Marginal Women, Marginalized Stories: Democracy and the Politics of Fifth-Century Supplication
The key questions posed by Aeschylus in his Suppliants are, according to Weir Smyth, simple ones at heart: ‘is mercy due the suppliant when hospitality spells peril? Is neutrality possible when the choice lies between war and the recognition of the rights of the oppressed?’1 The ‘primitive right of refuge’ and the broader principle of ‘Greek humanitarianism’ are thus the central concerns dramatized as inseparable from democracy itself in this tragedy about fifth-century supplication.2 But, as a tragedy that had its dramatic premiere in the mid-fifth century, amid a turbulent political backdrop, it is not inconceivable that Aeschylus’ tragedy also touched upon certain movements that were conspiring to unsettle the political orthodoxy in and around Athens at the time. Might it have been a tragedy which Aeschylus used to highlight political alternatives, which is to say, a multivocal tragedy that brought a greater variety of otherwise marginalized stories, characters and voices onto the public stage and into democratic debate?
This is the question that detains the present chapter, one that seeks to explore how tragic drama engaged democracy at the height of its popularity in fifth-century Athens. To do so, it will analyse the multivocal form of Aeschylus’ Suppliants by reading it as a democratic text apt to dramatize particular political and existential dilemmas which emerged in the wake of the democratic revolution. Deploying the multivocal form as an analytical tool enables us to better understand how the interplay between order and disorder and reality and fiction was disclosed through an actual tragedy. That said, it perhaps needs to be acknowledged that the veracity of the multivocal form may, for philologists and cultural historians, constitute something of an inadequate analytical apparatus. For example, it is not concerned with analysing Aeschylus’ tragedy according to the structure typical of suppliant dramas where, as Chad Turner points out, the focus is on there being a persecutor, victim and protector.3 Nor is it solely concerned with erecting comprehensive definitions of what amounts to tragic plots, characters and language. As an analytical framework, it is informed by the works of classical thinkers and contemporary classical scholarship, though its ultimate aspiration is to draw out the democratic allusions that are available to us through tragedy. Because of this, methodologies conventional to studies in the classics constitute a helpful guide, but they do not curtail the parameters of this reading. This reading, instead, is about analysing the multivocal form of this Aeschylean tragedy and how it intervened in democratic thought and practice in reality.
Such a reading, as the chapter will suggest, can in the first instance, reveal one of two things. First, it shows how by giving pride of place to a band of foreign and tempestuous women, by humbling otherwise powerful statesmen and by heeding the cry of those in need, even when this comes at a detriment to oneself, Aeschylus’ tragedy juggled the search for order with the spectre of disorder and depicted a universe that was the inverse of the democratic universe known to the Athenians in reality. Secondly, by reading Suppliants as a tragedy performed against a backdrop of political upheaval, it is evident just how Aeschylus may have used his play – as we know he did on other occasions – to provide indirect commentary on the nature and limits of democracy more broadly. While we may not be able to draw concrete links between play and politics, we can speculate whether the key events which were leading to the eventual abolition of the aristocratic Areopagus in Athens could have been an implicit source of inspiration for this dramatic text. After all, overcoming the pettiness of politics, the draw of aristocratic nostalgia and an increasingly hostile international arena were the stuff that consumed both Aeschylus’ drama and the Athens of his day. Exploring how the two intersected, if at all, holds possible lessons about the fluid relationship between reality and fiction.
Plot
But before we can say anything about that, first we need to establish just what Aeschylus’ play was about. Did it enact a real crisis or conflict – one that invoked a duel between values, wills and circumstances serious enough to shake the foundations of society? And how, if at all, did it dramatize the world’s complexity and foster an understanding that one’s world view is never the only or even the best world view?
Threatened with a destiny not of their own choosing, Aeschylus’ tragedy presents his audience with a group of 50 sisters who have fled from their homeland of Egypt to Argos, a democratic city-state of Greece. Met by a kindly king, the suppliants request that he decide their fate. Will he accept these women as suppliants and face a hostile reprisal from their Egyptian suitors? Or should he opt to let them die by their own hands and befoul the city’s gods? Structured around the suppliant maidens’ plea for political asylum in a foreign land, the plot line of this Aeschylean tragedy thus sparked a variety of competing values, wills and circumstances that would, in time, bring this city-state and its people to their knees.
It all begins, as Aeschylus’ tragedy opens, with a band of sisters who have fled their Egyptian home with the intention of escaping an arranged marriage scheduled to take place with their 50 Egyptian cousins. In Argos, they seek not only to find a safe haven that can shield them from their marital woes, but also a new city to call their home. In the opening scene, the chorus of suppliant maidens sing:
Hallowed netherland whose sunbruised
boundaries graze desert leaving it
we flew
not outlaws hounded publicly for murder’s blood on our hands
but fugitives
escaping self-built prisons for our own flesh.4
Terrified, they plead for asylum. They have no other recourse than supplication. Not long after their arrival, they are met personally by the king of Argos, Pelasgus. Initially, the king is warm in his reception and visibly moved by the suppliants’ predicament. He cannot be otherwise as the suppliants’ bid, at least at the outset, is candid and impassioned, yet also deferential to the king’s authority. But that does not last long. Rapidly, their tone changes as Pelasgus wavers. When he admits that he may not, despite being the Argive king, be capable of reaching a determination in his own right, supplication quickly turns into something more forceful. The suppliants despair, but not before they provide him with an ultimatum: accept them into his city walls as suppliants or live with the knowledge that their blood will be on his hands. If their demands are not met, the suppliants threaten Pelasgus that they will commit an act of mass suicide on the altars of the city’s gods outside Argos’ city walls. Such an act would displease the gods and pollute the city as a whole.
