Greek Notions of the Past in the Archaic and Classical Eras

EURIPIDEAN EXPLAINERS

There is wide consensus that tragic aetiologies (or ‘aitia’)1 connect the mythic, remote, past of the dramatic world to the real, experienced, present world of practice. Euripidean aetiologies, for example, ‘function as references to the more stable present and help the audience bridge the gap between mythical time and contemporary life’.² They are ‘one way of bringing myth into the present’ and ‘link the heroic and mythical world of the play to that of the fifth-century audience’.³ Tragic aetiology is ‘a strategy by which the Athenians define their relations to the panhellenic past and hence to the rest of Greece’, and ‘the aitiological poet is the civic poet, whose audience is the citizen body’.4 Such assessments focus strikingly on one dimension of communication. Aetiology is, in these familiar formulations, first and foremost an exchange between playwright and audience and one whose specific permutations through the mouths of a diverse range of speakers directed towards specific auditors on stage for specific goals would seem to matter little to the overarching authorial end of connecting past and present. This is problematic. Emphasis on the playwright who explains the origins of things, who knows or does not know details of cult, place and etymology, and whose skill is put on display in expressing such knowledge squeezes tragic aetiology into the idealised and idolised shape of a Herodotean logos, lopping off features which are not meaningless excess and paying insufficient attention to contemporary non-historiographic modes of talking about foundations and origins. Euripides is not a historian and Euripidean aetiology is not foreshadowing of historiographic narrative explanation.

Despite the ever-widening appropriation of the label ‘aetiology’ in analyses of tragedy,⁵ we would do well to heed the advice of G. S. Kirk, who recognised, some forty years ago, that the story of aetiological myths and legends is, in practice, always one of multiplicity more than of singular function.6 Discourse about origins can take the form of narrative or prophecy or be implied through the juxtaposition of story and context, as is demonstrated by examples in the tragic corpus. Most familiar in tragedy are the predictions of cult often (but not always) found at the end of Euripidean plays and delivered often (but not always) by divinities. Though pronouncements by deities (or divinised ex-mortals like the Dioscuri or Heracles) are relatively explicit in their prediction of future practice, there is great variation across the tragic corpus.⁷ So, for example, at the beginnings and endings of plays we regularly find references to the origins of peoples, names and cities, and elsewhere there are references to the origins of civilisation and of the universe.⁸ There are rarer cases of aetiological narrative delivered retrospectively, including Orestes’ report of the foundation of the Athenian Choes in Iphigenia among the Taurians (958–60), and aetiology often features in choral songs (for example, Hecuba 802 on the origin of the olive at Athens from Athena).9 Scholars have long claimed a type of aetiological resonance for plays like Sophocles’ Ajax, where the future cult of Ajax is only hinted at but seems crucial for understanding the play, or Euripides’ Bacchae, where aspects of Dionysus’ cult resonate through the play.¹⁰ This is a diverse body of stories and presentations. Folklorists like Barre Toelken remind us that the very assumption of a category of aetiological myth often conditions us, as cultural interlopers, to misunderstand what tellers of such tales find salient.¹¹ Paradoxically, in order to understand what Euripides is doing with his particular expressions of aetiology, it can be helpful first to de-emphasise the extra-dramatic category of ‘aetiology’ and focus instead on varieties of origin talk in their specific contexts. We must, similarly, decentre Euripides in favour of the characters who are the immediate mouthpieces of aetiological information within any given play. In what follows, I argue against familiar descriptions of Euripidean aetiology as bridge between past and present in order to show how Euripides exploits, with great variety and inventiveness, fifth-century discourse about foundations and, further, how Euripidean explainers all speak with idiosyncratic and distinct perspectives on past, present and future. Consequently, Euripidean aetiology does not function primarily as an act of communication about the past between playwright and audience, nor does it make salient any sort of message connecting one temporal domain to another; rather, the range of functions for tragic aetiology is highly variable and, to the extent that we can generalise about Euripides’ motives, a tool for filling in a fuller picture of the past as enacted on stage and making vividly alive the minds of those inhabiting that past.

For a modern reader primed to see the past as something that can be recorded and therefore known, but the future as a thing inherently unknown and, to non-believers in divination, unknowable, the gulf between predictions of foundation and narrative recounting of foundation seems wide; but in an ancient idiom where the past, and particularly the poetic access to the past, regularly requires appeal to divine knowledge or employing divinely given gifts, the line between vision of the future and vision of the past is far finer. It is not necessarily to ancient chroniclers or historiographers that we should look for fifth-century discourse about foundations and origins against which to contextualise aetiology generally, and especially Euripidean aetiology of the prophetic form which has received the bulk of scholarly attention. We have clues as to one important context for cult prediction in scenes that have frequently been misunderstood as mortal variations on divine patterns. For example, in Hecuba, Polymester speaks with Hecuba and Agamemnon and predicts Hecuba’s metamorphosis into a dog, her death and the naming of the headlands near the site of her drowning, etymologising the promontory Cynossema as κυνὸς . . . σῆμα (‘bitches’ grave’). It is misleading to lump these details together with Euripidean aetiologies in other closing scenes as if this is the slightly unusual offspring of the normative divine ending found elsewhere; aligning this case too closely with the function of gods who deliver aetiological predictions misses the specific tenor of the scene.12 Polymestor is trying to pain his interlocutors, as he makes clear towards the end (1283, ἀλγεῖς ἀκούων; ‘Does it hurt to listen?’, to Agamemnon). When his predictions of Hecuba’s own death do not have much effect on her (Hecuba even mocks him at 1272, ‘You going to give a name about my form [as a dog]?’), Polymestor turns to the death of her daughter Cassandra. Though Hecuba rejects this prediction (1276), it ensnares Agamemnon. Polymestor predicts, accurately, Agamemnon’s future death at the hands of Clytemnestra and it is only then, with Agamemnon’s growing anger, that Polymestor is silenced by gagging and his removal from the stage. Presumption that the normative aetiological speaker is either the divine speaker or, more perniciously, the playwright obscures the specific and much more salient context for explanation structuring this scene.

Polymestor locates his authority in the prophecies he heard from Thracian Dionysus (1267). To Polymestor’s claims of divine authority for his predictions, Hecuba responds with derision. She mocks him that the oracles did not foretell Polymestor’s own current misfortune, himself captured and his son brutally murdered by a ragtag group of women. This derision can be situated against the complex ambivalence towards divinatory professionals in Athens. In Michael Flower’s recent, vivid characterisation, seers ‘combined the role of confidant and personal adviser with that of psychic, fortune-teller, and homeopathic healer’.13 Despite frequent fifth-century rhetoric discrediting their activities, seers were authoritative and very stable sources of knowledge about religious matters – matters which, in the ancient world, always bled across social, political and medical spheres. Thus when Plato in the Republic mocks prophets as beggars out for a quick buck, we also get a snapshot of how potent they were as sources of authoritative knowledge about both past and present:

and begging priests (ἀγύρται) and seers (μάντεις) go to rich men’s doors and persuade them that they possess the power from the gods that through sacrifices and incantations, if any wrong has been done to him or his ancestors, they can cure with pleasurable festivities and, if a man wishes to harm an enemy, it’s only a small fee to harm just and unjust alike, since they can, through certain enchantments (ἐπαγωγαῖς) and spells (καταδέσμοις), persuade the gods to serve them.¹⁴

