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Mystery Cults and the Polis of Athens Amended Mystery Cults and the Polis of Athens: A Reading of Bakchai and Frogs [Volume One of One] Submitted by Luigi Barzini to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Classics. [May 2019] This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. Signed: 1 Abstract This work is dedicated to a comparative study of Euripides’ Bakchai and Aristophanes’ Frogs (also “the plays”) in their religious, historical and political context and in particular in their connection with mystery cults. Aristophanes had his comedy Frogs performed at the Lenaia festival in the winter of 405. The son of Euripides had his father’s tragedy Bakchai produced at the Great Dionysia at some point after Euripides’ death, possibly in the spring of the same year 405. The two plays have several points in common: the protagonist, the god Dionysos; they are both rich in themes, motifs and images connected with the initiation cults of Dionysos (in Bakchai) and those of Demeter (in Frogs); the choruses have the same role on stage as they have in their cultic reality in the theatre, worshippers of the deity; the two plays were awarded the first prize. This thesis is dedicated to exploring the plays in their Athenian religious and socio-political context, a theme largely ignored by classical scholars. By estimating the number of mystic initiates in Athens at the end of the fifth century the thesis shows that mystic initiates were a sizable part of the population and therefore of theatre audiences, likely to be sensitive to the plays’ mystic and civic content and able to influence public opinion. It examines the way Athenian audiences perceived the impact of public poetry and drama performances and shows that their effect on audiences was associated with a religious experience; it follows the thread of mystic and civic values in the perception of ancient writers before and during the Peloponnesian War and 2 evaluates the role of those values in the development of Athenian political consciousness during the fifth century; it analyses the political atmosphere in Athens in the period the plays were written, after the restoration of democracy in 410 and on the eve of the restoration of oligarchic rule by the Thirty that was followed by open stasis and the civic reconciliation of 403. This thesis proposes a new interpretation of the texts of the plays to evidence the relevance of their religious content in the political conditions Athens found itself in. The two plays delivered a message to the polis that was inspired by mystery cults, a message at the same time religious, ethical and political: the reconciliation of the polis’ social, religious and political conflicts through the acceptance of mystery cults and of their rituals. Acknowledgments I am deeply grateful to my supervisors, Richard Seaford and Lynette Mitchell, for their patient assistance in transforming an embryonic mass of ideas and digressions into a cohesive thesis. On a personal level, I am grateful for my family, Paula, Cosima and Luigi, for having supported my effort through the years. I also am indebted to my analyst Diane Zervas Hirst for having encouraged me to feed my passion for classical Greece. I dedicate the thesis to the memory of my Greek brother Konstantinos Gouzelis. 3 1 Table of Contents 1 Table of Contents .................................................................................................... 4 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 6 1.1 Mystic Initiation. ........................................................................................... 10 2 Mystery Initiates and Theatre Audiences at Athens ....................................... 17 2.1 Mystery initiates, some numbers. ............................................................... 18 2.2 Theatre Audiences ........................................................................................ 26 2.3 Theatrical Perception. ................................................................................... 39 2.4 Chorus and audience .................................................................................... 48 3 Mystic and Civic Values Prior to the Peloponnesian War ............................. 53 3.1 Kylon, Epimenides and the Initiation of the Polis ................................... 54 3.2 Political Implications of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter ....................... 60 3.3 Demeter, Miltiades and Telines. ................................................................. 69 3.4 Mystic/Political Values in Aeschylus’ Oresteia ......................................... 77 4 Religion and Stasis in Late Fifth-Century Athens ............................................ 88 4.1 The Herms and Mysteries Scandal. ............................................................ 88 4.2 The Arginousai trial and the Apatouria festival. ................................... 101 4.3 The Overthrow of the Thirty in Xenophon. ............................................ 109 5 The Plays .............................................................................................................. 125 5.1 Scholarship Review ..................................................................................... 130 5.2 Dionysos and Demeter, Mystery Deities ................................................. 148 5.3 Stasis in Thebes and Athens. ..................................................................... 161 5.4 Euripides and Athenian anti-tyrannical ideology .................................. 175 5.5 Pentheus the Tyrant .................................................................................... 184 4 5.6 Aristophanes and Athenian Political Leaders in Frogs .......................... 189 5.7 Mystic Spaces ............................................................................................... 192 5.8 Lights in the night, Fire and Torches ....................................................... 196 5.9 The Mystic Choruses .................................................................................. 201 5.10 Mystic/Moral Values. .............................................................................. 208 5.11 Political Implications .............................................................................. 228 6 Conclusions ......................................................................................................... 242 7 Bibliography ........................................................................................................ 245 5 Introduction Frogs was produced by Philonides at the Lenaia festival, which took place around the 12th day of Gamelion of the year when “the old temple of Athena at Athens was burned, Pythias being ephor at Sparta and Kallias archon at Athens” as Xenophon notes.1 In our calendar it was around the end of January- beginning of February 405. The play was awarded first prize. We have no direct evidence on the date of Bakchai’s production, other than a note on Aristotle’s Didaskaliai that the play was produced by Euripides’ son in Athens together with Iphigeneia in Aulis and Alkmeon after the playwright’s death that took place in 407/6. Some scholars, such as Webster, Cantarella, Kovacs and Hall, believe Bakchai was staged at the Great Dionysia of 405, some two months later than Frogs.2 The trilogy that included Bakchai won the first prize. Accepting the hypothesis of Kovacs and others, both plays were produced in the late winter/spring of 405, after the Athenians’ major naval victory at Arginousai that was followed by the divisive and controversial trial against some of the victorious generals (end of summer 406 – end of autumn 406). The Spartan final naval victory at Aigospotamoi (summer 405) lay a few weeks ahead, while the summer of 404 witnessed the re-establishment of an oligarchic regime in Athens that was followed by the revolt of the democrats and the return of the polis to a democratic constitution and the civic reconciliation of 403. 1 Xenophon Hellenika 1.18.6. 2 Webster 1967 p. 257, Cantarella 1974 pp. 291-292, n. 2, Kovacs 2002 p. 2, Hall 2016, p. 17. 6 The two plays, despite their authors’ distinctive artistic personalities and different theatrical genre, show significant similarities: the coincidence of the short period in which they were produced, the mystic ritual content of their choral odes, 3 the figure of the god Dionysos as protagonist and architect of political action, the role of the chorus that is at the same time religious and theatrical (see 5.9) and the fusion of mystic, ethical and political concepts (see 5.10-11). These similarities, unique in extant tragedies and comedies, suggest that Euripides and Aristophanes reacted to a common religious and political context and shared a similar political purpose, that of encouraging the reconciliation of the political tensions existing in Athens. The first prize awarded to Frogs and to Euripides’ trilogy is evidence for the popularity of the plays, not only because of their aesthetic merits, but also of their religious and moral content. Despite the vast number of scholarly works separately dedicated to the two plays,4 to mystery cults,5
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