Aithra at Eleusis *
Barbara Goff

The Euripidean Suppliant Women [1] has long been known as a 'political'[2] play, and a recent commentator has labeled it 'frankly ideological'.[3] The category of 'political' has often been assumed to connote 'not as good as other tragedies that are not political,' but such an easy division can no longer be so easily made. Critics who write on tragedy are increasingly involved with the ways in which, even in plays not overtly politicized, Athens deploys the dramas to promulgate certain representations of other cities and therefore of itself. Given these two critical contexts, it seems timely to examine some of the ways in which Suppliant Women can be seen to be produced by, and inversely to contribute to the production of, a discourse of Athenian identity, without miring the argument in the traditional vocabulary of 'historical allusion' and 'encomium.' I shall begin with a consideration of the form and setting of the drama before engaging with the details of speech and action. As my title indicates, I shall be particularly concerned with the figure and significance of Aithra, mother of Theseus.

The Suppliant Women is one of a group of plays that may be collectively called 'suppliant drama.' While numerous separate scenes of supplication occur in many other plays, I understand this group to comprise Eumenides, Oidipous at Kolonos, the Aeschylean Suppliants as well as the Euripidean, and Herakleidai. Suppliant drama constitutes an important subset of Athenian tragedy, which seems furthermore to speak quite directly to the political situation of Athens in the fifth century. Suppliant drama, as a genre, constructs a certain notion of Athens as a place of refuge, where even dangerously unmanageable creatures like Medeia and Herakles may find sanctuary. The historical city was indeed very open to people like the metics, who profited from its strong economy, and to people such as the itinerant Sophists who contributed to the city's political and intellectual debates. At the same time, however, historical Athens maintained a strictly exclusionary citizenship. Athenian citizens, as defined by the Periklean law of 451, were sons of Athenian citizens and of the daughters of Athenian citizens. Although Athens maintained an empire, it did not evolve the policy of allowing subjects and clients to acquire citizenship, as Rome later did. The event of supplication, frequently dramatized on the Athenian stage, can be seen to involve the Athenian relationship to what is not Athens, and thus to require a negotiation between the city's openness to the Greek world and its protection of its citizens' exclusivity. While very few tragedies are set in Athens or in Attica, it is significant that all the extant plays which do take place in Attica are suppliant dramas. Most of those that I listed above are not set in the city of Athens (the exception being Eumenides); they are set instead in the demes of Kolonos, Marathon, and Eleusis. The geography of supplication can thus suggest in and of itself that what is at stake is a negotiation between what can and what cannot be counted as 'internal'; this issue will be addressed below.

Dramatic suppliants usually constitute a problem, in that they threaten the exclusivity of the polis by needing to construct a relationship with it to which they have no obvious claim. This relationship then frequently presents the host city with a tragic dilemma that may menace its very existence.[4] Some of the suppliant dramas solve the problem by altering the status of the suppliant, so that the issue of the form of the suppliant's participation in the polis does not arise. Thus the Furies are consigned to their subterranean homes (and honored with ritual observance), and Oidipous is translated out of this world.[5] In no extant drama is the host city ultimately undone by the supplication. Suppliant dramas may, then, afford Athens an opportunity for dramatizing its varied forms of success. The city's internal politics work and the correct decision about the suppliants is taken. This happens despite the incongruous attention that may be drawn to these politics, as at Suppliant Women 349-53, where Theseus bizarrely coordinates the conflicting vocabularies of democracy and autocratic leadership.[6]

Suppliant drama most clearly allows Athens to display its abilities vis-à-vis the outside world. In suppliant dramas, Athens solves the problems thrown up by the troubled mythologies of other cities. In Eumenides, Athens ends the cycle of violence that is destroying the Mycenaean house. In Oidipous at Kolonos, Oidipous is returned to the earth with which Sown Men are always connected, but it is crucially that of Athens, not of Thebes. The Euripidean Suppliant Women corrects the relationship between Argos and Thebes, and the Herakleidai resolves a problem internal to Argos. In the Aeschylean Suppliants, the situation is displaced to Argos, and here the Greek city solves the problems of a foreign country. In the period during which the extant tragedies were produced, the historical question of Athens' relations to other cities was necessarily of paramount importance; it was a period during which Athens gained and lost an actual political hegemony, a version of which we can plausibly read in Athenian tragedy. While Athens was happy for the outside world to enter the city, on the city's terms, it imposed its own terms for its expansion into Greece, as instanced in the practice of establishing cleruchies[7] and the issuance of the coinage decree.[8] In suppliant drama, on the other hand, the rest of the Greek world turns voluntarily to Athens.

The particular suppliant myth dramatized in Suppliant Women occupied a special position within Athenian self-representation. The myth of the return of the bodies of the Seven who fell at Thebes became a topos of the Athenian funeral speech, where as Loraux has demonstrated, the parameters of Athenian identity are constantly reasserted.[9] The myth also figured in others of the city's rhetorical institutions. Isokrates in Panegyrikos 54-58 claims that one can recognize the character and strength of the city from the number of supplications to which it has responded, and the supplication of Adrastos holds pride of place in his account; a similar invocation of the myth appears in Panathenaikos 168-72. In Herodotos 9.27.3, the Athenians are represented as claiming the narrative as one of the many exploits that entitle them to honor over and above the Tegeans, while Xenophon's Hellenika 6.5.46 represents the myth as both evidence of Athens' former virtuous achievements and encouragement to yet more.

