When the Enlightenment looked for a model city, a place that epitomized the value of reason over superstition, it chose Athens–a counterweight to the city of revelation, Jerusalem, about which the Enlightenment was rather less enthusiastic. But Athens was not, in fact, a paragon of reason. There’s the trial and execution of Socrates, of course. And then there’s the treatment of Socrates’s somewhat lesser known, and entirely less sympathetic, contemporary, Alcibiades. Right before Alcibiades was to lead an expedition against Sicily in the Peloponnesian War, an anonymous group defaced statues of the god Hermes–a serious sacrilege. The suspicion fell on Alcibiades, no doubt because of his disreputable character, and the outrage eventually led to his downfall in Athens, as did the fact that he apparently mocked and revealed religious secrets–the Eleusinian Mysteries. All of which is to say that the Athenians were themselves plenty religious, even superstitious, by Enlightenment standards.
These episodes are no doubt discussed in a new biography of Alcibiades from Harvard University Press, Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens, by scholar David Stuttard. Here is the description from the Harvard website:
Alcibiades was one of the most dazzling figures of the Golden Age of Athens. A ward of Pericles and a friend of Socrates, he was spectacularly rich, bewitchingly handsome and charismatic, a skilled general, and a ruthless politician. He was also a serial traitor, infamous for his dizzying changes of loyalty in the Peloponnesian War. Nemesis tells the story of this extraordinary life and the turbulent world that Alcibiades set out to conquer.
David Stuttard recreates ancient Athens at the height of its glory as he follows Alcibiades from childhood to political power. Outraged by Alcibiades’ celebrity lifestyle, his enemies sought every chance to undermine him. Eventually, facing a capital charge of impiety, Alcibiades escaped to the enemy, Sparta. There he traded military intelligence for safety until, suspected of seducing a Spartan queen, he was forced to flee again—this time to Greece’s long-term foes, the Persians. Miraculously, though, he engineered a recall to Athens as Supreme Commander, but—suffering a reversal—he took flight to Thrace, where he lived as a warlord. At last in Anatolia, tracked by his enemies, he died naked and alone in a hail of arrows.
As he follows Alcibiades’ journeys crisscrossing the Mediterranean from mainland Greece to Syracuse, Sardis, and Byzantium, Stuttard weaves together the threads of Alcibiades’ adventures against a backdrop of cultural splendor and international chaos. Navigating often contradictory evidence, Nemesis provides a coherent and spellbinding account of a life that has gripped historians, storytellers, and artists for more than two thousand years.
The Religious Aspect of Warfare in the Ancient Near East, Greece and Rome is a volume dedicated to investigating the relationship between religion and war in antiquity in minute detail. The nineteen chapters are divided into three groups: the ancient Near East, Greece, and Rome. They are presented in turn and all possible aspects of warfare and its religious connections are investigated. The contributors focus on the theology of war, the role of priests in warfare, natural phenomena as signs for military activity, cruelty, piety, the divinity of humans in specific martial cases, rituals of war, iconographical representations and symbols of war, and even the archaeology of war. As editor Krzysztof Ulanowski invited both well-known specialists such as Robert Parker, Nicholas Sekunda, and Pietro Mander to contribute, as well as many young, talented scholars with fresh ideas. From this polyphony of voices, perspectives and opinions emerges a diverse, but coherent, representation of the complex relationship between religion and war in antiquity.
Jon D. Mikalson offers for classical and Hellenistic Athens a study of the terminology and contexts of praises of religious actions and artefacts and an investigation of the various authorities in religious activities. The terms of approbation apply to priests, priestesses, and lay individuals in various capacities as well as to sacrifices, dedications, and sanctuaries. From these a new esthetic of Greek religion emerges as well as a new social aspect of public religious practices. The authorities include oracles, traditional customs, laws, and decrees, and their hierarchy and interaction are described. The authority of the Ekklesia, Boule, administrative and military officials, priests, priestesses, and others is also delineated, and a new view of polis “control” of religion is put forward.
In April, Oxford University Press will release “Hellenistic Sanctuaries: Between Greece and Rome,” edited by Milena Melfi (Oxford University) and Olympia Bobou (Ashmolean Museum). The publisher’s description follows:
Sanctuaries were at the heart of Greek religious, social, political, and cultural life; however, we have a limited understanding of how sanctuary spaces, politics, and rituals intersected in the Greek cities of the Hellenistic and Republican periods. This edited collection focuses on the archaeological material of this era and how it can elucidate the complex relationship between the various forces operating on, and changing the physical space of, sanctuaries. Material such as archaeological remains, sculptures, and inscriptions provides us with concrete evidence of how sanctuaries functioned as locations of memory in a social environment dominated by the written word, and gives us insight into political choices and decisions. It also reveals changes unrecorded in surviving local or political histories. Each case study explored by this volume’s contributors employs archaeology as the primary means of investigation: from art-historical approaches, to surveys and fieldwork, to re-evaluation of archival material. Hellenistic Sanctuaries represents a significant contribution to the existing bibliography on ancient Greek religion, history, and archaeology, and provides new ways of thinking about politics, rituals, and sanctuary spaces in Greece.
We are coming to the end of Euripides’ great drama. The final scenes naturally divide into two parts. First, the chorus of the sons of the fallen Argive warriors enters, bearing the urns in which their fathers’ ashes are gathered. They engage in a colloquy with their grandmothers. The episode ends with a brief exchange between the two kings, Theseus and Adrastus, in which they exchange farewells. Second and unexpectedly, the goddess Athena appears on stage. She peremptorily issues two sets of instructions: first, to Theseus, to forbid the Argives to return with the remnants of their dead warriors until they swear to accept certain terms to the advantage of Athens, in accordance with ceremonies she prescribes; and then, to the Argive sons, to enjoin them to renew the war with Thebes once they come of fighting age. Theseus pledges to obey the goddess; the Argive women’s chorus also agrees and departs; and so the play ends.
Cycles of peace and war
The drama has come full cycle. It began with the prayers of Aethra in the sacred precincts of the goddess Demeter at Eleusis – a divinity associated with peace, abundance, agriculture and civilization; a mother who mourned the disappearance of her daughter Kore; and a foundress of Athens. It ends with the appearance of another goddess, Athena, who is associated with war: “she is a warmonger from the moment she is born shaking her armour and making her war cry.” Susan Deacy, Athena (2008). In one of the Homeric Hymns to Athena (ll.2-3), it is said that Athena, together with the war god Ares, “makes her business the works of war, the sack of cities and the shouting and the battle.” She is often depicted with a helmet, shield and spear, is childless and a virgin, and was not born of a mother, but of Zeus. (In Aeschylus’ Eumenides, in casting her vote to acquit the matricidal Orestes, she says, “No mother gave me birth,/I honour the male, in all things but marriage./Yes, with all my heart I am my Father’s child.”) (Robert Fagles trans.) Like Demeter, Athena is associated with agriculture, civilization and the founding of Athens; but she gave the Athenians the olive tree, not grain. Demeter’s shrine at Eleusis is suffused with panhellenic ideals; Athena is the patroness of a particular Greek city, Athens. (The forces that Theseus deploys against Thebes in the panhellenic cause are nonetheless called “the army of Pallas [Athena].)” The play opens with Aethra praying that Demeter grant “prosperity” or “good fortune” (“eudaimonein”) to Theseus and Athens; it ends with Theseus asking Athena to deal with the city so that it may live “in safety” or “securely” (“asphalos”). (Notice that Theseus’ more modest request is suited to harsh, wartime conditions.) The world of human action shown in the play occupies the space between the opposing poles of these two goddesses.
During the course of the drama, we have moved from the aftermath of war to a peace that is preparatory to war; then to war; and finally to a peace that is again the aftermath of war and again a preparation for war’s renewal. As if to mark the stages of this pattern, it appears that the same actor would have played, successively, Aethra, Evadne, and Athena.
War, it seems, is a recurring and inescapable part of the cycle of human existence, and peace a mere respite from it: there is a season to harvest the wheat crop, but there is also season for reaping human bodies. The Argive messenger has described Theseus in battle as brandishing his mace so that “necks, helmets, heads/ [were] mowed down or lopped.” Now the buried bodies of the Argive warriors have been sown and will yield a crop of avenging warrior sons.
Even if the gods are just (as part of the Argive women’s Chorus problematically assumes, while it anxiously awaits news of the fate of Athens’ forces at Thebes), “[y]et justice calls to justice, blood to blood.” The pattern of violence and counter-violence is never-ending; war has the repetitive character of a blood feud.
The war cycle and revenge
The war cycle feeds on revenge. The Greeks never underestimated the power of that motive. Greek historians frequently cited the desire for revenge as a cause of interstate war, and vengeance wars do indeed seem to have been a feature of Greek foreign affairs. See J.E. Lendon, Homeric vengeance and the outbreak of Greek wars, in Hans van Wees (ed.), War and Violence in Ancient Greece (2000). The revenge motive also operated on the individual level as well.
