This posting was originally a short speech given to students at the University of St. Thomas Law School on February 29.
We will all miss the unique and iconic personality of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Few if any Supreme Court Justices have been gifted with such charm, humor, charisma and pizzazz. He was a man of great faith; a brilliant and memorable writer; a witty raconteur; a powerful and bracing intellect. He argued law, as he lived life, with passion and gusto. In his impact on the American public, he was in a class of his own: among the Justices of the past, perhaps only Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Robert Jackson, and Thurgood Marshall can be compared to him. One might even say, with all due deference to Senator Cruz, that Justice Scalia was the living epitome of New York values.
But we are here to discuss his influence on the law, especially on constitutional law. And for all his great and varied gifts, his long tenure on the supreme bench, and the vigor and clarity of his opinions, his influence on constitutional law, at least judged from our current perspective, was very limited.
The two doctrines one associates most closely with Scalia’s jurisprudence are, of course, originalism and textualism. Others on this panel will no doubt discuss them, and I will say something about them a bit later. But what I want to consider briefly here is another important but neglected strand in his jurisprudence: his use of custom or tradition in constitutional adjudication. This aspect of his jurisprudence is, in my view, the most distinctively conservative element of it. There is no inherent connection between textualism or originalism and conservatism, but there is such a connection between custom and conservatism.
Nineteenth century legal conservatives such as James Coolidge Carter went so far as to identify law with custom. Or more accurately, they identified the common law with custom. One could say, in that spirit, that the common law identifies, articulates, stabilizes, and occasionally revises and improves, custom. And much of American Read more
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
The opening scene of The Suppliants is set in the holy ground of the sanctuary of the goddess Demeter in Eleusis. The Eleusinian Demeter was a grain goddess, whose Great Mysteries were celebrated annually in September, when the autumn rains were expected to renew the life of the earth. At the climax of the mysteries, a reaped ear of wheat was revealed. Grain was stored in underground rooms in the sanctuary. By placing the play at this site, Euripides is invoking the idea of civilization, which the Greeks associated with the practice of agriculture. Thus, in the description of the shield of Achilles in Book XVIII of The Iliad, the cultivation of wheat is tied to prosperity and the rise of kingship: “at a furrow’s end the king stood pleas’d at heart,/Said no word, but his scepter show’d. And from him, much apart,/His harvest-bailiffs underneath an oak a feast prepar’d” (ll. 506-08). According to Athenian legend, the demi-god Triptolemus, to whom a temple at Eleusis was dedicated, was a favorite (perhaps even the son) of Demeter and is depicted in her company in many Athenian vase paintings. Triptolemus, whose name seems to mean “thrice-ploughed” or “thrice-sown” and who presided over the sowing of grain and the milling of wheat, was credited with inventing the plough and spreading the cultivation of agriculture. Hence he was thought to have originated civilization, which resulted from his discoveries. Sophocles wrote a lost play called Triptolemus. See Susan B. Matheson, The Mission of Triptolemus and the Politics of Athens(1994).
There are many echoes of these legends in The Suppliants. One critic goes so
Demeter, Triptolemus, Persephone
far as to suggest seeing the entire play “as a kind of fertility ritual ensuring Athenian and Argive prosperity.” See D.J. Conacher, Euripidean Drama: Myth, Theme and Structure (1967). The Athenian king Theseus praises “whatever immortal power” it was whose wisdom “[g]ave us earth’s fruit for food and, lest supply should fail/Sends rain to nourish growing plants, and fertilize/The womb of earth.” (Here and hereafter, I use Philip Vellacott’s Penguin Classics translation of the play). And in the speech that opens the play, Aethra, Theseus’ mother, tells us that she has come to Demeter’s shrine at Eleusis “to make sacrifice,/For a good harvest, at this holy shrine, where first/Bristled above the soil the fruitful ears of [wheat].” Aethra is there, apparently, to officiate as Athens’ Queen Mother at the feast of the Eleusinian Proerosia, when the first fruits are gathered. The founding hero of the festival was Triptolemus; it commemorates the beginnings of agriculture. See Noel Robertson, New Light on Demeter’s Mysteries: The Festival Proerosia (1996). Note that Aethra claims that Athens is the place where grain “first” appeared.