The form and the central narrative of Suppliant Women, then, are both important elements in any account of Athenian ideology. The play's setting at Eleusis has not generated much critical comment, but this too can be understood as relevant within the construction of a particular notion of Athens. I suggested above that suppliant dramas are characteristically staged in areas not fully identical with the city of Athens, precisely because that identity is part of what is at stake. At Eleusis we are very closely concerned with Athenian relations to the outside world, which are skillfully mediated by Eleusis itself.

By the fifth century the history of struggle between Athens and Eleusis had long been decided in Athens' favor,[10] with Eleusis having become a deme of Athens and its people part of the Hippothoontis tribe.[11] By this time, too, the categories of persons eligible to attend the Mysteries and be initiated had expanded beyond Athenian citizens or Athenian-sponsored foreigners and comprised all who spoke Greek. In this panhellenic invitation the cult was unlike any other Athenian, or indeed Greek, institution.

Eleusis was not only the site of the Mysteries, crucial though they were to Greek ritual experience, but also of the mythic foundations of agriculture. Both the Mysteries and the advent of human cultivation are claimed to be the outcome of Demeter's sojourn at Eleusis in mourning for her daughter. Later sources persistently link the two institutions and, moreover, link them to Athens. Isokrates' Panegyrikos (28) claims that Athens gave the world dôreas dittas haiper megistai tunchanousin ousai, tous te karpous ... kai tên teletên. Xenophon's Hellenika 6.3.4-6 represents Kallias the daidouchos promoting the unity of Athens and Sparta by recalling that the ancestors of the Spartans were the first to be taught by Triptolemos. Cicero De Legibus 2.14.36 writes: 'nam mihi cum multa eximia divinaque videntur Athenae tuae peperisse atque in vitam hominum attulisse, tum nihil melius illis mysteriis.' Athens can thus be seen to appropriate not only the territory but also the symbolic significance of Eleusis,[12] and hence to claim its status as the major provider of both physical and spiritual nurture to the entire Greek world. While Athens maintains a rigidly exclusive citizenship, it also claims to be connected to all of Greece through the panhellenic and beneficial institutions at Eleusis.[13] This trope of panhellenic provision will figure prominently in my argument.

Also significant for my purposes is the fact that the Mysteries at Eleusis celebrated the relationship of mother and daughter, through the myth of Demeter and Persephone, as did no other ancient Greek institution or practice.[14] The only text similarly celebrating this particular relationship is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which is, of course, concerned with the same myth. We cannot say with confidence what satisfactions were provided to participants by the Mysteries' mobilization of the mother-daughter dyad.[15] The problem is obviously related to that of the 'defining paradox'[16] of women's absence from public life and overwhelming presence in public ritual, and as such is not susceptible of a simple answer. It seems to me, however, that the fact that the Mysteries do establish a female center of gravity is relevant to a reading of Suppliant Women.

Eleusis therefore provided Athens with a number of convenient metaphors and, historically, was an important site for the articulation of Athens' image within the wider Greek world, an image that was increasingly underpinned by the realities of Athenian hegemony. At Eleusis, Athens laid claim to both the Mysteries and agriculture, and thus allied itself with two of the potent female figures in the pantheon. In Suppliant Women, Eleusis provides the setting for the action but is mainly signified through a series of references to the twin goddesses. Criticism has been content to note that Eleusis figures in the play as the traditional site of the burial of the Seven. This line of argument would suggest that references to Demeter and Persephone are incidentals consequent on the location, but it seems to me that we can say more than this. In what follows I shall consider more closely the Eleusinian referents of the drama, and the modifications that the drama works on them.

The twin goddesses are frequently invoked by different characters, especially towards the beginning of the drama. The very first word of the play is 'Demeter.' In the play as a whole, such invocations seem to suggest a paradigm of normality against which the situation of the Chorus may be judged. Aithra is herself implicated in this paradigm when the Chorus apologize at 63 for interrupting her ritual performance. At 97 Theseus contrasts the Chorus with the Eleusinian setting of their supplication when he notes that they are not attired as for a festival, and later on (173) Adrastos continues the comparison when he points out how the women have come, scarcely able to move themselves, not to a festival of Demeter but on a far grimmer errand. Demeter and Persephone are both invoked as witnesses to the failure of the women's supplication (261, 271), and shortly after this failure, Theseus admonishes his mother not to cry in the precincts of Demeter (289-90). The exceptional situation in which the women of the Chorus, and hence Aithra, find themselves is demonstrated by the contrast to the sanctioned activity that Eleusis offers to them.