That seers might claim to be able to mould even the gods to their needs is probably exaggeration, but indicates the popular conception of their utility. Though the portrait is negative, it attests both the wide competence claimed by seers (or their imitators and rivals in divinatory craft) and a few of their working methods. Box-office seers came from elite families, may have advised the leading generals, and could demand high fees for their services.15 As Plato continues, mashing practices of chresmologoi and manteis in order to bring disrepute upon the whole divinatory apparatus, such prophets

make not only ordinary men but cities believe that there really are resolutions (λύσεις) and purifications (καθαρμοί) for injustices through sacrifice and pleasant games (παιδιᾶς ἡδονῶν) for the living, and that there are also special observances for the dead, which they call rites (τελετάς), that release us from ills in that place, while horrors await those who do not sacrifice.¹⁶

Part of the divinatory process is recommending the proper corrective procedures, a process which could involve performing old or new rituals. So, for example, at Bacchae 255–7, Pentheus charges Tiresias with trying to profit from introducing a new cult: ‘You want to introduce this new divinity (δαίμον’) to mankind and read his bird signs and entrails to make money.’ Seers were essential to the decision-making of battle, as is expressed strikingly by the way that legendary seers like Tiresias could claim to have won a war (Phoenissae 854–7, of Athens against Eleusis) or in the way the Spartans, according to Herodotus (9.33.3), would find it important to bribe the seer Tisamenus to be their leader in war.¹⁷ As Radermacher observed (echoed more recently by Dillery), the period from the beginning of the Peloponnesian War to the Sicilian expedition is rich in diviners.¹⁸ They were both crucial (at least until widespread outrage at the failure to help stave off the Sicilian disaster of 414), but also an object of derision. They were outsiders, but in with the leaders of the city. They were self-interested, such that they could be mocked as only pursuing their own profit, but also had a vital role in the polis, particularly for crucial decisions in wartime. Further, if we take seriously the notion that behind Aristophanes’ staging of an oracular contest in Peace (1043ff.) was a real practice of presenting oracles, as Dillery suggests,19 the interchange at the end of Hecuba resonates strikingly with the contemporary Athenian landscape of divination. Euripides stages an oracular contest where Polymestor’s true predictions are ignored and eventually silenced. These are human institutions of oracle-giving and a human context for evaluating and suspecting prophetic explanations, whatever the epistemic basis in divine sources. The relevant analogy for the aetiology in this moment is not knowledge like that of the god, but rather scenarios of human explanation and prediction. The analogy supplies information which is left unstated in the scene, allowing the audience to see in sharp relief the characters involved: the old woman from a defeated people, Hecuba, for whom her own impending death is not all that much of a threat; Agamemnon, blind to his future; and Polymestor, barbarian and outsider (much like the independent chresmologoi at Athens), who happens to be right in everything that he predicts. The scenario of oracular contestation makes Polymestor’s villainy stand out, as he is not playing the part of beneficial seer, but rather is only interested in his own need to abuse his captors.

Similar is Eurystheus in Heraclidae. At the end of the play he claims the authority of the oracles of Apollo to predict the benefit he will bring to Athens (1028). Eurystheus is predicting, of course, his own death and its beneficent effects rather than death and destruction to come for others. Eurystheus is the paradigm of heroism, seeking to die a noble death when, as he has explained, death on the battlefield has been denied.²⁰ The relevant scenario here is not that of gods at the end of other Euripidean plays, but rather the contemporary marketplace of explanation and prophecy.²¹ Even more so than in the case of Hecuba’s Polymestor, the structural analogy of Eurystheus with independent, often foreign manteis is marked. Eurystheus is here a foreigner and exile at Athens who claims to be a boon to the city, and a benefit in wartime. He even claims to think that the oracles were useless. It was not that he was not told what would happen to him; rather, he thought that Hera was stronger than oracles and would protect him (1038–40). Though we cannot know for certain whether the audience had detailed (rather than general) knowledge of Eurystheus’ fate in Attica, recognising that the scene presents him as a source whose claims are open to questioning may solve a longstanding problem in reconciling our non-Euripidean evidence for the cult with what Eurystheus says in the play. Though we have no independent evidence for this specific cult at Pallene, according to Strabo (8.6.19), Eurystheus’ body was buried nearby (at Gargettos), though his head elsewhere.22 If this were the analogue of divine intervention, then we might expect, as most scholars have, that Eurystheus predicts a truth about his future heroisation which the audience registers as relevant to their locale. But it is quite important that Eurystheus’ role as explainer be not entirely secure. Is he the interpreter of oracles that he claims to be? His report of the oracle here conceals bluster that is not entirely accurate. He predicts his cult in approximately its correct place but does not know that in fact it will be only his headless body that will lie there. Such a slip would be in keeping with his character, a man who ignored the oracle he was given and ends up dead despite his forewarning.²³

The messy marketplace of seers and their competing, contingent explanations about past and future foregrounds the way prediction always involved differences in perspective, selection and aim. That human figures activate analogies with the practices of seers is not surprising, but I would go further and suggest that divine speakers, through the act of prediction, likewise cannot be thought of by ancient audiences uncoloured by analogous mortal practices. To understand the actions of any figure on stage, audiences must attribute intentions, desires and bias in ways that draw on a wealth of human interactions surrounding foundations. Recent research in the cognitive sciences show that individuals make immediate and automatic inferences about potential future behaviours of any other individual by, in part, creating a working model of another person’s mind.²⁴ Audiences therefore, in order to follow the play at all, cannot help creating a mental model of the mind of, for example, Artemis or Apollo, even if such a divine mind is a novel creation; consequently, they cannot see the god on stage without immediately forming a series of expectations about perspective, self-interest and potential future actions. Gods are both human and extra-human.25 Though stark divides are often posited between gods and mortals, ancient evidence is not always so black and white. For example, at Eumenides 61–3 the Pythia refers to the god Apollo in distinctly human terms, as ἰατρόμαντις, τερασκόπος, καθάρσιος.²⁶ A natural consequence of anthropomorphism is that gods, though their motives may be ultimately unknowable, can be understood to act in familiarly mortal ways, even when, as in the case of Apollo, acting like a mantis would seem to dethrone him from his obvious place in the hierarchy.²⁷ Though precedents for epiphany, both literary and ‘real’, reveal much about the seriousness of Euripidean gods and are the clear model for the actions of the gods, this is a fertile rather than a constraining scaffolding.²⁸ Just as we see in mortal predictions the selection and perhaps even distortion of cult details in context and in character, so too we should be attuned to such differences among divine speakers as well.