In the Iliad, Homer has Achilles say that revenge is “much more sweet than liquid honey” (Book XVIII, l. 102). In his Rhetoric, Book II, c. 2, Aristotle cited this passage of Homer, saying “anger is always accompanied by a certain pleasure, due to the hope of revenge to come. For it is pleasant to think that one will obtain what one aims at; now, no one aims at what is obviously impossible of attainment by him, and the angry man aims at what is possible for himself. Wherefore it has been well said of anger, that ‘Far sweeter than dripping honey down the throat it spreads in men’s hearts.’” Odysseus’ son Telemachos, listening to the story of how Orestes avenged his father’s death, desires to act similarly: “what a stroke of revenge that was! All Achaeans/will spread Orestes’ fame across the world,/a song for those to come./If only the gods would arm me with such power/I’d take revenge.” Odyssey, Book III, ll. 230-35 (Robert Fagles trans.). In Sophocles’ Ajax, Athena invites Odysseus to gloat at the spectacle of his maddened foe Ajax, saying “Is not the sweetest mockery the mockery of enemies?” (Jebb Trans.). Herodotus speaks of one Hermotimus, castrated as a child by Panionius of Chios, who, after a successful career as a eunuch at the Persian court, re-encountered Panionius years later, persuaded him to bring his whole family to a feast, and there compelled Panionius to castrate all four of his sons there, after which he forced those sons to castrate their father. Thus, Herodotus says, Hermotinus managed to exact “the greatest revenge for an injustice.” Book VIII, cc. 105-06 (Strassler ed.).
Reflecting on his native Montenegro, the Yugoslav writer Milovan Djilas said:
Revenge is its greatest delight and glory. Is it possible that the human heart can find peace and pleasure only in returning evil for evil? . . . Revenge is an overpowering and consuming fire. It flares up and burns away every other thought and emotion. It alone remains, over and above everything else. . . . Vengeance is not hatred, but the wildest, sweetest kind of drunkenness, both for those who must wreak vengeance and for those who wish to be avenged.
Euripides implies that it lies beyond human power to end the war cycle. Here, there is to be no final resolution to the blood-letting, unlike the ending of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, where Athena appeases the avenging Furies, the helpers of justice, persuades them to reside in Athens, and institutes a court of law. (Other societies also managed to escape in a similar way from the retaliatory spiral of the feud to law, see Michelle Daniel, From Blood Feud to Jury System: The Metamorphosis of Cherokee Law from 1750 to 1840(1987)) Euripides’ implacable Athena permits no such escape route. The contrast with the Eumenides is clear: “for Euripides, unlike Aeschylus, there is no triumphant finale to this chain of fatalities; no development of justice; only a traumatic repetition of follies.” J.W. Fitton, The Suppliant Women and the Herakleidai of Euripides (1961).
Here, even when divine justice intervenes in human affairs, it is to order the war cycle to be resumed, not to bring it to a halt. “Peace is the moment when history catches its breath in order to hurl itself once more into war.” Janine Chanteur, From War to Peace (1992 (French ed. 1989)). The gods belie Theseus’ theological optimism: he tells us that divine power has separated mankind from “brutishness” (“theriodous”); but Athena promises the young Argives that they will become “lions’ whelps.” A conflict that began with Apollo’s prophesy about a lion and a boar will return with Athena’s prophesy to the lions’ cubs. Theseus seems to have misunderstood the gods’ intentions as much as Adrastus did: the gods speak as they must, but we hear what we will.
The Sons’ Chorus
The suicide of Evadne and the lament of Iphis are followed directly by a procession of the sons of the dead Argives, bearing their fathers’ ashes in urns. Their entrance may well have reminded Athenian audiences of the traditional ceremony in which the orphans of Athens’ own war dead were led into the orchestra before the performance of tragic plays in festival of the Great Dionysia. The Cambridge classicist Simon Goldhill explains this pre-play rite:
In Athens, if a boy’s father died fighting for the state, the boy was brought up at state expense, and at the end of this maintained childhood was presented with armour and weapons by the state, to take up his place in the state’s fighting forces. . . . These ‘ephebes’ or the class of ‘young males about to become proper men’, were paraded in the theatre in their military equipment. A herald announced the boy’s father’s name and made a moving speech which expressed in glowing terms how the fathers had done their duty, and how their boys, now to be men, would also fulfill their military obligations to the state. The boys then took a stirring oath of loyalty to the state. They promised by a long list of the gods of the state to stand by their comrades wherever they were placed in the line, and declared that they were prepared to fight and die for the city as their fathers had done before them. Then they took up their special seats, reserved for them.
Love, Sex and Tragedy (2004). It would be easy for the Athenian ephebes, watching their “Argive” counterparts on the stage, to see this part of the play as specifically intended for them. (We should also remember that Euripides himself had become an ephebe in 466 and was given a spear and shield for the occasion.)
To this point, the sons’ chorus has been silent. Now they speak, exchanging words with the chorus of their grandmothers. The sons mourn their fathers, the women, their sons. Then the sons say:
Father, your son mourns for you;
Do you hear? Shall I one day,
Shield in hand, avenge your death? God grant it!
Justice for my father’s blood –
It will yet come, with the favour of God.
The women’s chorus responds — somewhat enigmatically, perhaps because the text may be uncertain. In Vellacott’s translation, the women say:
This wrong sleeps not yet.
Why must we always weep?
I have had enough of disasters and misery.
If this translation is correct, the women seem to be expressing dismay at their grandsons’ declared intention of seeking revenge. The women have had enough of war and killing: they have lost their sons, are wretched, and want no more deadly violence. Remember, however, that these same women (or some of them) have earlier said that “blood calls to blood.” Do they want the war cycle to be breached, or have they instigated its renewal themselves?
The sons are adamant:
The day will come when Asopus [a river near Thebes (RJD)] gleams in welcome
As I march bronze-clad at the head of a Danaid army
To avenge my father’s death.
It seems to me that I still see you, father. . .
Not for these young Argives are the sentiments that Rudyard Kipling expressed in his poem The Settler, written in 1903 to mark the end of the Boer War. Kipling’s “Settler” (both meanings must be intended) sought to bridge the divide between the victorious English and the defeated Dutch:
And when we bring old fights to mind,
We will not remember the sin –
If there be blood on his head of my kind,
Or blood on my head of his kin –
For the ungrazed upland, the untilled lea
Cry, and the fields forlorn:
“The dead must bury their dead, but ye –
Ye serve an host unborn.”
In Kipling, the future bids old enemies to bury the past; in Euripides, the future, in the person of the sons, resurrects the past. Herman Melville’s war poetry expresses the mood of these youngsters far better than Kipling’s: “All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys/The champions and enthusiasts of the state.” (The March into Virginia (1861)).
After the choruses, Theseus and Adrastus exchange parting words. Theseus tells the Argives to bear Athens’ gift of the dead bodies “always in thankful memory . . . repeat this story to your sons,/And they to theirs in turn. Teach them the honour due/To Athens; let them recall in perpetuity/Kindness received.” Adrastus replies graciously, “Our gratitude will not grow old.” Then, as suddenly as Evadne did and in the very same place, Athena appears above the shrine.
The judgments of Athena
The goddess Athena’s connections to war and strategy on the one hand, and to Athens on the other, were extremely strong. Joan Bretton Connelly writes that as her legends developed, Athena “becomes a fierce advocate for the land of Attica. She is a shrewd architect of military strategies designed to protect it and a warrior goddess prepared to defend it with all her might.” The Parthenon Enigma (2014). The first thing that worshippers who approached Athens’ Acropolis would see was the temple of Athena Nike [“Victory”]:
Construction of this lovely Ionic temple was begun in the mid-420s, around the time The Suppliants was produced.
When worshippers then entered the sacred space on the Acropolis, they would discover “the astonishing excess of military booty, trophies, and treasures that would dazzle [them] once inside, culminating in a treasure trove of dedications within the Parthenon itself.” (Connelly). And within the Parthenon, the great sculptor Pheidias’ bronze statue of Athena presided:
This was the statue named as Athena “Promachos” (“Fighting in the front rank, and leading her people to victory”), where the virgin goddess was worshipped as a warrior. Athena brought victory to Athens, and victory brought wealth.
Athena’s message here is abrupt and peremptory: “Theseus, I am Athena; listen to my words.” She orders him not to permit the unconditional return of the bodies to Argos. Instead he must make the Argives swear an oath never to march against Athens in arms, and to take up arms in Athens’ defense if she is attacked. Athens is under no reciprocal obligation: the promise of non-aggression binds Argos only; the defensive alliance is to be one-sided. Argos’ oath is to be sanctified by a blood sacrifice. (Again, we see Greek international law resting on supernatural sanctions.) Theseus is to slay three sheep and to capture the blood that runs off in a bronze tripod that the hero Heracles took at Troy and that Theseus has been storing. After the sacrifice Theseus is to inscribe the Argives’ oath in the hollow of the tripod and present it to Apollo’s temple at Delphi, so that all of Greece may be witness to Argos’ pledge. Theseus is also to bury the knife that he will use in sacrificing the sheep and bury it in the earth near the seven pyres of the fallen Argives, so that if an Argive army encroaches on Athenian territory and reaches this crossroad, it will be reminded of the city’s oath (and take the route to Thebes instead). The buried knife will be a lasting reminder to Argos of the buried dead whom Athens had restored to it.