The play also seems to undertake a more striking mobilization of the Eleusinian myth. It is the figure of Demeter that dominates the Eleusinian references in the early part of the drama, but at 1022 Demeter's daughter is brought fully into play when Evadne announces that she is going to Persephone's chambers: Phersephoneias hêxô thalamous.[17] Evadne is going to the halls of Persephone, the abode of the dead, but the words are not merely a periphrasis for 'death.' Evadne also is Persephone, because she goes to an underground marriage that will prove her death, and like Persephone, she too is a lost daughter. While her husband's claims on her lead to her death, it is her father's claims that are visible on stage, and she is insistently represented as a daughter. Here an intriguing and persistent displacement of the Eleusinian material comes into play. Evadne is the daughter of a father, Iphis, rather than of a mother, and this father comes in search of her as she goes willingly to death rather than being snatched away as in the mythic paradigm.[18] The drama's representation of Iphis associates him with the mothers of the Chorus as well as with the Eleusinian mother herself, Demeter; Iphis articulates the same wish as the Chorus (790-93, 822-23) - the wish never to have had children (1087-93) - and he says he will die asitiais (1105), a fitting death for a bereaved parent at Eleusis.

In the Evadne-episode, the loss of a daughter by a parent is crucial, as is appropriate for the setting, but the parent is male, unlike in the paradigmatic myth of Demeter and Persephone. Overall, of course, the play is concerned with yet another parent-child relationship in which the parent has lost the child, that of the mothers of the Chorus and their dead sons. The Argive mothers are of the correct Eleusinian sex, but the child is a son rather than a Persephone-daughter. The daughter in the myth, destined for marriage, is replaced in the play by sons whose trajectory leads no less inevitably to war. The play, like the myth, is concerned to restore the child to the parent, insofar as the recovery of the corpses can be this restoration; for as Theseus points out, the mothers would be shattered by the sight of their sons' 'altered' bodies (944).

The reworking of the Eleusinian myth that the play seems to undertake thus replaces a daughter with sons and a mother with a father; it also achieves a reunion between parent and child that differs from the myth of Persephone's ascent from Hades, in that the child remains dead. The element of regeneration and renewal that characterizes the Eleusinian paradigm is completely missing from the account in the Suppliant Women. On the other hand, it is possible at one point in the play to read a version of rebirth. Theseus taunts the Thebans with not wanting to bury the Argive dead because they are afraid that they will father children (presumably sons) in the muchôi chthonos (545) who will avenge their deaths (timôria, 546). These children 'born in earth' can be seen to register the myth of Persephone's descent and re-ascent.[19] The lines are further auspicious because the Seven have no need to engender vengeful sons in the ground; they have already left behind the Epigonoi, who are desperate to take their fathers' places as warriors. At the end of the drama, these paides enter with the ashes of the Seven, and rework the parent-child formula one more time, so that it completely excludes any mother or daughter; they are sons of their fathers. Once Athena appears to close down the play, it becomes clear exactly what kind of regeneration can be expected from the Epigonoi, in that they are indeed to replace their fathers and renew the assault on Thebes.

We can, then, read the Suppliant Women as informed quite closely by Eleusinian metaphors. Demeter and Persephone provide certain parameters for representing the women's situation; the loss of children and separation between parent and child is pervasive; reunion and renewal between child and parent is legible, but ironized. The close of the drama ushers in a whole new war, and this has seemed to many a cynical ending that casts doubt on the achievements of the preceding action in what can be called a characteristically Euripidean manner. The literature on whether the Suppliant Women is pessimistic or optimistic is extensive and beyond the scope of this paper to canvass completely, since my focus is not on a possible evaluation of the play but on its coordination of various signifying resources.[20] At this point I want to note that while the investigation of parents and children and of loss and renewal has brought us to consideration of the new assault on Thebes, the account is incomplete because we have omitted the crucial parent-child pair of Aithra and Theseus. Within this pair, Aithra will chiefly concern us, first in her maternal and then in her political identity.

Aithra is a mother no less significant than the Argive women; like them she is a mother of a son, but her son is living, and moreover is king of Athens. It is through Aithra that the women of Argos, and Adrastos their protector, appeal to Theseus, thus challenging Aithra's own recommendation for women to get things done through men (41-42). Adrastos, the male who accompanies the Chorus, is lying useless on the ground (22), and the women sing the first choral song directly to Aithra; they completely ignore the avenues for masculine dialog such as will be established between Adrastos and Theseus and will prove so resoundingly ineffective.[21] The condition of motherhood is significant within the supplication that the Chorus make; they appeal to Aithra on the grounds of a shared experience of maternity (e.g. 54), and this appeal is only later followed by the invocation of kinship that is often a feature of such supplications (263-64). This first appeal to motherhood works, because Aithra weeps and mourns, covering her face, imitating the Argive women themselves (286-89).

