Nervegna, S. (2007). “Staging Scenes or Plays? Theatrical Revivals of ‘Old’ Greek Drama in Antiquity.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 162, 14–42. Nervegna, S. (2014). “Performing Classics: The Tragic Canon in the Fourth Century and Beyond.” In Csapo et al. eds., 157–87. Nervegna, S. (2018), “Aeschylus in the Hellenistic Period,” in Kennedy ed., 109–28. Newiger, H.-J. (1961). “Elektra in Aristophanes’ Wolken.” Hermes 89, 422–30. Papastamati-von Moock, C. (2007). “Menander und die Tragikergruppe. Neue Forschungen zu den Ehrenmonumenten im Dionysostheater von Athen.” Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Athenische Abteilung 122, 273–327. Papastamati-von Moock, C. (2014). “The Theatre of Dionysus Eleuthereus in Athens: New Data and Observations on Its ‘Lycurgan’ Phase.” In Csapo et al. eds., 15–76. Pickard-Cambridge, A. W. (1988). The Dramatic Festivals of Athens. Second Revised Edition by J. Gould and D. Lewis. Oxford. Podlecki, A. J. (2009). “Echoes of the Prometheia in Euripides’ Andromeda?” In J. R. C. Cousland and J. Hume, eds. The Play of Texts and Fragments: Papers Presented to Martin Cropp on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday. Leiden and Boston, 77–91. Polli Palladini, L. (2013). Aeschylus at Gela: An Integrated Approach. Alessandria. Prag, A. J. N. W. (1985). The Oresteia in Art and Literature. Warminster. Radding, J. (2015). “Clytemnestra in Aulis: Euripides and the Reconsideration of Tradition.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 55, 832–62. Revermann, M. (2006). Comic Business. Theatricality, Dramatic Technique and Performance Contexts of Aristophanic Comedy. Oxford. Rogers, B. M. (2020). “Electra-style: Reception(s) of Aeschylus’ Oresteia in Aristophanes’ Clouds.” In Marshall and Marshall eds., 173–88.

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Rosenbloom, D. (2012). “Scripting Revolution: Democracy and Its Discontents in Late Fifth-Century Athens.” In A. Markantonatos and B. Zimmermann, eds. Crisis on Stage: Tragedy and Comedy in Late Fifth-Century Athens. Berlin, 405–42. Rosenbloom, D. (2018). “The Comedians’ Aeschylus.” In Kennedy ed., 54–87. Scodel, R. (2007). “Lycurgus and the State Text of Tragedy.” In C. Cooper ed. Politics of Orality. Leiden and Boston, 129–54. Segal, C. P. (1985). “Tragedy, Corporeality, and the Texture of Language: Matricide in the Three Electra Plays.” Classical World 79, 7–23. Simas, A. (2020). “Aeschylus and the Iconography of the Erinyes.” In Marshall and Marshall eds., 145–59. Smith, D. C. (2018). “The Reception of Aeschylus in Sicily.” In Kennedy ed., 9–53. Snell, B., ed. (1971). Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, Vol. 1. Göttingen. Solmsen, F. (1967). Electra and Orestes: Three Recognitions in Greek Tragedy. Amsterdam. Sorum, C. E. (1992). “Myth, Choice, and Meaning in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis.” American Journal of Philology 113, 527–42. Stewart, E. (2017). Greek Tragedy on the Move. Oxford. Storey, I. C. (2011). Fragments of Old Comedy. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA. Taplin, O. (1972). “Aeschylean Silences and Silences in Aeschylus.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72, 57–97. Taplin, O. (1977). The Stagecraft of Aeschylus. Oxford. Taplin, O. (2007). Pots & Plays : Interactions between Tragedy and Greek Vase-Painting of the Fourth Century B.C. Los Angeles. Tarkow, T. A. (1982). “Achilles and the Ghost of Aeschyles [sic] in Aristophanes’ Frogs.” Traditio 38, 1–16. Telò, M. (2016). Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon. Chicago. Thalmann, W. G. (1993). “Euripides and Aeschylus: The Case of the Hekabe.” Classical Antiquity 12, 126–59. Torrance, I. (2013). Metapoetry in Euripides. Oxford. Vahtikari, V. (2014). Tragedy Performances outside Athens in the Late Fifth and the Fourth Centuries BC. Helsinki. West, M. L. (1990). Studies in Aeschylus. Stuttgart. West, M. L. (2000). “Iliad and Aithiopis on Stage: Aeschylus and Son.” Classical Quarterly 50, 338–52. Winnington-Ingram, R. P. (1980). Sophocles: An Interpretation. Cambridge. Wyles, R. (2020). “The Aeschylean Sting in Wasps’ Tail: Aristophanes’ Engagement with the Oresteia.” Classical Quarterly 70, 529–40. Zeitlin, F. I. (1980). “The Closet of Masks: Role-playing and Myth-making in the Orestes of Euripides.” Ramus 9, 51–77. Zeitlin, F. I. (2006). “Redeeming Matricide? Euripides Rereads the Oresteia.” In V. Pedrick and S. M. Oberhelman, eds. The Soul of Tragedy: Essays on Athenian Drama. Chicago, 199–206. Zeitlin, F. I. (2012). “A Study in Form: Recognition Scenes in the Three Electra Plays.” Lexis 30, 361–78.

CHAPTER 31

The Transmission of Aeschylus: The Miracle of Survival Marsh McCall The Performance Texts of Aeschylus If we were able to spread out in front of us everything that Aeschylus had composed when he died, c. 455 bce, we would be viewing a large number of papyrus rolls containing something like 88 or 92 plays. The papyrus rolls might indeed be the same number, one for each play. Fifth-century Athenian tragedians composed tetralogies, sets of four plays – three tragedies and a satyr play – each time they competed for a prize in the early spring festival of Dionysus. The mission of this chapter is to tell the miraculous story of how seven of Aeschylus’s tragedies survived for close to 2000 years and made their way to the age of printing, marked by the appearance in Venice in 1518 of the first printed edition, the editio princeps. The very first dilemma, one that is hardly ever faced, is to ask: how did Aeschylus’s complete oeuvre get put onto papyrus rolls? The regular statement is that Aeschylus himself wrote his plays. I dispute this assumption strongly. Several months intervened between the official decision (probably in the autumn) to award competitive places in the next festival of Dionysus (the formal phrase is to “grant a chorus”) to three tragic playwrights. This period allowed for extended rehearsal time – for the actors, the chorus, the choreography. I do not know of any theatrical tradition in which copious changes fail to be made in all these aspects of a dramatic performance during the rehearsal period. If the assumption is that Aeschylus went into this period with his own finished papyrus rolls, how will all the inevitable erasures and additions be envisioned? The thought of unrolling and rolling back up a papyrus text constantly, in order to record at some points, perhaps, minute by minute changes, lacks all conviction. Aeschylus, I believe, composed orally. This is not a barrier for fifth-century poets. The daunting memorisation involved is not a barrier for fifth-century actors or chorus members. In addition, Aeschylus himself was an actor in all of his sets of plays. Indeed, he was, I argue, his own lead actor, e.g. he himself played Clytemnestra. He had his newest tetralogy already sufficiently composed by the time of the official selection process to recite and sing large portions. Throughout the weeks and months of rehearsals, he made and communicated orally the daily changes. For the early spring day of performance, the only guaranteed time the plays would be seen, this extended oral process had its several hours of glory, as the three tragedies

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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and the satyr play took Aeschylus towards what we can conjecture, from the surviving plays, was a high percentage of first-place finishes. Then Aeschylus, on his own or through a scribe, committed his orally composed and orally rehearsed plays to the fixed text of papyrus rolls.

The First Official Archive of Aeschylus in Athens This now becomes the moment when, as I believe, we can begin to talk about Aeschylus’s complete written oeuvre and its long subsequent history. For about two centuries, the path is fairly straightforward. The state archives of Athens contained an official copy of Aeschylus’s works, along with those of all Athenian dramatists. Did Aeschylus himself hand over, or designate a member of his family to hand over after his death, the papyrus rolls of his plays? It cannot be known, but I think it much more probable that the city authorised an official copy to be created. More troubling, as we start to worry about all the ways in which Aeschylus’s autograph – his “pure” text – may have been compromised, is that we know that at least some of his tragedies were reperformed in the latter part of the fifth century, perhaps especially in the 420s (see C. W. Marshall, Chapter 30 in this volume). We also know that, perhaps within the fifth century and certainly in the fourth, acting troupes took plays throughout the Greek world. It is certain that the actors, especially star actors, would sometimes elaborate on the text they had with them. Were new copies made that now were at some non-Aeschylean variance with what the Athenian archives held? The likelihood is extremely high.

Aeschylus in the Library of Alexandria Nevertheless, until the end of the fourth century bce, the copy of Aeschylus in the Athenian state archives remained as close as existed – and surely this was very close – to the words that were uttered in all of Aeschylus’s c. 22/23 sets of plays. This situation changed in a major way in the third century. In 331, when Alexander conquered Egypt, he founded a new city and named it, as he modestly did for many foundations throughout his meteoric campaigns, Alexandria. The city’s initial citizens were recruited from all over the Greek world, plus large numbers of Egyptians and a sizeable Jewish community. It quickly became one of the grandest cities of the entire Mediterranean and by the time of the Roman Empire it was second in size only to Rome itself, the population perhaps approaching at its peak half a million. It became the leading port of the eastern Mediterranean, for both official and private shipping, and it was the link for the luxury trade from India to Rome. Alexander divided his empire, messily, among his generals and by the last years of the fourth century Ptolemy had gained control of Egypt. For almost three hundred years the thoroughly Greek dynasty of the Ptolemies ruled. Close to 300 or shortly thereafter, Ptolemy, now Ptolemy I Soter (Saviour), created two institutions of monumental importance to the transmission and survival of Aeschylus. The first was a fabulous research centre, the Museum (Mouseion, a place connected with the Muses) and within a few years the second, a fabulous Library (see Casson 2001, chapter 3). For the next several centuries, the Museum attracted the leading scholars, writers and scientists of the Mediterranean world to conduct more or less uninterrupted research and the Library built up, at a frenzied pace, the greatest collection of antiquity, reaching a pinnacle of perhaps 500,000 papyrus rolls. Ptolemy and his successor Ptolemies could pour vast finances into the Museum and the Library and Egypt had a near monopoly on the prime writing material, the papyrus plant. Ptolemaic agents were dispatched to acquire everything they could, from poetry to cook books, the older the better (older copies would have gone



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through less recopying and thus would be closer to the “original”). It was something of a cottage industry to forge “originals” to please the agents. Ships unloading at Alexandria regularly had all their papyrus rolls confiscated. Naturally, possessing the core canon of Athenian tragedy – already by the end of the fifth century this consisted of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides – was, in addition to Homer, at the top of the wish list. The Library acquired copies of every papyrus roll it could identify and bought “originals” where possible. This has to mean that by the middle of the third century a considerably larger number of copies were now in existence, but the ongoing “gold standard” reputation of the Athenian archive copies is demonstrated by a wonderful story, even if apocryphal. The Library asked to borrow the Athenian “originals” of the three tragedians and paid a bond of fifteen talents, an immense amount, to guarantee return. Deluxe new copies were made, but the Library decided to send these back to Athens, retain the “originals” and forfeit the bond (see Reynolds and Wilson 2013, 7). At the Museum and the Library, a succession of top scholars sought to establish the best possible poetic text of the tragedies by comparing multiple copies and deciding among the textual variants offered, e.g. word variants, line omissions, line additions, transposition of lines, all of this aiming at a genuine critical edition. Commentaries were prepared on separate rolls. Zenodotus, Eratosthenes, Aristophanes of Byzantium, Aristarchus and Didymus are a sampling of the majestic sequence of names. In many ways, the period down into the first century ce is the apogee for the preservation of tragic texts. Aeschylus’s complete works almost certainly still existed. All his papyrus rolls were now arranged in alphabetical order (though only by first letter) in the poetry section of the Library, along with the rolls of learned commentaries. Along the way, a long-held popular belief has to be dismissed, namely that the Library of Alexandria was destroyed through fire by the soldiers of Julius Caesar during his conquest of Egypt – and Cleopatra – in 48 bce (see Casson 2001, 45–47). There surely was some damage suffered, but there is also ample evidence that the Museum and Library remained thoroughly and preeminently active until toward the end of the third century ce. For instance, it is known that the prodigious scholar Didymus was hard at work after 48. In fact, it was only in the second century ce that the alphabetical listings of the Library were expanded beyond just the first letter.

Aeschylus Culled: The School Selection Plays But the beginning of the end was indeed in sight. In around 270, there was fierce fighting in Alexandria. The area of the palace was laid waste and the nearby Museum and Library must have suffered heavily. At the same time, the end of the beginning had started to arrive for the preservation of Aeschylus. From the second century bce onward, Athenian tragedy was being performed less and less frequently throughout the Greek-speaking world. The tragedies were increasingly simply read and studied in schools. Fewer and fewer new copies were being undertaken and the plays that were copied came from a narrower and narrower selection. Very occasionally, a new copy of the entire corpus of one or another of the three canonical tragedians would be created. The outcome was inevitable. As hundreds and hundreds of tragedies were culled, there gradually evolved, perhaps by the third–fourth century ce, a new canon, which has come to be termed the School Selection Texts, so called since the tragedies were by now used almost exclusively in the upper level schools of late antiquity. The criteria by which plays made the “cut” from full corpus to School Selection Text are totally mysterious, although each survivor must have seemed attractive for teaching purposes. Seven Aeschylean tragedies made the cut,

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seven Sophoclean tragedies and ten Euripidean. I hope it will not be attacked as a spoiler to say here that all of these survivors from late antiquity also survived the next thousand years to the age of printing. The seven Aeschylean plays to make the cut were: Persians, Agamemnon, Choephori (Libation Bearers), Prometheus Bound, Eumenides, Seven against Thebes, Suppliants. This list, showing Eumenides separated from the first two plays of its trilogy, reflects the order of the oldest surviving manuscript of Aeschylus (see the section “Aeschylus’s Oldest Surviving Manuscript”).

From Papyrus Rolls to Codex Book A cardinal factor in the dire movement from complete corpus to the tiny number gradually chosen for the School Selection Texts is that in parallel with this process two further mammoth changes were taking place. The first is that the papyrus roll was being supplanted by the parchment codex manuscript form of a text. The second is that the Early Christian church was the successor to the scholars of late antiquity as the main producer of texts. From the second to the fourth century ce, thousands of decisions had to be made: was a particular papyrus roll to be tossed away, thus ending the life of the pagan text it contained? Or was it to be transcribed into a parchment codex manuscript? If so, was the pagan text, e.g. a roll of Aeschylus, to become the text of the manuscript or was it to be replaced by some early Christian text, thus again ending the life of the text of Aeschylus? By the fifth century, after the establishment of the Eastern Roman Empire in Byzantium, almost all the copying of Greek texts was in the hands of the monks and scribes of Byzantium. Why would the decision ever be made to copy papyrus rolls containing the seven School Selection Texts of Aeschylus onto a parchment codex manuscript rather than fill the codex with a Christian text? The question is hard to answer, but the beautiful truth – a miraculous truth – is that such a decision was made, and seven Aeschylean tragedies survived the vast transition from papyrus rolls to parchment codex manuscripts. The same baffling miracle also took place for the seven Sophoclean and ten Euripidean tragedies that had made the survival cut to become School Selection Texts. In fact, every classical text from all genres that survived to the age of printing experienced a kind of miracle by not being snuffed out as papyrus rolls became parchment codex manuscripts.

From Majuscule to Minuscule About two centuries later, yet another total upheaval in the transmission and survival of Aeschylus took place. In a period of economic distress in the Byzantine world and with the skins for making book pages at high prices, it grew imperative to get as much onto each page as possible. Up to this point, papyrus and parchment writing was, in one form or another, majuscule. This could be full capital letters, modified capital, or semi-capital (uncial). The titanic move towards more words per page resulted in the creation of lower case minuscule (cursive) letters. Once again, thousands of decisions had to be made, essentially by the Byzantine church, exactly along the same lines as had happened when papyrus rolls gave way to parchment codex manuscripts. The same searing questions were oppressively present: why put out the immense labour and expense to recopy Aeschylus’s seven tragedies in the new minuscule script? Why Sophocles’ seven? Why Euripides’ ten? Why create any minuscule manuscripts at all except for church texts? Yet again, however, parallel miracles took place and at some point, probably in the seventh or eighth century, the first minuscule manuscripts of



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the School Selection Texts of the three tragedians were created in Byzantium/Constantinople, and Athenian tragedy had survived its next close-to-terminal crisis. A further large-scale miracle took place. I mentioned above the astonishing fact that even in late antiquity, on rare occasions, papyrus rolls containing the entire corpus of a tragedian were newly copied. At least one such creation, probably no more, of Euripides’ works then miraculously was copied in a set of parchment codex manuscripts. And those majuscule manuscripts somehow were recopied in minuscule manuscripts. By the beginning of the ninth century, the three sets of School Selection Texts and a complete Euripides still existed. In the first part of the fourteenth century, a portion (one manuscript?) of the complete Euripides was discovered in Byzantium by the scholar Demetrius Triclinius (see Reynolds and Wilson 2013, 77). It contained nine plays, alphabetically arranged, going from the Greek letter E (epsilon) to K (kappa). No other parts of the complete Euripides survived, but this alphabetic group makes the survival of 19 Euripidean plays to the age of printing fundamentally different from the survival of Aeschylus and Sophocles.

Aeschylus’s Oldest Surviving Manuscript At some point in the tenth century, a copy of the earliest minuscule manuscript of Aeschylus or a copy of that copy was made in Byzantium. This manuscript became the direct or indirect ancestor of all subsequent Aeschylean manuscripts and is referred to as M, Laurentianus 32.9 (see the section “Aeschylus Arrives in Italy” for an explanation of the title). It is Aeschylus’s oldest surviving manuscript and is one of the most celebrated of all medieval manuscripts (see Smyth 1933, 17–19; Turyn 1943, 17–19). It seems that the 70 folios containing Aeschylus’s plays were initially in a single volume, together with the four books (75 folios) of Apollonius of Rhodes’ Hellenistic epic Argonautica. Almost immediately, the seven Sophoclean tragedies were added at the beginning of the enhanced volume. In the manuscript as it now exists, Sophocles comes first (folios 1–118), Aeschylus second (folios 119–89), Apollonius third (folios 190–264). There are at least three scribal hands at work. The third of these acted as corrector and also added marginal notes (the ancient scholia).

Manuscript Proliferation From the tenth-century creation of M through to the early sixteenth century, the survival of Aeschylus, i.e. the number of additional manuscripts, becomes very busy and very messy. Smyth’s 1933 catalogue lists c. 120 manuscripts; Turyn’s 1943 catalogue lists c. 135, scattered mainly through the great libraries of Europe. I will give a general overview by dividing the seven Aeschylean plays into three groups of M’s descendants. To begin, what of M itself? Until the fifteenth century, M remained in Byzantium/ Constantinople. At some point, probably in the thirteenth century, a terrible disaster maimed parts of the folios containing Agamemnon and Libation Bearers. Fourteen folios (a folio = two pages) in two different sections of the play somehow were lost, very possibly torn out. This meant that M no longer had vv. 311–1066 of Agamemnon or vv. 1160–1673 (the play’s final verse). V. 1159 is at the bottom of a page in M; the first line at the top of the next page is normally referred to as v. 10 of Libation Bearers. In other words, the opening verses of Libation Bearers were the last verses of the previous page, after the final verses of Agamemnon. Any manuscript copied from M after this calamity of the thirteenth century would also lack those two major portions of Agamemnon, plus the title and opening verses of Libation Bearers. The effects will be seen immediately below.

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Libation Bearers and Suppliants The first and staggeringly simplest group consists of Choephori (Libation Bearers) and Suppliants. For the approximately half-millennium from the creation of M to the first printed edition of Aeschylus in 1518, these two plays were copied only from M or from a copy of M. I will be very specific about Suppliants, but the situation with Libation Bearers is almost identical. In addition to M itself, there are just five surviving manuscripts containing Suppliants. They all are direct copies (apographs) of M. All but one also contain some or all of the other Aeschylean plays. They are conveniently referred to and are in the following libraries: Ma (fourteenth century, Laurentian = Medicean Library in Florence; already in the fourteenth century, it is missing the lost parts of M); Mb (fifteenth century, Bologna University Library); Mc (mid-1490s, Herzog-August Library of Wolfenbüttel, Germany); Md (c. 1540, Royal Library of Escorial, Spain); and Me (c. 1520, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris). The extremely slender character of the manuscript tradition of Libation Bearers and Suppliants – one manuscript and a handful of apographs – also means that the actual text of these two plays is the most fragile and contested of all the seven plays.

Agamemnon and Eumenides The second group consists of Agamemnon and Eumenides. However many manuscripts might have been created for these two plays, there never could have been a full Agamemnon unless one or more manuscripts were found that were descendants of M before the 14 folios were lost in the thirteenth century. In the early 1550s, two such manuscripts, F and T/Tr, containing the entire Agamemnon were indeed discovered in the Vatican Library by humanist scholars and this amazing addition to the available text up to that point enabled the 1557 Geneva edition of Aeschylus to print, for the first time, the entire play. One of the two manuscripts, T/Tr, turned out to be edited by one of the most productive of Byzantine scholars, Demetrius Triclinius, and like M has a rich supply of marginal notes (scholia). To that extent, it is more valuable than F, but F has a sounder text, without all the often wild textual emendations of Triclinius (see Fraenkel 1950, 7–34). Here is the basic information about them: F (c. 1340, Laurentian = Medicean Library in Florence); T/Tr (c. 1325, Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples). How can both F and T(Tr) have the entire Agamemnon when they were written after the folios in M were lost in the thirteenth century? The reason is that they are copies of a now-lost manuscript that was copied from M before the loss.

Prometheus, Seven against Thebes, Persians, the Byzantine Triad One last question on Agamemnon and Eumenides will lead us into the final section of Aeschylus’s medieval manuscript tradition. Why do I not summarise the manuscript history of those two plays together with those of Prometheus, Seven against Thebes and Persians, since all five of them, unlike Libation Bearers and Suppliants have more elements in their history than simply M and its apographs? The reason is astounding. At some point in the medieval tradition, a further process comparable to that of the School Selection Texts evolved and three of the seven Aeschylean plays gained a special status and are known as the Byzantine Triad. Exactly the same process occurred within the School Selection Texts of Sophocles and Euripides, resulting again in a special popularity of three plays for each of



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them. There is vigorous debate over whether this process took place as early as the sixth century or – a more orthodox view – in the eleventh or twelth century. At whatever point, Prometheus, Seven against Thebes and Persians, regularly arranged in that sequence, became the chosen Byzantine Triad. The criteria – dramatic, aesthetic, pedagogical? – behind their elevation above the other four Aeschylean plays remain entirely obscure. The result for their manuscript history, however, is stupendous. Libation Bearers and Suppliants survive from one manuscript and copies of it. Agamemnon and Eumenides survive from a small handful of manuscripts. The Byzantine Triad survive in scores of manuscripts from the thirteenth–sixteenth centuries. In Smyth’s catalogue of c. 120 manuscripts, Persians, for example, is represented in 64. One more characteristic of this explosion is fundamental. In ways that are not always clear, Aeschylus’s Byzantine Triad illustrates a high point of the activity of Byzantine scholarship. Among many others, the names of Thomas Magister and Demetrius Triclinius loom large. They were the “Alexandrian scholars” of the high Byzantine age: copying manuscripts, entering both old and new marginal scholia, comparing manuscripts, editing them and including their own conjectures. The downside, of course, is that, when a Byzantine scholar replaces a word or more in a manuscript, the prior reading is lost, and thus we are at one further remove from the possibility of knowing Aeschylus’s own text. The upside is that, with so many new manuscripts of the Byzantine Triad being created over several centuries, not all of them will show the editorial changes of particular Byzantine scholars and earlier readings may well still be preserved. In addition, M predates the work of the Byzantine scholars and serves as a counterbalance to the “texts” of someone like Triclinius. The scholars today who labour to understand manuscript traditions are centrally concerned to establish whether a given tradition is “closed/pure” or “open/contaminated”. The tradition of Libation Bearers and Suppliants is closed/pure. The relationship (stemma) of the small number of existing manuscripts to one another is known; there are no loose ends. The tradition of Agamemnon and Eumenides is relatively closed/pure, but the precise relationship to one another of F and T/Tr is disputed and the influence of Triclinius adds to the muddiness. Turyn in 1943 believed that he could create a meaningful stemma for different subgroups of the vast number of Byzantine Triad manuscripts, but in 1964 Dawe’s scrupulous study exploded all hope of anything approaching a clean tradition. The Byzantine Triad manuscripts are erratically cross-fertilised and it is unpredictable where and what readings in one manuscript may play a part in another. The verdict has to be “open/contaminated”, reflecting feverish manuscript activity in the scholarly world of Byzantium, especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In a general sense, the expectation of investigating classical Greek authors whose manuscript tradition will turn out to be wholly “closed/pure” is fairly low.

Aeschylus Arrives in Italy By the early part of the fifteenth century, the power and territorial ambitions of the Ottoman Turks had brought them perilously close to Constantinople. At the same time, the start of the Italian Renaissance, accompanied by a consuming humanistic passion for recovering ancient Greek texts, was well underway. Wealthy men of learning and their envoys descended upon Constantinople to scour the churches, monasteries and palaces for manuscripts to buy or, indeed, acquire by whatever means. Thus there ensued for a few wild decades a vast exodus of manuscripts to the west, primarily Italy. Byzantine church officials took their own manuscripts to Italy in the panicky search for a safe home. The loss of Constantinople in 1453 was a dire blow.

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The survival of Aeschylus, marked by multiple miracles already, now experienced another. The story of M is, of course, our focus and we can follow at least part of it. No later than November 1423, Giovanni Aurispa bought the manuscript in Constantinople for Niccolò de Niccoli and transported it – and 238 manuscripts altogether – back to Venice. In May of 1424, M was at least temporarily in Florence and was inspected by Ambrogio Traversari, who in a letter to Niccoli described it as containing six plays by Aeschines (the fourth-century bce Athenian orator)! Exactly when M moved permanently to Florence is not known, but by the sixteenth century it came to rest in the family library of the Medici, the Laurentian Library, whence the designation of the Aeschylean portion of the famous manuscript as M. To top off all of this wondrous sequence, you can still see the Medicean manuscript of Aeschylus today. It is regularly, though perhaps not quite always, on view in one of the main display cases of the Library, which is open to the public. And even though the manuscript also contains Sophocles and Apollonius of Rhodes, usually it is opened to one of the Aeschylean folios. The crowds in Florence seem to have vanished from your life as you look at this gorgeous tenthcentury monument to the survival of Aeschylus. If the gods are smiling on you, the manuscript will be open to the place where the catastrophic tear took place, and at the bottom of the left page you will see v. 1159 of Agamemnon while on the right page you will see v. 10 of Libation Bearers.

Aeschylus Arrives in Venice: The 1518 Aldine Editio Princeps: Six Plays; the 1557 Geneva Edition: All Seven Plays As seen in the initial destination of M when it travelled from Constantinople to Italy, Venice was already in 1423 a focus of humanistic learning and the craze for Greek manuscripts. It remained so, and it is where the miracle of Aeschylus’s survival reached its culmination in the first decades of the following century. Aldus Manutius is now our hero. He was born c. 1450 near Rome, was educated there and began to enter the world of letters in Rome in the early 1470s (see Lowry 1979, chapter II). The new universe of printing was also at pitch intensity in Rome, as elsewhere. Aldus was certainly aware of the excitement surrounding the Latin books coming off the printing presses in Rome, but up to the age of 40 his core ambitions and achievements were as an academic, a scholar and teacher of Latin texts. In the late 1470s, having become disenchanted with the intellectual ambience in Rome, he went to Ferrara where he learned Greek and began his devotion to the Greek language and Greek texts that would last his lifetime. He was drawn, informally or formally, into the circle of the scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, but the humanist Aldus worshipped more than any other was Angelo Poliziano. By 1489 or 1490 Aldus had moved to Venice and undertaken to embroil himself in the turbulent and cutthroat world of Venetian printing houses. The reasons for changing his entire style of life are murky, but this chapter would not be possible if Aldus had not made the decision. He purchased property, set up a printing house, sought out business partners and investors, and in 1494 or 1495 launched the products of the Aldine Press (see Lowry 1979, 72–76). They were pretty equally Latin and Greek, but Aldus’s most fervent desire was to offer the Greek classics to the reading public. The unforgettable dolphin and anchor device that greets the reader opening an Aldine volume is as famous as the Aldine Press itself. Books printed before 1500 are termed incunabula. The Aldine Press can count more than 30 incunabula. The first Greek author is the Hellenistic pastoral poet Theocritus (1495); one dramatic poet, Aristophanes (1498), is in the list. The tragedians had to wait until the sixteenth century. Sophocles’ editio princeps appeared in 1502, Euripides’ in 1503. Probably Aldus had begun work on Aeschylus before his death



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in 1515, but it was left to his longtime partner – and father-in-law – Andrea Torresani to bring the process to publication in 1518. The average print run for Aldine texts was c. 1000 copies (see Lowry 1979, 257) and this is what we should imagine taking place in the House of Aldus in 1518, as Aeschylus neared the moment when the first printed copies of his immortal tragedies would appear before the eyes of the Renaissance world. We’ve reached the sunshine of Aeschylus’s miraculous preservation and the completion of our mission in this chapter: the first printed edition, the editio princeps, in 1518 at the Aldine press in Venice. Predictably, of course, the mission is not quite complete. The Aldine edition’s title page lists only six plays. There is no entry for Choephori (Libation Bearers), although in fact the whole play except vv. 1–9 is in the volume. As we saw earlier in discussing the transmission of Agamemnon, sometime in the thirteenth century a number of pages in the Agamemnon part of the Medicean manuscript were lost (torn out?). All subsequent manuscript copies of the Medicean manuscript, therefore, also are missing huge portions, about three-quarters of Agamemnon and the very first verses of Libation Bearers (Figure 31.1). The editor of the Aldine editio princeps, Franciscus Asulanus, had for his manuscript source in front of him as he prepared his Aeschylus volume either the Medicean manuscript itself (it is, in fact, doubtful that M was in Venice at all during this time) or one or more of several surviving manuscripts that are direct copies, apographs, of the Medicean manuscript. Thus, it was inevitable that Asulanus would print Agamemnon and Libation Bearers as a single play with the title Agamemnon covering both plays. It would be another generation before, in the early 1550s, two manuscripts (F and T/Tr) were discovered in the Vatican Library that were copies of a copy of the Medicean manuscript before the tears were made from it. This enabled the great scholar Victorius and the great printer Stephanus to produce the 1557 Geneva edition of Aeschylus in which, for the first time, the titles of all seven plays and the full text of Agamemnon are present.

Figure 31.1  Facsimile image from the Medicean manuscript of Aeschylus (Rostagno 1896, pl. 18). The text of Agamemnon breaks off at the bottom of the left page, after v.1159; the text of Libation Bearers starts in, without any sign of a change of play, at the top of the right page. Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

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Papyrus Fragments One further element in the transmission and survival of Aeschylus must be considered briefly: papyrus fragments. Many hundred have been dug up and published over the last century and a half. They range from a single word to substantial passages and have survived largely in the dusty and dry sands of Egypt, especially the Greco-Roman town of Oxyrhynchus. The very best way for a non-specialist to be introduced to Aeschylean fragments is by consulting vol. III of Alan Sommerstein’s (2008) invaluable Loeb Library edition and translation of Aeschylus. Here I mention just two fragments as of particularly huge importance for the study of Aeschylus (for these two fragments, see Garvie 2006, 1–28 and 204–33). Both have to do with Suppliants and are discussed in Kennedy, Chapter 8 of this volume. First is a documentary fragment, Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 2256.3, published in 1952, a fragment of a list of prizes awarded at the festival of Dionysus. In what can be read, it states that Aeschylus won first prize with his Danaids plays and that Sophocles finished second. This should mean that Suppliants the opening play of the Danaids set, cannot have been produced before Sophocles first competed, probably in 468. Further, the first two letters, ar-, either of the word for archon or of a particular archon can be read, and it is known that Archedemides was archon for the year 463. Thus, Suppliants might well now be given putatively to that year. This tiny fragment revolutionised Aeschylean studies since, up to its publication, Suppliants had been regarded for a very long time as by far the earliest of surviving Aeschylean dramas, in fact the very first tragedy that we have, produced as early as the 490s. Second, a literary fragment, frag. 44, from the third tragedy in the Danaids set, itself titled Danaids, seems to be part of a trial scene. Hypermestra, one of the Suppliants all of whom have been forced into marriage with their violent Egyptian cousins and have been ordered by their father to kill those cousins on the wedding night, has fallen in love and spares her new husband. For this betrayal of her father’s command, she is brought to trial. The speaker of the seven verses of frag. 44 is Aphrodite and she seems to be defending the action of Hypermestra by extolling the power and beauty of love through describing in gorgeously sensual language the desire of Heaven to mate with Earth. There is, I believe, no passage in Athenian tragedy more potent than this brief fragment. The possible parallels with the several divine presences in the trial scene of Eumenides are apparent and fascinating.

Coda at the House of Aldus Let us return, for a final glimpse, to Aldus Manutius. Although Aldus died in 1515, three years before Aeschylus’s editio princeps, the press remained as active as ever under the leadership of Aldine family members and close colleagues. Today, you can still pay homage to the famous humanist whose press brought so much of surviving Greek literature into the age of printing. Once you are in Venice, starting from San Marco, cross the Rialto, go one or two streets further, turn left and weave to and fro for several more streets and you will find yourself at 2311 Rio Terà Secondo, just before reaching Campo Sant’ Agostin. The House of Aldus is now an eye-catching mustard colour but only moderate in size, hardly even a minor palazzo. The business was conducted on the lower floor, the eating and living quarters on the upper floor (see Lowry 1979, 92–94). Erasmus paid a visit in 1508 and there is a marvellous report of him working hard in one corner, while Aldus concentrated in another corner and



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retorted curtly to all interruptions, “I’m studying”. There are two inscriptions on the front of the House honouring the family’s contributions to printing and learning. And there is a pleasant trattoria close by with canopied tables in the Campo and a full view of the House. A couple of hours over one or two glasses of something attractive and a plate of pasta, pondering how the world changed – right here! – will make life seem enhanced.

FURTHER READING The very best place to start and continue further serious exploration of the history and survival of papyri and manuscripts is by having Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, on a reading table near you at all times. This irreplaceable masterpiece first appeared in 1968, with subsequent editions in 1974, 1991 and – after Reynolds’ death – 2013. It is scholarly in every sense and is most helpfully used as a constant reference. The chapter headings give an idea of the scope: “Antiquity”, “The Greek East”, “The Latin West”, “The Renaissance”, “Some Aspects of Scholarship since the Renaissance”, “Textual Criticism”. A much more narrowly defined but also superb scholarly aid is Johnson 2004. Johnson’s explicit mission is to describe and analyse more than 300 Oxyrhynchus literary – not documentary – papyri and almost 110 papyri not from Oxyrhynchus. All of his literary texts also are attested in medieval manuscripts and thus are known to us today. He carries out his mission with amazing exactitude. For anyone who wants to see a papyrologist at work, this is the place to go. Two further high scholarly achievements (out of many) by Nigel Wilson (the Greek side of Reynolds and Wilson) that cover the millennium between late antiquity and the Renaissance are: Scholars of Byzantium (London 1983, rev. ed. 1996) and From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance (London 1992). A more approachable survey is Casson 2001. It moves gracefully all the way from the ancient Near East to the Middle Ages but concentrates on Greece (with a whole chapter on the Library of Alexandria) and Rome. On the Renaissance and Humanism, Lowry 1979 is an immense resource. It is sizeable and detailed, but thoroughly readable; every page illuminates some facet of its broad subject. It is a special pleasure for me to recognise Lowry’s scholarship: for a year, almost 65 years ago, we were in the same residential house at Shrewsbury School, one of England’s oldest public schools. We lost touch as soon as I returned to Harvard for my college years, but now – in fact for the past 40 years, even though Lowry died in 2002 – I have felt a renewed tie through my admiration for this distinguished book. The very best commentaries on individual plays are a concise and rich mine for Aeschylean manuscript history and survival. Pride of place must go to the first part of the first volume of Fraenkel’s (1950) monumental three-volume introduction, text, translation and commentary on Agamemnon. In what is called “Prolegomena” (1–61), the magisterial Fraenkel treats (I) “The Manuscripts” and (II) “Some Editions and Commentaries”. It is slow going, but the level of scholarship is breathtaking. Taking the other tragedies chronologically, the recommendations are: A. F. Garvie, Persae (Oxford 2009), lvii–lxi; G. O. Hutchinson, Septem contra Thebas (Oxford 1985), xl–lv; A. J. Bowen, Suppliant Women (2013), 32–35; A. F. Garvie, Libation Bearers (Oxford 1986), liv–lx; A. H. Sommerstein, Eumenides (Cambridge 1989), 35–37; M. Griffith, Prometheus Bound (Cambridge 1983), 35–38. Finally, for all those who are curious enough about Aeschylus to want to see the Greek text alongside an excellent English translation, Alan Sommerstein’s (2008) three-volume Loeb Classical Library edition with introductions, text and translation is indispensable. Vol. I contains Persians, Seven against Thebes, Suppliants and Prometheus Bound; vol. II contains the Oresteia; vol. III contains almost 500 fragments, including the two crucial papyrus fragments concerning the Suppliants trilogy discussed above in the section “Papyrus Fragments”

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REFERENCES Casson, L. (2001). Libraries in the Ancient World. New Haven. Dawe, R. D. (1964). The Collation and Investigation of Manuscripts of Aeschylus. Cambridge. Fraenkel, E. (1950). Aeschylus: Agamemnon. Vol. I. Oxford. Garvie, A. F. (1986). Libation Bearers. Oxford. Garvie, A. F. (2006). Aeschylus’ Supplices. Second Edition. Bristol. Garvie, A. F. (2009). Aeschylus Persae. Oxford. Griffith, M. (1983). Prometheus Bound. Cambridge. Hutchinson, G. O. (1985). Aeschylus Septem contra Thebas. Oxford. Johnson, W. A. (2004). Bookrolls and Scribes in Oxyrhynchus. Toronto. Lowry, M. (1979). The World of Aldus Manutius. Ithaca, NY. Reynolds, L. D. and Wilson, N. G. (2013 [1991]). Scribes and Scholars. Third Edition. Oxford. Rostagno, E. (1896). L'eschilo Laurenziano: Facsimile, pubblicato sotto gli auspici del Ministero dell’istruzione pubblica. Florence. Smyth, H. W. (1933). “Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Aeschylus.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 44, 1–62. Sommerstein, A. H. (1989). Aeschylus Eumenides. Cambridge. Sommerstein, A. H. (2008). Aeschylus III Fragments. Cambridge, MA. Turyn, A. (1943). The Manuscript Tradition of the Tragedies of Aeschylus. New York.

CHAPTER 32

The Bow of Ulysses: Aeschylus and his Translators Deborah H. Roberts In the preface to his 1831 translation of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, John S. Harford (banker, biographer and artist) defends with “unfeigned diffidence” his presumption in undertaking such a task: Although various translations of this drama have been published, distinguished by no ordinary ability, the author deems the path yet open of honourable competition. So great indeed are the obstacles to success, arising out of the peculiar style of certain parts of the original, that, like the bow of Ulysses in the hand of the suitors, it seems destined to invite and to baffle the efforts of successive translators. (Harford 1831, viii)

Efforts to translate Agamemnon and the other surviving plays of Aeschylus into English begin in the late eighteenth century with Thomas Morell’s Prometheus in Chains (1773) and Robert Potter’s The Tragedies of Aeschylus (1777) and continue in ever-increasing numbers to the present day. There are translations designed to assist the student of Greek or the reader whose Greek is rusty, translations for the general reader, translations for classroom use by students who know no Greek and translations suited for performance or written for a specific performance; the last two types become increasingly prominent from the middle of the twentieth century on. Variations include such diverse examples as an abridged Agamemnon for boys and girls to read aloud (Robinson 1921); Prometheus Bound presented as a theosophist allegory (Pryse 1925); and a version of Persians commissioned as a response to the 2003 Iraq invasion (McLaughlin 2005). Translations range from renderings identified (sometimes surprisingly) as “literal” to adaptations that radically remake their source. Who are the translators? From the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, they are scholars, schoolteachers, clergymen, poets and other men and women of letters, amateurs of the arts in assorted professions (bankers, lawyers) and members of the nobility. Whatever their credentials, a classical education with knowledge of Greek is generally presumed: no surprise, given the gender and class of most of the translators. Augusta Webster, one of several women who translate Aeschylus during this period, confronts possible doubts about her expertise by naming her husband Thomas Webster as editor on the title page; his

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Peter Burian and Jacques Bromberg. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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credentials (“MA, late fellow of Trinity College Cambridge”) offer “a better guarantee of accuracy than a lady’s name could give” (Webster 1866, n.p.; on Webster and others, see Prins 2017). From the mid-twentieth century, translators tend to be academic classicists, poets, playwrights or directors. Amateurs like Harford are few (Birnbaum and Harold 1978; Rubenstein 2003), perhaps as a result of the decreased role of ancient Greek in higher education; but some poets and playwrights who have translated Aeschylus in recent decades are ignorant of the language and work from previous translations or in collaboration with a scholar. While these translators vary widely in their approaches to Aeschylean tragedy, to their intended audience and to the task of translation, the idea that Aeschylus’s poetry presents “obstacles to success” likely to be beyond the translator’s capacity is remarkably persistent, and it is with translators’ articulation of and response to this challenge that I am here primarily concerned; my focus is on verse translation, and on text rather than performance, and my examples are taken from both well-known translations and others. I avoid judgement: tastes vary, contemporary translations are best evaluated in relation to particular contexts of use, and the same changes in linguistic usage and poetic discourse that cause translations to become dated make us inadequate judges of earlier translations. I draw on prefaces both because prefatory comments provide a guide to how translators envision their task and because readers’ experiences of a translation are conditioned by its paratextual framing. Harford’s diffidence finds echoes in other nineteenth century translators, whose recognition of the magnitude of the task they have undertaken sometimes involves a self-deprecating disclaimer: the translation is an experiment suggested by a friend (Symmons 1824, v); the translator would not have acted without a learned friend’s encouragement (Fox 1835, v); the translation was originally intended just for friends (Fitzgerald 1876, iii; cf. Swanwick 1865, iii). A contemporary version of this topos occurs in Anne Carson’s introduction to An Oresteia (which combines her translations of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Electra and Euripides’ Orestes): Not my idea to do this. It was the inspiration of the artistic director of the Classics Stage Company in New York City, Brian Kulick …. I said, “Who needs this?” – meaning, Aiskhylos has already given us an Oresteia richer than rubies, of which lots of good translations exist. Why monkey around with it? (Carson 2009, ix–x)

Carson’s “richer than rubies” looks back to a long tradition of efforts to characterise what is extraordinary about Aeschylean tragedy. Potter’s introduction to his Agamemnon evokes the sources and effects of Longinus’s sublime and suggests (by the word “oracular”) that Aeschylus offers truth through riddles: Great in his conceptions, bold and daring in his metaphors, strong in his passions, he here touches the heart with uncommon emotions. The odes are particularly sublime, and the oracular spirit, that breathes thro them, adds a wonderful elevation and dignity to them. (Potter 1777, 211)

Translators speak of Aeschylus’s work as sublime (especially Prometheus Bound, generally regarded as one of his greatest dramas until doubts about authorship become widespread in the later twentieth century), as grand, majestic or lofty, and as archaic, savage or primitive. Charles Cavendish Clifford, in the introduction to his 1852 Prometheus Chained, contrasts Aeschylus with Sophocles through this architectural analogy: The works of Sophocles I should compare to such a temple as that of the Olympian Jupiter at Athens must have been when it stood entire. With the beauty of its proportions, the perfect



The Bow of Ulysses: Aeschylus and his Translators 439 harmony of the general design, the chaste splendour of its ornaments, the severest critic could find no fault. The genius of Aeschylus I should liken to one of those Egyptian temples, vast, stupendous, impressing the mind with solemn awe, embellished with devices of vicious taste, and full of strange uncouth monsters, whose stony gaze seems enigmatic of some hidden mystery. (Clifford 1852, vii)

The oracular here no longer suggests dignity or elevation (as in Potter) but a primitive and monstrous religiosity, of which we are nonetheless in awe. Some translators find Aeschylean drama primitive or otherwise anomalous in genre, describing plays as lyricodramatic spectacle (Blackie 1850, 1); as epic (Swanwick 1873, 75) or rhetorical (Murray 1935, 18) rather than dramatic; as cantata (Campbell 1906, xx) or oratorio (Roche 1964, xvii). But whatever their view of genre, the majority of Aeschylus’s translators seek to render his poetry as poetry. In Lawrence Venuti’s formulation, such translation will inevitably create new poetry, as translators cultivate poetic effects that may seek to maintain an equivalence to the source text, but that fall short of and exceed it because the translation is written in a different language for a different culture. (Venuti 2013, 174)

The most obvious of these poetic effects is verse form itself. For those before the midtwentieth century this usually means representing the iambic trimeter of most Aeschylean dialogue by blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) – both because it is similar to the Greek line and because it is familiar from the Elizabethan dramatists. There are exceptions: some translators try to reproduce the Greek trimeter (Cayley 1867) or use Alexandrines (Kennedy 1878), and Gilbert Murray’s translations of Aeschylus (1920–39) are written in rhymed pentameter couplets. During the same period, most translators render Greek lyric by English stanzaic verse, often in the manner of odes, ballads or hymns; George C. W. Warr’s “modulated prose” is a striking exception (Warr 1900, xi). They generally reject the possibility of imitating Greek meters (but see Cayley 1867; Davies 1868), aiming instead to achieve a similar effect. Most further distinguish lyric from dialogue by the use of rhyme, as an essential feature of English lyric or as a substitute for the lost music of Greek tragedy (among early exceptions see Morell 1773; Cayley 1867; Plumptre 1868; Kennedy 1878). Anapaests are sometimes given a distinctive metric form, sometimes assimilated to dialogue or lyric. Beginning in the 1930s we find more experiments with line length and type in dialogue, including Louis MacNeice’s four stress line, Richmond Lattimore’s loose Alexandrines and Tony Harrison’s alliterative pairs of two beat phrases, with rhymed couplets for stichomythia (MacNeice 1936; Lattimore 1953; Harrison 1981). Lyric is increasingly unrhymed (MacNeice 1936; Hamilton 1937; Thomson 1938) and from the 1960s on free verse becomes common; the difference between dialogue and lyric is sometimes negligible, especially where short unrhymed lines or lines of varied length are favoured for both registers (Lembke 1975; Mueller 2002; Doerries 2015). Two translations in the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series (Scully and Herington 1975; Lembke and Herington 1981) seek to compensate for this levelling effect with stage directions that identify form or metre. In recent decades we find frequent efforts to reassert the difference between dialogue and lyric (Burian 1991, xiv; Shapiro and Burian 2003, 40; Poochigian 2011, xix; Mulroy 2016, x; Lefkowitz and Romm 2017, xv; Taplin 2018, xxxi), a difference marked by a return to rhyme in lyrics (Poochigian 2011; Mulroy 2016; Taplin 2018), by the use of prose for dialogue and verse for lyrics (Collard 2002, 2008; Sommerstein 2008) and by typographical means, generally indentation (Lefkowitz and Romm 2017; Taplin 2018) or italics (Meineck 1998; Grene and

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Lattimore 2013; Mulroy 2016). The extensive use of typographical markers may make translators seem more preoccupied with the fact of difference than with the poetic identity of these different forms: instead of experiencing the varieties of Aeschylean verse through the varied rhythms of English poetry, readers encounter difference through a visual correlative of poetic variation; the use of italics may also suggest that lyric entails an intensification or heightening. If Aeschylean verse form presents challenges, what most evokes translators’ mingled admiration and apprehension is the language of Aeschylean poetry. As Gilbert Murray puts it: The sense of difficulty, and indeed of awe, with which a scholar approaches the task of translating Aeschylus depends directly on its greatness as poetry. It is in part a matter of diction. The language of Aeschylus is an extraordinary thing, the syntax stiff and simple, the vocabulary obscure, unexpected, and steeped in splendor. Its peculiarities cannot be disregarded, or the translation will be false in character. Yet not Milton himself could produce in English the same great music, and a translator who should strive ambitiously to represent the complex effect of the original would clog his own powers of expression and strain his instrument to breaking. (Murray 1920, vii)

Translators seek to spell out for readers the nature and effects of Aeschylean language, emphasising its strangeness (“rich, sonorous, poetic words remote from the language of everyday”, Bevan 1912, viii) or its arresting variety: “As a poet with words he is grand, magisterial, craggy, sonorous, colourful, brilliant; but he is also delicate, natural, everyday” (Collard 2002, lv). In their proliferation of adjectives, often metaphorical, these descriptions of Aeschylean poetry seem compensatory, seeking to give readers (in language itself poetic) an idea or image of what the translator will inevitably fail fully to realise. Paul Roche writes, “What [Aeschylus] saw he sent flooding out of him, crashing down in thunderous poetry” (Roche 1962, xix). And for Anne Carson, the experience of Agamemnon in Greek is “like watching a forest fire. Big, violent, changing every minute and the sound not like anything else. Every character in Agamemnon sets fire to language in a different way” (Carson 2009, 3). Murray’s mention of Milton recalls another means by which translators endeavour to convey the aesthetic qualities and literary standing of an author readers cannot experience in the original: the evocation of a poetic voice like the author’s. For Aeschylus this usually means Milton, Marlowe, Shakespeare, the Bible. And in summoning up, only to dismiss it, the possibility that a poet as great as Milton might be able to translate Aeschylus, Murray echoes a related prefatory topos: the view, alternately nostalgic and messianic, that there was (or may yet be) some poet who is Aeschylus’s ideal translator. Edward Fitzgerald declares (in the introduction to his Agamemnon) that to re-create the tragedy, body, and soul, into English … must be reserved – especially the Lyric part – for some Poet, worthy of that name, and of congenial Genius with the Greek. Would that every one such would devote himself to such work! … [Dryden], perhaps, might have rendered such a service to Aeschylus and to us. Or, to go further back in our own Drama, one thinks what Marlowe might have done … (Fitzgerald 1876, v–vi; cf. Molyneux 1879, xi; Lowell 1978, n.p.)

In the absence of such a Poet, the central challenge of translating Aeschylus’s poetry takes two forms: How is the translator to find an idiom or poetic diction that does justice to his? How is the translator to deal with features of Aeschylean style such as enigmatic or compressed expression, compound words, imagery and figures of speech? In 1850, J. S. Blackie urges the language of the preceding generation of poets (presumably the Romantics) as a medium for the translation of Aeschylus’s Greek (Blackie 1850, I.10). But in keeping with the archaising tradition which dominated English translation of



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classical texts during much of the Victorian era and beyond, many translators in succeeding decades adopt the position Ernest Bevan articulates in the preface to his Prometheus Bound: “For us the spirit of Aeschylus can be expressed only in language of an archaic complexion.” He recommends a mingled idiom that draws on the Elizabethan dramatists, Milton and the King James Bible (Bevan 1902, viii–xiii). It is difficult for a twenty-firstcentury reader to know when translators are simply persisting in the mild archaism of older poetic diction and when they are adopting something like the practice Bevan urges. But we can detect such archaising in words like “fardel” and “yeanling” and in more extensive borrowings, as when Ocean says, echoing Macbeth (V.iii), “Knowest thou not, Prometheus, that apt words/Minister healing to a mind diseased?” (Cookson 1922, 177; Warr 1900, 2; Pember 1895, 142). Mildly archaising poetic diction persists in some translations well into the middle of the twentieth century (Hamilton 1937; Campbell 1940; Lucas 1954). This is then largely displaced by a variety of contemporary forms of speech. To take only two examples out of many, Richmond Lattimore seeks to evoke Aeschylus’s density of signification and flow of syntax in a more expansive poetic idiom, plainspoken without being ordinary, while Raphael and McLeish condense Aeschylus’s Greek to create a forceful and compact line. Compare the two on Agamemnon 966–972 (Murray 1955): ῥίζης γὰρ οὔσης φυλλὰς ἵκετ᾽ ἐς δόμους, σκιὰν ὑπερτείνασα σειρίου κυνός. καὶ σοῦ μολόντος δωματῖτιν ἑστίαν, θάλπος μὲν ἐν χειμῶνι σημαἰνει μολόν· ὅταν δὲ τεύχῃ Ζεὺς ἀπ᾽ ὄμφακος πικρᾶς οἶνον, τότ᾽ ἤδη ψῦχος ἐν δόμοις πέλει, ἀνδρὸς τελείου δῶμ᾽ ἐπιστρωφωμένου. For when the root lives yet the leaves will come again to fence the house with shade against the Dog Star’s heat, and now you have come home to keep your hearth and house you bring with you the symbol of our winter’s warmth; but when Zeus ripens the green clusters into wine there shall be coolness in the house upon those days because the master ranges his own halls once more. (Lattimore 1953) When a root is firmly planted, leaves return: a shade for the heat of day. You have returned, our warmth when it is cold, our comfort in summer, when Zeus turns sourness to wine. The master is home. (Raphael and McLeish 1979) Some adopt an idiom that is not only contemporary but at times colloquial; so, for example, in James Scully and C. J. Herington’s translation of Prometheus Bound, Power tells Hephaestus, “So be a bleeding heart” (σὺ μαλθακίζου, 79) and calls Prometheus “you cocky bastard” (ἐνταῦθα νῦν ὕβριζε, PB 82) (Scully and Herington 1975).

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The turn towards straightforward and colloquial speech is in part a response to the increased emphasis on performance; translators for the stage often question whether modern audiences can cope with Aeschylean language. MacNeice notes that he has “consciously sacrificed … the liturgical flavour of the diction” and Douglas Young, whose Oresteia is “designed to be easily readable and speakable and intelligible to an audience on first hearing”, does not try “to render the precious and conceited aspects of Aeschylean diction” (MacNeice 1936, 8; Young 1974, xiv). It is striking, then, that one of the most noteworthy stage translations makes use of an idiosyncratic invented diction. Tony Harrison, writing for Peter Hall’s production, describes his version as “written to be performed, a rhythmic libretto for masks, music, and an all male company” (Harrison 1981). To call a version a “libretto” implies incompleteness: Harrison sees himself not as supplying through poetic form the missing music of Greek tragedy, but as engaging in a collaboration in which actual music will play a part. Nonetheless, Harrison’s translation has its own musicality, evoking Old English alliterative verse, (“Wish it were over, this waiting, this watching”, says the watchman in Agamemnon’s opening lines), with variations in the choral odes and other lyric passages, including the use of ballad form, as in this condensation of Agamemnon 104–15: Two preybirds came as prophecy blackwing and silverhue came for our twin kings to see out of the blue the blue (Harrison 1981, 6) Harrison’s language is occasionally colloquial or deliberately anachronistic (“dog-tags” identify the urns that hold the ashes of dead soldiers) (Harrison 1981, 15) but it also engages in a kind of invention that recalls both Aeschylus’s own use of compounds and Old English kennings, and thus has a defamiliarising effect, evoking an archaic world that is not the classical world we have come to expect: Agamemnon and Menelaus are “clanchiefs” and “bloodkin” (Harrison 1981; Taplin 2006 and works cited there). In the first decades of the twenty-first century, Aeschylus’s translators continue to be eclectic in their choice of idiom. Bryan Doerries’ Prometheus Bound is deliberately “spare and incomplete” (Doerries 2015, xv); Anne Carson’s Agamemnon moves nimbly across registers, deploying everyday speech (“My gift. Oh yes. I was the local prophet”); rich compound neologisms (“golddrenched”, “dreamvisible”); Greek words explained in the text (“schismos means/a cleaving a cutting a splitting a chopping in two”); and sound effects (“BAM BAM BAM”) (Carson 2009, 25, 36, 52, 55). Taplin’s Oresteia aims for an Aeschylean mixture of high and low diction, deliberately incorporating language that is “‘traditional,’ even in places ‘high-flown’” (Taplin 2018, xxx). Aeschylus’s striking use of plain speech to powerful effect presents another challenge and at all periods we find some translators disregarding this Aeschylean register in favour of one that seems to offer a heightened effect. Orestes’ concluding words in Libation Bearers, as he departs driven by Furies the chorus cannot see, provide an apt example (Libation Bearers 1061–2 Murray 1955): ὑμεῖς μὲν οὐχ ὁρᾶτε τάσδ’, ἐγὼ δ’ ὁρῶ· ἐλαύνομαι δὲ κοὐκέτ᾽ ἂν μείναιμ᾽ ἐγὼ. You cannot see them, but I see them. I am driven from this place. I can stay here no longer. (Lattimore 2013)



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This becomes: And see you nothing there? Look, look! I see them. Distraction’s in the sight, I fly, I fly! (Potter 1777) Ye see them not. I see them. There! AWAY! The hell-hounds hunt me; here I may not stay. (Blackie 1850) No! You can’t See them! I see them! Hellhounds! Hounding! I can’t – can’t Stay! (Mueller 2002) Diction is only a part of the story; translators regularly identify Aeschylus as hard to translate because features of his writing are either themselves obscure or outlandish or risk becoming so in translation. They variously cite the profundity and compression of Aeschylus’s thought (Longford 1933, 5; Poochigian 2011, xviii); his use of metaphors – dense, flowing into each other, sometimes grotesque to later sensibilities (Shapiro and Burian 2003, 40; Carson 2009, 5; Dawson 1970, xxviii); his use of compound words and figures of speech not at home in English (Medwin 1832, iii–iv; Symmons 1824, 11–12). I offer as case studies three passages that present one or more of these challenges, with examples of translators’ strategies. One recurring feature of these examples is a divergence between the impulse towards clarification (a characteristic “deformation” of translation, Berman 2012, 244–46) and the impulse to communicate or even emphasise the enigmatic, difficult, or obscure.

“The Ideas of the Poet” In the introduction to his Agamemnon, which aims to be “literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language”, Robert Browning imagines a reader willing to relinquish “musicality” in favour of “the ideas of the poet” and prepared to find the presentation of these ideas in translation “very hard reading indeed” (Browning 1877, v–vi). As an example of a passage in which “the ideas of the poet” are in an obvious sense at play, consider these lines from Agamemnon’s “Hymn to Zeus” (Agamemnon 176–83, Page 1972): τὸν φρονεῖν βροτοὺς ὁδώσαντα, τὸν πάθει μάθος θέντα κυρίως ἔχειν. στάζει δ’ ἔν γ ᾽ ὕπνῳ πρὸ καρδίας μνησιπήμων πόνος· καὶ παρ᾽ ἄκοντας ἦλθε σωφρονεῖν. δαιμόνων δέ που χάρις βίαιος σέλμα σεμνὸν ἡμένων.