Why Pelasgus is reluctant to accede to the suppliants’ demands, as pointed out by a number of more contemporary scholars, is because he finds himself faced with having to resolve an issue that pits a set of rather incompatible values, wills and circumstances together. Whatever he decides, his society will not remain unaffected. As Janet Lembke writes of his predicament:
The petition presents [him] with a choice of evils. If sanctuary is refused, the gods, offended by such sacrilege, will surely punish Argos. But if the Suppliants are sheltered, war with Egypt is a certainty, for the Egyptians do seem to have a valid legal claim upon the women. In either event the Argive people will suffer.5
This, for both Pelasgus and the suppliants, seems to be a lose–lose situation. If they are denied asylum, the suppliants surely risk reprisal from their would-be grooms and, after that, a lifetime of repression and violence. Unable or unwilling to face such a prospect, the sisters rightly turn their thoughts, at the very least their threats, to the idea of suicide on the altars of the Argive gods. But an act seemingly directed at the gods was actually directed no less at Argos. Dirtying the gods’ altars, in other words, would have, in effect, been no different from befouling the city of Argos as a whole. And so, if the king does not act, those who will suffer the most will be none other than the Argive people. By the same token, however, if Pelasgus does decide to act and receive the suppliants into the city, he will most certainly antagonize his Egyptian neighbours, who are already in pursuit of the women they see as rightly theirs. Action, as such, will constitute an act of war. Either way then, it appears that the Argives cannot escape what is coming to them. From this one crisis – the suppliants’ bid for asylum in a foreign land – Pelasgus is made to adjudicate between a set of irreconcilable values, wills and circumstances. This is the crux of the plot line of this Aeschylean tragedy.
But, as it quickly transpires, Pelasgus may not need to make this decision by himself. It is true that his concern for the Argive people and his compassion for the suppliants weigh on his heart and deny him a final decision. Be that as it may, he is relieved from the duty of reaching a final determination alone because, as Aeschylus makes clear, Argos is a democratic city-state. Pressed by the urgent ultimatum presented to him by the suppliants, Pelasgus has no other choice than to defer this question directly to the people for debate and judgement. Taking his leave from the foreign refugees, he returns to the city to put their case before the Argive Assembly. Only they, not Pelasgus, can rightly determine the suppliants’ fate. Though the city’s king, Aeschylus has him defer to the citizens. And perhaps indicative of their democratic predisposition, the Argive people are similarly moved by the harrowing situation faced by these foreign women. But unlike their king, who was paralysed by indecision, Aeschylus unanimously makes the people of Argos back the suppliants’ claim for entry. They vote as one to recognize the suppliants’ plea and to accept them into their city.
It is a decision that the Argives make to their detriment, however – this being a tragic drama, a reversal of this sort is perhaps to be expected. In what evidence survives of Egyptians and Danaids, the second and third plays of the Danaid trilogy, we learn that soon afterwards Argos falls under the weight of an Egyptian invasion.6 As the suppliants had so rightly feared, an Egyptian Herald was then followed by a full-scale Egyptian invasion. Pelasgus and, we can only assume, the Argives who rose in defence of their city are slain. In his place, Danaus, the suppliants’ father, is crowned the new king – but not a democratic king as Turner suggests.7 He takes power by force and without popular support. Forced to honour the original betrothal of his daughters to the 50 sons of King Aegyptus of Egypt, Danaus and his daughters conceive a plot of murder: to kill their husbands on the wedding night. The plan is agreed to by all, that is, except Hypermestra, who discovers love for her new husband and unravels the entire sequence of events.
Perhaps had love been discovered sooner, and by all the sisters, then the bloodshed might have been avoided. But it was not and Aeschylus’ tragedy illuminates what happens when individuals are unwilling to look beyond their own world view and negotiate what they desire with the desires of others. The suppliants may have, according to their own logic, fled with just cause. Yet they refused to bend or concede their position. This was evident in the ultimatum they presented to Pelasgus: either he let them in or they will pollute the city with their corpses. There was no pause to contemplate what their imposition would mean for Argos or what right they have to flee from Egypt. As for the Egyptian brothers, little is known about the agreement that has guaranteed them their brides. All that is known is that they have come in search of what, they claim, is theirs by law. Either Argos returns the 50 brides to their grooms, or Egypt will wage war on the city and take back the women by force. There can be no concession. There is no willingness to recognize these women’s rights – which, of course, was custom throughout the ancient world. In the middle of it all was the city-state of Argos and its citizens who, for their part, voted to take the side of the suppliants, even with the threat of warfare looming down upon them. Perhaps, this was Aeschylus’ intention: to dramatize the complexity of a situation that had no obvious answers and was not devoid of risks. The need to understand the world view of others, which may very well have been a point Aeschylus was hoping to communicate with his tragedy, is both a necessary and fraught undertaking in a democratic polis. The costly decision that the democrats of Argos made was right, even though it was made to their own eventual detriment.
Characters
To make these decisions, Aeschylus populated his tragedy with a cast of characters that would have resounded with a good cross section of his Athenian audiences. Indeed, though not all were liked or familiar figures, they were, according to Mary Ebbott’s classification, ‘multidimensional, sublime, profoundly complex whole – all character traits without which no tragic fall could have been possible’. And given the varied cast, it also became possible for him to manufacture ‘zones of interaction’ for characters from different worlds to engage with one another.