Athena’s instructions to Theseus recall the bitter wisdom of Bias of Priene, whom the Greeks considered one of their seven sages, and whose maxims were often quoted. Bias cynically counseled mistrust: he advised his listeners to love their friends as if they would one day hate them. In the Rhetoric (1389b13-25), Aristotle cites Bias’ maxim, saying that old men, who know that “most things turn out badly,” tend to agree with Bias. Theseus is still young, and he trusts Argos as if it would always remain a friend to Athens. Athena demands that Theseus, as king, think like an old man instead.
Athena and the young Argives
Then Athena turns to the Argive sons. “When you reach manhood you shall sack the city of Thebes/In vengeance for your fathers’ blood.” The young Aigialeus, the son of King Adrastus, is to take his father’s place as commander-in-chief. (It is as if Adrastus, who is standing by, is already dead.) Diomedes, the son of the kin-slaying fugitive Tydeus, is to accompany him. The young soldiers are to hurl their bronze-armed forces against Thebes as soon as they are of age. They shall be the “lions’ whelps,” and they will sack the city. (Recall that Theseus had spared Thebes from that calamity.) The term for “sacking” the city is repeated twice, as if to emphasize the importance of that action, an extreme of violence that was rare in classical Greece: sacking is “[c]ognate to the Homeric practice of mutilation of the body” (Lendon). They must do this in order to avenge (“ekdikazontes”) their fathers; the word for “avenging” has the word “justice” (“dike”) as its root. “This is how things must be,” Athena declares (Euripides: Suppliant Women (James Morwood ed. & trans. 2007).) They will be called “The After-Comers,” and they will be remembered in heroic poetry sung throughout Greece. Their expedition against Thebes (unlike Adrastus’ one) will have the gods’ blessing (“sun theoi”). She does not say whether Thebes in its turn will seek revenge.
Two kings, the just warrior Theseus and the unjust warrior Adrastus, stand before the goddess, humbled and abashed. Theseus at once promises to obey, telling Athena “by your voice/Alone I am saved from error.” He will make Adrastus take the oath Athena prescribes. Adrastus is silent. So thoroughly has Adrastus been marginalized that the Argive women, not he, promise to give the oath to Theseus and Athens (even though Athena has said that Adrastus as King had the authority to make the pledge). Indeed, it is possible that Adrastus has neither seen nor heard Athena, who has not addressed him. (In the Ajax, Odysseus hears but does not see Athena, Ajax both sees and hears her, and Tecmessa neither sees nor hears her.) The Argive women thank Theseus, and the play ends.
Can war be “just”?
In these scenes, the question of war’s “justness” seems to shrink in significance;
Ixion on his wheel
what matters about war is its inevitability. It seems that we do not, after all, choose it; it comes to us. Like Lear towards his end, Theseus, Adrastus, indeed all of humanity, are “bound/Upon a wheel of fire,” King Lear, Act, IV, scene 7; and that wheel is war. One commentator suggests that Athena’s promise to bless the sons’ future war against Thebes is “needed to ensure that an act of war can function as justice,” but that seems plainly wrong to me. See Rebecca Futo-Kennedy, Athena’s Justice (2009). The divinely-guided war that Athena ordains will surely be less just than the purely human war ordered by Theseus. Athena, who brings a just resolution to violence in the Eumenides, is here the renewer of revenge. She is like the gods in Book IV of The Iliad who, after debating whether to perpetuate the fragile truce that the Greeks and Trojans have made or to stir up war again, decide on war, and chose Athena as the instrument for tricking the Trojan archer Laodocus into targeting Menelaus and breaking the truce. Let humans try to establish peace if they can; their efforts are useless. The mind of the gods is on war, and they will thwart our plans.
Pursuing the logic of this interpretation to its limit, we could be led to think that war, as Euripides dramatizes it here, is a necessity of nature, not an activity subject to human control, and hence is “beyond good and evil.” To ask whether a war is just or not would be like asking whether a drought or a plague or an earthquake or a crop infestation was just or not. War is a recurring, ineliminable feature of human existence, necessitated by the basic circumstances, forces, passions and drives that structure and constrain our lives, or by what men otherwise once called “the gods.”
Justice and the order of nature
Let me briefly explore a still bolder interpretative possibility. This is that even if Euripides is saying that the question whether any particular war is just has at best limited significance, nonetheless war as an institution or practice is just. Moreover, he might even be taken to be saying that even if war is a necessity of nature. How might he have reached that startling conclusion? At the risk of being extremely imprudent, let me offer this suggestion.
In a brilliant and influential essay, the Princeton historian of philosophy Gregory Vlastos argued that several “pre-Socratic” Greek thinkers taught, in various ways, that nature was maintained in a state of self-regulating, dynamic equilibrium by the unceasing conflict of equal, opposing forces. See Equality and Justice in Early Greek Cosmologies(1947). At various times, one of the forces would prevail, and its opposite would recede; then the receding force would in its turn prevail, and the force that had once prevailed, would recede. Thus, summer would give way to winter, and after its season, winter would give way to summer. The continuous balancing and rebalancing of opposing forces would produce a healthy equilibrium: the onset of winter would prevent the lassitude and indolence that would be caused by an endless summer, the return of summer would relieve the harshness and asperity of an unending winter. These ineluctable regularities or laws established, not only a natural pattern, but an immanent cosmic justice. By “invading” summer, winter would do summer an “injustice;” but the subsequent return of summer would constitute winter’s “reparations” for that injustice; and so on in turn. Indeed, justice is assured by the facts that all of the opposing forces are equal in strength, all take precedence in turn, and all exist in subjection to a “common law.” The resemblances to a democratic polity’s understanding of “justice” are not accidental. The “commonwealth of nature,” as Vlastos calls it, is the democratic city projected onto the plane of nature as a whole. Cosmic justice is ensured by cosmic equality.
Vlastos sees this philosophical concept of nature in several of the pre-Socratics, including in this fragment quoting Anaximander (Vlastos’ trans.):
And into those things from which existing things take their rise, they pass away once more, according to just necessity; for they render justice and reparation to one another for their injustices according to the ordering of time.
Vlastos argues that this physico-moral conception of nature eventually became “the common property of classical thought.” We can also discern its influence on Greek tragedy, as in these lines that Sophocles gives to Ajax in the play of that name:
Things of awe and might submit to authority. So it is that winter with its snow-covered paths gives place to fruitful summer; night’s dark orbit makes room for day with her white horses to kindle her radiance; the blast of dreadful winds allows the groaning sea to rest; and among them all, almighty Sleep releases the fettered sleeper, and does not hold him in a perpetual grasp.
(R. Jebb (trans.)).
Now it is very likely that Euripides, who was personally acquainted with some of the pre-Socratic thinkers, was both aware of this conception and influenced by it. He might, e.g., have heard about it from Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, who was only fifteen years older, a close friend and adviser of Pericles, a long-time resident of Athens and, reputedly, Euripides’ teacher. While we cannot be certain of this, we do know that Anaximander’s ideas were still being discussed in Athens (by Aristotle) well after Euripides’ death.
Granting these assumptions, it is possible to surmise that Euripides is saying that the endless cycle of war and peace is a manifestation of cosmic justice. War purges away the staleness and tedium of a protracted peace; peace relieves the terror and cruelty of war. There is no “just war.” But because war is natural, and what is natural is just, so war is just.
What should we conclude?
What are we to make of this strangely beautiful, perplexing play, and particularly of its unexpected conclusion? Why, in the warm afterglow of Theseus’ and Adrastus’ mutual promises of lasting amity and good will, does Athena suddenly appear, speaking in the cold voice of power politics? (Fitton describes her here as “the conscienceless voice of State Power.”) Why does she insist that the mere obligations of gratitude are insufficient? What accounts for her peremptory demand for political rationality and realism, for one-sided treaties ratified by blood-sworn oaths, in place of reliance on the ties formed by friendship and generosity? Is Euripides saying that realpolitik alone must be the guide to the conduct of international affairs, and that the memory of past benefits conferred is as likely to create resentment as affection? Is Euripides contrasting the strength and self-confidence of the pre-war Athens with an Athens weakened, wary and coarsened after years of war? Is the final image he gives us one, not of a benign and civilized Athens, but of a harder and more cynical city?