Aithra's relations with the Argive women are thus those of sympathetic identification, although it is only her difference from them that makes her useful, in that her son is living and can obtain the corpses of their dead sons. Aithra's maternity is a source of authority, as at 320 (mê dêt' emos g' ôn, ô teknon, drasêis tade), whereas it is motherhood that has disabled the Argive women. Her relations with Theseus are wholly positive;[22] her son is intent on hearing her speak when she intimates that she has advice to give (296), and he is solicitous of her welfare at all times (89-91). Theseus points out that care for a parent is a kind of investment (361-64), whereas the Argive mothers lament that they will not receive this kind of reciprocal trophê (923). While both Aithra and Theseus make conventional statements about limitations on women's speech and sphere of action (40-41, 294, 297-300), Aithra is, in fact, accorded the respect and relative freedom that may reward older women who have successfully, in patriarchal terms, negotiated marriage and motherhood.[23]

Given the Eleusinian setting, these aspects of Aithra's motherhood seem to me significant. But the figure of Aithra also has another important dimension; she holds a particular position within Athens. She is the mother of the king, and at the opening of the play she has come to Eleusis to perform the Proerosia, a celebration connected with the ritual plowing of the Rarian Field (28-31). While our information on this festival is limited, we may suppose that Aithra is involved in it by reason of her position as queen. She can perhaps be considered the representative, at Eleusis, of Athens and especially of Athenian women.

The figure of Aithra can thus be seen to combine two categories which, at Eleusis, can be particularly potent: the maternal and the Athenian. The most important intervention that she makes in the course of the drama, however, is the speech exhorting Theseus to yield to the suppliant women and to return the bodies of the Seven to their mothers (297-331). The appeal is all the more central because both Adrastos and the Argive mothers (at 277-85) have appealed to Theseus and have failed. Theseus' discourse has been eminently rational and pragmatic, and as such completely inadequate to deal with the situation of supplication.[24] His refusal to aid the suppliants produces a situation in which the mothers might threaten to hang themselves and thus pollute the city, like their Aeschylean namesakes. Instead, Aithra saves both mothers and Athens. In many ways, then, this speech is critical.

The success of Aithra's rhesis can be seen to depend on a combination of appeals to the ideology of Demeter, the mother exalted in her loss, and appeals to the ideology of Athenian identity. Before she speaks, Theseus tries to separate her from the Argive mothers and points out to her the ritual obligation not to cry in Demeter's precincts (289-90, 292). But the mothers too invoke the twin goddesses (Persephoneias, 271), and armed with these influential symbols Aithra can inculcate the necessity of reuniting parent with child, even when the child is dead. But the crucial appeal is made not so much by a mother as by an Athenian. Aithra invokes the Athenian identity and mission, and the Athens she is concerned with is the same kind of city as that which claims to have promulgated the benefits of Eleusis, a city which labors on behalf of others: en gar tois ponoisin auxetai (323). In the speech, Athens is linked in the appeal with the gods (301) and with the nomima pasês Ellados (311). The panhellenic nomos that guarantees the right of burial to the fallen is offered here as a moral imperative that ideally outweighs the specific hostilities of war; it has not been invoked before, despite the various appeals that have been made to Theseus. It is only here that Athens is charged with the defense of a panhellenic institution, as well as of divine prerogatives and of its own standing.

Aithra's speech is also concerned with Theseus' own character and reputation, which he makes much use of in his reply to her (338). Later on in the play, however, the element of her speech most reworked is precisely its panhellenic dimension. At 526 Theseus, replying to the Herald from Thebes, claims that to bury the Argive dead is to save (sôizôn) 'ton Panellênôn nomon', and he insists on this point again at 538: pasês Ellados koinon tode. The Messenger reports that Theseus had addressed the Theban army in similar terms, announcing that the Athenians came 'ton Panellênôn nomon sôizontes' (671-72). In recent times, the panhellenic claims of this drama have been most thoroughly canvassed by Zuntz, who rehabilitated the play after years of critical neglect. In his reading the play became a sign not of the dramatist's unreliable talent but of the promulgation of a new and enlightened Athenian morality.[25] But the nature of Aithra's panhellenism, and her ability to mobilize it at all, perhaps invite more critical scrutiny.

Aithra's rhesis makes many appeals; Athens' identity and mission is central, and panhellenic law is invoked for the first time in the drama. But how is Aithra enabled to enlarge upon the role of mother, which had indeed already afforded her a measure of authority, and to make this overtly political speech? She is, after all, a woman, and therefore, we may assume, not equipped with a discourse that would count as political. We may approach an answer if we consider again the reason why she is in Eleusis.

The Proerosia, which Aithra has come to celebrate, is a remarkably obscure festival. Commentators have suggested that the festival has importance only insofar as it brings Aithra to Eleusis.[26] While our information on the Proerosia is scanty and contested, the festival seems to have centered on a ritual plowing of the Rarian Field.[27] One may reasonably conclude, then, that the festival was concerned with agricultural fertility; indeed some references to it also mention a tribute of first-fruits.[28] Certain accounts of why the first-fruits came to be dedicated are very intriguing for our purposes. These accounts all appear in sources later than the Suppliant Women, but this does not mean, of course, that they could not have been current in the fifth century as well.[29] The narrative behind the offering, as given in Parke and Wormell, is from a passage in Lykourgos (frag. 86: my translations):[30]

They say that there was a famine throughout the world, and when the Greeks and barbarians consulted him, Apollo ordained that the Athenian people should offer prayers on behalf of all. Many peoples sent ambassadors to them...

For some say, that famine took hold of all the land, and the god said that the Athenians should perform a sacrifice, the proerosia, to Demeter on behalf of all; on account of which they send first-fruits to Athens from all parts, as thank-offerings.