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Zeus, who guided men to think, who has laid it down that wisdom comes alone through suffering. Still there drips in sleep against the heart grief of memory; against our will temperance comes. From the gods who sit in grandeur grace is somehow violent. (Lattimore 2013) This passage is “hard reading” in many respects, but I focus here on translators’ response to the central idea, πάθει μάθος (by suffering, learning), whose apparent simplicity conceals a basic ambiguity (is suffering a sufficient or a necessary condition for learning?) and allows for a variety of possible understandings of each of the two words and of the phrases’ application. Our earliest translators often engage in a mode of elaboration that both reflects contemporary poetic practice and seeks to clarify Aeschylus’s concise conceptual pairing. Potter’s 1777 version of lines 176–178 personifies πάθος as a feminine abstraction who both educates and disciplines mortals: Yet often, when to wisdom’s seat Jove deigns to guide man’s erring feet, His virtues to improve; He to affliction gives command To form him with her chastening hand: Symmons 1824 reads πάθος metaphorically as a school, with Jove as a kind of superintendent: Jove the great God Who show’d us mortals wisdom’s road And who by sapient rule Has made adversity instruction’s school. Later translators are less expansive and less given to added figures of speech; and although some continue to provide a kind of explanatory figurative framing for πάθει μάθος (A.S. Way 1908 has “from suffering’s root the flower instruction groweth”), suffering (or pain, or experience) and learning (or wisdom, or knowledge, or truth) are increasingly featured simply as two conjoined elements. To sober thought Zeus paves the way, And wisdom links with pain. (Swanwick 1865) Guide of mortal man to wisdom He who has ordained the law Knowledge won through suffering. (Hamilton 1937) He leads us on the way of wisdom’s Everlasting law that truth Is only learned by suffering it. (Roche 1962)



The Bow of Ulysses: Aeschylus and his Translators 445 Zeus puts us on the road to mindfulness, Zeus decrees we learn by suffering. (Ruden 2017)

Reading this series, we might picture the translator of πάθει μάθος as like an actor about to recite Hamlet’s “to be or not to be”: faced with a phrase so important, rendered by so many predecessors, so likely to be heard as cliché. A surprisingly large number of twentieth- and twenty-first-century translators (anticipated by Blew 1855) respond to this predicament by acknowledging it in their translations, that is, by somehow framing πάθει μάθος and setting it off from the rest of the text. Murray 1935 capitalises (“Man by Suffering Shall Learn”), Carson 2009 italicises (“By suffering we learn”); these are modes of emphasis, but may also imply that we are reading a familiar aphorism, something even more clearly suggested by the use of quotation marks: “‘That men must learn by suffering’” (MacNeice 1936); “‘Knowledge comes in suffering’” (Raphael and McLeish 1979), “‘that learning comes through pain’” (Taplin 2018; cf. Lucas 1954, Arnott 1964; Meineck 1998; Collard 2002; De May 2003). Three poet-translators, rather than framing the familiar, refuse or transform it. Robert Lowell 1978 condenses three strophes into three lines and alters both mythological tradition and the meaning of μάθος: Glory to Zeus, whatever he is: he cut off the testicles of his own father, and taught us dominion comes from pain. Ted Hughes’s 1999 version uses new metaphors to make of suffering something elemental and more confrontational than educational; expansion and repetition drive the point home as a very loose rendering of the following lines gives a strong version of the “only from suffering” reading. [Zeus] has given man this law: the truth Has to be melted out of our stubborn lives by suffering. Nothing speaks the truth, Nothing tells us how things really are Nothing forces us to know what we do not want to know Except pain. And this is how the gods declare their love. Truth comes with pain. Tony Harrison (with Fitzgerald as a nineteenth-century predecessor) leaves out the entire “Zeus Hymn”; the chorus moves directly from Calchas’s prophecy to its fulfillment. In omitting πάθει μάθος but not the trilogy’s other compressed expression of consequence (δράσαντι παθεῖν, Libation Bearers 313: “what you do gets done back/ you/him him/you”), he maintains the centrality of cause and effect and of retribution, but not the more puzzling prospect of compensatory learning (who learns, and what?) with its suggestion of theodicy (see Taplin 2006, 142; for the “Gloss Song” that offers a version of these lines, Harrison 1981, 104).

“No More Conundrums” In the preface to his Oresteia, Robert Potter declares that “the poet has nowhere exerted such efforts of his genius, as in the scene where Cassandra appears” (Potter 1777, 211). For E. D. A. Morshead a century later, “Close inspection of this scene will show Aeschylus at his very

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highest point of inspiration; it is as true, and as imaginative, as anything in ‘King Lear’”. Although Morshead’s is a verse translation, he imagines that parts of this scene “would be most fitly rendered in prose like that of the analogous passages of King Lear and Macbeth” but gives the idea up: “It is easy to write prose; it is impossible to write that prose” (Morshead 1881, xxiii, xxv). In the introduction to her 2009 Agamemnon, Anne Carson expresses a like sense of Cassandra’s extraordinary use of language and its inaccessibility to translation: As a translator, I have spent years trying to grasp Kassandra in words. Long before I had any interest in the rest of Agamemnon, I found myself working and reworking the single scene in which she appears with her language that breaks open. I got some fine sentences out of it and thought to publish them, but this seemed vain …. Eventually I accepted that what is ungraspable about Kassandra has to stay that way. Aiskhylos has distilled into her in extreme form his own method of work, his own way of using his mind, his way of using the theater as a mind. (Carson 2009, 4)

The following (Agamemnon 1178–83 Murray 1955) is a passage in which – although Cassandra has turned from lyric to iambics, declaring that she will now speak plainly – “images echo, overlap, and interlock” (Carson 2009, 5). καὶ μὴν ὁ χρησμὸς οὐκέτ᾽ ἐκ καλυμμάτων ἔσται δεδορκὼς νεογάμου νύμφης δίκην· λαμπρὸς δ’ ἔοικεν ἡλίου πρὸς ἀντολὰς πνέων ἐσᾴξειν, ὥστε κύματος δίκην κλύζειν πρὸς αὐγὰς τοῦδε πήματος πολὺ μεῖζον· φρενώσω δ’ οὐκέτ᾽ ἐξ αἰνιγμάτων. Now shall my oracle no longer be one that looks forth from a veil, like a newly wedded bride, but as a bright, clear wind it shall rush toward the sunrise, so that like a wave there shall surge toward the light a woe far greater than this; no more in riddles shall I instruct you. (Lloyd-Jones 1979) These lines by no means embody the clarity they promise. Cassandra offers in turn three images: the first a personification that no longer applies; the second curiously synaesthetic; the third syntactically ambiguous and embedded in the second. I single out three approaches that show translators responding to the perceived difficulty of these lines as well as to their poetic force. Some translators seek to clarify through elaboration or explanation. Thomas Medwin 1832 offers a more thoroughgoing description of the natural phenomena in Aeschylus’s metaphors, apparently to make clearer the operation of wind and wave, and thus to underscore the mingling of clarity and sorrow Cassandra promises. Wrapt no more As in a bridal veil, my prophecy Shall be disclosed – it shall come freshly forth As does the breath of morning from the spring Of sunrise, when the night draws back its mist; But not like it in gentleness, for the gale In the clear light will seem more dread to view, The winds will louder flow, and wilder beat,



The Bow of Ulysses: Aeschylus and his Translators 447 And like the stormy ocean the big wave Of sorrow heave, and roar more fearfully. I cease to clothe my meaning in enigmas.

Morshead 1881 tries to make plain by careful use of “as” and “so” the significance of each of the sequence of metaphors, and offers further clarification by adding fresh but cognate metaphors familiar in English (“clearing skies”, “dawns on my soul”). List! For no more the presage of my soul, Bride-like, shall peer from its secluding veil; But as the morning wind blows clear the east, More bright shall blow the wind of prophecy, And as against the low bright line of dawn Heaves high and higher yet the rolling wave, So in the clearing skies of prescience Dawns on my soul a further deadlier woe, And I will speak, but in dark speech no more. Other translators condense or alter the images to create some more pointed effect. Fitzgerald 1876 transforms Aeschylus’s veiled bride into “the bride of truth” and turns his complex system of metaphors into a simple contrast between the sea’s “hidden deeps” and “the fountain of the sun”. As from behind a veil no longer peeps The bride of truth, nor from their hidden deeps Darkle the waves of prophecy but run Clear from the very fountain of the sun. And in his “Theatre Version”, Rush Rehm 1978 adds detail to the image of a breaking wave: No more like a newly-wedded bride will my prophecy look out from under veils. A clear wind rushes toward the dawn light, seems to hold a wave suspended, spray reaching for the sun …. So pain, greater than you have known, holds at the point of breaking. But there are also translators who – without writing like Browning in “as Greek a fashion as the English will bear” (1877, v) – signal or underscore the complexity of Aeschylus’s sequence of images. To evoke Aeschylean effects, Lattimore 1953 not only interlaces his metaphors but makes strange the phenomena they describe through choice of words (“uprise”, after Browning) and synaesthesia (“the shining of this agony”) . No longer shall my prophecies like some young girl new-married glance from under veils, but bright and strong as winds blow into morning and the sun’s uprise shall wax along the swell like some great wave, to burst at last upon the shining of this agony. Now I will tell you plainly and from no cryptic speech …

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Harrison, who has discussed at length the influence of Browning’s Agamemnon on his 1981 Oresteia (Harrison 1981), plays more freely with the Greek than either Browning or Lattimore, but follows the Aeschylean sequence closely, while gesturing towards Aeschylus’s density of metaphor and use of compounds through compounds that join in one word the signifying metaphor and the thing signified: truthgust, woewave. Off with the brideveil then. Look into truth’s pupils. The truthgust. It’s rising. Blowing fresh headwinds sweeping sea-ripples into dawn’s molten cauldron, then building a woewave as big as a mountain. Riddles are over. Keep close on my track now …

3  “The Wings of Poets” In the preface to his 1824 Agamemnon, John Symmons numbers among the reasons it is hard to translate Aeschylus the fact that Greek allows a greater variety of tropes, figures, and metaphors, (some of which … are yet unknown to modern languages) which gave a spring and soar to the wings of poets. (Symmons 1824, xi–xii)

Symmons comments on the frequency in tragedy of hypallage (transfer of epithets), a figure he considers almost inexplicable to an English reader, and cites among his examples a double hypallage from “that terrific passage of the sacking of a town” in Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes (Symmons 1824, xi). This passage appears in the first stasimon, which anticipates in detail the suffering when a city is sacked and dwells on harrowing images of plunder, slaughter and rape. The third strophe begins (Seven against Thebes 345–50, Sommerstein 2008): κορκορυγαὶ δ’ ἀν᾽ ἄστυ, περὶ δ’ ὁρκάνα πυργῶτις· πρὸς ἀνδρὸς δ’ ἀνὴρ †δορὶ† καίνεται βλαχαὶ δ’ αἱματόεσσαι τῶν ἐπιμαστιδίων ἀρτιτρεφεῖς βρέμονται. There is tumult throughout the town; it is enclosed all round as if by a solid wall; man is slain by man with the spear; loud, bloody screams rise up from infants fresh from the nourishing breast. (Sommerstein 2008) Victor Bers defines this type of transferred epithet, which he calls enallage, as “the transfer to the governing substantive of an adjective which by logic, or at least convention, belongs with an expressed dependent genitive” (Bers 1973, 1). In 348–50 – “bloody just-nourished bleatings of nursing infants resound” – both αἱματόεσσαι and ἀρτιτρεφεῖς, which agree



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grammatically with βλαχαὶ, belong “properly” to the genitive, τῶν ἐπιμαστιδίων, the nursing or unweaned babies. How do translators deal with a figure of speech which is limited to poetic contexts in Greek, but which (unlike metaphor) may not strike English speakers as poetry? To what extent do they simply “correct” the figure of speech by reassigning epithets to their logical place; to what extent do they maintain the enallage; and to what extent do they seek to achieve some kind of poetic effect? From our earliest translators to some of the most recent, we find renderings that simply resolve the enallage by making one or both of the adjectives describe the babies: Gurney’s 1878 version speaks of “infants stained with blood/New-born, and seeking nature’s loving food” and Dawson, in 1970, has “infants at their mother’s breast/With their blood streaming down”. Few translators render the enallage in all its strangeness: Anna Swanwick 1865 writes: “The newborn infant wails/its gory bleating at the breast is heard” and Alan Sommerstein 2008, “Loud bloody screams/rise up from infants/ fresh from the nourishing breast”. Cecelia Luschnig 2016 retains the enallage by having αἱματόεσσαι modify the babies’ “bleatings” but naturalises the expression by making the adjective not “bloody” but “blood-curdling”, a familiar modifier for screams if not for babies’ cries. Others naturalise by assigning the epithet to the part of the infant that produces the cry, as in Bevan 1912, “But your wailings who shall regard/Small pitiful mouths blood-marr’d?” Some translators, however, without retaining the transfer of epithets, respond to its presence and recreate its syntactic oddity and poetic effect by aiming at the impressionistic effect described by Walter Headlam: … the inaccurate attachment of the epithets has that further value that I spoke of, producing an effect intentionally confused, impressionistic. Infants at their mothers’ breast, besmeared with blood, and passionately crying in their bleating voice; if you wish to convey the impressions vaguely flashed upon the eye and ear, you dab the various colours in among the substantives. (Headlam 1902, 435)

In these translations elements of the scene join and dissipate, and the babies’ cries are somehow associated with blood and nursing at the breast. Blackie’s 1850 translation begins the strophe with a series of participial absolutes; in the lines that include the enallage, “cries” might briefly seem to be the verb we are waiting for, but is instead the subject. Tower and catapults surrounding, And the greedy spear upswallowing Man by man, its gory food: And the sucking infants clinging To the breasts that cannot bear them, Cries to ears that cannot hear them Mingle with their mother’s blood These cries take on a life of their own, separated from the infants who utter them, and though not described as bloody, accomplish a synaesthetic mingling with the blood of mothers who seem to belong to the cries as much as to the infants. A century later, in a different style and idiom, Anthony Hecht and Helen Bacon 1973 also accommodate and respond to the Aeschylean enallage as displacement and as poetry:

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The city echoes with loud, bellowing howls; it is a death-trap, fatally self-ensnared. A thin blood-cry of infants, a shrill reed of nursling terror wails and lumbering spearmen pierce each others’ bowels. Here too the syntax is vague, even momentarily misleading: is wails a noun? No, a verb. The creation of a new word transforms the anomalous bloody crying of the child into a complex entity, the blood-cry, itself almost an Aeschylean compound. This effect is similar to what Harrison achieves in his Oresteia by the use of new compounds (“truthgust”, “woewave”) and by passages that elide normal syntax in favour of striking word associations: Hard hard for a general not to obey hard hard for a father to kill his girl his jewel his joy kill his own she-child virgin-blood father-guilt griming the godstone. (Harrison 1981, 9) Compare Carson’s practice of remaking Aeschylean compounds to defamiliarise or create a particular emphasis: “firstblush” for neogamou (newly married) and “godnonsensical” for theomanes (maddened by the gods) (Carson 2009, 54, 52). In all these cases an unexpected juxtaposition both transforms and realises an Aeschylean poetic effect. I noted that some translators seek to clarify what is enigmatic or obscure in Aeschylean poetry, others to maintain or even heighten these features of his verse. We might say – to return to our starting point – that some translators seek to remove or bypass, others to preserve the obstacles to translation Harford saw in Aeschylus’s sometimes “peculiar style”. The choice may depend in part on the translator’s sense of the source or status of Aeschylean obscurity. For some, obscurity is the likely product of an over-literal rendering which should therefore be avoided (Medwin 1832, iv; Harford 1831, x–xii, Conington 1848, v–vi). For others, Aeschylus is intrinsically and importantly difficult: his ideas are “hard” (Browning 1877, v), his “thought is so profound as often to make the expression of it obscure” (Longford, the Earl of and Christine 1933, 5), the “visionary scope” of his language suggests to us a profundity which “like God Himself, is difficult to grasp” (Poochigian 2011, 18; cf. Schein 2008, 388). What follows varies; translators may embrace obscurity, but they may also see it as a secondary feature of Aeschylean poetry, not to be cherished for its own sake, and put clarity first. Rushworth Kennard Davis writes: The obscurity of Aeschylus is the giant’s robe; to claim that an English translation of him must be obscure likewise is to demand the robe without the giant. I would have allowed myself something of his obscurity if I could have obtained some of the magnificence which is its excuse; failing that, I have tried to be lucid. (Davis 1919, vi)

But even if, in Davis’s formulation, obscurity can be justified only by an unattainable magnificence, mere lucidity emerges as a kind of second best. Aeschylus’ poetry remains the bow the suitors cannot bend – though some, like Telemachus, may seem to have come close.



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Acknowledgements I am grateful to Sheila Murnaghan for her extensive and invaluable comments and encouragement, to Aryeh Kosman for his keen editorial eye, to my students Zakery Oglesby and Aarushi Mohan for their thoughtful assistance at the beginning of this project, and to the editors for their patience and their helpful suggestions.

FURTHER READING Readers who would like a brief overview of the translation history of Aeschylus may want to consult Poole 2000, 356–60, or Poole 2006, 178–80,186–7; Burian 2000, 7–16, provides a list with assessment of translations available at the time of publication. Walton 2006a offers a wide-ranging study of issues in the translation of Greek tragedy, with a focus on performance, and includes an extensive list of translations (both well known and obscure) of all extant plays. Performance is also a central concern in Rainsberg and Banister 2010, Walton 2006b, Walton 2016a, 2016b, chapter 3, and Hardwick 2006, which focuses on the staging of Agamemnon in translation. Among other essays specifically on Agamemnon but with broader implications see especially Brower 1959, Green 1960, Hardwick 2006 and Schein 2008, which takes its main example of Aeschylean choral lyric from Agamemnon. For recent work on other plays and on different aspects of Aeschylean translation, see Burian 2020 and essays by Rehm 2016, Roberts 2008 and Meineck 2016. Prins 2017 examines the work (and the lives) of the women who translated Aeschylean tragedy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; see also Hardwick 2000, chapter 2.

TRANSLATIONS Arnott, P. D. (1964). The Oresteia. New York. Bevan, E. R. (1902). The Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus. London. Bevan, E. R. (1912). The Seven against Thebes of Aeschylus. London and Edinburgh. Birnbaum, R. F. and Harold, P. (1978). The Prometheus Trilogy. Lawrence. Blackie, J. S. (1850). The Lyrical Dramas of Aeschylus, 2 vols. London. Blew, W. J. (1855). Agamemnon the King. London . Browning, R. (1877). The Agamemnon of Aeschylus. London. Burian, P. (1991). Aeschylus, The Suppliants. Princeton. Campbell, A. Y. (1940). The Agamemnon of Aeschylus. London. Campbell, L. (1906). Aeschylus: The Seven Plays in English Verse. London, New York, Toronto. Originally published 1890. Carson, A. (2009). An Oresteia: Agamemnon by Aiskhylos, Elektra by Sophokles, Orestes by Euripides. New York. Cayley, C. B. (1867). The Prometheus Bound. London. Clifford, C. C. (1852). Prometheus Chained. Oxford. Collard, C. (2002). Aeschylus: Oresteia. Oxford. Collard, C. (2008). Aeschylus: Persians and Other Plays. Oxford. Conington, J. (1848). The Agamemnon. London. Cookson, G. M. (1922). Four Plays of Aeschylus: The Suppliant Maidens, the Persians, the Seven against Thebes, Prometheus Bound. Oxford. Davies, J. F. (1868). Agamemnon. London. Davis, R. K. (1919). The Agamemnon Oxford. Dawson, C. M. (1970). The Seven against Thebes by Aeschylus. Englewood Cliffs, NJ.

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De May, P. (2003). Aeschylus: Agamemnon. Cambridge. Doerries, B. (2015). All that You’ve Seen Here Is God: New Versions of Four Greek Tragedies: Sophocles’ Ajax, Philoctetetes, and Women of Trachis & Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. New York. Fitzgerald, E. (1876). Agamemnon: A Tragedy Taken from Aeschylus. London. Fox, G. C. (1835). The Prometheus of Aeschylus and the Electra of Sophocles. London. Grene, D. and Lattimore, R. (2013), Aeschylus I: The Persians, The Seven Against Thebes, The Suppliant Maidens, Prometheus Bound; Aeschylus II: The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides, Proteus (Fragments), Third Edition eds. Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most. Chicago. Hamilton, E. (1937). Three Greek Plays: Prometheus Bound, Agamemnon, Trojan Women. New York. Harford, J. S. (1831). Agamemnon. London. Harrison, T. (1981). Aeschylus: The Oresteia. London. Hecht, A. and Bacon, H. H. (1973). Aeschylus, Seven Against Thebes. Oxford. Hughes, T. (1999). Aeschylus: The Oresteia. New York. Kennedy, B. H. (1878). The Agamemnon of Aeschylus. Cambridge. Lattimore, R. (1953). Aeschylus, Oresteia. Chicago. Lattimore, R. (2013). Aeschylus, Oresteia, Third Edition ed. and rev. Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most. Chicago. Lefkowitz, M. and Romm, J., eds. (2017). The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. New York. Lembke, J. (1975). Aeschylus, Suppliants. Oxford. Lembke, J. and Herington, C. J. (1981). Aeschylus, Persians. Oxford. Lloyd-Jones, H. (1979). Aeschylus: Oresteia. London. Original edition published 1970. Longford, the Earl of and Christine (1933). The Oresteia of Aischylos. Dublin, Oxford. Lowell, R. (1978). The Oresteia of Aeschylus. New York . Lucas, F. L. (1954). Greek Drama for Everyman. London . Luschnig, C. E. (2016). Three Other Theban Plays: Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes, Euripides’ Suppliants, Euripides’ Phoenician Women. Indianapolis. MacNeice, L. (1936). The Agamemnon of Aeschylus. London . McLaughlin, E. 2005. The Greek Plays. New York. Medwin, T. (1832). Prometheus Bound, a Tragedy. London. (Revised version of 1827 edition). Meineck, P. (1998). Aeschylus, Oresteia. Indianapolis. [Molyneux, Henry Howard], Earl of Carnarvon 1879. Agamemnon. London. Morell, T. (1773). Prometheus in Chains. London. Morshead, E. D. A., trans. (1881). The House of Atreus, Being the Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers and Furies of Aeschylus. London. Mueller, C. R. (2002). Aeschylus, The Complete Plays, 2 vols. Hanover. Mulroy, D. (2016). Aeschylus, Agamemnon. Madison. Murray, G. (1920). The Agamemnon of Aeschylus. New York. Murray, G. (1923). The Choëphoroe. London. Murray, G., (1925). The Eumenides (The Furies) of Aeschylus. London. Murray, G. (1930a). Aeschylus, The Suppliant Woman. New York. Murray, G. (1930b). Prometheus Bound. London. Murray, G. (1935). Aeschylus, The Seven Against Thebes [Septem Contra Thebas]. New York. Murray, G. (1939). The Persians. London. Pember, E. H. (1895). The Voyage of the Phocaeans and Other Poems, with the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus. London. Plumptre, E. H. (1868). The Tragedies of Aischylos. London. Poochigian, A. (2011). Aeschylus: Persians, Seven against Thebes, and Suppliants. Baltimore. Potter, R. (1777). The Tragedies of Aeschylus. Norwich. Pryse, J. M. (1925). A New Presentation of the Prometheus Bound of Aischylos, Wherein Is Set Forth the Hidden Meaning of the Myth. Los Angeles, London. Raphael, F. and McLeish, K. (1979). The Serpent Son: Aeschylus: Oresteia. Cambridge. Rehm, R. (1978). Aeschylus: The Oresteian Trilogy: A Theatre Version. Melbourne.



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Robinson, C. E. (1921). The Genius of the Greek Drama: Three Plays, Being the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, the Antigone of Sophocles, & the Medea of Euripides. Oxford. Roche, P. (1962). The Orestes Plays of Aeschylus. The Agamemnon, the Libation Bearers, the Eumenides. New York. Roche, P. (1964). Prometheus Bound. New York. Rubenstein, H. (2003). Agamemnon: A Play by Aeschylus. Second Edition. El Cajon, CA. Ruden, S. (2017). “Aeschylus, Oresteia.” In M. Lefkowitz and J. Romm, eds. The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. New York. Scully, J. and Herington, C. J. (1975). Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound. New York. Shapiro, A. and Burian, P. (2003). The Oresteia. Oxford. (reprinted in Burian, Peter and Shapiro, Alan, eds. (2011). The Complete Aeschylus, vol. 1, Oxford). Sommerstein, A. (2008). Aeschylus I Persians, Seven Against Thebes, Suppliants, Prometheus Bound. Cambridge, MA, London. Swanwick, A. (1865). The Agamemnon, Choephoi, and Eumenides of Aeschylus. London. Swanwick, A. (1873). The Dramas of Aeschylus, 2 vols. London. Symmons, J. (1824). The Agamemnon. London. Taplin, O. (2018). Aeschylus: The Oresteia. New York. Thomson, G. (1938). The Oresteia of Aeschylus, 2 vols. Cambridge. Warr, G. C. W. (1900). The Oresteia of Aeschylus. London. Way, A. S. (1908). Aeschylus Part III. Agamemnon; Choëphoroe, or the Mourners; Eumenides, or the Reconciliation. London. Webster, A. (1866). The Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus. London, Cambridge. Young, D. (1974). Aeschylus: The Oresteia. Norman, OK.

OTHER REFERENCES Berman, A. (2012). “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign.” In L. Venuti, ed. The Translation Studies Reader, Third Edition. Abingdon and New York, 240–53. Bers, V. (1973). Enallage and Greek Style. Leiden Brower, R. (1959). “Seven Agamemnons.” In R. Brower, ed. On Translation. Cambridge, MA. Burian, P. (2000). “Aeschylus.” In O. Classe, ed. Encyclopedia of Literary Translation. London, 7–16. Burian, P. (2020). “Just on the Far Side of Language: On the Possibility (And Impossibility) of Translating Aeschylus.” In P. Burian, J. Strauss Clay and G. Davis, eds. Euphrosyne: Studies in Ancient Philosophy, History and Literature in Memory of Diskin Clay. Beiträge Zur Altertumskunde, Band 370. Berlin, 270–92. Constantinidis, S., ed. (2016). The Reception of Aeschylus’ Plays through Shifting Models and Frontiers. Leiden and Boston. Green, P. (1960). “Some Versions of Aeschylus.” In Essays in Antiquity. Cleveland and New York, 185–215. Gurney, W, trans. (1878). The Septem Contra Thebas: The Most Popular of the Extant Tragedies of Aeschylus. Cambridge and London. Hardwick, L. (2000). Translating Words, Translating Cultures. London. Hardwick, L. (2006). “Staging Agamemnon: The Languages of Translation.” In F. Macintosh, P. Michelakis, E. Hall and O. Taplin, eds. Agamemnon in Performance 458 BC to AD 2004. Oxford, 207–21. Headlam, W. (1902). “Metaphor, with a Note on Transference of Epithets.” Classical Review 16, 434–42. Meineck, P. (2016). “Cognitive Theory and Aeschylus: Translating beyond the Lexicon.” In Constantinidis ed., 147–75. Murray, G. (1955). Aeschyli Septem Quae Supersunt Tragoediae, 2nd ed. Oxford. Page, D. (1972). Aeschyli Septem Quae Supersunt Tragoediae. Oxford. Poole, A. (2000). “Aeschylus.” In P. France, ed. The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation. Oxford: 356–60.

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Poole, A. (2006). “Greek Drama.” In P. France and K Haynes, eds. The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English. Oxford, 178–80, 186–87. Prins, Y. (2017). Ladies’ Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy. Princeton. Rainsberg, B. R. B. (2010). Rewriting the Greeks: The Translations, Adaptations, Distant Relative and Productions of Aeschylus’ Tragedies in the United States of America from 1900 to 2009. Doctoral Dissertation, The Ohio State University. Rehm, R. (2016). “Aeschylus in the Balance: Weighing Corpses and the Problem of Translation.” In Constantinidis ed., 131–46. Roberts, D. H. (2008). “Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes: War, Women, and the Hecht/Bacon Translation.” In Constantinidis ed., 107–30. Schein, S. (2008). “Translating Aeschylean Choral Lyric: Agamemnon 367–474.” In A. Lianieri and V. Zajko, eds. Translation & the Classics: Identity as Change in the History of Culture. Oxford, 387–406. Taplin, O. (2006). “The Harrison Version: ‘So Long Ago that it’s Become a Song?’” In F. Macintosh, P. Michelakis, E.Hall and O. Taplin, eds. Agamemnon in Performance 458 BC to AD 2004. Oxford, 235–52. Venuti, L. (2013). “The Poet’s Version; Or, an Ethics of Translation.” In Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice. Abingdon and New York, 173–92. Walton, J. M. (2006a). Found in Translation: Greek Drama in English. Cambridge. Walton, J. M. (2006b). “Translation or Transubstantiation.” In F. Macintosh, P. Michelakis, E. Hall and O. Taplin, eds. Agamemnon in Performance 458 BC to AD 2004. Oxford, 189–206. Walton, J. M. (2016a). “Prometheus Bound in Translation: ‘The True Promethean Fire’.” In Constantinidis ed., 80–106. Walton, J. M. (2016b). Translating Classical Plays: Collected Papers. Abingdon and New York.

CHAPTER 33

Variations on a Theme: Prometheus Theodore Ziolkowski Few figures from Greek mythology, if any, have triggered such a wide variety of responses as Prometheus. This is evident if we look, for instance, at examples from a single decade: the 1930s. Since 1934 New York’s Rockefeller Center has been dominated by Paul Manship’s 18-foot, 8-ton gilded bronze statue of the Titan, whose symbolism is expressed by the inscription: “Prometheus, teacher in every art, brought the fire that hath provided to mortals a means to mighty ends” (a paraphrase of lines 252 and 254 of Prometheus Bound, traditionally ascribed to Aeschylus). During those same years in Germany the sculptors Arno Breker and Willy Melly produced huge statues of the torch-bearing Prometheus to exemplify Adolf Hitler’s characterisation of Aryan man as “the Prometheus of humanity from whose bright forehead the divine spark of genius sprang forth at all times” (Hitler 1943, 317). (Breker’s statue stood in the garden of the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda in Berlin; Meller’s sculpture decorated the Party training complex “Vogelsang” in North Rhine-Westphalia.) Meanwhile several German Marxist poets entertained a wholly different conception stemming from Karl Marx. In the preface to his dissertation (1841) the classically trained Marx quoted Aeschylus’s Prometheus (l. 975) – “In simple words, I hate the pack of gods” – and went on to praise the Titan as “the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar”. (Marx 2012, 15–16). A quarter-century later in Das Kapital (1867) Prometheus emerged as a prefiguration of the proletariat, “riveted to capital more firmly than the wedges of Hephaestus held Prometheus to the rock” (Marx n.d., 572). It was this image that captivated such German Marxist poets as Wilhelm Tkaczyk, in whose “Prometheus in der Fabrik” (1925; “Prometheus in the Factory”) the worker, pacing like a caged animal within the walls of his factory, feels within himself the power to move the world yet is frustrated by the thought that he is wasting his life in useless labour. Sigmund Freud adduced Prometheus in his essay “Zu Gewinnung des Feuers” (1932; “The Acquisition and Control of Fire”) as a negative figure: by subduing fire – that is, his own sexual desire – by urinating on it and sharing it with human beings, he deprived them of a basic instinctual gratification and aroused their resentment for forcing them into civilisation. Meanwhile, in his seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (1934–39), C. G Jung argued that it was Prometheus’s “tragic guilt” to bring fire to mankind. “It was a very great advantage to mankind, yet he stole it from the gods and they were offended” (1988 1, 614).

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Within the same decade, in sum, Prometheus was invoked to exemplify the arts and sciences, the Nazi conception of the genius of Aryan man, the exploited worker of the Communists and the cultural antihero who forces a humankind with suppressed desires into an unwanted civilisation or guilt. These variations, as drastic as they are, are by no means unique. The figure of Prometheus has, from the beginning, elicited an enormous variety of responses and interpretations. The powerful fifth-century drama Prometheus Bound, conventionally but controversially attributed to Aeschylus, provides the principal source for most subsequent treatments of the myth, but it was by no means the earliest or unique one. Three centuries earlier, Hesiod, in his Theogony (507–616) and Works and Days (42–105) had featured Prometheus as an amoral trickster who, like his fellows in scores of myths around the world, steals fire for humankind. In a meeting of gods and men to establish the terms of their relationship, Prometheus dupes Zeus out of the better part of the sacrificial ox. In his wrath Zeus deprives humanity of the use of fire, making it impossible for them to cook their meat. But Prometheus again swindles the god, concealing some fire in a fennel branch and taking it down to his mortals on earth. In revenge Zeus sends Pandora to earth with her jar of evils to plague humanity forever; and in punishment he fastens Prometheus to a pillar, where every day an eagle comes to eat his liver. Prometheus’s “deceitful skills” (Theogony 560) mark the beginning of a human history of moral deterioration and the view of him as the source of man’s grief and misery. In Prometheus Bound – the only surviving drama of the original alleged trilogy including “Prometheus Unbound” and “Prometheus the Fire-Bringer” – the image of the Titan has changed dramatically. No longer simply a trickster, his defiance of Zeus bestows upon him a nobility of character wholly lacking in Hesiod. Zeus is repeatedly identified as a new god – one who seized power violently and now governs as a “tyrant” (10). We learn, moreover, that Prometheus assisted Zeus and the “new gods” (439) in their conspiracy to overthrow the old dynasty of Kronos. This Prometheus is no longer motivated by the trickster’s simple delight in deceiving Zeus but by a genuine love of humankind – by what is twice (11 and 28) called his “philanthropic turn”. Finally, fire is no longer simply a primitive tool for cooking but, rather, symbolic of the general enlightenment that Prometheus has bestowed upon humankind. In his great Culture Speech (436–506) Prometheus points out that humankind was still childlike until he rendered it “mindful” (444; ennoos or “possessing nous”). Prometheus taught them the crafts of carpentry, the science of astronomy, the skills of counting and writing, the gift of healing and soothsaying. What in Hesiod was merely a trickster’s wit has matured into true knowledge and wisdom. Hesiod’s view of humankind declining from a glorious golden age to the present deplorable iron age has given way to a humanity progressing by means of knowledge from ignorance to its present loftiness. The continuing popularity of the myth in ancient Greece is indicated by its retelling in Plato’s dialogue Protagoras, its humorous reshaping in the dialogue Prometheus on Caucasus by the satirist Lucian of Samosata, his cultic veneration in Athens as their protective deity by the potters and other craftsmen (which involved an annual festival featuring a torch race and known as the Promethia) and the innumerable depictions on vases, gems and sculptures. But in Latin culture, apart from passing mentions in works by Cicero (Tusculanae disputationes), Ovid (Metamorphoses) and a few others, Prometheus played no significant cultural role. During late classical antiquity and early Christianity, Prometheus suffered the fate of all pagan deities: he was euhemerised out of divinity into human history and allegorised through the process of iconotropy into co-option by the young church. It was believed by some that the model for the legend was a ruler who fled from Jupiter into the remote Caucasus, where he was tormented by a great bird – that is to say, by his conscience and the misery of his condition. Others saw in him a nephew of the legendary Egyptian king Sesotris, who accompanied his uncle on wars of conquest and was left behind with his troops on the Caucasus to



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secure Scythia. Still others claimed that he was an astrologer who located his observatory on the Caucasus and subsequently brought his knowledge of the stars to the Assyrians. The Christian exegetes, in turn, who had no use for a rebel against God, saw Prometheus as a pagan counterpart to Adam (because he was the father of mankind and punished for the sin of knowledge), of Noah (because he rescued the human race from destruction by the deity), of Moses (because he liberated humankind from servitude), of Job (because of his tragic suffering), of Jesus Christ (because he took the sins of mankind upon himself and was tortured by a kind of crucifixion), and even of God himself (because of his creative powers). During most of the Middle Ages, however, the figure of Prometheus, along with the other pagan deities, faded from popular as well as intellectual consciousness because the principal Greek sources were not available to scholars. The Renaissance retrieved Prometheus from medieval obscurity and provided him with a new dimension that transcended the existing allegorisations. Boccaccio, in his influential mythological handbook De Genealogia deorum gentilium (1370), recapitulated the traditional stories and interpretations, including the ancient Christian exegesis of Tertullian – that Prometheus is a symbol of Deus verus et omnipotens because he created man from the clay of the earth. But Boccaccio went on to provide a second allegorical reading more in keeping with the emerging spirit of the Renaissance, according to which Prometheus represents doctus homo, who succeeds by his teaching in raising humankind from the rude state of nature to the level of civilised community (ex naturalibus hominibus civiles facit), possessing both a moral sense and virtue. Yet despite passing references to Prometheus in the works of such thinkers as Marsilio Ficino, Erasmus and Francis Bacon – who shared Boccaccio’s view of him as the embodiment of the principle of reason, as homo faber as well as homo sapiens – the Titan played only a peripheral role in the imaginative consciousness of the Renaissance. The Enlightenment opened with an antithesis à la Aeschylus and Hesiod of Prometheus as cultural hero versus antihero. In Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1751–52) he was termed “le génie audacieux de la race humaine” (in the entry Grec) and symbolised the creative human spirit. Rousseau, in contrast, in his award-winning “First Discourse” of 1750 on the question “Has the restoration of the sciences and the arts contributed to refining moral practices?” came to the opposite conclusion. At the beginning of Part 2 of his Discours he cites an ancient tradition that “a God inimical to men’s repose was the inventor of the sciences”. The accompanying note explains: It is easy to see the allegory of the Promethean fable, and it does not appear that the Greeks who nailed him to Mount Caucasus thought any more favourably of him than did the Egyptians of their God Theuth. “The satyr”, says an ancient fable, “wanted to kiss and embrace fire the first time he saw it but Prometheus cried out to him: ‘Satyr, you will weep the loss of the beard on your chin, for it burns when you touch it.’” This is the subject of the frontispiece. (Rousseau 1997)

(The frontispiece depicts Prometheus offering his torch to an idealised man but warning off a satyr with the words, “Satyre, tu ne le connois pas”.) In his reply to a refutation written a year later, Rousseau explained more specifically “that Prometheus’s torch is the torch of the Sciences made to quicken great geniuses; that the Satyr who, seeing fire for the first time, runs toward it and wants to embrace it, represents the vulgar who, seduced by the brilliance of Letters, indiscreetly give themselves over to study; that the Prometheus who cries out and warns them of the danger is the Citizen of Geneva” (Rousseau, 90). Across the Channel, meanwhile, Prometheus enjoyed an enthusiastic reawakening. Already in 1710, Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl) in his Soliloquy, or Advice to a

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Young Poet appropriated the image to distinguish true poets and “sovereign artists” from the so-called “poets” of modern society. “Such a real poet is indeed a second creator, a just Prometheus, under Jove” (Third Soliloquy: “The Greatness of True Poets”). A quartercentury later Edward Young, in the ninth of his Night Thoughts (1742–44) wrote (615–19): Come, my Prometheus, from thy pointed rock Of false ambition if unchain’d, we’ll mount; We’ll, innocently, steal celestial fire, And kindle our devotion at the stars; A theft, that shall not chain, but set thee free.

This enthusiasm was quickly picked up by the literary and social rebels of the German Sturm und Drang who, a generation later, recognised in the Greek Titan the archetype of their own defiance. The young Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), in the second collection of his Fragmente (1766; in his Über die neuere deutsche Litteratur), wrote glowingly of Young and the fire-like spirit that, in his works, speaks like an electrical spark from heart to heart, from genius to genius (Herder n.d. 1, 88). But it is dangerous, he continues, to fetch the electrical spark from heaven like a second Prometheus because it is more difficult to be an artist than an artistic sophist. Elsewhere Herder refers several times to Prometheus as the proper image for the true poet, but his own attempt to do poetic justice to the theme was hardly a success. His Der entfesselte Prometheus (1802; Prometheus Unchained) is specifically designated as “scenes” and Herder stresses in his prefatory remarks that he is not seeking to compete with Aeschylus. But Prometheus is so powerful an emblem that he cannot resist an attempt. His works consists of 13 allegorical scenes in which Prometheus, still bound to his rock, is visited by various figures – Oceanus, Ceres, Themis, Hermes, among others – until he is finally liberated by Pallas, who presents to him as a companion the true Pandora – not the false, hostile one with her jar of plagues – endowed with gifts for humankind. However, the work is utterly non-dramatic, and Herder’s gift was for scholarship and criticism – not poetry. The scenes are rather leaden and pedantic, conveying information rather than emotions. Nevertheless, Herder’s scenes inspired Franz Liszt in 1850 to create an overture and eight choruses composed for a celebration of a Herder Festival in Weimar – a composition expanded in 1855 into the more familiar symphonic poem Prometheus. Herder’s enthusiasm soon infected the young Goethe (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832). In his dramatic fragment Prometheus (1773) and especially in the concomitant hymnic poem “Prometheus”, Goethe gave the defining shape to a Prometheus opposing himself defiantly to a Zeus who has no further control over him and his creative energies. The two acts of his “dramatic fragment” (Goethe 1948–60 4, 176–87) begin with a conversation between Mercury and Prometheus, who vehemently refuses to submit to Zeus. Indeed, the scene begins with the words “ich will nicht!” He argues that the same power, “almighty Time”, brought him and Zeus to manhood. When Mercury departs, Prometheus turns back to his statues, which are scattered through the grove. After a further appeal by his brother Epimetheus, he explains that his world is here with the bodily shapes of his “dear children” with whom he has shared his own spirit. Then Minerva comes to tell him that Zeus is willing to give life to his figures if only he will return to Olympus, but Prometheus insists that he wants to remain in freedom with his creations. Minerva, conceding that it is destiny, not the gods, that has the power to give and take life, says that she will lead Prometheus to “the source of all life”. The second act begins on Olympus, where Mercury reports to Zeus that Minerva has betrayed him and is joining the rebel Prometheus. The scene shifts to a valley at the foot of Olympus, where Prometheus bids Zeus to look down



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and see the human race, formed after his image and now brought to life, cultivating food and playing on the meadows. Prometheus teaches a man how to build a hut from the trees he has cut down with a sharp stone. He shows another, who has been wounded in a fight, how to treat his wound. Then Pandora comes, emotionally wracked by a scene of lovemaking she has witnessed. Prometheus explains to her that the emotions she feels are both joy and grief, bliss and death. The “dramatic fragment” ends at this point, but it was especially in the concomitant hymnic poem “Prometheus” (Goethe 1948–60 1, 6) that Goethe gave the defining shape to a Prometheus who boldly defies a Zeus who has no further power over him and his creative energies. Zeus may cover his heavens with clouds and exercise his lightning on oaks and mountaintops. But he must leave to Prometheus his earth and his hut, which he built with no help from Zeus, and his hearth, for whose warmth the god envies him. Prometheus says that there is nothing under the sun more pathetic than the gods, who nourish themselves miserably from sacrifices and prayers and would starve if children and beggars were not such hopeful fools. As a child, he continues, he sometimes lifted his eyes to the skies, as though there were someone there to hear his pleas. Yet nothing but his own glowing heart rescued him from the arrogance of the Titans, from death, from slavery. Why, then, should he honour Zeus who never softened his pains nor stilled his tears? It was time and fate that made him into a man. In the final strophe he sits on the earth and shapes human beings after his own image: a race that will suffer, weep, enjoy and rejoice like him – and, like him, pay no heed to Zeus: Hier sitz’ ich, forme Menschen Nach meinem Bilde, Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei, Zu leiden, weinen, Genießen und zu freuen sich, Und dein nicht zu achten, wie ich.

Because the sheer human energy underlying this new understanding of the rebellious Titan was so central to German thought and literature of the Romantic age, several modern thinkers – notably the theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar (1947) and the philosopher Hans Blumenberg (1985) – have taken Prometheus to be the governing image of the period and the mythical metaphor of the German psyche. The Romantic obsession with Prometheus did not begin auspiciously. August Wilhelm Schlegel’s 600-line “Prometheus” (1797) amounts to a ponderous and pedantic dialogue in Dantean terza rima between the Titan and his mother Themis. Prometheus, having helped Zeus and the Titans overthrow the old order and the Golden Age, is dismayed at the neglect of his beloved humankind. Despite his mother’s warnings, who foresees the punishment he will undergo and his eventual liberation, Prometheus inspires his creations with the fire of life, as the poem ends (Schlegel 1962 1, 60): Er kehrt zum Bilde sich, das vor ihm steht, Und spricht: Geh! Wirke! Trage Leid und Wonne! Der Funke blitzt und Lebensodem weht, Der freie Mensch blickt zur verwandten Sonne. He turns to the image that stands before him and speaks: Go! Act! Bear sorrow and bliss. The spark flashes and life-breath blows, The free man looks at the kindred sun.

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But matters changed only a year later. In one of those remarkable groupings that characterise both German and English Romanticism – think Wordsworth/Coleridge or Wackenroder/ Tieck – in August 1797 A. W. Schlegel’s brother, Friedrich, met the Reformed theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, who was employed by Berlin’s Charité Hospital with pastoral responsibilities for its patients as well as inhabitants of nearby suburbs. The two young men quickly became good friends and at New Year’s 1798 Schlegel moved in with Schleiermacher in his quarters on Chausseestrasse (just beyond the Oranienburger Tor). It was during their year of shared habitation that Schlegel and Schleiermacher wrote two of the most important works of early German Romanticism: Schlegel’s novel Lucinde (1799) and Schleiermacher’s Reden über die Religion (1799; “Talks about Religion”). In the third of his Reden the theologian wrote that “religion and art stand side by side like two befriended souls whose inner relationship, though they sense it, is still unknown to them” (Schleiermacher 1980, 113). This statement characterises with astonishing precision that relationship between the religious work and the novel that the two friends were writing simultaneously. They obviously spent a great deal of time talking together, sharing ideas and discussing their works-in-progress because the two works display a number of surprising similarities of theme and image. One of the most conspicuous is their use of Prometheus to represent symbolically aspects of the enlightened protoindustrial society in which they lived and which they regarded as detrimental to art as well as religion – a conspicuous shift from the positive view of the Sturm und Drang writers, who regarded Prometheus as their prototypical hero. Schlegel portrays a chained Prometheus who creates human beings with forced haste. This inventor of education and enlightenment who seduced men to work is responsible for the fact, we learn, “that you can never be quiet and always push yourselves; for that reason, when you otherwise have nothing to do you must always in a stupid manner strive for character or want to observe and grasp one another. Such a beginning is despicable” (29). In Schleiermacher’s second “Rede” it is “the unfortunate meaning of Prometheus” that produced a society in which one thinks and acts without religion (36). For that reason – and here follows the famous sentence: “Religion is the sense and taste for the infinite” – Prometheus has robbed humankind of its feelings for its own infinity and similarity to God. One can go further, for Prometheus’s business is regarded as the negative pole in contrast to the “divine stillness”, that Schleiermacher determines as the essential precondition for contemplation of the universe (27). Schlegel uses the same thought – even the same words – when he writes that “only with composure and gentleness, in the holy stillness of true passivity can one recall his entire self (sein ganzes Ich) and contemplate the world and look at life” (27). The German Romantic view of Prometheus would not be complete without mention of the musical works based on the myth: notably Beethoven’s ballet Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus (op. 43, 1801), which features Prometheus less than his creatures and their dances; and the masterful Lieder of Franz Schubert (1819) and Hugo Wolf (1890), inspired by Goethe’s poem. Goethe returned to Prometheus in his fragmentary drama Pandora (1807/08), which is not so much a drama as a play with symbolic oppositions, represented by the stage set which features, on the left, cliffs and mountains and, on the right, a cultivated landscape. These sets symbolise Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus, who exemplify the active and the contemplative approach to life. Analogous oppositions are represented by Epimetheus’s daughters Elpore and Epimeleia (“hope” and “trust”) and by various choral groups: smiths and shepherds, warriors and tradesmen, vintners and fishermen. Apparently Goethe meant for the opposing figures to be united at the end in a grand reconciliation, in which Pandora (who never appears in the fragment) would return happily to Epimetheus. Although the work remained incomplete, it seems to constitute a retreat from the wholly titanic view of Prometheus represented in Goethe’s earlier works and, as such, more consistent with the modified view of Prometheus that characterised the later Romantics.



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Apart from passing references, Prometheus plays a much less significant role among the later German Romantics. In his Berlin lectures of the 1820s on aesthetics G. W. F. Hegel retained the negative view advanced by Friedrich Schlegel and Schleiermacher, arguing that Prometheus gave humanity not morality and law but “only the cunning to conquer natural things and to use them as a means for human satisfaction” (Hegel 1986, 14, 57). In his lectures on the philosophy of religion he refined that view: because as a Titan Prometheus belonged to the old gods, he was incapable of communicating anything more spiritual and moral. The use of fire had been placed only “in the service of self-interest and private use’ (Hegel 1986, 107–08). But almost simultaneously Prometheus emerged as a central figure in the minds and imaginations of the English Romantics, notably at the most famous house party in the history of English literature – the evening in the summer of 1816 at Byron’s Villa Diodati near Geneva, which brought together Byron and his friend, Dr John Polidori, with Percy and Mary Shelley and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont. It was on that occasion, as we know from Mary Shelley’s introduction to her Frankenstein that Byron challenged them all to write a horror story – the challenge that produced Frankenstein (1818). But those evenings involved conversations not only about ghosts and horror but also lively discussions about Prometheus, which resulted in works on the Titan by three of the participants: Byron, and Percy and Mary Shelley. The first of these works, Byron’s 1816 ode “Prometheus” (Byron 1975, 191), is addressed to the Titan, chained to his rock, who is seen less as the defiant challenger than as the patient sufferer. Thy Godlike crime was to be kind, To render with thy precepts less The sum of human wretchedness, And strengthen Man with his own mind.

Even though his purpose was “baffled from high” he remained patient and enduring. Thou art a symbol and a sign To Mortals of their fate and force; Like thee, Man is in part divine, A troubled stream from a pure source.

If Byron’s Prometheus appears to be quite remote from Goethe’s Sturm und Drang hero, yet another metamorphosis appears in the next and by far most famous of the Diodati treatments of the myth: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Or, the Modern Prometheus (1818). After the title page the novel provides not a single allusion to the mythic figure and the reader must deduce to what extent Victor Frankenstein can be said to be a modern Prometheus. The frequent references in the novel to electricity and lightning remind us that Prometheus incurred the wrath of Zeus by stealing fire for mankind. A further analogy can be detected in the legend according to which Prometheus created the human race by fashioning men of clay, just as Victor Frankenstein created his monster from fibres, muscles and veins he obtained. But at this point the analogy ends. For Prometheus devoted himself heart and soul to his creatures; but Frankenstein, appalled by what he has done, ignores and neglects his monster, who according to the motto on the title page from Milton’s Paradise Lost (X, 743–45) felt abandoned: Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay To mould me Man, did I solicit thee From darkness to promote me?

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It would be inconsistent with all we know about European Romanticism to think that Mary Shelley intended her novel to be a blanket indictment of the pursuit of knowledge per se. Instead, it is a cautionary tale against a science divorced from ethical responsibility. The fact that the creature, while ugly, is by no means inherently evil and becomes so only because of its treatment by its maker and society, makes us realise that scientific discovery becomes evil only when the scientist refuses to assume responsibility for his creation – that is, when he turns it loose upon an uncomprehending society. In sum, Mary Shelley uses the Prometheus myth for a wholly new purpose: as a warning against a science without ethics. Percy Bysshe Shelley began his four-act lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1820) soon after his wife completed her Frankenstein. As he tells us in his preface, he did not seek to retell Aeschylus’s drama of the same title, in which allegedly Prometheus was reconciled with Jupiter for disclosing the danger threatened by his marriage with Thetis. “I was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind” (Shelley 1866 1, 264). For Shelley, Prometheus represents “the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends” (Shelley 1866 1, 264). The first act shows Prometheus chained to his precipice and, in a monologue, depicting his sufferings. He once cursed the despot Jupiter but, in the course of time, gained insight and liberated himself from his thirst for revenge (Shelley 1866 1, 280): It doth repent me: words are quick and vain; Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine. I wish no living thing to suffer pain.

Even though he retracts his curse, he refuses when Mercury presses him to betray the danger threatening Jupiter. Prometheus does not appear in Act Two, in which his beloved Asia awaits her liberation, which requires the intercession of Demogorgon, a power of the underworld. Because Prometheus has retracted his curse, Demogorgon is able in the third act to deprive Jupiter of his power and free the cosmos from his tyranny. Prometheus, liberated by Hercules, is united with Asia. Mankind, too, is liberated, as the Spirit of the Hour declares (1, 344): The painted veil, by those who were, called life, Which mimick’d, as with colours idly spread, All men believed and hoped, is torn aside; The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless, Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king Over himself; just, gentle, wise: but man Passionless; no, not yet free from guilt or pain, Which were, for his will made or suffered them, Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves, From chance, and death, and mutability, …

In the last act, the elemental beings – choruses of spirits and hours, earth and moon – celebrate their liberation as Demogorgon looks on and comments in the concluding strophe (1, 366): To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates: Neither to change, nor faulter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory!



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Clearly, Shelley’s “lyrical drama”, which is hardly dramatic, goes in its intense lyricism far beyond any earlier variation on the Prometheus theme. Indeed, after the first act the Titan plays scarcely a role and he is no longer the defiant hero of Aeschylus and Goethe but, rather, a Christ-like figure of forgiveness. The Sturm und Drang followed by Romanticism in Germany and England popularised the theme of Prometheus so extensively that it is almost impossible to cite the many and varied treatments that followed (see Frenzel 1998). In France, for instance, Edgar Quinet’s threepart verse drama Prométhée (1838, consisting of Inventeur du Feu, Enchainé, Délivré) portrays Jupiter as overthrown by Christ and the Titan liberated by the archangels Michel and Raphaël. But only five years later Louis Ménard in his poem Prométhée délivré (1843) turns sharply against religion, arguing that his liberation can take place only through scientific progress. Balzac, according to the epigraph to André Maurois’s (1965) biography, stated a pronounced preference for Prometheus over Faust. And at the end of the century André Gide, in his satire Le Prométhée mal enchainé (1899), presents a modern-day Prometheus who proclaims “Je n’aime pas les hommes; j’aime ce qui les dévore” (Gide 1958, 322). At the end he sits in a restaurant with his friend Coclès and eats his pet eagle, which is found to be delicious. A concluding note informs us that he wrote his little story with a feather from that same eagle (Gide 1958, 341). One of the most remarkable nineteenth-century variations is the “parable” (Gleichnis) Prometheus und Epimetheus (1881) by the Swiss writer Carl Spitteler. Apart from its title, it bears absolutely no resemblance to the ancient or modern treatments of the myth by Goethe, Shelley their followers. Here the young Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus, withdrawing from humankind, retire to live in a quiet valley. When the Angel of God comes and offers Prometheus the crown over earth if he will give up his soul, Prometheus refuses. When Epimetheus accepts the crown, Prometheus leaves him for a life with his lovely mistress, his soul, and obeys her command to kill the young of his lion, symbol of power, and his dog, the symbol of peaceful content. As the years pass, Epimetheus governs as a wise king while Prometheus, accompanied by his lion and his dog, is driven by the Angel of God into servitude in a distant land. Many years later, and after further adventures that have no source in earlier versions of the myth, Prometheus returns to the land where Epimetheus’s people have been betrayed and driven into despair. Prometheus finds his brother hiding in a swamp and takes him home to their valley, where Epimetheus recovers his lost soul and his people are restored to happiness. We have already noted that the myth attracted the attention of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and C. G Jung. Inevitably Friedrich Nietzsche became the fourth in that intellectual quartet. Like Rousseau a century earlier, Nietzsche introduced his first work with a frontispiece depicting Prometheus resting his foot on the eagle that has just been slain by Herakles. Prometheus turns out to be, along with Dionysos, the true hero of The Birth of Tragedy (1872). Nietzsche, a professor of classical philology, had long admired the figure of Prometheus, especially as he knew it from Aeschylus. As a schoolboy at Schulpforta he produced a one-act drama entitled simply Prometheus (1859), in which the Titan expresses his intention to contest Zeus for his power and rule. But the hero, betrayed to the gods, is dashed down to the realm of Orcus and the drama concludes with a chorus in which humankind acknowledges the impotence of the individual before the might of the gods. In his analysis of the myth of Prometheus that constitutes section 9 of The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche, citing the words of Goethe’s Prometheus, argues that Aeschylus’s Prometheus represents the “glory of activity” as opposed to the “glory of passivity” that he detects in Sophocles’ Oedipus (Nietzsche 1954–56 1, 57ff.). It is the presupposition of the Prometheus myth, he explains, that mankind acquires the best and highest of which it is capable only through a sacrilege and must therefore be prepared to take upon itself the consequences of suffering and grief. “Active” sin is the Promethean virtue in contrast to the passive sin of the

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Judeo-Christian myth of the Fall. Such sin therefore becomes at once the ethical basis of pessimistic tragedy and the justification of human ills. For Nietzsche, the Aeschylean Prometheus is a Dionysian mask concealing the Apollonian longing for justice that equally characterises the Greek dramatist. Prometheus’s defiance of Zeus marks for Nietzsche the moment at which the serene Olympian culture of the Greeks is overcome by a darker, more profound worldview. In his Prometheus Bound Aeschylus resurrects the earlier age of the Titans from the Tartarus to which it had been banned, and Dionysian truth recaptures the realm of myth as the symbol of its understanding. It is the Heraclean power of music, he concludes, that freed Prometheus from the vulture and transformed myth into a vehicle of Dionysian wisdom. Inspired by Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and Jung, Prometheus continued to arouse the interest of writers in the twentieth century. Just after World War I, Franz Kafka set down a brief parable entitled “Prometheus” (1918; for the English translation see Kafka 1983, 432), which consists of four variant legends concerning the mythic hero. According to the first (the traditional one), because he betrayed the gods Prometheus was chained to the Caucasus and eagles were sent to gnaw away at his ever-regenerating liver. A second account recorded that Prometheus, in agony from the incessant gnawing of the cruel beaks, pressed himself ever more deeply into the cliff until he became one with it. According to a third version his betrayal was forgotten – by the gods, the eagles and eventually himself. And in the final version everyone wearies of the affair – the gods, the eagles and even the wound, which gradually heals. Only the mountain remains unexplained. The legend seeks to explain the inexplicable, concludes Kafka. Kafka’s French admirer Albert Camus remarks at the beginning of his “essay on man in revolt”, L’Homme révolté (1951), that his contemporaries like to believe that they live in Promethean times. “But is this really a Promethean age?” (Camus 1956, 26). Two hundred pages later his analysis of the modern condition has led him to the ironic conclusion that Prometheus himself has been transformed by the humanity he had hope to lead in an assault against the heavens. Because men are weak and cowardly and love pleasure and immediate rewards, Prometheus has had to become a master and teach them self-denial in order that they may grow up. “Those who doubt his word will be thrown into the desert, chained to a rock, offered to the vultures. The others will march henceforth in darkness, behind the pensive and solitary master. Prometheus alone has become god and reigns over the solitude of men” (244–45). However, the myth played its most powerfully constitutive role in the 40-year literature and thought of the German Democratic Republic (1949–89) (see Ziolkowski 2000, 121– 48). For at least two reasons Prometheus emerged as a central image in that Marxist culture. First, for Marx himself, as well as most recent students of his thought, Prometheus symbolised the proletariat in revolt against the capitalist ruling classes. Second, the recurrence of classical themes has long been recognised as one of the principal characteristics of literature in East Germany – both to stress the continuity of German culture and to provide metaphorical possibilities to discuss contemporary politics. Beyond Wilhelm Tkaczyk, whose poem “Prometheus in der Fabrik” this chapter has already cited, such leading writers as Johannes R. Becher, Bertolt Brecht, Heinz Czechowski, Georg Maurer, Volker Braun, Karl Mickel and Günter Kunert composed poems on the myth. Heiner Müller’s scenic drama Cement (1971), based on Fyodor Gladkov’s novel of that title, contains an interpolated account of “The Liberation of Prometheus”. And Franz Fühmann produced for the East German Children’s Book Press Prometheus: the Battle of the Titans (1974), which draws upon the standard classical sources to carry the story from the beginning of time down to Prometheus’s creation of man and woman. Otherwise the popularity of the myth has continued: from Ted Hughes’s cycle of 21 powerful poems voiced by the Titan, Prometheus on His Craig (1973), by way of Otto Mainzer’s



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700-page novel Prometheus (1989) – in which a Jewish psychoanalyst trapped on the coast of France in August 1939 concludes that Prometheus ends in a German concentration camp – to Tony Harrison’s film Prometheus (1999), in which the ancient legend of fire is welded together with a contemporary plot set in the postindustrial landscape of the Yorkshire coalfields. The twenty-first century produced, finally, Walter Mosley’s novella The Gift of Fire (2012), in which Prometheus, having been chained to his mountain for three thousand years, casts off his shackles, gathers his intestines in his left hand and makes his way back down the mountain to – South Central Los Angeles. Finding mankind relapsed into its original darkness, he looks for a soul that can bear the touch of the “second fire”, the light that illuminates the gateway from this world to the next, and lead mankind out of the shadows and back into unity with the “godmind” (50). He finds that soul in the 14-year old boy named Chief Reddy; the remainder of the novella, after Prometheus’s murder by the gods, depicts Reddy’s trip around the United States, bringing fire and a new light to his people. In sum, the three millennia since his first appearance in the tales and legends of pre-classical Greece have seen Prometheus adapt himself to a multitude of ideologies ranging from amoral trickster to culture-hero, from transfigurations of Judeo-Christian biblical figures to rationalistic anti-religious causes, from hero of the Marxist proletariat to Nazi icon. Aeschylus’s “teacher in every art” himself exemplifies every art and every belief.