The play’s conclusion raises even deeper and more intractable questions than these – questions that go, not to fifth century Athens alone, but to the nature of war and peace as such. How should we read the play as a whole? Is it, as some critics have argued, an encomium on war-time Athens? Or, as others have said, is it a denunciation of war and imperialism? Is it blueprint for just war, or a demonstration that war cannot secure either peace or justice, even for a little while? Is it a vindication of Theseus’ rational theology, or a proof of the opacity of the gods’ intentions? An argument for human self-reliance and the exercise of intelligence in the face of an indecipherable universe, or an acknowledgement of human helplessness and the futility of action? A plea for civilization, humaneness, and international law, or the bleak recognition that the defense of civilization must itself engender atrocity? A disparagement of human justice, but an affirmation of cosmic justice?
Must we choose between these alternatives, or may we affirm them all? We cannot be sure even as to that. To call the play “dialectical” is only to scratch its surface. Euripides’ greatness is to leave us with questions that are as urgent as they are unanswerable.
Theseus and the Theban herald part; the outbreak of war is imminent. As he leaves, the herald taunts Theseus, who refuses to be angered. One who holds himself out as the “punisher of injustice” cannot undertake to wage war from the passion of anger. Euripides models Theseus as a self-disciplined, as well as a just, warrior. And as Theseus sets out, he invokes the aid of “all those gods/Who respect justice.” His piety complements his justice and his moderation.
The chorus of Argive women awaits news of the battle anxiously. Suddenly, an Argive messenger arrives. He had been taken prisoner in the Argive campaign against Thebes, having served under Capaneus, one of the seven Argive leaders, “whom Zeus blasted with a lightning-flash.” (More on Capaneus later.) Now he has escaped in the confusion of battle. He brings the Argive women news of Theseus’ victory. (Note that he does not address Adrastus, his king.) The women are elated, hailing Theseus as a demi-god: he is not only the son of Aegus, but also “the son of Zeus.” (Perhaps the latter description is meant to tells us something about the tyrannical constitution of Argos: Athens is a republic of equals, and denies the possibility of semi-divine leaders; if they did exist, they would be dangerous to the city. See Walker, Theseus and Athens).
The messenger gives a detailed account of the battle. He says that once the two opposing armies faced off, Theseus made a final bid for peace. The Athenian herald announced to the Thebans “We have come to bring/Those bodies home for burial, in accordance with/The law of all Hellenic states. We have no wish/For further bloodshed.” Theseus goes to war only as a last resort. The Theban King Creon remains silent. Then battle is joined.
It is a hard and bitter struggle. The messenger’s descriptions of the horrors of the battle is reminiscent of The Iliad in its unsparing and gruesome detail. At a critical moment, Theseus demonstrates his generalship. He rallies his troops: at his call, “[c]ourage flared up in every heart.” The Athenians break the Theban line.
Athens buries the dead
The population of Thebes is in despair. Thousands expect Theseus to capture their city. “But Theseus,/With the way clear before him, would not enter the gates. ‘I have not marched from Athens to destroy this town,’/He said, ‘but to demand the dead for burial.’” The campaign ends with the recovery of the Argive bodies, not with the sacking of Thebes. The requirement that if a war is to be just it must be “proportionate” is plainly met. See Christopher Greenwood, The Relationship between jus ad bellum and jus in bello(1983).
Theseus buries most of the recovered Argive bodies on the high cliff of Eleutherae, on Athenian soil, just across the border from Theban Boeotia. Athens had annexed Eleutherae, which had once been part of Boeotia, in the sixth century. But this borderland site seems to have been contested between Athens and Thebes, and perhaps changed hands from time to time. By burying Argive soldiers there, Theseus reinforces Athens’ claim to it. See John Camp, The Archaeology of Athens (2004).
But Theseus does not bury the remains of the Argive leaders who were the “Seven against Thebes.” He brings those bodies (or such as are still near Thebes) back to Athens for a ceremonial funeral. Who has taken those bodies, Adrastus asks the messenger; surely a slave would be reluctant even to lift them? To Adrastus’ astonishment, the messenger answers that Theseus has tended to the bodies himself, washing away the blood-stains of their wounds, preparing their Read more
In his colloquy with the Theban herald, Theseus is not, I think, advocating any form of the “democratic peace” thesis (on which see Michael W. Doyle, Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs(1983)). Certainly Theseus is not claiming that democratic Athens is reluctant to go to war: as we have seen, fifth century Athens was more or less continually at war. Nor is he even claiming that Athens is unlikely to make war with other Greek democracies: that claim too is unsupported. (From 415 to 413, democratic Athens was at war with democratic Syracuse.) See Eric Robinson, Reading and Misreading the Ancient Evidence for Democratic Peace(2001).
Theseus and the claim that democracy is epistemically superior
What Theseus is saying, I think, is that democracies will make better decisions
Well, perhaps not.
about war than non-democratic states, both because more sources of information will be consulted, and also because the arguments for and against war will be more fully and critically examined. The historian Christian Meier, in his Athens: A Portrait of the City in Its Golden Age (English trans. 1998 (1993)) tells us that “Athenian democracy followed two fundamental principles: First, all decisions were to be made as openly as possible and on the basis of public discussion, with the deliberating bodies being as large as feasible. Second, as many citizens as possible were to take part in the political process and also hold office. Organized groups of aristocrats were thus prevented from using their influence in the appointment of public officials. In general, political manipulation by small groups was not to be tolerated.”
The Athenians often extolled the virtues of democratic deliberation. In his funeral oration (Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, Book II, c. 40), Pericles says that the Athenians “weigh what we undertake, and apprehend it perfectly in our minds; not accounting words for a hindrance of action, but that it is rather a hindrance to action to come to it without instruction of words before.” Moreover, Pericles argues (with an eye to Sparta) that Athens’ proclivity for deliberation does not prevent it from showing courage and daring when in arms: “For also in this we excel others; daring to undertake as much as any, and yet examining what we undertake; whereas with other men, ignorance makes them dare, and consideration dastards.” Indeed, Pericles claims, the kind of knowledge Athens acquires through deliberation is a necessary condition of the virtue of courage, rightly considered: “they are most rightly reputed valiant, who though they perfectly apprehend both what is dangerous and what is easy, are never the more thereby diverted from adventuring.”
Thucydides himself may have been more skeptical of the merits of deliberative
Democratic deliberation
democracy than Pericles (as Thucydides represents him) was. Thucydides’ account of the Athenian Assembly’s debates over the fate of the city of Mitylene, which had rebelled against Athens in wartime, is illustrative. After suppressing the revolt, the incensed Athenians had voted in a moment of fury to put the entire male population of Mitylene to death, and dispatched a vessel to convey their decision to the commander of their forces at the city. The next day, in a more sober and reflective mood, they decided to reconsider their hasty decree. Thucydides gives us the opposing speeches of Cleon (who advocated carrying out the original order) and Diodotus (who wanted it rescinded). See Thucydides, Book III, cc. 37-48. In a close vote, the Assembly decided to rescind the decree and spare those Mityleneans who had had nothing to do with the revolt. Luckily the vessel they dispatched to countermand the original order arrived before the first one did. Thucydides seems to want to illustrate both the pitfalls of the Assembly’s decision-making (it can act from passion and without consideration, and even its amended decree is extremely harsh) and also its desirable features (it provides a workable procedure for error-correction).
In this light, we can see the colloquies of the opening scenes between Theseus and the suppliants, and then between Theseus and Aethra, as modeling the debates of the Athenian assembly. The colloquies show us a process in which information is gathered and assessed, arguments and counter-arguments (including women’s) are heard, and appeals to the emotions of pity and pride are admissible along with considerations of national interest. And certainly the policy outcome – intervention against Thebes – seems to be better than the defective outcomes produced by one-man rule in Argos and Thebes.
If this interpretation is right, Euripides will be anticipating, through Theseus, a defense of deliberative democracy that Aristotle would later set forth: that it incorporates epistemically superior decision procedures. (More recent authors speak in this connection of “the wisdom of crowds.”) Aristotle says that when many different people
of whom each individual is not a good man, . . . meet together [they] may be better than the few good, if regarded not individually but collectively, just as a feast to which many contribute is better than a dinner provided out of a single purse. For each individual among the many has a share of excellence and practical wisdom, and when they meet together, just as they become in a manner one man, who has many feet, and hands, and senses, so too with regard to their character and thought. Hence the many are better judges than a single man of music and poetry; for some understand one part, and some another, and among them they understand the whole.
Quoted and analyzed in Jeremy Waldron, The Wisdom of the Multitude: Some Reflections on Book 3, Chapter II of Aristotle’s Politics (1993). Waldron interprets Aristotle to be saying here that “the many acting collectively may be a better judge than the few best not only of matters of fact, not only of social utility, but also and most importantly of matters of ethics, value, and the nature of the good life.” It is this very claim to epistemic superiority that critics of Athenian democracy like the Pseudo-Xenophon will deny: “Someone might say that they ought not to let everyone speak on equal terms and serve on the council, but rather just the cleverest and finest.”