Euripidean aetiologies vary greatly according to character and reflect the immediate self-interest of each character. In Hippolytus, for example, Artemis’ promise of cult honours for Hippolytus is pointedly cast in the language of reciprocity (1419, 1423, ἀντὶ τῶνδε τῶν κακῶν). This is a common form of ritual logic, but also particularly fitting for Artemis, the goddess who on the Athenian stage regularly demands retribution.29 Artemis receives similar treatment in Iphigenia among the Taurians from Athena, who marks Artemis’ cult as reciprocal in a way that is distinct from the other predictions and injunction in that extensive speech (1459, ἄποιν’). By contrast, in Andromache, Thetis appears to Peleus when he is in the position in which we find Thetis in the Iliad, that of mourning parent (1231). Her predictions and commands to Peleus are shaped by her role as mourning mother. She commands that Neoptolemus, her grandson, be buried and she directs Andromache’s fate towards the survival of the Trojan line, but this is in large part subsidiary to her aim that her line with Peleus should not perish (1249–52). The bulk of her speech is then concerned with detailed instructions to Peleus for his immortalisation, setting the stage for him to wait by the sea for her, recalling perhaps the Iliad scene where she and the Nereids mourn for Patroclus. When she leaves Peleus with the command that he is to cease his grieving, the declaration of burial and even of the continuation of the Trojan and Greek families falls into place, not as independent data scattershot from the storehouse of aetiological possibilities, but rather as a carefully constructed and characterised set of concerns about familial continuity, which makes her point to Peleus that he can in fact, stop grieving and continue on to his happy immortality with her. There is an immediate rhetorical purpose, but also one which is circumscribed by the character of Thetis, appropriate to Thetis and to a certain extent egocentric to Thetis. As one last illustration, in Euripides’ latest play with a fully preserved aetiological end, Apollo appears at the end of Orestes and gives, in the space of fifty lines, a rapid-fire succession of predictions and commands, including the possible worship of Helen along with her brothers the Dioscuri and the naming of a town after Orestes. The contrast with Artemis and Thetis highlights Apollo’s distinctive mode of speech. He explains what has happened and what will happen with a density of prediction and awareness appropriate to the prophetic god and unparalleled elsewhere. Indeed, this is precisely what Orestes remarks on after Apollo’s speech: ὦ Λοξία μαντεῖε, σῶν θεσπισμάτων / οὐ ψευδόμαντις ἦσθ’ ἄρ’, ἀλλ’ ἐτήτυμος (1666–7). Where Orestes thought he heard an avenging spirit (1669, ἀλαστόρων), he hears instead prophecy. These are the two faces of Apollo, and Orestes is rightly relieved to be speaking to the prophetic rather than the punishing incarnation. As a speech with an aetiological dimension, Apollo’s means of prediction are a stylised exaggeration of his role and distinct from that of Artemis or Thetis. Differing subjects and modes of explanation are, for both playwrights, an important tool of characterisation.

As characters speak differently, their distinctive interests and perspectives on the future shape the kind of information they provide and, consequently, any history of foundation extracted from tragedy comes packaged with the bias of the characters voicing it. So, for example, in Andromache, Thetis describes the future tomb of Neoptolemus at Delphi as ‘a reproach (ὄνειδος) to the Delphians, so that his grave may proclaim (ἀπαγγέλληι) that he was violently slain by the hand of Orestes’ (1241–3). Scullion, in a carefully argued note, claims that the verb ἀπαγγέλληι is nowhere else used metaphorically and can only imply that there was an inscription at Delphi to this effect.30 Denying Euripides a novel use of metaphor is dangerous ground, but the more pressing problem is that neither Scullion nor Seaford (who rightly makes the case against Scullion’s use of this point as evidence for Euripidean invention of cult) gives Thetis any role in the interpretation of this speech.³¹ But Thetis is no distanced observer. That the tomb was marked is sufficient for it to be, in the eyes of Neoptolemus’ grandmother, thought of as an inscription which will proclaim his violent death. In Pindar, Neoptolemus’ tomb is the observer of the procession and judge of the sacrifice (Nem.7.47, ‘overseer’). Rutherford suggests that Neoptolemus had a role in Delphic theoxenia, acting as arbiter of the division of meat and thus reversing through cult his actions as disrupter of sacrifice in the myth.³² What Thetis says in Andromache conjures an image of this cult in terms which highlight the injustice done to Neoptolemus through analogy with the general script of action for the cult. The censure which the tomb shouts out mimics the scenario wherein Neoptolemus corrects the different sort of violent slaughter, that is, sacrifice, which the Delphians perform. This might explain some of the forced metaphorical reach in the tomb that reports without implying an inscription, but it also highlights the way that such judgement depends on Thetis’ particular hopes for the future cult and its potential interpretation, one which is not disinterested or without a particular perspective.

There is not space here to treat other cases at length, though I would submit, in general, that debates over the veracity of cult information in tragic aetiology are a false problem, and that this information can be understood best as the rhetorically selective and biased reports of characters.33 So, for example, recent inscriptional evidence records purifications to the Hyacinthides, where in the Erecththeus fr. 370 Athena paints the future cult worship of the Hyacinthides with a markedly militaristic brush.³⁴ Artemis in Hippolytus overemphasises the continuing nature of Hippolytus’ worship and casts the cult in terms which are jarringly Artemisian, specifically interpreting an act of dedication as a mourning rite for premature death. In Iphigenia among the Taurians the apparent disparity between the tragic account of Iphigenia receiving dedications of clothes for women who die in childbirth and the more regular procedure of dedicating offerings for success in childbirth reflects the way that Athena has selectively tweaked the terms of her promise of future cult, in keeping with the kind of premature death which is Artemis’ domain. She makes the cult more appealing and more applicable through interpretation, not invention or reflection, of the general shape of the practice. There is no simple calculus of cult information against cult reality such that we can compute Euripidean aetiology as either true reflection of public knowledge or invention of non-existent cults to be interpreted in those terms. What Euripides does is far more interesting and in no case, I would submit, is a prediction without bias.

In closing, we can reconsider a case which has long been viewed as aberrant aetiology. In Iphigenia among the Taurians, during the recognition scene between Orestes and his long-lost, thought-to-besacrificed sister Iphigenia, Orestes tells how he ended up being so far afield in the first place (939–86). We hear the surprising new detail that not all the Furies were satisfied after the trial at Athens and that some continued to pursue Orestes until, in despair, he demanded of Apollo that Apollo help. The god instructed Orestes to take the Taurians’ statue of Artemis to Athens. Orestes dwells at some length on his reception at Athens and – what concerns us here – seems aware of the practice instituted in the wake of his stay there. His story is, for the audience, a particularly vivid recounting of how a signature practice of the second day of the Anthesteria festival came to be. In order to avoid excluding the guest but at the same time avoid pollution from having this guest share in the communal wine, the Athenian king (usually Pandion in later accounts) makes everyone drink from their own pitcher of wine, the chous.35 Commentators struggle to explain this passage as a variant on the kinds of divine ending speeches which scholars have assumed to be normative for Euripidean aetiologising. So, on the grounds that the ‘unsettling background’ of Orestes’ side of the story ‘would be out of place at the end of the play’, the most recent commentator concludes that this ‘excursus’ was ‘not unnecessary’ and was ‘perceived by the audience as a celebration of the Athenian community’s cohesion and its successful negotiation of ritual/religious challenges’.³⁶ So too Cropp follows Wolff’s interpretation that it is ‘advertising to Eur.’s audience the importance of such ritual institutions and their dependence on careful negotiation between humans and the divine’.³⁷ The terms here are probably familiar, viewing aetiology in terms of the collective, civic, positive ideology of Athens which, when placed in its supposedly natural position at the end of the play, would bridge unstable past and stabilising present. Such views mistake the aetiologising voice of Orestes for a sound-bite from the playwright.