This remarkably convenient narrative could obviously wield considerable ideological clout. It appears too in the Panegyrikos of Isokrates (31) where it is mobilized, along with other attributes, to argue for Athenian supremacy within a new coalition of Greeks against barbarians. It is also this speech, as noted above, that rehearses claims about Athenian benefactions through Eleusis (28); furthermore, this speech draws on the very myth that the Suppliant Women dramatizes, that of the return of the Seven corpses (54-58). If we accept the link between the Proerosia as ritual plowing and the offering of first-fruits, then it is clear that the Panegyrikos and the Suppliant Women deploy exactly the same components of Athenian representation. This convergence indicates not so much 'influence' between Euripidean tragedy and fourth-century rhetoric, as a common stock of Athenian representations on which diverse genres could draw. I suggest, then, that the Proerosia not only functions as a convenient way of getting Aithra to Eleusis, as commentators have been content to claim; the festival is also an integral part of the notion of Athens that is being constructed and promulgated here.

I suggested above that we might understand how Aithra could make her political speech, given that she is female and therefore excluded from what usually counts as political discourse, if we were to mobilize the Proerosia in our account of her role within the drama. I see the Proerosia as what in fact makes the speech possible. Even if we did not accept all the possible ramifications of the festival, we could still argue that Aithra's speech is facilitated by her ritual performance, in that she can be seen to espouse the cause of parent-child reunion invested both with the authority of Demeter and with the sign of fertility provided by the Proerosia. But if we accept the link with the first-fruits and with the mythic narrative of Athens' crucial intervention on behalf of Greece, then we can also suggest that the Proerosia enables Aithra to move beyond maternal imperatives and equips her with a powerful discourse of Athenian identity and mission. The appeal to panhellenic law in Aithra's speech is not unprecedented, because the narrative of the Proerosia already awards Athens a position of panhellenic significance. The myth of the Proerosia displays the contours to which Aithra wants Theseus' action to conform; the Proerosia already announces what the play sets out to prove, namely that Athens is the city which makes a salvific and ritually sanctioned intervention on behalf of all the Greeks, and which is consequently rewarded with undying loyalty and gratitude.

This representation of Athens concerns its relations to the outside world, the other Greeks; it was available in Athenian arenas other than ritual, or even tragedy. In Perikles' Funeral Speech, Athens appears in a similar light in that it is an education to all Greece (Thucydides 2.41) and on account of its megethos, goods from every country flow in to it (2.38). In this passage Athens appears as the center of a Greek network, receiving material goods in return for cultural excellence. We should note, however, that Perikles' speech is made, or is represented as being made, during a war which in part contests precisely Athens' right to be at the center of that network and to receive that kind of tribute. Athens' opponents in the Peloponnesian War contest its right to an empire, an empire founded not only on perceived cultural excellence but also on superior strategic and economic might. This empire, of course, according to Athenian representations, only came about in response to an appeal from other Greeks. In Thucydides 1.75 the Athenians are made to defend their empire to the Spartans in the following terms:

Surely, Spartans, the courage, the resolution and the ability which we showed then ought not to be repaid by such immoderate hostility from the Hellenes -- especially so far as our empire is concerned. We did not gain this empire by force. It came to us at a time when you were unwilling to fight on to the end against the Persians. At the time our allies came to us of their own accord and begged us to lead them.

The representation of Athens purveyed by these passages does not seem to me to differ greatly from that purveyed by the myth of the Proerosia. Athens' claimed panhellenic status and its imperial ambitions may well seem to intersect; they may even intersect exactly at the point of the Proerosia. An inscription found at Eleusis (and a fragmentary copy found in Athens), which regulates the practice of sending first-fruits to Eleusis, and possibly reactivates it after a hiatus, is interesting to us for this reason.[33] Although the date of this inscription is uncertain, arguments can be made which place it and the Suppliant Women within a few years of one another.[34] The date of the Suppliant Women is also uncertain, so these suggestions must remain speculative.[35] But if the inscription and the play were to coincide, then the evocation of the Proerosia in the prologue of the play would be all the more pointed, as it could be seen to register the renewal of the custom of offering first-fruits as tribute.[36] More important is the fact that the inscription makes it plain that the first-fruits and Athenian hegemony are mutually implicated.[37] eklogeis are to organize the collection of aparchai in the allied cities (lines 14-21), whereas hoi Hellenes -- Greeks yet unsubjected, one may surmise -- are to be encouraged, but not ordered, to send their contributions, in what Meiggs and Lewis term 'a Panhellenic invitation' (lines 24-26, 30-36). The subject cities may be coerced even though the myth of the aparchai claims that tribute to Athens is voluntary. Whereas the myth of the Proerosia speaks of Athens in an uncomplicated panhellenic relationship, the savior of all Greece, the inscription registers the political realities of the Greek world and the Athenian empire.