Furthermore, the sanctuary at Eleusis was emblematic of Athenian prestige and glory. The Eleusinian Mysteries “were for a thousand years one of the crowning glories of Athens, the pride of her statesmen, poets, and orators, a focal point of piety which though intimately civic was at the same time panhellenic.” Francis R. Walton, Athens, Eleusis, and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter(1952). Many of Athens’ greatest leaders, including Pericles, were associated with renovations of the sanctuary. The accusation against the Athenian politician and general Alcibiades, that he and his friends had profaned the Eleusinian rites, charged him with an extremely serious offense, fed into suspicions that he intended to overthrow the democracy, and prompted him to demand that he be put to death if tried and found guilty. See Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, Book V, cc. 28-29. The fourth century Athenian orator Isocrates, in celebrating Athens’ contributions to the world, significantly put first two gifts of Demeter, “the greatest [gifts] in the world—the fruits of the earth, which have enabled us to rise above the life of the beasts, and the holy rite [i.e., the Eleusinian mysteries (RJD)] which inspires in those who partake of it sweeter hopes regarding both the end of life and all eternity.” Panegyricus, IV, 28.
Eleusis and panhellenism
Although Eleusis was located on Athenian territory and although the rites celebrated there were used to serve Athens’ self-presentation, the sacred precincts had a panhellenic as well as a specifically Athenian significance. Athens claimed “to be connected to all of Greece through the panhellenic and beneficial institutions” at Eleusis. Barbara Goff, Aithra at Eleusis(1995).
Athens attempted to be at once exclusionary and engaged in relation to the rest of Greece. After a law of Pericles adopted in 451, Athens excluded from citizenship all those who were not born of Athenian parents on both sides. But Athens was happy to open the city to foreigners, and non-Athenians (like the Argive women in the play) were free to worship at Eleusis. Indeed, the shrine at Eleusis, along with those at Dodona, Delos and Samothrace, was one of the four great “common shrines” of Greece, with unrestricted access to all. And sometime in the 420s (i.e., around the time The Suppliants was written), Athens issued the so-called Aparkhai decree, which ordered the city’s allies, and invited other Greek states, to send offerings of corn and barley annually to Eleusis. Athens seems to have been promoting Eleusis as a common religious center for the whole of Greece. See Ian Rutherford, State Pilgrims and Sacred Observers in Ancient Greece (2013).
Eleusis and the legends associated with the site thus functioned as a kind of bridge to other Greek cities. In Xenophon’s Hellenika (Book VI, c. 3.4-6), the Athenian envoy Kallias reminds the Spartans that “the first foreigners to whom Triptolemus, our ancestor, revealed the secret rites of Demeter and Kore were Herakles, your founder, and the Diskouroi, your citizens; and he first gave the seeds of the fruit of Demeter to the Peloponnese” (The Landmark Xenophon’s Hellenika, Robert B. Strassler (ed.), John Marincola (trans.)). Through Eleusis and its cult, Athens claimed to be the source and provider of benefits, both material and spiritual, to the whole of the Greek world. It sought to be (as we might say) the supplier of international public goods for the other Greek cities (and hence entitled to a hegemonic role in their affairs). Panhellenic values will loom large in the play: Athens goes to war against Thebes for the sake of upholding panhellenic law and custom.
The rites of supplication
By situating the beginning of the play at a sacred site, Euripides has also underscored the social and religious significance of the actions of the Argive King and women in “supplicating” Athens. “Supplication” (“hiketeia”) was an important and distinctive social practice in ancient Greece. It was highly ritualized and was enacted through stylized symbolic gestures, such as kneeling and clasping or touching the beard, chin, hands or knees of the person to whom the supplication is made. The two main forms of supplication were a face-to-face encounter between a human being and a god (or another human), and an appeal through contact with the altar or sacred precincts of a god. See John Gould, Hiketeia(1973). Supplication of the first kind is illustrated by King Priam’s visit to the camp of Achilles in Book XXIV of The Iliad, ll. 414 et seq., when – following the instructions given by the god Hermes — he kisses Achilles’ hand and beseeches him to release to him the body of his son Hector. The action of The Suppliants, which takes place at a shrine, illustrates the second form, although it includes significant elements of the first. (For example, the Argive women cling to the knees of Theseus, clasp his hand and touch his beard.) Theseus himself describes the Argive women and their king as “formal suppliants.”