As a function of character, Orestes imitates his patron Apollo, and, distinct from other mortal speakers, is especially self-aware and a reader of signs. For example, in Eumenides, Orestes had promised to protect Athens after his death; that is, he predicted his own future hero cult (762–74). In the Oresteia, he was pointedly tested as an ‘expounder’ rival to Apollo (Cho. 118, 552, Eum. 595, 609). Both aetiological retrospection and prediction are the mark of kings in relation to their own lands. For example, Pelasgus in Aeschylus’ Suppliants speaks of the origin of the name of the land Apia and, much like Orestes, uses this origin story in order to lay out two possible outcomes for his auditors (260–70). Through his origin story he conveys to the Danaids that if they are hostile snakes, they will be destroyed, as Apis killed the snakes that were infesting the land long ago; if they are natives returning to the land, then they will be protected, as Apis did for the people through that same act of violent killing. In Euripides’ Suppliants, it is striking that Theseus is in fact the one to institute cults; Athena appears at the end to confirm them. So too, it is against this role of king as expert on his lands’ foundations that we should situate Theseus’ role in Heracles, where he offers Heracles sanctuaries in the land, and in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, where Theseus is the only one who knows the place of Oedipus’ disappearance. In Iphigenia among the Taurians, then, Orestes declares, by the form of his aetiological retrospection, that he is royalty of Athens. Like Pelasgus, he makes a point of using explanations not to ruminate on the past but to project a possible outcome. The frame of expectations in the first part of the speech sets up the surprise twist in the last part. He begins by glossing the Areopagus court as the one that Zeus established for Ares, implying a happy resolution, and then he explains how the Athenians successfully managed his pollution at the Anthesteria. This looks like a favourable pattern. But in the last part of his speech, where he describes the Areopagus trial, the schema of resolution in continuing practice is not fulfilled, as not all the Furies are successfully transmuted to Semnai Theai and Orestes must again run to Apollo in Fury-driven madness. His new task, to steal Artemis’ cult statue, is the one that must be undertaken with Iphigenia’s help, and he closes his speech by appealing to her to help him. By setting up his request with successful outcomes elsewhere (though obviously not definitive solutions for his plight), Orestes frames what he is asking in terms of its likelihood to succeed in some way. That is, aetiology is not really about explanation at all but is rather servant to persuasion and to Orestes’ immediate self-interest.

This passage, too often considered deviant, is perhaps the most difficult case of Euripidean aetiology to explain if we start from assuming that the deus ex machina type of ending is conventional or that it is Euripides who is the explainer of greatest moment. The problem is not with the passage, but with these starting points. Were we to interpret the Choes passage as a reflection of Euripides’ voice, it might seem that Euripides is simply flattering his audience with Orestes’ gratuitous Athens shot. But there is a point to Orestes knowing more than others do and there is a point to making him use that knowledge to try to convince others to help him. If we are looking for a model through which to glimpse the scenario of ancient explanation of subsequent practice which would be, in turn, most analogous to Euripides’ role as explainer, then this is, perhaps, the closest we get to a conventional retrospective scenario of explaining foundations. It is, notably, history with an immediate, prospective aim which shapes the account in selective and biased terms. Like Toelken and his Navajo myths, if we parse this as ‘aetiological’, as a narrative meant to explicate past and present, then we have missed the point.

To return briefly to seers and prediction, mantic activities required claims to knowledge of both the past and the future and, further, regularly involved explication for future foundations and, consequently, knowledge of past foundations.38 So, for example, titles of works by known seers are less obviously how-to manuals for divination than histories of past prophecies by famous seers.³⁹ Striking is Aristotle’s notice that Epimenides of Crete (the legendary figure who probably did not call himself a mantis but shared many of their attributes) ‘used to divine, not the future, but only things that were past but unclear’ (Rhet. 3.17.10). Aristotle’s larger point is that deliberative speaking, because it is about the future, is more difficult than forensic speech, which is about the past. Epimenides provides evidence that ‘even manteis’ know the past and, though it is not a direct quotation, one has the sense that what Epimenides was advertising was not a novel ability but rather a pithy framing of what prophetic personnel regularly did. Outside of the developing genre of historiography, then, we might well suspect that accounts of origins were often delivered not as retrospection but rather as admonition or in the service of paradigms for predictions and immediate actions.⁴⁰ In this sense, when Euripides stages a history of cult through voices of prophecy or, in those rarer cases, retrospection targeting the future, he reveals something of the reality of discourse about origins in the fifth century.

The long fondness for historiographic claims to explain, going back at least to Herodotus’ historie of aitia, has conditioned modern readers to approach tragic explanation of the past with a particular bias. Explanation is key to modern definitions of the historian’s project, perhaps most strikingly in forays into ‘virtual’ or counterfactual history which claim historical value by exposing the underlying mechanics of explanation.⁴¹ Closer to home, in an insightful study of fifth-century commemorative genres in Athens, Deborah Boedeker distinguishes the memorialising modes of literary and visual arts, tragedy included, from the practice of historiography by separating the discontinuous past of art from the continuous past articulated in historiographers, which ‘presents a series of events in a fixed sequence – logical rather than analogical – where this event follows that, and therefore somehow comes from that’.42 Historiography thus ‘sets up a post hoc ergo propter hoc view of events’ and the authorial voice matters: ‘Active authorial judgments stand in contrast to the more silent genres of monumental painting or sculpture, for example, which only show and do not tell, and even to tragedy, where only characters and chorus have voices, not the dramatist.’⁴³ This is indeed the difference, but we should not lament the absence of the author’s voice in Euripidean aetiologies. The fact that the characters have distinctive voices is precisely the point.

1    I define aetiology broadly as that class of communication which, by narration or implication, uses legendary or mythic stories to explain the origins of things. The labels ‘aetiology’ or ‘aitia’ do not reflect or reproduce fifth-century concepts. Herodotus refers to a given origin story not as an αἲτιον, but as a λόγος (or ἱερός λόγος), as for example at 2.156.3 (λόγον δὲ τόνδε ἐπιλέγοντες) or where he refuses to elaborate sacred λόγοι (2.47.2, 2.48.3, 2.51.4, 2.62.2, 2.81.2). When he speaks of causality in such stories, he uses a simple and unmarked construction such as διά followed by the accusative. By contrast, he uses the term αἲτιον elsewhere of natural causes, usually ones that he finds particularly amazing (and thus in need of explanation). So, for example, at Histories 3.12, he wonders at the strong bones of Egyptians and the equally weak skulls of Persians and recounts the reason he is told to explain this difference, a reason rooted in the particular habits of each group. Cf. 2.25–6, 3.108, 7.125 and the unmarked use of the term αἲτιον at 1.91, 4.43, 8.128, 8.129, 9.8, 9.93. In philosophy and medicine, the terminology of cause has a particular prestige, but is also not obviously akin to the phenomenon of aetiological stories we find in pre-Hellenistic literature. Telling is the fact that Plato in the Phaedo (99a), in Socrates’ criticism of Anaxagoras’ account of cause, speaks of people using the term αἲτιον in a wrong sense, thus explicitly problematising the term for the first time in extant literature: ἀλλ’ αἲτια μὲν τὰ τοιαῦτα καλεῖν λίαν ἄτοπαν. So too, despite Aristotle’s overdeveloped theoretical edifice of causality, in Metaphysics Δ 5 he lists a number of different definitions and examples of αἲτια, none of which could easily refer to the sorts of mythic explanations which modern critics label ‘aitia’.

