Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women: The Tragedy of Immigration

227 Pages·2013·0.921 MB·English

by  Geoffrey W. Bakewell

Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women
Publication of this volume has been made possible, in
part, through the generous support and enduring vision
of warren g. moon.
Aeschylus’s Suppliant
Women
The Tragedy of Immigration
Geoffrey W. Bakewell
T h e U n i v e r s i t y o f W i s c o n s i n P r e s s
The University of Wisconsin Press
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The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Bakewell, Geoffrey W.
Aeschylus’s Suppliant women : the tragedy of immigration / Geoffrey W. Bakewell.
p. cm. — (Wisconsin studies in classics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978- 0- 299- 29174- 7 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0 - 299- 29173- 0 (e- book)
1. Aeschylus. Suppliants—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Metics. 3. Athens
(Greece)—Emigration and immigration. I. Title. II. Series: Wisconsin studies in classics.
PA3829.B35 2013
882'.01—dc23
2012032674
For Rosie

Contents
Preface ix
Introduction 3
1 Charter Myth for Metoikia 17
2 Spoken Like a Metic 34
3 The Cypriote Stamp 59
4 Sons of Earth 87
Conclusion 122
Notes 127
References 179
Index 193
vii

Preface
Questions of where, to what, and to whom we belong are central to our
lives. Yet they are not new. The inhabitants of classical Athens found
them equally compelling, and explored them in numerous ways. Two
of their most important vehicles for such refl ection were the tragic stage
and the democratic assembly. This book works the seam between these
complementary means of collective self- defi nition. Its main conten-
tion is that Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women offers an invaluable perspec-
tive on Athenian attempts at establishing their own identity in the late
460s BCE. Because it is often harder to say what one is than what one is
not, Aeschylus operated at a number of removes. He set his suppliant
drama in the fi ctionalized city of Argos and had its inhabitants offer an
ambivalent welcome to exotic immigrants. The displaced self-p ortrait
of Athens that results is not entirely fl attering. The citizens’ wariness
toward outsiders and their fears about the newcomers’ political, sexual,
and economic leanings have clear, if complex, echoes in our contem-
porary debates about immigration. I leave it to ears better trained and
attuned than mine to trace such reverberations. But I confess to having
considerable sympathy for the Athenians and their tragic democracy:
they had to think through pressing and perilous questions without the
benefi t of their own example. Should we now make different choices
than they did, we do so in large part via the political and intellectual
instruments they invented.
Though I sympathize with the Athenians, I empathize still more with
the metics who lived among them. Like many academics today, I was
led far from home by the exigencies of the job market. And I’ve seen
fi rst-h and how conscience and creed, class and color, can affect one’s
membership in various tight- knit communities. Along the way I’ve
ix