Suppliants were under the special protection of Zeus. In Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women (l. 1, l. 438), Zeus is said to “guard suppliants.” In Sophocles’ Ajax, the archer Teucer, fearing for the life of the son of his brother Ajax after Ajax’s death, bids him to assume the posture of a suppliant next to his father’s body and places a curse on any evil-doer who may seek to harm the lad. In Book IX of the Odyssey (ll. 303-05), Odysseus appeals to Polyphemus to bear in mind that he is a suppliant, guarded by Zeus of the Strangers, who will punish disregard of his rights. “[A]ll suppliants were placed under Zeus’ protection, and those who harmed a suppliant or violated the established rules were liable to divine sanctions.” Nonetheless, whether to yield to a suppliant’s pleas was in the discretion of the more powerful person to whom the appeal was made. Angeliki Tzanetou, City of Suppliants: Tragedy and the Athenian Empire (2012).
As suppliants at the Eleusian sanctuary, the Argive women and king occupy a liminal position between the gods and men: they stand at the border where humanity encounters the divine, and so demonstrate the “extra-territoriality of the sacred” (Gould). Moreover, they are powerless, but their very powerlessness invests them with the mystery and aura of the supernatural. (The blind, aged, ruined, destitute Oedipus, also portrayed as a suppliant in Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus, exerts the same kind of power when seeking refuge from Thebes at the village of Colonus, near Athens.) Their speech, gestures and posture demonstrate their shameful vulnerability; but they also pose an implicit threat to the more powerful, because it would be shameful not to pity those who are so wretched, especially when the supplication is enacted in a public space. “The suppliant is by definition weak and defenceless; yet he carries within him the threatening power of what is ‘beyond’” (Gould). Moreover, the Argive women are foreigners, strangers to Athens; and yet they assert some claim to its protection, as if they were members of the city’s community. Supplication, in short, was “a ritual one of whose functions is to bring an aberrant human being within the norms of the social order and to mitigate or resolve the crises which result when the community or its representative agent is confronted with what is ‘outside’” (Gould).
Just as the unburied sons are “outsiders” at Thebes, lying on its soil but given no place in its social order, so the suppliant women are “outsiders” at Athens. But Euripides will show that Athens, unlike Thebes, has the humaneness and the courage to take the outsiders “in.” As Sophocles’ Oedipus will say of Athens, it must show itself to be “that rock of reverence all men say it is,/the only city on earth to save the ruined stranger,/the only one to protect him, give him shelter.” Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 277-79 (Robert Fagles trans.).
Note, though, the counterpoint later in the play (after Athens’ victory at Thebes). Although the Argive mothers get their sons’ bodies back, they will still lament their deaths and, strikingly, they will still remain “outsiders.” Just as their unburied sons occupied a liminal place between the living and the dead, so too will their bereaved mothers:
Now in childless misery
I tread the lonely road to old age;
Numbered neither with the dead nor with the living
I inhabit the world of the outcast.
The Argive mothers
War is unfamiliar to most of us. But we should not mistake the depths of the Argive mothers’ agony. In our own time, we need only consider the anguish of the Argentine “Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.” Beginning in 1977, a group of mothers marched every Thursday around the central square of Buenos Aires, demanding that the government inform them of the fates of their children, who had “disappeared” by the tens of thousands in the political violence of the 1970s and early 1980s against left-wing activists. Until they discovered what had happened to their children, the mothers’ grief could not be assuaged: they marched for over thirty-five years.
