It has long been universally accepted that The Suppliants was part of a sequence of plays that also contained The Danaids, which likewise had the daughters of Danaus as its Chorus and which, as fr. 43 showed (see pp. 154–5), presented a later stage of their story, being set on the day after their marriage to their cousins, the sons of Aegyptus, and the murder of all but one of the bridegrooms by their unwilling brides. The other play of the tragic trilogy has almost always been identified as The Egyptians; whether it preceded or followed The Suppliants was, and is, disputed (see pp. 152–4). The satyr drama that wound up the production, if (as was normal) it dealt with another section of the same myth, had to be Amymone, whose title character was one of the Danaids, but until 1952 it was not known for certain whether Amymone was a satyr drama at all.
Until 1952, also, it was generally taken as all but certain that The Suppliants was the earliest of Aeschylus’ surviving plays and therefore the oldest known European drama: the active role of the Chorus, the dominance of song (more than half the text is sung or chanted), the apparent presence of two singing subsidiary choruses (Egyptians in 825–65, Argive soldiers or the Danaids’ maidservants in 1034–61), the scant use made of the second actor, and the simplicity and slightness of the plot all seemed to point in that direction.
In 1952, Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 2256 was published. One of its many fragments (fr. 3) comes from a headnote (‘Hypothesis’) giving information about the result of the City Dionysia tragic competition in a particular year (we cannot identify the year for sure). In this year, Aeschylus was victorious with a production that included, as its third and fourth plays, The Danaids and the satyr drama Amymone; Sophocles was second, and one Mesatus was third. Mesatus’ name was followed by a series of play titles, some of which are enclosed in brackets in the papyrus; the likeliest explanation is that these bracketed titles belong to Sophocles (the brackets indicating that they are out of place) and the remainder to Mesatus.
Now, unless we resort to some desperate suppositions,1 this evidence proves that the Danaid tetralogy was written to be performed at a festival at which Sophocles was also competing. Sophocles won his first victory in 468;2 according to Plutarch3 this was the first time he had competed, but another source (the chronicle of Eusebius) says he first came before the public in the second year of the 77th Olympiad – which would mean the City Dionysia of 470 – and Plutarch, or his source, is under considerable suspicion of having improved the story to make Sophocles’ defeat of the established master Aeschylus a more sensational event. We can say, then, that the Danaid plays were almost certainly produced between 470 and 459 inclusive, but probably not in the last few years of this period in view of the absence from the setting of Suppliants of any house, cave etc. which could be represented by a skene.4 The date is often given as 463 because the name of that year’s archon (chief magistrate), Archedemides, matches the scanty remnants of the date rubric on the papyrus; but so does the word archon itself, which in year-dates sometimes precedes the archon’s name, sometimes follows it and sometimes is omitted altogether.
The story of the Danaids exists in dozens of variants.5 Their common core is that a quarrel between the brothers Danaus and Aegyptus, great-grandsons of Zeus and of Io of Argos, leads to Danaus and his fifty daughters6 fleeing from Egypt to Argos, their ancestral home, pursued by their cousins, the fifty sons of Aegyptus (in many accounts accompanied by Aegyptus himself), who desired to take the Danaids in marriage regardless of their wishes or their father’s. The conflict is seemingly resolved when Danaus agrees to the marriages taking place, but he secretly supplies weapons to his daughters, and all but one of them kill their bridegrooms on the wedding night. The survivor, Lynceus, in many versions seeks and gains revenge upon Danaus; at any rate, he and his wife, Hypermestra, regularly become the founders of a new royal line of Argos and the ancestors of such heroes as Perseus and Heracles. Hypermestra’s sisters are in some versions punished (sometimes eternally), while in others new husbands are found for them.
