The play is set at Delphi, the most holy of Apollo’s shrines and the centre of his worship in the Greek world. Its importance in Greek life was symbolized by its being regarded as the centre or ‘navel’ of the whole world, an idea mentioned several times in the play. Delphi was most famous for its oracle, at which Apollo was thought to give prophetic responses through his priestess, the Pythia (Pytho being another name for Delphi and ‘Pythian’ one of Apollo’s titles). Although the oracle always spoke the truth, it did not always speak clearly or unambiguously: many stories in Greek literature hinge on the obscurity or double meaning of an oracular pronouncement. The legend of Oedipus, who was told that he would slay his father and marry his mother, is a case in point: this warning seemed clear to him, but he was misled by his ignorance of the true identity of his parents. Ion involves an ambiguity of a different kind: Xuthus, who greatly desires a son, is told that he must treat as his son the first person he meets on leaving the shrine. He takes this to mean that Ion is indeed his son, fathered in a youthful escapade; but the truth is otherwise. Apollo’s truth can be misleading; the god’s words, like his role in this play, are ambiguous.
To Delphi comes a group of Athenians, attending their queen Creusa and her foreign husband, Xuthus of Euboea. The contrast between Delphi and Athens is important in the play, and the presence of Athens offstage, a great city and a kingdom without an heir, is strongly felt. Creusa and Xuthus have no child, and seek the guidance of Apollo in the hope that their wish may be granted. The audience knows, but the characters do not, that the temple-servant Ion is in fact Creusa’s child, whom she bore after having been raped by Apollo, and exposed in shame. She does not recognize her son, now a promising youth; he does not know his origins. The play develops this situation in the most ingenious ways, which it would be superfluous to summarize. Recognition and failed recognition are both key elements in Euripides’ lighter dramas, and they are handled with the skill of a master of irony. Eventually Creusa and her son are reunited, but the twists and turns of the plot keep the audience guessing how this can possibly be achieved.
Recognition, and the failure or delay in reaching that goal, had since the Odyssey been a major source of literary and dramatic plots. In the second half of the Odyssey the hero moves in disguise within his own palace, testing the loyalty of his servants and his wife, observing the misdeeds of the suitors who have taken over his home. In both the Sophoclean and the Euripidean versions of the Electra myth, Orestes remains in disguise much longer than seems natural or necessary, but the suspense is intensely effective. In Iphigenia among the Taurians, Orestes and Iphigenia converse, and again and again it seems inevitable that they will realize each other’s identity, but the poet continually defers the final moment of comprehension. Other examples are easily found. In the present play one influential element is the use of tokens to prove Ion’s identity (again, this goes back to Homer, for Odysseus establishes his true identity by the evidence of the scar he bears from his youth). This type of plot often seems more suited to comedy, or at least to less serious forms of tragedy, for it normally involves the welcome reunion of those who belong together, whether husband and wife or other relations. As ancient critics already remarked, the line continues to the New Comedy of Menander and his Roman imitators; we can follow the tradition still further, to Shakespearian comedies such as The Comedy of Errors (itself based on a classical model) or As You Like It, and to the drawing-room recognitions of Oscar Wilde. The handbag of Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Ernest is the distant descendant of Ion’s royal cradle!
As with other plays in this volume, we need to consider the significance of the Athenian dimension of the story. We immediately respond with sympathy to the story of Creusa’s loss of her virginity, her agonized decision to expose her infant child, her subsequent regrets and her longing for a son to replace the one she lost; also attractive and appealing is the portrayal of Ion as a naïve, unworldly but polite and virtuous young man. The political dimension, however, means that this is more than just a personal drama. The throne of Athens needs an heir. By a procedure common in tragedy, contemporary laws and preoccupations are projected back on the mythical period, so that it is assumed that a true Athenian should be of Athenian birth on both sides (this was in fact required by legislation passed at Perciles’ instigation in 451–450 BC). This means, as Ion hints in the play, that to be Xuthus’ son is not as good as to have Athenian parents (at 670–75 he hopes that he may at least find that his mother is Athenian). In the end he discovers that he is the son of the god Apollo and a royal princess of Athens; the monarchic structure of myth is rather uneasily associated with democratic legal structures.
Ion himself is not a major figure of mythology, but does occupy a significant place in the heroic genealogies. The Greeks sometimes saw themselves as a unified nation: a famous passage in Herodotus refers to the bonds that unite them in the face of a foreign invader as shared blood, shared language, common sanctuaries and sacrifices, and similar customs. But in fact there were many divisions among the peoples we think of as Greek, not only the division into many different political communities, but ethnic or racial differences which were reflected in customs and dialect. One of the most prominent is the division into three peoples, the Ionians, the Dorians and the Achaeans. These divisions were given mythical justification, and Ion is the ancestor of the Ionian peoples; in other versions he has a brother Achaeus, who similarly gives his name to the Achaeans. For Hesiod, Xuthus is son of Hellen and brother of Dorus and Aeolus (again names associated with ethnic groups). The marriage of Xuthus to the Athenian Creusa reflects Athenian claims to be the leaders of the Ionian peoples, and the Euripidean version, making Ion son of Apollo, carries this further, eliminating non-Athenian ancestry and giving a higher status to Ion as opposed to the other sons of Xuthus, Dorus and Achaeus, who have no such divine blood. The passage in Athena’s speech which looks forward to later generations is a conventional element at the end of most plays, but in this play more than most the aetiology has political resonances (1571–94).
What of Apollo? Many interpretations have seen the rape of Creusa as the central and horrific fact of the play, and have read Ion as a critique of divine immorality. This gains some support from the intensity of Creusa’s distress, especially the powerful aria in which she breaks years of silence and cries out in angry accusation of the god (859ff.). It is also striking that the god does not appear in person to defend himself. Hermes represents him at the start of the play, Athena at the conclusion; nor does Apollo’s plan work out precisely as Hermes predicts in the prologue. We must remember, however, that Creusa’s outburst dwells chiefly on the loss of her child, a loss which will not be permanent. By the end of the play, mother and son are reunited. As Athena says and the mortals accept, ‘All has been well managed by Apollo’ (1595) It is typical of Euripides to raise questions about the ways of the gods, and he does so at several points in the play, especially through Ion’s mouth (384–400, 1312–19, 1537). But it does not seem that these questions, however startling to those who share Ion’s naïve piety, are intended to amount to a wholesale assault on Olympian religion. The gods of Greek myth are as they are: from the Iliad onwards, it was possible for mortals to denounce them and even to resist their will, but the better course is normally to accede to that will and hope to receive more good than bad at their hands. In the last book of the Iliad, Achilles comments that there are two jars which stand at Zeus’ side, filled with good fortune and bad; to some he gives nothing but bad, to others a mixture of good and evil. But no mortal receives unmixed good fortune. This sombre but realistic outlook is also present in Greek tragedy. In the closing scene of this play Ion comments: ‘It was the work of a god; but I pray that our fortune may be as good in days to come as it has proved bad in the past’ (1456–7). Neither the play nor other myths involving Ion and Creusa give us reason to suppose that this prayer was disappointed.