But, of the four main characters in Suppliants, it is arguably the group of 50 suppliant women who are the most noteworthy. Because of their number, Aeschylus has made them take the place of the chorus within the tragedy. In itself a unique feature, the chorus of suppliant maidens essentially constitutes the protagonist in Aeschylus’ tragedy, given that more than half of the play is composed of suppliant choral lyric.8 The three remaining characters include Danaus, the suppliants’ father, Pelasgus, the king of Argos and the Egyptian Herald, who enters late in the tragedy to forcibly seek the return of the suppliants to Egypt.
As women, the suppliants’ prominence within the tragedy would have been highly significant. For both the Argives within the tragedy and the Athenian audiences who witnessed the performance of it at the City Dionysia, these were not like the typical women they would have confronted in their daily lives. They were impetuous and exotic Egyptian women. Here, the words of Danaus and Pelasgus are a testament to this:
Remember, bend!
You are in want, strangers, fugitives,
and rash tongues do not suit
the part of weakness.9
Where
have you come from? A congregation
glittering, bizarre in alien robes and diadems,
and womanly, yet gaudy as no women
I have ever known or dreamed . . .10
The words of their father and later of the king depict the suppliants as women eccentric in their status and aspiration. Not only that, but they are foreign both in their physical and political constitutions. They dictate the action as public figures, something which no woman of Greece was. Women, in Greek society, were private figures who had no public voice or democratic vote. By contrast, the Egyptian sisters of Aeschylus’ tragedy dominate the dialogue and, before long, turn into Pelasgus’ inquisitor: what cause has he to deny them entry into the city? This is all the more astounding since Pelasgus is the sovereign of the land in which they are seeking asylum. Regardless of their lowly position, these women take charge. They assume the role that is conventionally reserved for the father figure, Danaus. As a result, all he can do is caution his boisterous daughters to ‘trust | in the elder wisdom of your captain-father’.11 But, these words have little weight. They are more a plea than a command. From beginning to end, Danaus appears insignificant; a wise sage turned servant. There is little that Aeschylus does with him, at least within this tragedy. For a man of stately prestige, this would indeed have amounted to an inversion of ancient norms.
Yet, this is only where the state of inversion begins. The character of Pelasgus is also intriguing as he accedes both to the women and then to the polis. A strong and benevolent ruler, he boasts of the land in which the suppliants have come in search of asylum. However, through his interaction with this lowly group of women, his strength and benevolence are reduced to fear and apprehension. Their words strike unease into his heart and he is quickly incapacitated by these women. A dilemma that would see the ruin of his beloved Argos and put his compatriots at risk is not one that he can easily overcome. He is torn. Perhaps then, what is most peculiar about Pelasgus – as a tragic hero faced with an insurmountable dilemma – is his incapacity to face tragedy head on. Unlike an Oedipus or an Antigone, Pelasgus cannot decide either way. That is, until the people have decided as one. This means that the democratically empowered Argive people in effect take the place of the tragic hero and become the final arbiter of the tragedy’s crisis.12 At least symbolically, it is the everyday citizens and the democracy of Argos that take centre stage in this Aeschylean tragedy.
Finally, the minor character of the Egyptian Herald is of note because he is the embodiment of the political autocracy from which the suppliants are seeking to escape. Compare his engagement with the Danaids to that of Pelasgus’:
I order: stop this madmouth
crazy woman cursing.
get up, march down to the landing craft.
You – honorless, homeless,
Not worth my love or fear.13
. . . I am amazed.
But the branches
that lie besides you in godshadow
seem lawhonored signs that you claim asylum.
At this one point perhaps your world meets mine.14
A more contrary state representative could not be found in these two characters. While to the Herald the women are neither deserving of his honour or love, Pelasgus is moved by compassion and understands that two civilizations have met together outside his city walls. This exemplifies for us the zones of interaction in this tragedy that allow for such characters as the suppliants, Danus, Pelasgus and the Herald to come face to face. Moreover, through this interaction, what we find is that characters like Danaus, Pelasgus and the Herald – the wise, stately and authoritarian men who would have dominated the ancient world – are made to bow to the will of the many: first to the people of Argos who themselves bowed to the will of the 50 suppliant women of Egypt.
Language
Unlike most other tragedies of its day though, what would have really set Suppliants apart is its language, more than half of which is composed entirely of choral lyric. The ‘many-voicedness’, both rational and non-rational, of the characters staged would have vocalized a polyphony of viewpoints quite likely to provoke the ‘freedom of others’ points of view to . . . reveal themselves’. The lyrics, in Peter Burian’s assessment, amount to some of ‘the densest, most opulent, most purely lovely things in all Greek poetry’; there to give voice to the suppliants’ ecstatic irrationalities, their intense yearning and their deepest despair.15 What can be heard at length in these choral lyrics is what could not be expressed rationally. It is poetic and seizes their innermost mood. Take these two passages for example:
io io ioioioioio
No flight
no time to hide
Inhuman cruelty leaves no escape
My heart beats darker
dashes like a small trapped creature
A father’s eye snares me, fear haunts me
Let my bondage to doom
end in a slipnoose
Before a man
I wish unborn
Can touch my flesh, O come
husband me, Death.16
If terror, angst, defiance and arrogance could be verbalized in one single outburst, perhaps it is the choral lyrics of these ancient tragedies that came the closest. Indeed, in the above two passages it is made clear that, despite their best efforts, the suppliants may not be able to escape their own fate. Their words give form to this realization. There is no sense or logic to be salvaged at these moments. With no middle ground, no escape route, the tension stretches to hyperbolic dimensions. Will the suppliants escape the one thing they have led us to believe they cannot tolerate? Logic cannot easily explain such a predicament.