Of the three plays in the Aeschylean corpus that are surviving fragments of closely connected suites of dramas, The Suppliants is the one that has suffered most by the loss of its companion plays. It only covers one small section of the Danaid story – the arrival and reception of the Danaids and their father at Argos, and the Argive refusal of a demand for their surrender, resulting in a declaration of war by the Herald speaking in the name of the sons of Aegyptus; its references to earlier events are scanty and vague (we are told far more about Io than we ever are about the past history of Danaus, his brother and their families), and while some things said in The Suppliants are clearly designed to foreshadow the coming mass murder,7 hardly any further information about Aeschylus’ treatment of the later part of the story can be safely inferred from the text of the surviving play. We are fortunate, at least, to have part of a speech of Aphrodite from the third play (fr. 44), which clearly harks back to the warning given to the Danaids by the Secondary Chorus8 in The Suppliants (1034–42) that they should not slight her power.
The scantiness of our evidence for the rest of the trilogy has made it hard to resolve certain important issues in the interpretation of The Suppliants itself. Two that are particularly crucial – and related to each other – are the motivation of the Danaids and their father, and the extent to which we are being invited to sympathize with their position and plight.
It is obvious that the Danaids are determined not to accept marriage to their cousins, and obvious too that the cousins deserve most if not all of the invective that is flung at them in the play; the words and actions of the Aegyptiads’ representatives (the Herald and the Egyptians accompanying him) leave it in no doubt that they regard the Danaids as their property – in effect, as runaway slaves – and are likely to treat them as such,9 just as the Danaids themselves had feared (335). No Greek would have accepted this equation of marriage with slavery, and no Greek would have tolerated anyone claiming the right to take his daughter as a wife without his consent.10 But the Danaids’ words throughout leave it less than entirely clear whether they are simply seeking to avoid being forcibly claimed in marriage by these particular unwelcome suitors, or whether their aim is actually to avoid marriage altogether. The latter objective would seem to any Greek male bizarre and anti-social; the only women Greeks had heard of who lived in that way were the Amazons (cf. 287), the mythical enemies of Heracles, Theseus and Greek civilization generally.
Which is it? The answer is given, I think, by the emphasis placed, at crucial moments in the trilogy, on the power of Aphrodite, and by the clear implication of the words of the Secondary Chorus, at the end of The Suppliants, that the Danaids are slighting her. Now it is in no way a slight to Aphrodite for a woman, or her father, to reject a disagreeable suitor, much less one who displays as much arrogance, insolence and violence as the Aegyptiads do. But it is most certainly an offence against her if a woman, or a man for that matter, rejects absolutely all relationships with the opposite sex; it is precisely for that offence that Aphrodite engineers the destruction of Hippolytus in Euripides’ play of that name. That, therefore, is the Secondary Chorus’ perception of the Danaids’ attitude – and the Danaids, when they respond (1052–73), give no indication that it was a mistaken perception. That permanent virginity is indeed the Danaids’ aim is also indicated by the implication of Danaus’ speech shortly before (996–1013) that it was to avoid the effects of Aphrodite’s power that the family had fled from Egypt, and by the Danaids’ invocations of the virgin goddess Artemis both near the beginning of the play (144–53) and near its end (1030–31); relevant too, no doubt, is their great fondness for reminding Zeus of the unusual reproductive technique which he used to beget Epaphus (17–18, 40–47, 170–71, 535, 574–89, 592, 1064–7). And it appears that Danaus not only has no objection to this determination of his daughters, but has actually inspired it; just before they go into Argos he reminds them, with what many have found unnecessary insistence, of the importance of their preserving their chastity, and at the outset they describe themselves as the pawns on his gameboard (11ff.).
It is hardly surprising that the Danaids avoid making all this clear to the Argives – at least until they have ensured that Argos is firmly committed to support them even at the cost of war with Egypt. The Argives are willing to take on that grave risk because of the greater danger of offending the gods if they refuse; they might well not have been willing had they been aware that they were aiding and abetting a serious offence against Aphrodite (and against the Greek way of life). What is surprising is that it is not made clear to the audience before the Argives appear; even towards the end of the play, where the evidence is stronger, the matter is not made explicit. This has some weight as an argument in support of the view that The Suppliants was the second play of the trilogy, not the first as usually supposed; if Danaus’ intentions and motives were made clear in a preceding play (which would have to be The Egyptians), the audience would not need to have them spelt out again. (On the question of what those motives may have been, see pp. 153–4.)