For reasons that I cannot claim to fathom, it is a balm to such suffering to learn the fate of a child who has gone missing in war, and still more to be able to hold that child’s remains, visit that child’s grave, or at least know the place and circumstances of his or her death. In his moving and powerful account of how Britain and her Empire dealt with the burial of their dead soldiers after the First World War, David Crane writes of the yearning that thousands of parents across the Empire felt to identify or to visit the sites where their sons had died or been buried:
In 1931, an Australian mother was found sobbing at the grave on Gallipoli of a son who she had thought among the missing. ‘If only I could see your grave, I would die happy,’ another Australian, the mother of Jack Fothergill, killed on the first day of the Gallipoli landings in 1915, wrote . . . eight years later.
Empires of the Dead (2013).
While reflection on experiences that are, like these, nearer in culture and time to us may help us understand the Argive mothers’ sorrow, it seems that we would still have not touched the full depth of their agony. Greek epic and tragedy seem to have had a unique pathos and poignancy on this matter. In her Mothers in Mourning (1998 (French ed. 1990)), the French classicist Nicole Loraux calls attention to the fact that in Greek literature, the sight of a son’s corpse is presented as the cause of a peculiarly intense, as it were physical, anguish for his mother, activating in her what Loraux calls a “body-memory.” “Suddenly present with a heart-rending accuracy, the grief and the memory of the intimacy of these bodies produce excessive pain for the body-memory of mothers. Euripidean tragedy has much to say about this sensual intensity that expresses itself only on a background of loss.” Here in The Suppliants, the Argive women plead for the recovery of their sons’ bodies so that they can once more hold and touch them: “Out of the depth of pain I cry to your [Aethra’s] son/To give my dead into my arms,/ That I may embrace and mourn the body that I bore.” And later: “Give me my son;/ Let my arms hold him fast;/ Let my embrace rest and enfold him.”
Loraux connects this longing with the scene in Book XXII of The Iliad in which Hector’s mother Hecuba implores him not to fight Achilles: she knows, not only that Achilles will kill her son, but also that he will take his body, and so deprive her of the comfort that she has often imagined that she would eventually have in holding his body in the mourning ritual. Hecuba tells Hector (in Loraux’s translation) (ll. 86-7):
If he kills you, I shall no longer be able to weep
Over your bier, dear child, whom I myself begat.
Loraux comments: “As if mourning necessarily were part of a mother’s fate from the very beginning, Hecuba has so much anticipated the vision, both dreaded and strangely comforting, of Hector’s prothesis [the part of the Greek death ritual in which the body is laid out and ritually cleansed (RJD)] that the mother panics . . . foreseeing the loss of her son and of his dead body [my italics (RJD)], as well as of the comfort brought on by ritual. . . . Hecuba thus evokes . . . the ritual that has been imagined so often and will not take place.” The bond between the mother’s body and her son’s, ruptured by his death, must be reknitted in the funeral ritual by her holding and mourning over his body, or her grief and loss are redoubled.
And this, Euripides shows us, will become the final, exquisite agony of the Argive mothers. For Theseus, despite eventually recovering their sons’ bodies and bringing them back to Athens, will deny them the one last chance to hold them; and Adrastus will concur. Between them, the two kings, guardians of the civil order, will set limits to the grieving of the women:
ADRASTUS: Is it wrong for a mother’s hand to touch her son?
THESEUS: They are disfigured; the sight would be too great a shock. . . [W]hy inflict distress on these women?
ADRASTUS [To the CHORUS]: Wait patiently. Theseus is right.
The civic ideology of ancient Athens had little patience with women’s mourning. In Sophocles’ Ajax (ll. 579-80), the hero says to his concubine Tecmessa, “make no laments before the house. God, what a weepy thing is woman” (Richard Jebb trans.). Even Pericles’ funeral oration pays little concern to women: Pericles remarks near the end (Book Two, c. 45) that a woman’s part is simply not to be talked about. But Euripides’ play lets the Argive mothers speak, if not mourn.