FURTHER READING For the development of the theme of Prometheus as an image of divine and human knowledge see Dietz 1989; and for its emergence as an image of human existence Kerényi 1963. Peters 2016 uses Prometheus as an example to analyse various models of myth in European literature. For the treatment of the theme in specific European literatures see Awad 1963, Kreutz 1963 and Trousson 1964.

REFERENCES Awad, L. (1963). The Theme of Prometheus in English and French Literature. A Study in Literary Influence. Cairo. Blumenberg, H. (1985). Work on Myth. (trans. Robert M. Wallace.) Cambridge, MA. Byron, G. G. (1975). The Poetical Works of Byron. Boston. Camus, A. (1956). The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. (trans. Anthony Bower.) New York. Dietz, K.-M. (1989). Prometheus – vom göttlichen zum menschlichen Wissen, Vol. I of Metamorphosen des Geistes. Stuttgart. Frenzel, E. (1998). “Prometheus.” In Stoffe der Weltliteratur. Ein Lexikon dichtungsgeschichtlicher Längsschnitte. Ninth Edition. Stuttgart, 653–58. Gide, A. (1958). Romans, récits et soties. Oeuvres lyriques, ed. Yvonne Davet and Jean-Jacques Thierry. Paris. Goethe, J. W. (1948–60). Werke, ed. Erich Trunz. 14 vols. Hamburg. Hegel, G. W. F. (1986). Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 20 vols. Frankfurt. Herder, J. G. (n.d.). Werke, ed. Theodor Matthias. 5 vols. Leipzig. Hitler, A. (1943). Mein Kampf. 855th ed. Munich. Jung, C. G. (1988). Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, ed. J. L. Jarrett, 2 vols. Princeton. Kafka, F. (1983). The Complete Stories and Parables, ed. N. H. Glazer. New York. Kerényi, K. (1963). Prometheus: Archetypal Image of Human Existence. (trans. Ralph Manheim.) New York. Kreutz, C. (1963). Das Prometheussymbol in der Dichtung der englischen Romantik, Palaestra 236. Göttingen.

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Marx, K. (n.d.). Das Kapital, reprint of 1872 edition. Paderborn. Marx, K. (2012). The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature. trans. with commentary Michael George. Google Books. Maurois, A. (1965). Prométhée; ou, La vie de Balzac. Paris. Mosley, W. (2012). The Gift of Fire. New York. Nietzsche, F. (1954–56). Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta. Munich. Peters, G. (2016). Prometheus: Modelle eines Mythos in der europäischen Literatur. Weilerswist. Rousseau, J.-J. (1997). The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge. Schlegel, A. W. (1846–47). Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Eduard Böcking. 12 vols. Leipzig. Schlegel, F. (1962). Dichtungen, ed. Hans Eichner. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, vol. 5. Munich. Schleiermacher, F. (1980). Über die Religion. Reden an Die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern, ed. Carl Heinz Ratschow. Reclam Universal-Bibliothek Nr. 8313. Stuttgart. Shelley, P. B. (1866). The Poetical Works, ed. Mary Shelley. 3 vols. London. Trousson, R. (1964). Le Thème de Prométhée dans la littérature européenne. Geneva. Von Balthasar, H. U. (1947). Prometheus. Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Idealismus, Second Edition. Heidelberg. Ziolkowski, T. (2000). The Sin of Knowledge: Ancient Themes and Modern Variations. Princeton.

CHAPTER 34

Myth, History and Revolution in the Nineteenth-Century Reception of the Oresteia Adam Lecznar In 1917, as the geopolitical status quo that had reigned during the nineteenth century was breaking down in the fire and death of World War I, a performance of Aeschylus’s tragic trilogy Oresteia attended one of the foundational moments of the next century: the outbreak of the Russian Revolution. In the St Petersburg flat belonging to the Polish classical scholar Tadeusz Zieliński, an influential lecturer at the city’s university, a group of Greek experts calling themselves the “Union of the Third Renaissance” met to exchange their theories about the role that Hellenism might play in the forthcoming cultural and political revolution. When Nikolai Bakhtin, the classical scholar and elder brother of the literary theorist Mikhail, later remembered these evenings, one moment burned bright in his memory: “the evening when [Vyacheslav] Ivanov read his translation of the Oresteia”, he said, was “the most intense and decisive experience” of his life (Bachtin 1963, 41). Dwelling briefly on the progression of this particular Greek tragic trilogy we can begin to understand why it was such a significant text to encounter at this precise moment: a series of dramas at the cusp of myth and history, exploring the death of a king, the violent reprisals that follow, and the eventual foundation of a new social structure. At a moment of revolutionary kairos Aeschylus’s rearrangement of Homeric myth to treat issues of political instability and reconciliation held clear importance. Alongside the political resonance of this moment of Aeschylean reception, there was also a cultural-literary one. The author of the translation mentioned by Bakhtin, the Russian Vyacheslav Ivanov, is significant in shedding light on another element of the trilogy’s presence in the nineteenth century. Ivanov’s 1919 essay “On the Crisis of Humanism: Toward a Morphology of Modern Culture and the Psychology of Modernity” explored the moment of artistic and moral crisis that he perceived in Russian culture. Ivanov concluded by drawing a parallel between Aeschylus and the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky:

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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It is noteworthy that our creator of Crime and Punishment, in his resolution of the problem of cleansing spilled blood, coincides with the ancient Aeschylus. To take upon his own shoulders a cross offered as if by God himself, to go out into the square, to kiss the Earth, to confess everything and repent before the entire nation: is this not essentially the same as abandoning the throne one has only just ascended to and going as a humble pilgrim to pray to Phoebus, and then to affirm Phoebus’s inner cleansing by the communal decision of the holy national Areopagus? … Here ancient memory and new presentiments converge. (Ivanov 2001, 174)

In this passage Ivanov melds together two scenes from Aeschylus’s Eumenides, the final play of Oresteia. The first is when Orestes comes to Delphi to gain protection from Apollo at the beginning of the drama, and the second is when he is absolved of matricide by Athena and the Athenian Areopagus. Ivanov puts these dramatic moments into dialogue with a scene from the close of Dostoyevsky’s 1866 novel Crime and Punishment, where the protagonist Rodion Raskolnikov finally confesses his guilt for the murder of the two sisters Alyona and Lizaveta Ivanovna (see Dostoyevsky 2003, 621–33). The tone of the two scenes is very different. Compared to the divine allegory of Eumenides, where Athena presides over a tussle between Apollo and the Furies, representatives of the Olympian and chthonian element of the gods, Raskolnikov hears only abusive shouts from passers-by when he kneels down and kisses the ground to confess his crime to the city, and his subsequent confession in the busy police house is almost ignored. The outcome is also different, as Raskolnikov is convicted and jailed, while Orestes is acquitted – nevertheless, both scenes represent a concern with how to think about the changing priorities and emergent duties of a revolutionary time. When Ivanov narrated his translation of the Oresteia in Zieliński’s flat it was on the eve of a revolution, and it resonated in the minds of his audience as a reflection on the problem of justice and its role in a new society. Similarly, when Ivanov drew the links between the “ancient memory and new presentiments” of Aeschylus and Dostoyevsky he did so to meld together two literary treatments of the question of justice, one realist-mythological and the other mythological-realist. The role of Aeschylus’s Oresteia in the coordination of these various themes of revolution and justice, myth and history will run through this chapter, and it is through them that we will peer into the different roles that the Oresteia played for thinkers and writers during the nineteenth century, focusing on the examples of G. W. F. Hegel, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas Hardy. The very idea of the “long nineteenth century” makes political crisis into the dominant leitmotif of this period; and no thinker was so keen as Hegel (1770–1831) to fabricate a philosophical structure that could balance the ideas of revolutionary change and spiritual salvation. In terms of his response to Greek tragedy, Hegel is most renowned for his famous discussion of Sophocles’ Antigone in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) as figuring a tragic modality of human ethical consciousness. If we shift back five years or so to an 1802/3 essay that he wrote on natural law, titled The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, Its Place in Moral Philosophy, and its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Law (see Hegel 1999, 102–80), we can find evidence that in this earlier manifestation of his tragic thinking Hegel was keen to deploy Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and in particular the final play of the trilogy, Eumenides, to instantiate a particular position on the origins of different types of law and their relationship to human community. This essay is of particular significance to the development of Hegel’s thinking about tragedy since, as Martin Thibodeau (2011, 110) argues, it contains the “first properly Hegelian theory of Greek tragedy” (see also Lukács 1975, 410–11). Hegel’s complex discussion of tragedy in this essay has received much criticism and response in later literature (see the “Further Reading” section at the end of this chapter). One way of understanding his argument about natural law is to see it as a critique of different notions of



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human development, and as an attempt to reconcile historical and mythical planes of understanding. For Hegel and his contemporaries, the idea of “natural law” was a way of thinking about the development of human ethical existence (the capacity of humans to live in lawbound and harmonious communities, where the rights of the individual and the group coexist). In his essay Hegel critiques two dominant understandings of these issues. First, he attacks what he calls the “empiricism” of a crude anthropological model of justice and law that requires the idea of a wild Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all, which is intended to represent the zero-point of modern ethical organisation but which is simply its negative inversion. Second, he critiques what he terms the “formalism” of philosophical theories such as those of Kant and Fichte, which rely on pre-judicial and abstract notions of law and justice which are then shown to manifest themselves in ethical communities without any account of historical development (Miller 2009 offers a clear exploration of this opposition). Hegel’s philosophical project is predicated on an effort to meld together the spiritual and the historical: he wishes to understand how the absolute, his own conception of the underlying quasi-divine fabric of being, develops through and as history and its events. It is through tragedy, and in particular the Oresteia, that Hegel tries to assimilate these different models of historical understanding. Hegel belonged to the generation after the Weimar Classicists like Goethe and Schiller; on reading the Oresteia in 1816, Goethe described it in remarkably physical terms in a letter to Wilhelm von Humboldt: “A primevally gigantic form, of monstrous shape, steps shockingly before us, and we must gather all our senses together to somehow manage to stand worthily in front of it” (cited in Ewans 2005, 107). For Goethe, the Aeschylean trilogy is understood as something grotesque and non-human that obtrudes into human consciousness. For Hegel it would have to be otherwise, since he wished to understand its events as in some way a compromise between the purely anthropological and the purely conceptual. In this way it was necessary to account for the intersection of concepts and the historical world of experience; and he accomplishes this by focusing on the appeal that Aeschylus’s tragic drama makes to a realm of action and fate that is common to the human and the divine. In the first instance, he does this by using tragedy to refer to the wholesale movements of the absolute: This is nothing other than the enactment, in the ethical realm, of the tragedy which the absolute eternally plays out within itself – by eternally giving birth to itself into objectivity, thereby surrendering itself in this shape to suffering and death, and rising up to glory from its ashes. (Hegel 1999, 151)

Of a piece with the porous conceptual boundaries between Hegel’s absolute and God, the Passion of Christ is a dominant model in this account, patterned as it is by the rhythms of death and resurrection. But Hegel swiftly particularises his reference to tragedy by invoking Aeschylus’s Eumenides and making clear the specific elements of the encounter between the human and the divine that he wishes to focus on: The image of this tragedy, in its more specifically ethical determination, is the outcome of that legal process between the Eumenides (as the powers of the right which resides in difference) and Apollo (the god of undifferentiated light) over Orestes, played out before the organised ethical entity of the Athenian people. In a [very] human way, the latter, as the Areopagus of Athens, puts equal votes in the urn for each of the two powers, and so acknowledges their co-existence. This does not, however, resolve the conflict or define the connection and relationship between them. But in a divine way, the Athenian people, as the goddess Athene, wholly restores to the god the man [i.e. Orestes] whom the god himself had involved in difference; and by separating those powers, both of which had had an interest in the criminal, it also effects a reconciliation in such a way that the Eumenides would [thereafter] be honored by this people as divine powers and

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have their abode in the city, so that their savage nature might enjoy and be pacified by the sight of Athene enthroned high above on the Acropolis, opposite the altar erected to them in the city below. (Hegel 1999, 152)

The city of Athens is described here with both human and divine qualities, which need to intermix before Orestes’ case can be resolved. Without divine sanction, the judicial institution of the Areopagus is a solely human institution that can recognise the competing claims of the Furies and Apollo to the vindication of justice, but not to choose between them through the act of condemning or acquitting Orestes. Therefore, the Areopagus cannot “define the connection and relationship between them”. It is only through the intervention of Athene, and the subsequent acquittal of Orestes, that the Furies can be rejected in their claim to justice while still being incorporated into the religious order of the city. As Hegel later claims, “the absolute relation is … presented in tragedy” (155; see further Hyppolite 1996, 58–59), by which he means the coincidence between the mutable human realm and the unchanging divine one. Hegel symbolises the tragic formation of this absolute relationship in a particularly complex concluding passage to his discussion of Eumenides: Tragedy arises when ethical nature cuts its inorganic nature off from itself as a fate – in order not to become embroiled in it – and treats it as an opposite; and by acknowledging this fate in the [ensuing] struggle, it is reconciled with the divine being as the unity of both. (Hegel 1999, 152)

When he speaks of “ethical nature” here, Hegel is referring to human rational self-consciousness that comes about due to coexisting within the kind of socialised community represented by the polis. The “inorganic nature” of this human community is therefore the instinctive and irrational units of behaviour and alliance that belie the rational edifice of political organisation, and which are embodied by Aeschylus in the revenge of the Furies. The revolutionary arc of the trilogy is completed when the judgement of Athena on the Areopagus institutes the inception of the lawful community of Athens, itself the sublimation of conflict between the different registers of revenge, reprisal and reconciliation that emerges from the different determinations of rightful activity represented by Clytemnestra and Orestes, Apollo and the Furies (see De Boer 2010, 15–17). Josh Billings (2014, 155) suggests that one reason for Hegel’s invocation of Eumenides here is that it had just that same year, in 1802, been first published in a German translation by Friedrich Stolberg (see also Joshua 2005, 19). The existence of a modern translation may also explain why Hegel’s essay picked up on Aeschylus’s stark, and intensely visual, representation in the play of the different spheres of existence and their conflicts. Hegel went on to become an immensely controversial figure in nineteenth-century intellectual history; one of his many readers was the composer Richard Wagner (1813–83), who also happened to be deeply fascinated by the Oresteia. One anecdote has Wagner earnestly trying to convince a friend of the value of a particular passage from Hegel, before bursting into laughter when he was unable to understand what he had read (see Magee 2000, 96). Compared to this, Wagner’s reading of the Oresteia seems to have been more solemnly carried out, though not always by much. In her diaries, Cosima Wagner noted a comment that Richard made on 24 June 1880 in response to Clytemnestra’s condemnation of the chorus’s happy support for the sacrifice of Iphigenia in Agamemnon: “If Thyestes had been a vegetarian […] none of it would have happened” (see C. Wagner 1980, 495, quoted in Rather 1990, 16–17). Wagner’s operatic cycle The Ring of the Nibelung has long been known as one of the most renowned receptions of the Oresteia in the nineteenth century. Begun in the late 1840s and only finally presented as a total tetralogy in 1876, at the opening of Wagner’s Bayreuth Festspielhaus, this massive work took almost a quarter of a century to complete (see Haymes



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2010, 1–38 for its development). Its link to the Oresteia is both formal and a matter of content. The four music-dramas of Wagner’s cycle are intended to mirror the original Aeschylean structure of three tragedies, Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and Eumenides, followed by the satyr drama Proteus; its depiction of the interactions between humans and gods owed much more to Greek myth than it did to its Germanic and Nordic mythological forebears (see Haymes 1993, 27). In the 1960s, the German classicist Wolfgang Schadewaldt gave talks intended to erase the connections to Germanic nationalism that had become a hallmark of responses to Wagner’s plays, particularly during Wieland Wagner’s controversial Hellenic adaptation of the Ring in the late 1940s in Bayreuth that explicitly linked different character relationships in Wagner’s works to those of Aeschylean tragedy and in particular the Oresteia (see Carnegy 2006, 290– 96; Goldhill 2011, 125–50; see also Schadewaldt 1999; Deathridge 1999). For example, Schadewaldt linked the recognition scene between the brother and sister Siegmund and Sieglinde from Die Walküre with that of Orestes and Electra in Libation Bearers. Similarly, in 1982 the German film director Hans-Jürgen Syberberg created a cinematic version of Wagner’s Parsifal, which featured a plaster-cast head of Aeschylus lying next to separate ones of King Ludwig II, Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx, respectively his one-time patron, his protégé and his intellectual rival, as well as a bust of Wagner himself (see Carnegy 2006, xviii and 376–94). But while Wagner’s legacy has been bound up in a relationship with Aeschylus – Nietzsche (1997, 208–09) would himself align the two in his essay Richard Wagner at Bayreuth – more striking is the way that his Ring came out of an intense passion for the Oresteia. When we look at the origins of Aeschylus’s influence on Wagner it becomes clear that this was only one of many different texts and treatments of mythology that were at work in his thinking at this time. In his autobiography, Wagner pinpoints the moment that he rediscovered the texts in the summer of 1847, while he was in Dresden and devoting his time to studying literature, mythology and drama: In order to approach the real goal of these studies, Old and Middle High German, I began anew with Greek antiquity and was soon filled with such overwhelming enthusiasm for it that whenever I could be brought to talk, I would only show signs of animation if I could force the conversation around to that sphere. (Wagner 1983, 339)

Wagner can only reach the Germanic past via the Greek (which he had studied as a child) and he is filled afresh with a passion for antiquity, and with one author in particular: For the first time I now mastered Aeschylus with mature feeling and understanding. Droysen’s eloquent commentaries in particular helped to bring the intoxicating vision of Attic tragedy so clearly before me that I could see the Oresteia with my mind’s eye as if actually being performed, and its impact on me was indescribable. There was nothing to equal the exalted emotion evoked in me by Agamemnon; and to the close of The Eumenides I remained in a state of transport from which I have never really returned to become fully reconciled with modern literature. My ideas about the significance of drama, and especially of the theatre itself, were decisively moulded by these impressions. (Wagner 1983, 342–43)

There are two main points to consider in this passage. First, Wagner attributes his encounter with Aeschylus’s Oresteia to the 1832 translation of Johann Gustav Droysen. Second, he depicts it in terms of a performance that he sees in his mind. Indeed, Droysen did set out the plays in his edition as tetralogies (each with their three tragedies and satyr plays, though his reconstructions are not always the same as those made by modern scholars) and Wagner goes on to explain that at the same time he was reading Droysen’s translations of Aristophanes. From this and an unnamed translation of Plato’s Symposium, Wagner describes how he

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“gained such an intimate insight into the wonderful beauty of Greek life that I felt myself palpably more at home in Athens than in any circumstances afforded by the modern world” (Wagner 1983, 343). There is a sense here that the Oresteia forms just one part of a multitextual immersion in the memory of the ancient Greek world. This idea that the Oresteia formed a significant part of Wagner’s response to revolutionary moments is also made clear in the way that it would come to inform his developing understanding of the Ring cycle, and of the role of art more generally, in the following years. It was around this time that Wagner became connected with the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and was briefly implicated in the abortive uprising in Dresden of May 1849. After this he went into exile in Switzerland and it was here that he wrote many of the theoretical pieces such as “Art and Revolution” and “Opera and Drama” in which he sketched out the fundamental role of the Greek dramatic festival to his theories of art (see e.g. Wagner 1895, 30–34). At around the same time, Wagner was juggling three competing projects: one called Jesus von Nazareth, another called Achilleis and a third entitled Siegfried (see Garten 1977, 66–68; other accounts, such as Foster 2010, 286–87, mention further prose drafts of operas on the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and Alexander the Great). The three traditions that are represented here – the Judaeo-Christian, the Greek and the Germanic – suggest that the Greek was just one way in which Wagner wished to understand the resonances of myth and history: as he stated in his autobiography, “the consciousness of the close primeval kinship of these old myths, which had been shaping within me for some time, thus gradually gained the power to create the dramatic forms which governed my subsequent works” (Wagner 1983, 343). Though it was the Germanic subject-matter that Wagner chose in the development of the Ring (the original music-drama Siegfried forming the third part of the eventual tetralogy, alongside Rheingold, Die Walküre and the Götterdämmerung), there was considerable interchange between the Greek and the Germanic influences on his thinking at this period, and the major vehicle of the performative element of this influence was the Oresteia (see Haymes 1993). Similarly, Wagner’s desire to use the structure of the Oresteia to articulate the present world as the outcome of mythicohistorical processes involving the interplay of the human and the divine is of a piece with Hegel’s use of the drama. As Theodor Adorno (1981, 130) puts it, acknowledging elsewhere the Hegelian tone of his description: “In its form, the Ring is a metaphor of the totality of world history which perfects itself by achieving consciousness of what it had been in itself from time immemorial.” One person who was well aware of Wagner’s deep debt to Aeschylus’s tragedies was Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who commented in 1875 that “never has an ancient work had so powerful an effect as did the Oresteia on Wagner” (cited in Ziolkowski 2017, 234; see further Borchmeyer 2003, 279–307). One of Nietzsche’s major engagements with the Oresteia comes in his lecture notes for a course that he gave repeatedly during his time at the University of Basel on the Libation Bearers, the middle play of the trilogy (see Porter 2014, 28–32). Nietzsche was part of a thriving intellectual culture in Basel during the late 1860s and early 1870s, which could have informed his understanding of the Oresteia. It was during this period that the historian Jacob Burckhardt was giving his famous lectures on Greek cultural history (which Nietzsche attended). At one point in these, Burckhardt suggests that “the last great chorus of Eumenides” shared a particular religious fervour with certain biblical passages: “Only in one text of the ancient world are such notes sounded with greater power: Aeschylus voices wishes and prayers, but Isaiah in his vision of the New Jerusalem … is both prophesying and seeing the fulfilment of his prophecy” (Burckhardt 1998, 56). At a similar time, the renowned Johan Jakob Bachofen from Basel also became famous for his reading of the Oresteia as part of a mythical revolution in human prehistory in his work The Mother-Right (1861). This used the arc of Aeschylus’s play and the decision of Athena on the Areopagus to privilege the death of Orestes’ father over his matricide as evidence of the



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movement whereby primitive matriarchy was supplanted by patriarchy (see Bachofen 1967, 110–11). This approach was then later taken up by Karl Marx’s long-time collaborator Friedrich Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), who described Bachofen’s interpretation as “new but undoubtedly correct”, though he criticised its reliance on myth as “pure mysticism” and as an avoidance of the real economic and political details of this historical change (see Engels 1941, 6–9). While Marx was more interested in reading Aeschylus for his image of the Promethean instigator of revolutionary action, Engels demonstrates the potential for understanding the Oresteia as a document of the outcome of revolution as sociohistorical process. I want to focus on two points emerging from Nietzsche’s lecture notes. First, Nietzsche reflects on the performative context of the drama in a passage clearly intended to be delivered to his students: No one amongst us has seen the Oresteia; no one has heard it: an elaborate and backbreaking guesswork is required to understand things that would have been simple and easy [to follow] at the performance. Here goes one attempt to view things as they were in their actuality: I will tell you what I saw there. Naturally much of this will be sheer fantasy. But we need to experience an effect; once we have that we can form an opinion about the artist. I want to sit in the theatre not as an ancient but as a modern: my observations may well be pedantic; but at first I have to wonder at everything so as to comprehend it all afterwards. I have a certain impression of the Choephori and this is what I want to describe. But what does it matter to us, you will say, what my impression is? Why don’t I appeal to yours? Or to the work? – An impression is something rare. To attain it one has to add so much – which not everyone is able and willing to do. (Nietzsche 1993, 34–35; translation from, Porter 2014, 31)

Nietzsche’s focus on the performative context here as a central conceptual focus for interpretations of the drama echoes one of the most heated debates in nineteenth-century German classical scholarship between Karl Otfried Müller and Theodor Gottfried Hermann. Ostensibly concerning Müller’s 1833 translation and edition of Eumenides, though eventually involving many other texts by both authors, this debate was founded on an opposition between Hermann’s belief that the text of the tragedy was the most important object of research, and Müller’s emphasis on the historical and sociopolitical elements that the play brings into focus (what he calls its Realia, or its “real elements”) and its enmeshment in the performance culture of Athens. As Most (1998, 371) puts it in his summary of the quarrel: “Hermann reads Aeschylus’s Eumenides as a timelessly valid literary text and is interested in Realia only to the extent that they cast light upon its obscurities. Müller reads the play as the document of a unique performance and, despite his occasional protestations, is really interested in how the play can be used to help explain Realia.” Evidence of what the particular hermeneutic praxis that Nietzsche encourages for his students in these notes might look like can be found in some of Richard Wagner’s notes from February 1866, where he reflects on the performance of the Oresteia: Day – Night. – The Hellenes had a fine sense of the sanctity of night. The profoundest sense of it must have been revealed to those attending the great performances of the Oresteia of Aeschylus. This began in daylight: Agamemnon – complete human error–crime–desire. Afternoon: Electra – revenge– expiation–punishment. With the Eumenides dusk falls; at the end fully night: the young men escort the appeased, reconciled daemons of revenge in torchlight procession to their nocturnal place of rest. – Now the sanctity of the night feeling gives birth to playful merriment also: fauns and satyrs tease each other by torchlight, jocular dismay and disappointment – drunks scrambling for restingplace. The world lightly sheds its burdensome seriousness, and – peace becomes possible. – Here sleep, – there death! (R. Wagner 1980, 86; cited in Foster 2010, 261)

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Wagner here offers his own “impression”, to use the Nietzschean terminology, of what he saw in his mind’s eye as he read the translation by Droysen and of the play’s “effect”, where the temporal and narrative progression of the drama is matched by the natural rhythms of time. Though modern reconstructions are undecided on the specific order of the dramatic performances at ancient festivals, it is clear that Wagner has mapped out his understanding of the experience of watching the dramas onto an all-encompassing vision of the Athenian dramatic festival (see Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 63–68; Csapo and Slater 1994, 107; the fact that the Oresteia was originally performed outside of war time, in 458 bce, suggests that a whole day may indeed have been devoted to its performance). Further on, Nietzsche includes some comments which make clear his view on the problematic role of the middle play in the action of the trilogy in a series of notes which seem to illustrate some of his broader problems with the play: “The artistic problem of the middle position. Naivety of its conclusion. No conflict of conscience. Nothing Hamlet-like” (Nietzsche 1993, 36; all translations from these notes are my own). He then goes on to describe his feelings about the usefulness of the trilogic structure for understanding the plays. In a section entitled “On the Aeschylean trilogy” (22–27), he begins by listing examples of tetralogies by authors including Euripides, Xenocles and Aeschylus and then introduces the main issue of contention: “Either the tetralogies are the rule and the individual plays the exception, or the individual plays are the rule and the tetralogies the exception” (23). This then begs the following question, which Nietzsche swiftly poses: “For example, is the Oresteia already composed amidst innovation, or not?” (24). The issue of whether Aeschylus is himself a formal innovator, or the emblem of a tradition that is only later altered, is then put aside for his own beliefs about the significance of the trilogic structure, as Nietzsche suggests that its disappearance in later tragedians should be grounds for a very different approach to the question: “We overvalue the trilogic point of view. It is important that the subtle Sophocles let it go” (26). But this leads him to consider where the idea of the trilogy came from and why it would have been significant in the first place. Nietzsche immediately dismisses the belief that it might have emerged from “a philosophical-ethical basic idea” (he remarks enigmatically that it is “absurd”, unsinnig, to expect this from Aeschylus), or from an “artistic point of view” (26) Likening the length and complexity of a tragic trilogy to the expansive structure and themes of an epic like Homer’s Iliad, Nietzsche says it is impossible to appraise the trilogy as a whole, let alone to take it in, and goes on to say that it was on the model of epic performance that the extended tragic form developed. As he continues (26–27): Thereby appeared larger interconnected pieces. In these one sought ever more to come to a unity. The process came to an end with Sophocles: he wanted a single organism, and it was fatal to this that in the Aeschylean trilogy: 1. the individual play was not self-contained. 2. the trilogy as a whole could not constitute an artistic unity. 3. at any rate, the Satyr-play hindered the unity of the impression. It is in any case significant that the developed era of Athenian aesthetic sensibility got rid of it, or at least didn’t use it as a principle.

Nietzsche concludes that “The trilogy was an aesthetic fetter [eine aesthetische Fessel] for Aeschylus. The genius under constraint” (27). Like Wagner, Nietzsche is concerned with the development of artistic practice, and he believes that Aeschylus’s example helps elucidate the way that this was taking place even in Athens. But while Wagner would rely on the structure of the trilogy as a whole, along with its satyr play, as an enabling template for the overwhelming experience that he hoped to achieve with his own Gesamtkunstwerk, in these lecture notes Nietzsche approaches the issue as one of artistic limitations. Indeed, though



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Aeschylus features heavily in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, out of the Spirit of Music (1872) as emblematic of the Greek tragic tradition before its decline, the Oresteia receives only a very brief discussion in the text (see Nietzsche 1999, 23). This chapter has been necessarily selective from the massive range of receptions that Aeschylus’s Oresteia underwent in the nineteenth century, and I will conclude with a final one from the writings of the English novelist Thomas Hardy (1840–1928). The characters and plot of the Oresteia make fleeting appearances in other nineteenth-century English novels, including a brief appearance in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) and a more extended role in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), where Thackeray has the character Becky Sharp enact a charade of Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon (see Fiske 2015 for Eliot, and Macintosh 2005 and Witucki 2017 for further details and bibliography on Thackeray). Hardy’s main association with Aeschylus is his borrowing from Prometheus Bound at the conclusion of Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). At around the same time, in January 1890, he wrote a short essay in which he draws instead on Agamemnon in a description of the novelist’s art and its relationship to contemporary criticism: Were the objections of the scrupulous limited to a prurient treatment of the relations of the sexes, or to any view of vice calculated to undermine the essential principles of social order, all honest lovers of literature would be in accord with them. All really true literature directly or indirectly sounds as its refrain the words in the Agamemnon: “Chant Aelinon, Aelinon! but may the good prevail”. But the writer may print the not of his broken commandment in capitals of flame; it makes no difference. A question which should be wholly a question of treatment is confusedly regarded as a question of subject. (Orel 1967, 131; see also, 1987, 37–38)

Hardy reaches back to the very beginning of Aeschylus’s Oresteia here to support his suggestion that literature’s moral imperative is to assert that the good should reign victorious over sorrow and despair. The chorus in Agamemnon repeat the line that Hardy cites, “αἴλινον αἴλινον εἰπέ, τὸ δ’ εὖ νικάτω”, three times during its ominous description of the background to Agamemnon’s decision to sacrifice Iphigenia at Aulis so that the Argive fleet might sail to Troy (Agamemnon 121, 139, 159). Hardy suggests that this moral note of “all really true literature” is often ignored by critics, who instead believe that the depiction of something negative taking place is the same as support for that thing. Pite (2015, 603) suggests that Hardy was influenced in his reading of Aeschylus by an essay of John Addington Symonds that was published in The Cornhill Magazine in 1876, where Symonds emphasises what he terms the “colossal” and “demiurgic” quality of Aeschylean drama, and especially the Oresteia (see Symonds 1876a, 30; for an extended version, see, 1876b, 158). For Hardy, Aeschylus’s desire to narrate the emergence of law from the violence of revenge as well as the very creation of justice and the good are at the heart of the attraction of these lines from Agamemnon. In the examples explored in this chapter, we can see how very different understandings of the relationship between myth and history have been developed through the reception of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Hegel used Eumenides to model an abstract understanding of the development of the concept of law in human communities, while Wagner used the structure of the dramatic trilogy as a basis for his own narrative of the destruction of the gods and his recuperation of Germanic myth at a moment of historical crisis. Taking a different approach, though one influenced by Wagner, Nietzsche demonstrated his interest in the evolution of dramatic form, and in the fresh insights that can be gained from considering the play’s performance, while Hardy is concerned with the particular type of morality that art can express. Underpinning all these understandings is a recurring relationship to revolution and social change. Compared with the great influence exerted on nineteenth-century art,

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literature, and thought by Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, Sophocles’ Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannus, Aeschylus’s Oresteia presents a very different set of concerns. The myths and tragedies of Prometheus, Antigone and Oedipus embody the nineteenth century’s obsession with the monumental achievements of singular, revolutionary human beings in politics and science, as well as a single-minded rejection of tyranny and oppression and an emphasis on science, rationality, and its limitations. Compared to this heroic model of historical development, the fate of the house of Atreus represented a more sociological approach to similar issues, whereby what is at stake is not who acts, but what society these actions emerge from and, in turn, create. In the Oresteia, we see revolution understood from the outside as a shift from one status of being to another: it is not the act of the heroic individual, but the fundamental destruction and reassembling of the social order.

FURTHER READING This chapter has been necessarily selective from an immense field of work and examples. For those beginning work on the reception of Aeschylus in the nineteenth century, the essays collected in Macintosh et al. 2005, Vance and Wallace 2015 and Kennedy 2017 are invaluable; Ewans 2005 and Ziolkowski 2017 explore other elements of Aeschylus’s German reception in this period. There is extensive bibliography on Hegel and Greek tragedy; see particularly Bradley 1950, De Beistegui 2000, Miller 2009, Thibodeau 2011 and Wake 2014; for the broader context of tragic appropriations, see Schmidt 2000, Billings 2014 and Leonard 2015. For Wagner and Aeschylus, see Seaford 2017, Foster 2010 and Ewans 1982. Nietzsche’s philological work is well examined in Porter 2000 and Jensen and Heit 2014, while Gossman 2000 explores the intellectual milieu of Basel. For more on Vyacheslav Ivanov, the Union of the Third Renaissance, and tragedy, see Clark and Holquist 1984, 32–43, Kliger 2011 and Ivanov 1952.

REFERENCES Adorno, T. (1981). In Search of Wagner. (trans. R. Livingstone). London. Bachofen, J. J. (1967). Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen. (trans. R. Manheim). London. Bachtin, N. (1963). Lectures and Essays. Birmingham. Billings, J. (2014). Genealogy of the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy. Princeton. Borchmeyer, D. (2003). Drama and the World of Wagner. (trans. D. Ellis). Princeton. Bradley, A. C. (1950). “Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy.” In A. C. Bradley, ed. Oxford Lectures on Poetry. London, 69–95. Burckhardt, J. (1998). The Greeks and Greek Civilization. (ed. O. Murray, trans. S. Stern). New York. Carnegy, P. (2006). Wagner and the Art of the Theatre. New Haven. Clark, K. and Holquist, M. (1984). Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge, MA. Csapo, E. and Slater, W. J. (1994). The Context of Ancient Drama. Ann Arbor. De Beistegui, M. (2000). “Hegel: Or the Tragedy of Thinking.” In M. de Beistegui and S. Sparks, eds. Philosophy and Tragedy. London, 11–37. De Boer, K. (2010). On Hegel: The Sway of the Negative. Basingstoke. Deathridge, J. (1999). “Wagner, the Greeks and Wolfgang Schadewaldt.” Dialogos 6, 133–40. Dostoyevsky, F. (2003). Crime and Punishment (trans. D. McDuff). London. Engels, F. (1941). The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. In the Light of the Reseaches of Lewis H. Morgan. London. Ewans, M. (1982). Wagner and Aeschylus: The Ring and the Oresteia. London. Ewans, M. (2005). “Agamemnon’s Influence in Germany: Goethe, Schiller, and Wagner.” In Macintosh, Michelakis, Hall et al. eds. 107–18.



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Fiske, S. (2015). “George Eliot.” In Vance and Wallace eds., 579–99. Foster, D. H. (2010). Wagner’s Ring Cycle and the Greeks. Cambridge. Garten, H. F. (1977). Wagner the Dramatist. London. Goldhill, S. (2011). Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity. Princeton. Gossman, L. (2000). Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas. Chicago. Haymes, E. R. (1993). “Richard Wagner and the Altgermanisten: Die Wibelungen and Franz Joseph Mone.” In R. Grimm and J. Hermand, eds. Re-reading Wagner. Madison, 23–38. Haymes, E. R. (2010). Wagner’s Ring in 1848. Rochester, NY. Hegel, G. W. F. (1999). Hegel: Political Writings. (ed. L. Dickey and H. B. Nisbet, trans. H. B. Nisbet). Cambridge. Hyppolite, J. (1996). Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of History. (trans. B. Harris and J. B. Spurlock). Gainesville. Ivanov, V. (1952). Freedom and the Tragic Life: A Study in Dostoevsky. London. Ivanov, V. (2001). Selected Essays. (trans. R. Bird, ed. M. Wachtel). Evanston. Jensen, A. K. and Heit, H., ed. (2014). Nietzsche as a Scholar of Antiquity. London. Joshua, E. (2005). Friedrich Leopold Graf Zu Stolberg and the German Romantics. Bern. Kennedy, R. F., ed (2017). Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Aeschylus. Leiden and Boston. Kliger, I. (2011). “Dostoevsky and the Novel-Tragedy: Genre and Modernity in Ivanov, Pumpyansky, and Bakhtin.” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 126, 73–87. Leonard, M. (2015). Tragic Modernities. Cambridge, MA. Lukács, G. (1975). The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics (trans. R. Livingstone). London. Macintosh, F. (2005). “Viewing Agamemnon in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” In Macintosh et al. eds. 139–62. Macintosh, F., Michelakis, P., Hall, E., et al. (2005). Agamemnon in Performance 458 BC to AD 2004. Magee, B. (2000). Wagner and Philosophy. London. Miller, E. P. (2009). “Tragedy, Natural Law, and Sexual Difference in Hegel.” In D. E. McCoskey and E. Zakin, eds. Bound by the City: Greek Tragedy, Sexual Difference, and the Formation of the Polis. Albany, 149–76. Most, G. W. (1998). “Karl Otfried Müller’s Edition of Aeschylus’ Eumenides.” In W. M. Calder III and R. Schlesier, eds. Zwischen Rationalismus und Romantik: Karl Otfried Müller und die antike Kultur. Hildesheim, 249–374. Nietzsche, F. (1993). Nietzsche Werke Kritische Gesamtausgabe 2.2: Vorlesungsaufzeichnungen, SS 1869WS 1869/70 (ed. F. Bornmann). Berlin. Nietzsche, F. (1997). Untimely Meditations. (ed. D. Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale). Cambridge. Nietzsche, F. (1999). The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. (ed. R. Geuss and R. Speirs, trans. R. Speirs). Cambridge. Orel, H., ed (1967). Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings. London and Melbourne. Orel, H. (1987). The Unknown Thomas Hardy: Lesser-Known Aspects of Hardy’s Life and Career. Brighton. Pickard-Cambridge, A. (1988). The Dramatic Festivals of Athens. Second Edition, rev. J. Gould and D. M. Lewis). Oxford. Pite, R. (2015). “Thomas Hardy.” In Vance and Wallace, eds. 601–18. Porter, J. I. (2000). Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future. Stanford. Porter, J. I. (2014). “Nietzsche’s Radical Philology.” In Jensen and Heit, eds. 27–50. Rather, L. J. (1990). Reading Wagner: A Study in the History of Ideas. Baton Rouge. Schadewaldt, W. (1999). “Richard Wagner and the Greeks.” Dialogos 6, 108–33. Schmidt, D. (2000). On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life. Bloomington. Seaford, R. (2017). “Form and Money in Wagner’s Ring and Aeschylean Tragedy.” In Kennedy, ed. 349–61.

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Symonds, J. A. (1876a). “Aeschylus.” The Cornhill Magazine 33, 27–40. Symonds, J. A. (1876b). Studies of the Greek Poets. Second Series. London. Thibodeau, M. (2011). Hegel et la tragédie grecque. Rennes. Vance, N. and Wallace, J., eds. (2015). The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature. Volume 4: 1790–1880. Oxford. Wagner, C. (1980). Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, Volume II: 1878–1883. (ed. M. Gregor-Dellin and D. Mack, trans. G. Skelton). New York. Wagner, R. (1895). Richard Wagner’s Prose Works. Volume I: The Art-work of the Future &c. (trans. W. A. Ellis). London. Wagner, R. (1980). The Diary of Richard Wagner 1865–1882: The Brown Book. (ed. J. Bergfield, trans. G. Bird). London. Wagner, R. (1983). My Life. (ed. M. Whittall, trans. A. Gray). Cambridge. Wake, P. (2014). Tragedy in Hegel’s Early Theological Writings. Bloomington. Witucki, B. (2017). “An Aeschylean Waterloo: Responding to War from the Oresteia to Vanity Fair.” In Kennedy ed. 323–47. Ziolkowski, T. (2017). “Aeschylus in Germany.” In Kennedy, ed. 225–42.

CHAPTER 35

Three Landmarks in the Reception of the Oresteia in Twentieth-Century Drama Vayos Liapis The plays discussed in this chapter – Eugene O’Neill’s trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra, T. S. Eliot’s Family Reunion and Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Flies (Les Mouches) – are among the most important and best-known 20th-century attempts to rewrite the Oresteia myth into contemporary contexts and concerns.

Aeschylus’s Oresteia and O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra To a considerable extent, Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy (458 bce) concerns foundations. It enacts the transition from a prehistory of matriarchy, unrestrained individualism and selfperpetuating reciprocal violence to a phase of patriarchy, city-state collectivity, judicial procedure and the rule of law (see, in this volume Porter, Chapter 9 and Burian, Chapter 10). Foundations are also a central concern in Eugene O’Neill’s (1888–1953) trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra (henceforth MBE), which premiered at Manhattan’s Guild Theatre on 26 October 1931. The trilogy is, to all intents and purposes, a modern American Oresteia. Aeschylus had used the old myths concerning the House of Atreus to dramatise the (then historically recent) emergence of Athenian democratic institutions from the (mythically remote) Trojan War. For his part, O’Neill appropriates Aeschylus’s version of Atreid myth and refracts it through the event that defined the modern American state and its national and political identities: the American Civil War (1861–65). In fact, while working on MBE, O’Neill toyed with the idea of writing a play on Aeschylus’s life, “as if in rewriting his predecessor’s play he somehow attempted to move into Aeschylus’s mind” (Chirico 2000, 82). By aligning MBE with the perceived universality and canonicity of Greek tragic myth, and of Aeschylean drama in particular, O’Neill was arguably seeking to raise his own work above the historical specificity of its setting to an opus that could transcend historical and national boundaries.

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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One of the most characteristic means by which MBE seeks to establish its intertextual relationship with the Oresteia is verbal and visual allusiveness. A prominent visual marker is the imposing mansion of the Mannon family, a looming presence throughout the trilogy (Rice 1992, 47–48). It is described as a “large building of the Greek temple type that was the vogue in the first half of the nineteenth century”, its white “Grecian temple” portico contrasting with the grey cut-stone walls of the house proper “like an incongruous white mask fixed on the house to hide its somber gray ugliness” (O’Neill 1988, 890, 893). At once “Grecian” and early-nineteenth-century American, the house’s mask-like portico turns out to be in line with the disconcerting impression of life-like masks created, as the trilogy emphasises time and again, by the faces of several dramatis personae (O’Neill 1988, 894, 896, 897, 907, 931, Rice 1992, 46). As well as pointing to MBE’s Grecian ancestry, the persistent references to masks create an alienating effect, an impression of secretive aloofness: Secret lookin’ –’s if it was a mask she’d put on. That’s the Mannon look. They all has it. They grow it on their wives. […] They don’t want folks to guess their secrets. (O’Neill 1988, 896–97)

O’Neill, who had initially envisaged using actual half-masks (Bogard 1987, 266, 337–38, Rice 1992, 46), stresses in his Work Diary that he wanted the mask-like features of his principal characters to function as “a dramatic arresting visual image of the separateness, the fated isolation of this family” (cited in Burke 2006, 10). The defamiliarising effect of a theatrical convention peculiar to the tradition of ancient Greek drama contrasts with the familiarity (to an American audience) of the events and situations dramatised and helps elevate them above the level of ephemeral realism to that of an enduring immutability. The names of the trilogy’s central characters also establish implicit connections to their mythic counterparts, thereby allowing the remoteness of Greek tragic myth to encroach upon its Americanised descendant. We know from O’Neill’s working notes on MBE that he intentionally used “characteristic names with some similarity to Greek ones – for main characters, at least” (quoted in Törnqvist 1966, 362, 369). First letters are important here: Christine Mannon, the adulterous, murderous wife, evokes Clytemnestra; her lover Adam stands for Aegisthus; and her son Orin functions as Orestes’ counterpart. Even the family name Mannon, a common enough name attested as early as the first United States Federal Census in 1790, seems to acquire Greek associations in MBE. “Mannon” vaguely evokes Aga-memnon, a name etymologised already in antiquity as meaning “admirably steadfast” (Plato, Cratylus 395a–b) – a meaning which resurfaces in the story of how Ezra Mannon, the family patriarch and victorious brigadier-general, was nicknamed by General Ulysses S. Grant himself “Old Stick – short for Stick-in-the-Mud” because Grant would “trust him to stick in the mud and hold a position until hell froze over” (O’Neill 1988, 976; see further Moorton 1988).

Mourning Becomes Electra I: Homecoming The first play of the MBE trilogy, Homecoming, begins with an unmistakable nod to its Aeschylean counterpart, Agamemnon. In the Aeschylean play, the prologue is delivered by an anonymous palace Guard, who complains of the long nights during which he has had to hum a tune to keep himself awake (16–17) and shows himself unwilling to reveal the dark secrets of the House of Atreus (36–39). Likewise, MBE begins with the singing voice of Seth Beckwith, the gardener and man of all work, who is also ominously reticent about the Mannons’ domestic situation (O’Neill 1988, 893–94, 897).



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Homecoming dwells on Christine Mannon’s adulterous affair with Adam Brant in far greater detail than Agamemnon, does with regard to Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. Christine insists that her adulterous affair with Brant was encouraged by Ezra’s “nagging” of their son Orin into the war, which left the latter severely traumatised (O’Neill 1988, 917). As an alleged motive for his mother’s infidelity, Orin’s symbolic sacrifice parallels Iphigenia’s actual sacrifice, which the Aeschylean Clytemnestra evokes as a reason for her murderous lovealliance with Aegisthus (Agamemnon 1431–37; cf. Miller 2000, esp. 105–10). As it later transpires, Christine’s lover is the disinherited natural son of David Mannon, brother of Ezra’s father, Abe Mannon. The relationship evokes, again, the mythic House of Atreus: Thyestes, Aegisthus’s father, was involved in an adulterous relationship with the wife of his brother Atreus, Agamemnon’s father, as a result of which he was expelled by the offended party (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1193, 1583–86). Given his undisclosed family connection with the Mannons, Adam’s physical resemblance with Ezra Mannon is all too explicable and O’Neill unsurprisingly makes dramatic capital of it. In order to divert suspicion from his affair with Christine and justify his frequent calls to her house, Adam pretends to court Christine and Ezra’s daughter, Lavinia, who is repulsed by his overtures but also unsettled by his uncanny resemblance to her father (cf. O’Neill 1988, 905). It is obvious that O’Neill exploits here, perhaps in too blatant a manner (cf. Nugent 1988; Burian 1997, 255), Carl Jung’s notion of the “Electra complex”, the female equivalent, more or less, of the Oedipus complex, in which a girl’s desire for her father leads to sexual antagonism against her mother, but leaves her in a state of unsatisfied longing for a father who is perpetually absent (see Jung 1961, 154–55, 168, 245; on Jung’s influence on O’Neill, which the playwright explicitly admitted [Nethercot 1960, 247–48], see Törnqvist 1998, 22–23). Indeed, Christine herself offers an expressly “Jungian” reading of her daughter’s behaviour, when she accuses her of wanting “to become the wife of your father and the mother of Orin” (O’Neill 1988, 919). The play’s psychoanalytic luggage becomes even heavier when Christine confesses to her lover that he reminds her of her own son Orin (O’Neill 1988, 922). From the end of the second act onwards, the trilogy’s Oresteia-like plotline continues in more explicit fashion. Ezra Mannon’s “homecoming” occurs at night – yet another nod to Agamemnon, whose arrival is announced through a chain of beacon-signals before daybreak (Agamemnon 281–316). A reservedly courteous Christine greets her husband with words of ominous ambivalence (e.g. O’Neill 1988, 939, “What must be, must be”), which are eerily reminiscent of Clytemnestra’s sinister words in Agamemnon 912–13 (“As for the rest, my careful attention, unvanquished by sleep, will order it according to justice”). In the climactic fourth act, Christine causes her husband’s death, Lavinia rushes to his side and Ezra, gasping his last, points to his wife as his murderer. The play concludes with Lavinia’s dramatic appeal to her dead father – “Father! Don’t leave me alone! Come back to me! Tell me what to do!” (O’Neill 1988, 317) – which recalls Electra’s and Orestes’ famous dirge in Libation Bearers (306–478, esp. 315–18): “O father, miserable father, by what word or deed of mine can I obtain a propitious wind, so as to reach from afar your resting-place?”

Mourning Becomes Electra II: The Hunted The second play of the MBE trilogy, set two days after Ezra Mannon’s death, begins with a “chorus” (O’Neill 1988, 951) of six middle-class persons, who echo the common people’s view of the exclusive Mannons. By contrast, Libation Bearers, the corresponding second play of the Oresteia, is set several years (perhaps as many as two decades) after the events of the Agamemnon and begins not with a chorus but with Orestes’ prayer to Hermes and Zeus, in which he asks for divine assistance to avenge his father’s death. The difference is significant: O’Neill’s “Orestes”,

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Orin Mannon, who now comes back, wounded, from the war, is curiously unwilling – unlike his Aeschylean predecessor – to work himself up to a rage for, or even grief at, his father’s death. What is more, upon his return, Orin must confront a brewing domestic conflict: his mother attempts to win over Orin’s would-be fiancée, Hazel Niles, as a means of isolating Lavinia, while Lavinia tries to pre-empt her mother’s influence on Orin. In a tête-à-tête with his mother, in Act 2, the “Oedipal” aspect of Orin’s relationship with her comes to the fore: Christine tells him that she had formerly been jealous of Hazel and Orin confesses that his outward affection for the girl was merely a ploy to provoke his mother’s jealousy. This “Oedipal” encounter culminates, appropriately, in Orin’s confession that he wishes to spend the rest of his life in the company of his mother: “And I’ll never leave you again now. I don’t want Hazel or anyone. (with a tender grin) You’re my only girl!” (O’Neill 1988, 972). In Act 3, Lavinia repeatedly attempts to convince her brother of their mother’s responsibility for Ezra’s death, but to no avail; she succeeds only when she refers to Christine’s adulterous affair with Brant, which fans the sparks of Orin’s sexual jealousy. In Act 4, set at a Boston wharf, Orin and his sister spy on the adulterous couple’s tryst aboard Brant’s ship. When Christine leaves the ship, Orin shoots Brant in the back, a detail that may evoke Orestes stabbing Aegisthus in the back in Euripides’ Electra (839–43). An inverted echo of the Euripidean play may be identified in Lavinia’s prayer for “the soul of our cousin, Adam Mannon” (O’Neill 1988, 995): by calling him “Mannon” rather than “Brant”, Lavinia grants her dead relative symbolic admission into the family, in stark contrast to the Euripidean Electra’s gloating vituperation over Aegisthus’s body (Electra 902–56). The (by now worn-out) incest theme recurs in Orin’s confession, after Adam’s murder, that “If I had been he I would have done what he did! I would have loved her – and killed Father too – for her sake!” (O’Neill 1988, 996). In Act 5, Orin, after apprising his mother of her lover’s murder, goes on to ask her to join him on a voyage to the South Seas – a seemingly absurd request under the circumstances, which however serves to introduce the theme of (unattainable) escape to a place free of guilt that is developed in The Haunted. As it turns out, Christine will never make that voyage: she retires to the house interior and commits suicide using her husband’s pistol.

Mourning Becomes Electra III: The Haunted The trilogy’s third and final part, which begins with yet another “Greek chorus” of common people, is set more than a year after the events of the first two plays. Lavinia and Orin, now back from their voyage to the South Seas (the one Orin had dreamt of embarking on with his mother), are visibly changed. Lavinia has been transformed, it seems, into an almost exact replica of her dead mother, full of feminine grace and voluptuousness, but also possessed of her mother’s manipulative despotism towards an enervated Orin. As for the latter, he is now half-mad, pursued by the ghosts of this dead forebears and convinced that the ancestral mansion is haunted – just as his literary ancestor, Orestes, is haunted by the Furies in Eumenides and other Greek tragedies (Moorton 1991). At the same time, both Lavinia and Orin become further and further entangled in their morbid, quasi-erotic relationship, with the former striving to disrupt her brother’s engagement with Hazel, and the latter increasingly yielding to bouts of thinly veiled sexual jealousy towards his sister. In Act 3, Orin entrusts his fiancée Hazel with his manuscript of the Mannon history, where all the dark family secrets are revealed, asking her to store it away in a safe place until his death. Lavinia, who suspects what Orin has been up to, asks him to surrender the manuscript to her, promising in return to “do anything – anything you want me to!” (O’Neill 1988, 1040). This is Orin’s cue to venture upon a request he had not worked up the courage to make, until now: he asks his sister, in fairly direct terms, to enter into an incestuous relation



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with him (O’Neill 1988, 1041). A horrified Lavinia replies that her brother is “too vile to live” and that he ought to have the courage to kill himself. Sure enough, Orin is eventually driven to suicide, which Lavinia does nothing to prevent. The final act of the trilogy (Act 4) is dominated not so much by the drama’s human agents but by the Mannon house itself, an ominous presence invested with an almost supernatural power of death and destruction. It was built “as a temple of Hate and Death”, says Lavinia, who vows to “close it up and leave it in the sun and rain to die” in the hope that “the ghosts will fade back into death” (O’Neill 1988, 1046). A similarly central role is played by the Atreid palace in the Oresteia: “it would speak with utter clarity if it had voice”, says the Guard in Agamemnon 37–38, and it witnesses all the bloody events punctuating the trilogy. In a final desperate attempt to exorcise the evil ancestral influence from the family mansion, Lavinia begs her suitor Peter Niles to take her “in this house of the dead” so that their love may “drive the dead away”. However, when she inadvertently calls him by the name of her mother’s lover, Adam, she realises that “the dead are too strong” (O’Neill 1988, 1052). In Greek tragedy (Choephori 886–87, Sophocles’ Electra 1416–21, 1477–78), the idea that the dead are alive and powerful motivates Orestes’ triumphant reinstatement on the ancestral throne. By contrast, in MBE the dead Mannons prove too overwhelming a force to allow the surviving members of the family to lead normal lives. Lavinia, who had fervently hoped to break the vicious circle of her family’s self-destruction, ends up by withdrawing into the interior of the house, there to spend the rest of her life surrounded by the ghosts of her dead.

Mourning Becomes Electra as a Foundational Text MBE was conceived from the start as a magnum opus, which unsurprisingly led to O’Neill being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. The trilogy was hailed by the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, in his Presentation speech, as a “tragedy of the moderntime house of Atreus […] laid in the period of the great Civil War, America’s Iliad” (in Frenz 1969, 333). It was a crowning moment towards which O’Neill had been steering his career since at least the early 1920s, when he was lauded as America’s “first really important dramatist” by the then doyen of American critics, George Jean Nathan (O’Neill 1923, vii; Savran 2007). As an emblematic expression of O’Neill’s ambition to become the true founder of American drama, MBE invites comparisons with founding figures of American literature. The explicit reference to “a book called ‘Typee’ – about the South Sea Islands” as the inspiration behind Orin’s escapist dreams (O’Neill 1988, 972) establishes an implicit parallelism with Herman Melville, author of Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846) and one of the founding fathers of the American novel. Similarly, MBE’s Puritan New England context evokes the other founding father of the American novel, Nathaniel Hawthorne, especially perhaps his The House of the Seven Gables, where the titular house, like the Mannons’, embodies a family’s sinful past. Above and beyond his American literary forebears, O’Neill, the would-be creator of the modern American theatre, manifestly aspired to artistic parity with Aeschylus, who had been memorably labelled “creator of Tragedy” by Von Schlegel (1846, 90). His decision to pour the old wine of Aeschylus’s Oresteia into the new wineskins of MBE was gravid with the significance of a spiritual and cultural manifesto. Moreover, by choosing as the trilogy’s setting the aftermath of the American Civil War, an internal crisis of colossal proportions, which did however eventually consolidate the United States as a Union, O’Neill conjured up an era of origins and nascent identities. All of this helps to invest MBE with a primeval quality comparable to that of Greek plays about the Trojan War – that defining moment of Greek historical and national selfawareness, which in particular established the paradigmatic antithesis between Greece and Asia, thus helping forge Greek national identity (cf. Hall 1989, 164–65, 193–97).