Athens here uses the language of panhellenism, the appeal to 'all the Greeks', in a context where it is also quite clearly articulating imperial relationships. Panhellenism as a political force is often thought of as confined to the fourth-century struggles against Philip and to Alexander's campaign of Greek 'revenge' against the Persians, but it is possible to read panhellenic references in those fifth century sources where again Athenian hegemony is at stake.[38] Perikles' congress decree of 448/7, according to Plutarch Perikles 17, proposed that

all Greeks, whether living in Europe or in Asia, in small or large cities alike, should be invited to send delegates to a congress at Athens. The subjects to be discussed were the Greek sanctuaries which had been burned down by the Persians; the sacrifices owed to the gods on behalf of Hellas... and the security of the seas... However, nothing was achieved, and the delegates never assembled because of the covert opposition of the Spartans. (Loeb translation)

It would seem that the ideology of panhellenism, as practiced by fifth-century Athens, and imperialism as practiced by the Athenian empire, cannot easily be told apart. Zuntz claimed that panhellenism was not identical with imperialism when he suggested that in the Suppliant Women, the myth of the return of the Seven corpses permits the articulation of a new construct of Athenian and Greek identity. The various texts I have juxtaposed here lead me to suggest instead that Athens deploys the figure of 'all the Greeks' to elide the imperial dimension of its relationship with those very Greeks. The panhellenic ethic that Aithra articulates is an integral component of Athens' representation of its imperial mission, one that is available for both internal consumption, within Athens, and also external consumption among allies and potential enemies alike. One site for such external consumption may be the tragic festival itself.

All the elements of the Suppliant Women, then, seem to bring us back to the question of Athens' formulation of the relations that it maintains with the wider Greek world. I began this paper by suggesting that the prevalence of suppliant drama, of which the play is obviously an example, was conditioned by Athens' need constantly to promulgate a certain notion of its own identity and mission with regard to the entire Greek world. The site of Eleusis, where the play is located, can be seen to be significant within this notion; Athens lays claim at Eleusis not only to territory but also to symbolic significance. Genre, location, and myth of the Suppliant Women thus all seem to converge around the notion of Athens as the center of a wholly benevolent network, driven only by the panhellenic imperative. Such representations can be seen to be necessitated by the very real political negotiations that had to be managed between Athens and other Greek cities.

One anomaly remains about Eleusis, to which I adverted earlier, and this is that its mythology was dominated by female figures. In the Suppliant Women, too, Aithra provides the motivating force and initial source of authority for the subsequent salvific action. I have suggested that while her political intervention is exceptional, it may be accounted for to some extent by her ritual performance. Athenian tragedy here allows a political voice to a female character, but this extension of the dramatic franchise is not innocent; the defense of Athens' interventionist stance is subtly achieved via a speaker to whom an aggressively imperialist motivation could perhaps not be readily attributed. In the course of the play the hegemonic politics of Athens can be seen to appropriate the female in other ways as well. The drama allots the supreme mythical gesture of reuniting mother and child to Theseus, as the representative of Athens. Although Aithra disappears once she has said her piece, it is her initial intervention that eventually allows Theseus to assume the maternal posture that she has vacated, as when he performs the actions of laying out the corpses that might have been the mothers' prerogative (765-66). We might conclude that at Eleusis Athens can appropriate for itself the feminine, nurturing role that it wishes to be seen to deploy with regards to other Greek cities, but that it abjures at home when it identifies with the warrior virgin.

Aithra's maternal and political authority, then, can be seen to be appropriated by the play as a crucial tool for its representation of Athens. Her performance of the Proerosia and her important speech are closely related; she is enabled to make the political intervention that she does by her participation in the ceremony. Can we generalize from these conclusions or are the play's conditions quite specific? It seems to me that in other tragedies, female figures likewise articulate a political identity for Athens, and mobilize ritual forms to do so. In Ion, a play explicitly concerned with Athens' imperial destiny, Kreousa's story models itself on the ritual practice of the Arrephoria; the final positive outcome of her own story is bound up with that of Athens' historical success.[40] In the fragmentary Erechtheus, Praxithea sacrifices her daughter (in order to win the war against Eleusis) and is honored as the first priestess of Athena Polias. The connections are perhaps clearer in Aristophanic comedy, where women seem to mobilize the metaphors of the Adonia (in Lysistrata) and Skira (in Ecclesiazousai) to save the city. Thebes, by contrast, continues to present itself as the theatrical anti-polis;[41] Theban women are repeatedly prevented from performing appropriate ritual actions and thus deprived of a productive identification with their city.[42]

Ritual actions performed by women in tragedy are not often understood along these lines; they are usually taken to signal simultaneous commemoration of, and compensation for, an ever reenacted defeat of the female . At the end of the Oresteia, the Eumenides are disarmed and placated with ritual observance; Zeitlin has suggested that the Danaid trilogy closed in the same fashion with the Thesmophoria as the Danaids' reward and consolation for their acquiescence in patriarchal marriage.[43] Even rituals that engage the individual rather than the community may be understood in this way; the bridal rite that closes Hippolytos commemorates the silencing of Phaidra and thus teaches the young women of Troizen their proper destiny.[44] Defeating female figures is arguably an important part of the tragic project; but we might consider the possibility that Athens could also deploy tragic female voices in support of its hegemonic politics.[45]