2    D. J. Mastronarde, The Art of Euripides: Dramatic Technique and Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 158.

3    R. Parker, Polytheism and Society at Athens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 142–3, and W. Allan, Euripides: Helen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 340, on the end of Euripides’ Helen.

4    B. Kowalzig, ‘The aetiology of empire? Hero cult and Athenian tragedy’, in J. Davidson, F. Muecke and P. Wilson (eds), Greek Drama III: Essays in Honour of Kevin Lee (London: Insitute of Classical Studies, 2006), pp. 79–98, at p. 81, and Parker, Polytheism and Society, p. 143.

5    Recent work finds in aetiology a general hermeneutic for tragedy as a genre, described well by Easterling as ‘the play’s implicit references to its contemporary theatrical, ritual, and political functions’, in P. E. Easterling, ‘Theatrical furies: Thoughts on Eumenides’, in M. Revermann and P. Wilson (eds), Performance, Iconography, Reception: Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 219–36, at p. 221. F. I. Zeitlin, ‘The dynamics of misogyny: Myth and mythmaking in the Oresteia’, Arethusa 11 (1978), pp. 149–84, posits an aetiology of patriarchy in Eumenides. Richard Seaford’s work has provocatively expanded the scope of tragic aetiologies from isolated instances within specific plays to more general relevance: R. Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 123–39 and 385: ‘tragedy, in concluding with the foundation of cult involving the collective and regular renewal of the kind of liminality perverted in the drama by interfamilial violence, itself encapsulates that historical transformation of cult which issued in the genesis of tragedy’. Most recently, Claude Calame argues that satyr plays have a ‘quasi-aetiological function with regard to the cult given in honour of the city god [Dionysus] by participants in the Great Dionysia’, in C. Calame, ‘Aetiological performance and consecration in the sanctuary of Dionysos’, in O. Taplin and R. Wyles (eds), The Pronomos Vase and Its Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 65–78, at p. 66. P. Wilson and O. Taplin, ‘The “aetiology” of tragedy in the Oresteia’, PCPhS 39 (1993), pp. 169–80, suggest that the Oresteia dramatises the aetiology of the tragic genre itself. M. Revermann, ‘Aeschylus’ Eumenides, chronotopes, and the “aetiological mode”’, in Revermann and Wilson, Performance, Iconography, Reception, pp. 237–61, at p. 252, highlights some of these predecessors to argue that the Oresteia is similarly about ‘the meta-level’ and what he terms ‘the aetiological mode’.

6    G. S. Kirk, ‘Aetiology, ritual, charter: Three equivocal terms in the study of myths’, YClS 22 (1972), pp. 83–102 (esp. p. 84: ‘these explanatory modes tend to be functionally distinct, so that the application of the one generic label of “aetiology” – and most critics are content with that – is inadequate and misleading’), prefigured in Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), pp. 13–31, and echoed in Kirk, The Nature of Greek Myths (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1975), pp. 53–68.

7    In addition to the nine cases of divine appearance at the end of extant plays (Hippolytus, Andromache, Supplices, Electra, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Ion, Helen, Orestes, Bacchae), all of which contain aetiological information of some sort, Athena’s appearance at the end of Erecththeus and Hermes’ at the end of Antiope both survive in substantial papyrus fragments and contain aetiological information. Dionysus’ appearance at the end of Hypsipyle is marked in the margin of the papyrus, but the speech does not survive. Other cases of the deus ex machina (and aetiology), though frequently inferred by modern scholars, are inferences of varying likelihood from later plot summaries. At the end of Medea, Medea boasts to Jason that she will bury her children at Corinth and they will receive cult worship, but we should not interpret this case as a variety of divine intervention scenes. The play predates the earliest securely attested deus ex machina scene (Hippolytus of 428) and Medea’s arrival on the chariot of the Sun differs greatly in tone and emphasis from the appearance of a god, particularly in foregrounding Jason’s inability to touch either Medea or their children. The non-Euripidean Rhesus ended with the Muse predicting, among other things, the future cult for Rhesus.

8    Both Euripides’ Ion and the fragmentary Archelaus begin with extensive genealogies. Etymology is common as, for example, in Antiope fr. 181 and 182, Archelaus fr. 228.7–8, Erechtheus fr. 370, Hec. 1270, Hel. 1670–5, Hipp. 29–33, Ion 661–2 and 1577–81, Or. 1643–7, Phrixos fr. 819, Telephus fr. 393, Tro. 13–14. See further the list of figura etymologica in J. D. Smereka, Studia Euripidea (Leopoldi: Sumptibus Societatis Litterarum, 1936), pp. 172–6. City foundation is predicted at El. 1273–5 and mentioned at Archelaus fr. 228.6. Alexandros fr. 61b gives the origin of human kinds. On the origins of the universe, Aeschylus fr. 44, Euripides, Melanippe the Wise fr. 484, Chrysippus fr. 839 (cf. Hippolytus Veiled, fr. 429).

9    Mastronarde, Art of Euripides, p. 122. See especially his discussion on pp. 123–4 and 165.

10    R. C. S. Jebb, Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments (Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 1893), pp. xxx–xxxii; J. C. Kamerbeek, The Plays of Sophocles: Commentaries (Leiden: Brill, 1953), pp. 14–15; P. H. Burian, ‘Supplication and hero cult in Sophocles’ Ajax’, GRBS 13 (1972), pp. 151–6; P. E. Easterling, ‘Tragedy and ritual: Cry “woe, woe”, but may the good prevail!’, Métis 3 (1988), pp. 87–109; A. Henrichs, ‘The tomb of Aias and the prospect of hero cult in Sophokles’, ClAnt 12/2 (1993), pp. 165–80; J. R. March, ‘Sophocles’ Ajax: The death and burial of a hero’, BICS 38 (1991–3), pp. 1–36; Kowalzig, ‘Aetiology of empire?’. Cf. J. P. Poe, Genre and Meaning in Sophocles’ Ajax (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1987), pp. 9–18, and A. F. Garvie, Sophocles, Ajax (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1998), pp. 5–6. On the connections of the Salaminian chorus, Ajax and Athens, see Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual, pp. 398–9. For Bacchae, see especially R. Seaford, Euripides, Bacchae (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1996), and Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual.

11    B. Toelken, ‘The “pretty languages” of Yellowman: Genre, mode, and texture in Navaho Coyote narratives’, in D. Ben-Amos (ed.), Folklore Genres (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976), pp. 145–70, at pp. 146–7, describing an aetiological tale for the origin of snow recounted by a Navajo elder: ‘I found by questioning him that he did not in fact consider it an aetiological story and did not in any way believe that that was the way snow originated; rather, if the story was “about” anything, it was about moral values, about the deportment of a young protagonist whose actions showed a properly reciprocal relationship between himself and nature. In short, by seeing the story in terms of any categories I had been taught to recognize, I had missed the point.’

