Plato, drama, and rhetoric 3. Nothing to do with Athens? Tragedians at the courts of tyrants Response II. Athenian tragedy as democratic discourse 5.
Euripidean euboulia and the problem of 'tragic politics' 6. Extended families, marriage, and inter-city relations in later Athenian tragedy: Dynasts II 8. Choroi achoroi: the Athenian politics of tragic choral identity Supplication and empire in Athenian tragedy The panhellenism of Athenian tragedy As Tzanetou reads them following Isocrates 4. They encode empire as a fundamentally moral enterprise to protect the weak against the powerful while also depicting Athens, or a stand-in for Athens, as in addition more powerful and more just than its opponents.
Thus, the play weaves together disparate threads, such as the Proerosia festival, funerary orations and rituals, and supplication, to send complex messages that are not reducible to any single dimension. In fact, Vinh resists readings that seek to distill the political message of the Suppliants into a simple celebration and justification of Athenian power, such as the one offered for suppliant drama in general by Tzanetou.
The final section deals with the Panhellenic aspirations of tragedy. Rosenbloom surveys the evidence broadly, but focuses especially on Aeschylean and early tragedy, while Gibert deals with Hellenicity in later Euripidean tragedy.
In his wide-ranging contribution Rosenbloom begins with the semantics of the term Panhellenes, suggesting that it differs from the simple Hellenes in that it suggests an assembled collective. In tragedy it occurs only in the context of war, specifically in Panhellenic expeditions such as the Trojan War and the Theban War.
It is not a straightforward sleight-of-hand however, equating Athens with all of Greece in order to praise Athens as most Hellenic of the Hellenes. Overall, the essays in this volume are uniformly high-quality. Scholars working on the topics and plays covered will certainly want to consult them. It is uncommon to find a set of conference proceedings this well-integrated. The essays frequently refer to each other not only in the footnotes but in the body as well, suggesting that the original conference must have sparked lively and fruitful scholarly exchange, which has been carried over into publication.
Secondly, Aithra's own words can themselves be read as another example of such rhetorical loadedness as the action of the play unfolds. After all, Aithra partly persuades Theseus to change his mind by arguing that a refusal to aid the Argives could look like unmanly cowardice on his part — And she promises that an intervention will bring honour and glory to both Theseus and Athens , Are these not precisely the sort of arguments which must have swayed Adrastus? So, her dismissal of the charge of aboulia as the propaganda of enemies must surely make the audience worry that Theseus is about to repeat Adrastus' mistakes.
Of course, Athens' military intervention is successful and culminates in an alliance with Argos. Thirdly and finally, Aithra's remarks evoke the traditional adage that Athens is inherently aboulos or dusboulos. Why is Aithra so confident in her advice when we, the audience, know that Athens is proverbially dusboulos?
Furthermore, the audience may well be reminded of the myth that Athena is supposed to counteract the bad consequences of inherent Athenian dusboulia. We must remember that the play does end with the epiphany of Athena. First he must extract oaths from Adrastus to form a military alliance between Athens and Argos and the sons of the Seven must attack Thebes when they have reached adulthood. He then asks her to keep him on the correct path and reminds her that her kindliness to Athens ensures its safety — So, we can read this ending as endorsing the aetiological myth of Athenian dusboulia and Athena's corrective activity in response to it.
But another in my view, more plausible reading would question the traditional assumption that Athens always has this divine insurance against its making of bad decisions. The audience are surely left wondering whether Athena will always be willing to keep Athens on the straight and narrow, whatever it decides to do. Adrastus as good as points this out himself when he responds to the messenger's account of the bloody battle that has taken place to recover the corpses — The content of Athena's instructions and prophecies falls precisely into the category of the unforeseen and unknowable, with which we saw Herodotean and Thucydidean speakers grappling in their discussions of euboulia.
Theseus may have done well to take his mother's advice and to have secured the agreement of Athens to support the Argives against Thebes. Thus, while the play implies that there are better and worse ways of deliberating, represented by Theseus and Adrastus respectively, it also reminds us that there are limitations p.
But what is it that causes Aithra to break her silence in order to change her son's mind? She weeps and laments for the mothers of the Seven — Although he is affected by the suffering of the Argives on stage, Theseus cannot understand the extent of Aithra's sympathy.