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Even O’Neill’s heavy-handed use of the (then) relatively young discipline of psychoanalysis – the “Oedipal” (and “Electral”) themes permeating MBE, disparagingly dubbed by a prominent critic “the watered-down Freudianism […] of the subintelligentsia” (Bentley 1952, 490) – must ­probably be understood as part and parcel of his effort to bolster MBE’s universality of scope. For, notoriously, psychoanalysis claims that its tenets and findings are universally valid and a­ pplicable, irrespective of social, historical and other contexts (e.g. Flax 1993, 48–50; Taylor 2010, 64). An equally important component of MBE’s claim to timeless, global validity is its attempt to offer a new synthesis combining, on the one hand, the Greek notion of moira (“fate”, or more accurately an individual’s “portion” in life) and, on the other, the emphasis of naturalistic theatre on heredity and upbringing as defining individual character. For O’Neill, “fate is a force or compulsion located in the past, specifically in the family’s history” (Chirico 2000, 84), in which the consequences of evil engendered in the past continue to reverberate in future generations.

T. S. Eliot’s the Family Reunion and the Oresteia The Family Reunion (Eliot 1964 [1939]) was essentially T. S. Eliot’s first attempt to recreate a Greek tragic text, Aeschylus’s Oresteia (especially Libation Bearers and Eumenides), as a modern play. Ostensibly, The Family Reunion is a drawing-room drama; it even appears to begin with a nod to Victorian high comedy and some of its characteristic tropes – the witty but perhaps inane banter, the social satire. This momentary impression, however, is illusory: very soon, the atmosphere changes into one of ominous foreboding. Harry, Lord Monchensey, is expected to come back to Wishwood, the family estate, to take possession of his patrimony from his mother Amy, the Dowager Lady Monchensey. The latter has notable similarities to Clytemnestra: she is an overbearing matriarch (Carpentier 1989, 21–24), hostile to her husband and eventually “killed” by her son (see later in this section). As soon as Harry appears, it becomes evident that he, like his dramatic ancestor Orestes, suffers from delusions in which he is persecuted by Furies. For he is convinced that he is guilty of the death of his wife, whom he says he pushed overboard from a ship in the middle of the Atlantic eight years earlier (Eliot 1964 [1939], 29) – although whether this is really the case remains uncertain until the end. Like the Aeschylean Orestes, Harry insists that the Furies are not figments of his imagination, but a manifestation of the diseased “world I have to live in” (Eliot 1964 [1939], 31), a world inaccessible to the slumbering senses of his interlocutors (Eliot 1964 [1939], 28). The reality of the Furies is, indeed, essential to their eventual transformation into “bright angels” of salvation (see later in this section). Lady Monchensey hopes that her son will assume command of the family estate, more or less as (we recall) Orestes in Aeschylus’s Eumenides (755–60) is rightfully reinstated to the throne of Argos. However, the family past, like the ancestral curse of the Oresteia, has the Monchenseys in its ineluctable grip. In Act 2, we learn that Harry’s dead father – whose absent shadow (like Agamemnon’s in Libation Bearers) has been looming large over the action – had also planned his wife’s death, and that at a time when she was pregnant with Harry. The murder was averted thanks to the intervention of Agatha, one of Lady Monchensey’s sisters, who was motivated by the curious feeling that the unborn Harry was somehow her own child. Thus, Harry’s father emerges as an incomplete Agamemnon figure, who attempts (indirectly, through the intended murder of his pregnant wife) to kill his progeny, as Agamemnon had sacrificed Iphigenia. But the crime is staved off and the tragic burden accordingly diminished. Paradoxically, the revelations about the family past cause in Harry a sense of resolution, redemption and existential self-realisation. He declares that he finds himself, for the first time, “free | From the ring of ghosts with joined hands, from the pursuers” (Eliot 1964 [1939], 105). This is a transparent allusion to the Aeschylean Erinyes, who “join in dance” to sing a



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magic “binding song” in their persecution of Orestes (Eumenides 306–07). Eliot’s drama, however, is imbued with the ethics of Christian salvation and so his Erinyes are transformed from demonic agents of vengeance to “bright angels” (Eliot 1964 [1939], 111) of grace and expiation; accordingly, “the Oresteia’s theme of communal absolution is transformed into a tale of personal salvation” (Burian 1997, 258). Harry now realises that, rather than trying to escape the persecuting Erinyes, he must follow them willingly, as this is the only way to achieve expiation and salvation. He even implies that he will seek redemption in self-imposed exile (“the worship in the desert, the thirst and deprivation …”, Eliot 1964 [1939], 111), which recalls Orestes’ year-long purificatory exile in Arcadia (Euripides, Orestes 1643–47). Lady Monchensey’s death at the end of the play is, we feel, somehow provoked by Harry’s refusal to take possession of Wishwood; in other words, it looks like a drastically attenuated version of Orestes’ matricide. And although this emergence of the “matricide” theme adds to the sombre atmosphere, it also leads to a somewhat brighter finale, which seems to echo the triumphal torch-lit procession at the end of the Eumenides. We see Agatha and Mary (Harry’s cousin) walk slowly in single file round and round the table, clockwise. At each revolution they blow out a few candles [on the dead Lady Monchensey’s birthday cake], so that their last words are spoken in the dark. (Eliot 1964 [1939], 129)

The two women’s repeated injunction, “Follow follow”, seems to hark back to the Processional Escort’s “Go on your way … walk hither”, addressed to the pacified Eumenides in Aeschylus’s play (Eumenides 1033, 1041). And although the celebratory torches of the end of the Eumenides have been replaced by darkness, the circular movement of the two characters develops into a “pilgrimage | Of expiation”, which magically causes “the curse [to] be ended” (Eliot 1964 [1939], 131). As Raine (2006, 119) remarks, the “stale, familiar rigmarole” of the birthday cake ceremony is “invested with the force of religious ritual”, with the conflation of death and (re) birth as an evident nod to the Christian idea of resurrection. Ritual is typically an agent of ­closure, and the circular movement of the two women paradoxically breaks the circle of sin in which the family had been entrapped. Agatha’s seemingly prophetic words at the beginning of the play – “everything is irrevocable | Because the past is irremediable” (Eliot 1964 [1939], 17) – are thus rendered void. She is a peculiar Cassandra figure, who turns out to be wrong. Eliot’s attempt to create a modern analogue of the old Greek myth, and at the same time to infuse it with the Christian ethics of sin and redemption, seems at times contrived. It is as if Eliot had tried to do too much in too limited a space, especially in view of his decision to spend – as he himself later admitted (Eliot 1951, 29–30) – too much dramatic time exploring the Monchensey’s family past. As a result, the action in the first part of the play is brought down almost to a halt and never really picks up speed, despite the rather abrupt dénouement in the second part. Eliot himself later criticised The Family Reunion for failing to adjust the ancient Greek story with the modern situation: I should either have stuck closer to Aeschylus or else taken a great deal more liberty with his myth. […] They [sc. the Furies] never succeed in being either Greek goddesses or modern spooks. (Eliot 1951, 30)

J.-P. Sartre’s The Flies and the Oresteia Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Flies (French title: Les Mouches), first produced in Paris’ Théâtre de la Cité during the Nazi occupation (3 June 1943), is a rewriting of a number of Greek tragedies dealing with the House of Atreus – mainly Sophocles’ Electra, but also Aeschylus’s Libation

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Bearers and Eumenides, and Euripides’ Electra and Orestes. The same year saw the publication of Being and Nothingness (L’Être et le Néant), Sartre’s monumental exposé of the philosophical approach that came to be known as existentialism; it is hardly surprising, then, that The Flies reads largely like an existentialist manifesto in dramatic form. Sartre’s Orestes arrives in Argos from enlightened Athens (rather than from obscure Phocis as in Greek tragedy) under the assumed name of Philebus – an obvious allusion to the Platonic dialogue of the same title, which discusses the subject of pleasure. He is accompanied by his Tutor, who (contrary to his counterpart in Sophocles’ Electra) does not approve of his charge’s decision to return to his native city. For Argos is a backwater infested by a perverse cult of the dead: once every year, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus open the gates of the Underworld to allow the spirits of the dead to return and confront the living with indictments of their past offences against them. The living Argives respond with hysterical self-condemnation for a number of crimes (including the murder of Agamemnon) and profusely express their guilt at the simple fact of being alive; at the same time, they repeatedly beg the dead for mercy and try to shake off the burden of guilt by claiming that “it isn’t our fault” (Sartre 1972, 158–60, 166–67). This fusion of collective self-incrimination and extravagant but evidently insincere repentance reads like a mordant caricature not only of the Christian ethics of contrition but also of the politics of national guilt the Vichy collaborationist regime sought to implement during the Nazi occupation (see the end of this section). As Electra explains to Philebus/Orestes: Don’t let this affect you, Philebus; the Queen is enjoying our national sport – public confession. Here everybody shouts out their sins in front of everybody else. […] But the people of Argos are growing weary of it all: everyone knows everyone else’s crimes by heart; the Queen’s in particular no longer amuse anyone: they are official crimes, foundational crimes, so to speak. (Sartre 1972, 140–41)

Despite this charade of ostentatious self-accusation, the Argives fail actually to assume responsibility in any meaningful sense of the term: their repentance is precisely a denial of responsibility, a refusal to commit themselves to a freely chosen course of action. This failure is to be associated with a fundamental tenet of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, namely “bad faith” as the opposite of existential freedom. According to Sartre, we are all situated of necessity in our “facticity”, in a pre-existing set of particular conditions, which is independent of ourselves and our choices. To simply assume that our facticity cannot be transcended, that it delimits our ability to claim existential freedom, is a cardinal manifestation of bad faith; conversely, the freedom to transcend one’s facticity is an essential presupposition of existential authenticity (see further Sartre 1956 [1943] 47–70, 79–84, 481–553; Webber 2009, 19, 22, 74–87). At the beginning of The Flies, Orestes, as well as the Argives, is subject to the helpless passivity of bad faith and to the lightweight hedonism connoted by his assumed name of Philebus. When he meets his sister Electra, his identity still concealed, he asks her to abandon Argos and follow him to Corinth (Sartre 1972, 169): he has no desire to assume the responsibility of involving himself in his family’s circle of violence. Soon enough, however, Orestes’ instinctual urge to flee is eclipsed by a growing awareness that he does not belong anywhere, that the superficial freedom he enjoys is “the freedom of those threads that the wind blows off from cobwebs and that float at ten feet from the ground; I weigh no more than a thread and I live in the air” (Sartre 1972,123). Orestes “experiences his freedom not so much as a liberation but rather as a crushing necessity” (Leonard 2005, 218). His sheltered childhood and privileged upbringing have divested him of the ability to claim his share in the anguish of existence and prevented him from fighting for the painful choice of a deeply personal lifeproject away from the shackles of facticity. “I hardly exist”, he proclaims; “of all the ghosts that roam about the city today, none is ghostlier than I am” (Sartre 1972,176). Rootless and



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deprived of a personal past, he realises that the murder of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra would at least enable him to appropriate a personhood, an identity similar to the spectre of a righteous, vengeful Orestes that had been haunting Electra for years. As he puts it, he needs “the ballast of a heavy crime” to make him “go straight down, to the bottom of Argos” (Sartre 1972, 181), thus delivering him from the futility of vagabond detachment. By embracing the murder of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus as his own personal life-project, Orestes embarks on the pursuit of existential authenticity. Resisting Jupiter’s intimidation as well as the Argives’ pervasive guilt culture, Orestes realises that he must “bear the anguish of full responsibility for inventing values by his acts” (McCall 1969, 12). It is no doubt significant that Sartre diverges from the Sophoclean Electra in having his Orestes kill Clytemnestra after Aegisthus, so as not to mitigate the horror of the matricide in the least. The murderous act over, Orestes finally proclaims himself free: “Freedom has crashed down on me like a thunderbolt” (Sartre 1972, 210; cf. Leonard 2005, 218–19). As a true existentialist hero, who welcomes his full share of moral responsibility, Sartre’s Orestes can be allowed no attenuating circumstances: he must suffer the pursuit of the Erinyes in full. Indeed, at the beginning of Act 3, Orestes and Electra are discovered asleep at the feet of Apollo’s statue, surrounded by the slumbering Erinyes. The scene is clearly constructed as a visual allusion to Aeschylus’s Eumenides, where the Erinyes wake up slowly and reluctantly only after being scolded, in a dream, by Clytemnestra’s ghost for their inaction. However, Sartre’s Erinyes wake up before the matricidal siblings and even attempt to mesmerise Electra with their dance (Sartre 1972, 215, 224; Act 3, sc. 1) – an unmistakable allusion, once again, to the Erinyes’ “binding song” and dance (Eumenides 306–07), with which they can magically shackle their victims. Sartre’s alert Erinyes have the edge over their slumbering prey and they put their head start to good use: soon, under their influence, Electra will succumb to the ethics of remorse and repentance, and will attempt to shake off the unbearable burden of moral responsibility, even going so far as to deny having ever desired her mother’s death, despite Orestes’ efforts to strengthen her resolve and uphold her commitment (Sartre 1972, 222–23). To Electra’s gradual descent into the hell of guilt and repentance Orestes opposes the ethics of existential freedom: far from denying his responsibility for the matricidal act, he assumes it willingly and fully, and even admits that he will be haunted forever by the agonising memory of his crime. Nonetheless, Orestes embraces his crime as a supreme expression of his freedom to choose – to choose the identity of a mother-killer, without falling victim to the ethics of guilt: “I am not guilty”, he tells Jupiter, “and you can’t make me pay for what I don’t consider to be a crime” (Sartre 1972, 226). He even offers to assist and guide Electra along the steep and narrow path of existential freedom: “Give me your hand: I won’t abandon you”, he tells his sister (Sartre 1972, 224), in a conspicuous echo of the very first words Apollo utters to Orestes in Aeschylus’s Eumenides (64): οὔτοι προδώσω, “I won’t abandon you.” Having accepted the crushing burden of free choice, Sartre’s Orestes leaves Argos to go into exile. His decision, as he makes clear, signifies his refusal to perpetuate the old order by accepting the throne of the tyrant he has slain, the throne offered him by the odious Jupiter (Sartre 1972, 246). On the other hand, as Leonard (2005) 219 remarks, Sartre’s Orestes has delivered “the Argives to a freedom which they do not want” (contra Ryder 2009, 83, who argues that Orestes’ act, by eliminating oppression, has provided the necessary space for the collective pursuit of freedom). Indeed, by leaving the city he has liberated, Orestes may be thought to renege on his responsibilities to his fellow-citizens and to reaffirm, ultimately, his own individualism, thereby creating a gap between the moral justification of his act and the political contingencies he fails to engage with (see further Leonard 2005, 222; for a more optimistic reading see Dennis 2002, esp. 22). Sartre’s Orestes does not attempt to go beyond the negation of the current order to create something new: he is more a nihilist than a

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genuine rebel, for he annuls without affirming, and his reaction “to an order judged ­unacceptable” (McCall 1969, 23) results in “estrangement, fear, and anguish as a final ‘resting’ point” (Slochower 1948, 43). Though freed from the constraints of facticity and bad faith, he fails to take the quantum leap towards social engagement. This failure may be seen as an inherent vice of the existentialist worldview, but also as a corollary of The Flies’ essentially reactive character: the play is largely an indictment of the corrupt old order – as manifested in the Nazi occupation of France, the Vichy regime and French collaborationism – rather than a coherent programme for superseding it. As Sartre himself stated in an interview on the occasion of a revival of The Flies in 1951, his play “tried to contribute […] to the extirpation of this sickness of repentance, this abandonment to shame that Vichy was soliciting” from the French people (quoted in McCall 1969, 167 n.18; further on the play’s complicated, even ambiguous politics see Stoekl 2003; Ryder 2009). Among other things, the Vichy regime had launched a demoralising campaign, which promoted a sweeping ethics of shame and remorse, as well as a denigratory image of the French people as “fickle, foolish, boastful, egotistical” and therefore responsible for their defeat by the German forces (see Sartre 1949, 35; Grégoire 2004). Like the French under the Vichy regime, the Argives fall for “the official dogma of an original sin-like guilt that all share equally” (McCall (1969) 23). This ethics of collective guilt allows the Argives to avoid coming to grips with their individual responsibility and at the same time blurs the distinction between the true culprits (Aegisthus and Clytemnestra) and the artfully inculpated populace. Albeit anchored in the politics of a particular period of French history, The Flies claims, largely thanks to its existentialist background, a universal applicability that both contains and surpasses individual considerations. Sartre explicitly prioritised the use, in drama, of “situations so general that they are common to all” as a means of achieving “the unity of all spectators” (quotation in Jeanson 1955, 12). This is consistent with his use of a well-known Greek myth as the play’s narrative template. By virtue of its widespread familiarity and its perceived relevance across different periods, the Greek myth of Orestes is an apposite device through which to focus on and promote an archetypal reading of the human condition and the concomitant questions of freedom and personal choice.

NOTE I am grateful to Dr Elsa Bouchard for valuable bibliographic assistance and to the volume’s editors for their thoughtful comments. Unless otherwise indicated, translations from classical texts and from J.-P. Sartre’s Les Mouches are mine, as are all errors.

FURTHER READING The classic study of O’Neill’s plays is Bogard 1987. For an excellent overview of O’Neill’s work, ­background and reception see Manheim 1998. For good essays on MBE, especially in relation to the Oresteia, see Knickerbocker 1932, Chirico 2000 and Black 2004, often with discussions of earlier (unpublished) versions of the trilogy. On MBE as an American “charter myth” see Alvis 1986. On O’Neill’s stagecraft in MBE see Tiusanen 1968, 225–40; on his dramatic language see Chothia 1979, 99–110. There are several good introductions to T. S. Eliot’s plays: for instance, Smith 1963, Chiari 1979, 115–43, Malamud 1992, Sarkar 2006 and Pattie 2012. For a fine discussion of the design of The Family Reunion see Hamalian 1977. On the use of Greek tragic myth in Eliot’s plays see Branford 1955. On the parallels between The Family Reunion and the Oresteia see Tanner 1970, 127–28 and esp. Carpentier 1989, the latter with a review of earlier literature. The fundamental study of Sartre’s theatre production is McCall 1969. For an extensive study of The Flies and for a dossier of relevant texts by Sartre and others see Noudelmann 1993 (in French). The funda-



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mental text of Sartrian existentialism is Sartre 1956 [1943], although beginners may find it heavy-going; for accessible introductions see Webber 2009 and Reynolds 2014. On The Flies as an existentialist text see Jeanson 1955, 12–28 (in French); on the tension between individual freedom and freedom in society see Ryder 2009. On Sartre’s use of Greek myth in the context of his political theatre see Leonard 2005, 216–31.

REFERENCES Alvis, J. (1986). “On the American Line: O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra and the Principles of the Founding.” The Southern Review 22, 69–85. Bentley, E. (1952). “Trying to Like O’Neill.” The Kenyon Review 14, 476–92. Black, S. A. (2004). “Mourning Becomes Electra as a Greek Tragedy.” The Eugene O’Neill Review 26, 166–88. Bogard, T. (1987). Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill. Revised Edition. Oxford. Branford, W. R. G. (1955). “Myth and Theme in the Plays of T. S. Eliot.” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 7, 101–10. Burian, P., 1997. “Tragedy Adapted for Stages and Screens: The Renaissance to the Present.” In Easterling ed., 228–83. Burke, A. (2006). “From Aeschylus’ Oresteia to Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra: Text, Adaptation and Performance.” New Voices in Classical Reception Studies 1, 1–26. http://fass.open. ac.uk/sites/fass.open.ac.uk/files/files/new-voices-journal/issue1/Burke.pdf (last accessed: 9 August 2020). Carpentier, M. C. (1989). “Orestes in the Drawing Room: Aeschylean Parallels in T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Family Reunion’.” Twentieth Century Literature 35, 17–42. Chiari, J. (1979). T. S. Eliot: Poet and Dramatist. New York. Chirico, M. M. (2000). “Moving Fate into the Family: Tragedy Redefined in O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra.” The Eugene O’Neill Review 24, 81–100. Chothia, J. (1979). Forging A Language: A Study of the Plays of Eugene O’Neill. Cambridge. Dennis, G. (2002). “‘Enfin Sartre vint’: D’un théâtre de la fatalité à un théätre de la liberté.” Chimères 26, 14–23. Easterling, P. E., ed. (1997). The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge. Eliot, T. S. (1951). Poetry and Drama: The Theodore Spencer Memorial Lecture, Harvard University, November 21, 1950. London. Eliot, T. S. (1964 [1939]). The Family Reunion. New York. Flax, J. (1993). Disputed Subjects: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Politics and Philosophy, Vol. 5. London. Frenz, H. (1969). Literature 1901–1967: Nobel Lectures Including Presentation Speeches and Laureates’ Biographies. Amsterdam and New York. Grégoire, V. (2004). “L’Impact de la repentance vichyssoise dans Les Mouches de Sartre et La Peste de Camus.” The French Review 77, 690–704. Hall, E. (1989). Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy. Oxford. Hamalian, L. (1977). “The Figures in the Window: Design in T. S. Eliot’s the Family Reunion.” College Literature 4, 107–21. Hoppe, E. A. and Nicholls, T., eds. (2010). Fanon and the Decolonization of Philosophy. Lanham, MD. Jeanson, F. (1955). Sartre par lui-même. Paris. Jung, C. G. (1961). Freud and Psychoanalysis. (trans. R. F. C. Hull) The Collected Works of C. G. Jung vol. 4, Bolingen Series XX. New York. Knickerbocker, F. W. (1932). “A New England House of Atreus.” The Sewanee Review 40, 249–54. Leonard, M. (2005). Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-War French Thought. Oxford. Malamud, R. (1992). T. S. Eliot’s Drama: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, CT. Manheim, M., ed. (1998). The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill. Cambridge. McCall, D. (1969). The Theatre of Jean-Paul Sartre. New York.

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Miller, L. (2000). “Iphigenia: An Overlooked Influence in Mourning Becomes Electra.” The Eugene O’Neill Review 24, 101–12. Moorton, R. F. (1988). “What’s in a Name? the Significance of ‘Mannon’ in Mourning Becomes Electra.” The Eugene O’Neill Newsletter 12, 42–44. Moorton, R. F. (1991). “Eugene O’Neill’s American Eumenides.” In R. F. Moorton, ed. Eugene O’Neill’s Century: Centennial Views on America’s Foremost Tragic Dramatist. New York, 105–18. Nethercot, A. H. (1960). “The Psychoanalyzing of Eugene O’Neill.” Modern Drama 3, 242–56. Noudelmann, F. (1993). Huis Clos et Les Mouches de Jean–Paul Sartre. Paris. Nugent, S. G. (1988). “Masking Becomes Electra: O’Neill, Freud, and the Feminine.” Comparative Drama 22, 37–55. O’Neill, E. (1923). The Moon of the Caribees, and Six Other Plays of the Sea. Introduction by George Jean Nathan. New York. O’Neill, E. (1988). Complete Plays 1920–1931. The Library of America 41. New York. Pattie, D. (2012). Modern British Playwriting: The 1950s. Voices, Documents, New Interpretations. London. Raine, C. (2006). T. S. Eliot. Oxford. Reynolds, J. (2014 [2016]). Understanding Existentialism. London. Rice, J. (1992). “The Blinding of Mannon House: O’Neill, Electra, and Oedipus.” Text and Presentation: The Journal of the Comparative Drama Conference 13, 45–51. Ryder, A. (2009). “Sartre’s Theater of Resistance: Les Mouches and the Deadlock of Collective Responsibility.” Sartre Studies International 15, 78–95. Sarkar, S. (2006). T. S. Eliot: The Dramatist. New Delhi. Sartre, J.-P. (1949). Situations, III: Lendemains de guerre. Paris. Sartre, J.-P. (1956 [1943]). Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. (trans. H. E. Barnes). New York. Sartre, J.-P. (1972). Huis clos: Suivi de les Mouches. Paris. Savran, D. (2007). “The Canonization of Eugene O’Neill.” Modern Drama 50, 565–81. Schlegel, A. W. von (1846). Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur: Erster Theil. Leipzig. (In E. Böcking, ed., August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5). Slochower, H. (1948). “The Function of Myth in Existentialism.” Yale French Studies 1, 42–52. Smith, A. C. H. (1963). T. S. Eliot’s Dramatic Theory and Practice: From ‘Sweeney Agonistes’ to ‘The Elder Statesman’. Princeton. Stoekl, A. (2003). “What the Nazis Saw: Les Mouches in Occupied Paris.” SubStance 32.3 (102), 78–91. Tanner, R. G. (1970). “The Dramas of T. S. Eliot and Their Greek Models.” Greece & Rome 17.2, 123–34. Taylor, C. 2010. “Fanon, Foucault, and the Politics of Psychiatry.” In Hoppe and Nicholls, eds. 55–75. Tiusanen, T. (1968). O’Neill’s Scenic Images. Princeton. Törnqvist, E. (1966). “Personal Nomenclature in the Plays of O’Neill.” Modern Drama 8, 362–73. Törnqvist, E. 1998. “O’Neill’s Philosophical and Literary Paragons.” In Manheim ed., 18–32. Webber, J. (2009). The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. London.

CHAPTER 36

Oresteia on Stage: Koun, Stein, Hall and Mnouchkine Hallie Rebecca Marshall The decade between 1980 and 1990 saw four important productions of Aeschylus’s Oresteia: Karolos Koun’s Oresteia (1980), Peter Stein’s Die Orestie (1980), Peter Hall’s The Oresteia (1981) and Ariane Mnouchkine’s Les Atrides (1990–92). This chapter seeks to provide something of an overview of these productions, with a particular focus on some of the contrasts among them. While these were not the only productions of the Oresteia produced in the late twentieth century, they are all marked by the importance of their directors and their theatre companies. (For a list of productions of Agamemnon, see the appendix to Macintosh et al. 2005; for productions of the Oresteia in its entirety between 1950 and 2000, see Taplin 2002, 10–11, and for a relatively complete list, visit the database at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at the University of Oxford.) Each director stands pre-eminent among the theatre practitioners in their respective countries, shaping the development of the theatre traditions within their national borders but also beyond those borders. And for each of these directors their versions of Aeschylus’s Oresteia are numbered as being among the most significant productions of their careers, thus providing a valuable touchstone not only for the reception of ancient Greek drama on stage, but also the development of modern theatre performance traditions in Europe (though perhaps England, for a variety of reasons, ought not to be considered European).

Karolos Koun’s Oresteia (1980) Koun’s production of the Oresteia has a much more complicated relationship to the past than the other three productions. As Sidiropoulou observes, the productions of Hall, Stein and Mnouchkine were “created within a context of relative political stability and economic prosperity in the West at a time when humanist ideals of progress and faith in a unified European future seemed more possible that ever” (2018, 167). These directors took it for granted that Eumenides was rooted in democratic ideals and that their own productions would reaffirm those ideals. And similarly, the place and function of the Oresteia in the cultural canon was secure in England,

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Germany and France. The political and cultural landscape underpinning Koun’s Oresteia, first staged at the ancient theatre in Epidaurus in 1980, was significantly different. The production must be viewed in the context of Greek history, Koun’s status and history as a theatre artist in Greece and also the history of production of the Oresteia in modern Greece. In 1903, there was rioting in Athens, which resulted in the deaths of two people, when the Royal Theater staged a production of Mistriotis’s translation of a German adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. These riots and the events surrounding them came to be known as the Oresteiaká. The issue was not the production of the plays themselves, but rather the language of production – not demotic Greek, and not ancient Greek, but a mixture – which played into a cultural battle about the Greek language, in which some people, especially intellectuals associated with the university, argued that to translate ancient works into any form of modern Greek, but especially demotic, was to deny Greece the continuity of its cultural history (Mackridge 2010, 252–53). And while such a violent response to a theatrical translation might seem grossly overwrought, that is to ignore the experience of Greece colonised by the Ottoman Empire, which sought to suppress the Greek language, refusing to allow its printing within its borders and the attempts of much of the rest of Europe to appropriate the history and literature of ancient Greece for themselves (often physically plundering its material remains), while denying any meaningful cultural continuity for modern Greeks (Hanink 2017). While the other productions discussed in this chapter are not untouched by the cultural legacy of the ancient Greeks in their own countries, their productions are also not inevitably bound to centuries of history replete with political tumult and the desire of a people to assert their national identity on their own terms rather than those of their colonisers, a militarised government, or non-Greeks. Koun (1908–87), like the other three directors discussed in this chapter, revolutionised theatre in his country. Born in Turkey in 1908 to a Greek mother and Polish Jewish father, his life and career were bound up with the turmoil of Greece in the twentieth century. Among the central political events that shaped his life were: the Greco-Turkish War (1918– 23), resulting in the Treaty of Lausanne which, through its population exchange agreement, saw more than one and a half million people resettled in Greece in a matter of months; the occupation of Greece by the Nazis during World War II (1941–44); the civil war that followed the end of World War II (1946–49); the military dictatorship (1967–74), followed by the restoration of democracy (1974–). He founded his theatre company Theatro Technis (Art Theatre) – the most influential Greek theatre company of the twentieth century – in 1942, when Greece was under Nazi occupation. In its earliest form the theatre company sought to promote new Greek playwrights and introduce the work of contemporary playwrights from other countries, such as Ibsen, Ionesco, Beckett and Miller, to Greek audiences. It was not until 1959 that they produced their first ancient play, a production of Aristophanes’ Birds, as part of the Athens Festival. The festival was founded in 1955 by Georgios Rallis, then a cabinet minister but later Prime Minister, to celebrate and promote the Arts (theatre, music and dance). The festival in its first decades promoted Greek culture and targeted a domestic audience, though its modern incarnation as the Athens & Epidaurus Festival is distinctly international, in terms of both programming and audience. After a single performance in the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, the three remaining performances of the 1959 Birds were cancelled on the grounds that the production was insufficiently reverential of the ancient text and anticlerical (on the production and its reception, see Van Steen 2007, 159–66). The production would be remounted in 1962, with a revised score and new choreography. This version, which from 1965 onward was often staged as part of a double-bill with Koun’s production of Aeschylus’s Persians, had become legendary by the time it was staged in in the ancient theatre of Epidaurus after the fall of the junta (on the revisions and the reception of the revised version, see Van Steen 2007, 166–70). And while it is for his productions of classical plays that Koun is best known in reception studies circles, in Greece his reputation rests

Oresteia on Stage: Koun, Stein, Hall and Mnouchkine 493 on his role in building a modern theatre tradition for his country, one that at times looks to its classical past, but which is also deeply engaged with developments in modern theatre, reflecting the larger struggle of the nation to build and define its modern national identity while looking to the past, present and future. The relationship of modern Greece to ancient Greece, and the extent to which the present ought to be defined by or in relation to the past, is an issue that has been a significant point of negotiation of a national identity since the emergence of a free Greek state in the 1800s. Ancient Greek theatre, both texts and performance spaces, has been a constant presence within this negotiation. The standard expectation was that productions of ancient Greek plays in Greece would be reverential and monumental (and ideally staged by Greeks). The National Theatre of Greece staged a lavish production of the Oresteia in 1972 at the ancient theatre of Epidaurus embracing the conservative antiquarian approach encouraged by the military dictatorship which ruled the country from 1967 to 1974. But there was also resistance, both to the aesthetic preferences championed by the dictatorship and to the dictatorship itself which were also made manifest through performances of ancient Greek plays. In 1973, the year after the National Theatre of Greece’s production, against the backdrop of the student protests against the junta, the Theater Department at the University of Athens staged the Oresteia in the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, deploying the red cloth used in the trilogy as a metaphor to comment on the reign of the dictators and the bloody hands of collaborators who supported the government (Van Steen 2002, 212–14). Koun’s Oresteia would echo this student production, using a “giant red cloth to implicate actors, chorus, and spectators alike from the perspective of hindsight (of the six years that had passed since the collapse of the military regime)”, dramatising the idea of collective guilt (Van Steen 2002, 214). Koun’s production stood in relation to earlier productions of classical plays and their political reverberations in Greece not just through performative allusion, but also through the performance space. While the production would go on to tour widely, its first performance was at the ancient theatre of Epidaurus as part of the annual Epidaurus Festivals. This was a performance space which under the junta had been reserved for productions by the National Theatre of Greece, the artistic vision of which worked to reinforce the dictators’ vision of the Greece’s classical past, thus helping to define their vision of modern Greece (on the place of Greek theatre space in the modern Greek cultural imagination, see Ioannidou 2010). As Antoniou has written, Koun “believed that ancient drama was inseparably linked with the socio-political realties of its own time and, even though socio-political conditions had changed, its themes continued to be relevant across time” (2017, 38). He, like many of his fellow countrymen, saw modern Greeks as the direct heirs of ancient Greek drama – a relationship which critic Yannis Varveris described as “the umbilical cord – of both language and place” (Ioannidou 2010, 385) –, but he was also expansive in his view of Greek history, looking not just to the classical, but also to the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman occupation, the role of the Orthodox Church and the tumultuous events of the twentieth century (Antoniou 2017, 39–40). As a result of this historical perspective, Koun’s “stagings of both tragedy and comedy abounded in visual and musical elements drawn from the Byzantine, oriental and folk traditions, which he considered to be deep-seated in Greek life” – what he called “Greek folk expressionism” (Ioannidou 2010, 399). Koun sought in his Oresteia to find production elements that would incorporate these various strands of Greek history and culture. Koun’s Oresteia had a run time of just under three hours, intended for viewing as a single performance. The production was marked by Koun’s theatrical methodologies. The production used masks, though they were the half-masks preferred by Koun, which he felt concealed the individual nature of the actor, while at the same time drawing attention to the artifice of performance (an approach in which many have seen the influence of Brecht – see Varakis 2007, 268). Masking pointed to the ritual origins of ancient Greek theatre, which Koun saw extending from

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antiquity to the folk practices of modern Greece. His student, Mimis Kougioumtzis has stated the masks were also intended to give “primacy to the dramatic narrative” (Varakis 2007, 268), but this primacy is not the reverential treatment of the text, but rather Koun’s vision of text mediated through the body. Koun’s productions are marked by their physicality (Antoniou 2017, 38, 42–43) – actress Rennie Pitaki recalls being given feedback such as “I don’t see the darkness in your movement …”, “I don’t hear his voice in your hair” (Ellines.com). Tied to this use of mask and belief in the primacy of the text mediated through the performative body, was Koun’s belief that the ensemble was an essential part of theatre creation and the chorus the heart of ancient Greek theatre. The chorus was the centre of the performance with individual actors stepping out of their choral role by removing the chorus’s mask and robe, then putting on the mask of an individual character such as Clytemnestra or Agamemnon, along with an animal skin or cloak, then removing the characterising mask and costume and returning to the choral body once their scene was complete. All this took place in full view of the audience, “underlining the magic of theater” to use Koun’s words (Varakis 2007, 268), but also creating an argument that the central characters in tragedy are also part of the collective citizen body. The focus on this collective body extended beyond the performance itself, seeking to encompass Koun’s vision of Greek cultural history, stretching from antiquity to the present. The starting point was obviously the theatre of fifth-century Athens. His chorus at times looked to the Greek Orthodox church and traditional practices of female mourning (Varakis 2007, 267), but also to other ritualistic aspects of twentieth-century Greek culture. The music and costume design included folk elements evoking modern Greek culture. But Koun’s production worked not just to construct a sense of Greek collective identity stretching from the past to the present; he also made more specific comment on recent Greek history, through costume and mask. The chorus of Argive elders in Agamemnon are dressed with red robes over their dark undergarments, which coupled with the way in which the central characters emerge from and then return to the choral collective, suggests a sense of communal guilt for the bloody acts of violence which take place. The costumes evocative of bloodshed give way to all black costumes of mourning for the choruses of Libation Bearers and Eumenides, though with markedly different music, movement and vocalisations. The red imagery returns at the end as the Furies become the Eumenides, chorus members emerging from the stage building with red robes trimmed with white, carrying torches. The legacy of the bloodshed remains, but it is tinged with light and hope for the future. The final speech and song of the trilogy is performed unmasked, inviting an association between the dramatic world of the chorus and the world of the audience, the ancient sociopolitical context of Aeschylus and the modern sociopolitical context of Koun. As Borodovčáková puts it, “Koun’s image of Greece is that of a country rising from the depths of dictatorship, delivering a political message that conveys doubts of the recent past. Koun focused on dramatising the idea of collective guilt and encourage self-questioning instead of defaming the tyrants or creating a dictatorship drama” (2015, 81). And so while from the outside Koun’s production has at times been deemed to be the least political of the Oresteia productions discussed in this chapter, I would argue that it was, perhaps inevitably, the most political of the four, seeking not just to make comment on the politics of the past and/or present, but as part of an ongoing nation-building agenda, helping to define what was/is Greek culture.

Peter Stein’s Die Orestie (1980) Peter Stein and Peter Hall’s productions, produced in 1980 and 1981 respectively, were part of a wave of epic stagings that demanded audiences who wished to see a theatre production in its entirety devote not just an evening of their time, but the equivalent of a full day – what Kalb (2011) calls “Marathon Theater”. Stein’s Die Orestie (1980) had a run time of over nine

Oresteia on Stage: Koun, Stein, Hall and Mnouchkine 495 hours (including the two one-hour intermissions), while Hall’s production (1981) at the National Theater production had a run time of approximately five and a half hours, including a 40-minute dinner break and a second 15-minute intermission. Mnouchkine’s Les Atrides, staged more than a decade later, had a total run time of nearly 10 hours, but was broken into four shows that were rolled out one at a time over the space of two years (1990–92), before being combined into a 10-hour marathon performance. Hall, too, had considered doing the plays individually but, by the spring of 1976, he had decided to put them all on stage at the same time as “one brave gesture” (Fay 1995, 283). While the productions had varying run times, they all had extremely long development periods, with the director and various members of the production team spending not just months with the plays, but years – Stein spent more than 18 months in rehearsal, while there was eight years between Peter Hall first approaching Tony Harrison about the project and the National Theatre production reaching the stage. And while these productions share some features with Koun’s Oresteia, they are also fundamentally different because they exist in very different cultural and sociopolitical contexts, as reflected in their approaches to the text and production choices. Peter Stein (b. 1937) is the most important German theatre director of his generation, which is to say the most important German theatre director since Brecht. In 1970, Stein moved to Berlin and was the central figure in the foundation of a new theatre collective at the Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer. The work of Schaubühne would be marked by a collective decision-making production process which included all members of the theatre company as well as equal pay for everyone; political productions (their first production in 1970 was Brecht’s The Mother, in which a woman converts to communism – a provocative choice in city in which a wall marked division by political ideology); and a lengthy production process which involved research into the historical context of the play (theatrical, social, political), extensive use of dramaturgs to support, question and critique the production in the development process, and an extended rehearsal period (several months rather than the more typical rehearsal period of several weeks). The Oresteia would be Schaubühne’s second production of an ancient Greek play, with their 1974 Antikenprojekt (Antiquity Project) being a two-part production of Euripides’ Bacchae. (Die Orestie is subtitled Antikenprojekt II.) The production began with the development of the performance text. Case provides a relatively detailed summary of the process which began with 30 existing translations and resulted in the decision to produce a new version by Stein, with suggestions from the actors, for the production which was close to the original, clear in German and suited to the stage (1980, 24). Chioles describes the text as, “essentially prosaic and carefully understated as language”, suggesting that the primary concern is the sociopolitical focus of the director rather than aesthetic choices (which he contrasts with London’s National Theatre Oresteia production) and a desire to clarify the myth so as to both maximise its shock value and to ensure audience comprehension (1993, 22). This translation was provided to audiences as a booklet in lieu of a programme with various production notes. Not only did the company expend significant effort on developing their text, but at the same time Stein and dramaturg Marleen Stoessel produced a 400-page Protocol for the production, following the Schaubühne tradition of researching a play in detail in order to provide a contextualising framework for the production, in this case looking at “the theatre of Aeschylus, the history of fifth-century Athens, the critical examination of key scenes/principle characters and the elements of stage design/acting style found in the text” (Case 1980, 24). The pre-production preparations extended beyond the theatre company to spectators as well. Six months before opening Stein, along with some of the actors, led a series of public workshops which “were partly meant to remedy the ‘shortcomings’ of those spectators who had not attended a grammar school (Gymnasium), where not only Latin but also Greek is taught” (Fischer-Lichte 2017, 295). The workshops focused on imparting knowledge of ancient Greek culture and

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“problems relating to the text – that is, its construction, genealogy, and translation” (FischerLichte 2017, 295). As Patterson puts it, one of the points of the production was to show “how a text known only to an elite, is relevant to the experience and problems of our generation” (1981, 157). Fischer-Lichte has pointed out that, while prolonged engagement with the Classics might seem an odd choice for a “socialist theatre”, Schaubühne, and Stein in particular, were deeply interested in the history of bourgeois society in Germany and central to the bourgeois was the educated Bildungsbürgertum for whom their classical education and philhellenism was a central part of their identity (2017, 271). Many Germans of this class thought of the cultural legacy of Greece as their own and, like certain elements of the British elite, saw themselves as more direct heirs and better custodians of these traditions than the modern Greeks (pointing towards the larger European permeations of Koun’s insistence on both the unbroken continuity of Greek culture and the unique relationship of modern Greeks to ancient Greece). In the conclusion to her discussion of the first part of Antikenprojekt, Fischer-Lichte writes, “The idea of the cultural identity of the Bildungsbürger derived from Greek culture was not simply undermined – as in Exercises for Actors (for a concise summary of what the Exercises entailed, see Fischer-Lichte 2004, 333–35) – but shattered to its very core. The Bacchae performed a sparagmos of the cultural identity of the Bildungsbürgertum to which the majority of the spectators belonged. It was dismembered and any attempt to mend it – to sew the piece back together – would create nothing but a patchwork consisting of fragments from our own contemporary world” (2017, 293). The Schaubühne Oresteia made a series of production choices, from the text, to the use of space, to costumes and running time which were distinctly diachronic. As Fischer-Lichte notes, the performance of the entire trilogy, with its nine-hour run time, was evocative of the City Dionysia and its all-day performances (2017, 296). Karl-Ernst Herrmann’s design for the theatre space created seating that “gradually sloped up to the back wall in low, felt-covered steps on which approximately 400 spectators … sat uncomfortably, leaving a broad passage from the door at the back left side to the stage for the entrance of actors” (Fischer-Lichte 2017, 296). The production used an ekkyklema (a rolling platform to bring what was understood as happening offstage into view) for the scenes at the end of Agamemnon and Libation Bearers, again echoing the ancient theatre. The performances of the actors were also at moments evocative of antiquity, with actions that accompanied the ritual offerings and poured libation in Libation Bearers being rooted in scholarship and vase paintings. In Eumenides, Athena “looked exactly as if she had climbed down from an ancient pedestal or out of a vase painting” (Fischer-Lichte 2017, 297). Yet despite these elements that sought to imbue the production with elements of the ancient Greek performance traditions, the production was also distinctly modern in other aspects, freely mixing periods. Clytemnestra was very much the modern woman, initially wearing a suit jacket and skirt combination, though when she is revealed standing over the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra she is wearing a white blouse and form-fitting black skirt. In Libation Bearers she wears a black satin gown and heels. (On Clytemnestra’s costume, see Chioles 1993, 22–23, Fischer-Lichte 2017, 297). The chorus of Argive Elders in Agamemnon was also dressed in modern clothing, but less specifically contemporary than Clytemnestra’s outfits – “neutral and naturally timeless in a rather modern style. They were dressed in black suits with hats and sticks in their hands” (Bierl 2005, 297), at times wearing long overcoats. They begin the play sitting around a table in the auditorium, as though they were men gathering for coffee in a public café, listening to the messenger (see production still in Fischer-Lichte 2017, 299, illustration 8.8). In accordance with the prosaic language of Stein’s translation, the chorus neither sang nor danced, but were members of the community, curious about and responding to the situations before them – “they reflected on the situation and behaved like the average citizens among the spectators” (Bierl 2005, 298).

Oresteia on Stage: Koun, Stein, Hall and Mnouchkine 497 The chorus of Libation Bearers, however, was far more specific, “dressed in black garments and headscarves to resemble wailers in rural parts of Greece” (Fisher-Lichte 2017, 299). The Erinyes on the other hand – “panting monsters with claws donning silvery black outfits” (Fischer-Lichter 2017, 302) – were at once both ancient, calling to mind the black Furies on the Orestes Crater held by the Naples Archaeological Museum (Naples 3249 (inv. 82270) = RVAp 167 13 = LIMC VII.72 “Orestes” no. 12), while at the same time evocative of modern movie monsters. This mélange of periods and places resulted in a production that was neither Peter Hall’s archaising Oresteia (to be discussed in detail in the section “Peter Hall’s The Oresteia (1981)”), nor Koun’s diachronic performance that attempted to create a sense of Greek cultural continuity from the ancient past to the present. Like many productions, the Schaubühne Oresteia saw in the plays a text that could speak from antiquity to more recent history, and in their particular case to the turmoil of Germany in the twentieth century as it moved from the chaos and mass bloodshed of the Third Reich, through the partitioning into East and West Germany, to the orderly democracy of West Germany in 1980. As Fischer-Lichte (2004, 348) writes, The production decisively refused to convey any “original” meaning of the ancient and distant story, or even one particular present-day meaning. Rather, it opened up the possibility of reflecting on the deeply problematic relationship between historicity and topicality which underlies and is the condition of a theatrical working process drawing on an ancient foreign text as material.

The chorus of men observing, murmuring amongst themselves, but failing to intervene and thus to avert the bloodshed in Agamemnon, is evocative of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s as Hitler came to power and led the nation to war and genocide. The production moves through the violence begotten by violence with its intergenerational implications. The physical performance of the ending of the production is particularly striking. While the text describes Athena as “persuading” the Furies to become benevolent deities settled beneath the Acropolis, their new robes in Stein’s staging are made from the same purple cloth on which Agamemnon had been persuaded to hubristically walk upon in the first play and the Furies, rather than be draped with the robes, are bound with them to the point of immobility by the citizens of Athens. Fischer-Lichte (2017, 302–03) observes, The action on stage was a comment on the notion of persuasion, as well as on its content, for the German word einwickeln, which best describes what the citizens did to the Erinyes, is twofold. It means “to wrap” as well as “to talk someone into something” or “to trick someone”. Athena persuading the Erinyes thus spanned the different meanings of einwickeln, the consequences of which were enacted on stage. This involved a pun on another German word, einbinden, which means “to bind” or “to bandage”, but also “to include”.

However, the production did not end with the binding of the Furies, but rather, thanks to some manipulation of the text by Stein, with the voting, and rather than ending the voting with the tie-breaking vote of Athena, her vote was followed by the 10 judges in modern suits repeating the voting, returning again and again to cast their ballots (for a detailed description, see Fischer-Lichte 2017, 303–05). Many critics read this ending as a comment on the history and politics of Europe more broadly, but also Germany more specifically; from a cycle of violence and bloodshed democratic processes bring about a political and legal order that helps to safeguard the individual and the larger state. (For a range of critical responses, again see Fischer-Lichte 2017, 305–06).

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Peter Hall’s The Oresteia (1981) As an undergraduate student in 1953, Peter Hall (1930–2017) had one line in the Cambridge Greek Play production of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, and he traced his desire to stage the entirety of the trilogy back to that experience (Lewis 1990, 159). Hall approached poet Tony Harrison almost immediately after he was notified that he would be replacing Sir Laurence Olivier as the Artistic Director of the National Theatre in 1973. The National had just mounted a production of Moliere’s The Misanthrope, directed by John Dexter, which used a new English translation by Tony Harrison. The show had received rapturous reviews, with much of the praise focused on the translation (Marshall 2019, 95–96). Harrison’s ability to translate plays into English verse that worked on stage while at the same time conveying significant features of the text in the original language, coupled with his training in Classics – he completed an undergraduate degree in Classics at Leeds University, a diploma in Linguistics and had undertaken significant work on a PhD in Classics on English translations of Virgil before abandoning academia for poetry – made him the ideal collaborator for Hall’s envisioned Oresteia production. While Hall directed more than 30 productions during his time as the National Theatre’s Artistic Director (1973–88), The Oresteia was by far the most ambitious. The production which devoted the largest of the National’s three theatres – the Olivier which seats 1150 – to the three plays running in repertory, was a huge financial risk as well as a significant artistic risk (Fay 1995, 283–87). Shakespearean verse was a staple of the English stage, its place in the cultural canon elevated in the second half of the twentieth century by the Royal Shakespeare Company, itself founded by Peter Hall in 1961, but non-Shakespearean verse drama had largely been pushed offstage, as was the case in most of the western world, by the rise of realism. And while poets such as T. S. Eliot had tried their hand at writing new verse plays in English (for Eliot’s The Family Reunion as an adaptation of the Oresteia, see Liapis, Chapter 35 in this volume), their efforts did little to revivify verse drama, at times doing more harm than good. And ancient Greek tragedy was even less promising in terms of its box office draw. During the 1964 election, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is reported to have suggested to the Director General of the BBC that they could drive people to the polls by airing Greek tragedy, preferably in the original, rather than the popular programme Steptoe and Son. Devoting the Olivier Auditorium to the production of the entirety of the Oresteia in a new English verse version was the sort of production that only someone of Peter Hall’s stature could risk. It was, however, a risk that paid off. The run was originally to be 20 performances, but the production was so successful that it stretched to 65, having been twice extended due to audience demand. The following year, 1982, Hall’s production would become the first non-Greek production to be permitted to perform in the ancient theatre at Epidaurus. The National Theatre’s 1981 production of The Oresteia is atypical among the plays discussed in this chapter for the fact that, whereas the translator is generally invisible (rightly or wrongly), in many discussions of the National Theatre production the translator, Tony Harrison, is given more prominence than the director, Peter Hall. To quote Chioles characterisation, Hall “made Harrison’s text the protagonist of the production” (1993, 16). As Taplin has noted, using Venuti’s translation theory terminology, “Harrison’s Oresteia is very clearly an example of foreignisation” (2005, 240). That is to say, the translation sought to emphasise the otherness of the language of Aeschylus’s plays. Harrison’s language echoes Anglo-Saxon poetry in an attempt to find an English equivalent for the slightly archaic nature of Aeschylus’s Greek, which also allowed him to create alliterative compound words, such as “blood-bond”, “bed-bond”, “he-god”, “she-god”, echoing both the use of compound word construction in ancient Greek, as well as the gendered nature of the language. But the

Oresteia on Stage: Koun, Stein, Hall and Mnouchkine 499 translation emphasised not just the sound of the words, but also the metre, accompanied by the percussive score of Harrison Birtwistle (on Birtwistle’s music and its development, see Beard 2010). This stylised language which sought to evoke not just something of the sound and feel of Aeschylus’s language for an English-speaking audience, also insisted on the monumentally poetic nature of the language and the musicality of ancient Greek tragedy in performance, while at the same time also conveying Harrison’s own unique poetic voice. As Chioles writes, “the contemporary poet appropriated the ancient one and made the text his own. In both rhythm and texture Harrison’s Aeschylus: The Oresteia (title of production and published version) makes one feel transported into an old English mythic landscape” (1993, 16). The world of the play was very much a creation of the language of the poet. But not only did the poet contribute through language, “he also contributed enormously towards finding the whole acting style and performance priorities in general” (Taplin 2002, 13). While the production was in many ways defined by the poet and his poetry, the idea of a production that was rooted in original practices was very much the vision of the director. Hall wanted not just a poetic translation that captured something of Aeschylus’s Greek (the 1953 production in which Hall performed was an original language performance of the ancient Greek text) accompanied by music, but he also wanted to use masks and an exclusively male cast. The result was a production that, whatever social and/or political intentions it may have had, foregrounded aesthetics above all else (a trait shared with Mnouchkine’s Les Atrides). While the published introduction to Harrison’s translation describes the trilogy as “a sexual battleground” and describes feminist scholarship being part of the background reading that some production team members were doing, especially Harrison, the production had no real political underpinnings (Harrison 2002, 30). The central vision of Hall and his production team was to put on stage a version of Aeschylus’s trilogy that was at once faithful to the original, but also spectacular theatre for audiences in the late twentieth century. It was “acted in a highly stylised and consistently non-naturalistic manner, always directed towards the audience rather than actor-to-actor. This was one of the great examples in modern times of classical theatre made strange rather than domesticated” (Taplin 2002, 11). Stage designer Jocelyn Herbert was brought on to the production team to design the set, costumes and masks. Her starting point for her designs was that, “The essence of Greek drama is to use the auditorium itself and just add elements where necessary” (Courtney 1993, 119). Her set design used the architecture of the Olivier auditorium, the architectural design of which was based on the ancient theatre at Epidaurus. The stage was bare except a large aluminium wall at the back of the theatre formed out of three panels with a centrally located doorway which represented the palace. In front of this skene there was a shallow stage and then the circular orchestra, with a parodos to either side, echoing the performance space of the ancient theatre more closely than any of the other productions discussed in this chapter, with the exception of Koun’s Oresteia, staged in the ancient theatre at Epidaurus. (For a detailed description of various production elements of the National Theatre’s Oresteia, see Parker 1986). The stage design was subject to minor alterations for the second and third plays, with the addition of a mound for the grave of Agamemnon in Libation Bearers and a reconfiguration of the skene panels to give the effect of a portico for the Aeropagus in Eumenides. Costumes were for the most part nondescript robes in muted colours. As in Koun’s production, red was used sparingly and symbolically: red for the vast carpet rolled out to welcome Agamemnon home, red gloves for the hands of Clytemnestra and Orestes after they have committed murder, and red hair for the Furies and for their robes as they transform into the Eumenides, taking on their new role as the benevolent protectors of Athens. The most visually striking feature of the production was the use of masks, created by Jocelyn Herbert and her team. Like all directors who have worked with masks, Hall had clear ideas about how masks functioned, arguing that while half masks insist upon the audience seeing

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the actor beneath the mask (what Koun saw as the value of the half mask), full head masks helped concentrate the viewer on the dramatic narrative, allowing them to keep looking even in the face of violence and suffering – a view that has had a significant impact on Tony Harrison’s subsequent classical plays, even though he himself has not opted for masks in performance. As Parker has catalogued, many of the production choices for how to stage individual aspects of the plays were shaped by Taplin’s revolutionary book, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (1977), which opened the door to an entire body of scholarship on the performance of ancient plays (1986, 343–46). Whereas Stein had done extensive research on the text of Aeschylus’s Oresteia and its sociopolitical context, his production choices were ultimately rooted in very modern theatre practices, with the production at various times and in various ways echoing antiquity, but in no way trying to recreate antiquity – one could in fact argue that among the things that Stein was doing with his production was pointing to the impossibility of recreating antiquity. Hall’s production, on the other hand, was at its heart about re-creation and part of his agenda was to incorporate ideas from a scholarly text that pointed to Aeschylus’s own stagecraft in 458 bce.