12    Contra J. Gregory, Euripides, Hecuba: Introduction, Text, and Commentary (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999), pp. xxxv–xxxvi. See also K. Matthiessen, Euripides ‘Hekabe’: Edition und Kommentar (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), p. 416, and J. Mossman, Wild Justice: A Study of Euripides’ Hecuba (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 200–1.

13    M. A. Flower, The Seer in Ancient Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), p. 22. Distinguishing the activities of manteis, chresmologoi and others who would claim to divine is a notorious problem. See further Flower’s discussions at pp. 58–71. I echo his terminology here. On the diverse roles and manifestations of seer-craft, see also the essays in S. I. Johnston and P. T. Struck, Mantikê: Studies in Ancient Divination (Leiden: Brill, 2005).

14    364b–c with Flower, Seer in Ancient Greece, pp. 27–9.

15    Flower, Seer in Ancient Greece, pp. 37–50.

16    364e–365a.

17    Flower, Seer in Ancient Greece, pp. 94–7, and J. Dillery, ‘Chresmologues and manteis: Independent diviners and the problem of authority’, in Johnston and Struck, Mantikê, pp. 167–231.

18    L. Radermacher, ‘Euripides und die Mantik’, Rheinisches Museum 53 (1898), pp. 497–510, at pp. 504–9, and Dillery, ‘Chresmologues and manteis’, p. 184.

19    Dillery, ‘Chresmologues and manteis’, pp. 194 and 210–12, interprets the ‘wooden walls’ episode of Themistocles as oracular competition.

20    This is a heroic paradigm rather than a divine one and his concerns are not unlike those of heroes of epic. See G. Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, revised edn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 118–19 and 222–42.

21    Contra J. Wilkins, Euripides: Heraclidae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 188: ‘the speech of Eurystheus stands in the place of an ex machina speech, and his report of the oracle covering his heroization and the Spartan invasion is equivalent to the aition expected at the end of a Euripides play’.

22    See R. Seaford, ‘Aitiologies of cult in Euripides: A response to Scott Scullion’, in J. R. C. Cousland and J. R. Hume (eds), The Play of Texts and Fragments: Essays in Honour of Martin Cropp (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 221–34, at pp. 225–8; Wilkins, Euripides: Heraclidae, p. 189; and S. Scullion, ‘Tradition and invention in Euripidean aitiology’, ICS 25 (2000), pp. 217–33.

23    Socrates in Xen. Symp. 4.5 notes that seers cannot foresee what will happen to themselves.

24    For the application of theory of mind to the study of literature see, with further references, L. Zunshine, Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), and, for drama, B. A. McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and McConachie and F. E. Hart, Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn (London: Routledge, 2006).

25    J. Gould, Myth, Ritual, Memory, and Exchange: Essays in Greek Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 203–34, noted also in R. Buxton, ‘Metamorphoses of gods into animals and humans’, in J. Bremmer and A. Erskine (eds), The Gods of Ancient Greece: Identities and Transformations (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 81–91, at p. 90.

26    Elsewhere in tragedy: Hecuba 1267, Iphigenia among the Taurians 711 and 1128, Bacchae 298, Euripides fr. 1110. Outside of tragedy: Plato, Phdr. 244c, Laws 686a, Euth. 3c, Hom. Hym. Hermes 533–8, Archilochus fr. 298 W.

27    On anthropomorphism, see A. Henrichs, ‘What is a Greek god?’, in Bremmer and Erskine, Gods of Ancient Greece, pp. 19–39, at pp. 32–5.

28    On the divine side of such scenes, see esp. C. Sourvinou-Inwood, Tragedy and Athenian Religion (Lanham: Lexington, 2003), pp. 459–511. She effectively critiques the view of tragic gods as artificial as expressed in J. D. Mikalson, Honor Thy Gods: Popular Religion in Greek Tragedy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). In addition to the evidence she provides, I would emphasise the less spectacular though probably individually important acts of divine visitation attested by dedicatory inscriptions such as those collected in G. Renberg, ‘“Commanded by the gods”: An epigraphical study of dreams and visions in Greek and Roman religious life’ (diss., Duke University, 2003).

29    Besides the Iphigenia stories that were the subject of plays by all major tragedians, Artemis would also have played some role in a number of lost plays (Aeschylus’ Callisto, Euripides’ and Sophocles’ Meleager plays).

30    Scullion, ‘Tradition and invention’, p. 219 n. 6.

31    Seaford, ‘Aitiologies of cult in Euripides’, pp. 222–3.

32    I. Rutherford, Pindar’s Paeans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 314–15, with Paean 6.103–20 and Nem. 7.38–47.

33    In addition to the discussions of Scullion and of Seaford cited above, see W. Allan, The Children of Heracles (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 2001), pp. 215–19

34    Agora I 7577 Face B 16 (Gawlinski 2007): [v]v v v hυακιν[θίσι] / [ ^amount ] καθαρμ[όν] (‘for the Hyacinthides, a purification’).

35    For other accounts, see R. Hamilton, Choes and Anthesteria: Athenian Iconography and Ritual (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992).

36    P. Kyriakou, A Commentary on Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006), pp. 311–12.

37    M. Cropp, Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 2000), p. 231, with C. Wolff, ‘Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians: Aetiology, ritual, and myth’, ClAnt 11 (1992), pp. 308–34, at pp. 325–9.

38    Flower, Seer in Ancient Greece, p. 78.

39    Flower, Seer in Ancient Greece, p. 52.

40    The exact relationship between more explicit accounts of religious history, which we might expect to include the sort of information often found in Euripidean aetiological prediction, and the practices of seers remains obscure. Philochorus, a few generations post-Euripides, was a seer and an ‘exegete’, but it is unclear both what status exegetes may have had in Euripides’ day and whether this combination of prophet and ritual ‘expounder’ was shared by others. On post-classical religious history, see most recently J. Dillery, ‘Greek sacred history’, American Journal of Philology 126/4 (2005), pp. 505–26.

40    41 N. Ferguson, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

42    D. Boedeker, ‘Presenting the past in fifth-century Athens’, in D. Boedeker and K. A. Raaflaub (eds), Democracy, Empire, and the Arts in Fifth-Century Athens (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 185–202, at p. 199.