She is not one of them, and that is the bottom line. With their suppliant branches, as you see, they are keeping me close in a circle, my son. The word order shows that it is the women's status as mothers of sons which is most important to Aithra. Although Aithra never says outright that she pities, and sympathetically identifies with, the Argive women, it is clear to me that she does both.
The point at which Theseus fails to comprehend the nature and relevance of her feeling for the Argive women is the point at which she decides to speak out.
But Aithra does not then argue that the Argives must be helped out of pity. This is the concluding request to an argument based on religious law and duty, national character, justice, honour, and the negative reputation which Theseus and his city will accrue if they sit on their hands. Pity does not enter into it. Of course, it may be that Aithra does not appeal to pity or sympathy, despite the fact that she seems so moved by these emotions, because she knows that it will cut no ice with Theseus.
She has seen him reject a significant earlier appeal for pity from Adrastus. It is wise for both the rich man to look upon poverty and for the poor man to turn his gaze on the rich and to emulate them so that desire for money may possess him, and for those who have no bad fortune to fix their eyes on what is pitiable.
This could be a programmatic statement of the intellectual and moral value of watching Greek tragedy and it is a shame that we cannot be sure what the next line contained. That is to say, one must see that it is advantageous to imagine oneself in, and identify with, the situation of the other person in question, as well as, or rather than, one's own situation. But it is very significant, I think, that Aristotle would eventually p.
Fascinatingly, the play seems to have Aithra undergo this process without her subsequently mentioning its importance or echoing Adrastus' appeal to it. I am not the first to notice the thematic significance of pity in this play.
We may want to argue that Theseus' change of heart and subsequent actions on behalf of the Argives reveal that he has grown into a compassionate king, positively brimming with wisdom and good sense. But the action and dialogue prior to Aithra's intervention offer an anatomical study of the complexity and difficulty of coming to the right political and diplomatic decision.
Euboulia is easy to lay claim to but much harder to practise. The opening scene raises the question of the extent to which deliberation about going to war should take p.
One only has to read Thucydides' account of the Mytilenean debate or the debate prior to the Sicilian expedition to see this. There are ways of reducing the risk of bad outcomes: one must listen to authoritative advice especially from those who know the will of the gods and be alert to the private or factional interests and agendas lying behind certain proposals.
And yet, sometimes it is better to take risks than live in safety. It is no easy matter to decide when to be cautious and when to make caution subordinate to principles. And you should never assume that you know what is round the corner or that you have the full picture. Rhesus This play, which most would date to the late fifth or early fourth century, opens with a chorus of Trojan watchmen informing Hector that the Greeks are burning huge watch fires near their ships.
One mortal cannot be good at everything —9. Aeneas proceeds to exemplify the implication that he is himself euboulos by listing the drawbacks of Hector's proposed attack: the Trojans could cross the Greeks' defensive ditch and find that the enemy are facing them with spears and not fleeing at all — How will the army and its chariots deal with the Greeks' palisades and embankments if they are routed —17?
And what about Achilles? He is formidable and will not allow the Greeks' ships to be set on fire — This is also the kind of euboulia which Artabanus models in Herodotus. Without doubt, the playwright of Rhesus is working very closely with the text of the Iliad: Aeneas' apparently wise advice and Hector's imprudence have Iliadic analogues.
The playwright has reworked the Homeric model in order to depict a scene of deliberation between two characters and a change of mind on Hector's part. As Rosivach saw over three decades ago, this adoption of a supposedly more prudent and less selfish course of action in response to another's advice establishes a recurring pattern to Hector's behaviour. The work of Apollo p. It is a proper tragedy, then, when one sees that Hector is as important to its action as Dolon and Rhesus.
Aeneas' cautious advice has an immediate affect. The chorus weigh in, urging Hector to change tack and making it clear that Aeneas' proposal is safer —7. And Hector seems to take on a more deliberatively virtuous quality himself. This stresses that his euboulia is not an excuse for inaction or cowardice but is part of a wider portfolio of positive virtues. Euboulia allows one to exhibit military courage when the time is right and when all the facts are in. But we cannot say that the Rhesus is simply providing us with a straightforward lesson in the importance of deliberative virtue in a martial context.
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