And as women from faraway lands, they would have been hard-pressed to do so before Pelasgus, the Argives as well as the audiences at the City Dionysia in Athens. Their language, unintelligible at times, voiced the unheard predicaments of women from foreign countries. It made audible certain fears and aspirations that the Athenians had suppressed within the political realm. And yet, for the women, foreign residents and even the slaves who from time to time attended the Dionysia and Lenaia festivals, these were concerns that they, as marginalized individuals, may have been quite capable of relating to. The chorus gives voice to these facets of ourselves and societies.
Set against the choral odes are the passages of Danaus, Pelasgus and the Egyptian Herald. As already touched upon, Danaus’ words express a father figure whose authority resembles that of a mother’s. Without any real authority, he is not so much the suppliants’ spokesman as their aid and messenger. As for the language of Pelasgus and the Herald, they are indicative of their political differences: one even-handed, open to debate and democratic; the other cold, rigid and dictatorial. The opposition between empathetic paralysis and a crude one-sidedness is starkly visible in the words of Pelasgus and the Herald.
Taken together, the tragic language in this tragedy gives voice to the divergent perspectives and aspirations of the characters. The choral lyric of the suppliants, which dominates the dialogue within the whole play, expresses their arrogance and their fears. Danus, who actually says very little, is dictated to by his pestilent daughters. As a conciliator, Pelasgus speaks in uncertain terms and attempts to balance competing arguments and possibilities. He pauses, often for too long, to process the claims made before him. He urges restraint but also understands the dire situation that the suppliants are faced with. By contrast, the Egyptian Herald’s language conveys that he is not there to negotiate. He has no desire to listen to the reasons offered by the suppliants nor does he recognize the democratic principles and laws of humanitarianism that has apparently compelled the Argives to receive the suppliants as refugees from a foreign land.
The multivocal form of Aeschylus’ Suppliants: A dramatic representation of Athens’ democracy
Read together, there are therefore three interrelated points of note. The first and most obvious is how prominent the suppliants are within the tragedy – a fact that is affirmed by the relative weakness of Danaus and Pelasgus. Aeschylus’ tragedy is one where the women take centre stage. It is their agency, their personal aspirations and, ultimately, their repudiation of men’s authority around which the tragedy’s plot revolves. In this sense, it can be said that the tragedy attempts to foreground certain things that had habitually been suppressed in the public domain of the polis. The mass intrusion of the foreign, alien and anti-democratic into a democratic city-state of Greece shows just what a democratic city-state of Greece should endure in the name of its democracy. Related to this is the second point: that issues of inclusion and exclusion are near indivisible. Here, the suppliants’ plea for inclusion raised the question of what it was a democratic polis should, by its nature, be able to tolerate. But such a plea was soon shown to be inseparable from existence itself. Exclusion would have resulted in the suppliants’ suicide at the altar of the gods. Inclusion did result in Argive deaths. Accordingly, the third point made by Aeschylus’ Suppliants is that inclusion and exclusion are at the heart of democracy, and this is why it is so tragic.
Through these three points, this tragedy would have problematized for its audiences the two dichotomies crucial to democratic politics at the time. The first is the interplay between order and disorder and the second between reality and fiction. Order, dramatized as what the suppliants seek and what the Argives possess, coexists intimately with disorder in Aeschylus’ tragedy. Indeed, it was the very nature of the Argives’ democratic existence that demanded they take the suppliants’ plea into account. Their comfortable existence as such could be ruptured at any time. This was what their democracy demanded of them. And so, by recognizing the suppliants’ appeal, Argos effectively brought about its own capitulation at the hands of the Egyptians. Pelasgus, chief among the Argives, was to pay the greatest price. In that instant, the idea and ideal of democracy must have reverberated around the theatre of Dionysus in Athens. We know this because Suppliants premiered at a time when the issue of democracy’s future raged within the Athenian Assembly and courts. Performed just years after Themistocles, one of Athens’ more notable democrats, was ostracized for championing a stronger and more egalitarian democratic make-up, the tragedy would have had unmistakable political overtones. While the similarities between the plot line of Suppliants and Themistocles’ ostracism are interesting, and possibly more than mere coincidence, the differences that emerge between them also raise intriguing questions. And thus, by blurring or problematizing reality and fiction, this tragedy would quite likely have been a medium which the citizens of the day turned to in an attempt to think through some of the more intractable obstacles impeding democracy’s expansion during the fifth century.
Order/Disorder
But just how exactly can we say that the multivocal form of Aeschylus’ tragedy brought a variety of otherwise marginalized stories, characters and voices onto the public stage and into democratic debate? That is the question which detains us here and, in the first instance, it will be answered through an exploration of the interplay between order and disorder – something that Aeschylus’ Suppliants manages to traverse to powerful effect.
After all, it is the issue of order that the tragedy broaches from the very outset when, through the suppliants, it begs the question: ‘Land? shall you welcome | our coming?’17 Yet, as a question which concerns the inclusion of the foreign other into the polis, it also touches upon the spectre of disorder. Weighed down by the impending clash and the prospect of destruction, Pelasgus thus proclaims to the suppliants: ‘At this one point perhaps your world meets mine’.18 What order is to result in the aftermath? This is arguably the first fundamental theme Suppliants broaches: the necessity of order.