Ariane Mnouchkine’s Les Atrides (1990–92) Of the same generation as Stein and Hall, Mnouchkine (b.1939) has had a profound influence on French theatre in the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, and she can reasonably be argued to be the most influential female director of her generation. In a review of Les Atrides in New Republic, Robert Brustein wrote, “Ariane Mnouchkine has committed her life to transforming the ways in which we think about the stage” (1992, 36). In 1964, along with others, she formed the Théâtre du Soleil in Paris, which like the Schaubühne operated as a collective, with everyone having a say and everyone receiving equal pay, but also participating in all of the company’s activities, from production aspects to dishwashing (on the importance of the theatre company ensemble to Mnouchkine, see Bethune 1993, 187–88). The company sought to create a people’s theatre and through the 1970s was explicitly left leaning and political in its productions. During this period the company focused on devised theatre (collective creation), applying popular theatre forms to French history on an epic scale. The 1980s, however, saw a shift towards working with texts from the western theatre canon (Shakespeare, Moliere, Euripides and Aeschylus) approached through the intercultural lens of eastern performance traditions, borrowing heavily from Indian Kathakali theatre and the Japanese traditions of Noh and Kabuki. Les Atrides in its entirety consists of four plays – Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, and Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Libation Bearers and Eumenides. Mnouchkine began work on it in 1989, with the first play, Iphigenia at Aulis, being staged in 1990 and the final part, Eumenides, being staged in 1992. The four plays, having been unveiled individually over two years, were then combined in to a marathon 10-hour production performed both at Théâtre du Soleil’s home base at the Cartoucherie de Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris and elsewhere (see Brustein 1992; Bethune 1993 on the Brooklyn Academy of Music production). The lengthy production process was collaborative, from the development of the text to the rehearsals to the involvement of other artists, from musicians to a sculptor (Judet de la Combe 2005, 275; Glynn 2017, 217–18). The function of beginning the project with Iphigenia in Aulis – which tells of the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter on the way to Troy – was to start the story of the bloodshed within the household of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra at its beginning. Yet despite the concern for giving the audience a sense of the entirety of the mythic narrative of the family from beginning to end, and the involvement of classical

Oresteia on Stage: Koun, Stein, Hall and Mnouchkine 501 scholars throughout the development process (see Judet de la Combe 2005, 274–75), the production itself in no way alluded to ancient Greek culture, in contrast to the three other productions discussed in this chapter which in different ways forged clear links to the original performance context of the plays in ancient Greece. The performative points of reference for Les Atrides were Asian. Judet de la Combe has observed that prior to the 1980s the Oresteia had a place in France as an object of intellectual study and discussion rather than as a performance text (2005, 277). Its place within the educational system and academic and aesthetic discourses meant that, as with the previously discussed productions staged in Greece, Germany and England, French audiences came to this production of the Oresteia with a sense that the plays and their myths were part of the communal cultural heritage of France. In her production of these plays, Mnouchkine made an artistic choice akin to Hall’s decision to make Aeschylus’s plays strange to his audience, opting to make them foreign. As Glynn observes, “though references to non-Western traditions might be taken as indicators of the universal scope of the myth, they mainly highlighted the distance for European audiences between the material and themselves” (2017, 221). Mnounchkine’s intercultural or syncretic approach in Les Atrides has generally been well received, but there have also been those who have raised concerns about cultural appropriation and the use of Eastern art forms for purely aesthetic functions, diminishing the craft represented by the tradition, as well as its cultural heritage and function. That discussion is beyond the remit of this chapter, but for those who are interested in a range of perspectives on this topic that extend beyond this one example, I would point you towards Bharucha 1993, Pavis 1992 and Mnouchkine et al. (2019) herself. Here I will simply note that the habit of western artists and scholars across the twentieth century to argue that we can gain some insight into ancient Greek tragedy – be it a sense of ritual or simply its foreignness to the modern world (Bierl 2005, 301) – through the use of the oriental other is not unproblematic however aesthetically pleasing the results may be. Unlike the other productions in this chapter that evoked the classical theatre through its performance space, the Théâtre du Soleil made no obvious gesture to the ancient performance space. The only possible tip of the hat to the relationship of past to present was an installation that the audiences passed on their way to the theatre space which consisted of trenches evocative of an archaeological dig. Glynn reads these trenches as, “a metaphor for the excavation work that Mnouchkine had undertaken in order to translate the works in the first place” (2017, 221). But as he notes, rather than being filled with the relics of Greek antiquity, they were filled with rows of life-size statues of people and horses, evoking China’s terracotta warriors. Judet de la Combe interprets it as the audience unconsciously perceiving “that they were invited to see something about death and about a world that had disappeared” (2005, 285). Whatever the interpretation of the trenches, the performance space itself is described by critics as resembling an arena evocative of blood sports (bull fighting, bear baiting, gladiatorial fights) (Glynn 2017, 222) – but a blood sports arena in which musicians and their instruments “occupied a good third of the playing space at stage left” (Chioles 1993, 4). Despite the fact that the production did not echo the song of ancient Greek tragedy, it was musical – “no spoken sentence was uttered without continuous accompaniment of the improvised musical line. From time to time, recorded music (inspired by Balkan tradition) accompanied the dances of the chorus; the improvisation still continued. This recorded music stopped when the chorus, or rather a Chorus leader, spoke” (Judet de la Combe 2005, 286). While this music was not tied to song, it was very much tied to the movement of the plays, particularly the movement of the choruses (various videoclips are available on YouTube which show aspects of both the music and the chorus). The choruses of Iphigenia in Aulis and Agamemnon used the movement, costume and makeup of the Indian Kathakali, while the chorus of Libation

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Bearers used the movement, costume and makeup of the Japanese Kabuki tradition. The use of Eastern theatre traditions did not continue through to the chorus of Eumenides, however, with the chorus of the final play consisting of three old women – which more than one reviewer associates with the witches in Macbeth – and a pack of dogs. (Each of the previous plays had ended with the sound of the barking of dogs, pointing to the arrival of the Furies and their companions in the final play.) Brustein described the shift in performance style in the third play, saying “as the choreography changes from the athletic to the grotesque, so the acting evolves from Kathakali to Brecht” (Brustein 1992, 37). Macintosh describes this as an “apparent disjunction in artistic and conceptual styles between the first three plays and the Eumenides” which “meant that the final play was both an aesthetic and intellectual puzzle” (1997, 319). At the same time, however, even reviewers who commented on the ways in which the production of all four parts as a single performance at moments did not quite cohere, acknowledged that the work was extraordinary, existing in a realm beyond the average theatre experience. This sense of disjunction between the first three plays and the final play was almost certainly in part due to the production process. Mnouchkine has said the first three plays were prepared over a period of 30 weeks, but due to funding concerns they had to go into performance before the company had time to work on the fourth play (Bethune 1993, 186). Bethune describes the shift between what had come before and the final play as “a difference of degree rather than of kind” (1993, 186), which is to say that the purposeful physicality and visual aesthetic remained, albeit in a diminished form, belying the immense investment of resources of both time and money required to bring Mnouchkine’s and the Théâtre du Soleil’s vision to complete fruition. At the same time the downgrading of the aesthetic aspect of the production also opened the door to the audience having more space to think about the meaning of Les Atrides, having for the first three parts been dazzled by the physical performance. Many critics have seen in the production – in no small part because of the inclusion of the Iphigenia story which always functions to both make Clytemnestra more sympathetic and to justify her murderous actions – a feminist agenda. Bethune – rightly I think – identifies the feminist reading of the myth as a secondary motif. Rather he argues, “the ultimate message of Les Atrides is that these conflicts do not come to rest; the demons within are tamable, but not killable” (1993, 189). And to this reading Mnouchkine has offered a political dimension, saying that her Oresteia was no less concerned with the modern Furies of Eastern Europe than with the Furies of Aeschylus’s Greece (Macintosh 1997, 319). This blending of the political with the aesthetic positions Les Atrides between Stein’s Die Orestie and Hall’s The Oresteia.

Conclusion A large part of the appeal of tragedy in modern theatre is the way in which, through the veil of myth and production choices, ancient plays are able to speak to the very immediate concerns of the present and engage with contemporary theatre trends. As Tony Harrison has said of the translations he saw on stage while living in Prague in the 1960s, “[they] have a very strong regard for the past, but they also bristle with a sense of the present” (Haffenden 1991, 237). Each of the productions discussed in this chapter points to the ways in which Aeschylus’s Oresteia, through translation and production choices, was made to speak to the contexts in which those translations were staged, both theatrical and sociopolitical. But while the productions were individually reflective of the work and ideologies of the directors and theatre companies that produced them and the immediate context in which they were working, the existence of four monumental productions in four different but geographically proximate countries within a relatively brief span of time also points to larger trends in European and

Oresteia on Stage: Koun, Stein, Hall and Mnouchkine 503 British theatre. All of these productions were undertaken by companies that, for a variety of reasons, generally working in tandem – especially the ethos of the company and the levels of state funding received –, were able to devote massive amounts of time and resources (both artistic and financial) to the development of these shows. Each production was spectacular and culturally significant in its own way, but it was not simply the genius of the director supported by their theatre company, but also the cultural investment of their respective communities.

FURTHER READING No secondary source can replace seeing a production in its entirety. Koun’s Oresteia is available online through the Greek National Televisions Archive in two parts: https://archive.ert.gr/7749 and https:// archive.ert.gr/33850. The best English language discussion of Koun’s production is Chioles 1993, but I would also point readers to Mavromoustakos 2008, which contains detailed production information, including photographs. Peter Hall’s Oresteia at the National Theatre is also available in its entirety and can be viewed on YouTube, as can a documentary filmed when the production toured to Epidaurus, which provides insight into various aspects of the production and additional footage of the production in both rehearsal and performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VvgKu6zc9Q. An excellent discussion of Hall’s Oresteia can be found in Parker 1986. In the absence of publicly available recordings of the entirety of Stein’s Die Orestie, a detailed description can be found in Fischer-Lichte 2017. Clips of various lengths of Les Atrides are also available online, which can be helpfully supplemented by Judet de la Combe 2005 and Bethune 1993. On the broader history of the reperformance of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, see Macintosh et al. 2005. For a broader look at the role of the director in shaping modern productions of Greek tragedy, see Rodosthenous 2017.

REFERENCES Antoniou, M. (2017). “Performing Ancient Greek Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Greece: Dimitris Rontiris and Karolos Koun.” New Theatre Quarterly 33, 31–46. Astley, N., ed. (2002). Bloodaxe Critical Anthologies: I Tony Harrison. Newcastle upon Tyne. Barsby, J., ed. (2002). Greek and Roman Drama: Translation and Performance. Stuttgart. Beard, D. (2010), “‘Batter the Doom Drum’: The Music for Peter Hall’s Oresteia and Other Productions of Greek Tragedy by Harrison Birtwistle and Judith Weir.” In Brown and Ograjenšek, eds. 369–97. Bethune, R. (1993). “Le Théâtre du Soleil’s Les Atrides.” Asian Theatre Journal 10, 179–90. Bharucha, R. (1993). Theatre and the World: Performances and the Politics of Culture. London. Bierl, A. (2005). “The Chorus of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon in Modern Stage Productions. Towards the ‘Performative Turn’.” In F. MacIntosh, P. Michelakis, E. Hall, O. Taplin, eds. Agamemnon in Performance, 458 BC to AD 2004. Oxford, 291–306. Borodovčáková, M. (2015). “Ancient Drama Today: Oresteia and Its Stage Forms.” Slovenské divadlo 63, 73–86. Brown, P. and Ograjenšek, S., eds. (2010). Ancient Drama in Music for the Modern Stage. Oxford. Brustein, R. (1992). “The Theatre of Pain.” New Republic 207.20, 36–37. Case, S. (1980). “Peter Stein Directs The Oresteia.” Theatre 11, 23–28. Chioles, J. (1993). “The Oresteia and the Avant-Garde: Three Decades of Discourse.” Performing Arts Journal 15, 1–28. Courtney, C. (1993). Jocelyn Herbert: A Theatre Workbook. London. Cropp, M., Fantham, E. and Scully, S. E., eds. (1986). Greek Tragedy and Its Legacy: Essays Presented to D.J. Conacher. Calgary. Easterling, P. E., ed. (1997). The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge.

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Ellines. (n.d.) https://www.ellines.com/en/myths/46862-o-megalos-daskalos-tou-theatrou-1908-1987. Last accessed March 2, 2020. Fay, S. (1995). Power Play: The Life and Times of Peter Hall. London. Fischer-Lichte, E. (2004). “Thinking about the Origins of Theatre in the 1970s.” In Hall, Macintosh and Wrigley, eds. 329–60. Fischer-Lichte, E. (2017). Tragedy’s Endurance: Performances of Greek Tragedies and Cultural Identity in Germany since 1800. Oxford. Glynn, D. (2017), “Ariane Mnouchkine’s Les Atrides: Uncovering a Classic.” In Rodosthenous, ed. 213–26. Haffenden, J. (1991) “Interview with Tony Harrison.” In Astley, ed. 227–46. Hall, E., ed. (2019). New Light on Tony Harrison. Oxford. Hall, E., Macintosh, F. and Wrigley, A., eds. (2004). Dionysus since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium. Oxford. Hall, E. and Wrigley, A., eds. (2007). Aristophanes in Performance 421 BC- AD 2007: Peace, Birds, and Frogs. Oxford. Hanink, J. (2017). The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity. Cambridge, MA. Hardwick, L. and Stray, C., eds. (2007). A Companion to Classical Receptions. Malden, MA. Harrison, T. (2002). Plays 4: The Oresteia, the Common Chorus (Parts I and II). London. Ioannidou, E. (2010). “Towards a National Heterotopia: Ancient Theaters and the Cultural Politics of Performing Ancient Drama in Modern Greece.” Comparative Drama 44, 385–403. Judet de la Combe, P. (2005), “Ariane Mnouchkine and the History of French Agamemnon.” In Macintosh, Michelakis, Hall and Taplin, eds. 273–89. Kalb, J. (2011). Great Lengths: Seven Works of Marathon Theatre. Ann Arbor. Lewis, P. (1990). The National: A Dream Made Concrete. London. Macintosh, F. (1997), “Tragedy in Performance: Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Productions.” In Easterling, ed. 284–323. Macintosh, F., Michelakis, P., Hall, E. and Taplin, O., eds. (2005). Agamemnon in Performance 458 BC to AD 2004. Oxford. Mackridge, P. (2010). Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976. Oxford. Marshall, H. R. (2019), “The Early Years at the National Theatre: Harrison’s Molière and Racine.” In Hall, ed. 91–100. Mavromoustakos, P. (2008). Karolos Koun Performances. Athens. Mnouchkine, A., Gayot, J. and Armani, N. (2019). “Cultures Are Not Anyone’s Property.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 41, 65–70. Parker, R. B. (1986), “National Theatre Oresteia, 1981–2.” In Cropp, Fantham, and Scully, eds. 337–57. Patterson, M. (1981). Peter Stein: Germany’s Leading Theatre Director. Cambridge. Pavis, P. (1992). Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture. London. Rodosthenous, G., ed. (2017). Contemporary Adaptations of Greek Tragedy: Auteurship and Directorial Visions. London. Sidiropoulou, A. (2018). “Directing as Political Act: The ‘Dangers’ and ‘Fears’ of Mounting Aeschylus’ Oresteia in Contemporary Periods of ‘Tyranny’.” Comparative Drama 52, 159–80. Taplin, O. (2002), “An Academic in the Rehearsal Room.” In Barsby, ed. 7–22. Taplin, O. (2005), “The Harrison Version: “So Long Ago that It’s Become a Song?’” In Macintosh, Michelakis, Hall and Taplin, eds. 235–51. Van Steen, G. (2002). “Rolling Out the Red Carpet: Power ‘Play’ in Modern Greek Versions of the Myth of Orestes from the 1960s and 1970s (II).” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 9, 195–235. Van Steen, G. (2007), “From Scandal to Success Story: Aristophanes’ Birds as Staged by Karolos Koun.” In Hall and Wrigley, eds. 155–78. Varakis, A. (2007), “‘Body and Mask’ in Performances of Classical Drama on the Modern Stage.” In Hardwick and Stray, eds. 259–73.

CHAPTER 37

Transforming Aeschylus on the Modern Stage Helene P. Foley Productions and new versions of all or parts of Aeschylus’s Oresteia continue to emerge regularly on the modern stage, especially after the mid-twentieth century, and have already received considerable scholarly attention (e.g. Macintosh et al. 2005). Persians and Prometheus Bound have been produced or adapted less often, whereas Suppliants and Seven against Thebes have been rarely performed. This chapter will focus on a select group of notable, primarily western professional productions and new versions of the four less-performed plays and explore why twentieth- and twenty-first century directors have turned to these plays and how they dealt with the problems of interpreting and staging plays with central and often dominant choruses and relatively limited, non-realistic stage action.

Persians Aeschylus’s earliest extant play, Persians of 472 bce, represents the failure of the Persian King Xerxes’ hubristic expedition against Greece in 480/79 from the Persian perspective (see Garvie, Chapter 6 in this volume). Despite difficulties posed for production by the play’s action and chorus (including lavish, often exotic costumes), Persians has been performed quite regularly from the early twentieth-century to the present (as well as in earlier centuries) in Europe, especially in Greece and Germany, and more recently in the US. Some Greek performances of the play simply offered a patriotic celebration of Hellenic/Western victory over the East, as did a Nazi restaging of the play in 1942 (Rosenbloom 2006, 162). Other productions used Persians to address a range of contemporary political issues. During the Greek Civil War of 1946–49 the right appropriated the play for their conflict with communism (Van Steen 2016, 209). Mattias Braun’s productions in the German Democratic Republic (1960–69) equated a fascistic Xerxes, retrospectively, with Hitler; some of his performances were viewed as an attack on US involvement in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Several New York anti-Vietnam productions in the 1970s took a similar tack. Leftist political prisoners on the island of Aï Stratis in 1951 aimed to question Greek delusions of power

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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through the play, while Takis Mouzendis’s staging at Epidauros in 1971 implicitly addressed the Greek junta that presided from 1967–74 (see also Karolos Koun’s productions discussed later in this section; Rosenbloom 2006, 162–63; Hartigan 1995, 102–03; Hall 2004, 175, 2007, 185–86; van Steen 2011, chapter 4, 2016, 211). The Berliner ensemble in 1983 linked the Persian court to militarised Latin American dictatorships, while the Bulgarian director Dimiter Gotscheff staged the play as a critique of theocratic fundamentalism and imperialist wars for Munich’s Deutsches Theater in 2006 and again at Epidaurus for the National Theatre of Greece in 2009; at Epidaurus the play included a female chorus of war victims and a collective messenger consisting of seven Muslim rebels in T-shirts (Savas Patsalidas, http://www.critical-stages.org/1/war-over-the-persians; Bierl 2016, 277). Yet a number of performances and adaptations have responded more strongly to the play’s arguably empathetic viewing of the Persian disaster through the eyes of its own people. In the US, the two Iraq Wars inspired performances starting with Peter Sellars’s and Robert Auletta’s new version in 1993. Sellars’s Persians outraged audiences in Edinburgh and Los Angeles (in comparison to its reception in Salzburg, Paris and Berlin) by equating the Persians with Iraqis bombed by the US in Baghdad in 1991. Sellars was particularly disturbed by the US media’s effacing of the bombing and its devastating effects on innocent Iraqi civilians (Auletta 1993; Hall 2004, 176–85; Foley 2012b, 139–41). In this version Athens stood in for an America pointedly accused of terrorism and cursed by the chorus. His Darius, played by the deaf actor Howie Seago, signed for Atossa a horrific mental tour of the destroyed city, while his words were voiced by another actor. Auletta’s translation mixed ancient with colloquial modern images: horses, “skyships”, “mechanised land monsters” and “armoured chariots” led an attack later accompanied by modern cluster and carpet bombs. The play’s megalomaniac and narcissistic Xerxes (Saddam Hussein), however, perverted by his bad relations to an overindulgent mother and a distant and competitive father, delighted in his challenge to superpowers like the US and in his slaughter of “tribesmen” (the Kurds). At the conclusion Xerxes even surrendered his kingship as he directed his mother to dress a chorus member in the kingly robes she had brought for him. The play’s two-person chorus, however, despite suggestive eclectic music by Hamza El Din, inevitably played a less central role in relation to its leaders. In the spring of 2003, after the second US invasion of Iraq, Tony Randall organised a production of Persians directed by Ethan McSweeney for his National Actors Theatre in New York. Spectators inevitably noticed the parallels between the hubristic Xerxes’ failed attempt to avenge his heroic father’s Darius’s previous abortive attack on Greece and George W. Bush’s attempt to follow up on his father’s previous attack on Iraq. Yet Ellen McLaughlin’s adaptation (McLaughlin 2005) rejected literalising the parallels. Her version put particular emphasis on the role of the regal Atossa, who united the play by taking the important initiative at every stage. After puzzling over her shocking prophetic dream about Xerxes with the chorus, she distracted the chorus, which was verging towards revolt against Xerxes, by proposing to evoke the ghost of Darius and by turning all towards a sense of loss. She finally appeared in suppliant black to change the tone of the chorus’s final confrontation of Xerxes, after it refused to bow in obeisance to the king, and brought all together in the concluding act of ritualised mourning. In Aeschylus’s version Atossa leaves to get fresh clothing for the defeated Xerxes before he arrives, but never returns. A number of productions besides Sellars’s and McLaughlin’s staged her return to assuage her son’s grief in the final scene. This choice emphasised in different ways Xerxes’ problematic relation to his family rather than focusing heavily on his confrontation with Persian elders. McLaughlin’s chorus was a group of older once powerful leaders with individualised perspectives who divided and united in their views throughout. Their expanded evocation of the suffering of the Persian wives again underlined the emergence of a stronger female perspective



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in the play. The performance took place on a stage covered with red sand with a mirror expanding the space at the back and included surprising silent entrances for Darius and Xerxes. Muted sounds of percussion and cello accompanied many of the later scenes. This well-reviewed version was later revived in Washington, Berkeley and Philadelphia (Foley 2012b, 141–44). Many innovative productions of Persians have experimented with exciting modes of choral performance. Karolos Koun’s production for his Theatro Technis in Athens (1965, 1967, 1976) was memorable for brilliant choreography that inspired a number of later productions, especially in Greece (Hall 2007, 185–86; Van Steen 2016, 211). Koun’s often whirling choral movement, rich and flowing costumes, and musical background to the lines of individual choral members, powerfully performed the collective reaction to the Persian goals and losses at every stage, to the point where they virtually upstaged Xerxes in the final scene. In a similar fashion, Lydia Koniordou’s 2006 production for the National Theatre of Greece deployed a set of bleacher-like steps that turned the final scenes of lament into “war reportage raised to operatic dimensions” (Charles Isherwood, New York Times, 18 September 2006). The well-known Greek director Theodoros Terzopoulos staged three experimental productions centred on the suffering bodies of the chorus in 1990–92 (Iraklion, Crete), 2003 (Meyerhold Centre, Moscow) and in 2006 (Aghia Irini, Istanbul and Epidaurus) (Sidiropoulou 2017, 55–62). Terzopoulos’s grieving actors repeatedly struggled to the point of exhaustion and barely managed to produce speech. In the 1990–92 production the chorus, dressed in black, generated ceremonial rocking movements and wavelike patterns often inspired by Asian theatre as it perched on platforms placed on a white circular canvas marked by a splotch of red. Darius’s golden ghost temporarily dispersed the darkness before the semi-naked chorus returned to lamenting the dead with Xerxes. In 2003 the chorus moved in and out of a circle. Darius separated the circular space of intense mourning from an external site of reflection. As in the first production photographs of war victims appeared along with some other vivid props. The 2006 production featured a combined Greek and Turkish cast that brought the enemies together (again with photographs) in shared suffering. The music drew on eastern and Byzantine traditions. The explosive choreography included whirling, fighting, embracing, staring into each other’s eyes, shaking and undressing. The chorus finally became a series of red dots disappearing into history. Performances of versions of Persians in spectacular and evocative settings have also enriched the reception of the play. In August 2010, the National Theatre of Wales staged a site-specific adaptation directed by Kaite O’Reilly in the uninhabited military village of Cilieni in the Breton Beacons, a site normally banned to civilians, that started to be used during the Cold War to teach troops how to fight in built-up areas. The audience was bussed up to an empty square where a chorus of functionaries wearing grey suits accompanied by military music held a rally nervously insisting that victory was imminent. The audience then moved to bleachers set before a three-storey house without a façade but with a giant screen at attic level. On screen the audience saw the messenger’s report of disaster, Queen Atossa’s vivid reactions and then the ghost of Darius. Xerxes arrived from a distance scattering sheep as he stumbled across open fields. The angry chorus finally joined his lament and carried him home (Charles Spencer, Telegraph, 13 August 2010; Clare Brennan, The Guardian, 14 August 2010). Peter Brook’s 1970–71 Orghast, was staged in Iran before the royal tomb of Artaxerxes II in ancient Persepolis and at Naqsh-e-Rustam where Darius I and Xerxes I were buried. This eclectic version, which used both Avestan, a pre-Iranian sacred language, as well as transliterated Greek, was performed by actors of many nationalities, especially Iranians. The ghost of Darius appeared from his tomb and the chorus sang the lyric portions of Persians, including the final lament, with Xerxes. Brooks’s attempt to create an international theatrical language blurred the boundaries between Greeks and Persians, as well as drawing on myths from several cultures (Hall 2007, 187–91).

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One unusual tragicomic Persians, however, the well-reviewed 2005 The Persians: A Comedy about War with Five Songs in New York City, offered a western-contemporary Iranian take on the play. The play included excerpts from Persians – the entire messenger speech on the Persian naval disaster, Atossa’s summoning of Darius’s ghost and Xerxes’ return – that alternated with the often humorous experiences of a modern Iranian family. It pointedly included a song delivered first in English, then in Farsi, as well as a final turn to shared intercultural woe (Foley 2012b, 144–46; Jenkins 2015, 104–12).

Seven against Thebes Outside of Greece, Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes has rarely been performed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The last play of an otherwise lost trilogy, the action is framed by a verbal confrontation between the Theban defender Eteocles and a chorus of women terrified by the war of the seven against Thebes. In the central scene, Eteocles sends virtuous Theban warriors against each of the largely hubristic Argive attackers at the city’s seven gates, then discovers that he is doomed to enact his father Oedipus’s curse by meeting his brother Polyneices at the last gate. No member of the invading seven warriors appears on stage; most or even all of the Theban warriors probably failed to appear as well. The chorus fails to persuade Eteocles to avoid his brother at the seventh gate; a messenger reports the Theban defeat of the enemy, and the chorus laments the fratricidal brothers. A final scene that includes the sisters Antigone and Ismene is probably spurious and often excluded or abbreviated in modern productions. The fireworks of this play are often verbal and the dominant role of the chorus again demands an ambitious production. My discussion here will focus above all on why two important productions in the US and Cuba chose to adapt the play and how they dealt with the difficulties of bringing an apparently static play alive on the modern stage. Innovations included attempts to recreate and dramatise some of the back-story presumably contained in the lost earlier plays of the trilogy, Laius and Oedipus, and updating the role of the chorus as singers and dancers in a modern context. Most important, these versions brought on stage both brothers along with their supporting champions as voices or as performers in a far more active and stylised confrontation of the warriors that emphasised, like Euripides’ later Phoenician Women, the complexity of a war between brothers. The Cuban author Antón Arrufat’s Los siete contra Thebas, first produced in 1968 (Arrufat 2001), was banned by Fidel Castro’s communist government after winning a prestigious award. Arrufat’s play allegorised as a war between symbolic brothers the 1961 Bay of Pigs attack on Castro’s Cuba by wealthy, capitalist Cuban exiles supported by the American government. (The play drew on Euripides’ and Seneca’s versions, and Racine’s La Thébaide as well as Aeschylus.) In reality Castro, the Eteocles figure, supported by his brother Raul, survived while the heavily armed American invaders were defeated by an army of poor men. Arrufat preserved the fratricidal death of the brothers. As in Seven, Los siete centred on actively dramatising the conflict between the two armies; all the Argive champions, with shields retaining powerful emblems as in Aeschylus, characterised themselves as arrogant: Tideo (Tydeus), a prominent landowner deprived of land by Castro’s 1959 Agrarian Reform Law; Hipomedonte (Hippomedon), a bringer of purifying fire; Capaneo (Capaneus), a warrior asserting that no one could throw him off the towering wall; Ecleo (Eteoclus); Anfiarao, who is represented as too self-absorbed, unlike Aeschylus’s virtuous Amphiaraeus, with his blank shield; and Partenópeo, who like Aeschylus’s Parthenopaeus is represented by his spear, an oath to defeat the enemy and a bird of prey (rather than a Sphinx) with open talons on his shield. Arrufat’s villainous Polinice, however, was allowed not only to claim justice, but to



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mention a failed deal to share power between the brothers that appeared in Euripides’ Phoenician Women but not in Aeschylus, and offered his brother a truce. Etéocles agreed that he broke the truce, but justified his absolute rule due to his distribution of wealth among the poor. Hence, when both brothers met their death, each was responsible for his demise. Etéocles also, unlike Aeschylus’s Eteocles, defended the importance of the chorus of women to the city, whereas Polinice dismissed them. The chorus women tried to dissuade Etéocles from fighting, but also sympathised with his selfless concern for the city’s defence. Along with the play’s Theban spies, they mimed the events narrated as well as singing odes to dramatise the conflict. The play was differently interpreted in 1970 by Salvador Flores in Mexico as reminiscent of the conflict between Castro and Che Guevara in the 1960s, and finally heavily adapted in Cuba by Alberto Sarrain in 2007. In the Cuban context, civil war provided and continues to provide a context in which to reimagine Seven (Torrance 2015). Will Powers’s tragicomic hip-hop remixing or mashup of the play, The Seven, on the other hand, drew on gang-infested African-American culture of San Francisco’s working class Fillmore district to revitalise the play’s fratricidal conflict. Originally staged by Thick Description in San Francisco in 2002, it was revised for the New York Theatre Workshop in 2006 and for the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego in 2008. The DJ who opened the play claimed the ability to loop, flip and reframe Aeschylus’s script: “There are no two worlds that I can’t mix.” This version reintroduced the character of Oedipus from the lost second play of Aeschylus’s trilogy as a 1970s original gangsta and pimp accompanied by three Funky Fates who not only staged his original encounter with Laius, but cursed his sons for neglecting their father and then deliberately sowed hostility between them after they decided to resist the paternal curse by sharing power. Eteocles grew increasingly attracted to power; Polynices withdrew into nature with Tydeus only to become outraged by his brother’s dishonesty and injustice. Act Two introduced the seven urban enemy champions (who included a gang leader, a martial arts expert, an ex-prisoner and a peace promoter) and turned the Theban opponents into a co-ed civic chorus who decided to defend their city. (The same actors played the opposing forces on both sides). The final scene staged the battle and the fatal duel of the brothers (Feingold 2006; Meineck 2006; Foley 2012b, 104–07; Jenkins 2015, 164– 65; Wetmore 2015, 2017, 237–43). The tension between the female chorus and the male protagonist is particularly critical in Seven. The chorus of virgins enters in disarray, rushes to embrace statues of the gods and sings in excited dochmiac metres. Eteocles tries to silence and finally to calm them. This effort is only partially effective and the tensions between chorus and Eteocles re-emerge as the chorus tries and fails to prevent the fratricide and then mourns the brothers in a fashion that stresses their intrafamilial violence. The Seven exploited hip-hop culture and practices such as break dancing as ritual attempts to mediate street violence that failed in this case to resist the fatalities of inner city culture. As Power put it, “hip-hop is thick with language” and story-telling (Mee 2006, 31). The play’s street-inspired choreography by Bill T. Jones, accompanied by eclectic music, also put choral dance and song at the centre of the production, as did a number of other versions of Seven. Among other important experiments with representing Aeschylus’s chorus, Einar Schleef’s 1968 Die Mütter (“The Mothers”) staged Aeschylus’s Seven with Euripides’ Suppliant Women at the Frankfurt Schauspielhaus in a space that almost surrounded the audience and at times seemed to incorporate the spectators into their midst or threaten them with their violence. The Seven’s chorus of virgins spoke and moved in unison, while simultaneously creating what Erika Fischer-Lichte called a Nietzschean tension between group and individual: “Over and over again it [the chorus] made itself felt as an act of violence done to the individual by the community as well as to the community by the individual” (Fischer-Lichte 2004, 356). At one point when the chorus “shouted Eteocles down by the strength of their

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voices, he fell to his knees and cowered … While the [choral] language tried to subordinate the ecstatic body to its symbolic order, the body strove to undermine and to subvert the symbolic order of language by dissolving it in the maelstrom of its ecstasy” (Fischer-Lichte 2004, 356, 358). Whereas Schleef controversially aimed to create a tragic theatre based on a rebellious and at times nearly fascistic chorus (Bierl 2016, 275), the dance theatre piece, The Seven against Thebes, performed several times at La Mama E.T.C. (“Experimental Theater Club”) in New York (2001, 2004) by Great Jones Repertory Company and directed by Ellen Stewart with music by Elizabeth Swados, offered a brilliantly choreographed series of silent physical confrontations between the seven champions from both sides observed by a singing and dancing chorus.

Suppliants Outside of Greece, Aeschylus’s Suppliants, the first play of a lost trilogy about Io’s descendants the Danaids’ arrival to Argos from Egypt, has rarely been performed. In Suppliants the chorus of 50 women arrive from Egypt with their father Danaus to seek refuge from marriage to their 50 pursuing first cousins. The Argive king Pelasgus eventually agrees to accept them into the city and defend them against their cousins after the women threaten to kill themselves in a sanctuary and he has consulted his people about his dilemma. In the missing remainder of the trilogy the Argives apparently lost the battle against the Egyptians; 49 of the 50 Danaids killed their husbands on their wedding night; Hypermestra, the Danaid who spared her husband Lynceus, probably went on trial for betraying her commitment to her father and sisters; the goddess Aphrodite defended Hypermestra; Hypermestra and Lynceus probably became rulers of Argos, while the other Danaids married Argives or were punished for their crime. In 1930, Angelos and Eva Palmer Sikelianos staged Suppliants as their second Greek tragedy for their new Delphic festival, following their Prometheus of 1927; once again it was the play’s dominant chorus that made it especially attractive to Eva Palmer-Sikelianos. This production featured a chorus of 50 Danaids wearing hand-woven costumes with Egyptian patterns, complimented by Egyptian hair-styling and supported by 25 maidservants in white with yellow necklaces stationed in semi-circles near the audience. Danaus was accompanied by four exotic, masked Egyptian followers. The ambitious harmony of the choreography was partly inspired by Greek vase-painting and the work of Isadora Duncan, who had performed the third stasimon of the play at the Royal Theatre of Athens in 1903. The Byzantineinspired music aimed to serve the words of the demotic translation and take advantage of the circular space of the orchestra (Papadopoulou 2011, 116–18; Palmer-Sikelianos 1992). Other distinguished performances of Suppliants have often drawn on the possible events of the missing two plays to address the plight of vulnerable (especially female) refugees in various modern contexts and to develop exciting movement for an exotic chorus. Interestingly, as Geoffrey Bakewell (2013) has argued in detail, the original trilogy very likely addressed problems posed by increased numbers of immigrants to Athens in the 460s bce, which eventually resulted in Pericles’ citizenship law of 451–50 that established new grounds for Athenian citizenship (two Athenian parents) and a legal boundary between citizens and resident aliens or metics. A performance in the Hearst Theatre at Berkeley in 1990 already included an all-black chorus representing African refugees. From 1995–97 the Romanian director Silviu Purcarete, probably inspired by Islamic refugees in former Yugoslavia and his experience of the brutal Ceausescu dictatorship, had similarly re-created for multiple audiences in Romania, Europe and New York a version of the whole trilogy that included a chorus of 50 asylum-seeking women who killed all but one of their 50 bridegrooms.



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Purcarete’s Les Danaides (viewable as Danaidele on YouTube in French with Romanian titles), was framed by the presence of six gods dressed in white (Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Artemis, Hermes and Poseidon), who cynically and playfully presided over and mockingly observed the beleaguered humans and their futile attempts to escape tragedy. An aged, blind and emaciated Pelasgus, wearing dark glasses and leaning on crutches, provided little real assistance in a context where human politics were meaningless and eventually died in battle (as in Aeschylus). An androgynous Danaus (a bare-breasted woman with a beard), who emerged and re-emerged from a white box, presided over a group of 50 initially faceless daughters who arrived dressed in Islamic-style blue robes and carrying white suitcases. The women used these suitcases to create barriers around themselves or to build altars as they wailed and prayed and generated an appearance of Io (borrowed from Prometheus Bound) from their song. Zeus and Hera criticised the Danaids’ resistance to marriage. After being attacked and forced to marry their 50 orange-robed barbaric cousins, the chorus women removed their clothes. They drew white veils from their suitcases, then used them to create 50 tents, from which they emerged standing triumphantly over their dead grooms. Each groom’s head was wrapped in bloody bandages, with cutlery from the wedding feast stuck in their mouths. Hypermestra, who spared her husband Lynceus, then distractingly became Amymone searching for water in a brief interpolated satyr play (Amymone was the title of Aeschylus’s satyr play) and finally emerged, in Purcarete’s interpretation, as the ancestress of Europe. The aged Danaus died and the Danaids, after laughing and dragging off their dead husbands’ bodies, were pursued, killed as their white suitcases fell like dominoes, and eternally punished after death for their crimes. The two 50-person choruses, enhanced by stunning use of movement and lighting, constituted the most powerful experiment of this production. The play also offered an implicit plea for European recognition of marginalised Eastern Europeans and of human rights (Papadopoulou 2011, 118–21; Wilmer 1996). Three similarly themed European productions followed. In 2013, Irène Bonnaud presented Retour à Argos, which included Les Exilées and a piece by Violaine Schwartz, at Lille’s Théâtre du Nord. In 2014, Nicolas Stemann directed the Nobel prize-winning author Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Schutzbefohlenen at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg to address the plight of asylum seekers on the Italian island of Lampedusa; actors spoke for a chorus of refugees from Lampedusa on stage. The performance in 2015 at Siracusa, Sicily represented the chorus as refugees from Africa and the Middle East in a contemporary context where large numbers of such refugees are very much an urgent reality. Moni Ovadia’s 2015 Le Supplici was performed in Sicilian and modern Greek in the outdoor Teatro Antica in Siracusa under the auspices of the Istituto Nazionale del Dramma Antico (INDA). The chorus of sea-borne migrants performed operatically to almost continuous music by a small Bouzouki band (clarinet, accordion, guitar, huge drum). The orchestra space was covered by sand with nine stylised Cycladic idols on pedestals and a monumental gate to Argos looming in the background. A Sicilian storyteller (cantastorie) framed the play using cuntu, a rhymed rhythmic Sicilian form, as he introduced the myth and re-emerged to tell the future at the end. He identified himself with Aeschylus, here viewed as a Sicilian. An assertive and imposing Pelasgus in rich ancient-Greek inspired costume (blue with a Doric column on the front and an Ionic temple on the back), accompanied by men in white biohazard suits, invited the women and Danaus to remain. The stunning chorus, which moved and danced electrically throughout, entered in burkas but then revealed African inspired costumes, with jungle prints, hip-length dreadlocks and bare plastic breasts. The Egyptians suitors wore dark linen skirts and jack boots with Egyptian fans on their helmets; a general in a huge four-horse chariot egged them on as he circled the orchestra. The men tried to capture the chorus with nets, but the women were rescued by the Greeks and accepted into the city of Argos. This optimistic version of Suppliants, which offered no hint of the complicated

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events of the rest of the lost trilogy and emphasised the threatening aspects of the Egyptians in contrast to the rational receptivity of the Argives, included groups of refugees in every audience. Finally, Charles Mee’s tragicomic version, Big Love, performed in multiple contexts in the US from its premiere at the Humana Festival, Louisville, Kentucky (directed by Les Waters) in 2000, made the chorus Greek refugees from an arranged marriage with American cousins that focused on gender conflict and included both the killing of the bridegrooms and the final reconciliation of all involved to the bride who chose to save her husband (www.charles​ mee.org, Foley 2004, 107–08; Hartigan 2011, 109–20; Papadopoulou 2011, 118–21; Monaghan 2017, 260–61). Mee’s Greek refugees are accepted as uninvited guests in an exquisite Italian villa. The three characters representing the offstage 47 other cousins have different female perspectives on their plight: the feminist Thyona, promised to the sexist Constantine, is hostile to men, the easily swayed and superficial Olympia proves initially tempted by the luxuries of marriage with Oed, but the more sensible Lydia is eventually open to persuasion by Nikos, who is already in love with her. (Their father figure Danaus is eliminated from this script, which makes the women’s choices strictly independent). Their host Piero (Pelasgus) tries to mediate for the couples once the suitors arrive; both sexes separately perform their overall frustration with and repressed fantasies about the other sex/traditional gender roles, while throwing themselves dramatically onto the stage. Mee’s script recommends musical accompaniment for many scenes, including a full repertoire of popular wedding music. After Piero refuses to rescue the women, Thyona persuades her sisters to murder their husbands during the wedding at which all 100 partners are imagined to be present (often as projections); the ceremony turns into a shocking bloodbath. Lydia is put on trial by her sisters, an event judged by Bella (a stand-in for Aeschylus’s Aphrodite, who defends heterosexual bonding), the mother of their host, who frees Lydia for her commitment to love and offers to adopt her 49 sisters because she has only borne sons. Lydia throws her bridal bouquet into the audience and the couple departs looking shell-shocked. This tragicomic version has proved spectacularly popular in the US, with performances emerging regularly on both professional and university stages across the country. Its experiments with producing chorality through synchronised, acrobatic and non-naturalistic stage movement and setting were particularly notable.

Prometheus The nineteenth century saw in Prometheus a romantic hero of resistance against tyranny (e.g. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound), the archetype of revolutionary will (Marx), the embodiment of liberty (Goethe, Schlegel, Byron) and the prototype of the artist (Nietzsche) (Ruffell 2012, 112–24). Twentieth- and twenty-first-century versions have also turned to the play (which may not be by Aeschylus) to address tyranny, slavery, unjust imprisonment and torture, or class conflict. The 1964 drama Black Titan, which honoured a Promethean Martin Luther King bound by Klansmen and featured an Io sold as a slave by a white man, was performed in New York’s East River amphitheatre (Hartigan 1995, 132; Foley 2012b, 154). The black actor David Oyelowo later played Prometheus bound in chains at London’s Sound Theatre in 2005 and at New York’s Classic Stage Company in 2007 in a translation by James Kerr (2005) that evoked the colonial slave trade of the west. Heiner Müller’s Prometheus (written for performance and published in the German Democratic Republic in 1968, and brought to Zurich by Peter Stein in 1969) was later followed by his 1972 The Freeing of Prometheus, embedded in his play Zement, which featured a Prometheus resistant to rescue by Herakles after millennia of exposure and concluded with the death of the gods. The 1979



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performance by Theatro Technis (London), directed by George Eugenio, offered an implicit indictment of the Greek junta, whereas the Irish playwright Tom Paulin’s 1989 Seize the Fire (published 1990; video 1989 BBC Open University Production) attacked the military-industrial complex as a form of tyranny (Hall 2004, 174–75). A musical version of the play performed in the spring of 2011 at the Oberon Club for the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, directed by Diane Paulus with book and lyrics by Steven Slater, was co-sponsored by Amnesty International. The project aimed to promote Amnesty International’s mission “to free prisoners of conscience and aid individuals at risk all over the world”. Each performance focused on beleaguered historical individuals and audiences were invited to sign petitions, send postcards and engage in the work of Amnesty International. This performance’s Prometheus (an electric Gavin Creel) donated the arts as well as fire to humankind (Stahl 2012; Jenkins 2015, 213–15, 219–20). Prometheus has also challenged adapters and directors because its protagonist remains chained to a rock, and the play’s primary action is verbal. Prometheus’s divinity allows him to address suffering with knowledge of the future and eternal life; only in the scene with Io does the play bring us close to mortal suffering, although the dedication and sympathy of the chorus of Oceanids come close to heroic in the final scene, where they assert their desire to share Prometheus’s descent into Tartarus, even if we are not sure how this final scene was originally staged. The settings of various productions have often made spectacular efforts to dramatise the immobile hero’s situation. The famous 1927 production of the play in the theatre at Delphi by Angelos Sikelianos and Eva Palmer-Sikelianos created a huge rocklike mound at the back of the orchestra on which to impale the god. Both characters and chorus climbed up the mound to address the god and at the climax the whole mound collapsed, sending Prometheus into its depths as the chorus scattered in fright. Here, as often elsewhere, Prometheus was bound in a pose suggestive of the crucifixion. In a striking 2013 production at Getty villa directed by Travis Preston and translated by Joel Agee (2014), the hero was attached to a circular structure on a 5-ton 23-foot high steel wheel that was large enough for members of the chorus and other actors to mount as well. Prometheus was bound to a smaller wheel that could slide up the perimeter of the larger wheel like a planet circling the sun. The subtle jazz score contributed to the celestial atmosphere created by the set. In the London and New York production mentioned at the beginning of this section, David Oyelowo, virtually naked and bleeding from a chest wound, hung on chains that symbolically linked him to an Olympus at the top of the stage. Tom Paulin’s Seize the Fire placed Prometheus in a scene of post-industrial waste. In the American Repertory Theater (Cambridge, Mass.) rock musical, Prometheus was bound and brutalised in the middle of the audience, who surrounded him on a dance floor offering limited seating. The audience brushed shoulders with the actors, while three “daughters of Aether” performed standing on ladders. Mary Shelley’s more pessimistic evaluation of Prometheus as hubristic scientist in her Frankenstein; or, The modern Prometheus, on the other hand, anticipated Robert Lowell’s and Richard Schechner’s twentieth-century linking of Promethean fire in their versions with the invention of the atomic bomb. Lowell’s 1967 version at the Yale School of Drama in New Haven also referred to the Vietnam War, whereas Schechner’s The Prometheus Project: Four Movements and a Coda in New York linked Hiroshima with the sexual abuse of Io (Lowell 1969; Colakis 1993, 21–29; Hartigan 1995, 132–35; Foley 2012b, 154–56). The Belgian director Jan Fabre’s 2011 Prometheus Landscape II for his Troubleyn Company in Antwerp also explored human abuse of fire/passion/imagination through psychological repression, religion, materialistic consumption and violence. Prometheus, suspended in a Christ-like position and silent for much of the performance, is again and again revealed to be irrelevant to humanity’s need for a hero. Jeroen Olysleagher’s text included conflicting fragmentary

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monologues of eight gods and mythical figures and the performance offered “a profusion of physicalized images” populating a bleak and dimming apocalyptic landscape (Monaghan 2017, 273). Two important versions used the play to raise class issues. In Tony Harrison’s pessimistic 1998 film Prometheus, mistreated Northern British working class miners in Yorkshire who struck against the closure of the coal pits in 1984 identify with Prometheus. A former union shop steward, dying of smoker’s and miner’s lung, and his grandson represent the miners while the boy’s mother, the film’s wordless half-cow Io, is arrested by Kratos and Bia, prodded into a cattle truck, slaughtered and cremated in a fashion suggestive of the Holocaust. The miners end up trapped in a van, carted to Europe and melted down for a gold statue of Prometheus, while their wives turn into wailing tailor’s dummies floated down to the oil refineries of Eleusis to join the humiliated statue. Zeus’s henchman Hermes oversees the destruction of the community and stresses the negative sides of both fire and industry for humankind (Hall 2004, 185–97; Ruffell 2012, 126–29). By contrast in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the 1999 Steelbound, written by Alison Carey and directed by Bill Rauch, offered a more positive communal response to the closing of local steel plants. Located in a monumental and cavernous abandoned plant, where Prometheus, a resistant laid-off steelworker, was welded to a 275-ton pouring ladle in a Christlike position, the play involved a procession of local community members who visited Prometheus and adopted the play’s roles. This version included a chorus of local women who had never been allowed to enter the plant, a chorus of puzzled children and a chorus of steelworkers who laid tools at the site and recited closing dates for various plants, then recalled the injuries to workers, industrial pollution and betrayed promises. The play aimed to memorialise the workers’ fellowship and their contribution to the American economy; it closed with the release of Prometheus, who rejoined his community (Foley 2012b, 156–58). Some productions left Prometheus’s enduring millennia of torture for his assistance to humankind as in the original, while others like Steelbound directly or indirectly evoked the probable reconciliation of the god with the once tyrannical Zeus and the release of Prometheus in the lost final play of the trilogy, Prometheus Unbound. Many reviews of various productions have complained about the inconclusive ending of the original play. A 2002 performance at the Studio Theatre in Washington adapted by Sophie Burnham and directed by Joy Zinoman staged an ironised reconciliation of Prometheus with Zeus and his rescue by Heracles after performing the Aeschylean original in Act I. In Act II, Hephaestus released Prometheus from his chains. A ragged Prometheus journeyed to confront Zeus. Zeus defended his distrust of Prometheus, who betrayed him, and of humans, who increasingly abused Prometheus’s gifts. Prometheus’s secret was no longer relevant in a world without pagan gods, but Zeus enlisted Prometheus to use his wiles to recivilise humanity. The chorus of Oceanids celebrated the conclusion, but Power and Violence still lurked in the background (Foley 2012a, 319–20). By contrast, Theodorus Terzopoloulos’s three remakings of Prometheus (1995, 2008, 2010) created post-tragic, anti-heroic versions that once again lacked the literary scaffolding of other productions. The most radical version in 2010 performed in Elefsina (modern Eleusis), Istanbul, and Essen, Germany involved an international group of actors speaking in Greek, Turkish and German. Laughter and lament intermingled, but ultimately the play “renounces the dignity of psychological pain” (67) and unfolds as a cycle of “coercion and defiance”, in which languages, bodies and ethnic histories endlessly clashed and meshed. The play opened and closed with the sound of a siren. Prometheus, played by a Greek, Turkish and German actor, delivered an ironic political message that “after I am dead, the world will change” (Sidiropoulou 2017, 62–70). Although Aeschylus’s ethereal chorus of Oceanids may have made a spectacular aerial entrance, critics rarely praised the choral side of these productions. For its time, the



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beautifully choreographed choruses of the 1927 Sikelianos production, with its exquisite hand-woven costumes, seem not to have been surpassed. In the A.R.T. production, for example, the hard-driving rock music was in the view of critics strong but eventually monotonous, drowned out the lyrics and left little room for contemplation, except during Io’s solo song, “The Hunger”, much admired by critics. Finally, the 2010 Prometheus in Athens, a one-night event contributed by Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel and directed by Rimini Protokoll at the theatre of Herodes Atticus during the Greek economic crisis, created a collective Prometheus. Here 103 residents of Athens, diverse in age, ethnicity, gender, occupation and status, represented the entire population of the city. Each amateur actor introduced him or herself, explained with which character in Aeschylus’s play they identified and joined a group under a banner inscribed with the chosen name. For diverse reasons the majority identified with Prometheus. Eight scenes, often punctuated with musical interventions, followed, each responding to the themes and questions posed by the original such as imprisonment, invention and the arts, power, civil disobedience, sacrifice, rebellion, victimisation, political systems. The play constructed an inclusive community through its performance and invited the audience to choose its own ways of identifying with some aspect of the play or its characters (Laera 2013, 265–76). Many of the productions and adaptations of Persians, Seven and Suppliants, all of which make the chorus a central character, have aimed to explore through these plays a remarkably varied range of collective political and cultural issues, have experimented with theatrical space and have sometimes offered innovative intrageneric remakings of texts. Many imaginatively confronted the problems of choral performance, even with limited resources. Perhaps surprisingly, productions of Prometheus have remained somewhat more isolated from a modern world that struggles to find a place for the god’s nevertheless still-appealing heroic resistance. A number of these productions reached out to other parts of now lost trilogies, especially in the case of Suppliants and Seven. Some versions attempted, sometimes somewhat awkwardly, to bridge the gaps opened in the plays between Greeks and cultural others that are already challenging to interpret in the originals. Due to limits of space, I have avoided sharing my own views on these productions. Nevertheless, these four less-performed plays clearly continue to provoke contemporary interest and controversy.

FURTHER READING The Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD) is a critical resource. For productions in the US and Latin America, see Colakis 1993, Hartigan 1995, Foley 2012b and Bosher et al. 2015. For international productions, see especially Hall et al. 2004. The Duckworth/Bloomsbury series on individual plays each have a section on reception; see Rosenbloom 2006, Torrance 2007, Papadopoulou 2011 and Ruffell 2012.

REFERENCES Agee, J. (2014). Prometheus Bound. Aeschylus. New York. Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk). The Database and Archives contain extensive information about productions of these plays worldwide. Arrufat, A. (2001). Los Siete Contra Tebas. Havana. Auletta, R. (1993). The Persians by Aeschylus: A Modern Version, with an Introduction by Peter Sellars. Los Angeles. Bakewell, G. (2013). Aeschylus’s Suppliant Wmen: The Tragedy of Immigration. Madison.

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Bierl, A. (2016). “Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.” In Van Zyl Smit, ed. 257–82. Bosher, K., Macintosh, F., McConnell, J. and Rankine, P., eds. (2015). The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas. Oxford. Colakis, M. (1993). The Classics in the American Theater of the 1960s and Early 1970s. Lanham, MD. Constantinidis, S. E., ed. (2017). The Reception of Aeschylus’ Plays through Shifting Models and Frontiers. Leiden and Boston. Feingold, M. (2006). “Remixing Aeschylus, The Seven Spills Classic Tragedy onto Today’s Mean Streets.” Village Voice, February 22–28. Fischer-Lichte, E. (2004). “Thinking about the Origins of Theatre in the 1970s.” In Hall et al. eds. 329–60. Foley, H. P. (2004). “Bad Women: Gender Politics in Late Twentieth-Century Performance and Revision of Greek Tragedy.” In Hall et al. eds. 77–112. Foley, H. P. (2012a). “Greek Tragedy on the American Stage.” Atene E Roma New Series 6, 314–21. Foley, H. P. (2012b). Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Hall, E. (2004). “Aeschylus, Race, Class and War in the 1990s.” In Hall et al. eds. 169–98. Hall, E. (2007). “Aeschylus’ Persians via the Ottoman Empire to Saddam Hussein.” In E. Bridges, E. Hall and P. J. Rhodes, eds. Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars: Antiquity to the Third Millennium. Oxford, 167–96. Hall, E., Macintosh, F. and Wrigley, A., eds. (2004). Dionysus since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium. Oxford. Hartigan, K. V. (1995). Greek Tragedy on the American Stage: Ancient Drama in the Commercial Theater, 1882–1994. Westport, CT. Hartigan, K. V. (2011). (Re)making Tragedy: Charles Mee and Greek Drama. North Charleston, SC. Jenkins, T. E. (2015). Antiquity Now: The Classical World in the Contemporary American Imagination. Cambridge. Kerr, J., trans. (2005). Aeschylus Prometheus Bound. London. Laera, M. (2013). Reaching Athens. Community, Democracy and Other Mythologies in Adaptations of Greek Tragedy. London and Berlin. Lowell, R. (1969). Prometheus Bound. New York. Macintosh, F., Michelakis, P., Hall, E. and Taplin, O., eds. (2005). Agamemnon in Performance 458 BC to AD 2004. Oxford. McLaughlin, E. (2005). The Greek Plays. New York. Mee, C. (2006). “Hip-Hop Visions of an Ancient World.” American Theatre 23, 28–32, 70. Meineck, P. (2006). “Live from New York: Hip Hop Aeschylus and Operatic Aristophanes.” Arion 14, 145–68. Monaghan, P. (2017). “Aeschylus as Postdramatic Analogue: ‘A Thing Both Cool and Fiery’.” In Constantinidis ed. 250–79. Palmer-Sikelianos, E. (1992). Upward Panic: The Autobiography of Eva Palmer-Sikelianos. (trans. with introduction J. P. Anton.) Amsterdam, Chur, and Philadelphia. Papadopoulou, T. (2011). Aeschylus: Suppliants. London. Paulin, T. (1990). Seize the Fire: A Version of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. Reprinted 2011. London. Rosenbloom, D. (2006). Aeschylus: Persians. London. Ruffell, I. A. (2012). Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound. London. Sidiropoulou, A. (2017). “Greek Contemporary Approaches to Tragedy: Terzopoulos’ Revisions of Aeschylus.” In G. Rodenhaus, ed. Contemporary Adaptations of Greek Tragedy: Auteurship and Directorial Vision. London, 53–72. Stahl, M. (2012). “Prometheus Bound.” Theatre Journal 64, 116–17. Torrance, I. (2007). Aeschylus: Seven Against Thebes. London. Torrance, I. (2015). “Brothers at War: Aeschylus in Cuba, 1968 and 2007.” In Bosher et al. eds. 434–53. Van Steen, G. (2011). Theater of the Condemned: Classical Tragedy on Greek Prison Islands. Oxford.



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Van Steen, G. 2016. “Greece. A History of Turns, Traditions, and Transformations.” In Van Zyl Smit, ed. 201–56. Van Zyl Smit, B. ed. (2016). A Handbook to the Reception of Greek Drama. Chicester. Wetmore, K., Jr. 2015. “‘Aeschylus’ Got Flow!’: Afrosporic Greek Tragedy and Will Power’s The Seven.” In Bosher et al. eds. 543–55. Wetmore, K., Jr. 2017. “Pop Music: Adaptations of Aeschylus’ Plays: What Kind of Rock was Prometheus Fastened To?” In Constantinidis ed., 236–49. Wilmer, S. E. (1996). “Review of Les Danaides by Silviu Purcarete.” Didaskalia 3.3, 1–2.

CHAPTER 38

Applied Aeschylus Peter Meineck In 1919, Europe was reeling from the ravages of World War I and the classicist Jane Harrison wrote to the English scholar and populariser of Greek tragedy, Gilbert Murray, imploring him to translate Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women to inspire public sentiment towards peace and justice. She wrote, “I begin to think that Aeschylus was a more amazing sheer genius than Euripides – is this rank blasphemy? You must translate him” (cited by Fiske 2008, 235). Harrison’s own work on ancient theatre had a great deal of influence on writers, directors and choreographers of her day such as W. B. Yeats, Gordon Craig, T. S. Eliot, Granville Barker and Isadora Duncan, and even on much younger creators such as Merce Cunningham (Warden 2012, 66). She had identified an inherent quality of Aeschylean drama – that it could be applied to new forms of social and political activism to promote a social cause. A century later Aeschylus is still being placed into service to highlight contemporary political and social causes and in this chapter I describe two recent examples: a summer drama camp for refugee and immigrant teens, and a multi-week programme for American veterans. These programmes might best be described as applied Aeschylean theatre. Applied theatre has been defined as “a broad set of theatrical practices and creative processes that take participants and audiences beyond the scope of conventional mainstream theatre into the realm of a theatre that is responsive to ordinary people and their stories, local setting and priorities” (Prentki and Preston 2013, 9). However, programmes that call themselves “applied” are often non-traditional and genre-defying and may not fit neatly into this description. On the whole, applied theatre is not especially concerned with theatrical aesthetics, or the business side of the ticket-selling theatre, and usually occurs in non-theatrical settings such as community centres, schools, prisons, libraries, hospitals, shelters, veteran’s facilities and youth groups, etc. Prentki and Preston identify three broad categories of applied theatre: (i) theatre “for”, (ii) theatre “with”, and (iii) theatre “by” a community (Prentki and Preston 2013, 10–11). To this list I propose that theatre “across” communities be added – an appropriate descriptor for the veteran’s programme discussed in this chapter. Of course, many scholars have suggested how Aeschylus’s works must have served to provoke social discourse at the time of their original performances (see e.g. Griffith 1995; Podlecki 1999; Goldhill 2000; Harrison 2019). While these plays might be considered as having had a political or social application in terms of their content and relevance to contemporaneous events in their own day, their presentation at a formal state festival in a competitive

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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setting means that they do not meet the definition of applied theatre given in the previous paragraph. For our purposes, then, applied Aeschylus comes about when his dramatic works are extrapolated from their traditional performance setting in a theatre, or their function as a literary text, and are applied as part of a community, social or public programme.