A violation of the Greek norm that enjoins dishonoring the bodies of an enemy’s
Thebans at war
battle-dead is at the core of Euripides’ Suppliants. Correcting that violation is what appears to give Athens just cause to wage war against the violator, Thebes, which will not permit the burial of the soldiers from Argos who died in battle before Thebes’ gates. We have thus far tracked the development of this norm from Homer through Sophocles, with sidelong glances at other Greek authors. We have seen that the norm was upheld as early as Homer, although it permitted exceptions. We have also seen that the norm was sometimes characterized as unwritten, divine in origin and everlasting in duration, and sometimes as a custom binding in the Greek world only and a special mark of its superior civilization.
In what follows, we shall briefly review other sources of evidence for the norm: the early fifth century historian Herodotus, who was born in Halicarnassus, now in Turkey but then in Greek Ionia, and the later fifth century Athenian historian Thucydides. Both writers strongly confirm the existence of the norm. We shall conclude this section with an analysis of the special place of this norm to fifth century, democratic Athens, and to the Athenian audiences of Euripides’ play.
Herodotus
By the time Herodotus wrote, it would seem that the burial norm in question had
Herodotus
become well entrenched. In Book IX of his Histories, an inquiry into the wars between the Greek city states and the neighboring Persian Empire, Herodotus recounts a conversation after the Greek victory over the Persians in the battle of Plataea between one Lampron, a leading figure in the Greek city of Aegina, and Pausanias, a Spartan general. Seeking to ingratiate himself to Pausanias, Lampron proposed that Pausanias cut off the head of the fallen Persian Mardonius and impale it, just as Mardonius had earlier done to Leonidas, the uncle of Pausanias. This, Lampron said, would both avenge Leonidas and deter other barbarians from attacking Greece. But Pausanias was repelled by the suggestion. He said to Lampron:
Aeginetan, I thank you for your goodwill and forethought, but you have missed the mark of right judgment. First you exalt me and my fatherland and my deeds, yet next you cast me down to mere nothingness when you advise me to insult the dead, and say that I shall win more praise if I do so. That would be an act more proper for barbarians than for Greeks and one that we consider worthy of censure even in barbarians.
Herodotus further illustrates the norm in a story that concerns Onesilos, the younger brother of the King of Salamis in Cyprus, who was killed while besieging the city of Amathous. Herodotus tells us (Book V, cc. 114) that the Amathousians cut off his head and hung it up over their city’s gates. In time bees swarmed into the hollow skull and honeycombed it. The Amathousians consulted an oracle about it, who advised them to take down the head, bury it, and worship Onesilos as a hero every year. It would seem that the Amathousians had wronged Onesilos by displaying his severed head and had to make recompense by offering him worship.
Thucydides
A single episode from Thucydides’ History will suffice. This occurs after the
Thucydides
battle of Delium in November 424, in which the Athenians were defeated by the Thebans. See The Peloponnesian War, Book IV, cc. 97 et seq. As was customary for the side that had been defeated, the Athenians requested a truce after the battle so that they might reclaim and bury their dead. The victorious Thebans at first refused, arguing that because the Athenians had transgressed the law by occupying and fortifying the consecrated site of a temple, they would not permit them to gather in their dead until they evacuated the temple. The Athenian defense, which is not of direct concern to us here, is an extended and sophistic application of the doctrine of “necessity” in war (on which see Clifford Orwin, Piety, Justice, and the Necessities of War: Thucydides’ Delian Debate(1989). For our purposes, the critical facts are that the Athenians affirmed, and the Thebans did not deny, that but for the alleged Athenian sacrilege, the Thebans should have granted a truce and allowed the Athenians to recover their dead. Moreover, after driving away the Athenians, the Thebans did in fact permit the Athenians to retrieve the bodies, thus underscoring the legitimacy of the Athenians’ claims.