Indeed, even in the tragedy’s opening lines, Aeschylus makes clear that the suppliants have fled their homeland solely because of their animus towards the violent order where forced marriage and male domination are only the external by-products:
Never
not ever
may the power of a male fist crush me
With help instead from sailorguiding stars
I chart my own course flight
from a loathsome marriage . . .19
Driven by pure self-will, they desire unfettered sovereignty over their lives.20 Their demands for asylum are unyielding, ‘even insolent’, as Meier writes.21 For them, it is either success or failure, acceptance or death. They push Pelasgus to make his decision. As king, the suppliants argue that he alone possesses the right to warrant their entry. As king, the women believe that Pelasgus is just like a pharaoh of Egypt, whose single-voice and single-hand dictates to all people, willing or otherwise, their place and rights in the world. He is the one who sanctions what is and what is not in his city. To him, they cry:
You the people! You the government!
A pharaoh chosen, unimpeachable you
sustain the fire blazing on the country’s altarhearth
with single-voiced decrees, your own,
and single-handed from your sovereign bench you
bring all debts to final reckoning . . .22
What the king decrees, they argue, is what will come to pass. Their insistence reaches a climax when, faced with Pelasgus’ continual diffidence, the suppliants threaten their own deaths on the altars of the gods:
If you can make us no firm promise –
New strange offerings to give the godstone splendour . . .
To hang myself, and now, AND FROM THESE VERY GODS!23
Their threat, in this sense, echoes the primal human need to secure meaningful order, which for them would have been impossible under the rule of the sons of Aegyptus. But neither would it be possible in the wilderness, a place of nothingness and death. The means they have chosen in procuring order is indicative of the despotic order they have known.24 As women without political status or physical might, their forceful words, their imposition and their hoped for acquiescence on the Argive part are their only weapons – weapons that ultimately prove to be successful.
For democratic Argos, however, the question of order – for the suppliants and themselves – is approached differently. The Argos of Aeschylus’ Suppliants seems a place that appears worthy of envy. Pelasgus regales of its glory early on in the play:
Over plains, over valleys
where rivers curl redgold
toward the sunset, I hold all power.
Beyond eye’s north horizon
to mountains that build immense palisades
against the wild tribes,
to foothills where oaktrees
rustle their oracles . . .25
But that is not entirely accurate. Being a democratic polis, the leader is found on more than one occasion referring to the power of the people. On this particular occasion, after agonizing over the suppliants’ situation, Pelasgus ultimately delegates the issue to the people. Can Argos cope with the implications of the suppliants’ presence within its walls? Can it cope with the difference of the women and the potential destruction they bring? Can it cope, in short, with what they are not and those who would bring them their end? These are the questions the Argive people assemble to decide. The decision they make, reached after a democratic vote, is recounted by the suppliants’ father, Danaus, who accompanies Pelasgus to the Assembly:
The men of Argos voted not ambivalently
but so that my old veins ran hot and young again.
In full assembly every man raised his right hand –
air bristled! – to confirm this resolution:
THAT WE BECOME SETTLERS IN OUR MOTHERLAND,
FREE, SECURE IN OUR PERSONS
AGAINST ALL SEIZURE AND HUMAN REPRISAL;
THAT NO MAN, EITHER NATIVEBORN OR ALIEN,
DRIVE US OUT INTO CAPTIVITY,
HE WHO DOES NOT AID US,
THOUGH IT IS HIS RIGHT AND DUTY TO BEAR ARMS,
SHALL LOSE ALL RIGHTS,
HIS EXILE MANDATED BY HIS PEERS.26
With this democratic resolution, Argive order is reaffirmed anew. But as the final line shows, order is always laced with its opposite.
Disorder, in this sense, can come in many forms, though it will always appear in a manner and at an interval just beyond one’s grasp. In Suppliants, symbolic reminders of the presence of disorder are littered throughout the tragedy. However, the two most overt instances are the suppliants’ threat of suicide and the final destruction of Argos by the Egyptians.
Pitched as their ultimate threat, the suppliants inform Pelasgus that if they do not receive asylum within his city, they will have no option except to hang themselves from the statues of the city’s gods. To threaten such a profane act implied two things. The first is the state of desperation these women must have been in. Toying with the thought of suicide insinuates just how despondent they were becoming at the possibility of returning to Egypt or dying in the desert. It was with this mentality that they entertained the idea of death. However, to hang themselves from the statues of the gods signified that these women had also lost faith in the gods and, by extension, the order they symbolized for human existence. What better way to show this than to defile the gods and the city of Argos with their bodily remains. Both their afterlives and the life of Argos as a community would be put in jeopardy – but, if we are to believe the suppliants’ threats, this was something that these women neither cared about nor believed in any longer. Yet, for Pelasgus, who clearly did still care and believe, the suppliants’ words were like ‘whips that flay my heart’.27 And how could they not, for such an act would, according to him, ‘[befoul] both gods and men’,28 thereby polluting the very core of Argos and presage its eventual doom at the hands of those gods.29 Had the suppliants’ committed suicide, all of Argos would have been thrust into disorder. But luckily for all involved, this prospect was averted at the last minute, when the Argive people voted to accept the suppliants into their midst.