Modern scholars on democracy’s epistemic advantages
Modern scholars have developed interesting defenses of democracy that harken back to these Greek debates, arguing that the Athenian experience supports the claim that democracy as a decision procedure offers epistemic advantages over alternative processes. See Josiah Ober, Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens (2008). The philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, e.g., using a model of democratic decision-making derived from John Dewey, contends that democracy should be seen as akin to experimentally-based scientific investigation. Ideally, democracy pools widely distributed information from the many diverse knowers who participate in it, subjects their different claims to shared deliberation and critique, reaches public policy conclusions on that basis, permits dissent, ensures accountability, and makes policy changes after getting feedback. These characteristics promote sound policy choices and give democracies a competitive edge over other systems. See Elizabeth Anderson, The Epistemology of Democracy(2006). In particular, democratic procedures arguably give democracies a competitive advantage in waging war. In Why Societies Need Dissent (2003), the legal scholar Cass Sunstein points to evidence that the superior performance of the American and British democracies over the Germany, Italy and Japan was owed to the fact that the public and press in a democracy are free to review, debate and criticize the government’s actions, while in totalitarian systems, criticisms and suggestions are both unwanted and unheeded, and the streams of information and authority run from the top on down. (To be sure, the superior wartime performance of the Stalinist Soviet Union cannot be explained in this way.) Democracies are therefore more likely to make adaptations and correct errors when it is useful to do so.
Further, both Euripides’ Theseus and modern researchers are saying that once democracies go to war, they will tend to prosecute it more determinedly, because the citizens who fight it have done so of their own accord, and because they rather than their overlords stand to enjoy the rewards of victory. “Making decisions about the city was . . . an essential part of being a citizen, and those who made the decisions had also to be ready to die for them on the battlefield” (Sophie Mills). There is substantial support for this view: in Democracies at War (2002), Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam amass the evidence that
democratic elites [are] far less likely than other kinds of states to enter into war impulsively, and thereby avoiding risky and costly military adventures. On the battlefield, democratic political culture imbues democracies’ citizens with individual attributes that serve both the citizens and the state well in war as well as in peace. More often than not, the sons of democracy outfight the sons of tyranny by showing better individual initiative and leadership than their counterparts raised in and fighting for autocratic regimes.
Finally, Theseus is saying that democracies will make war with less wastage of life – or at least, with less wastage of its own citizens’ lives – because the citizens and the decision-makers are one and the same. Modern democracies behave similarly: in the 1999 war in Kosovo, the NATO democracies attempted to wage a “zero-casualty” war – meaning, that their forces would suffer no casualties.
Theseus and the Theban Herald, Round Two: Why Athens fights
Theseus’ debate with the Theban herald is not over: there remains the question of explaining to Thebes why Athens will fight.
The core of Theseus’ argument is, of course, that Athens will fight to uphold the laws and customs of Greece. But Theseus is not content simply to refer to those laws; instead, he undertakes to show their rationality. Some readers take this to indicate that Euripides was a rationalist or humanist who did not credit the divine authority of the laws. That may be so, but there is a simpler explanation for this turn of the drama: the Thebans already know that they are violating a religious prescription (an action they consider justified by Argos’ impiety in attacking them). Theseus’ effort to display the rationality of the laws therefore addresses an aspect of the situation that Thebes has insufficiently considered. In any case, here is what Theseus says:
I claim the right to fulfill the law of all Hellas
In burying those dead bodies. Wherein lies the offence?
If you were injured by those Argives – they are dead.
You fought your foes with glory to yourselves, and shame
To them. That done, the score is paid. Permit their bodies
To hide below ground, and each part to return there
Whence first it came into this light; breath to the sky,
Flesh to the soil. For we have in our own bodies
But a life-tenancy, not lasting ownership;
At death, the earth that bred us must receive us back.
Do you think that you hurt Argos by not burying them?
Far from it; this is a hurt done to the whole Hellene race,
When dead men are denied their proper rites, and left
Unburied. Should such practice become general,
Brave men would shrink from battle. And do you, who hurl
At me these threatening speeches, tremble at dead men
Unless they lie unburied? What fear troubles you?
Do you think that from their graves they’ll undermine your town,
Or in their earthy chambers beget sons, from whom
Vengeance will haunt you? . . .
Yield us the bodies to inter;
We wish to give them pious rites. If you will not –
In plain terms, I will come with arms and bury them.
It never shall be published through the Hellene lands
That I and this city of Pandion, called upon
To uphold this ancient, divine ordinance, let it die.
Theseus is invoking the ideal of “helping the wronged” – an ideal that held a powerful attraction for Athens and its public. Matthew Christ, in The Limits of Altruism in Democratic Athens (2012), argues that “the Athenians were drawn to the notion that they were a noble people who were always prepared to intervene on behalf of fellow Greeks in distress and to save them from their oppressors.” Abundant evidence supports this view. For instance, in his funeral speech, Pericles argues that Athens intervenes on behalf of other Greeks states disinterestedly, without a view to its own gain – and thereby earns their esteem and gratitude (which, incidentally, serves its interests):
we purchase our friends, not by receiving, but by bestowing benefits. And he that bestoweth a good turn, is ever the most constant friend; because he will not lose the thanks due unto him from him whom he bestowed it on. Whereas the friendship of him that oweth a benefit, is dull and flat, as knowing his benefit not to be taken for a favour, but for a debt. So that we only do good to others, not upon computation of profit, but freeness of trust.
It is true, as Christ also shows, that this ideal, despite its attractiveness as a matter of Athens’ self-image, did not appreciably affect its relationships with other cities: his analysis shows that Athenian intervention in practice was regularly based on strategic considerations, not on compassion. It is also true that what Athens presented to itself and to its allies as “humanitarianism” could be a cloak for imperialism: in arguing for going to war on behalf of Athens’ Sicilian allies, Alcibiades is reported to have told the Assembly that Athens acquired its empire precisely through (ostensibly) benign intervention:
the way whereby we, and whosoever else hath dominion, hath gotten it, hath ever been the cheerful succouring of their associates that required it, whether they were Greeks or barbarians. (Thucydides, Book VI, c. 18)
But within the dramatic world of The Suppliants, such strategic thinking does not appear. The only hint of it I can discern occurs near the end of Theseus’ exchange with the Theban herald, when the latter accuses both Theseus and Athens of “busy-bodiness” or “meddlesomeness” (prassein poll’) and Theseus replies that that habit makes Athens very prosperous (poll’ eudaimonei). “Busy-bodiness” can occupy the same semantic field as “interventionism,” as when the Athenians tell the Camarineans in Sicily that they have come as allies to the cities on that island that have suffered injustice (adikoumenois) from Syracuse, and that they are intervenors (polla prassein) and liberators because they have much to guard against on Sicily themselves (Book VI, c. 87, 2). But if Euripides is implying a connection between interventionism and imperialism, he does not develop it in this play.
A final note
One final note on Theseus’ speech. In seeking to explain the rationality of the Greek laws relating to the burial of the combat-dead, Theseus remarks that if the custom of permitting the bodies of the defeated side were not upheld, “brave men would shrink from battle.” That may well have been true in classical Greece. In describing the retreat of the beaten and demoralized Athenian army from Sicily, Thucydides tells us that the soldiers were struck “both with fear and grief” in seeing their dead comrades lying unburied on the ground (Book VII, c. 75). Something similar might even be true nowadays. I once asked the grandfather of one of my students, who had taken part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy, what he remembered most about that day. He recalled first his own “fear and grief” at seeing the dead bodies of other GIs stacked up.
There is a subtle, ironical consequence to Theseus’ argument, however. If the custom of burying the combat-dead is not honored, then men will be reluctant to fight – and so the chances of future war will be less. On the other hand, by enforcing the war code, Theseus will be making future wars more likely. The code thus seems to be a way of perpetuating the institution of war, not of limiting or ending it. We shall see other ironies of a similar kind as the drama nears its conclusion.
This is an opportune moment to discuss the character of Theseus, as Euripides portrays him. By the fifth century, the image of Theseus had become, in a word, that of the consummate Athenian statesman, warrior and gentleman — the founder of the city’s democracy but also the epitome of its aristocratic qualities. In the image of Theseus, Athens saw the best and finest presentation of itself. “Of all Greek heroes, Theseus . . . has the greatest claim to enshrine all the best qualities of the Athenian citizen, not least in his championship of the demos, celebrated by poets and painters alike of the classical period.” John N. Davie, Theseus the King in Fifth Century Athens(1982). (For a more recent and very full treatment, see Sophie Mills, Theseus, Tragedy and the Athenian Empire (1997)).
By the time Euripides’ Suppliants was produced, Theseus had been richly and variously mythologized; but he had become, unmistakably, an Athenian national figure (unlike Heracles, with whom he had been associated, but who remained a Greek hero). He was famed for having killed the Minotaur, a monster that was half-man and half-bull, and who devoured sacrificial offerings of young Athenians. By that act, Theseus liberated Athens from being forced to pay (human) tribute and came to represent the forces of civilization against barbarism. His legendary deeds were commemorated by the fifth century lyric poet Bacchylides, who in one fragment says that “a god impels him, so that he can bring justice down on the unjust,” and that he journeys seeking “splendor-loving Athens.” Theseus also seems to have been the central figure in a lost epic poem.