Several scholars have viewed this episode after the battle at Delium as the inspiration for Euripides’ Suppliants, thus dating the play close to 424 (perhaps 423). That may be so, although the evidence is inconclusive. Other scholars, observing that the play ends with an alliance between Athens and Argos, date the play to around 421, seeing it as a celebration of the treaty that Athens and Argos concluded that year. (See L.H.G. Greenwood, Aspects of Euripidean Tragedy (1953); for the treaty, see Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, Book V, cc. 44, 47.) This too cannot be proven. In her valuable Theseus, Tragedy, and the Athenian Empire (1997), Sophie Mills notes that “since an alliance was made between Argos and Athens in 421 (and renewed in 416), it is likely that the alliance of the play is also intended to link the myth with contemporary politics for the audience;” but she also points out that “although the language of Euripides’ treaty strongly resembles that of historical treaties, its actual terms differ significantly from those of the treaty of 421.”
What matters more for us is that by the time The Suppliants was produced, the Greeks considered it to be among the most fundamental norms of war to allow an adversary to collect and to bury its battle-dead. The justice of a war depends in large part (though not entirely) on the justice of the cause for which it is undertaken. If Euripides means us to think that Athens made war on Thebes to uphold this norm, then that war would seem to have had a just cause.
War and democratic Athens
Moreover, we are now also in a position to see the particularly compelling nature of the norm for Euripides’ audience in democratic Athens. To an extent that most Americans would find hard to understand (even though our country has been almost constantly at war since 1941), the Athenian imagination was saturated with the idea, and usually the fact, of war. W.R. Connor, in an article on Greek warfare cited earlier, remarks that for fifth century Greeks, “war was more than tactics, strategy and gore; it was linked to almost every aspect of their social organization and to their rich imaginative life.” And with its rulership over a large, tribute-paying overseas empire, democratic Athens was especially war-prone. David Pritchard writes of fifth century Athens:
War now dominated the politics of the city and the lives of thousands of upper- and lower-class citizens. Foreign policy was the mainstay of political debate, with war and peace being a compulsory item on the agenda [of Athens’ assemblies]. Fifth-century Athenians waged war more frequently than ever before: they launched one or more campaigns in two out of every three years on average and never enjoyed peace for more than a decade. . . By the 450s military service was also perceived as the duty of every citizen, which the Athenian demos appears to have taken very seriously.
When our Athenian authors wrote or spoke of war, they spoke with first-hand knowledge. Thucydides was a general, as was Sophocles; Socrates had fought at the battle of Delium. Over 70% of adult, male Athenian citizens were available for active service, and about 30% of militarily active citizens served in the hoplite infantry (Pritchard). At the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles (in Thucydides’ account) stated that Athens was fielding 13,000 hoplites and deploying another 16,000 men to guard the city’s forts and walls. At the time, the adult male population of the city is estimated at about 60,000. And not only did many Athenian citizens experience combat; high numbers of those citizens were killed in action, and many more risked being killed.
For Athenian citizens and their families, therefore, war was woven into the fabric of ordinary life. They debated it; waged it; endured its hardships; and died in or from it. And for those reasons, the city’s practices regarding the burial of its citizen battle-dead were of the utmost importance to all of them. The city’s commemoration of those dead flooded and enriched its citizens’ imaginations. Its funerary practices lay at the center of the web of reciprocal claims and obligations that bound the citizens and the city to each other. Athens might ask you to give your life for it; but in return it promised you an afterlife of undying glory in its collective memory. Every Athenian soldier whom Pericles praised in his Funeral Oration had died, he argued, a beautiful death, worthy of a Homeric hero:
For having every one given his body to the commonwealth, they receive in place thereof an undecaying commendation and a most remarkable sepulchre; not wherein they are buried so much, as wherein their glory is laid up, upon all occasions both of speech and action to be remembered for ever. For to famous men all the earth is a sepulchre: and their virtues shall be testified, not only by the inscription in stone at home, but by an unwritten record of the mind, which more than of any monument will remain with every one for ever.
With this understanding of the Greek war convention in mind, let us consider the play itself more closely. In the following installments, I will review and analyze the action of the drama. The next posting will discuss the significance of the setting of the play at the shrine of the goddess Demeter at Eleusis, and will describe the institution of “supplication.” Thereafter, postings will successively cover the opening scenes leading up to the entry of the Theban herald; Theseus’ colloquy with the Theban herald; the scenes culminating in the report of Theseus’ victory at Thebes and his return to Athens; and from then on up to the play’s conclusion, including the appearance of the goddess Athena.