Notes

1 The text used in this paper is that of J. Diggle, Euripidis Fabulae II (Oxford 1981).

2 As in G. Zuntz, The Political Plays of Euripides (Manchester 1955).

3 F. I. Zeitlin, "Thebes: theater of self and society in Athenian drama", in Nothing to do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in its Social Context, ed. J. J. Winkler and F. I. Zeitlin (Princeton 1990) 130-67 (hereafter Zeitlin 1990a), p.146. C. Collard, Euripides 'Supplices' edited with introduction and commentary (Groningen 1975), provides a bibliography for the play, to which may be added especially P. Burian, 'Logos and Pathos: the politics of the Suppliant Women' in Directions in Euripidean Criticism, ed. P. Burian (Durham, NC 1985), 129-56, and Ann Michelini, "The Maze of the Logos: Euripides, Suppliants", Ramus 20.1 (1991) 16-36.

4 The Aeschylean Suppliants moves the problem to Argos, and here the arrival of the suppliants proves more than usually troublesome in that Danaos seems eventually to have brought down the democratic constitution. For bibliography, see F. I. Zeitlin, "Patterns of Gender in Aeschylean Drama: Seven Against Thebes and the Danaid trilogy", 103-15 in The Cabinet of the Muses: essays in classical and comparative literature in honor of Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, ed. M. Griffith and D. J. Mastronarde (Atlanta 1990) p. 13, n.8 (hereafter Zeitlin 1990b). Medeia and Herakles are potential threats to the integrity of Athens even if the dramas choose not to pursue this point; see, e.g., the choral ode in Medeia 846-50.

5 The Furies are not the original suppliants in Eumenides, because Orestes is. However, they seem to me to occupy the suppliant position of threatening the city and having to be incorporated into it in some fashion.

6 See Collard (above note 3) ad loc.

7 On cleruchies, see Russell Meiggs, The Athenian Empire (Oxford 1972) 260-62.

8 On this decree of the 440s see Meiggs ibid. 167-72. It was precisely these kinds of practices that Athens was not able to follow when it constructed its second empire in the 380s. See N. G. L. Hammond, A History of Greece to 322 B. C. (Oxford 1986) 513-16 and Meiggs (above, note 7) 402-03.

9 N. Loraux, L'Invention d'Athènes (Paris and the Hague 1981), trans. A. Sheridan as The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City (Cambridge MA 1986). For examples, see Lysias 2.7-10, Plato Menexenos 239b, and Demosthenes 60.8.

10 For arguments about the date of Athenian incorporation of Eleusis, see R. Padgug "Eleusis and the Union of Attika", GRBS 13 (1972) 135-50.

11 George E. Mylonas, Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries (Princeton 1962) 103.

12 Primarily of course we are concerned with the Mysteries themselves; but in a related gesture, the Athenian mythology of Theseus involved the defeat of various figures who had been heroes in or near Eleusis but who for Athenian purposes were recast as monsters. See Mylonas ibid. 28 and Barbette Stanley Spaeth, "Athenians and Eleusinians in the West Pediment of the Parthenon", Hesperia 60.3. (1991),331-62, p. 352.

13 See Spaeth ibid. 360 for recent discussion and bibliography.

14 The relationship between mother and daughter was important at moments of personal crisis like marriage and childbirth, and tragic mothers like Alkestis (Alkestis 317-19) and Klytaimestra (IA 716-40) make much of this. But family commitment does not seem to me to be the same as institutional recognition.

15 Some of our sources indicate that initiands in some way imitated the goddesses, particularly Demeter in her search for Persephone. The evidence, however, is mainly from the Christian fathers, and so necessarily suspect. See Clement of Alexandria Protreptikos 2.12 and Lactantius Divin. Inst. epitome 23. On the dra`ma mustikovn see P. Foucart, Les Mystères d'Eleusis (Paris 1914) 457-97.

16 The term used in Pierre Brulé, La Fille d'Athènes: la religion des filles à Athènes à l'époque classique (Paris 1987) 410.

17 Collard's commentary to his edition of Suppliant Women does not index "Persephone", an indication perhaps of how unimportant the Eleusinian setting has usually seemed to critics.

18 The relations of children to parents in Suppliant Women have aroused little critical interest. See, however, Burian (above, note 3) 134 n. 11 and 138 n.13, , and Michael Shaw, 'The ethos of Theseus in the Suppliant Women', Hermes 110 (1982) 3-19, p. 5.

19 This birth from the earth is perhaps similar to the familiar Athenian sign of autochthony. The lines can thus be seen to appeal to and to coordinate the myths both of Athens and of Eleusis, so that the two cities are even more closely identified one with another.

20 Zuntz gives what is probably the most positive account of the play, followed by C. Collard in "The Funeral Oration in Euripides' Supplices", BICS 19 (1972) 39-53. The recent work on the play that describes it as largely satirical is best represented by J. W. Fitton, "The Suppliant Women and the Herakleidai of Euripides", Hermes 89 (1961) 430-61, and W. Smith, "Expressive Form in Euripides' Suppliants" HSCP 71 (1966) 154-55. H. F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy (London 1969; repr. 1973) 229, calls the play "as much a national warning as a national eulogy". D. Conacher, Euripidean Drama: Myth, Theme and Structure (Toronto 1967), has a similar argument. See also R. B. Gamble, "Euripides' Suppliant Women: Decision and Ambivalence", Hermes 98 (1970) 386, and Shaw (above, note 18).