43    Boedeker, ‘Presenting the past’, p. 202.

1		I define aetiology broadly as that class of communication which, by narration or implication, uses legendary or mythic stories to explain the origins of things. The labels ‘aetiology’ or ‘aitia’ do not reflect or reproduce fifth-century concepts. Herodotus refers to a given origin story not as an αἲτιον, but as a λόγος (or ἱερός λόγος), as for example at 2.156.3 (λόγον δὲ τόνδε ἐπιλέγοντες) or where he refuses to elaborate sacred λόγοι (2.47.2, 2.48.3, 2.51.4, 2.62.2, 2.81.2). When he speaks of causality in such stories, he uses a simple and unmarked construction such as διά followed by the accusative. By contrast, he uses the term αἲτιον elsewhere of natural causes, usually ones that he finds particularly amazing (and thus in need of explanation). So, for example, at Histories 3.12, he wonders at the strong bones of Egyptians and the equally weak skulls of Persians and recounts the reason he is told to explain this difference, a reason rooted in the particular habits of each group. Cf. 2.25–6, 3.108, 7.125 and the unmarked use of the term αἲτιον at 1.91, 4.43, 8.128, 8.129, 9.8, 9.93. In philosophy and medicine, the terminology of cause has a particular prestige, but is also not obviously akin to the phenomenon of aetiological stories we find in pre-Hellenistic literature. Telling is the fact that Plato in the Phaedo (99a), in Socrates’ criticism of Anaxagoras’ account of cause, speaks of people using the term αἲτιον in a wrong sense, thus explicitly problematising the term for the first time in extant literature: ἀλλ’ αἲτια μὲν τὰ τοιαῦτα καλεῖν λίαν ἄτοπαν. So too, despite Aristotle’s overdeveloped theoretical edifice of causality, in Metaphysics Δ 5 he lists a number of different definitions and examples of αἲτια, none of which could easily refer to the sorts of mythic explanations which modern critics label ‘aitia’.
2		D. J. Mastronarde, The Art of Euripides: Dramatic Technique and Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 158.
3		R. Parker, Polytheism and Society at Athens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 142–3, and W. Allan, Euripides: Helen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 340, on the end of Euripides’ Helen.
4		B. Kowalzig, ‘The aetiology of empire? Hero cult and Athenian tragedy’, in J. Davidson, F. Muecke and P. Wilson (eds), Greek Drama III: Essays in Honour of Kevin Lee (London: Insitute of Classical Studies, 2006), pp. 79–98, at p. 81, and Parker, Polytheism and Society, p. 143.
5		Recent work finds in aetiology a general hermeneutic for tragedy as a genre, described well by Easterling as ‘the play’s implicit references to its contemporary theatrical, ritual, and political functions’, in P. E. Easterling, ‘Theatrical furies: Thoughts on Eumenides’, in M. Revermann and P. Wilson (eds), Performance, Iconography, Reception: Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 219–36, at p. 221. F. I. Zeitlin, ‘The dynamics of misogyny: Myth and mythmaking in the Oresteia’, Arethusa 11 (1978), pp. 149–84, posits an aetiology of patriarchy in Eumenides. Richard Seaford’s work has provocatively expanded the scope of tragic aetiologies from isolated instances within specific plays to more general relevance: R. Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 123–39 and 385: ‘tragedy, in concluding with the foundation of cult involving the collective and regular renewal of the kind of liminality perverted in the drama by interfamilial violence, itself encapsulates that historical transformation of cult which issued in the genesis of tragedy’. Most recently, Claude Calame argues that satyr plays have a ‘quasi-aetiological function with regard to the cult given in honour of the city god [Dionysus] by participants in the Great Dionysia’, in C. Calame, ‘Aetiological performance and consecration in the sanctuary of Dionysos’, in O. Taplin and R. Wyles (eds), The Pronomos Vase and Its Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 65–78, at p. 66. P. Wilson and O. Taplin, ‘The “aetiology” of tragedy in the Oresteia’, PCPhS 39 (1993), pp. 169–80, suggest that the Oresteia dramatises the aetiology of the tragic genre itself. M. Revermann, ‘Aeschylus’ Eumenides, chronotopes, and the “aetiological mode”’, in Revermann and Wilson, Performance, Iconography, Reception, pp. 237–61, at p. 252, highlights some of these predecessors to argue that the Oresteia is similarly about ‘the meta-level’ and what he terms ‘the aetiological mode’.
6		G. S. Kirk, ‘Aetiology, ritual, charter: Three equivocal terms in the study of myths’, YClS 22 (1972), pp. 83–102 (esp. p. 84: ‘these explanatory modes tend to be functionally distinct, so that the application of the one generic label of “aetiology” – and most critics are content with that – is inadequate and misleading’), prefigured in Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), pp. 13–31, and echoed in Kirk, The Nature of Greek Myths (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1975), pp. 53–68.
7		In addition to the nine cases of divine appearance at the end of extant plays (Hippolytus, Andromache, Supplices, Electra, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Ion, Helen, Orestes, Bacchae), all of which contain aetiological information of some sort, Athena’s appearance at the end of Erecththeus and Hermes’ at the end of Antiope both survive in substantial papyrus fragments and contain aetiological information. Dionysus’ appearance at the end of Hypsipyle is marked in the margin of the papyrus, but the speech does not survive. Other cases of the deus ex machina (and aetiology), though frequently inferred by modern scholars, are inferences of varying likelihood from later plot summaries. At the end of Medea, Medea boasts to Jason that she will bury her children at Corinth and they will receive cult worship, but we should not interpret this case as a variety of divine intervention scenes. The play predates the earliest securely attested deus ex machina scene (Hippolytus of 428) and Medea’s arrival on the chariot of the Sun differs greatly in tone and emphasis from the appearance of a god, particularly in foregrounding Jason’s inability to touch either Medea or their children. The non-Euripidean Rhesus ended with the Muse predicting, among other things, the future cult for Rhesus.
8		Both Euripides’ Ion and the fragmentary Archelaus begin with extensive genealogies. Etymology is common as, for example, in Antiope fr. 181 and 182, Archelaus fr. 228.7–8, Erechtheus fr. 370, Hec. 1270, Hel. 1670–5, Hipp. 29–33, Ion 661–2 and 1577–81, Or. 1643–7, Phrixos fr. 819, Telephus fr. 393, Tro. 13–14. See further the list of figura etymologica in J. D. Smereka, Studia Euripidea (Leopoldi: Sumptibus Societatis Litterarum, 1936), pp. 172–6. City foundation is predicted at El. 1273–5 and mentioned at Archelaus fr. 228.6. Alexandros fr. 61b gives the origin of human kinds. On the origins of the universe, Aeschylus fr. 44, Euripides, Melanippe the Wise fr. 484, Chrysippus fr. 839 (cf. Hippolytus Veiled, fr. 429).
9		Mastronarde, Art of Euripides, p. 122. See especially his discussion on pp. 123–4 and 165.
10		R. C. S. Jebb, Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments (Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 1893), pp. xxx–xxxii; J. C. Kamerbeek, The Plays of Sophocles: Commentaries (Leiden: Brill, 1953), pp. 14–15; P. H. Burian, ‘Supplication and hero cult in Sophocles’ Ajax’, GRBS 13 (1972), pp. 151–6; P. E. Easterling, ‘Tragedy and ritual: Cry “woe, woe”, but may the good prevail!’, Métis 3 (1988), pp. 87–109; A. Henrichs, ‘The tomb of Aias and the prospect of hero cult in Sophokles’, ClAnt 12/2 (1993), pp. 165–80; J. R. March, ‘Sophocles’ Ajax: The death and burial of a hero’, BICS 38 (1991–3), pp. 1–36; Kowalzig, ‘Aetiology of empire?’. Cf. J. P. Poe, Genre and Meaning in Sophocles’ Ajax (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1987), pp. 9–18, and A. F. Garvie, Sophocles, Ajax (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1998), pp. 5–6. On the connections of the Salaminian chorus, Ajax and Athens, see Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual, pp. 398–9. For Bacchae, see especially R. Seaford, Euripides, Bacchae (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1996), and Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual.