Ancient Greek cities were frequently at war with each other, and death took its toll. Male citizens must often have been battle-hardened veterans, accustomed to the spectacle of battlefield carnage. Families and near relatives, who took part in washing the corpses and readying them for burial, must also have become sickeningly familiar with the look of violent death. The Greek preoccupation with the honorable interment of the combat-dead may have stemmed from a desire to hold the horror of such spectacles at a certain remove. It must surely have been hard to forget such sights as those that the First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon described in his Counter-Attack:
The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs
High-booted, sprawled and groveled along the saps
And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,
Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled;
And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,
Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.
And then the rain began, — the jolly old rain!
The Fifth Century: Sophocles
By the fifth century, the Greeks had come to conclude that an enemy’s battle-dead were entitled to respect and should not be mistreated. In Miasma (1983), an important work on Greek religion, the Oxford classicist Robert Parker summarized the outcome that had been reached by the fifth century:
The individual’s right to receive burial was, of course, supported by powerful social and supernatural sanctions. The ‘common law of the Greeks’ agreed with the ‘unwritten, unshakeable laws of the gods’ in insisting that even the body of an enemy should be given up after battle for burial.
The “Antigone”
The “unwritten, unshakeable laws of the gods” to which Parker alludes are those expounded in the great speech of Antigone, in the play of that name by the fifth century Athenian tragic poet Sophocles. (Sophocles’ Antigone is fashioned from the same body of mythic material as Euripides’ Suppliants.) Antigone, daughter of King Oedipus of Thebes and sister of his son Prince Polynices, wishes to bury her brother’s remains after he has died at the hands of their brother Eteocles, whom Polynices has himself killed in their battle at one of the seven gates of Thebes. While Creon, Eteocles’ successor as King of Thebes, gives honors to Eteocles’ remains, he refuses to allow Polynices to be buried. Antigone defies Creon’s orders and attempts to bury Polynices. Challenged by Creon as to whether she had disobeyed him, she replies:
Of course I did. It wasn’t Zeus, not in the least,
Bear in mind that Polynices was not merely a fallen enemy warrior but also (in Creon’s view) a rebel, a regicide and a fratricide, a leader in an invading foreign army and a pretender to the crown of Thebes. Refusing him burial might therefore arguably be seen as a permissible exception to the obligation to grant burial which, as Parker notes, was “never absolute,” and which allowed Greek cities to cast away the bodies of at least some criminals. The city’s treatment of corpses, as Parker shows, was “one of the means by which men could hurt, humiliate, or honour one another, express contempt or respect;” hence, “the theme could be of central importance in great works of literature.”
In the Antigone, as Hegel famously argued (Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Pt. II, sec. 2, c. 1), Sophocles revealed the very essence of tragedy, which arises when “the ethical substance” is “divided against itself,” or in other words when there is an irreconcilable collision between two valid and compelling norms: here, the right of the family to bury its dead as against the State’s prerogative to punish those who disloyally take up arms against it. Antigone argues: “Death longs for the same rites for all;” and Creon answers, “Never the same for the patriot and the traitor” (ll. 384-85).
As legal scholar Martha Nussbaum (following Hegel) has pointed out, both major protagonists in The Antigone have unduly narrow and unreflective moral views. Surely the claims of the city do not always count for more than those of the family; for what is a city but an association of families? On the other hand, is not Creon right to say that our country is our safety (l. 211)? See The Costs of Tragedy: Some Moral Limits of Cost-Benefit Analysis (2000),
In the end, however, it is Antigone, not Creon, whose claim prevails in Sophocles’ drama: Creon’s treatment of Polynices’ brings pollution and plague to Thebes. Nature itself rises up against the violation of the unwritten and unshakeable laws. The blind prophet Tiresias tells Creon that the birds of the sanctuary where he sits, which used to hover at his hands, began to scream madly and to rip each other apart with flashing talons. The fires over which the sacrifices were offered would not light; the birds, gorged with blood and fat, drop scraps of Polynices’ body on the altar. Prophecy becomes impossible; the city’s link to the gods is entirely severed. And the fault, Tiresias tells him, is Creon’s:
And it is you—
Your high resolve that sets this plague on Thebes.