Immigrants and Refugees In the summer of 2019, Aquila Theatre mounted a new applied theatre programme at New York University aimed at teens from refugee, asylee and other immigrant families. The programme was built around Aeschylus’s Suppliants and entitled Hear Our Call, after line 79 of the play, where a chorus made up of teenage African girls lands in Greece to seek asylum. The play provided the themes that guided a three-week intensive session. These were: to ­introduce a marginalised group to the university environment and let them feel welcomed and accepted; to create an artistic community based on shared but different experiences; to offer free drama training to a community that is not only under underserved, but at the time was actively under threat in America (predominantly due to the policies and intimidations of the Trump administration); and to learn more about the play by working collectively with a group that would bring different perspectives and experiences to their readings. The first challenge was to recruit prospective applicants to fill the 20 places at a moment when the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency was actively using mock higher education institutions to identify and then detain undocumented migrants (“From fake universities to workplace raids: ICE’s increased immigration crackdowns under Trump”, Washington Post, 31 January 2019). This and many other actions fuelled a prevailing culture of fear among both documented and undocumented immigrant families, making recruitment incredibly difficult. Eventually, 14 teenagers ranging from 12 to 19 signed up mainly through contacts with refugee charities, specialised schools and immigration legal organisations. The participants’ families hailed from Turkmenistan, Russia, India, Somalia, Egypt, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico (US citizens, but still subject to discrimination, especially if English is their second language). The programme was organised around three choral scenes from Suppliants. The first (lines 1–39) shows the young women arriving in Argos from Egypt along with their elderly father, Danaus. The women recount their flight from forced marriages to the sons of Aegyptus, who are in hot pursuit. They pray that Zeus will help them gain asylum in Argos, a place they consider their ancestral homeland based on their descent from Io. This first scene was approached after four days of actor training consisting of group warm-ups, physical and vocal exercises, and character development at New York University’s (NYU’s) Tisch School for the Arts. This was interspersed with seminars in the classics department where they started to work on text analysis, cultural contexts, story development and writing. In this way, the participants experienced two different facets of university life, in addition to being welcomed and valued in both departments. But it was not all plain sailing; academia can seem inaccessible and even hostile to those unfamiliar with its ways. For example, it was very important for our participants to have NYU ID cards to give them access to rooms and facilities and help foster a sense of belonging. However, the card centre required them to provide a passport or government-issued ID to obtain an NYU card. This led to confusion, exasperation and initially disappointment as our initial attempt to gain these promised credentials was rebuffed. What might seem like an administrative annoyance to many can present itself as a major barrier to people from marginalised communities: validation by a government document is the very thing that some refugees cannot have. Many universities have announced

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that they are “sanctuary communities” and “safe spaces” for members of the migrant community, regardless of their status. Yet how welcoming is our academic space really when those we proport to welcome experience severe anxiety and tension at the threatened denial of access to it? The young women in Aeschylus’s Suppliants validate their claim for acceptance based on their common ancestry with the Argives through Io and then the recognition of that shared heritage by Pelasgus, the ruler of Argos. The way that the Hear Our Call group handled their own obstacle to entry was to initially withdraw and then formulate of a new strategy. This involved us finding a sympathetic administrator (and there are many) who could pre-approve the students before any attempt was made at a second supplication at the card centre. As the students were led away after the first failed attempt at “entering” the institution, it was apparent that the initial rejection hurt the group and dampened their enthusiasm. Episodes like this beg the question, does our privilege (including my own) obstruct our view of how best to be accessible and equal for all? Aeschylus proposes such questions in Suppliants and in applying this material to social programmes of this kind can be illuminating in many different ways. In the classics department the participants spent time learning and talking about the play and then were divided into small groups and tasked to take the 1926 translation by Weir Smyth posted on Perseus (perseus.tufts.edu) and develop a new version of their own – to “translate” the translation, as it were. To achieve this, each participant was given a broad personality type as a chorus member, such as “a woman of action”, “a doubter”, or a “god fearer”, and worked on this character in the studio and by observing people in Washington Square Park. When it came time to divide up the choral lines into individual voices, they actively debated which lines their character might say, leading to them take a personal stake in the phrases they would then “translate” and perform. When they came together as a full group to read their new lines, they brought with them a specific point of view, a self-selected distinct attitude and an astute response to what was said by the character who spoke before them. In this way, an Aeschylean chorus started to come to ingenious new life. Below is the text of their own “translation” of 1–39 (the participants’ names indicate the lines they created and spoke). MARINA May Zeus, guardian of refugees, help us! We have come far across the rough seas And left Egypt behind us – planning to never return. MATTHEW We fled the land founded by Epaphus, son of Zeus, and Io, which borders Syria, And now we are fugitives, not because of the judgment of men Against a crime, nor the betrayal of our blood. REBECCA Because of our own choice to control our fates and escape From the oppressive act of forced marriage, since we despise The unholy union forced on us by the sons of Egypt. MABARAK It was our father, Danaus, teacher and leader, who considered It was in our best interest to pick from these two evils And depart as fast as we could, riding the surge of the sea To find the shore of this land of Argos.



Applied Aeschylus 521 SAHARA Because this is where our people are originally from, Sprung from the caress of Zeus and Io, Our great, great grandmother. RIHANNA Turned to a cow and goaded from here to Egypt By the bites of Hera’s divine gadfly. SIRENA Where else could we have gone With these wool-covered branches in our hands? This is the symbol of the suppliant – You’ll help us, won’t you? NOELLY From the sky to the sea and everything in between We beg for your help, almighty gods Who holds all power, in the name Of our ancestors, please help us! DENNIS Zeus the protector, save us all! Guardian of the homes of good people, We seek asylum! May the kind spirit of this land Take us in and help us survive! MUNISA If that vicious swarm of men, the sons of Aegyptus, Try to follow us to this shore, May the dangerous sea swallow them all And take their ships with them! ADRIANA And may the cruel sea punish them all With thunder, lightning, wind and rain And drag them deep down to their deaths! LEILANI May they never lay their hands on us Their cousins, in forced marriages Which we will never accept! ALL We will never accept! Never accept! Never Accept!

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The chorus members of The Suppliants are fleeing forced marriages they regard as “unholy unions” that they will “never accept”. This premise can seem quite distant – an ancient practice unfamiliar to most of us, but for many people in the world today it is still a very real issue. One of the programme participants on first reading this scene told the group how she came to the United States from Turkmenistan at the age of 13, seeking asylum with her mother, after her father promised her in marriage to a much older man she had never met. After fleeing at night they came to Russia and then, in a long immigration process, to New York, being granted asylum just before 2017. Her story was chillingly relevant to The Suppliants and she responded to the play by composing and singing a song based on her own experiences that intersected with Aeschylus’s ancient text. The application of themes found in Aeschylus’s play to the creation of new writing, music, dance pieces, mask work and literary adaptations formed the second part of the Hear Our Call programme. The participants were guided by teaching artists to develop and present these works alongside our three scenes from Suppliants in a final presentation to family and friends. These were: a short theatre piece based on Natasha Preston’s 2014 novel The Cellar – the story of young women being held captive by a man; a dance work based on four broad themes found in The Suppliants – sacrifice, hate, violence and unity; a comic mask piece presenting a screenplay scene written by one of the participants (masks were used in the studio to explore Greek drama but also as a tool to develop character, explore emotions and improve movement); and a final modern chorus made up of personal statements inspired by the play and written by each participant. Applied theatre programmes are most often conceived as fulfilling a common good and providing a social, educational or vocational advantage to the participants. Certainly, working with an Aeschylean text, even in translation, is difficult for most students, let alone those who may have the additional burdens of challenging circumstances at home or school. Nevertheless, working with sensitive and attentive teaching artists, the participants can feel a great sense of achievement in reading, parsing, comprehending and performing a text as seemingly difficult as The Suppliants. Even in antiquity, Aeschylus was known for his thorny metaphorical language, his bold phrasing and verbal complexity, lampooned in Aristophanes’ Frogs, whose comic Euripides says that Aeschylus’s dramas are “all Scamanders and ravines, bronzewrought Griffins on shields and hippomountainsides. Nobody has a clue what he means!” (Frogs 928–30) To see participants taking ownership of complex ancient words, investing in them, and delivering their lines with commitment, emotional integrity and passion, can be a very fulfilling experience. In so doing, the teenage participants also developed techniques to improve their public speaking skills, increased awareness of what their bodies might be communicating, and learned to function as a creative contributor within a larger group, gaining self-confidence and the personal commitment required to be part of a theatre company. But Hear Our Call was not a pedagogical one-way street and the learning was not all top-down, for like the veteran’s programme (described in the following section, “Veterans”), these teenagers also taught their teachers a good deal about Aeschylus. The knowledge gained from this kind of applied Greek drama programme can be illuminating. It permits the scholar to view a text from a new perspective, perhaps one closer in some respects to how the play was perceived in antiquity. In the field of cognitive archaeology this is termed comparative social modelling; the practice of comparing what is known about a culture that no longer exists with similar aspects of one that still does (Meineck 2017, 14–18). In this respect, our teenagers from refugee, asylee and immigrant families have something valuable to contribute to our understanding and appreciation of a play about ancient teenage refugees seeking and winning asylum, In fifth-century Athens, the average marriage age of women from elite and upper-middle-class families would have been in the mid-teens (Huebner 2017, 13). This implies that the original masked chorus (likely made up



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of young men) would have represented 15- or 16-year olds, the same age as many of the programme participants. Additionally, many of our teens knew what it meant to deal with unwanted sexual attention, violence, racism, sexism and marginalisation, so the appeal of the chorus in The Suppliants for asylum in Argos resonated with them personally. Their scenes were consequently delivered with a power and intensity that altered our perceptions of the text. One example of this is the entrance of this chorus at the start of the play, set to a metre of marching anapaests often used for choral entrances in tragedy. In the original production the Aeschylean chorus of 12 or 15 members probably entered from one of the long eisodoi (side entrances) into the orchestra (dancing place/playing area of beaten earth, possibly not circular at this time) before rows of wooden benches that sat perhaps five or six thousand spectators on the south-east slope of the Acropolis. Following the entrance song, Danaus tells his daughters to move to a sacred hill (pagos, 189) – could this be a low raised stage? If so, placing the chorus on the stage and the actors in the orchestra, would have been a remarkable innovation that heightened the role of the chorus as the main collective protagonist. The chorus is certainly afforded greater dramatic agency here than in the other plays of Aeschylus, their importance further emphasised by the fact that their father accompanies them into the orchestra but does not speak until after their long self-presentation in song and dance. The African suppliant women demonstrate that in Greek tragedy a chorus can act as far more than a metatheatrical commentator on, or mediator to, the action of the play. Several scholars have noted how “agitated” the suppliants are at the beginning of Suppliants (see Papadopoulou 2014, 94) and yet the consensus has been that their anapaestic entrance and following lament were structured and orderly. Sandin has suggested that they walked in single file with each anapaestic foot (or beat) coinciding with each step they took. Then they formed into three rows in the middle of the orchestra and “delayed for a little while” to wait for Danaus to enter (Sandin 2005, 37). This suggests a stately, ordered and fairly slow entrance. In contrast, what the Hear Our Call participants brought to this scene, mainly from their personal experiences, was the overarching imperative of time that motivates these young women as they flee the country of their birth with their unwanted suitors in hot pursuit. This temporal pressure is magnified when Aeschylus places all their hopes on obtaining refuge and protection in Argos jut when the “vicious swarm of men” is not far behind. Kavoulaki argues that in the opening anapaests “[t]he narrative element seems to tone down the immediacy of the performative dimension” (Kavoulaki 2011, 380), but in our teenagers’ enactment the play begins at a blistering pace and the stakes are incredibly high. The proverbial clock is ticking for these women who have already travelled so far at such great peril and the opportunity to plead with Pelasgus for asylum is their very last chance for safety. Rather than “tone down” the immediacy of this entrance, the narrative elements, which are propelled by marching anapaests are spoken with great urgency. Zeus’s protection of suppliants and the hope that the Argives will respect their ancient blood connection to Argos and take them in are in this moment their only defence against the sons of Aegyptus who might flood down the eisodos into the orchestra and abduct them by force at any moment. What we learned working with these teens is that The Suppliants has a thrilling opening to the taut and incredibly intense drama which places the chorus firmly at its centre. The next section of the play performed by the group were lines 348–419 where the chorus appeals to Pelasgus to grant asylum. Sommerstein has pointed out that this passage contains the earliest use of the term demos (398) to describe a citizen body in a political context (Sommerstein 2010, 134–35). The third part was made up of lines 600–28, which is Danaus’s announcement that the Argives are unanimously granted sanctuary and protection. This is also notable as the first instance in Greek literature of the combination of demos and kratos (as in demo-cracy) describing the vote of the citizens in assembly (604). These two scenes are

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significant considering the rapidly developing democratic systems that were being established in Athens at the time The Suppliants was first performed. This idea of “first democracy” permeates this play, as does the concept that the protection of legitimate asylum seekers should be a function of the democratic state. This had obvious connotations with the political situation in the United States in the summer of 2019, particularly for the students and their family members and caregivers who attended the final presentation. In that same week, the acting director of US Citizen and Immigration Services, Ken Cuccinelli, suggested that the famous 1883 poem affixed to the Statue of Liberty, The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus, should be amended. Cuccinelli, trying to convince people of the need to implement “public charge” laws for new immigrants, said on National Public Radio (August 12, 2019) that Lazarus’s poem should read: “Give me your tired and your poor [who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge].” The contrast between the decision of the democratic assembly in The Suppliants to admit and protect these African women, even at the cost of a destructive war, and the notion of means-testing potential immigrants to the US provoked a spirited audience response. In this way, the ancient text opened-up a contextualised discussion on the value system of democracy today. Another aspect of the play that surprised many of the students was the presentation of difference. The Greek connections to Africa, told in The Suppliants through the myth of Io, raised questions about whether ancient Greek civilisation should be perceived as belonging only to “white” or “western” culture. The participants were intrigued by the mythological connectivity between Greece and Egypt articulated in the play, despite the text’s explicit references to skin colour and dress. They wondered why Aeschylus chose to test democracy with a group that seemed to be as alien as possible from what they had learned about Athenian culture in the fifth century bce. This led to broader conversations about racism, religious and cultural differences, the “whitewashing of ancient cultures”, the suppression of African ancient histories, and how these concepts continue to play such an important role in the contemporary US immigration process and ideas about “Americanness”. The fact that the aliens in this play are teenage girls, the same age as the programme participants, also opened-up a further series of questions. These young women actively repudiate the central feature of Greek female life – the institution of marriage, something that would have been very controversial in classical Athenian society. Their father, Danaus, advises them to “be submissive: you are alien, a refugee, and in need, bold speech does not suit the weak” (202–03), but their speech grows bolder and bolder. They are so certain of their own agency that not only are they are prepared to sacrifice their lives for it, but in doing, curse both their potential hosts and their violent pursuers. Scholars have come away from this work asking what Aeschylus had in mind presenting such bold female characters, which would have been played by men to a predominantly, if not entirely, male audience (Rabinowitz 2013; Kennedy 2014, 12–25). Is Aeschylus, a child of Eleusis, the sacred city of Demeter and Persephone, reflecting the tenets of the mysteries and advocating for a balance between male and female in Athenian cultural life? There are certainly cultural connections between the mysteries and Egyptian ritual practice, and the Suppliants reflects elements of the women-only Thesmophoria festival, sacred to the two goddesses. Or is the pay a consideration of the way in which the Athenian democracy further marginalised women from civic life by presenting women who refuse to marry as a powerful force that might disrupt and even destroy the state? My own view of Aeschylus’s surviving works and fragments is that he did indeed bring an Eleusinian sensibility to tragedy, hence his characterisation as a devotee of Demeter in Aristophanes’ Frogs and the later stories that he was prosecuted for revealing the mysteries. The Eleusinian mysteries were perhaps the most inclusive of all the known cults in Greece, welcoming men, women, enslaved people, children and even foreigners (if they could speak Greek). Perhaps, for Aeschylus, who fought at Marathon and Salamis to protect the democracy, its



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survival depended on it developing as a more inclusive institution. The reforms of Cleisthenes in 507 ushered in new democratic institutions, including a reorganisation of the City Dionysia, where Suppliants would have been performed. These also expanded membership into the citizen body, including many foreigners and even some enslaved people living and working in Attica at the time. This produced a geographic, economic and socially diverse population that later also accommodated waves of refugees form the Persian Wars, increasing the number of metokioi (resident aliens) who contributed greatly to the economic and artistic life of Athens. These rapid social upheavals must have been disconcerting for many in Athens as people from different parts of the Greek world came to live and work in the city in large numbers, something that began before the reforms of Cleisthenes. It is notable that the “tyrant-killers” Harmodius and Aristogeiton, credited as the catalysts for the coming democratic revolution, were said to have been Boeotians of Syrian origin. (Herodotus 5.55–57). Thus, Suppliants may be addressing tensions that existed in Athenian democratic society from a mythological perspective with an ancient story about Argos standing in for contemporary Athens. Likewise, an ancient Athenian story can still reflect democratic tensions today. The participants in the Hear Our Call programme had witnessed a year of trauma and tension, from the rise of heavy-handed immigration enforcement and the curtailment of asylee rights to the Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings, the further rise of the Me Too movement, the credible accusations of rape and sexual assault against a sitting US President, and their own knowledge of the sexual exploitation of many young women during migration. For them, the young African women in this play became vivid symbols of defiance, female agency and women’s voices heard and valued in the public sphere. But they came to understand that Greek drama offers no easy solutions to tragic situations. The suppliant women are granted asylum in Argos, but in the most likely reconstruction of the lost sequel this leads to war and the death of Pelasgus. Tragedy’s refusal to offer neat, self-contained solutions to its own narratives is perhaps what draws people who have experienced traumatic situations to appreciate the kinds of questions tragedy raises yet rarely resolves. The Hear Our Call programme was very nearly thwarted by the culture of fear and repression inflicted on the US immigrant population since 2017. But the participants were inspired by the fact that the young women in the play did not ultimately take their father’s advice to be silent, but instead spoke up and acted boldly, resolutely, even shockingly. They could use this ancient play to provoke and frame original creative acts and speak new words in public, all the while being welcomed and valued in the sometimes rarefied and elitist spaces of the American university. Perhaps because the plays of Aeschylus themselves were created during fraught times when the culture was rapidly changing and values were being questioned, they still convey something essential about the struggle of people who desire to live in a just society – something increasingly sidelined in our screen-driven, selfie-generating, closed-loop world. For three weeks these teenagers hardly glanced at a smartphone, posted on TikTok or swiped through Instagram. Instead, they grappled with the themes of Aeschylus, producing beautiful, compelling and thought-provoking new works. At the end of it all we gathered as an audience and watched these young people perform Aeschylus and the works he inspired with passion, integrity and skill — and we all heard their call loud and clear.

Veterans Aquila Theatre has become well known for the arts and humanities public programming it offers to the American veteran community (Lodewyck and Monoson 2015). Their most recent programme, running since 2017 is called The Warrior Chorus, developed to foster

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community and dialogue between veterans and the public, based around ancient Greek epic and drama. Like the Hear Our Call programme, The Warrior Chorus extracted broad themes from ancient works to bind together a programme made up of multiple training sessions, reading groups, workshops, public talks and a series of staged dramatic readings in New York, Texas, California and Florida. These groups were oriented around five different ancient Greek works: Homer’s Odyssey, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, Euripides’ Herakles and Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and Persians, and each two-year programme focused on one overarching theme such as combat trauma, homecoming, and women at war. Veteran participants also developed, contributed and performed their new works inspired by the ancient material and the discussions they generated. Jonathan Shay has pointed out that ancient Greek drama was “theater of combat veterans, by combat veterans, for combat veterans” (Shay 2002, 152–53) and just as the teens who enrolled in the Hear Our Call summer programme found many personal connections with The Suppliants, so did many of the more than two hundred veterans who participated in some form in these programmes. Veterans in The Warrior Chorus programme read two Aeschylean plays, Persians and Agamemnon, and found it striking how certain aspects of the dramatic narratives and poetic imagery evoked strong associations with their own experiences of war. This association can be found in all Greek drama, but the historical circumstances in which Aeschylus’s works were produced perhaps provide veterans a particular connection to their own concerns as citizen soldiers. Aeschylus was not only responding to the remarkable increase in combat of his day, however, but was also influenced by similar tropes found in Homer. Aeschylus, born around 525 bce, came of age at a remarkable time for the political and military expansion of Athens. The reforms of Cleisthenes around 508 had not only established the basis for a democratic regime, revolutionising citizen participation, but also created a system for rapid mobilisation of a large citizen militia and a reorganised expansion of the Festival of Dionysus. Before this Athens had no standing military but was reliant on a small personal bodyguard for the Peisistratid tyrants, as well as a collection of mercenaries levied when needed. After the expulsion of the last tyrant, Hippias, a new Athenian citizen hoplite army was placed into almost immediate service against an invasion by both Sparta and Corinth in 506, which this new force defeated. Aeschylus marched and fought with this same army in 490 at the Battle of Marathon and was almost certainly involved in the battles of Salamis and Plataea in 480. As an Athenian citizen living in the new democracy during these tumultuous times, Aeschylus would have known battle first hand and fought in the kind of mass international conflicts unknown to previous Athenian generations. Persians shows us what happens in the Persian homeland when the elders of the royal court receive the unbelievable news that their massive military force has been defeated by the Greeks. A messenger delivers a powerfully evocative speech detailing the carnage of the naval battle at Salamis, where an Athenian-led force defeated Xerxes’ invasion fleet, leaving the broken king to return home and mourn his loss. The veterans of The Warrior Chorus, many of whom fought in Iraq and had seen the remains of Mesopotamian, Babylonian and Persian cultures, focused on the end of the play, the great lament between the defeated Persian king and the elders gathered at Susa. In discussions we noticed how at a key moment in this lament Aeschylus has Xerxes tell the Persian elders to look at his tattered royal robes and empty quiver. Then he makes a reference to the Persian treasury being depleted (1014–25). On a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we all gathered around a tiny gold Persian daric coin that shows the Great Persian King running forward with flowing regal robes and holding a bow with a quiver full of arrows. It was not lost on this audience that this was one of the earliest coins depicting a personage ever minted and that if the ancient Athenian warriors had any idea of the man they were fighting against it would have been from their contact



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with Persian coins like this one. The tiny image of the Persian king enabled his personage to be held in the hand and communicated the idea that his power and prestige was ubiquitous. When Aeschylus presented Xerxes on stage he was attired like the representation on the coin, except his robe was tattered and torn, he had no bow and his quiver was empty. The overt reference to the depletion of the Persian treasury suggests that the Persian daric is indeed being referenced here. The collective opinion of the New York Warrior Chorus veterans was that to the Persians, the Athenians were the insurgents. They seemed incapable at that time of destroying the vast Persian empire militarily, but they could repel its aggression, harm its reputation, defame its Great King and debase its currency. This was an original reading of the text and one borne from experience, fighting smaller unconventional forces in the very region where the play is set. Clothing symbols are incredibly important to warriors, whether it is the green and red berets of US special forces, unit insignia worn on combat dress or the American flag fabric patch: “These symbols define us and root our pride, when they are damaged or defaced it’s a big deal.” Another veteran noted the power of images to change public opinion such, as the photos of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib or the statue of Saddam Hussein that would not be fully brought down. They agreed that Aeschylus’s portrayal of a tattered and defeated Xerxes was an act of propaganda that debased the reputation of both the power of the Persian king and his currency. The scholarly debate over the end of The Persians tends to be divided between the belief that Aeschylus’s portrayal of Persian grief is meant to create sympathy for the defeated Persians, and the view that it is intended to hearten an Athenian population still fighting Persian forces (Thalmann 1980). The veterans agreed it could be both and that Aeschylus had captured something of the contradictions of war and also its close relationship with money. It was not too long before the Persian daric and siglos had been replaced in the Aegean by a new currency, one which helped ensure Athenian commercial, cultural and military hegemony in the region for decades to come – Athenian coins minted with the image of an owl, the symbol of Athena, their patron deity, from the same silver that paid for the building of the fleet that defeated the Persians at Salamis. Aeschylus’s Agamemnon is also a play about a king returning home from war. Instead of defeat, Agamemnon wins victory at Troy, but at what cost? By means of the first choral song in the play, Aeschylus allows his audience to experience Agamemnon the commander as he makes the terrible decision to sacrifice his daughter and allow the Greeks to sail against Troy. Through the same chorus, we learn of the men of Argos lying dead around the walls of Troy and hear about the rebellious murmurs from those who remained at home. In Aeschylus’s portrayal of Agamemnon, veterans found many parallels to their own experiences of the consequences of military decision-making in times of war. The combat veterans of the Warrior Chorus viewed the sacrifice of Iphigenia as an honest portrayal of what war does – it kills and maims civilians, including children. Noting the influence of Homer on Aeschylus, we read Demodocus’s song of the Trojan War from Book 8 of The Odyssey and Odysseus’s emotional response to it. His grief is described as the wailing and shrieking of a Trojan woman crying over her dead husband, forced away from the corpse and into slavery by the sharp prod of the Greek spear shaft. This moment was received by a room of 12 veterans, most who had directly experienced combat in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, with complete silence, even the veteran reader halted, unable to finish the last few words. Although the seminar room was silent, an atmosphere of recognition, remembrance and regret provided its emotional resonance – until the stillness was ended by a former marine officer, a veteran of the fierce combat in 2004 at Fallujah, the ancient river city on the Euphrates, who said quietly “Homer knows war”. In this Homeric simile the veterans identified that what often remains of the experience of war is not memories of victories, tactics,

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battles and war plans, but instead the real results of warfare and its horrifying effects on civilians – trauma, loss, despair, displacement, exile and extreme grief. They felt that the horror of Iphigenia’s sacrifice was a similar device. Once these ancient words had been contemplated, the veterans started to tell their own harrowing stories of the civilian casualties of war – entire families found dead after they shelled a village and the mortar round hit the wrong target; fathers bringing their dead children to the base perimeter to show the carnage of a recent assault; small children used as walking improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and blown up in the midst of a medical team; and civilians weeping and wailing, like Homer’s Trojan woman, for their dead family members. To hear such stories is distressing but to be allowed to witness their telling feels like a privilege, as if a truth known by those who have experienced war at first hand but hardly ever spoken about it is already there in the ancient text. These moments of communal recognition between veterans of different generations, nationalities, socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnicities and genders can yield moments of brutal honesty and extreme candour. Normally, these stories tend to be shared only between veterans in private, but for some veterans (for American veterans are of course as diverse as the population of America), an engagement with the classical material can offer a cultural validation of painful memories and create an environment where they can be shared, sometimes in public. The authority and prestige our culture tends to assign to this material means that, while it provides legitimisation of experiences in war as perhaps universal across cultures, the veterans’ direct connection to it gives them ownership and therefore some authority over it. The word veteran is derived from the Latin vetus means “old” but also conveys a sense of valued knowledge and experience. Placing modern veterans in the position of offering their experience of war to give civilians insights into ancient texts created by people who like them knew war first hand, gives particular significance to their participation in this programme. Most of course are not professors of ancient Greek language and culture (although some veterans, such as Paul Woodruff, William Race, Larry Tritle and Jason Crowley, are, and all contributed to a related academic publication entitled Combat Trauma and the Ancient Greeks [Meineck and Konstan 2014]), yet their readings of the ancient texts provided valuable and often fascinating means for civilians to understand both the modern veteran and the ancient text better. Literature is inevitably interpreted based on the social and cultural environment of the particular reader, and combat veterans do, I think, respond to ancient poetry somewhat differently than those who have not experienced the vicissitudes of war and their experience might even offer the classicist new insights into how the ancient texts may have been originally received. One of the passages from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon we read closely in these sessions was the end of the parodos, the choral entry song, where the Argive elders recount the killing of Iphigeneia at Aulis (184–247). Reading these lines with veterans, one of the first things to stand out is their focus on the status of Agamemnon as a commander and how he makes his decisions. Many people know something of the Iphigeneia story, but not usually the Aeschylean version. Veterans noted how Aeschylus sets out a storm of divided responsibilities: to the divine, the family and the men under arms. Agamemnon has gathered a large allied fleet to sail on Troy, but they are hemmed in at the bay of Aulis by storm winds and his men are starting to run out of provisions and starve. It was customary for Greek war commanders to offer a pre-sacrifice, a proteleia, to Artemis, goddess of the hunt, before battle: the killing of war approximated that of a hunt and therefore she must be propitiated. But the sons of Atreus understand the prophecy of the seer Calchas to mean not just an animal; rather, to win the greatest war, they must make the greatest sacrifice — Agamemnon’s daughter, Iphigenia. Aeschylus has the chorus sing of the terrible moment Agamemnon makes this decision as they perform his words (Agamemnon 206–18):



Applied Aeschylus 529 An Unbearable fate will fall on me if I disobey But how can I bear to slaughter my own daughter The glory of my House? How can I stain my hands, the hands of a father, With this young girl’s blood, as it drenches the altar? How can I choose? Both ways are full of evil! Should I desert the fleet and fail my allies? The sacrifice stops the storm, The blood of a virgin must be spilt, Rage craves rage, What must be must be Let it be for the best.

Considering this scene from the perspective of a command decision, the veterans noted that Agamemnon’s judgement to take his daughter’s life was not, according to Aeschylus, the direct command from Artemis, but instead based on the interpretation of a prophet: “Oh, I get it, Calchas is intel – military intelligence or the CIA, what Aeschylus calls prophecy we called intel, but it’s the same thing – the best guess about a shitty situation. We went to war in Iraq over less intel than Agamemnon was given – and how many people were sacrificed for non-existent weapons of mass destruction! Agamemnon looked at birds and used superstition, we use satellite images and rumors, so nothing has changed really.” Other aspects of this moment stood out: Agamemnon is forced to decide between his duty to his command and his devotion to his family. Here it is magnified to life and death, but for the veterans, the call to war is often about duty versus family, especially when drafted or repeatedly reactivated and sent to war. The family is left behind and sacrificed for the military service, relationships can suffer, bills go unpaid, births, marriages and deaths are missed, children’s milestones go unattended and in some cases the warrior makes the supreme sacrifice, being killed in action, never to return. For many veterans, the choice Agamemnon is forced to make between family and duty is a metaphor for the hardship of military service that most civilians will never fully understand. Secondly, the veterans perceived Agamemnon’s decision through the lens of military command and, while still horrified by what he does, perhaps understood his dilemma differently from those who had never been faced with the kind of no-win decisions that commanders must make, where the worst course of action is to make no decision at all. Aeschylus also shows his Agamemnon not just sacrificing his daughter to get fair winds and ensure his victory over Troy but making a terrible decision to save the men under his command and placing them before his own family. They understood that “his men are dying, right there and then, they’re starving, that storm is killing them, he has to do something, he’s the boss, it’s down to him”. Then why not just leave? Scrub the mission? Go home? “Do you know what a logistical nightmare it is to shelter and feed an army?” replied one former Colonel, “Plus, they can’t leave, there’s a storm, and even if they could how would they survive the journey home without food and freshwater? It’s a ‘Russian Winter’, he has to act, it’s his responsibility”. A god-sent storm, the life of a young girl, a suffering army, Aeschylus was surely deliberate in evoking a similar set of circumstances in book 1 of The Iliad. Like Homer, the veterans on this programme felt that Aeschylus knew war first hand, as we know he did. The Athenians who were willing to sacrifice everything in the storm of the Persian invasion might, like our veterans, have empathised with the decision Agamemnon is forced to make. In this scene, Aeschylus seems to be saying to his audience, “What would you have done?” The strophe that immediately follows these lines (219–27) was also very significant for the veterans. It describes that once Agamemnon “strapped himself to the yoke of Necessity” and decided to sacrifice his daughter, the natural storm hemming in the ships at the bay of Aulis

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becomes a psychological one as Agamemnon’s “storm-swept psyche veered on an impious course”. Aeschylus goes on to describe the very moment his mental state changed entirely and “his altered mind would dare do anything”. The psychology of killing is rendered in poetic form within the narrative context of a military commander forced to make a decision that will result in the death of an innocent – represented by his own daughter. The focus on the cost of war is here extended to its effects on non-combatants. Veterans noticed this as a frequent trope in Greek literature, from Demodocus’s song in The Odyssey, mentioned earlier in this section, to other plays of Aeschylus, such as Seven against Thebes, where the threats to civilians in a besieged city are unflinchingly related by a chorus of terrified Theban women. In Agamemnon, Cassandra, the captive Trojan daughter of the house of Priam, also encapsulates the suffering of the civilian and the brutality of sexual violence, dispossession, psychological and physical trauma and slavery that is inflicted on those who survive the violence of military conquest. Agamemnon asks his wife Clytemnestra to take in Cassandra and treat her well, publicly commenting that “the god looks down with goodwill on the conqueror who can be kind” (951–52). But can there be any kindness in conquest? Agamemnon has already proclaimed that he has utterly destroyed Troy (819–20) and the Herald has told the chorus that the Greek army obliterated Troy’s altars and shrines and ground the “seed of life to dust” (527–28). To many of the veterans, war and its effects on both combatants and noncombatants are part of the fabric of Greek poetry that they know from lived experience. Agamemnon’s psychological transformation at the moment of his decision to kill his daughter also raises the question of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). One connection between modern veterans and ancient poetry pursued by Jonathan Shay, Larry Tritle and others is between contemporary diagnoses of PTSD and descriptions of combat trauma found in ancient texts, which these studies have approached from a variety of different perspectives. Shay (1994, 2002) explored how Homeric texts speak to Vietnam veterans; Tritle (2000) documents what he considers to be descriptions of combat trauma in the ancient texts themselves; whereas others, such as Crowley (2014), argue that combat trauma as we define it was not known in ancient Greece. Scholarly arguments around this subject have tended perhaps to obfuscate the simple fact that the human brain has not changed since antiquity, although the environmental and cultural factors that affect it certainly have. As Garrett Fagan (2011) pointed out, the fact that we can still understand many of the emotional qualities of ancient works shows us that there is much in common between us and fellow humans who lived in different times and cultures. Ancient Greek descriptions of the after-effects of conflict and war for both soldiers and civilians strongly indicate the presence of psychological trauma, to the point of sometimes being deployed as an instrument of war itself. One can see this in operation in Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes where the deafening noise of the surrounding army and threats of the Seven are intended to terrorise the besieged population into forcing surrender of the city, something the Theban ruler Eteocles is fully aware of. The severe altered mental states of warriors such as Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Ajax and Euripides’ Herakles must have resonated with spectators who, since the Persian invasion and in later wars, were becoming all too familiar with the psychological after-effects of battle. Agamemnon’s “storm-swept psyche” exists in a particular context for modern veterans and it must have done so as well for the Athenian combat veterans who watched the Oresteia in 458 bce. Whether the Greeks diagnosed such mental illnesses as “trauma” or considered them something sent by the gods, the effects must have been manifest to them as they are to us. Perhaps then one of the forms of catharsis, the healing or purgation offered by the theatre, was a kind of collective narrative medicine, whereby telling and receiving such stories helped to contextualise and assuage the pain of remembered combat. This is suggested, too, when later in the fifth century, amidst the Peloponnesian War, the cult of Asclepius was brought to Athens, reputedly by Sophocles. The shrine of this healing god was subsequently established next to the Theatre of Dionysus (Mitchell-Boyask 2007, 112–14).



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Aquila’s applied theatre programmes are arts- and humanities-based and do not purport to offer therapy, although many participants say they find them therapeutic. There is, moreover, a growing body of evidence that has demonstrated the health benefits of “chorality” – the kind of collective, group-based positive problem-solving, analysis, vocal and movement work that forms the practice of theatre-making (for example, Judd and Pooley 2014). One veteran participant remarked that the programme was not only about trauma (it must be said that by no means do all veterans suffer from PTSD). Using works of Aeschylus and other Greek dramatists to help foster dialogue between the veteran and the civilian provided a bridge: their status as classical texts helping to transcend time and place and elevate the conversation beyond the specific political and cultural moment. The experience shared between performer and audience of empathy, respect and understanding led one veteran to remark: “Greek drama can help Americans become more literate about the after-effects of war.” In this chapter, I have described two public programmes developed by Aquila Theatre that have “applied” Aeschylus to two different groups. Even in antiquity, Aeschylus had a reputation for grandiloquent language, lofty themes and thorny metaphorical imagery; yet, as Jane Harrison urged a century ago, Aeschylus’s plays are dynamic pieces of music and movementbased masked theatre that when staged can frequently provide a gripping and exciting experience. In both Hear our Call and The Warrior Chorus, Aeschylus is in action again, not in a full stage production, but applied to create communities, validate experience, bring different people together to better understand one another, and offer different ways to present his work to new audiences. The idea of applying Aeschylus is not a new one, In Aristophanes’ Frogs it is the long-dead Aeschylus, not Euripides, who is chosen to rise again to the land of the living and save Athens in a moment of dire need. Yes, Frogs is a comedy, but the concept that the theatre could save the state was a real one in ancient Athens and as Aeschylus ascends with Dionysus (Frogs 1529–31) the chorus sings: “Let great good come from good ideas, then the great pain will stop, and the unbearable war will end.” In fifth-century Athens and twenty-first-century America, the plays of Aeschylus have the power to bring us together, share our emotions and help us contemplate other possibilities for the societies in which we live. Aeschylus lives.

FURTHER READING There are many works that deal with applied theatre. Two good books to consult, which describe various applied approaches are Prentiki and Preston 2013 and Shaughnessy 2012. A special edition of the journal Classical World (Meineck 2010) included several papers on Aquila Theatre’s NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities)-funded Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives programme and were intended to provide a guide to classics-based public programming. For Greek drama applied to veterans and differing views on combat trauma in antiquity see Meineck and Konstan 2014. Discussions of applied theatre programmes using Greek drama and aimed at the veteran community can be found in Lodewyck and Monoson 2015, Powers 2018 and Meineck 2020. A collection of essays examining Aeschylus and his relationship to war, including a compelling interview with retired US Army combat veteran Lt. Col. Kristen Janowsky is Torrance 2017. A good resource on the reception of Aeschylus is Constantinidis 2016. On Aeschylus and ancient refugees see Bakewell 2013, and a thoughtful collection of papers on drama applied to refugees including chapters on Greek tragedy is Wilmer 2018.

REFERENCES Bakewell, G. W. (2013). Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women: The Tragedy of Immigration. Madison. Crowley, J. (2014). “Beyond the Universal Soldier: Combat Trauma in Classical Antiquity.” In P. Meineck and D. Konstan, eds. Combat Trauma and the Ancient Greeks. New York, 105–30.

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Fagan, G. G. (2011). The Lure of the Arena: Social Psychology and the Crowd at the Roman Games. Cambridge. Fiske, S. (2008). Heretical Hellenism: Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination. Athens, OH. Goldhill, S. (2000). “Civic Ideology and the Problem of Difference: The Politics of Aeschylean Tragedy, Once Again.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 120, 34–56. Griffith, M. (1995). “Brilliant Dynasts: Power and Politics in the Oresteia.” Classical Antiquity 14, 62–129. Harrison, T. (2019). The Emptiness of Asia: Aeschylus’ Persians and the History of the Fifth Century. London. Huebner, S. R. (2017). “A Mediterranean Family? A Comparative Approach to the Ancient World.” In S. R. Huebner and G. Nathan, eds. Mediterranean Families in Antiquity: Households, Extended Families, and Domestic Space. Malden, MA, 3–26. Judd, M. and Pooley, J. A. (2014). “The Psychological Benefits of Participating in Group Singing for Members of the General Public.” Psychology of Music 42, 269–83. Kavoulaki, A. (2011). “Choral Self-Awareness: On the Introductory Anapaests of Aeschylus’ Supplices.” In L. Athanassaki and E. Bowie, eds. Archaic and Classical Choral Song: Performance, Politics and Dissemination. Berlin and Boston, 365–90. Kennedy, R. F. (2014). Immigrant Women in Athens: Gender, Ethnicity, and Citizenship in the Classical City. New York. Lodewyck, L. and Monoson, S. (2015). “Performing for Soldiers.” In K. Bosher, F. Macintosh, J. McConnell and P. Rankine, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas. Oxford, 652–67. Meineck, P. (2010). “’Page and Stage’: Theater, Tradition, and Culture in America”. Classical World 103.2, 221–26. Meineck, P. (2017). Theatrocracy: Greek Drama, Cognition, and the Imperative for Theater. Abingdon and New York. Meineck, P. (2020). “Post-Conflict Resolution and the Health Humanities: The Warrior Chorus Program.” In P. Crawford, B. Brown and A. Charise, eds. The Routledge Companion to Health Humanities. Abingdon and New York, 54–59. Meineck, P. and Konstan, D., eds. (2014). Combat Trauma and the Ancient Greeks. New York. Mitchell-Boyask, R. (2007). Plague and the Athenian Imagination: Drama, History, and the Cult of Asclepius. Cambridge. Papadopoulou, T. (2014). Aeschylus: Suppliants. London. Podlecki, A. J. (1999). The Political Background to Aeschylean Tragedy. Second Edition. London. Powers, M. (2018). Diversifying Greek Tragedy on the Contemporary US Stage. Oxford. Prentki, T. and Preston, S., eds. (2013). The Applied Theatre Reader. Abingdon and New York. Rabinowitz, N. S. (2013). “Women as Subject and Object of the Gaze in Tragedy.” Helios 40, 195–221. Sandin P. (2003). Aeschylus' Supplices. Introduction and Commentary on vv. 1–523. Göteborg. Shaughnessy, N. (2012). Applying Performance: Live Art, Socially Engaged Theatre and Affective Practice. New York. Shay, J. (1994). Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. New York. Shay, J. (2002). Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. New York. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010). “The Theater Audience, the Demos, and the Suppliants of Aeschylus.” In The Tangled Ways of Zeus, and Other Studies in and around Greek Tragedy. Oxford, 118–42. Thalmann, W. G. (1980). “Xerxes’ Rags: Some Problems in Aeschylus’ Persians.” American Journal of Philology 101, 260–82. Torrance, I. ed. (2017). Aeschylus and War: Comparative Perspectives on Seven against Thebes. Abingdon and New York. Tritle, L. A. (2000). From Melos to My Lai: A Study in Violence, Culture and Social Survival. Oxford. Warden, C. (2012). British Avant-Garde Theatre. New York. Wilmer, S. E. (2018). Performing Statelessness in Europe. Cham, Switzerland.

CHAPTER 39

Teaching the Oresteia as a Work for the Theatre Robin Mitchell-Boyask My task here is to attempt to shed a little light on some ways to teach Aeschylus’s Oresteia in translation and in an undergraduate classroom, most likely in an introductory course on the Greek tragic theatre. My focus will be on how performance pedagogy can enhance the students’ understanding and appreciation of this masterpiece by engaging them actively with the relationship between vexed questions concerning the trilogy’s original staging and our interpretation of it today. I start – not self-indulgently, I hope – with an anecdote from my youth. During my first term in 1979 as a freshman undergraduate at the University of Chicago, as a student in the Core course Human Being and Citizen, we read Aeschylus’s Oresteia. I did not like it. We had just finished the Iliad and my 18-year-old self was far too into Achilles, who was absent from Aeschylus’s trilogy. We dutifully discussed the problem of justice, looked at the imagery and did the other things one traditionally did with the Oresteia then (which did not much include the representation of women). Oliver Taplin’s The Stagecraft of Aeschylus had only been published two years previously (1977) and its ideas had yet to achieve wider circulation. Reading the Oresteia in Greek during graduate school with Charles Segal as part of a survey of fifth-century literature was very different; if you have reached that point and reading the original does not excite you, it is probably best to consider a different line of work. While my scholarship started to drift towards the Oresteia early in my career, I did not truly appreciate Aeschylus’s masterpiece until I began the struggle of teaching it myself to undergraduates during the 1990s (one does, as Aeschylus says, learn by suffering or experience), a period that coincided with hosting Peter Meineck’s Aquila Theatre, which then was mainly touring with productions of Greek tragedy and comedy, often using masks. This experience completely changed my approach to the subject. Suddenly, my teaching merged with my scholarship in ways that will form the content of this chapter. My own freshman class had read the Oresteia in the same way we had read the Iliad, as a large-scale, mimetic narrative. My task running my own classroom became to get students to see what an extraordinarily bold work of theatre Aeschylus had imagined and how understanding the risks he took are fundamental to understanding its meaning. I was gradually stumbling my way into what is known as performance pedagogy, a practice that had earlier taken root in Shakespearean studies (Riggio 1999).

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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What is particularly exciting for me in reading, with students, Greek tragedy as theatre and not only as narrative is that it allows relative neophytes to engage actively with problems that are hotly debated by scholars and for which there are no easy or set answers. They thus also engage actively in another sense: they do not just think and talk, but they do. Now, what I suggest here is not acting by students – which is almost guaranteed to make most 19-year-old American college students die of embarrassment – but physically working with the problems that are raised by a performed script (as opposed to a read text) from 2500 years ago that survived antiquity in the form of just two incomplete manuscripts. To demonstrate briefly the connection of theatrical technique to interpretation in the classroom, I start here with the opening of Sophocles’ Ajax. Scholars dispute whether Athena follows Odysseus around the orchēstra in the early morning light or the goddess addresses Odysseus while she stands atop the skēnē that represents Ajax’s tent. A neophyte reader might find her location a secondary, if not trivial matter, but place that same reader on top of a sturdy table and have her recite Athena’s lines while two more students read the parts of Ajax and Odysseus while standing below and, in my experience, students immediately see that the only logical place for Athena is on high, that the vertical axis is strongly associated with power, and the power of the gods is after all what Athena stresses to Odysseus at the end of the prologue. While it is extremely unlikely that a classroom will have a table or any platform high enough to present a student Athena standing directly above a student, once verticality is established, it is quite easy for students to take the next steps in their imaginations, envisioning Athena’s physical domination over the mad Ajax. Other than getting a student on top of a table with the text in hand, the teacher really does not do much here; the scene teaches itself. I now turn to several activities involving Aeschylus’s Oresteia that similarly combine the understanding of his theatrical techniques with central questions of interpretation. They can also be applied to the works of Euripides and Sophocles, but at least the first can really only involve the Oresteia, as it needs a trilogy.

Casting the Oresteia Perhaps my favourite in-class activity in teaching Greek tragedy involves distributing parts across the three actors who were available to the poets and that does not get any better or more fun than with the Oresteia, simply because it is our only surviving tragic trilogy and thus raises important questions about how dramatists utilised their actors and whether their choices were meaningful. I draw the title of this exercise and much of its content from C. W. Marshall’s fascinating and stimulating article on this subject (2003). I should note here first that, by this point in the term, my students will have already become accustomed to figuring out part distribution, mainly because I never begin with the Oresteia, which needs a more educated student audience than Euripides’ Bacchae, the text that always opens my course (and often closes it as well). An instructor’s desire to proceed chronologically through the most famous plays and start with the more difficult Oresteia stands a good chance of getting in the way of the students’ learning. At the second or third class meeting of the semester, students work through the text of the Bacchae carefully to see which characters do not appear together and which combinations are mutually exclusive. Their realisation that Pentheus and Agave were played by the same actor then opens the door to a range of exciting topics, including the possibility of metatheatre (i.e. the Pentheus actor puts on his Agave costume when he dresses for the trip to Mt Cithaeron) and the link between this double-casting and Pentheus’s psychology. With the Oresteia, I reinforce the lessons learned from this exercise with the Bacchae and any other play we have read (I often have them read Ajax second) by repeating it first with Agamemnon and then delaying it for the Libation Bearers until the casting of the entire



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trilogy is discussed. The process of casting the Agamemnon cuts quickly to the heart of some of the essential aspects of Aeschylean dramatic technique and a few important differences from Euripides. In determining the distribution of parts, students must carefully note who appears in each scene and which characters never appear together. Here it is helpful to create a schematic chart or diagram of the play’s scenes that students can fill in as needed. It quickly becomes apparent that Agamemnon and Aegisthus must have been played by the same actor and students might themselves draw some conclusions about whether there might be any meaning to this combination (Agamemnon and Aegisthus are, after all, cousins), or whether the original actor specialised in portraying aristocratic males who display a certain air of pomposity. Less quickly, the schematic chart shows something very important about Aeschylean dramatic technique in the Agamemnon: there is almost no dialogue between pairs of characters. The topic of the absence of dialogue can, ironically, be good fodder for dialogue in the classroom! Most of the Agamemnon consists of speeches by individuals or interactions with the chorus, a practice that throws the single scene with actual dialogue, the great confrontation between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, into sharper relief. The contrast with the Bacchae for my students is telling; a half-century later, dramatists are composing scenes with threeway conversations or arguments, something that Aeschylus almost does in the third play (where he has three speaking characters on stage during the trial of Orestes, but really interacting as two pairs and not as a trio). The students’ expectation that scenes can or should have three speaking characters opens the door to considering the initial silence of Cassandra. Ask students to find clues in the text that the audience is likely to expect that Cassandra would remain a mute character and you will likely find they can, which leads them to the exciting (I think) realisation that Aeschylus was likely using a third actor for the first time (as Knox 1972 observed); this is what I mean by trying to restore to students what a bold work of theatre the Oresteia is. Once students are aware of the paucity of dialogue in the Agamemnon, they will likely notice for themselves its increasing presence through the next two plays, and connecting that with the trilogy’s larger themes and meanings is a rich discussion. As we start the first class on the last play, traditionally known as the Eumenides (I prefer the title Furies), I give each student a sheet of paper with the following text (which could also be projected or posted on a learning management system): Casting the Oresteia This is an in-class exercise involving reading skills, critical thinking, the imagination and group work. The class will divide into groups of no larger than five members. Each group will create a master list of the characters for each of the three plays of the Oresteia and then divide them among the three actors Aeschylus had at his disposal. Since some characters appear in two or three of the plays, each group will have to decide whether the same actor played that character each time, or whether the leading actor switched roles as a character increased or decreased in importance. The biggest questions you will face involve Orestes and Clytemnestra. Keep in mind that prizes for actors did not begin until after the production of the Oresteia, so Aeschylus’s actors likely had less incentive to make their voices recognizable. You might also consider which parts Aeschylus himself would have played (and why). Because the part distribution of the entire Oresteia is complex, it is unlikely that the class groups will all offer the same solutions. Each group must be prepared to defend their assignments.

Indeed, I have never found that the different groups reach the same conclusions, if for no other reason than that mistakes easily enter into such a complex exercise. In collating the different cast list assignments, it can help to project a table with the characters in each play on

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to a whiteboard and use coloured markers for each actor. The students will have gone through the exact same decision-making process that scholars have over the past century, such as weighing the continuity of a single voice for a character like Clytemnestra across the three plays, as opposed to using the best actor available to Aeschylus for the part with the most lines and thus handing the part to two or three actors as the trilogy progresses. Students might also come to the realisation that one actor might have served as a “voice of Apollo” across the three plays, speaking the lines of Cassandra, then Pylades and then Apollo himself. So many questions arise, not least whether having the same voice speaking Athena and Clytemnestra tells us anything about the status of powerful clever females in the trilogy. If the class is using a translation that clearly marks the lyric, sung lines (e.g. Meineck or the third edition of Lattimore), it becomes possible to see that there were actors who specialised in singing. I close the exercise by showing them Marshall’s compilation of nine attempts at the same activity (including his own; Marshall 2003, 260). In an age where public disputes so easily turn rancorous and bitter, it is valuable, if not liberating, for students to see scholars coming up with solutions that so fundamentally disagree with each but that are still valid, and that resemble the students’ own efforts. Framing the comparison of work by students and scholars in terms of what added knowledge the latter have can be help students to value their own work while still recognising the fundamental value of long, sustained study of a subject. All told, I find this a valuable exercise because it involves active learning that forces students to see the trilogy simultaneously as a whole and in detailed parts, leading them on a selfguided journey that takes them to the same destination a lecture would have, but with the moments of the journey far better retained.

Stage Directions A similar replication of scholarly work can take the form of a critical appraisal of stage directions. When writing my book on the Eumenides (2009), I was struck by just how little is securely known or agreed on by scholars about important dramaturgical aspects; e.g. when and how the Furies first appear or enter the acting area. Despite such uncertainties, translations are usually quite certain about their own stage directions, and ambiguities are usually buried in notes that students do not see or do not consider. Students tend to accept the authority of the translators’ directions or simply do not know that everything outside of the characters’ words are the interpretation of the translators or are based upon scholarly work that might not be cited. Matters such as entrances and exits should be based upon cues in the dialogue (“Look, here comes Creon!”), but often that dialogue is less helpful than one would hope; indeed, Aeschylus often does not indicate when aristocratic characters enter (Hamilton 1978, 65). Putting students in a position to see that they can, based upon words in the scripts, come up with their own, different stage directions can be quite liberating for them. First (at least, first after letting the students know that the stage directions are not in the surviving Greek manuscripts), the instructor needs to establish the principle that stage directions, ideally, are implicitly based upon what the characters say about themselves and each other. Of course, this is quite easy, as the first stage direction in any translation of the Oresteia is that the Watchman is on top of the roof and, in fact, a quick glance at the opening lines shows him saying that he is not happy about being stuck on the roof at night. An added bonus to this pedagogical move is that it raises a great topic for discussion: why start the Oresteia on the roof of Agamemnon’s palace? Now, there are various senses to “why” here, but if the instructor is focusing on Aeschylean theatrics, a good aim for this discussion is that, in the five surviving earlier plays by Aeschylus, there is no evidence that the skēnē was used. In other words, with the Watchman’s speech, either the skēnē is being introduced in 458 bce,



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or it had been introduced in a recent year and Aeschylus himself is now using it for the first time. In other words, Aeschylus has a new toy and is exploring its potential. Less charitably, Aeschylus is a showman, and he is showing off. Plant the idea here that Aeschylus is testing a new set of special effects and then any subsequent discussion of the ekkyklēma used to wheel out quickly the corpses of Agamemnon, Cassandra, Aegisthus and Clytemnestra will be much richer. Students do find this interesting. I now discuss four exercises – with each part of the trilogy getting at least one – that involve performance pedagogy and stage directions.

1. When is Clytemnestra visible to the audience during Agamemnon? After establishing the principle that stage directions should be based on the words in the script, one can problematise (if not undermine) it by exploring the issue of Clytemnestra’s comings and goings in Agamemnon. Because there is a wide range of approaches to her movements, here is it useful to have multiple translations among the students in the classroom, which is much more likely than when I was a freshman, as today’s students have more choices and tend to choose the least expensive one they can find; one can thus make a virtue of what is often a problem. If most students do have the assigned translation, it is now easy to scan and project translations that conflict with each other in terms of stage directions. It is quite striking that informed, scholarly translators disagree, often sharply, about the timing of Clytemnestra’s presence from the parodos to her exit into the palace to kill her husband, mainly because at no point does anyone say “Look, here comes Clytemnestra”, nor does she herself always clearly announce her exits. The translator who grants Clytemnestra the most generous amount of time in the acting area is Lattimore in the complete series of Greek tragedies published by the University of Chicago Press, which likely remains the most widely used translation in the classroom. It was originally published in 1947, with a second edition in 1953 and third revised edition in 2013; I still have my student text from 1979 and many used copies are still in circulation. In Lattimore’s translation, “Clytemnestra enters quietly” during the parodos after line 82 and thus prompts the chorus’s address to her (83–84): “But you, lady,/daughter of Tyndareus, Clytemnestra, our queen …” Now, on the face of it, Lattimore’s decision makes sense, as it seems natural for the chorus to say such things if she has in fact appeared at the doors of the palace and, at 781, a similar address to Agamemnon marks his entrance, but, as we shall see, Lattimore is definitely the outlier here. A good topic for discussion here would be why Aeschylus might have had her enter here and then stay in the acting area through the narrative of the sacrifice of her daughter. Does she visibly react to the content of the chorus’s song? Indeed, Lattimore has Clytemnestra stay in view of the audience – through two choral odes, the Herald’s speech and the arrival of Agamemnon and Cassandra – never leaving the acting area until she follows Agamemnon into the palace at 974. I do wonder here whether Lattimore was influenced by Euripides’ later Medea, whose eponymous main character, once she enters the acting area to addresses the chorus, does not seem to leave it until she takes her children inside to kill them; on the other hand, Lattimore could be implicitly suggesting that Euripides echoes Aeschylus’s handling of Clytemnestra in this way. Comparison with other translations yields stark differences. Let us consider, for example, Peter Meineck’s edition, which is based on his own staged production. While most recent translations have Clytemnestra arrive after the chorus ends and leave before it resumes singing, Meineck often has them overlap. At line 83 the chorus “addresses the house”, without her appearing, and she finally enters after line 255 as the chorus refers to “our guardian here”, in the final two sung lines of the parodos; she then directly addresses the chorus.

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Meineck has her exit after the chorus acknowledges her “proof” (352), before the last two choral lines, and reenter after the herald’s speech and choral response (586), although her own response suggests (to me, at least) that she has heard the contents of the herald’s speech; she then leaves after her she finishes speaking (614). Clytemnestra reenters to address her husband after his speech concludes (854). Even the revision in 2013 to Lattimore by Mark Griffith and Glenn Most makes different decisions; exactly whose decisions they were is not explained, but I am guessing they were Griffith’s, as he has devoted the most scholarly attention of the two to the Oresteia. In the revision “Lattimore” has Clytemnestra enter to speak at line 258, after the parodos, and then leave at line 354 as soon as she stops speaking. She next re-enters to speak after the chorus replies to the Herald’s first speech (586) and then stays until she follows Agamemnon into the palace (974), which means she is in the acting area during second stasimon, listening to the chorus sing about Helen’s name, the lion cub parable and, last but not least, the righteous justice that the gods bring to bear on sinners like the Trojans (and, by extension, Agamemnon). Again, if she is present, are we intended to imagine her visibly reacting to the content of the chorus’s songs? Does the chorus’s evocation of justice make more sense and sound more powerful if the agent of the next round of justice is visible to the audience? The rich interpretive sauce created by the decisions of Lattimore and then Griffith comes to a full boil when we turn to their mutual choice to have Clytemnestra in the acting area to greet Agamemnon’s chariot after line 781, instead of entering when she first speaks (855). Other translators and editors choose the latter entrance. The interpretive gap between these choices is an absolutely wonderful teaching opportunity, if for no other reason than the question of Clytemnestra’s presence or absence during Agamemnon’s speech changes how we read or hear both his speech and Clytemnestra’s. Aside from the discussion of how the same words can mean different things depending on who hears them or is present to hear them, a good exercise is first to get a male student to read Agamemnon’s speech to a group of other male students in the rest of the class (perhaps with a silent female who represents Cassandra standing next to him), and then, second, to repeat the speech but with a female playing Clytemnestra who stands nearby, being ignored by Agamemnon, before she speaks herself. What effect does Agamemnon’s refusal to acknowledge her in this way have on our understanding of both characters and the tension in this scene? For a third version, put Clytemnestra in the hallway, with her first lurking in the doorway and then inserting herself into the room. How quickly should her first words follow Agamemnon’s last? Does she, essentially, step on his lines, or does an awkward pause first ensue as they meet for the first time in the decade that has elapsed since he sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia in order to sail to Troy? At this point, it should be obvious – and empowering – to students that when Clytemnestra enters is not a simple stage direction, but a question with significant interpretive consequences and about which serious, learned people disagree. If they have the translations of Meineck, Collard, Shapiro and others, they likely will not even suspect this is a question to be asked. My own experience with such exercises is that this scene is much more powerful with Clytemnestra in the acting area at Agamemnon’s arrival.