From the late sixth century onwards, Theseus begins to appear frequently in Athenian vase painting, and the imagery depicting him there resembles that of the Athenian tyrannicide Harmodius, suggesting that Theseus was linked to the emergence of the young Athenian democracy. Euripides goes so far as to say in The Suppliants that he was the true founder of the Athenian democracy. By the fourth century, the belief that associated Theseus with the foundation of the democracy seems to have been widespread: the celebrated painter Euphranor showed him in the company of Demos (the People) and Demokratia (the Democracy). By fabricating this link, Athens’ artists and myth-makers gave the city’s democracy a royal pedigree. See Henry J. Walker, Theseus and Athens (1995); Martin Robinson, A Shorter History of Greek Art (1991).
Athens also memorialized and honored Theseus in its public buildings. The
Theseion
Theseion, was a hero shrine in the center of Athens, built to house his body. According to the later writer Plutarch’s Life of Theseus, “now he lies buried in the heart of the city, . . . and his tomb is a sanctuary and place of refuge for runaway slaves and all men of low estate who are afraid of men in power, since Theseus was a champion and helper of such during his life, and graciously received the supplications of the poor and needy.” In the comic poet Aristophanes’ The Knights(l. 1312), the Theseion is also represented as a place of refuge. Gradually, Theseus’ shrine came to be seen as a place of refuge for suppliants of all kinds.
Athens’ fifth century tragic poets exalted Theseus to new levels. “[I]n the hands of the tragedians . . . Theseus grew in stature as a statesman and king until, in the [Suppliants] of Euripides and Oedipus Coloneus of Sophokles he appears as a humane and articulate representative of democracy” (Davie). Indeed, he becomes the personification of the city itself: “Where he is representative of Athens in tragedy, Theseus embodies Athenian civilization in all its manifestations, so that he is usually less an individual character with his own fate than a symbol of Athenian virtue. . . . [H]e is amply endowed with all four cardinal Greek virtues, and other characters can simply look on and admire.” (Mills). Later Athenians singled out the justice of Theseus’ intervention on behalf of the Argive suppliants for special praise. In his Funeral Oration, the Athenian speaker Lysias commended Theseus for deploying Athens’ military might for the selfless and humanitarian purposes of upholding Greek laws and of ending Thebes’ outrages against the gods. See Lys. 2.7-10,
Theseus’ colloquy with the Athenian herald
Returning now to the play, we pick up the action after Theseus has received the Assembly’s assent to his expedition against Thebes. Theseus addresses two heralds – the first, Athenian, the other, Theban – in succession. (Functionally, both heralds serve as ambassadors.) Theseus instructs the Athenian herald to appeal “graciously” to Creon, King of Thebes, to surrender the unburied Argives; if Creon refuses, the herald is to tell him that war with Athens will ensue.
Theseus gives his (intended) ambassador specific instructions what to say and how to say it. Greek cities commonly, but not invariably, limited the discretion of their diplomatic representatives in that way. See, e.g., Herodotus, Histories, Book VII, c. 148 (ambassadors to Argos say what “they have been instructed” to say). As one scholar notes, the practice of sending an ambassador with instructions was especially advantageous for a democracy, because that procedure “ensured that the will of the people would not be thwarted by their envoys.” Anna Missiou-Ladi, Coercive Diplomacy in Greek Interrstate Relations (1987). Theseus’ instructions may reflect a preference for democratic diplomatic practice.
Theseus’ colloquy with the Theban herald
As Theseus is giving these instructions, a second herald, the Theban, appears. The Theban brusquely demands to speak with the “king absolute” of Athens. Theseus corrects him sharply: “This state is not/Subject to one man’s will, but is a free city. The king here is the people, who by yearly office/Govern in turn.” (Euripides is obviously being anachronistic here.) The Theban herald rejoins with a stinging critique of Athenian democracy, and Theseus answers with a defense of it.
Some critics find this constitutional colloquy intrusive (or even a later interpolation), see, e.g., G.M.A Grube, The Drama of Euripides (1941) (finding the debate to be a “flagrant irrelevancy”). But Euripidean drama was renowned for its intellectual qualities: later ancients called him “the philosopher of the stage,” see C. Collard, Euripides (1981), and even in his own lifetime, the comic poet Aristophanes satirized his efforts to educate the Athenian public, see John Dillon, Euripides and the Philosophy of His Time(2004). The debate between Theseus and the Theban herald in fact deepens the argument of what is essentially a drama of ideas. In particular, it raises the possibility that Athens’ military intervention was just because, in part, of the decisional procedures that led to it.
The constitutional argument
The clash between the Theban herald and the Athenian democrat-king mirrors the great fifth and fourth century debate in Greece between the proponents and opponents of democracy. (Herodotus presents a version of the debate in the form of a dialogue among three Persian nobles, one of whom advocates democracy, the second oligarchy, and the third, monarch. Histories Book III, cc. 80-83; see generally Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule (1998). For the Theban, whose city (he says) “lives under command/Of one man,” it is obvious that a democratically governed city cannot make coherent or intelligent public policy. “Experience gives/More useful knowledge than impatience. Your poor rustic,/Even though he be no fool – how can he turn his mind/From ploughs to politics?”
The Theban’s argument parallels that of the fourth century writer known as “Pseudo-Xenophon,” who is his tract On the Constitution of Athensmaintained that “among the best people there is minimal wantonness and injustice but a maximum of scrupulous care for what is good, whereas among the people there is a maximum of ignorance, disorder, and wickedness; for poverty draws them rather to disgraceful actions, and because of a lack of money some men are uneducated and ignorant.” (E.C. Marchant trans.). Some critics take the Theban’s anti-democratic speech to be “good Euripidean doctrine” that “Theseus does little or nothing” to refute. (See L.H.G. Greenwood, Aspects of Euripidean Tragedy (1953)). This, I think, is clearly wrong.
The essence of Theseus’ answer is that Athenian democracy depends on the equal protection of the law, and therefore serves the ends of justice. “Equal laws” mean that the rich and the poor, the strong and the weak, are subject to the same laws and can all seek their protection. (The Pseudo-Xenophon contends that this is untrue, alleging that Athens’ laws are designed to promote the interests of the worse-off.) Further (although this is more implicit than explicit), Theseus’ argument suggests that a domestic policy that protects the city’s lower classes through equal laws is congruent with a foreign policy that gives precedence to the claims of Greek customary international law over the claims of power and force:
A state has no worse enemy than an absolute king.
First, under such a ruler there is no common law.
One man holds the whole law in his own grasp; that means
An end to equality. When laws are written down,
Both poor and rich possess their equal right; the weak,
Threatened or insulted by a prosperous neighbor, can
Retort in the same terms; the humble man’s just cause
Defeats the great.
Just as the written law of Athens protects the weak from the strong, so Athens itself, by enforcing the common (if unwritten) laws of the Greeks, will vindicate the rights of Argos that a more powerful Thebes is violating. Democracy, it appears, leads naturally to humanitarian intervention, or to what we call “the responsibility to protect.” Both in its domestic arrangements and in its foreign policy, Athens as a democracy is deeply committed to the rule of law. By contrast, in violating the common law of the Greek city states, Thebes is rejecting the idea of equal justice, and “is behaving toward the other states of Greece just as a despot . . . behaves toward the other citizens of his [city].” Walker, Theseus and Athens.
Theseus also defends Athens’ constitution on the grounds that deliberative democracy tends to produce policy decisions of a higher quality than autocracy. Specifically, he argues that that is true of the question of initiating wars:
Further: the people, vested with authority,
Values its young men as the city’s great resource.
An absolute king regards them as his enemies;
The best of them, and those he thinks intelligent,
He kills off, being afraid of rivals to his throne.
How can a city grow in strength, when all its young
And bold spirits are mown down like fresh stalks in spring?
As Plato will later argue, see The Republic, Book IX, 578a-579c, the “absolute king” or tyrant is governed by fear of internal enemies; and that fear may cause him to project violence outward against foreign states. Thus, the absolute king will tend to make decisions, especially concerning war, that are destructive of the common good. By contrast, Theseus argues, a democracy will address the question of war far more carefully, because the decision rests in the hands of its citizens – and it is their lives, or those of their children, that will be at stake. Here again we may cite Pseudo-Xenophon, who says that in Athens, “it is the people who man the ships and impart strength to the city; the steersmen, the boatswains, the sub-boatswains, the look-out officers, and the shipwrights — these are the ones who impart strength to the city far more than the hoplites, the high-born, and the good men.”
Theseus also argues that Athens’ democratic system makes the city richer,
Theseus in discussion
because under a tyranny the common people have no incentive to work and save: “Why should a man win wealth and substance for his sons/When all his labour only swells a tyrant’s hoard?” Herodotus had earlier made exactly the same point about Athens (Histories Book V, c. 78): once Athens had rid itself of its tyrants, the Athenians “became by far the best of all. . . . [T]hey were deliberately slack when repressed, since they were working for a master, but after they were freed, they became ardently devoted to win achievements for themselves as individuals” (The Landmark Herodotus (Robert B. Strassler ed., Andrea L. Purvis trans. (2007)). And in fact, recent research confirms the unusual prosperity of ancient Athens. See Mogens Herman Hansen & Thomas Heine Nielsen, An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis(2004).