Despite this, as the tragedy ends, we realize that Argos would not to be spared. Having chosen to recognize the suppliants as one of their own, the Argives in effect elected to destroy themselves. Their destruction, in this sense, was not up to them, being intrinsic to the way they lived. What Pelasgus had sought so desperately to avoid when he mulled over what he would do with these women is ultimately proved true:
But if I stand, back to the wall, and battletest
the issue with your cousins, Egypt’s sons,
shall not the cost be bitter: men drenching
trampled earth with blood, and all in the name of women?30
According to the myth, the lost plays of the Danaid trilogy tell precisely of the deaths of Pelasgus and the Argive defenders at the hands of the Egyptians. To this end, the order which the Argives sought so hard to preserve was the very order that called them to accept the suppliants. And this was what brought disruption and death to their city. But even if the Egyptians had not come to seek the return of these women, the women themselves would have disrupted the natural flow of this Greek society. Their absolute denunciation of marriage and, with it, conventions of family, fertility and community went against deeply held Greek beliefs.31 As such, even without war and destruction, the Argives would have subjected themselves and their society to the foreign beliefs of these Egyptian women.32
Order, accordingly, exists in a problematic relationship with its opposite. Certainly, the question of inclusion and the spectre of destruction go hand in hand in Suppliants. The dilemma faced by Pelasgus and the Argives pit foreigners against citizens, inside against outside, women against men, war against peace and the gods against the city. For this reason, Pelasgus, in his own assessment, is instantly
. . .made weaponless.
Fear beat in my body like a pulse:
to act, or not to act and let chance deliver
its blind verdict.33
Is he to accede to the laws of the gods, the moral law of humanitarianism or does he save the city from the prospect of war with Egypt? All pertain to order, and all bring with them the prospect of an impending disorder that terrorizes Argive existence. To be physically secure and prosperous at the expense of moral wholeness or to be morally upright at the cost of the city’s destruction? These are the questions which tear at Pelasgus’ heart. Responsibility is due both to the Argives and the suppliants, both to the city and the gods. There are no easy, inconsequential answers. Indeed, as Pelasgus pleads,
There is no facile judgement for the case.
Choose not me as judge.
I have told you, tell you now, not without
the polity’s consent
may I act on the question, not even though I rule, . . .
Aliens. When you honored them, you damned your people.34
For Kitto, Pelasgus is a man on the brink of the abyss, forced like typical tragic heroes to choose between two evils.35
But as is clear, it is a choice which Pelasgus ultimately relinquishes to the Argive people as a whole. Here, Podlecki makes the critical point that while Kitto is correct to see Pelasgus as an individual thrust to the brink of the abyss by Aeschylus, he does not realize that Aeschylus ultimately fails to push Pelasgus over that edge.36 Instead, Aeschylus transfers the right and responsibility of this choice onto the people. The transfer of power and focus is significant since it presents not Pelasgus as the ultimate tragic hero around which the tragedy centres, but the citizens of democratic Argos. While the king is paralysed by vacillation, the people possess the gall to decide as one and confront the consequences together. By identifying the people as the tragic heroes of this play, we are reminded of the dangers of overstepping individual limits.37 Living with the prospect of disorder is best done together. Not that this makes life any easier. Individually, the fate of Pelasgus attests to this. And as a collective, so did the fates of the Argive people, whose decision to receive the suppliants signalled open hostility against their Egyptian suitors; this, the harbinger of their ultimate demise.
Reality/Fiction
These issues and themes, central to Aeschylus’ Suppliants, were also central to fifth-century Athenian politics. Refuge in a foreign, democratic land; eminent figures turned into suppliants; the onset of political strife and the broadening of the democratic franchise – these were the very dilemmas faced by Athens in reality in the mid-460s, when Suppliants had its premiere. From what we now know about the tragedy, it would not be a stretch of one’s imagination to read Aeschylus’ play against – and indeed as indirect commentary of – these political dilemmas. It would not be a stretch of one’s imagination to think that this was what the Athenians themselves did, what Aeschylus intended for them to do. For, this was how fictional accounts legitimately entered political lexicon in ancient Athens.
But aided by both hindsight and the historical accounts that we do have, we can conjecture a more specific way in which Aeschylus’ Suppliants might have entered Athens’ political debates. As a tragedy that touched upon the topics of exile, democratic franchise and war, it would have also touched upon or rephrased a number of the key questions that were reverberating around Athens at the time. These questions, first raised during the ostracism of Themistocles from Athens, which occurred just years before the premiere of Aeschylus’ tragedy, were eventually resolved when the aristocratic Areopagus was finally abolished in 462/461 BC. Wedged in between these two events, notable in the history of democratic Athens, can we say that Aeschylus used his tragedy, in part, to illuminate the broader trajectory which democracy was at that time on?