The public altars and sacred hearths are fouled,
One and all, by the birds and dogs with carrion
Torn from the corpse, the doomstruck son of Oedipus!
And so the gods are deaf to our prayers, they spurn
The offerings in our hands, the flame of holy flesh.
No birds cry out an omen clear and true-
They’re gorged with the murdered victim’s blood and fat.
Take these things to heart, my son, I warn you. . .
Where’s the glory, killing the dead twice over?
Antigone ll. 1123-40.
Readers of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers may recall the last march of the Ents, an ancient race of tall, human-like trees, against the fortress of Saruman at Isengard, which they destroy. There too, nature itself rises up against the unholy forces that would violate it.
Oedipus the King
Sophocles also addresses the subject of the “unwritten” and “unshakeable” laws of the gods in a Chorus in Oedipus the King. (Rémi Brague suggest that Sophocles is writing here in response to the Sophists who had attacked the divine origin of those laws. See The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea (English trans. 2007 (2005)). Although the context here is that of Oedipus’ violations – parricide and incest – not that of burial, the lines reinforce the action and speeches of the Antigone:
Great laws tower above us, reared on high
Born for the brilliant vault of heaven—
Olympian Sky their only father,
Nothing mortal, no man gave them birth,
Their memory deathless, never lost in sleep:
Within them lives a mighty god, the god does not grow old. . .
God, my champion, I will never let you go.
Oedipus the King, ll. 957-971 (Robert Fagles trans.).
What were these laws, variously called “unwritten laws,” “common laws” or laws “of the gods”? Edith Hall of King’s College, London, finds that they “constituted simultaneously an expression of the most fundamental and ancient taboos, and a didactic charter of ‘decent’ behavior which was invested at times with a sanctity far greater than the strict observance of ritual. . . [T]hese laws seem to have enshrined such integral taboos as the killing of guest or host, family member or suppliant, incest, and the failure to bury the dead.” See Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (1989).
In grasping that the norm forbidding the non-burial of the dead was, for the Greeks, of the same magnitude as the prohibition on incest, we can understand Euripides’ Suppliants more deeply. The cause that drove King Theseus and Athens to war against Thebes touched a matter of the utmost sensitivity for the Athenian audiences that watch Euripides’ drama.
Divine law or human law?
The questions whether the laws in question were divine (without beginning or end) or human (customary), and whether they applied universally or only to the Greeks, were debated in fifth and fourth century Athens. In the Rhetoric (though not elsewhere), Aristotle drew this distinction, and in a passage that refers to the Antigone, see Rhetoric 1373b, places on one side the law that is proper to a particular city (which may or may not be written) and the universal law, which is according to nature (“kata phusin”).
We see signs of both views in The Suppliants, and perhaps they had not yet been fully distinguished. (Indeed, they are arguably not distinguishable when fully thought through.) King Theseus describes the norm about burial as “the law of all Hellas” (Philip Vellacott trans.)), but he also speaks of it as “this ancient, divine ordinance.” Aethra, Theseus’ mother, at first characterizes them as “the gods’ law,” but later calls them “the established laws/Of all Hellas.” Other Euripidean dramas also leave the question in some doubt. In The Hecuba (l. 1247 (E.P. Coleridge trans.)), the Greek King Agamemnon says to the Thracian Polymester, “Perhaps among you it is a light thing to murder guests, but with us in Hellas it is a disgrace,” implying that the norms surrounding guest-friendship are characteristic of (a higher) Greek civilization, but are not universal. The latter view – if indeed it is Euripides’ – would seem to resemble the post-Enlightenment non-foundationalism of the late Richard Rorty.
So much for the treatment of the warrior burial norm in Sophocles. In the next installment, we shall consider evidence of that norm in the historians Herodotus and Thucydides.