The Theban herald, however, denies that democratic decision-making is rational. From his perspective, it is impaired by a cognitive or emotional deficiency from which every voter suffers: no voter thinks that he will be a casualty. In other words, democracies take undue risks because their voters discount risk too much: they are therefore war-prone.
For when an issue of war hangs on the people’s vote,
Then no one reckons that his own death may be involved;
This mournful prospect he assigns to someone else.
If Death stood there in person while men cast their votes,
Hellas would not be dying from war-mania.
Moreover, the Theban argues, if democracies were rational, they would consistently prefer peace to war, since the benefits of peace are obviously greater:
All men know, which of two arguments
Is more valid; we know what good, what evil is;
How far peace outweighs war in benefits to man;
Peace, the chief friend and cherisher of Muses; peace,
The enemy of revenge, lover of families
And children, patroness of wealth. . . .
And more pointedly, he says to Theseus:
A wise man’s love is owed first to his children, then
To his parents; and to his native land, which he should strive
To build, not to dismember. Whether on land or sea,
A rash leader is a risk; timely inaction, wise.
It is, of course, entirely natural that the Theban ambassador should urge on Athens the advantages of peace: if he is persuasive, his city will be spared an Athenian invasion. Nonetheless, there is obvious appeal in his arguments.
But Theseus remains unpersuaded. Euripides invites us to think that Athens occupies a midway position between Argos and Thebes. Argos by its aggressiveness has initiated a foolish and unjust war, which it has lost. Thebes counsels peace, but the peace for which it calls is stained by the Theban injustice of not allowing the Argives to repatriate their dead. There is an unjust peace, exactly as there is an unjust war; and an unjust peace is an unstable one. Athens is positioned as the mean between these two opposites: it wages war justly, to undo the effects of an unjust war that has led to an unjust peace.
We have reached a turning point in Euripides’ drama. Theseus, king of Athens, has rejected the pleas of the suppliants from Argos to intervene on their behalf against the city of Thebes, and to recover the dead bodies of their sons, which still lie exposed and unburied before that city’s walls. Theseus seems to be willing to allow Thebes’ offense against the laws and customs of Greece to stand; he will not deploy Athens’ military power or even its diplomatic efforts on behalf of the Argives.
At this point, Theseus’ mother, Queen Aethra, personally supplicates him on the Argives’ behalf. She appeals partly to his personal sense of honor, partly to his concern for his reputation and that of Athens, partly to his duty to uphold the claims of justice and law.
In general, women in classical Athens were allowed no role in public political discourse. See Paul A. Rahe, The Primacy of Politics in Classical Greece(1984). Despite that, Theseus (pointedly unlike King Creon in The Antigone) is willing, not only to hear her out, but to be persuaded by the force of her reasoning. Aethra says:
This, my son, is for your honour; nor do I
Shrink from exhorting you, when pride of power denies
Dead men due burial and the rites of decency,
To force them to their duty by the might of arms,
And stop them undermining the established laws
Of all Hellas. This one bond makes all cities one:
Free, honourable respect for universal rights. . .
You’ll march with Justice on your side.
Theseus is persuaded:
To avoid a dangerous task
Is not my nature. I have, by honourable deeds,
Chosen and claimed this character among the Greeks,
To be always the punisher of injustice. So,
I cannot now refuse this task. . . .
I will go and redeem their dead,
If I can, by persuasion; if words fail, the sword
Shall gain the same end.
The place of pity in politics
In his illuminating essay Pity and Politics (2005) (in Pity and Power in Ancient Athens, Rachel Hall Sternberg (ed.)), David Konstan has read the colloquy between Theseus and Aethra in light of Athenian conceptions of the place of pity in politics. The Greeks viewed pity not to be raw emotion, but to incorporate an intellectual component – to involve the exercise of moral judgment. Pity was not simply a response to suffering or misfortune as such, but only to undeserved hardship. So understood, Theseus’ refusal (before Aethra’s intervention) to take up the cause of the Argives was not a matter of his obtuseness or insensitivity, as some critics suppose. Rather, it reflected Theseus’ judgment that the sufferings Adrastus had brought on himself and his city were deserved, because they flowed from an unjust (and unsuccessful) war. Pity would have been out of place.
Aethra’s intervention might then be read as an exercise in persuading Theseus to reconsider that judgment. After all, the Argive women had nothing to do with Adrastus’ campaign of aggression. Moreover, Argos’ aggression had been fully punished by its defeat; for Thebes to deny the Argive warriors the burial rites customarily given to the fallen was to not to exact justice but to commit injustice. By persuading Theseus to reconsider his incomplete understanding of the Argive case, Aethra would have opened the valves of pity in his heart.
In fact, however, that is not Konstan’s analysis. Rather, he argues that Aethra persuades Theseus by convincing him that both Athens’ and his own reputational interests are at stake. She is making her case, in other words, in terms of public, political rationality. There is no “hint that Theseus’ change of heart has been inspired by pity. He has been convinced to help the Argives on the grounds that doing so will enhance his reputation and that of Athens, and will also vindicate a divinely sanctioned custom of the Greeks. This is a politically sober, if high-minded, motive.”
Konstan’s interpretation seems correct to me. But by accepting it, we do not impeach the justice of Athens’ armed intervention. Perfect altruism is not to be expected in the world of statecraft. But concern for the international order and the common good of nations may be, and in fact is, found. Moreover, states may seek to maintain a certain reputation for themselves because of a profound sense of self-identity: they may intervene protectively on behalf of strangers at some material cost to themselves because of a strong conviction that that is the kind of State they are. International Relations theorists have noted that “the search for moral prestige and credibility” can function as a cause of humanitarian intervention, and that this purpose, though no doubt related to more “materialist” power political aims, is still distinguishable from them. See, e.g., Oded Löwenheim, “Do Ourselves Credit and Render a Lasting Service to Mankind”: British Moral Prestige, Humanitarian Intervention, and the Barbary Pirates (2003). As Euripides presents the matter, that is the case with Athens here.
Other interpreters err, in my judgment, either on the side of too much cynicism or on the side of too much idealism. Either they seem to think that states are simply incapable of acting disinterestedly, or they think that states can only be supposed to have acted disinterestedly if altruism was their sole motive. For an overly cynical interpretation, see Ann N. Michelini, Political Themes in Euripides’ Suppliants, (1994) (“Even the strong moral motivations and apparent altruism in Theseus’ involvement in the Theban-Argive quarrel are characteristic of imperialism, since high principle is a necessary support for intervention that is not justified by traditional interests or obvious needs.”). But that is to say that the only considerations that can motivate states are unqualifiedly material ones – and that is false. For the idealist error, see J.W. Fitton, The Suppliant Women and the Herakleidai of Euripides (1961) (“If this were a Just War, it would be inspired by high motives; in fact the straight appeal of Adrastos fails and the motivation appears to be a tangle of national pride, personal egoism and maternal compulsion”). But a Just War can be inspired from a mixture of motives, and here it seems that the defense of panhellenic values is the crucial one.
The Justice of Athens
By representing Theseus as initially unwilling, despite the Argives’ pleading, to intervene in Argos’ quarrel with Thebes, Euripides has underscored the justice of Athens’ eventual war. Unlike Argos’ expedition against Thebes, Athens’ war is not undertaken rashly and without due deliberation. Rather, its intervention is a reluctant one. After questioning Adrastus closely about his expedition against Thebes and concluding that it was an impious war, Theseus was at first unwilling to lend him support or to associate himself with an unjust aggressor, even if that aggressor has in turn been wronged. Further, Theseus vows to attempt (and does attempt) to resolve the quarrel peaceably “by persuasion,” so that armed intervention is a last, not first, resort. Athens is also going to war as “the punisher of injustice,” not for narrowly self-interested reasons. Its cause – to uphold “the established laws of all Hellas” – seems unquestionably just.
Even if its reputational interests are also at stake, Athens’ chief motive is to see justice done, established law upheld, wrongs righted. And the Chorus acclaims Athens for doing precisely that:
Come, city of Pallas [Athens (RJD)], come to a mother’s aid;
Save from dishonour the laws of mankind.
You reverence Justice;
Injustice you despise;
To those in distress you bring deliverance.
Moreover, Theseus is portrayed as an exemplary ruler, not as a tyrant (as, it would seem, Adrastus was). Theseus is open to reason and argument; he yields when his mother’s case convinces him. Further, after making his decision to intervene, he announces that he will seek democratic ratification for it from the Athenian popular assembly:
I desire that all my citizens
Shall give their free assent; they will uphold my wish,
But their hearts will be stronger in this cause, if I
Have given them reason.