Ostracized from Athens most likely around 471/470 BC, Themistocles was a notable Athenian democrat and one of only 20 recorded individuals ever to be ostracized from Athens.38 Though already touched upon in previous chapters, the procedure of ostracism is interesting as it exemplified perfectly the democratic balance between order and disorder in Athenian life. Here was a procedure created, first, to stem the resurgence of autocracy and, second, to enable citizens to keep each other in check.39 Preventing the absolute rule of one was the ultimate aim of this procedure. Effectively, ostracism permitted citizens to elect and vote particular members of the community into a 10-year exile from Athens for reasons of political arrogance, mismanagement or fraud. According to Donald Kagan, ‘[t]he law doubtless had the stated intent of preventing the recurrence of tyranny, and being enacted when it was [after the democratic revolution], it was sure to be popular’.40 More than this, he argues that ostracism could accommodate the bigger, constitutional question which confronted the nascent democracy, which was ‘how to prevent the dangers of faction and subversion while avoiding the extremes of inquisition, violence and mass expulsion resorted to by other Greek democracies with tragic consequences’.41
Unlike intra-elite exile, therefore, ostracism provided the people with the right, as citizens, to determine the make-up of their world and those who would rule therein. Because of this, questions about and decisions to ostracize were not taken lightly nor before sustained public debate. It was not arbitrary, exclusive and imposed from above, but an open, fair and judicious mechanism to rid the polis of its most violent and oppressive constituents.42 But none of this, it should be made clear, prevented ostracism from being used or misused to achieve particular political ends. Indeed, given that democracy was the rule of majority sentiment, whatever sentiment happened to be in the minority could end up being branded as violent and oppressive. Because of this, even the most powerful Athenians could, if they fell out of favour, with the majority, find themselves lowered to a position that was often worse off than the worst off in Athens: the women, children, foreign residents and slaves. They could find themselves in the clasp of disorder, even as they strove to institute greater order.
While fought over specific policies and against one particular opponent, Themistocles’ ostracism was evocative of a greater schism which had developed in Athens after the democratic revolution. Put simply, this schism was one which divided the aristocrats of Athens from the democrats or those who supported the Areopagus from those who did not.43 In the aftermath of the Cleisthenic reforms of 508/507 BC, the continued existence of the Areopagus remained a topic of some contention. It came to symbolize the greater struggle between democracy and aristocracy in Athens, that is, until its eventual abolition in 462/461 BC, one year following the first staging of Suppliants. Themistocles achieved prominence during these years, as a renowned activist for democracy in Athens.
The precise cause of Themistocles’ ostracism, of course, arose from a much more specific, yet nonetheless divisive, issue: Athenian foreign policy. The conventional wisdom that continued to grip Athens, even in the post-Persian Wars era, was that Persia nevertheless constituted the city’s greatest adversary. For Themistocles, however, this fear was ill-conceived. Instead of Persia, he believed that it was actually Sparta which posed the greatest threat to Athens following the capitulation of Persia. Buoyed by its victory in the Persian Wars, Athens’ ascendancy rightly troubled Sparta. They would, Themistocles thought, not rest long in the Hellenic alliance which had united the two city-states in opposition to Persia.44 Because of this, war with Sparta would eventually be inevitable – as would Athens’ eventual conquest, if it did not do all it could to suppress a resurgent Sparta. In view of this, Themistocles is recorded as having pushed for closer ties with the enemies of Sparta, most prominently Argos.45 For him, a compact of democratic states was envisioned to counter the rise of an aristocratic one.
To be expected, the aspirations of Themistocles did not find favour, with many of Athens’ most powerful elites. These powerbrokers were largely sympathetic to Athens’ aristocratic heritage and believed that an authoritarian Sparta was obviously preferable to an exotic and aggressive Persia that had only years before undertaking an invasion of Greece. One of the key proponents of this position, and an ardent political opponent of Themistocles, was Cimon, whose animus towards Persia and support for Sparta distinguished him from Themistocles. Crucially though, unlike Themistocles, Cimon enjoyed the majority of the people’s backing. Being a man who esteemed tradition and, by extension, a politically robust Areopagus, Cimon’s views reflected a large cross-section of Athenians who desired greater stability within their domestic and foreign affairs.46 As the stronger of the two parties, Cimon quickly outmanoeuvred Themistocles politically. In an alliance led by Cimon and other pro-Spartan elites, Themistocles, therefore, found himself accused and convicted of treason – for allegedly conspiring to betray Hellas to Persia.47 Portrayed as unpatriotic, Cimon and his Spartan backers managed to convince the Athenian voters to ostracize Themistocles.48
Exiled from Athens, Themistocles, perhaps to be expected, sought asylum in Argos – the city-state which he had tried to ally Athens with. Astoundingly, Argos granted Themistocles asylum knowing full well what consequences might ensue. By receiving Themistocles and aiding his plan to subvert Athens and Sparta, Forrest notes that Argos effectively signalled open hostility to both Sparta and Cimonian Athens.49 What evidence there is indicates that Argos had been a democracy from the outset of the fifth century, sharing many parallels with her Athenian sister state.50 Hence, its decision to receive Themistocles as a suppliant must have, to some degree, met with the approval of a significant portion of the citizens within Argos, perhaps as a result of a democratic vote similar to the one which took place in Suppliants.
But what happened next was both curious and unexpected. Almost as quickly as he had entered Argos, we read that Themistocles fled his newfound haven. This we know from a passage in Thucydides, who recounts that, upon learning of a combined Spartan-Athenian embassy charged to pursue and ‘take him wherever they found him’, Themistocles fled of his own accord.51 For Sparta, these measures were justified. Themistocles, who ‘was in the habit of visiting other parts of the Peloponnese’,52 presumably to shore up democratic resolve and establish an anti-Spartan league, provoked tremendous suspicion and anxiety from Sparta.53
But, the exact reasons as to why he left Argos remain unknown. Did he no longer have the support of his Argive hosts? Was there internal turmoil brewing within Argos itself? Or, did Themistocles simply wish to avert the bloodbath which would have ensued had he stayed? The answers to these questions remain unclear. All that is clear is that he did flee, to Corcyra which, though ‘under obligations towards him . . . could not venture to shelter him at the cost of offending Athens and Lacedaemon, and they conveyed him over to the continent opposite’.54
Whatever the reasons then, the Argos of this story escaped the wrath that the Argos of Aeschylus’ Suppliants could not. Even so, the similarities and differences between Aeschylus’ tragedy and the political consequences of Themistocles’ ostracism are fascinating and worthy of some further speculation.