21 On conventions of gender in the play, see Rush Rehm, 'The Staging of Suppliant Plays', GRBS 29.3 (1988) 284 and 288.

22 She can perhaps be contrasted with that other tragic mother who is forced to teach her sons political behavior, Jokaste in Phoinissai.

23 See Brulé (above, note 16) 354.

24 On his speech see Michelini (above, note 3).

25 e.g. Zuntz (above, note 2) 9-11, 17-18, 22.

26 Conacher (above, note 20) 98 n. 11 remarks that the presence of the ritual opens the possibility of the whole play being seen as a fertility rite. He is the only commentator, to my knowledge, who considers that the rite has any bearing on the drama whatsoever.

27 See, e.g., Ludwig Deubner, Attische Feste (Hildesheim 1966) 68-69; Kevin Clinton, The Sacred Officials of the Eleusinian Mysteries, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 64.3 (Philadelphia 1974) 22; H. W. Parke, The Festivals of the Athenians (Ithaca 1977) 73-75, and Collard (above, note 3) II: 112 ( with bibliography).

28 See Parke (above, note 27) 73-75, H. W. Parke and D. E. W. Wormell, The Delphic Oracle (Oxford 1956) vol. II, #164, and Foucart (above note 15) 56-59. One may note an inconsistency, in so far as first-fruits cannot logically appear before a plowing, but Clinton suggests, apropos of another issue, that first-fruits dedicated in the summer might be stored and offered before the following fall plowing (above, note 27,15). That agricultural produce should be offered in the hopes of more such produce does not seem entirely unlikely.

29 F.Jacoby, FGH III.B (Suppl.) 1.84, who supplies further bibliography, points out that in the Euripidean Proerosia we have an archaically simple ceremony, or only part of a ceremony. This does not exclude the possibility, of course, that the drama may register a more complex late fifth-century ceremony.

30 See also Lykourgos frag. 87.

31 See also Suda P 2420.

32 Jon Mikalson, in The Sacred and Civil Calendar of the Athenian Year (Princeton 1975) 67-69, argues that the Proerosia was primarily for the Eleusinians; Athenians were invited to it but were not its focal point. He argues from the fact that a possible meeting of the boulhv can be attributed to the day when the Proerosia was celebrated.

33 This is most readily available as IG i³ 78(= IG i² 76) and as #73 in Russell Meiggs and David Lewis, ed., A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions (Oxford 1969).

34 Meiggs and Lewis provide a summary of the various proposals and arguments. According to them, the upper date for the inscription is 435, although most scholars date it later than that. The lower date, which they suggest can only be argued with some difficulty, is 415. I should point out that Clinton has recently reaffirmed 435, in "The Eleusinian Mysteries: Roman initiates and benefactors" ANRW 18.2 (Berlin 1989) 1521.

35 See Collard (above, note 3) 8-14 for a discussion of the date of the play and evidence for it. Collard argues for 423; the range of suggested dates lies between 424 and 416. My general argument, of course, does not depend on any particular dating.

36 Parke (above, note 27) 74 follows Murray in suggesting that the Suppliant Women 'delicately alludes' to the revival.

37 See Spaeth (above, note 12) 361 n. 186 for recent discussion of this inscription and bibliography on it.

38 Suzanne Said in "Iphigenie a Aulis: une piece panhellenique?", Sacris Erudiri: Jaarboek voor Godsdienstwetenschappen 31 (1989-90) 357-78, argues at 360-65 against the availability of a notion of panhellenism in the fifth century, but she restricts herself to a narrow definition of panhellenism.

39 See Meiggs (above, note 7) 152-3, Hammond (above, note 8) 307, and A. R. Burn, The Pelican History of Greece (Harmondsworth 1974) 221-22. Some historians, less cynical than the Spartans, take the Athenians at their word, e.g., J. B. Burn, A History of Greece (London 1924) and M. F. McGregor, The Athenians and their Empire (Vancouver 1982) 70-75. For a discussion of the decree's authenticity see Meiggs (above, note 7) 512-13.

40 See especially W. Burkert "Kekropidensage und Arrhephoria" Hermes 94 (1966) 1-25, Nicole Loraux in Les enfants d'Athéna (Paris 1981), Froma Zeitlin "Mysteries of Identity and Designs of the Self in Euripides' Ion," PCPS 35 (1989) 144-97.

41 See Zeitlin 1990a.

42 Antigone is merely the most striking example of a pattern that is repeated, with variations, in all the Theban plays, including the Euripidean Suppliant Women.

43 See Zeitlin 1990b.

44 See Nancy S. Rabinowitz, "Female speech and female sexuality: Euripides' Hippolytos as model" in Rescuing Creusa: New Methodological Approaches to Women in Antiquity , ed. M. Skinner, Helios n.s. 13 (1985) 127-40.

45 This discussion of the female voices in tragedy which are mediated by ritual is evidently too complex to be concluded here, although I hope to pursue its implications elsewhere.

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