In consulting his people, Theseus acts like King Pelasgus of Argos in Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women, who declares “though I am ruler, I will not do this thing without the consent of my people, lest hereafter, if any evil befall, the people should say, “You honored aliens and brought ruin upon your own land.”” (l. 397, H.W. Smyth trans.).
Those who hold that democratic procedures and informed deliberation improve the quality of public decision-making, or who hold that democracies are more likely than autocracies to choose the “right” wars to fight, will take note of Theseus’ invitation to debate. Certainly, unlike the impulsive and grasping Adrastus, he does not take his city to war only because of the urging of hot-blooded or opportunistic young men. That is not the Athenian way, which is to be open, consultative, considered. Notice too that Theseus has earlier asked Adrastus if he is seeking Athens’ help with, or without, the backing of the people of Argos. (On the other hand, we should also notice that Theseus does not offer the Assembly the opportunity to reject his decision for war: he calls the Assembly to explain his reasons and have it ratify his decision.)
Furthermore, Theseus, who is young himself, combines the prudence of age with the vigor of youth, while Adrastus, who is old, has shown both the folly of youth and the weakness of age. In Aeschylus’ The Persians, the ghost of the prudent Shah Darius bemoans the rashness of his son and successor, Shah Xerxes, who has arrogantly led his army and navy to disaster in Greece. “My son Xerxes,” Darius says, “is a young man who thinks young thoughts and does not remember my injunctions” (ll. 781-83; Edith Hall trans.). Theseus comports himself as a young Darius, Adrastus as an old Xerxes.
Indeed, we should contrast Theseus’ treatment of the suppliant Argive women and their king with Adrastus’ treatment of Polyneices and Tydeus, both of whom were strangers to Argos and both of whom were presumably suppliants seeking Adrastus’ protection. Adrastus welcomed them both and indeed married them into his family, even though Polyneices was under his father’s curse and Tydeus had killed a kinsman, an act that the Greeks regarded as “utterly abominable” (Parker, Miasma). If Theseus seems too harsh initially in not yielding to the pleas of the wronged stranger/suppliant women who seek his aid, he does at least act far more prudently than Adrastus had when Polymeices and Tydeus arrived at Argos. His conduct towards both sets of foreign visitors displays the reserve that characterizes a wise statesman.
In all these respects, Theseus and Athens appear to be acting bravely, prudently, moderately and above all justly. Euripides seems to be showing us the blueprint for a just war, or more specifically of a “good” humanitarian intervention. Although problematic under contemporary international law, armed humanitarian intervention for the Greeks was not merely permissible, but in some circumstances normatively mandatory. The core characteristic of such actions, as the Greeks understood them, is present here: “helping, protecting, or saving the wronged.” Indeed, the phrase “to help the wronged” (boethein tois adikoumenois) became the watchword for such interventions. See Polly Low, Interstate Relations in Classical Greece (2007).
Peering below the surface?
In later postings, I shall argue that Euripides is also presenting a subtler, darker and more complicated picture – though his intentions become clearer only after the Athenian victory at Thebes in announced. As I read the play, that announcement marks a decisive reversal in the drama: the underside of war, even of an immaculately just and lawful war, will be revealed. It is as though we are shown the hidden side of a carpet whose cunning surface beauty and artistry we have admired. But that is for later; in the following postings, I pursue the analysis of the action of the play.
The opening scene of The Suppliants consists primarily of a series of three colloquies: first, between the suppliant Argive women and their king, Adrastus on the one side, and King Theseus’ mother Queen Aethra on the other; then, after Aethra has explained to Theseus the nature of the suppliants’ wishes, between Theseus and Adrastus (supported by the chorus of Argive women); and finally between Theseus and his mother. (A secondary chorus of boys, sons of the fallen Argive warriors, is mentioned in passing. This chorus remains silent until the end of the play.) These colloquies are followed by a brief address by Theseus to the Argive women and then a speech by their chorus.
Aethra and the suppliants
The action begins with Theseus’ mother Aethra at prayer to Demeter. She asks blessings on herself, her son Theseus, the city of Athens, and her native city Troezen, a small town in the Peloponnese named for her grandfather. Aethra’s recollection of her non-Athenian birthplace indicates that she will be sympathetic to the pleas of the foreign women who surround her. Her sympathy for them is further engaged by the facts that like them, she too is elderly and the mother of a son.
Aethra explains who the Argive women are and why they have come:
Round the gates
Of Cadmus’ walls [i.e., at Thebes (RJD)] their seven noble sons lie dead.
Adrastus led them against Thebes, resolved to gain
For his exiled son-in-law Polyneices the due share
Of Oedipus’ inheritance [i.e., succession to the crown of Thebes, of which Oedipus had been King (RJD)]. And when these mothers
Desired to bury those who had fallen by the sword,
The victors, dishonouring the gods’ law, turned them back
And would not let them take up their dead bodies.
The Argive women are joined by Adrastus, who had led the disastrous expedition against Thebes in which the mothers’ seven sons had been killed. Adrastus too is a supplicant. He implores Aethra to intervene with Theseus to persuade him to undertake, “whether by negotiation or by force of arms,” to recover those bodies and assist in their burial. Aethra sends for Theseus to have him decide “either to banish this distressful company/Out of the land, or loose their suppliant constraint/By rendering some holy service to the gods.” From Aethra’s pious point of view, the Thebans’ refusal to permit the Argive warriors to be buried plainly “dishonors the gods’ law,” and to rectify that violation would be to perform “some holy service.” Aethra’s speech and conduct remind us of the specifically religious sanctions that underpinned Greek customary international law. (See Polly Low, Interstate Relations in Classical Greece (2007) (religion was “arguably the most important controlling mechanism” for enforcing Greek customary law); see also Gregory Crane, Power, Prestige, and the Corcyrean Affair in Thucydides I(1992) (underscoring Corcyra’s breaches of religiously sanctioned customary law as causes of its war with Corinth, and thus of the Peloponnesian War).
Theseus and Adrastus
Theseus has hastened to the shrine, after having heard wailing and fearing some accident to his mother. (This initial display of solicitude for his mother is revealing; we shall see more of his consideration for her later in the play.) She Read more
When the Enlightenment looked for a model city, a place that epitomized the value of reason over superstition, it chose Athens–a counterweight to the city of revelation, Jerusalem, about which the Enlightenment was rather less enthusiastic. But Athens was not, in fact, a paragon of reason. There’s the trial and execution of Socrates, of course. And then there’s the treatment of Socrates’s somewhat lesser known, and entirely less sympathetic, contemporary, Alcibiades. Right before Alcibiades was to lead an expedition against Sicily in the Peloponnesian War, an anonymous group defaced statues of the god Hermes–a serious sacrilege. The suspicion fell on Alcibiades, no doubt because of his disreputable character, and the outrage eventually led to his downfall in Athens, as did the fact that he apparently mocked and revealed religious secrets–the Eleusinian Mysteries. All of which is to say that the Athenians were themselves plenty religious, even superstitious, by Enlightenment standards.
minute detail. The nineteen chapters are divided into three groups: the ancient Near East, Greece, and Rome. They are presented in turn and all possible aspects of warfare and its religious connections are investigated. The contributors focus on the theology of war, the role of priests in warfare, natural phenomena as signs for military activity, cruelty, piety, the divinity of humans in specific martial cases, rituals of war, iconographical representations and symbols of war, and even the archaeology of war. As editor Krzysztof Ulanowski invited both well-known specialists such as Robert Parker, Nicholas Sekunda, and Pietro Mander to contribute, as well as many young, talented scholars with fresh ideas. From this polyphony of voices, perspectives and opinions emerges a diverse, but coherent, representation of the complex relationship between religion and war in antiquity.
various authorities in religious activities. The terms of approbation apply to priests, priestesses, and lay individuals in various capacities as well as to sacrifices, dedications, and sanctuaries. From these a new esthetic of Greek religion emerges as well as a new social aspect of public religious practices. The authorities include oracles, traditional customs, laws, and decrees, and their hierarchy and interaction are described. The authority of the Ekklesia, Boule, administrative and military officials, priests, priestesses, and others is also delineated, and a new view of polis “control” of religion is put forward.
rituals intersected in the Greek cities of the Hellenistic and Republican periods. This edited collection focuses on the archaeological material of this era and how it can elucidate the complex relationship between the various forces operating on, and changing the physical space of, sanctuaries. Material such as archaeological remains, sculptures, and inscriptions provides us with concrete evidence of how sanctuaries functioned as locations of memory in a social environment dominated by the written word, and gives us insight into political choices and decisions. It also reveals changes unrecorded in surviving local or political histories. Each case study explored by this volume’s contributors employs archaeology as the primary means of investigation: from art-historical approaches, to surveys and fieldwork, to re-evaluation of archival material. Hellenistic Sanctuaries represents a significant contribution to the existing bibliography on ancient Greek religion, history, and archaeology, and provides new ways of thinking about politics, rituals, and sanctuary spaces in Greece.