To any Greek it was the duty of every father to see to it that his daughters were given to appropriate husbands, and a father who neglected this duty, let alone one who deliberately kept his daughters unmarried for selfish reasons – as Acrisius did with his daughter Danaë, or Aegisthus with his stepdaughter Electra – was a social criminal.11 At the same time, many spectators will have wondered what they would have done if they had been told by an oracle (as Danaus may have been; see pp. 153–4) that they would be killed by a son-in-law. As for Danaus’ daughters, the audience will probably have regarded them as innocent parties, obeying their father either because they were given no choice or because they assumed, as every decent son or daughter was expected to assume, that their father was always right. In The Suppliants, Danaus at first stays very much in the background, putting forward his daughters – much more likely to win compassion – as the seekers of asylum and protection. Against such men as the sons of Aegyptus, they fully deserve it.
Many attempts have been made to find contemporary political relevance in the Danaid trilogy, but in view of our uncertainty as to its precise date none of them can be regarded as compelling. It is, however, worth recording that The Suppliants contains the earliest evidence for the existence of the word dēmokratia ‘democracy’: the word itself does not appear in the play, but thinly disguised equivalents are found in two passages.12
1. Such as that the ‘Hypothesis’ refers to a posthumous production, or that the tetralogy was not produced until many years after it was written.
2. Parian Marble (Fragmente der griechischen Historiker [Jacoby] 239 A 56); Plutarch, Cimon 8.8–9.
3. Cimon 8.8.
4. The years 468 (when Sophocles was victorious) and 467 (the date of the Theban tetralogy) are also excluded.
5. Set out in full by H. Friis Johansen and E. W. Whittle in the introduction to their edition (Copenhagen 1980), pp. 40–55; see also T. R. Gantz, Early Greek Myth (Baltimore 1993), pp. 198–208.
6. When The Suppliants was thought to be a very early play, it was often suggested that its Chorus actually numbered fifty. There was never any justification for this. If in a Euripidean play of the 420s (coincidentally of the same name) a conventional tragic Chorus of fifteen can represent a group who are repeatedly described as the mothers of the Seven against Thebes (Euripides, Suppliants 12–13, 100–102 etc.) and even as ‘seven mothers of seven sons’ (ibid. 963–4), it cannot seriously be doubted that several decades earlier it would have been possible for a conventional Chorus of (as it then was) twelve to represent a group of fifty.
7. For example, the reference to the Danaids’ suppliant-boughs as encheiridia (21), literally ‘things held in the hand’ but in ordinary usage ‘daggers’; or their father’s injunction to them to ‘value… chastity more than life itself’ (1013), not specifying whose life they should value less.
8. Assumed in this translation to consist of the Argive soldiers assigned by King Pelasgus to escort the Danaids into the city; for other views see note on 1034.
9. Suppliants 838–40, 918; see also notes on 873 and 920.
10. The woman’s own consent was in principle not required, though it is striking that in our play (940–41) King Pelasgus says that the Herald, on behalf of the Aegyptiads, may take the Danaids provided that they (not their father) are willing, that the Secondary Chorus name Desire and Persuasion as the daughters and assistants of Aphrodite (1038–40), and that Aphrodite herself in The Danaids (fr. 44.1–2) lays stress on the mutual desire of the primal couple Heaven and Earth. It should be added that the question of endogamy versus exogamy, sometimes thought to be at issue in this trilogy, is entirely irrelevant; marriage between cousins, and indeed between even closer relatives (uncle and niece, half-brother and half-sister), was very common at Athens, was often regarded as the option of choice, and in some circumstances (where a father died leaving a daughter or daughters but no son) could actually be compulsory (the daughter had to marry the closest relative who claimed her).
11. Though, so far as we know, there was no way to compel him legally to take action, or punish him legally if he did not.
12. Suppliants 604 (dēmou kratousa cheir ‘the people’s sovereign vote’) and 699 (to damion, to ptolin kratunei ‘the people, which rules the city’); see V. Ehrenberg, ‘Origins of Democracy’, Historia 1 (1950), p. 522.