2. Whose Line Is It Anyway? Similar to getting students to avoid taking the truth of stage directions for granted, this brief exercise involves understanding interactively that we cannot always be sure that the traditional attribution of lines to characters is necessarily correct. Translations almost never reveal that the oldest manuscripts indicate a change in speaker by a simple mark in the margin, not with the character’s name, as found in modern editions. Sometimes the traditional



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assignation leads to lines that sound a bit off coming from a particular character’s mouth and scholars (in more specialised translations that generalists might not read) thus express doubts as to whether we have the speaker right. This becomes another instance where students can participate in pressing questions of textual interpretation. Such is the case with lines 691–99 in Libation Bearers, where translations traditionally have Clytemnestra react to the false news from the disguised Orestes that Orestes is dead. At first glance, there is no reason to suspect that these lines are incorrectly attributed; the only question would seem to be whether her stated grief is genuine or yet another dissimulation on her part. If the former, her sympathy is completely unprepared by what has preceded. Her next speech is more in character, as she moves on to matters of hospitality and her desire to share the news with Aegisthus. On the other hand, a few scholars have argued that this lines sound more appropriate coming from Electra and, indeed, there is no reason that we should not consider that she is their correct speaker (see the discussion, with bibliography, in Marshall 2017, 96–99). If students object that the stage directions do not indicate she entered with Clytemnestra, here one can remind them that the stage directions are the translator’s. Moreover, these words match quite well what Orestes had earlier advised Electra to do when they were conspiring (579– 80). Students are often confused as to why what seemed to be an increasingly central character had not spoken since her last prayer at her father’s tomb (508–09) and had completely, if not mysteriously, disappeared so early, exiting at 584. Giving her these lines brings Electra actively in the conspiracy in a much more coherent fashion, turning her much more fully into her mother’s daughter. Students can decide who should get these lines by enacting the scene. Assuming you are not situated off of a noisy, busy hallway, use the classroom door to represent the entrance to the palace. Try the scene in two ways: first with Clytemnestra by herself, and second with her and Electra. Orestes and Pylades should approach the door, knock and the woman or women should enter; make sure you have a Pylades, who will be needed for the exercise in the next section. It will thus quickly become clear – in a way that it will not by reading the words on the page – that having three speaking characters in the scene significantly changes the tone of 691–99 and that what might matter most is Clytemnestra’s reaction to these lines, as she watches her daughter’s feigned despair at the news while repressing her own joy. This triangle is quite similar, though smaller in scale, to the pivotal scene in Oedipus Tyrannus, where Jocasta silently observes the exchange between Oedipus and the Corinthian as the truth dawns on her. That said, my experience is that some students prefer the scene with a Clytemnestra who baldly lies through her teeth. It can make for a lively discussion. I should close this section by noting that assigning lines 691–99 to Electra can really complicate the casting exercise, as the idea that the same actor plays mother and daughter is fairly powerful but cannot be realised if Electra speaks in this scene (see Marshall 2017, 99–100 on the problems raised by this recasting).

3. How many actors does it take to kill Clytemnestra? This exercise builds on the previous one and asks students to imagine whether, in the dizzyingly fast sequence of entrances and exits that begins with the nurse Cilissa and ends with Orestes standing over the corpses of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, this play can be performed within the bounds of the rule of three actors. With students already trained by the example of Cassandra that characters who are expected to remain mute extras can suddenly speak and speak to great effect, they are ready to consider this problem in a more complex and fastmoving scenario. The difficulty some see (e.g. Starkey 2018, 273–74) involves the speed with

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which the actor playing the servant must change costume to become Pylades, thus necessitating a fourth actor. Let us look at how this might work with students. Students should continue to move in and out of the classroom door while speaking the lines of their assigned characters. After 718, a group – consisting either of Clytemnestra, Orestes and the silent Pylades or those three plus Electra (if she speaks 691–99) – leaves the stage, the chorus sings briefly and then the nurse Cilissa enters (734); the casting exercise has already shown that Cilissa can be played by any of the three actors but most likely by the Orestes actor. She exits (782), the chorus sings again and then Aegisthus makes the briefest appearance (838–54), only to be immediately killed offstage. Even by this point, the difference here from the dramatic technique of Agamemnon should be apparent to the students who have been embodying it; in the first play, movements are long and slow until after Agamemnon’s death cry, but in this play the pace gradually accelerates towards the matricide, underscoring what a true crisis it is. If the students’ movements do not make that pace clear, have them watch this sequence electrifyingly portrayed in the film of Peter Hall’s famous masked production from London’s National Theatre. Now students reach the three-actor controversy. The servant enters to report the death of Aegisthus (875–83), Clytemnestra emerges from the house to hear the news and the servant goes back inside at 886. Orestes emerges alone at 892, or perhaps accompanied by Pylades; otherwise Pylades enters sometime between 893 and his speech at 900. Trying both entrances and debating which is more effective and likely are productive; the two armed young men confronting the lone woman is always a powerful image. We now have two students speaking to one another as Orestes and Clytemnestra. So, students, trained in the three-actor rule, might figure out themselves that, because Pylades suddenly and unexpectedly speaks, the only actor available is the one who just played the departed servant, who only has as little as the space of five lines (if he re-enters with Orestes) spoken by the other two to make what is called a “lightning change”. Some (Starkey 2018) believe this is impossible, while others (Marshall 2017, 120; Knox 1972, 53 n. 10) believe it is. Grab a couple of hats and jackets and have your students try turning themselves from the servant to Pylades in as little as 15 seconds. If someone has a copy of Meineck’s translation, note that he delays Pylades’ entrance until 900, giving the actor more time to change (Meineck and Foley 1998); unlike most translations, Meineck’s is the result of theatrical productions and the timing of this entrance is motivated by stage experience. Some students might find that the delayed entrance does not work visually or dramatically. If the class decides that a fourth actor is necessary, then it would be good to discuss whether the three-actor rule was at this early point an absolute rule (Csapo and Slater 1994, 221–22).

4. How many humans serve in the jury at the trial of Orestes? Of the many controversies concerning the third play of the Oresteia, perhaps the most contested is what happens at the trial of Orestes and how many people make it happen. It is also perhaps the scholarly conundrum that is most fun for students to attempt to solve themselves. To recap: scholarship on the play diverges sharply over (i) how many humans compose the jury – 10, 11 or 12; (ii) how the human vote results – a majority voting to convict Orestes or a tie that leads to his acquittal; and (iii) whether Athena’s vote as a member of the jury creates a tie if the humans vote to convict or Athena’s vote is a chairman’s “casting” vote that breaks the human deadlock. For a full discussion of this controversy, see Sommerstein 1989, 221–26; Mitchell-Boyask 2009, 78–80; both provide a full bibliography. As with other scholarly debates that we have discussed, what the students know about the mechanics of the trial depends initially on what translations tell them, so let us examine the stage directions and notes for several commonly used editions. All translations agree that, during the 10 couplets spoken between lines 711 and 730, a juror steps forward to place his



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vote in one of the two urns that were brought on with the jury. Presumably, when the chorus or chorus leader speaks, a vote is cast to convict and, when Apollo speaks, one is cast to acquit; Apollo’s last couplet then ties the score. The question is what, if anything, happens during the triplet spoken at the conclusion of the chorus’s couplets (731–33). Is the triplet the 11th and convicting vote? The available translations display all sides of the controversy but sometimes without indicating that there is a controversy. Here is another case where a range of translations among students can improve discussion, as they indicate the lack of consensus about the nature of the vote that solves the very crisis of the Oresteia. The unrevised (1953, and, remember, there are still many used copies of it floating around the marketplace) Lattimore’s stage direction after line 565 is “Athena reenters, guiding twelve citizens chosen as jurors …”; there is no indication of why twelve (the size of a modern jury?) and no any indication of how the voting proceeds. The 2013 revision by Griffith and Most changes the direction to “Athena reenters from the side, guiding eleven citizens chosen as jurors …”, with an endnote that indicates the scholarly controversy about the number and includes her vote as counted with theirs, thus creating the tie. A stage direction describes how the vote matches the sequence of couplets but without noting the oddity of the final triplet. Meineck’s stage direction at line 570 has “Enter ten Athenian elders …” As the voting commences (710), he notes, “One by one the ten jurors cast their votes”. There is no note about the final triplet. Collard’s stage direction at line 565 specifies “Athena enters … followed by the citizens chosen to act as jurors”; i.e. he does not specify their number. He expands a bit in note on lines 711–33, placed at the end of the book (page 220): “In this tense exchange it seems likely that each of the eleven couplets accompanied successive voting by eleven jurors.” Of course, students might be confused here, as there are only eleven couplets, so he adds a note on line 735: “the last of them is actually a triplet”. Collard’s (2002) translation, however, is unusual in acknowledging the debate about the number of jurors: “it seems unlikely that scholars will agree upon an answer.” The stage direction of Shapiro and Burian (2003) at their line 660 (their numbers differ from other translations) is “Athena enters from the right, accompanied by a group of Athenian citizen-jurors”. No number is given, but an endnote on pages 259–60 discuss the uncertainty and settle on 10 jurors, with Athena thus breaking the tie. Before the 10 couplets (after line 829), a stage direction indicates that the voting takes place “during the following exchange”. Most recently, Taplin’s translation offers a stage direction after line 564: “Athena reenters with jurors …” (Taplin and Billings 2018). Again, the number of jurors is left unspoken, but a footnote after line 710 indicates the likelihood that a vote was cast with each couplet. Nothing is made of the triplet, so the reader has to assume that Taplin implies 10 jurors. Three initial questions arise if one pursues these differences in the classroom: (i) Does the number of jurors matter? (ii) On what basis do the translators make their assumptions about the number? (iii) If we ignore all stage directions, does the voting and the reactions to it make sense based upon the words on the page as they are read? The first two questions will depend on how one regards Athena’s vote. For the third, based on my pedagogical experience, the words on the page need an assist from bodily activity. My suggestion is to enact the vote twice, once with a 10-person jury and once with one with 11 people, and include the immediate responses of the trial’s participants up to line 778, when the Furies react to the vote. You will need, in addition to speakers for all of the parts, two receptacles to serve as urns, cleared marked as “guilty” and “innocent”, as well as something equivalent to Athenian voting pebbles. You will have to decide – perhaps after experimentation with the scene – whether the jury should vote like ancient Athenians and hold a hand over each receptacle to conceal the destination of their votes or whether a clear stage action demands that the audience can see their choices. After demonstrating the vote with each jury, discussion should centre on which makes the most sense as effective theatre and which is clearest to the audience. This will boil down to that final triplet (731–33): does the

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shift from couplets signal the voting has been completed, or does the triplet complete the voting, its extra verse signalling the deciding vote to convict, which Athena then nullifies with her surprising decision to vote despite her earlier assertion that she must be neutral? I should acknowledge here that I have discussed this matter in my book on the Eumenides (MitchellBoyask 2009, 78–80) and concluded that (i) there are 11 jurors; (ii) their votes are clear to the audience; and (iii) Orestes is convicted by the human jury and saved by Athena. I will not rehearse that discussion here except to note that I regard as crucial the reactions of both Orestes and the Furies to what they have witnessed as they indicate that Athena’s intervention has been meaningful. That said, my students, when they complete this exercise, do not always reach the same conclusion and opt for the 10-person jury. Luckily, they have not read my book!

Conclusion I hope these classroom exercises prove useful to my readers here. I could include others, such as the one where Clytemnestra’s speeches are read first by a woman and then by a man with a tenor (as opposed to baritone) voice, but space does not allow that here. But I hope you get the basic thrust that performance pedagogy is an extremely useful, effective and fun approach, perhaps more so with the Oresteia than with any other Greek dramas. These exercises do take a fair amount of time, however, expanding the space devoted to Aeschylus in the course, and that means less time for the other two tragedians. One has to decide whether depth or breadth is more desirable. For me, this is an easy choice.

FURTHER READING The staging of ancient Greek theatrical works has been one of the richest modern areas of scholarship. The most useful aspects of Oliver Taplin’s groundbreaking The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (1977) can be found in a more approachable form in his Greek Tragedy in Action (2003). Other valuable introductions include Ley’s A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theater (2006) and Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction (2000) by David Wiles. Each of these two scholars has also published important, more advanced, works on performance: Wiles’s Tragedy in Athens: Performance Space and Theatrical Meaning (1997) and Ley’s The Theatricality of Greek Tragedy: Playing Space and Chorus (2007). Performance pedagogy was developed mainly in Shakespearean studies; see the edited volume of Riggio (1999). The website Didaskalia (https://didaskalia.net) publishes reviews of modern productions and essays on ancient theatrical performance, occasionally on the latter and pedagogy; see, for example Christopher Bungard, “Navigating Tricky Topics: The Benefits of Performance Pedagogy” (2016–17, https:// www.didaskalia.net/issues/13/9), which focuses more on the Roman theatre but is useful for application to Greek performance.

REFERENCES Collard, C. (2002). Aeschylus: Oresteia. Oxford. Csapo, E. and Slater, W. J. (1994). The Context of Ancient Drama. Ann Arbor. Hamilton, R. (1978). “Announced Entrances in Greek Tragedy.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 82, 63–82. Knox, B. M. W. (1972). “Aeschylus and the Third Actor.” American Journal of Philology 9, 104–24. Reprinted in Knox (1979), Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater. Baltimore, 39–55.



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Lattimore, R. (1953). Aeschylus I. Chicago. Lattimore, R., Griffith, M. and Most, G. (2013). Aeschylus I. Chicago. Ley, G. (2006). A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theater. Chicago. Ley, G. (2007). The Theatricality of Greek Tragedy: Playing Space and Chorus. Chicago. Marshall, C. W. (2003). “Casting the Oresteia.” Classical Journal 98.3, 257–74. Marshall, C. W. (2017). Aeschylus, Libation Bearers. London. Meineck, P. and Foley, H. P. (1998). The Oresteia. Indianapolis. Mitchell-Boyask, R. (2009). Aeschylus: Eumenides. London. Riggio, M. C., ed. (1999). Teaching Shakespeare Through Performance. New York. Shapiro, A. and Burian, P. (2003). Aeschylus: The Oresteia. Oxford. Sommerstein, A. H. (1989). Aeschylus: Eumenides. Cambridge. Starkey, J. (2018). “The Origin and Purpose of the Three-Actor Rule.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 148, 269–97. Taplin, O. (1977). The Stagecraft of Aeschylus. Oxford. Taplin, O. (2003). Greek Tragedy in Action. Second Edition. London. Taplin, O. and Billings, J. (2018). The Oresteia: The Texts of the Plays, Ancient Backgrounds and Responses, Criticism. A Norton Critical Edition. New York. Wiles, D. (1997). Tragedy in Athens: Performance Space and Theatrical Meaning. Cambridge.

Epilogue Jacques A. Bromberg

Aeschylus thus will not give, as Sophocles gives, the very words that people might have spoken, only so arranged that they have in some mysterious way a general force, a symbolic power, nor like Euripides will he combine incongruities and thus enlarge his little space, as a small room is enlarged by mirrors in odd corners. By the bold and running use of metaphor he will amplify and give us, not the thing itself, but the reverberation and reflection which, taken into his mind, the thing has made; close enough to the original to illustrate it, remote enough to heighten, enlarge, and make splendid. (Woolf 1925, 14) Many paths lead into appreciating the unique joys and challenges of reading Aeschylus. Taking licence from Robin Mitchell-Boyask’s fine essay (Chapter 39 in this volume), which perhaps you have just finished reading, I begin – not self-indulgently, I hope – with a personal recollection. When I first arrived at the University of Pittsburgh, a recently retired colleague shared a memory with me about reading the Oresteia with a group of graduate students after having been diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer. “It was”, she quipped, “a semester of onkologia”. Her grim, but delightful wordplay drew upon Aeschylus’s reputation among extant tragedians for a severe style of poetry characterised by ὄγκος (“swelling”), a term both of abuse (“tumescence”, “turgidity”, “bloating”, “bombast”) and of praise (“grandeur”, “majesty”, “dignity”). Aristotle in one passage attributes the richness and variety of epic poetry to its “bulk” (ὄγκος, Poetics 1459b28), but in another passage defines a “bulky style” as turgid and verbose: “for instance, don’t say ‘circle’, but ‘a plane figure [whose points are all] equidistant from the center’” (Rhetoric 1407b27–28). In a famous anecdote preserved in Plutarch, Sophocles accuses Aeschylus of this “bloating [ὄγκος], harshness, and artifice” (Moralia 2.79b). This paradox of onkologia encapsulates the spectrum of responses to Aeschylus (what some have admired in his style and thought, others have reviled), and his reputation for difficulty and obscurity has roots in antiquity (see Rutherford, Chapter 19 in this volume). Writing nearly a century ago, Virginia Woolf characterised Aeschylean thought as elusive and ambiguous. In response to a verse from Agamemnon that attempts to capture Menelaus’s grief at the absence of Helen, she remarked that the meaning is “just on the far side of language”, adding “it is the meaning which in moments of astonishing excitement and stress we

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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perceive in our minds without words” (Woolf 1925, 14). The selected passage is illustrative: “in want of eyes, all Desire perishes” (ὀμμάτων δ ᾽ ἐν ἀχηνίαις ἔρρει πᾶσ᾽ Ἀφροδίτα, 418–19). The clause contains no word, form or construction unfamiliar to an undergraduate Greek student, and yet it resists our efforts to stabilise its meaning: some have taken it to mean that Menelaus despises the sight even of statues, who lack eyes and therefore cannot inspire love; others have understood that the eyes belong instead to Menelaus, who longs for the sight of his beloved; still others have argued that they are in fact Helen’s eyes, of whose sight the lovesick Menelaus is so desperately in need. “There is an ambiguity which is the mark of the highest poetry”, explains Woolf, “we cannot know exactly what it means” (on Woolf’s reading of Aeschylus, see Burian 2020, 275–91). Woolf’s contemporary, A. E. Housman (who commented on the above passage) captured the difficulty of rendering Aeschylean Greek into English in his famous “Fragment of a Greek Tragedy”, a parody as much of Aeschylean poetics as of the idiom of its modern English translations: “O suitably-attired-in-leather-boots head of a traveller, wherefore seeking whom whence by what way how purposed art thou come to this well-nightingaled vicinity?” (for the text and an attempt at a translation into Greek, see Raven and Housman 1959; for Housman’s poem as primarily Aeschylean, see Marcellino 1953). Hausman’s caricature exaggerates elements of Aeschylus’s poetic style that have vexed readers for millennia: its repetitive rhythms, grandiloquence and compound adjectives. Aristophanes had ridiculed these features in Frogs, calling Aeschylean compounds “held-together-with-bolts” (γομφοπαγῆ, 824), and Dionysius of Halicarnassus described his style as rough and austere: “like blocks of building stone that are laid together unworked, blocks that are not square and smooth, but preserve their natural roughness and irregularity” (22.7–10; trans. Rhys Roberts 1910, 211; see also Horace, Ars Poetica, 279–80). These observations and remarks reflect feelings of alienation from Aeschylus, whose thought and poetry have frequently been characterised as inscrutable, unpolished and archaic (see Roberts, Chapter 32 in this volume). Dionysius characterises the “austere” style of Aeschylus and other poets as possessing τὸν ἀρχαϊσμόν, which Rhys Roberts (1910, 213) renders “an old-world mellowness”. Though the features that make Aeschylus “archaic” are sometimes identified as the source of his “majestic grandeur of expression” (Haigh 1896, 81) or of “the loaded magnificence of the style” (Bowra 1933, 81), just as often they are perceived as obstructing access to the dramas. Kitto described the feeling as follows: “although we feel the grandeur of the whole, it remains a remote grandeur, remote both in style and thought; we think it archaic, and make allowances” (Kitto 2011, 55 with emphasis added). This remoteness, which above I called “alienation”, contrasts with the feelings of proximity (even contemporaneity) to Sophocles and Euripides. In his influential Sather Lectures, Bernard Knox identified Sophocles as inventor of “the modern concept of tragic drama” (1964, 1, with emphasis added). In contrast to Aeschylus’s characters, whose actions and their consequences play out within a multigenerational, all-encompassing divine vision, Sophocles’ heroes act “in a terrifying vacuum, a present which has no future to comfort and no past to guide” (1964, 5). Euripides has enjoyed an even more enthusiastic reception as a “modern”. W. H. Salter, drawing from the studies of his father-in-law, Arthur Verrall (who once wrote, “No one in modern times, since Greek has been well understood, has said that his dearest desire beyond the grave would be to meet Euripides”, 1895, viii) and inspired by the translations by Gilbert Murray, published a brief monograph on Euripides and Samuel Butler, entitled An Essay on Two Moderns. “That Euripides is a ‘modern’ requires no proof”, Salter opens, describing the fin-de-siècle mentality that he perceived among the surviving authors of the late-fifth century (Aristophanes, Thucydides, Euripides): The problems of Imperialism, of the relations between civilized nations and “barbarism”; of the dominance of one civilized people over another; the position of women; the conflicting claims of

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the individual and the State; even such trivial matters as professionalism in athletics; all these subjects of discussion entertained or bored them as they do us. And so we feel a kinship for the men of this period which we do not feel for the men of other and even fairly recent periods. (Salter 1911, 9–10)

Michael Walton also bases his argument for Euripides’ enduring resonance and significance on the “contemporaneity” of Euripidean themes and subjects: “War, its causes and conduct; morality and power; the influence of oligarchy in a notional democracy; domestic strife; old age, illness and bereavement; sickness within society; personal responsibility; refugees and immigration; religion and ideology; sacrifice and self-sacrifice” (2009, 3). Despite being written almost exactly a century apart, Salter’s and Walton’s feelings of contemporaneity with Euripides derived from their perception that the key themes of his tragedies spoke directly to the issues that mattered most in their own times. When compared with these glimpses of modernity in Sophoclean and Euripidean tragedy, Aeschylean drama remains an enigmatic anachronism, straddling the division between the “classical” and the “archaic”. The lamentable result is that generations of readers and students have given themselves permission to ignore or to displace Aeschylus. He was the last of the three tragedians to be fully recaptured in translation and performance in the revival of Greek learning that began in the Renaissance; and though he has been increasingly admired since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, exerting an important influence on such diverse figures as Marx and Wagner and regaining in our own day (both in translation and adaptation) an important place on stage, Aeschylus remains a distant third. One manifestation of this trend is that this poet, whose modern readers and audiences are perhaps most in need of companionship, has been largely passed over by the companion industry. Our volume has aimed to fill this gap, to present Aeschylus’s dramas, their cultural contexts and receptions, in all their richness and complexity, and to contribute to the project of reclaiming Aeschylus as a poet for our own time. The essays that make up this collection tell a variety of stories about Aeschylus, his life and work, and his audiences and readers over 25 centuries. Written by a group of distinguished, contemporary Aeschylean scholars, the Companion addresses the central issues surrounding the surviving plays and fragments; the place of Aeschylus as an artist and thinker in the context of the rise of Athenian democracy, the defeat of Persia and the emergence of Athens as a major power as well as major artistic and intellectual hub of the Hellenic world; and the later influence of Aeschylus, up to and including recent performances and adaptations that have made him again a significant presence on a globalised stage. The chapters reveal the degree to which Aeschylean drama is fundamental to the large historical and cultural narratives about the origins of the modern world and its arrangements of ideas and power. My goals in this Epilogue are to draw some conclusions from the diversity of subjects and approaches represented herein, to reflect on how our approaches to this unique dramatist have evolved – notably, even over the course of the years that this collection has taken to produce – and to point in some future directions. While no single volume can hope to address all of the questions or model all of the approaches to Aeschylus and his plays, our aims were to represent the current state of the field by inviting a multigenerational group of scholars to reflect on the past, present and future of Aeschylean studies.

The Volume Our Companion has four parts. In the early days of the project, the number of subdivisions was slightly larger, but as we began commissioning the individual essays, we found no rationale for separating, e.g. the study of the extant plays from the study of Aeschylean poetics, nor



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for separating his intellectual, historical and sociopolitical contexts. We were rewarded when adjacent chapters materialised that complemented one another in valuable ways, and we hope that readers will also profit from these fascinating correspondences. At the same time, we are more than aware that each chapter (let alone each part) could easily be a book unto itself – and that many, in fact, are! Our only instruction to the authors, therefore, was to avoid encyclopaedic treatments of their subjects (as many such resources already exist for students of Greek literature), but to stake out a unique claim and invest in making an argument that might showcase their interests, research methodologies, and descriptive styles. The chapters should thus be read as representative, not comprehensive, treatments of current Aeschylean research across several subfields of classics. Each contribution advances a conversation (some decades or even centuries old, others having developed quite recently) and invites in turn further reflection and analysis. The volume’s Introduction sets forth what can be known or deduced about the poet’s life and character. The first five chapters that make up Part I (“Aeschylus in His Time”) address the world which he and his audience inhabited: the sociopolitical, artistic and intellectual climate from and into which Aeschylus’s works emerge. Their purpose is first to document the remarkable changes that took place in Athens during Aeschylus’s adult life and then to survey the poetic and philosophical traditions that form the background to the plays. Wallace (Chapter 1) shows how the plays engage with the complex social and political issues that confronted the new Cleisthenic democracy in Athens after 508/7 bce, especially the shifting attitudes toward traditional class hierarchies (with implications on political participation and foreign policy). Of Finglass’s two chapters on the poetic traditions before Aeschylus (Chapters 2–3), the first treats Aeschylus’s engagement with lyric (especially Stesichorus and Pindar) and epic (Homer and Hesiod), and the second judiciously evaluates what can be known of the tragic genre before Aeschylus. Bromberg (Chapter 4) attempts to characterise the intellectual background of the plays by exploring Aeschylus’s common interests with Presocratic (especially Ionian) thinkers displaced by the Persian Wars. Bell (Chapter 5) accounts for Aeschylus’s time in Sicily, with particular focus on the evidence for the production of Aitnaiai (“Women of Aetna”), its content, structure and historical context. Part II, entitled “Aeschylus as a Playwright”, is the longest of the four subdivisions. It contains 15 chapters that cover not only the extant plays and fragments, but matters of dramatic genre, performance, arrangement, composition and storytelling which we felt were inseparable from readings of the plays themselves. Our aim for this section was to present issues in the interpretation of Aeschylus’s extant plays and fragments in a way that contributes to current theories and debates in the field while at the same time remaining accessible to readers approaching Aeschylus for the first time. The first nine chapters (6–14) address the surviving dramas and fragments. They have the hybrid function of introducing major issues of interpretation while at the same time pursuing new claims: Garvie’s reading of Persians (Chapter 6) treats the historicity of the drama and the thematics of Xerxes’ hybris, while presenting a fresh reading of the play’s inversion of conventional “homecoming” (nostos) narratives. Torrance (Chapter 7) balances the task of introducing Seven against Thebes (which, as she remarks, “deserves to be better known”) with an interpretation of the play’s richly contrasting perspectives on the besieged city. Kennedy’s essay on Suppliants (Chapter 8) frames the play’s treatment of immigration and integration from the perspective of an Athenian audience that was hostile to foreigners (rather than, as the play’s Argives are, receptive of them). Her reading thus complements recent treatments of the drama as celebrating (even promoting) the democratic acceptance of foreign refugees. In recognition that any treatment of the Oresteia (even a separate Companion, which the trilogy would most likely fill) is bound to be incomplete, we determined to commission three chapters (9–11) that would treat the individual plays as part of larger wholes: Porter’s chapter (9) thus focuses on the chaotic

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worldview in Agamemnon and Libation Bearers, Burian’s (10) on the understandings of justice in Eumenides and Ormand’s (11) on the relation of Aeschylus’s treatment of Electra’s story to those of Sophocles and Euripides. As a trilogy themselves, these chapters combine a variety of methodologies and interpretive styles (new criticism, historicised close reading, intertextuality) that we hope readers will enjoy and find instructive. Ruffell’s chapter (12) on Prometheus Bound covers but de-emphasises the questions of date and authorship, focusing instead on the play’s rejection of tyranny and conservatism in favour of solidarity, compassion and hope. Podlecki (Chapter 13) offers a systematic and detailed account of the lost and fragmentary dramas, emphasising Aeschylus’s predilection for producing thematically interconnected trilogies and tetralogies. Shaw (Chapter 14) draws attention to the often-ignored genre of satyr plays, in which Aeschylus is reputed to have excelled, documenting Aeschylus’s place in the history of the genre alongside the fragmentary remains of the plays themselves. The ensuing six chapters (15–20) of Part II examine significant aspects of Aeschylus’s technique and accomplishment as a poet and dramatist across the body of surviving work. These include matters of arrangement, staging, choreography, and music, style and storytelling, which enrich the interpretation of individual plays and fragments by drawing attention to unique features of Aeschylus’s artistry. The interconnections between Aeschylus’s tragedies and satyr plays, elaborated by Podlecki and Shaw, is reinforced by Sommerstein (Chapter 15), whose essay presents in detail the evidence of four attested, and seven hypothetical, Aeschylean tetralogies. Duncan’s exploration (Chapter 16) of the visual aspects of Aeschylus’s art deftly merges the study of the dramas’ poetics with questions of their staging, drawing on the cognitive sciences to show how imagery and stagecraft interact and enrich the audience’s experience of the plays. Stehle (Chapter 17) reads the Aeschylean chorus as critical to the plays’ cosmopoiesis, showing how communities of women perform the closing acts that bring about the transition from crisis to calm. Weiss (Chapter 18) reminds us that music and choreography were vital and no doubt memorable features of the genre and surveys both the evidence for Aeschylean rhythm and dance and the plays’ references (“metamusicality”) to themselves as musical. Rutherford (Chapter 19) addresses the question of Aeschylus’s “style”, giving attention to his reputation for obscurity, but emphasising the use of language and linguistic forms to define the dramas’ major themes and characters. The section’s final essay, by Park (Chapter 20), draws together many of themes from the preceding chapters by focusing on Aeschylus’s dramas as sites of mythogenesis, creating (and not only dramatising) myth. While no doubt many other essays could be written on features of Aeschylean stagecraft and mythmaking, we are confident that our selection highlights some of the most noteworthy aspects of narrative and poetic style, dramaturgy and dramatic technique. Besides offering points of entry into the study of the dramas’ distinctive features, the contents of Part II also introduce major recurring themes that form the subject of Part III, “Aeschylus and Greek Society”. These eight chapters (21–28) address widely discussed questions of interpretation that have occupied scholars and are thus vital to a full understanding of the plays: religion and ritual, justice, race, war, history, law and imperialism. The essays in this part of the Companion draw from multiple dramas to pursue thematic analyses of these key topics across Aeschylus’s surviving work and throughout his career. Seaford (Chapter 21) and Shilo (Chapter 22) address the divine architecture of the plays, treating respectively their representations of familiar (but subverted) rituals and their rich supernatural/superhuman cast of characters. Nooter’s chapter (23) stakes out new ground on the question of Aeschylean justice by focusing on its materiality and especially the dramas’ use of metaphors drawn from the written (“inscribed”) word. Derbew (Chapter 24) examines the contested notion of “race” in Persians and Suppliants, which both destabilise the relationship between outwardfacing, visual cues (skin colour, clothing) and the perception of alterity and cultural difference. Roy (Chapter 25) situates Persians within the history of changing norms in Hellenic



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warfare and the need to develop not only new rules and tactics, but also new ways of rationalising and justifying war. Picking up these same texts (Persians and Suppliants), Baragwanath (Chapter 26) considers the historical content and context of the tragedies alongside the engagement of Aeschylus’s work with emerging historiographical and intellectual discourses. Naiden’s chapter (27) on law, like Seaford’s on ritual, reflects on the structures and contexts of legislation and litigation that would have been familiar to Aeschylus and his audience and offers fresh readings of the dramatisations of legal procedure in Suppliants and Eumenides. Rounding out this part of the Companion, Rosenbloom (Chapter 28) interprets the focus in Persians and Agamemnon on hybris and ateˉ as containing stern warnings against Athens’ increasingly imperialist foreign policy in the years following the Persian Wars. The fourth and final part, “The Influence of Aeschylus”, contains 11 chapters (29–39) that contribute to an area of growing interest and potential in classics: the histories of criticism, reception and reperformance of Aeschylean tragedy from antiquity into the present day. While the term “influence” might appear outdated, it still captures better than many alternative words or phrases the varieties of experience and engagement with Aeschylean tragedy in and beyond his lifetime. The section presents important aspects of the “afterlife” of Aeschylus, beginning with antiquity itself and the partial survival of his text in Byzantine manuscripts and moving through important moments in his rediscovery and revival in modern times, including in translation, performance, pedagogy and beyond. It opens with Griffith’s survey of Aeschylean criticism (Chapter 29), which presents 20 critical trends and approaches to the plays over two hundred years, from moralist and didactic readings through postcolonialism and new materialism, illuminating the plays’ inexhaustible, ever-evolving potential for interpretation. Complementing this outline are the two ensuing chapters by Marshall (30) and McCall (31), addressing respectively Aeschylus’s reputation and reception in antiquity and the fascinating and improbable story of the plays’ preservation, survival and transmission. Since these three topics (history of criticism, reception in antiquity, survival and transmission) often go overlooked in treatments of an ancient author’s “reception”, we were delighted and grateful when three distinguished Aeschyleans signed on, and we expect that readers will derive much pleasure, value, and interest from their lucid treatments of these vital subjects. Roberts (Chapter 32) takes on the Olympian task of surveying, starting in the eighteenth century, the history of translation of the plays into English, while at the same time reflecting on the history of efforts to characterise what is extraordinary (also “hard”, “sublime”, “obscure”) about Aeschylean tragedy. Ziolkowski (Chapter 33) magisterially covers two and a half millennia of Promethean mythmaking, demonstrating the variety of contexts and ideologies that have embraced Prometheus as trickster, culture hero and revolutionary, religious icon and iconoclast. Like the trio on the plays themselves in the Companion’s first part, the three chapters (34– 36) on receptions of the Oresteia take complementary approaches to a complex subject. Lecznar (Chapter 34) treats the shifting intellectual and revolutionary climate in which the Oresteia was read, translated, performed and studied in the nineteenth century, reflecting on key moments in the revival of interest in Aeschylean tragedy. Liapis (Chapter 35) offers comparative treatments of three “landmark” attempts to rewrite the trilogy for modern audiences by emphasising themes of post-war reconstruction and national identity (Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, 1931), the crisis of family and inheritance (T. S. Eliot’s The Family Reunion, 1939) and the ethics of individual responsibility and collective guilt (Jean-Paul Sartre’s, The Flies, 1943). Marshall’s chapter (36) examines four monumental European productions in the 1980s and 1990s (Karolos Koun, Greece 1980; Peter Stein, Germany, 1980; Peter Hall, UK, 1981; and Ariane Mnouchkine, France, 1990–92), which not only reflect the contemporary trends in theatre and political discourse of their respective nations but demonstrate what can be achieved when (as in antiquity) nations and communities invest in theatrical productions. These

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three chapters on the Oresteia, alongside the excellent and extensive work that has been done on its reception (e.g. in Macintosh et al. 2005), permit Foley (Chapter 37) to shift focus to the transformations of Persians, Seven against Thebes, Suppliants and Prometheus Bound, calling attention to the inventive and thoughtful ways in which authors and dramaturges have ­managed these plays’ dominant choruses, limited speaking characters, and circumscribed action. The final two chapters (38 and 39) take up subjects that are frequently omitted from scholarly discourse and, as a result, from publications like this one, but which we believe are not only fascinating in their own right, but indispensable to any aspiring or professional Aeschylean: outreach and pedagogy. Our hope is that the inclusion of these subjects as representing essential scholarly activities, intimately connected to the production and dissemination of new knowledge, will contribute something to the broader project of normalising both pedagogy and outreach as vital forms of classical scholarship. Meineck’s chapter (38) reflects on two public programmes that drew themes from Aeschylus’s plays to foster community and promote dialogue among underserved communities. The Warrior Chorus organised readings and discussions of Aeschylus’s Persians and Agamemnon to spark dialogue about conflict, leadership, accountability, trauma and the experience of war between veterans and civilians. Hear Our Call recruited fourteen refugee teenagers, many displaced to the United States from conflict zones around the world, and through a series of workshops and readings developed a stirring and original performance based on three choruses from Suppliants. It was a welcome coincidence that Mitchell-Boyask (without knowing that Peter Meineck would be authoring the chapter before his own) chose to open his exploration of teaching Aeschylus (Chapter 39) by reflecting on the impact of encountering Meineck’s Aquila Theatre in the 1990s. Through a methodical description of focused classroom exercises, carefully honed over many years of undergraduate teaching, Mitchell-Boyask illustrates not only the benefits of teaching Aeschylus’s plays as theatrical works, but how teaching and research can be mutually constitutive and reinforcing. It goes without saying that the volume’s treatment of Aeschylean receptions is far from comprehensive, but our selections reflect the variety of materials and methodologies currently being used to study the plays and their histories of reperformance, adaptation, transformation and study. While this area in Aeschylean studies will no doubt continue to evolve rapidly in the years to come, the chapters in this section illustrate the principle (characteristic of the best work in reception studies) that a text’s reception history not only illuminates the particular time and place of later authors, but has the potential also to enrich our understanding of Aeschylus’s plays in their original contexts.

Our Aeschylean Century In attempting to counterbalance Aeschylus’s reputation for difficulty and archaism with my belief that Aeschylean tragedy speaks, perhaps uniquely, to the early twenty-first century, it is important to observe several paradigm shifts that have taken place since the turn of the millennium. During my first semester as a graduate student in Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, students in my cohort alongside a group of ancient historians enrolled in a one-credit proseminar dedicated to the “Materials and Methods” of scholarship in classics and related fields. We met for an hour on Tuesday mornings to discuss a wide range of topics, including the state and history of the discipline, the diverse research methodologies and datasets involved in the study of antiquity, and the unique resources available for research and teaching at Penn. Much of my own peculiar orientation to this rich and complex discipline, I owe to those conversations. It was on one such Tuesday morning in 2001 that we met and, speaking in hushed tones, watched on a tiny departmental television as black smoke poured into the cloudless sky from the two towers of the World Trade Center, an hour or so away in



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New York City. Those of us whose professional lives began in the new millennium with the attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11) may be forgiven for feeling a unique kinship with Aeschylus, whose own career as a dramatist began in the same year (499 bce) as the cataclysms that sparked the Greco-Persian war – 2500 years before 9/11. Nearly a half-century has now passed since Heiner Müller’s enigmatic proclamation (coincidentally, on the eve of what would have been Aeschylus’s 2500th birthday) that, “In the century of Orestes and Electra, which is upon us, Oedipus will be a comedy” (quoted in Macintosh 2004, 313). How the Oresteia has supplanted Sophocles’ Oedipus since the 1960s is the subject of a penetrating essay by Fiona Macintosh (2004), in which she calls attention to political readings of the Oresteia among the emerging democracies of the former Soviet bloc. The restructuring in the arrangement of the world, beginning with the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first Gulf War, the 9/11 attacks, and the ongoing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine have helped to enshrine Asechylus’s plays as key texts for exploring pressing issues resulting from decades-long conflicts, political instability, and the massive movement of people across borders. Much like the past two decades of endless war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, the two decades in which Aeschylus produced and staged his first dramas were defined by the conflict between the Hellenes and Achaemenid Persia, a globalising empire intent on expanding its borders and its sphere of influence. At the start of the war, Darius’s empire stretched from the Aegean coast, including Egypt and Thrace, to Gandara and the Indus River. The generations of Greek speakers, who were Aeschylus’s contemporaries, born in the western empire bore a complex, hybrid identity with strong links both to Greece and to the empire (Morgan 2016, 98–105). Herodotus illustrates some of the consequences of these intersecting identities in his descriptions of the displacements (both voluntary and involuntary) of Greek communities and individuals: the Teans and Phocaeans (1.162–8), the Samians (6.14) and Milesians (6.18–22). Commenting on the exodus from Ionia, historians have noted how the rest of the Hellenic world benefited from the Ionian diaspora, with one scholar remarking: “in the fifth century the Ionic thinkers and professional men were active everywhere except in Ionia” (Cook 1962, 135). The conflict with Persia was so defining of Aeschylus’s generation of Athenians that later readers wrote for him an epitaph that emphasised his role as a marathonomachos (“fighter at Marathon”, Life of Aeschylus; see the Introduction to this volume) and totally omitted any mention of his plays. Like the events of 9/11 and the ensuing “War on Terror”, the Persian Wars produced an acute sense of disruption in the arrangement of the world such that no going back to the old ways of doing things would be possible. The feelings of sociopolitical ambivalence and anxiety that have defined the early twenty-first century echo the tensions and anxieties of the Greco-Persian wars; they are discernible, for instance, in the contrasting interpretations of Persians among modern scholars, who remain divided about whether the play is a patriotic celebration of Athenian democracy and military leadership, or an admonition to the Athenian audience about the dangers of unchecked imperialism (see Kyriakou 2011, 33–35 with bibliography). In the years since 9/11, the desire to contextualise American globalism within the history of world civilisations has only grown, and Aeschylean tragedy has had – and through receptions and reperformances will continue to have – an important role to play in understanding the globalising moment in which we live. The reception history of Aeschylus’s Persians in the context of the two American interventions in Iraq over the past 30 years lays bare the confrontation between reactionaries and progressives that has dominated foreign policy debates for decades. The Athenian memory of the Persian Wars that Aeschylus helped to craft, with its opposition of Hellenic freedom and Persian despotism (see e.g. Krikona 2018) has been foundational to occidentalist narratives celebrating victories by free European nations and the so-called “West” over centralised despotic powers and the so-called “East”. For apologists of

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empire, little appears to have changed between the 1850s, when Sir Edward Creasy placed the battle of Marathon (upon which depended “the whole future progress of human civilisation”) first in his list of Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, to the 1990s, when Victor Davis Hanson praised the battle of Salamis as “the supreme confrontation between East and West, in which all manner of futures were either set in motion or denied” (1999, 15). In recent years, moreover, Athenian memories of Marathon and Salamis have been used as blueprints for constructing arguments in favour of military and economic interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. These arguments, especially the “freedom agenda” espoused by the George W. Bush administration in the early years of “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, reflect a paradigm shift in thinking after 9/11: whereas once the project of spreading liberty and democracy was seen as altruistic, even compassionate, after 9/11 it was reframed as essential to restoring US national security (Mantoan 2018, 16). How this reframing was accomplished by means of scripted political performances has been the subject of numerous books and articles from the past decade, especially Jenny Hughes’s Performance in a Time of Terror: Critical Mimesis and the Age of Uncertainty (2011) and Lindsay Mantoan’s War as Performance: Conflicts in Iraq and Political Theatricality (2018), which set out to make visible the invisible processes of political theatre. Audiences at Tony Randall’s 2003 production of Persians inevitably made the connection between George W. Bush’s attempt to bring to a decisive end the conflict against Saddam Hussein that his father had opened in 1991 and Xerxes’ attempt to accomplish what his father had failed to do at Marathon in 490 bce. But even as proponents of the wars in Iraq embraced the rhetoric of the “freedom agenda”, drawing in part from Aeschylus’s and Herodotus’s celebratory narratives, others have continued to adapt Aeschylean tragedies into critiques of occidentalist imperialism. Writing in 2002, when the US invasion of Iraq seemed “increasingly likely”, Edith Hall felt moved to comment on how Greek tragedy (especially Aeschylean) had helped audiences deal with the discomfort and political unease of the 1990s (Hall 2004). Her essay opened with an account of the presence in the public discourse of the late-twentieth century of the Oresteia. Beginning with Robert Kennedy’s invocation of Aeschylus (Agamemnon 179–81) in his plea to the Black community of Indianapolis after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Hall describes how the Oresteia would become a crucial and recurring presence on the global stage, “now speaking louder than ever before to our war-town modern consciousness” (Hall 2004, 173). Her essay’s focus, however, was not the Oresteia in reperformance (itself the subject of a separate volume, Macintosh et al., 2005), but rather Peter Sellars’s The Persians (1993) and Tony Harrison’s Prometheus (1998), two Aeschylean dramas with long histories of association with radicals and revolutionaries (see also Foley 2012, 139–46; and Chapter 37 in this volume). Sellars’s adaptation of Persians, with a script written by Robert Auletta, sought to repair the stereotyped image that Americans held of ordinary Iraqis, by giving a voice and a humanity to the enemy. The play provoked strong reactions, with hundreds of audience members walking out during every night of its American theatrical run in October 1993 (Hall 2004, 181). In portraying the devastation of Baghdad and the terror of its citizens during the bombings in the winter of 1991, Auletta’s script illustrates tragedy’s ability to say the unsayable, a key theme of Hall’s essay. From the time when we sent out our first invitations (around the 2500th anniversary of the Battle of Marathon) to the time when we sent the final chapters to the publisher (on the eve of the 2500th anniversary of the Battle of Plataea), the global climate for reading, performing, and studying Greek Tragedy has rapidly evolved. The global financial crisis and recession, beginning in 2008, laid bare not only the interdependence and illusory stability of global markets, but also the unequal distribution of risk among the world’s richest and poorest people, a lesson that we continue to learn in our third year of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on the moment’s widespread anger and sadness, ambitious populists and



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ethnonationalist politicians positioned themselves atop major world economies – Russia, China, India, Brazil, and the United States (not to mention Turkey, Hungary, and Israel) – and pursued agendas that have further victimised marginalised groups and cultural outsiders, including immigrants, religious minorities, and the poor. While these trends contribute to the popular view of globalisation as a homogenising force from the top down, oppositional movements beginning with the “Arab Spring” in Tunisia and Egypt and the rebellion against Bashar al-Assad in Syria, built global support networks from the bottom up, taking advantage of emerging communication tools and wireless technologies (for globalisation from below, see Appadurai 2000; della Porta et al. 2006; Nederveen Pieterse 2013, 509; Darian-Smith and McCarty 2017, 37–39 and passim). Despite the challenges facing these particular movements, they demonstrate the multidirectional, multiscalar nature of globalisation, which is not just a tool of “westernisation”, erasing difference, but also one of resistance, expressing, preserving and sometimes even creating difference. The trends and strategies of “bottom-up globalisation”, remain visible, more recently in the rise of global social justice movements, responding in particular to extrajudicial killings by police of men and women of colour, but also more broadly to growing public revulsion at the long-entrenched structural inequalities that precipitate, sanction, and even require unjust deaths from among vulnerable groups. When one takes into account these developments, it becomes clear that choosing to study, to read, and especially to perform Greek Tragedy in the twenty-first century is a political and an ethical act, calling for the development of a new, global methodology.

Global Aeschylus This new “global” approach to Aeschylus and his plays involves freeing the texts not only from their unique time and place of origin, but more importantly from the structures and cognitive frameworks of eurocentric “antiquity”, and investigating Aeschylean drama in ways that transcend national, periodic, and cultural boundaries. It is predicated on the belief, drawn from postcoloniality and reception, that the plays “belong” neither to any single cultural (let alone, national) group or tradition nor to any single time and place. Instead, Aeschylean literature is global literature in its circulation, readership, study and reperformance, as well as in the wide potential for applicability of its mythmaking properties to the analysis of major global issues. In taking some steps towards a “global” agenda for Aeschylean studies, I have profited especially from the accounts of global studies by Mark Jurgensmeyer (2013), Manfred Steger and Amentahru Wahlrab (2017), and Eve Darien-Smith and Philip McCarty (2017). (For a fuller description of the new “global” classics, see Bromberg 2021.) The global approach to Aeschylus has five characteristics: Transnational. Aeschylus’s plays are concerned with events, ideas, processes and phenomena that transcend regional, cultural and political boundaries, and that link together people (in kinship or in conflict) from different parts of the globe. Global issues include interstate conflict, diplomacy, and imperialism, migration and citizenship, inclusion and exclusion, enslavement and other forms of injustice, perceptions of difference and alterity. They form the background to the events of all the plays, illuminating a thoroughly interconnected world. In Persians and Seven against Thebes, for instance, Aeschylus shows the high cost of interstate warfare and political ambition on the health and safety of ordinary people. Both Xerxes and Eteocles are characterised as arrogant autocrats, recklessly pursuing personal agendas. Suppliants, on the other hand, dramatises the establishment of kinship ties between a group of Egyptian refugee women and the Argive people, a bond that for the Argives is strong enough to risk bringing on a war that they will ultimately lose. Aeschylus’s characters build their sense of shared belonging and mutual obligation upon the transregional myth of Io’s journey, told not in lengthy

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exposition (as in Prometheus Bound 707–35 and 790–815), but in a dialogue (292–325) between the Chorus of refugees and the Argive king that is so rapid that they appear almost to be completing each other’s thoughts. In the Oresteia, the presence in Agamemnon’s house of luxurious fabrics, dyed with Tyrian purple (“sea-worked”, ἁλουργέσιν, Agamemnon 946) reflects the transregional trade networks of elite goods in place since the Bronze Age; while in Libation Bearers, the Chorus addresses Orestes’ devoted nurse (a slave) with the ethnic name “Cilissa” (732) drawn from her country of origin. The flow of people, stories, objects, and ideas across borders facilitates the construction of Aeschylus’s global narratives. Interdisciplinary. Not only are the cross-border flows reflected in the extant tragedies complex phenomena, but the dramas themselves are also challenging artefacts. Both are best examined from the variety of disciplinary perspectives reflected in (and beyond) the contents of this volume, which draw on the work of philologists, historians, archaeologists, political scientists and social theorists, philosophers (including political philosophers), theorists of religion, race and gender, and scholars of reception. Due to their social, political and intellectual contexts, Aeschylus’s plays and fragments deal with questions about war, justice, and governance, cultural difference and human decision-making, the formation and dissolution of communities, the nature of nature and of the divine, to list only a few. While these subjects have become central to modern academic disciplines (not only in the humanities, but in the social and natural sciences as well), Aeschylean drama adopts a problem-based approach characteristic of global studies by dramatising situations that take place at the intersection of specific transnational processes, (e.g. imperialism, cross-border migration, and interstate conflict). The drama of Suppliants, for instance, occurs when questions of migration and cultural difference intersect with questions of gender, citizenship, and democratic governance. Multidisciplinary approaches are therefore vital to a full appreciation of Aeschylus’s plays. Transhistorical. Aeschylus’s trilogies and tetralogies weave networks of interdependence not only among the mythological and historical communities of their plots, but through and across time as well. His large-scale, interconnected trilogies and tetralogies are in fact perhaps most preoccupied with exploring the consequences of injustice and impiety from one generation to another (see Podlecki (Chapter 13), Sommerstein (Chapter 15) and Park (Chapter 20) in this volume). The tragedies of the Theban and Argive royal families, such as we have them in the remains of the Oedipodeia (the Theban tetralogy from which only Seven against Thebes survives; see Torrance, Chapter 7 in this volume) and the Oresteia, dramatise the deadly consequences of multigenerational cycles of violence and wrongdoing. In another sense, the plays are transhistorical in their enduring popularity throughout antiquity and in their exploration of subjects that remain painfully familiar twenty-five centuries later. Although the six datable dramas were produced within a period of only about fifteen years (472–58 bce), reperformances began almost immediately after Aeschylus’s death (see Lamari 2017, 68–77; Marshall, Chapter 30 in this volume). By the end of the fifth century, Aeschylean reperformance was common enough that Aristophanes’ “Aeschylus” character in Frogs could joke (at the expense of “Euripides”) that, “my poetry did not die with me, as [his poetry] died with him” (Frogs 868–69). Reception studies in particular embrace this transhistorical modality both on account of their non-linear orientation, which breaks down the “chain” (singular) of tradition into its individual (plural) links, and as a result of its bidirectional focus, in which the meaning of ancient texts is not taken as stable, but as contingent on and illuminated by later receptions. (The metaphor of the “chain” of influence or receptions is a common way to characterise what has come to be known as the “Classical Tradition”; see Kallendorff 2007, 2–3.) From this perspective, it is not surprising that a companion to Aeschylus’s reception has appeared in print before the companion to the author himself (Kennedy 2017). Critical and cross-cultural. The globalising potential of reception studies (Aeschylean and otherwise) stems from its necessarily transdisciplinary orientation, juxtaposing diverse cultural



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contexts and artifacts that traditionally have been the objects of study of separate disciplines, as well as from its collaborative outlook. Global methodologies embrace and promote collaboration, believing that the American and European views of globalisation and global issues are not the only ones. Some have observed, however, that globalisation itself (including the globalised structures and processes of knowledge-production) obstruct the kinds of transcultural collaborations that would make it easier to study and critique (Appadurai 2000, 4). A challenge in Aeschylean studies, therefore, and in Classical Studies more broadly, has been in welcoming voices and perspectives from outside the traditional centres of knowledge production in Europe and North America and in building a discipline that includes and promotes the work of scholars from the broader global intellectual community. Few scholars nowadays would care to defend the notion that readers, scholars, and audiences in the so-called “West” are the sole intended recipients and beneficiaries of the literary-cultural production of ancient Athens (including Aeschylean theatre). The discourse of critical globalisation is therefore valuable in signalling an approach that seeks both to understand (without promoting) the history of Euro-American dominance in Aeschylean reperformance, teaching, translation, and scholarship, and to supplement it with viewpoints from many cultural perspectives. A treatment of Aeschylean drama still waiting to be written would view the plays from a variety of cultural standpoints, decentring European and North American perspectives in favour of those of Aeschylus’s African, Asian and Latin American readers and audiences. Ethical and responsible. Global studies takes seriously the proposition, formulated by Pierre Bourdieu, that a commitment to political action and critique in the public sphere is not incompatible with professional scholarship: “Today’s researchers must innovate an improbable but indispensable combination: scholarship with commitment, that is, a collective politics of intervention in the political field that follows, as much as possible, the rules that govern the scientific field” (Bourdieu 2003, 24, emphasis in the original; cf. Steger and Wahlrab 2017, 154–55). The aims of a “critical” Aeschylean studies are therefore not only to recognise and study the processes through which Aeschylus’s texts and ideas have been instrumentalised in perpetuating forms of harm, but then also to intervene in ways that disrupt those processes. While this controversial position may alienate and disturb those used to a comfortable distance between academic and political critique, recent examples of Aeschylean texts and ideas deployed in service of imperialist ideologies are easy to find. The rhetoric of the “freedom agenda”, for instance, weaponised stereotypes of oriental alterity drawn partly from Persians to promote and justify Euro-American military and economic interventions on a global scale. In like manner, the Oresteia is sometimes invoked as modelling the successful transition of a tribal society ruled by the force of vengeance and reciprocal bloodshed to an ordered civilisation governed by the rule of law; and through this invocation, the trilogy is used to rationalise the imposition of undesired “Western” institutions, values, and norms across the globe with little regard to cultural difference. By using the collaborative, crosscultural study of Aeschylean tragedy and its receptions as a window into global problems over time, scholars imply that they want to help solve those problems. This agenda rests on the supposition that the plays of Aeschylus contain not only paradigmatic instantiations of global inequalities and injustices, but also perhaps clues to their mitigation and resolution. In response to triumphalist readings of Eumenides, for instance, some have acknowledged that the much-celebrated trial does not in fact resolve the conflict but rather exacerbates it. Instead, the drama’s resolution takes place in the post-trial scene, when Athena and the Furies negotiate a settlement outside of the newly created legal system through a process similar to the modern practice of restorative justice (Dugdale and Gerstbauer 2017). These similarities are on display in Yaël Farber’s Molora, which relocates Aeschylus’s myth to a Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing in post-apartheid South Africa (Farber 2008; Odom 2011).

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This attempt to outline “global” approaches to Aeschylean tragedy depends on the plays’ potential to shine light on issues that transcend national, cultural, and periodic boundaries and to build communities based on shared experiences of suffering. We have good reason to believe that Aeschylus himself was a politically committed dramatist, and the political tensions of his time between democrats and oligarchs shine through in the execution of his plots, which consistently dramatise the dangers posed by the powerful, wealthy, and unaccountable to the well-being of their communities (Sommerstein 2010, 281–301). Persians tensely stages an empire’s ruin through Xerxes’ reckless ambition, leaving the people to lament “what a celebrated and good, well-governed livelihood we [once] had” (852–53). Seven against Thebes, too, features an inexperienced and entitled young king, Eteocles, who very nearly brings about the destruction of his city, leaving ordinary citizens to pick up the pieces of the community, grieve, and bury the dead (assuming as many do that the play originally concluded with what appears to be a choral exodus and before the entrance of Antigone and Ismene; see Torrance, Chapter 7 in this volume). In their commitment to democracy and community, the plays enact forms of ethicopolitical solidarity among ordinary people, which in turn make collective, emancipatory action possible. This feeling is memorably expressed by the Chorus in Agamemnon who wishes for “prosperity without envy” and prays, “may I not be a city-sacker nor myself, captured, look at life under others’ power” (Agamemnon 456– 74; trans. Rosenbloom, Chapter 28 in this volume). Again and again in his dramas, Aeschylus highlights and reflects on the ways in which communities come together when they fall apart.

REFERENCES Appadurai, A. (2000). “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination.” Public Culture 12, 1–19. Auletta, R. (1993). The Persians. Aeschylus. Los Angeles. Bourdieu, P. (2003). Firing Back. Against the Tyranny of the Market 2. (trans. L. Wacquant.) London and New York. Bowra, C. M. (1933). Ancient Greek Literature. Oxford. Bromberg, J. A. (2021). Global Classics. Abingdon and New York. Burian, P. (2020). “Just on the Far Side of Language: On the Possibility (And Impossibility of Translating Aeschylus).” In P. Burian, J. Strauss Clay and G. Davis, eds. Euphrosyne: Studies in Ancient Philosophy, History, and Ancient Literature in Memory of Diskin Clay. Beithräge zu Altertumskunde 370, 270–92. Cook, J. M. (1962). The Greeks in the East. London. Darian-Smith, E. and McCarty, P. (2017). The Global Turn. Theories, Research Design, and Methods for Global Studies. Berkeley and Los Angeles. della Porta, D., Andretta, M., Mosca, L. and Reiter, H., eds. (2006). Globalization from Below. Transnational Activists and Protest Networks. Minneapolis. Dugdale, E. and Gerstbauer, L. (2017). “Forms of Justice in Aeschylus’ Eumenides.” Polis 34, 226–50. Farber, Y. (2008). Molora. Based on the Oresteia by Aeschylus. London. Foley, H. P. (2012). Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Haigh, A. E. (1896). The Tragic Drama of the Greeks. Oxford. Hall, E. (2004). “Aeschylus, Race, Class, and War in the 1990s.” In E. Hall, F. Macintosh and A. Wrigley, eds. Dionysus since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium. Oxford, 169–97. Hanson, V. D. (1999). “No Glory That Was Greece.” In R. Cowley, ed. What If?: The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been. New York, 15–35.