For one, a consensus now exists confirming that Suppliants was probably first performed at the City Dionysia in Athens sometime around the mid-460s, most likely in 463 BC.55 The temporal proximity between Themistocles’ ostracism and the performance of Aeschylus’ Suppliants could quite conceivably have spoken volumes to the Athenian audiences, as well as to the visiting dignitaries of neighbouring Argos and Sparta. The overwhelming resemblance and chronological immediacy between what took place in reality with what was staged through fiction meant that the tragedy could, at least in the interpretation of some, be viewed as a political metaphor for the events of the recent past.56
But this symbolism was not merely historical. The politics surrounding Themistocles’ ostracism was not a thing of the past. Certainly, by the time Aeschylus’ Suppliants was performed in Athens, it was becoming clear that these issues were still very much alive. If anything, Themistocles’ ostracism had only been a prelude to the bigger shift that was set to occur: the abolition of the Areopagus and the move to greater democracy in Athens.
Aeschylus’ tragedy sat between the key political events of Themistocles’ ostracism, which coincided with the rise of Cimon/Sparta, and Ephialtes’ reforms to abolish the Areopagus, the harbinger of Cimon’s eventual downfall and ostracism from Athens. Amid the political commotion, Meier makes the point that ‘[q]uestion upon question was bound to arise, questions which could hardly be aired before the Assembly without arousing suspicions of vested political interests’.57 Think here of what had happened to Themistocles for suggesting that the Athenians had misplaced their efforts in seeking to defend against another Persian attack. Exempt from these restraints, tragedians like Aeschylus used their fictional creations to air, problematize and even resolve these political questions in a manner and forum accessible to all. Aeschylean tragedy was certainly a culprit of political commentary and contemplation, in both a narrow and broad sense.58 However, we must again remember that Aeschylus’ intentions and his tragedies were not mere ‘charades on contemporary events’.59 Instead, the political purpose and treatment of Aeschylean tragedy was always more metaphorical, abstract and redolent.60
Insofar as Aeschylus was broadly inspired by the political connotations of Themistocles’ ostracism, Suppliants did not amount to mere ‘political allegory’.61 Rather, Aeschylus reinterpreted the myth to remind the Athenians of the heroism of the Argives when they received Themistocles, even with the knowledge of looming hostilities. But the drama also acted as a personal medium for Aeschylus to air his appreciation to the democrats – both within and beyond Athens.62 Aeschylus’ constant emphasis on the people’s power in Suppliants,63 in this regard, was not only astounding because it was anachronistic from a mythological perspective but also because of the democratic sympathies and developments rife within Athens at the time.64 Too many similarities exist between the Argives’ democracy, as recounted by Danaus in Suppliants, and the Athenians’ democracy of the mid-460s to have been mere coincidence.65 But more than this, the tragedy also alluded to some of the most pressing concerns on Athens’ political horizon, even suggesting a possible way forward.
Just take Themistocles’ seemingly self-imposed flight from Argos, for example. Aeschylus, as we know, chose to recreate a different ending for his tragedy. But why? As has already been mentioned, the precise reasons for Themistocles’ departure are unknown. But if they were, in fact, to do with internal turmoil within Argos, that is to say, a battle between its own democrats and aristocrats, then Aeschylus’ tragedy may have had one of two effects. If, on the one hand, Argos was no longer dependable as a democratic ally – for Themistocles and the Athenian democrats – then Aeschylus’ Suppliants may have acted both as encouragement and reproach: first, to the Argives and, second, to the Athenians. It may, therefore, have been the case that Aeschylus made his fictional Argos stand firm, even against all odds, so as to encourage Argos to do the same in reality. Yet, if this was Aeschylus’ message, it would have been aimed no less at Athens. In the late 460s, we know Athens was reaching the final stages of its democratic ascension with the abolition of the aristocratic Areopagus. Aeschylus understood that the reform’s success or failure in Athens depended on the people, a people strong enough to bear the new burdens of democracy as the mythical Argives had done in Suppliants. This is why Turner argues that ‘[i]n the Supplices, all of Greece is Argos and Argos, Athens’.66 Through his mythical dramatization, Aeschylus used Argos to encourage the citizens of Athens.
Having said all this, the question still needs to be asked: did the multivocal form of Suppliants actually inspire, remedy and complement democracy in Athens? Did it influence the Athenians’ vote to abolish the aristocratic Areopagus so that they too could vote as one like the Argives of Aeschylus’ Suppliants had done? These questions are, of course, difficult to answer with any certainty. And doing so is certainly beyond the scope of this current reading. However, that the momentous push towards democracy and the significant realignment of foreign policy occurred only one year after the performance of Suppliants suggests that a connection of some sort did exist. Establishing a quantitatively precise chain of causation is, of course, quite another matter. But, one thing is certain. Given the proximity in time and the parallels between reality and fiction, we can safely assume that tragic dramatizations such as this formed part of and, perhaps, even helped shape the political discourse that fed directly back into the events of the day. They were timely and valued interventions into democratic life, though of a qualitatively different kind.