11		B. Toelken, ‘The “pretty languages” of Yellowman: Genre, mode, and texture in Navaho Coyote narratives’, in D. Ben-Amos (ed.), Folklore Genres (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976), pp. 145–70, at pp. 146–7, describing an aetiological tale for the origin of snow recounted by a Navajo elder: ‘I found by questioning him that he did not in fact consider it an aetiological story and did not in any way believe that that was the way snow originated; rather, if the story was “about” anything, it was about moral values, about the deportment of a young protagonist whose actions showed a properly reciprocal relationship between himself and nature. In short, by seeing the story in terms of any categories I had been taught to recognize, I had missed the point.’
12		Contra J. Gregory, Euripides, Hecuba: Introduction, Text, and Commentary (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999), pp. xxxv–xxxvi. See also K. Matthiessen, Euripides ‘Hekabe’: Edition und Kommentar (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), p. 416, and J. Mossman, Wild Justice: A Study of Euripides’ Hecuba (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 200–1.
13		M. A. Flower, The Seer in Ancient Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), p. 22. Distinguishing the activities of manteis, chresmologoi and others who would claim to divine is a notorious problem. See further Flower’s discussions at pp. 58–71. I echo his terminology here. On the diverse roles and manifestations of seer-craft, see also the essays in S. I. Johnston and P. T. Struck, Mantikê: Studies in Ancient Divination (Leiden: Brill, 2005).
14		364b–c with Flower, Seer in Ancient Greece, pp. 27–9.
15		Flower, Seer in Ancient Greece, pp. 37–50.
16		364e–365a.
17		Flower, Seer in Ancient Greece, pp. 94–7, and J. Dillery, ‘Chresmologues and manteis: Independent diviners and the problem of authority’, in Johnston and Struck, Mantikê, pp. 167–231.
18		L. Radermacher, ‘Euripides und die Mantik’, Rheinisches Museum 53 (1898), pp. 497–510, at pp. 504–9, and Dillery, ‘Chresmologues and manteis’, p. 184.
19		Dillery, ‘Chresmologues and manteis’, pp. 194 and 210–12, interprets the ‘wooden walls’ episode of Themistocles as oracular competition.
20		This is a heroic paradigm rather than a divine one and his concerns are not unlike those of heroes of epic. See G. Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, revised edn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 118–19 and 222–42.
21		Contra J. Wilkins, Euripides: Heraclidae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 188: ‘the speech of Eurystheus stands in the place of an ex machina speech, and his report of the oracle covering his heroization and the Spartan invasion is equivalent to the aition expected at the end of a Euripides play’.
22		See R. Seaford, ‘Aitiologies of cult in Euripides: A response to Scott Scullion’, in J. R. C. Cousland and J. R. Hume (eds), The Play of Texts and Fragments: Essays in Honour of Martin Cropp (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 221–34, at pp. 225–8; Wilkins, Euripides: Heraclidae, p. 189; and S. Scullion, ‘Tradition and invention in Euripidean aitiology’, ICS 25 (2000), pp. 217–33.
23		Socrates in Xen. Symp. 4.5 notes that seers cannot foresee what will happen to themselves.
24		For the application of theory of mind to the study of literature see, with further references, L. Zunshine, Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), and, for drama, B. A. McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and McConachie and F. E. Hart, Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn (London: Routledge, 2006).
25		J. Gould, Myth, Ritual, Memory, and Exchange: Essays in Greek Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 203–34, noted also in R. Buxton, ‘Metamorphoses of gods into animals and humans’, in J. Bremmer and A. Erskine (eds), The Gods of Ancient Greece: Identities and Transformations (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 81–91, at p. 90.
26		Elsewhere in tragedy: Hecuba 1267, Iphigenia among the Taurians 711 and 1128, Bacchae 298, Euripides fr. 1110. Outside of tragedy: Plato, Phdr. 244c, Laws 686a, Euth. 3c, Hom. Hym. Hermes 533–8, Archilochus fr. 298 W.
27		On anthropomorphism, see A. Henrichs, ‘What is a Greek god?’, in Bremmer and Erskine, Gods of Ancient Greece, pp. 19–39, at pp. 32–5.
28		On the divine side of such scenes, see esp. C. Sourvinou-Inwood, Tragedy and Athenian Religion (Lanham: Lexington, 2003), pp. 459–511. She effectively critiques the view of tragic gods as artificial as expressed in J. D. Mikalson, Honor Thy Gods: Popular Religion in Greek Tragedy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). In addition to the evidence she provides, I would emphasise the less spectacular though probably individually important acts of divine visitation attested by dedicatory inscriptions such as those collected in G. Renberg, ‘“Commanded by the gods”: An epigraphical study of dreams and visions in Greek and Roman religious life’ (diss., Duke University, 2003).
29		Besides the Iphigenia stories that were the subject of plays by all major tragedians, Artemis would also have played some role in a number of lost plays (Aeschylus’ Callisto, Euripides’ and Sophocles’ Meleager plays).
30		Scullion, ‘Tradition and invention’, p. 219 n. 6.
31		Seaford, ‘Aitiologies of cult in Euripides’, pp. 222–3.
32		I. Rutherford, Pindar’s Paeans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 314–15, with Paean 6.103–20 and Nem. 7.38–47.
33		In addition to the discussions of Scullion and of Seaford cited above, see W. Allan, The Children of Heracles (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 2001), pp. 215–19
34		Agora I 7577 Face B 16 (Gawlinski 2007): [v]v v v hυακιν[θίσι] / [ ^amount ] καθαρμ[όν] (‘for the Hyacinthides, a purification’).
35		For other accounts, see R. Hamilton, Choes and Anthesteria: Athenian Iconography and Ritual (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992).
36		P. Kyriakou, A Commentary on Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006), pp. 311–12.
37		M. Cropp, Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 2000), p. 231, with C. Wolff, ‘Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians: Aetiology, ritual, and myth’, ClAnt 11 (1992), pp. 308–34, at pp. 325–9.
38		Flower, Seer in Ancient Greece, p. 78.
39		Flower, Seer in Ancient Greece, p. 52.
40		The exact relationship between more explicit accounts of religious history, which we might expect to include the sort of information often found in Euripidean aetiological prediction, and the practices of seers remains obscure. Philochorus, a few generations post-Euripides, was a seer and an ‘exegete’, but it is unclear both what status exegetes may have had in Euripides’ day and whether this combination of prophet and ritual ‘expounder’ was shared by others. On post-classical religious history, see most recently J. Dillery, ‘Greek sacred history’, American Journal of Philology 126/4 (2005), pp. 505–26.
40		41 N. Ferguson, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
42		D. Boedeker, ‘Presenting the past in fifth-century Athens’, in D. Boedeker and K. A. Raaflaub (eds), Democracy, Empire, and the Arts in Fifth-Century Athens (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 185–202, at p. 199.
43		Boedeker, ‘Presenting the past’, p. 202.