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Hughes, J. (2011). Performance in a Time of Terror: Critical Mimesis and the Age of Uncertainty. New York. Jurgensmeyer, M. (2013). Thinking Globally: A Global Studies Reader. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Kallendorff, C. W. (2007). “Introduction.” In C. W. Kallendorff, ed. A Companion to the Classical Tradition. Malden, MA, 1–4. Kennedy, R. F. (2017). Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Aeschylus. Leiden and Boston. Kitto, H. D. F. (2011 [1961]). Greek Tragedy. A Literary Study. Abingdon and New York. Knox, B. (1964). The Heroic Temper. Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Krikona, E. (2018). “The Memory of the Persian Wars through the Eyes of Aeschylus: Commemorating the Victory of the Power of Democracy.” Akropolis: Journal of Hellenic Studies 1, 85–104. Kyriakou, P. (2011). The Past in Aeschylus and Sophocles. Berlin and Boston. Lamari, A. (2017). Reperforming Greek Tragedy. Theater, Politics, and Cultural Mobility in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BC. Berlin and Boston. Macintosh, F. (2004). “Oedipus in the East End: From Freud to Berkoff.” In E. Hall, F. Macintosh and A. Wrigley, eds. Dionysus since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium. Oxford, 313–27. Macintosh, F., Michelakis, P., Hall, E. and Taplin, O., eds. (2005). Agamemnon in Performance 458 BC to AD 2004. Oxford. Mantoan, L. (2018). War as Performance. Conflicts in Iraq and Political Theatricality. Cham, Switzerland. Marcellino, R. (1953). “A. E. Housman’s ‘Fragment of the Greek Tragedy’.” Classical Journal 48, 171–78 + 188. Morgan, J. (2016). Greek Perspectives on the Achaemenid Empire. Persia through the Looking Glass. Edinburgh. Nederveen Pieterse, J. (2013). “What Is Global Studies?” Globalizations 10, 499–514. Odom, G. A. (2011). “South African Truth and Tragedy: Yaël Farber’s Molora and Reconciliation Aesthetics.” Comparative Literature 63, 47–63. Raven, D. S. and Housman, A. E. (1959). “Fragment of a Greek Tragedy.” Greece & Rome 6, 14–19. Rhys Roberts, W. (1910). Dionysius of Halicarnassus. On Literary Composition. London. Salter, W. H. (1911). Essay on Two Modern. Euripides, Samuel Butler. London. Sommerstein, A. H. (2010). Aeschylean Tragedy. Second Edition. London. Steger, M. and Wahlrab, A. (2017). What Is Global Studies? Theory and Practice. Abingdon and New York. Verrall, A. W. (1895). Euripides the Rationalist. Cambridge. Walton, J. M. (2009). Euripides Our Contemporary. London. Woolf, V. (1925). “On Not Knowing Greek.” In The Common Reader. New York, 10–17.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “f” indicate figures. Acharnians (Aristophanes)  415 Achilleis (Wagner)  472 Achilles (son of Peleus)  334, 533 Agamemnon vs.  15, 175 anger against Greeks  35 Hermes warning to  173 Iphigenia and  29, 34 Priam and  181 monstrous complaint of  35 Thetis and  36, 53, 173 trilogy 208 Achilles’ Lovers (Sophocles)  173 adaptation as approach to Aeschylus  405–406 Adrastus tetralogy  209 Aegisthus  115, 151 Aegyptians/Aegyptids  101, 108, 270–271 Danaos and  108 reference to black skin of  106 Aeschylus (father of tragedy)  1–2, 40, 43, 56, 114–126, 135, 137, 145–146, 194, 208, 347, 391 biography 2–7 character and character of plays  7–8 choruses of  9, 48, 84, 85, 159–160, 210, 230–239, 251, 298, 342 Oresteia 234–237 Agamemnon (Argive elders)  131 kommos, emphasising self-perpetuating character of retribution  116 parodos 118–119 parodos and second stasimon reinforce pattern of lex talionis 115 Libation Bearers (elderly slave women in palace of Agamemnon) 235

kommos, dirge-like song before tomb of Agamemnon, metrical complexity of  245 Eumenides: see Erinyes/Furies Persians (elderly councillors of the King) 232–234 celebrating skill of Xerxes  79 Prometheus (daughters of Okeanos)  159–60, 163–64, 165, 166 Seven against Thebes  47, 237–238 Theban women  270 Suppliants  238, 239. See also Danaids critical approaches to Aeschylus’s art  214–29 critique by Euripides of recognition tokens in Libation Bearers 148 engagement: with epic  33–37 with experiences in late-sixth-century Athens  51 with political, social, military issues in contemporary Athens  15–24 with Presocratic philosophy  51 in Sicily  61, 413 Euripides and  416–418 “formalist” criticism of dramas  400 intellectual history in  47–58 knowledge of divine in  297–299 Medicean manuscript  432–433 metre: art form primarily choral in origin  242 Aristotle: developed out of dithyramb  242 common lyric metres in surviving Aeschylean tragedies  244, n.1 parody in Aristophanes’ Frogs 245 “Agamemnon metre” (predominantly iambic, with cretics and bacchiacs)  119

A Companion to Aeschylus, First Edition. Edited by Jacques A. Bromberg and Peter Burian. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

range of metrical patterns show experimentation on metres of lyric poetry  245 Aeschylus employs, likely invented, dochmiac metre 244 Aeschylus’s predilection for certain metres, e.g., dactylics 245 structure of strophic/antistrophic pairs appears to be new  245 metamusicality 247–249 music and dance: see music and dance Aeschylus innovator in music and dance  243 antistrophic structure implies matching melodies, choreography 245 character of music and movement  243–244 experiments with dramatic potential of  251 frequency of sound-words like ktupos suggest percussive movements  247–48 lament, associated with women and foreigners 248 nightingale’s archetypal lament (Suppliants 58–71) model for Danaids’ song  247–48 Persians: antiphonal laments of male elders perform eastern character  248 verbal markers and metamusical language enhance sense of foreignness  248 music-making referred to in text without corresponding live performance, e.g., Edonians frag. 57 describes Dionysian music in recitative anapaests  24 Suppliants, clear example of link between music and plot: Choral song dominates, shifts among prayer, plea, thanksgiving  250 approach of Aegyptus’s sons changes lyrics to increasingly agitated rhythms  251 musical narratives in  249–252 prominence of powerful female figures in  30 reception in Fifth and Fourth Centuries: comedy 418–420 initial reperformances  414–416 Prometheus, reperformance of  420 satyr drama  185–200 early history of  186–188 interrelated tetralogies and spectacle  188–197 sociology in  287 style of  254–255 bold, rich, individual, memorable  254 compounds and coinages  255 difficulty and obscurity  254–258 turgidity, tumescence, bombast  544 elevation, high style appropriate to genre  255 vocabulary of Aeschylean drama  257 survival of text: see transmission subversion of ritual in Aeschylean drama  284 Persians 291–292 Seven against Thebes  290–2 and 91 Suppliant Women 287–289 war in  338–343 Aeschylus, the Creator of Tragedy (Murray)  9–10 Aethiopis  36, 37, 174–175, 203 “aetiological” myth  289

Index 559 aetiologies of hope: human progress  161–163 materialism 161–163 affective/aesthetic approach to Aeschylus  399 Agamemnon (Aeschylus)  4, 10, 28, 78–79, 172, 415, 498, 526–527, 528 Aeschylean dramatic technique in  535 Agamemnon (king of Mycenae)  10, 17, 22, 57, 91, 116, 119, 415, 428, 429, 430, 442, 471, 500 audience 286 burial of  285 Cassandra and  283 Aegisthus and  535 Clytemnestra and  23, 27, 151–152, 284, 500, 537–538 declaration of justice in destruction of Troy 379 focus on status of  528 Greek community’s anger against  22 house/home of  499, 554 murder of  284. See also phonos ek pronoias nostos (homecoming) of  189 Agamemnon’s failed nostos contrasted by trilogy’s satyr play dealing with Menelaus’s return 190 Argive watchman’s prologue to  50 Argos bears identifiers of Athens’ collective identity in 376 carpet scene  399, 405 Cassandra in  20, 530 choruses of  21, 57, 378, 402, 475, 496–497, 501 cries  151, 540 ekkyklema in  496 hunting image  261 justice in  310–322 perversion of sacrifice and wedding in  287 process of casting  535 proclaiming to destroyed Troy  530 prophetic quality of choruses in  231 psychological transformation  530 retribution  131, 152 sacrifice of Iphigenia  22, 32–34, 119, 261, 269, 377–379, 470, 528 tableau of murderer and corpses  379 text of  433f translation of  437 Trojan War  376 vengeance on Troy  115 Zeus and  119 using robes in  85 Watchman character in  42 Zeus in parados of  54 Hymn to Zeus  24 Agave 534 agōn  8, 366 agoraios: see Zeus Aigyptioi 189 Aitna: city of  61 women of  67

560 Aitnaiai, (Women of Aitna)  6, 61–62, 64–70, 167, 413–414 dramatic coherence of  67 figures from mythical history of area included in  68 fragments of  70 Ajax (son of King Telamon)  24, 398 death of  36, 203–204 and Odysseus  203, 209, 534 Ajax (Sophocles)  24, 37, 161, 166, 208, 209, 313, 415, 534 judgement of arms, subject of first play of Aeschylean trilogy 37 Alcestis (Euripides)  24, 179, 201 Alcmaeon in Psophis (Euripides)  201 alektros (“unwedded”: Electra’s name reflects unmarried status) 31 Alexandros (Euripides)  201 allegories of hope  158–161 alpha-privatives 326 Aldus Manutiius (Aldo Manuzio)  434–435 Also sprach Zarathustra (Nietzsche)  455 Amymone (Aeschylus)  189, 192–193, 202, 272, 511 anagnōrisis (recognition)  146, 147 Anatomy of Criticism (Frye)  398 Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (pre-Socratic philosopher)  52, 55–56, 137–139 approach through ancient theatre and staging  405 anthropological-ritual approach to Aeschylus  398–399 anti-immigration policies  103 Antigone and Ismene, appearance in at end of Seven against Thebes, probably spurious  89–90 Antigone (Sophocles)  88, 90, 97, 161, 202, 396 antilabe 256 antiphonal composition  259 antistrophes 94 Anxiety of Influence, The (Bloom)  35 Aphrodite  94, 133, 178, 181, 233, 272, 289, 512 Apollo and  181 defended Hypermestra  510 sexualised cosmogony  53 about universality of sex and reproduction  272 Apollo (god of music, poetry, light, prophecy, and medicine)  132–133, 136, 302–304, 511 Aphrodite and  181 Athena and  133 biological view claimed by  136–14 cultic celebrations  249 denial 138–139 Apollo Temenites, sanctuary of  71 aporia  283, 335 applied theatre  518 immigrants and refugees  519–525 veterans 525–531 Aquila Theatre  519, 525–526, 531, 550 “Arab Spring” in Tunisia and Egypt  553 Archeresses, The  50, 204. See also tetralogy Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, The 405 Areopagites  24, 367, 384

Index Areopagus (Hill of Ares)  67, 304, 380. See also Athena (patron goddess of heroic endeavour) ancient institution of court  305 connected to Athenian hegemony  382 court of  124, 125, 277, 347, 403 Eumenides presents new version of foundation  135 guardian function of  381 judicial institution of  470 lawsuits 371 location and symbolic meaning  382 loss of privileges  404 phonos ek pronoias (premeditated murder) in 367–368 power of  382–383 unified function with cult of Semnai Theai  383 Areopagus Council  135, 141 Ares (god of war)  68, 93, 94, 193, 367–368, 378 connected with Thebes  92 Erinyes’ linkage of Zeus with  381 evocation of  119 Argives  178, 251, 271, 324, 346, 351, 486, 523, 547, 553 assembly of  349 citizenry 235 pledge to protect Danaids  365 rituals of lamenting and honouring war dead  377 Argos  9, 16, 65, 102, 141, 404 Danaids and  104–108 Danaos and  101, 192 descendants of Io Danaids’ genos originated in  21 Egyptian immigrants to  21 suppliants for asylum in  511, 523, 525 Argo, The, (or Oarsmen)  179, 206 Aristotelian model of tragedy  208 Artemis (goddess in Greek mythology)  32, 34, 511 Art of Poetry (Horace)  392 asebeia (impiety)  139 Assessors, The (Synthōkoi) (Phrynicus, also recorded as The Just Men and The Persians) 202 astoxenoi (“locals/foreigners”)  21, 106, 107, 109 astrophic metre  94, 232 atē (calamity)  352, 377, 379, 380, 384 Athena (patron goddess of wisdom and crafts, patron of Athens)  16, 17, 31, 42, 94, 126, 141, 380. See also Areopagus (Hill of Ares) Andromache and  95 Apollo and  133 in Athens  133–135 claim to Persian land  19 decisive vote  139 for Athens, for (external) war  304–305 Furies and  125 institution of legal justice  141 language 140 Polias, temple on Acropolis  132 votes to acquit Orestes of matricide  24 works by reason and persuasion  124 Athenian/Athens: acceptance of suppliants  363 democracy  161, 546

greater after expulsion of tyrants  51 language of democracy adopted for absolutist purposes 95 imperialism  100, 168 indecisive aid to east Greeks’ revolt against Persia 18 law  103, 361 in Eumenides 367–371 of murder  367 of supplication  362–367 memory of Persian Wars  551 militarism 19–20 Orestes’ trial at  30 reaction to Phrynichus’s tragedy  44, 373 tyrannicides 161 victories over Persia  20 Atossa, Queen (daughter of Cyrus; unnamed in Persians)  16, 20, 80, 83, 324 handling of race  330 language 330 questioning efficacy of clothes  329 use of Dorian dress  330 Atreus, House of  33, 115, 121, 276–277 Atrides, Les (Mnouchkine)  500–502 Attic-Ionic vocalisation  42 Attic drama  217 Attic territory  15 Attic tragedy  220 Aulis  30, 33 Agamemnon at  396 Iphigenia’s sacrifice at  34, 117, 120, 475 omen at  261 aulos (double pipes)  230, 242, 244, 246, 248 “austere” style  545 autochthony 109 Award of the Arms, The (Aeschylus)  203 axios, “deserving,” i.e., legally innocent  362 Bachofen, Johann Jakob  472–473 Bacchae  177, 204, 249 Bakhtin, Nikolai  467 barbarian/ barbarism, see also Karbanos, 78, 545–546 Bassarai/ Bassarids  53, 176, 177, 189, 193, 249, 250 “Behold” as signal to spectators  225 Being and Nothingness (Sartre)  486 Bibliotheca (Apollodorus)  193 Big Love (Mee)  402, 406 “binding song”  133–134, 236, 247, 250, 485 Birth of Tragedy, The (Nietzsche)  463, 475 blackface, racist history of  99 Black Titan (1964 drama)  512 bombast: see Aeschylus: style of Bone-Gatherers (Ostologoi)  36, 174 bouleusis 367 Brechtian “alienation”  219 bretas (wooden image of a god)  382 bronze, age of  15–25 bulky style  544 Burckhart, Jakob  472 Byzantine Triad. See transmission of Aeschylus

Index 561 Cabeiri, The  179, 206 Cadmus (son of Phoenix)  31, 92, 204 Calchas 234 Cambridge Ritualists  398 Capaneus  92, 178, 508 Capture of Miletos  373 Capture of Miletus, The (Phrynichus)  44, 45, 352, 385 carbon dioxide emissions  66n2 carding wool  205 Casa di Aldo. See Aldus Carians, The  174, 203 Cassandra (female slave)  20 Catalogue of Women (Hesiod)  33–34 catharsis 530 Cellar, The (Preston)  522 Cement (drama) (Heiner Müller)  464 chairete “greetings,”literally “rejoice”,237 Chalcidian cities in Sicily  64, 68 Chalcidians of Himera  64 Chamaeleon (pupil of Aristotle)  7 Chamber-Builders (Chamber-Makers, Thalamopoioi) 173 character-focused approach to Aeschylus  392–393 chattel slavery at Athens  20 Chiron 167 Choephori/Choephoroi, see Libation Bearers Choerilus  6, 43, 45 choregos 61. See also khorēgoi/khorēgos choruses of Aeschylus  9, 48, 84, 85, 159–160, 210, 230–239, 251, 298, 342 celebrating skill of Xerxes (Persians) 79 describing “race of lifegiving Zeus” (Suppliants) 54 Oresteia 234–237 Agamemnon (Argive elders)  131 Libation Bearers (elderly serving-women) Eumenides (Erinyes/Furies) Persians 232–234 Prometheus  159–60, 163–64, 165, 166 Seven against Thebes  47, 237–38 of Theban women  270 Suppliants  238, 239. See also Danaids chrēstoi 418 Chryseis (slave-girl)  33 Chrysothemis 149–150 Cimon 353 Circe 36 city-sacking (perseptolis) royal army  374 City Dionysia  188–90, 201, 412. See also Great Dionysia class-based social analysis  396–97 Cleisthenes (Athens)  15 Cleisthenic democracy in Athens  547 Clisthenic revolution  43 Clisthenes (Sicyon)  41 clothing 122 Clytemnestra (wife of Agamemnon)  20, 22, 115–16, 119–26, 140, 153, 262, 270, 378. See also Agamemnon (king of Mycenae) and Aegisthus  33, 115, 142, 151, 268–269, 540 praised by chorus of Agamemnon 22–23

562 appeals to Orestes  153 description of Greeks in Troy  116 dreams 29 exploiting Argive invaders’ greed  378 frustration 121 ghost of, seeking revenge for her murder  132, 300 guilt of  29 Iphigenia and  29–30 justice  115, 118 killing of Agamemnon by  23, 27, 117, 284, 298 killing of, by Orestes  151, 152 language of  121–122 motivations for actions  269 number of actors  539–540 psychology  28, 32 sympathising with Cassandra’s situation  20 tableau of, standing over her victims  10 words of  283–284 Clytemnestra (Graham)  406 cognitive sciences  214 cognitive linguistics  218–219 Coleridgean “suspension of disbelief”  219 colloquial touches  262 combat trauma  528 compassion 163–165 conceptual blending/conceptual integration  219–222, 224–226 Constitution of the Athenians (Aristotle)  18, 376, 383 “contemporaneity” of Euripidean themes  546 Corcyra 341 Corinth 341 cosmos 48 cosmic necessity  394–396 cosmological principles  55 Cratinus 19 Cratylus (Plato)  54 Cretan Women, The (Euripides)  201 Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky)  468 critical approaches to Aeschylus  391–411 adaptation approach  405–406 affective/aesthetic approach  399 affective approach  406 anthropological-ritual approach  398–399 cultural materialist and new historicist approach  404 deconstructive approach  403 dialectical/socio-political approach  396 existential/humanistic approach  394–396 feminist approach  401–402 from Fifth Century bce to c. 1780  391 formalist/generic/developmental approach  400 formalist/new critical approach  400 historicist and new historicist approach  403–404 Marxist analysis  396–397 materialist approach  406 moralistic, character-focused, didactic approach 392–393 Nietzschean and Dionysian/ritualistic approach 397–398 performance criticism  405 post-humanist approach  406

Index postcolonialist approach  406 psychoanalytic approach  402–403 reception and later history of performance  405 religious/philosophical approach  393–394 structuralist approach  401 cross-cultural approaches  554–555 Cyclops (satyr play, Euripides)  186, 189, 416 Cynaegirus  2, 328 Cypria (poem attributed to Stasinus)  34, 182, 269 Cyrus, the Great (Persian King)  354, 365 daemon 238, daimon 355, supernatural being. See also demons Danaids  21, 271–272, 324 contradiction between appearance and claims of Greek genealogy  106–107 handling of race  330 invocation of Sun god’s rays by  325 trilogy  209, 289–290, 351, 396 Danaids, The, third play of Danaid trilogy Danaids, The (trilogy)  53, 101–102, 103f, 104f, 106–110, 189, 202, 209, 238–239, 270–272, 288–290, 351, 396 Danaus/Danaos (son of King Belus of Egypt)  9, 21, 51, 102, 109 dance in Aeschylean Tragedy  245–247. See also music and dance Darius, the Great (Persian King)  20 Ghost of  83–84, 299, 329, 374 Das Kapital (Marx)  455 death-cycle of “tragedy” as “winter” that precedes “spring” of comedy (Northrup Fry)  398 De casibus virorum illustrium (Boccaccio)  392 deconstructive approach to Aeschylus  403 defamiliarization of tragic events  256 Defence of Poesy, The (Sidney)  392 De Genealogia deorum gentilium (Boccaccio)  457 Deinomenid tyranny, based in Syracuse, ended at Hieron’s death  62 “reorganistion” of eastern Sicily by  64 Delian League  168 Delloi 66 Delphic prophecy  172 democracy  17–18, 403 Athenian intellectuals’ critique of  354 Athens’ post-508/7 18, 20 dēmokratia 16 dēmos  64, 68–69, 523, 168, 354 demons 295 Der entfesselte Prometheus (Herder)  458 dialectical/sociopolitical approach to Aeschylus  396 Dictys (Euripides)  201 Dictyulci 193–194 didactic (moralistic) approach to Aeschylus  392–393 dignity.See praise of Aeschylus’s style dikē (Justice)  130–131, 159, 368 in Eumenides 131–133 “Dikē play”  68 dilogy 206 Diodorus Siculus  64–67 “Dionysian” effect  398

Dionysian/ritualistic approach to Aeschylus  397–398 Dionysios I (Sicily)  71 Dionysus (god of grape-harvest)  7, 186, 195, 204, 243 and Apollo  177 cultic celebrations  249 descended to Hades to bring Euripides  8 in Frogs 227 in Lycurgus  177, 193, 195 temple of  43 divinities in Greek religion and earlier literature 296–297 dochmiac metre: see metre Dorian Greece  64 Douketios (Sicily)  65, 66 drama, dramata  5–6, 379–380, 384 dramatisations of historical events  273 editio princeps  432–433, 434 Edonians (Edonoi)  176, 189, 193, 249 egocentric eroticism  22 Egyptian campaign  376 Egyptian law  350 Egyptians, The  202 Eidothea 189 ekkyklēma  10, 132 elaboration 219 Eleatic principles  55 Electra (Euripides)  486 Electra (Sophocles)  483, 485–486 “intertheatricality” of Libation Bearers and the two Electra plays  145–156 Electra  20, 78, 145, 147, 152, 222–223, 260, 551 Aeschylus’s treatment of  548 Clytemnestra and  539 complex  403, 481 in Libation Bearers  57, 269, 314–315, 402 madness and fiction  154–155 matricide 151–153 Orestes and  481, 487, 539 signs and recognitions  148–150 elegies 5 Eleusinian Mysteries, secrets of  2–3, 50 Aeschylus accused of revealing them in several plays: Aristotle lists Iphigenia, Oedipus, Priestesses, Sisyphus the Stoneroller, Archeresses (Toxotides) 50 Eleusinian religion  50 Eleusinians, The  178, 205, 290 Eleusis (western Attica, Aeschylus’s family home)  2, 50 embodied minds  218–220 Empedocles 55–57 empiricism 469 enallage 448 Encyclopédie (Diderot)  457 Engels, Friedrich  473 ennoma (“in accordance with law”)  362–364, 382 “entrapment” scenes in tragedy  262 Ephialtes’ revolution  158 epic  27, 37, 147, 148 dactylic hexameters of  245

Index 563 epic cycle and Catalogue of Women importance of for Aeschylus: both respect and rivalry 36 treatment of Oresteia matter: Epigoni, The  178, 205, 209 epiklēroi 364 epode  79, 85 Erechtheis (Athenian tribe)  19 Erinyes/Furies  17, 24, 30, 32, 131, 133–137, 140, 141, 153, 236, 269–70, 277, 382 Escorts (Propompoi) 173 Eteocles (Theban ruler)  16, 17, 88, 95, 97, 237, 270, 298–299 ethical resolution  396 ethnicity 270–272 Euaion 70 Eumenides  16–17, 52, 123–126, 130–142, 161, 189, 236, 247, 261, 269, 380, 382, 419, 428, 430, 468–470, 471, 473, 500, 536, 555. See also Oresteia Apollo in  53–54, 303, 306, 307 Athena in  19, 304 Athenian Law and  367–371 biology 136–141 chorus of Erinyes/Furies in  17, 30, 301, 482. See also Erinyes/Furies Clytemnestra in  117, 270 darkest forces of universe  301 endings of  141–142 gendered justice  136–141 Hegel on  468–70 inscribing justice in  315–316 Müller’s translation and edition of  473 performance of  4 reperformance of  418 supernatural change  302 trial  135–136, 347 Zeus in  306 euphrones (”the well-disposed”), Furies in new role as “Eumenides,” term not used in play)  140 Euripides  8, 40, 56, 145–146, 214 Europa  174, 203, 349 rape by Zeus  24, 54 existential/humanistic approach to Aeschylus  394–396 exodos: of Seven  89–90, 556 of Eumenides 141–42 exodus from Ionia  556 “facticity” (Sartre)  486 Fall of Miletus (Phrynichus)  272 Fall of Princes (Lydgate)  392 Family Reunion, The (Eliot)  484–485 feminist approach to Aeschylus  401–402 ”fiction” of Aeschylean Electra story versus “reality” of Sophocles’ and Euripides’  154–155 Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World (Creasy)  552 fish sauce (garos) 173 Flies, The (Sartre)  485–488 folk wisdom  48–49 formalism 469

564 formalist/generic/developmental approach to Aeschylus 400 formalist/new critical approach to Aeschylus  400 Fraenkel, Eduard  400 Fragmente (Herder)  458 “Fragment of a Greek Tragedy” (Housman)  545 fragments of lost Aeschylean tragedies  171–184 satyric fragments  185–187 Frankenstein, Or, the Modern Prometheus (M. Shelley) 461 “freedom agenda”  552 Freeing of Prometheus, The 512 Frogs (Aristophanes)  145, 215–216, 242–243, 245, 255–258, 413, 418, 545, 554 Fujita Hydria  191 Furies, see Erinyes Gela  62, 63f, 70, 159 Gelon  61n1, 64 gendered justice  136–141 gender in Suppliants 270–272 genos (family)  90, 105–106 Geryon (monster)  42 Gerytades (Aristophanes)  418, 419 Gesamtkunstwerk (Nietzsche)  474 Geschöpfe des Prometheus, Die (Beethoven)  46 ghost of Darius  49, 82–84. See also Darius. Ghost-Raisers, The (Psychagōgoi) 174 Gift of Fire, The (Mosley)  465 Gigantomachy 347 Glaucus  171, 172 Glaucus of Potniae  172, 196, 413 Glaucus of the Sea  172 global approaches to Aeschylus  553–556. See also critical approaches to Aeschylus globalisation  551–553, 555 “Gloss Song” (in Harrison’s Oresteia) 445 “gnomic” poetry  49 Götterdämmerung, Die (Wagner)  472 grandeur: see Aeschylean: style Great Dionysia  5. See also City Dionysia Greco-Persian war  551 Greek Enlightenment  49 Greekness  106, 108. See also Hellenism Greek Tragedy in Action (Taplin)  217 guardianship (of the constitution)  383 habrotēs (softness, luxury)  355, 356 Hades (god of underworld; also Pluto)  160, 174, 183, 288, 301, 330 Dionysus descended to  8 net of  285 Sisyphus angers by binding Death  182–183 takes Persephone off to underworld  289f “writing tablet” in mind of  315–316, 319 inscribed mind of  320 hamartia 392 hapax legomenon  105, 325, 326, 327 Pelasgus’s description of Danaids  326 Hardy, Thomas  475 Harpies 171

Index Haunted, The, see Mourning Becomes Electra Hear Our Call programme  519–520, 526 Hector (son of king Priam)  208 Armour of  417 death of  35, 56 Hecuba (Euripides)  286, 416–417 Hecuba (queen of Troy; wife of King Priam)  95, 417 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  468–470 Hegelian dialectical approach to Aeschylus  396 natural law in  468–469 negative view of Prometheus  461 Helen (wife of Menelaus)  23, 36, 115, 118–119, 189, 190, 235, 261, 377, 544 Paris’s seduction of  115 Hellenism  349, 467. See also Greekness Hephaestus (god of fire)  35, 67, 163, 173, 179, 180, 275, 455, 514 Hephaistos 159 Hera (Greek goddess, wife of Zeus)  24, 94, 133, 177, 204, 511 fleeing requitals of  306 Io and  271 Ixion and  182 sanctuary of  152 Heracles (also Herakles, son of Zeus, demigod in Greek mythology)  28, 42, 65, 160, 175, 176, 273, 276, 514 Heracles (Euripides)  249 Heraclides of Pontus  43 Heraclides Ponticus  2–3 Heraclitus  54–55, 131 Herald  334, 378 declaration of justice in sack of Troy  379 Hermes (god in Greek mythology)  511 Hermann, Theodor Gottfried  473 Herodotus  18, 41, 51, 77 description of Nile  327 Hesiodic genealogies  270 Hesiodic myth  160 Hestiatorion 66 Hieron, Deinomenid tyrant of Syrcuse  4, 61 (with n. 1)-64 founder of Aitna, polis myriandros  64, 346 city reflects Deinomenid practice of demographic relocation 364 connection with Aeschylus, who wrote Aitnaiai at his behest  64 high genres  255 hikesios (epithet of Zeus as protector of suppliants) 363 Hippias (Sophist)  51, 354, 526 Hippocratic Corpus  138 Hippomedon 92 historicist approach to Aeschylus  403–404 Homecoming, The, see Mourning Becomes Electra homeric “banquet”  173 Homeric colouring  256 Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite  204 homicide law  402 homologia (pledge)  363

hope: aetiologies of  161–163 allegories of  158–161 compassion 163–165 embodying 163–165 politics of  166–168 principle of  158 solidarity 163–165 hospitality 100 House of the Seven Gables, The (Hawthorne)  483 hubris (also hybris)  83–84, 180, 257, 352, 374–375, 378–380, 383, 384, 392 human progress in Prometheus Bound 161–163 Hunted, The, see Mourning Becomes Electra hypallage (transfer of epithets)  448 Hypermnestra (daughter of King Danaus)  101–102, 192–193, 271, 272 hyporchema 186–187 Hypsipyle  179, 202, 205–206 iconotropy process  456 ideological space  348 Iliad (Homer)  15, 32–33, 27, 34, 47, 173–174, 176, 178, 180, 183, 203 Iliadic tetralogy/trilogy (or “set”)  173, 203, 209 imagery in Aeschylus  260–262 immigrants, fear of.See also xenophobia in contemporary America  519, 524 in Suppliants 100–101 imperialism, Persian, marked by hubris and atē 375 impermanence of abusive power  274–276 improvised explosive devices (IEDs)  528 incunabula 432 individual responsibility  394–396 intellectual milieu of Aeschylean drama  57 intellectual culture  47, 49 intellectual experiments  57 interdisciplinary examination of Aeschylean drama  554 intergenerational narratives and resolution  273–274 intertextuality 146 Invention of Love, The (Stoppard)  36 Ionians  51, 64, 248 revolt of  339 Iphigeneia/Iphigenia (Aeschylus)  50, 145, 175, 207, 175, 207 Iphigenia (daughter of Agamemnon)  27, 29, 117–118, 234 Agamemnon’s sacrifice of  32–34, 119, 261, 269, 378–379, 528 chorus’s portrait of  313 city of Troy and  313, 380 Iphigenia at Aulis (Euripides)  475, 500–501 Isagoras 15 isēgoria (equal voice [in politics])  16 Isocrates 52 isogonia (equal birth)  21 isonomia (equality)  21, 108 Isthmiastai (Women at the Isthmian Games)  178, 183, 196 Italy, Aeschylus arrival in  431–432 ius ad bellum (just cause for war)  336–339

Index 565 ius post bellum  337, 339–343 Ivanov, Vyacheslav  467–468 draws parallel between Aeschylus and Dostoyevsky 467–468 Ixion 181–182 Jesus von Nazareth (Wagner)  472 Judgement of the Arms, The 36 justice 130–131. See also dikē declarations of, for Trojan War  379 fragment 318–321 Just Men, The  202 just war theory  334 language of  131 legal 131 political theorizing: in Persians 335–338 of war in Aeschylus  338–343 kalos 70 karbanos 21 katharsis  397, 398 khorēgoi/khorēgos  42, 43. See also choregos Knights (Aristophanes)  166, 420 knowledge of divine in Aeschylean tragedy  297–299 koinon dogma 65 kommos  123, 236, 375, 380 complex metrical structure of kommos in Libation Bearers 245–246. See also metre Kratos (Power)  159 kreissones 67 Kronia  67–68, 69 Lago di Naftia  66 Laius  37, 88, 172, 189–190 House of  203 Lake Tritonis  180, 207 language  254, 260 characterisation through  262–263 of justice  131 metamusical 247 metaphorical 261 Laodamia 30 laudator temporis acti 8 lecythion 119 legal justice  131, 141 Leitmotive (Wagner)  400 Lemnian deeds  206 Lemnians 179 Lemnian Women, The (Lēmniai) 205–206 Leontinoi 68–69 Le Prométhée mal enchainé (Gide)  463 Les Atrides (Mnouchkine)  491, 500–502 lex talionis 115–116 L’Homme révolté (Camus)  464 Libation Bearers (Choephori) Aeschylus)  10, 20, 23, 29, 48, 52, 57, 78, 123, 145–147, 149, 151, 153–154, 189, 204, 215, 235, 291–292, 429, 430, 500, 554 (see also “intertheatricality,” Nietzsche) blending of image and stage in Aeschylus  222–226

566 chorus 246 evocation of  415 Orestes in  117 reperformance of  418 epic influence  33 Catalogue of Women and Epic Cycle  33–34 Iliad and Odyssey 33 Lyric influence: see Stesichorus, Xanthus Library of Alexandria, Aeschylus in  426–427 Life of Aeschylus (Vita Aeschyli)  2–7, 16, 47, 243, 412 Life of Apolllonius of Tyre (Philostratus)  1–2, 414 Life of Cimon (Plutarch)  18, 376 Life of Pericles (Plutarch)  55 Life of Pythagoras (Porphyry)  52, 53 Little Iliad  36, 203, 381 Los siete contra Tebas (Arrufat)  96 Lucinde (Schlegel)  460 Lycurgeia (tetralogy)  176–77, 189, 202–203, 249 Lycurgeia (Polyphrasmon)  202 Lycurgus (Thracian king)  53 Lycurgus (satyr play)  189, 192–193, 209, 249, 421 Lynceus 102 lyric: lyrical drama  463 Oresteia: Pindar 31–33 Stesichorus 28–31 Xanthus 31 Transformation of  34–37 Lysistrata (Aristophanes)  94 Macrobius 66 madness in Electra  154–155 majesty. See Aeschylean: style manuscripts: Aeschylus’s oldest surviving  429 Medicean manuscript of Aeschylus  432, 433f proliferation of  429 Marathon  41, 338–339 battle of  552 marathonomachos (fighter at Marathon)  551 Mariandynian dirge-singer  248 Marx, Karl  471 Marxist analysis  396–397 material anchors  215, 218–220 materialism 161–163 materialist approach to Aeschylus  406 matricide 151–153 mechanêma (the intrigue)  146 Medea, (Euripides)  201, 349 mediation 230 Medicean manuscript of Aeschylus  432, 433f mēkhanē 166 Melanaigis 290 Memnon (son of Laomedon)  175, 203 Memnon  37, 56, 175, 203, 209 Memnonis or Aethiopis 174–175 Menedemus 185 Menelaus (brother of Agamemnon)  189, 234, 365, 442, 545 destruction of Troy  115

Index Greek community’s anger against  22 homecomings 190 nostos of  189 mesode 232 messenger speech  50, 256, 508 metamusicality 247–249 metamusical language  247 metaphor  218, 220 metaphorical language  261 verbal metaphor elaborates on conceptual blend  22 metatheatricality 151 metics 142 metoikoi (resident aliens), metoikia  21, 101, 109, 347metre (see also Aeschylean: metre) “Agamemnoon metre,”  119 lecythion, frequently associated with resolution of evils 119 metres commonly used in Aeschylean Tragedy 245–247 Miletos city  19, 51 Capture of by Persia  373 Milton, John  440 mind (nous), Anaxagoras theory of  55–56 mind–body divide  218 mise en scène 363 mnēma (monument)  70 modern stage, transformations of: Persians 505–508 Prometheus 512–515 Seven against Thebes  508–510 Suppliants 510–512 Moira 484 Molora (Farber)  406, 555 monogenesis 138 moralistic approach to Aeschylus  392–393 Mutterrecht (Bachofen)  472 Mütter, Die (Schleef)  97 Mourning Becomes Electra (O’Neill)  479–480 as foundational text  483–484 I Homecoming 480–481 II The Hunted 481–482 III The Haunted 482–483 mouseion (museum)  426 mousikē 244 music (see also metre) in Aeschylean Tragedy  245–247 musical narratives  249–252 Mycale 51 Myrmidons  35, 173, 419 “Aeschylean silences” in  418 Mysians, The  182, 207 myth/mythology  158, 160 myth-making 267–268 natural fulfilment  43 natural law  468–469 Neaniskoi, (Youths)  189, 193, 249 negative enclitics  326 Nekyia (Odyssey)  3 Nemea  178, 205 nemesis 257

Neoptolemus (son of Achilles)  175 Nereids  35, 173 Net-Haulers, The  179–180, 183, 207 New Criticism  216, 217, 283 new historicist approach to Aeschylus  403–404 Rowland, Ingrid  99–100 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle)  50, 175 Nietzsche, Friedrich: active at an early age as philologist and professor of Greek in Basel  473 Nietzschean approach to Aeschylus influenced early by his immersion in Wagner’s works and ideas 397–398 skeptical of value of trilogy as structure, and particularly of middle tragedy  474 Night Thoughts (Young)  458 Nile 56 Niobe  181, 392 nomoi  351, 353, 355 nomos  248, 347, 351, 356, 362 non-Greeks and war  272–273 non-sexual friendship  35 nostalgic response  190 nostimon phaos (light of return)  80 nostos (return)  78, 146 poetry  78, 80, 82, 84 Nurses of Dionysus, The  177, 205 Oarsmen 179. See also Argo, The obscurity  286, 450, 547. See also Aeschylean: style Aeschylean  255–257, 450 Oceanids 163 Odyssean tetralogy  203 Odysseus (king of Ithaca)  17, 36, 65, 176, 182, 334, 527 adventures 82 Ajax and  203, 209, 534 death of  174 enemies of  83 Orestes and  149 Odyssey (Homer)  27, 32–34, 78–79, 149, 174, 183, 186, 189, 268–269, 334 Oedipal themes  484 Oedipodeia (Aeschylus)  554 Oedipus (king of Thebes)  17, 37, 97 anagnorisis 172 birth of  172 character of  509 daughters of  89 destiny of  91 lamentation for genos of  90 mother/wife’s fate of  172 murder of Laius  89 paternal curse  394 sons of  90, 290 success with Sphinx  192 tetralogy 190 trilogy 237 Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles)  16, 40, 50, 53, 398 Oedipus the King (Sophocles)  88, 172, 189–190, 208, 551

Index 567 oikeia kaka (“troubles close to home”)  352 Okeanos  160, 163 olbos (“prosperity”)  383 ololugē/ololugmos (cry of triumph)  95, 250 onkologia 544 On Nature (poem) (Empedocles)  56 On the Generation of Animals (Aristotle)  56, 138 On the Nature of Animals (Aelian)  420 On Wounds of the Head (Hippocrates)  48 Operation Iraqi Freedom  552 Opfertod 398 Oresteia (Aeschylus)  4, 10, 16, 27, 48, 88, 108, 114, 130–131, 190, 192, 202–203, 209, 232, 234, 237, 380, 401, 413, 445, 479–480, 533, 544, 551, 554, 555. See also Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides, Proteus association of deeds of blood with healthy, joyous images 123 characters and plot of, in 19th c. novels  475 comedy in  418–420 influence of comedy  418 engagement with, in Euripides’ and Sophocles’ Electra,145–156, 417 epic influence  33 Catalogue of Women and Epic Cycle  33–34 Iliad and Odyssey 33 Family Reunion, The (Eliot) and  484–485 Flies, The and,485–488 gender and conflict  268–270 Les Atrides (Mnouchkine) and Oresteia 500–502 in lyric  28 Pindar 31–33 Stesichorus 28–31 Xanthus 31 Mourning Becomes Electra (O’Neill) and Oresteia 479–480 as foundational text  483–484 Homecoming 480–481 The Hunted 481–482 The Haunted 482–483 mythical revolution in human prehistory  472–473, 476 natural law  469 nineteenth-century reception of  467–478 Oresteia, The (Hall)  498–500 relentless rhythms  115–116 reperformance at Dionysia probable in 420s  415 revenge and resolution  276–277 survival 261 teaching as work for theatre: casting 534–536 Clytemnestra visible to audience during Agamemnon 537–538 Line assignment to characters  538–539 problem of 3-actor rule  539–540 stage directions  536–537 trial of Orestes  135–140, 540–542 transforming epic  34–37 zigzag pattern  208 Orestie, Die (Stein)  494–497 Oresteia (Koun)  491–494

568 Oresteia, The (Hall)  491, 498–500 Orestes (son of Agamemnon)  116, 119, 123, 133–135, 139, 141, 146–147, 152–153, 155, 260, 298, 551 appeal to Athena  125 comparing with Electra  117 jury at trial of in Athens  30, 135–141, 540–542 speech  125, 126 Orestie, Die (Stein)  491, 494–497 orientalism 20 Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, The (Marx) 473 Orin 482 Orpheus 250 ostraka 17 Paedagogus  146–147, 154–155 Palaestae (Wrestlers) (Pratinas)  188 Palamedes (Euripides)  201 Palici 66–67 Palike, city of  66 Pandionis 201 Pandora (Goethe)  460 Papyrus fragments  434 papyrus hypothesis  67, 166 Paradise Lost (Milton)  461 parascenium 194 parergon 171 Parian Marble  6 parodos (pl. parodoi)  10, 78–79, 81, 118–120, 234 paronomasia 54 pathos  375, 380, 384 Pausanias  7, 185 Peisistratids 109 Pelasgos. See Pelasgus Pelasgus  9, 101–102, 104–110, 135, 324–327, 365, 366 genealogy 106 Peloponnesian War  158 Penelope  36, 174 Pentheus  177, 204 Pentheus (character)  534 Pentheus group (tetralogy)  209 pedagogy 533 performance: criticism 405 of Eumenides  4 of Seven against Thebes 96 texts of Aeschylus  425–426 Periclean Citizenship Law  102, 138, 510 Pericles  58, 102 Perrhaebian Women  181 Persian fire  373 Persians (Persai) (Aeschylus)  9, 16, 18, 20, 40, 45, 48, 61, 77–78, 115, 171, 196, 202, 232–233, 272–273, 291–292, 352–357, 413, 428, 430–431, 526, 553, 555, 556 conventions of nostos story in  84–85 hybris 83–84 in Ionian Revolt  77 on modern stage  505–508 nostos 80

Index parodos 78–79 political messages in Greek tragedy  86 race 328–330 stages 81–82 trilogy 167 Persians, The (Sellars)  552 Persian Wars  551 phallic humour  194 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel)  468 philanthrōpia 395 Philoctetes  176, 201 tale of  175 Philostratus  1–2, 414 Phineus  171, 196 Phlius 185 phobos 382 Phoenician Women (also Phoenissae) (Euripides)  90, 91, 172, 418 Phoenician Women (Phrynichus)  20, 44, 45, 202 phonos dikaios 367 phonos ek pronoias 367 Phorcides  179, 193, 207 Phormis 62 phoros  376, 379 Phrygiai 203 Phrygians, The  173, 203 Phrynichus, tragedian  43–45. See also Fall of Miletus fined for presenting tragedy based on Athenian sorrows on the capture of Mileus  44, 373 phthonos 81 Pindar 31–33 Plataea 51 Plato 36 Ploutoi (Cratinus)  166, 420 Poetics (Aristotle)  9, 42–43, 214, 544 polis (city), 67, 90–91; poleis (plural)  335 polis myriandros 64 political cohesiveness of citizenry  20 politics of hope  166–168 Polydectes (King of Seriphus)  179–180, 193, 207, 177 Polynices (brother of Eteocles)  16–17, 97, 237 Polyphontes 92 Polyphrasmon, tragedian, son of Phrynicus  202 Polyzalos 61n1 ponēroi 418 Poseidon (god of sea)  83, 84, 94, 171, 192–193, 298, 368, 374, 511 positionality 106 post-Aeschylean dramaturgy  202 post-humanist approach to Aeschylus  406 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)  530 postcolonialist approach to Aeschylus  406 praise of Aeschylus’s style  544. See also Aeschylean: style Pratinas of Phlius  6, 43, 45, 186–188 pre-Aeschylean tragedy  44 Presocratics  48, 58, 138 Priam (king of Troy)  181, 208 Priestesses (Hiereiai) (Aeschylus)  50 Principle of Hope, The (Ernst Bloch)  158 Prométhée (Quinet)  463 Prométhée délivré (poem) (Ménard)  463

Prometheus (Harrison’s film)  552, 465 Prometheus (Titan god of fire)  275–276, 311 defiance of Zeus  464 on modern stage  512–515 provocation 159 shackles 165 story of  159 trilogy  167, 396 Zeus and  159–161, 164, 458–459, 514 Prometheus: the Battle of the Titans (Fühmann)  464 Prometheus Bound (play attributed to Aeschylus)  1, 6, 18, 40, 48, 62, 158–170, 206, 232, 263–264, 274–276, 311–312, 394, 420, 428, 430–431, 437, 455–456, 464 aetiologies of hope  161–163 allegories of hope  158–161 dramatic presentation of cosmic-scale defiance and suffering 395 dramatic fragment (Goethe)  459 embodying hope  163–165 end of tyranny  158–161 German Romantic view of  460–461 myth of  463–464 politics of hope  166–168 Scully and Herington’s translation of  441 symbol of Deus verus et omnipotens  457 Prometheus Bound (Doerries)  442 Prometheus Chained (Clifford)  438–439 Prometheus Fire-bringer (Pyrphoros)  167 Prometheus in Chains (Morell)  437 Prometheus on Caucasus (Lucian)  456 Prometheus on His Crag (Ted Hughes)  464–465 Prometheus Pyrkaeus (Prometheus the FireKindler)  171–172, 196, 456 Prometheus Unbound (Shelley)  161, 420, 456, 462 Prometheus und Epimetheus (Spitteler)  463 prophecy 302–304 proskynesis 355 prosperity (olbos) 383 Protagoras 456 Proteus (Satyr play of Oresteia)  172, 189–190, 192–193 contrasts homecoming of Menelaus with that of Agamemnon 190 proxenoi, proxenos  366 Psychagogoi  3, 174 Psychoanalysis 483 psychoanalytic approach to Aeschylus  402–403 Psychostasia 160 Purifications (poem) (Empedocles)  56 Pylades 17 Pyrrhus. see Neoptolemus (son of Achilles) Pythagoras 52–53 Pythagoreanism 52 Pythia  132, 139 Quaestiones Conviviales (Plutarch)  5 race 323–333 as colour, religion and/or geography  330–331 Persians 328–330 Quarrel of imagined sisters in Queen’s dream  330

Index 569 Suppliant Women  324–328 Ransoming of Hector, The  173, 180 rationalism, Euripides’ supposed  398 Reapers, The (Theristai) (Euripides)  201 reception and later history of performance  405 Reden über die Religion (Schleiermacher)  460 refugees 519–525. See also Aquila Theatre religious language  258–260 religious/philosophical approach to Aeschylus 393–394 religious ritual  258 “renaissance” of Hellenic culture  49 Republic, (Plato)  53 resistance to tyranny in Prometheus Bound 158–161 resolution of conflict in Aschylean tragedy (Hegelian dialectic)  396, 401 responsibility for war losses  339–343 resurrection, nod to idea in Eliot’s Family Reunion 485 retributive justice  130–131 Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) 101 Rhesus 40 Rhetoric (Aristotle)  544 rhetoric 302–304 Ring des Nibelungen, operatic tetralogy (Wagner)  470, 472 ritual 284 chorus 231 drama 399 invocation 399 subverted ritual  284 Rower(s), The 206 Rural Dionysia  5 Sack of Troy  31, 42. See also Troy. Sacred Delegation, The  178, 183 Salaminians, The (Salaminioi) 204 Salaminian Women (Salaminiai, proposed correction of received title)  36 Salamis  40, 41, 202 battle of  51, 339, 552, 268 sanctuary communities  520 satyr(s) 185–186 Attic amphora fragment  187f drama (“tragedy at play”)  5–6, Aeschylus regarded as master of genre: chief contribution: linkage of satyr play to myth, particularly to myths featured in tragic trilogy, links between themes of tragedies and satyr play in tetralogies 192–193 fragments 185–200 satyrika 5 scene-painting 217 scholarship with commitment  555 scholia 32 school selection plays of Aeschylus  427–428 sebas 382 Second Sex, The (Beauvoir)  401 Semele  177, 204 Semnai Theai  277, 302, 383, 384

570 Seven against Thebes (Aeschylus) 16–18, 22, 62, 65, 79, 88–98, 189–190, 232, 237–238, 270, 290–291, 406, 428, 430–431, 553, 554, 556 accompanying plays and plot  88–90 Capaneus in  178 chorus of  47, 172 doubtful authenticity of transmitted ending  89–90, 556 gendered perspectives  94–96 inscribing justice in  317–318 on modern stage  508–510 parodos  246, 249 performance and reception  96–97 ship of state and cursed family  90–91 siege warfare  91–93 Tydeus’s war-cry in  48 sexual satisfaction, Hippocratic model of  138 Shakespeare 114 ship-timbers 255 Sicily: Aeschylus in  61, 413 Aitnaiai 61–62 claims to invention of tragedy as well as comedy  42 democratic Sicily  63 “Dikē play”  68 Eastern Sicily in era of Aeschylus  63f Greek cities of  66 indigenous mythical material  66–67 posthumous memory of Aeschylus  70–71 “reorganistion” of eastern Sicily  64–65 tetradrachm of Aitna  65f Sicyonians 42 siege warfare  91–93 Siegfried (Wagner)  472 Sisyphus (king of Ephyra)  182–183, 201 silences in Aeschylus  418 Sisyphus the Runaway (Drapetēs) 182–183 Sisyphus the Stone-Roller (Petrokylistēs)  50, 182–183 solidarity 163–165 Soliloquy, or Advice to a Young Poet (Shaftesbury)  458 Solon 380 solo songs  250 Sons of Euneus, The (Cratinus)  419 Sophists 48 sōtēr  364, 394 Soul-Raisers (Psychagogoi) 418 spectators 185 speech(es)  256, 263 by actors  256 figures of  254, 443, 444 messenger  50, 256, 508 Sphinx  37, 88, 93, 172, 189–191, 191f, 192–193, 206 staging  263–264, 405 stasiarchos 21 stasima (pl. stasima) 234–5 Stesichorus 28–31 influence on tragedy  30 island of Stesichorus of Himera  42 Sthenelus 178 stichomythia 66

Index strophe/antistrophe pairs  94 structuralist approach to Aeschylus  401 struggle in Prometheus Bound 158–161 style, Aeschylus and  254–255 subverted ritual  284 Suda (Byzantine lexicon/encyclopedia)  4–5, 43–44, 186 Suppliants (Suppliant Women, Suppliant Maidens) (Aeschylus)  6, 9–10, 16, 18, 21, 40–41, 51, 56, 79, 99, 103f, 104f, 135, 166, 186, 189, 192, 215, 232, 238–239, 251, 287–289, 347–351, 416, 428, 430, 518–525, 553 Athenian Law  362–367 belt as noose in  220–222 citizen participation in civic institutions  64 context 102–103 defending women  22 dangers 107–110 ethnicity and gender  270–272 identities 104–106 justice 316–317 on modern stage  510–512 obligations 106–107 race 324–328 responses to  100 story 101–102 surviving manuscript of Aeschylus  429 swelling 544 symbolic image-systems  215 symbolic mapping  224 supplication 362 Symposiaka, (Table talk) (Plutarch)  5 symposium 472 syntax 254 Syracuse  50, 66, 68–69. See also Sicily Syracusan performance of Persians 61 theatre at  62 tagein 354 talio 370 “tawny horsecock” (bird, Aristophanic example of Aeschylus’s linguistic extravagance)  8 Teatro di Guerra (film) (Martone)  96 tekmēria  148, 150 Telamon 36 teleios 394 Telemachus 33 Telepheia (Sophocles)  201 Telephus (Euripides)  182, 201, 207 Telephus (son of Heracles and Augê)  182, 207 Temenites (quarter in Syracuse)  67, 69 temenos 69 terza rima 459 Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Hardy)  475 testimonia 53 tetralogy  6, 171, 189, 201–212. See also trilogy attested tetraogies/trilogies of Aeschylus  202–203 Danaid tetralogy: Suppliants, Aegyptians (or Aegyptians, Suppliants), Danaids, Amymone  202, 209 (for reversed order of first two, see also 101)

Lycurgeia: Edonians, Bassarids, Youths (Neaniskoi), Lycurgus  203, 209 Oresteia (458): Agamemnon, Libation Bearers (Choephoroi), Eumenides, Proteus  16, 22–24, 202, 209 Theban tetralogy (467): Laius, Oedipus, Seven against Thebes, Sphinx  203, 209 tetralogies that can be reconstructed: Adrastus tetralogy: Women of Argos (Argeiai), Eleusinians, Epigonoi, possible satyr play Nemea  205, 209 Aethiopis tetralogy: Memnon and Weighing of Souls (Psychostasia) definitely, possible third tragedy Phrygioi (corruption of Phrygiai?), satyr play unknown  203, 209 Ajax trilogy: Award of the Arms (Hoplôn Krisis), Thracian Women Thrêissai), Women of Salamis (Salaminiai), satyr play unknown  36–37, 203–204, 209 Argonaut tetralogy: Lemnian Women, Hypsipyle, Cabeiri [or Cabeiri, Hypsipyle], Argo or Oarsmen (Kôpastai) 205–206 Dionysian tetralogy: Archeresses (Toxotides), Semele or Water-Carriers (Hydrophoroi), Pentheus or Wool-Carders, perhaps Nurses of Dionysus (Trophoi) as satyr play  204–05, 209 Iliadic tetralogy: Myrmidons, Nereids, Phrygians, Chamber-Makers (Thalamopoioi) 35–36, 203, 208 Odyssean tetralogy: Ghost-Raisers (Psychagogoi), Penelope, Bone-Gatherers (Ostologoi), Circe  36, 203, 206 exceptions: plays of 472: Phineus,Persians, Glaucus of Potniae, Prometheus the Fire-Bearer (Pyrphoros) 201 produced as dilogy at Lenaean festival  206 part of Aeschylean-style trilogy or tetralogy  275 Telephus 207 Teucer (son of King Telamon)  36–37, 204, 209 Teucer (Sophocles)  37 Theatre of Dionysus  4, 10, 79, 142, 405 Theban trilogy  207, 209, 210, 291 theft of fire  161–163 Themiscyra 327 Theogony (Hesiod)  159, 162, 456 theology 264 Theoroi 196. See also Isthmiastai theory of dialectical conflict  396 Thesmophoria 100 Thespis 43 Thetis (mother of Achilles)  35, 36, 53, 160, 173, 175, 203, 462 marriage to Peleus  160 Zeus’s sexual pursuit of  306 Thracian bacchanals  177 Thracian king  171 Thracian Women (Aeschylus)  36, 203, 415 Thrasyboulos 61n1 threomai (song)  94 thymela of Dionysus  188

Index 571 time intervals  210 Tiresias 3 Tithonus 175 torch-races 167 Trachinian Women (Sophocles)  85 traditional tale  267 Tragedies of Aeschylus (Potter)  437 tragic drama, modern concept of  545 tragic/tragedy  41, 42, 267, 416–418 before Aeschylus: chorus  41, 230–231 early practitioners  43–45 search for origins  40–43 translation history of Aeschylus  437–450 Agamemnon translation  437 challenge of translating Aeschylus’s poetry  440–441 difference between dialogue and lyric  439–440 Prometheus Chained  438 Webster, Augusta, 437 transmission of Aeschylus  426–434 Aldus (Aldo Manuzio)  434–435 Byzantine triad (Prometheus, Seven, Persians) 430–431 Library of Alexandria  426–427 oldest surviving manuscript  429 Oresteia 430 official archive in Athens  426 Papyrus fragments  434 performance texts, composed orally, preserved in writing after performance  425–426 Venice 432–433 transnational approaches  553–554 trilogy  6, 102, 201. See also tetralogy Danaid 289–290 Iliadic 209 interpenetration of image and reality  117 Prometheus 167 reconstruction 101 rich imagery  116–117 Theban  207, 209, 210, 291 theme 260 Trojan War  376, 483. See also Troy. Athenian warfare from  382 “cyclic” epics  183 Demodocus’s song of  527 end of  142 Euripides about  273 participation of gods in  308 Trojan Women, The (Euripides)  201, 417 Troy 182 Agamemnon as gods’ agent of justice against  120 Agamemnon returns to Greece from  27, 33, 222 Agamemnon’s expedition to  234 Agamemnon’s vengeance on  115 Agamemnon’s victory over  116, 527 annihilation of  379, 380 Apollo’s vengeance against  303 arrival of Memnon at  203 fall of  22, 30 fate of  380

572 frustration of Greek leaders  176 Greek expedition to  119, 175 Helen in  377 phantom of Helen in  189 Theseus’s sons’ arrival to  381 tyche 3 Tydeus 48 Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (Melville)  483 undead humans  299–300 Valerius 3 verbal metaphors  222 veterans 525–531 violence of Apollo  302–304 Vita Aeschyli.See Life of Aeschylus vocabulary 254 voices 268 Wagner, Cosima  470 Wagner, Richard  471–472 war in Aeschylus  338 Ionian revolt  339 just cause  338 right attitude and responsibility  339–343 Warrior Chorus  525–526, 531. See also Aquila Theatre Watchman (character in Agamemnon)  30–31, 42, 117, 123, 370, 442, 536 opening prayer for release from toils  123, 126 Water-carriers, The  177, 204 Wealth Gods (Cratinus)  419 Weighing of Souls, The  37, 175, 203 wergild 369 Women of Aitna (Aeschylus). See Aitnaiai. Women of Argos, The  205, 209 Women of Salamis, The (Salaminiai) 204 Women of Trachis (Sophocles)  78, 208, 287, 415 Wool-carders, The  177, 204–205 Works and Days (Hesiod)  159, 162, 374, 456 Xanthus, poet influential on Stesichorus  31 xenoi (“guest-friends”) xenia  100–101, 366 Xenophanes 53–54

Index xenophobia 100 Xerxes (son of Darius)  16, 18, 20, 77, 85, 81, 232–233, 328, 336, 337, 342 accountability  340, 342 appearance 83 dimensions of hybris 374 feeling pressure of kingship  339 intrusion 330 invasion of  56 ludicrous caricature of  78 monarchy 341 Queen’s image of  341 sacked Athens  375 skill of  79 Xouthia  67, 68, 69 You Are a Prometheus in Words  2, 420 Youths (Aeschylus)  176, 177 Zement (Müller)  512 Zeus (Greek god of sky)  24, 53, 84, 115, 119, 125, 132–133, 137, 141, 159–160, 234, 238, 275–276, 298, 355, 368, 511 agoraios 370 characterizations 306 Europa’s rape by  24 as guarantor of justice  394 Hesiodic henchmen  159 hikesios 363 inscribed mind of  320 inscrutability of  306 motherless procreation of Athena  137 omnipotence of  53 planning 254 Prometheus and  159–161, 164, 458–459, 514 sexual attentions of  160 sexual pursuit of Thetis  160, 306 sōtēr 364 source of blessings and good rule  306 teleios 394 thunderbolt  164, 382 Zieliński, Tadeusz  467

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