A Literary Study of Euripides' Phoinissai

A LITERARY STUDY OF EURIPIDES’ PHOINISSAI Ita Hilton UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON 2011 1 Acknowledgements My greatest debt by far is to my supervisor, Professor Chris Carey, whose untiring guidance and support have been instrumental to my research, on which his influence has been very great. His input has added much to my enjoyment of and engagement with my work, and I am extremely grateful to him. I also thank Bill Allan, Alan Woolley, and especially Chris Pelling for their generous help and support when I was an undergraduate and postgraduate student at Oxford; and I am grateful to University College, Oxford, for all the help and encouragement I had in my six years as a student there. I am also grateful to the Greek & Latin department at UCL for providing a supportive and stimulating environment while I completed my doctoral research. Thanks are due especially to Akrivi Taousiani, Stella Papastamati, Emmanuela Bakola, and Stephen Colvin; and elsewhere, to Gottfried Mader, and to my father, Edward Hilton; and lastly (but by no means least) to Stephen, to whom this thesis is dedicated. 2 CONTENTS Introduction.....page 5 Chapter One: Euripides and the Theban Tradition.....p.20 1.1 The Iliad.....p.25 1.2 Septem: Shields and the Theatre.....p.28 1.3 Character: Eteocles.....p.34 1.4 The Chorus.....p.41 1.5 Sophocles: Antigone.....p.46 1.6 Oedipus Tyrannos.....p.51 1.7 Stesichorus.....p.55 Chapter Two: Politics and Phoinissai.....p.60 2.1 Phoinissai: Oratory and Rhetoric.....p.67 2.2 Public versus Private: Philotimia.....p.76 2.3 Myth and History: Alcibiades and Athens.....p.85 2.4 Democracy and Power.....p.90 Chapter Three: Thebes: The Tragic Polis.....p.97 3.1 Thebes and Dramatic ‘Space’.....p.97 3.2 ‘Inside’ and ‘Outside’.....p.99 3.3 Thebes and the Gods.....p.106 3.4 Curse.....p.111 3.5 Thebes as the ‘anti-Athens’.....p.119 Chapter Four: Polis and Oikos: Women and Gender Roles.....p.135 4.1 Women and the Theatre: Gender-Spatial Dynamics.....p.142 4.2 Women and Speech: Gender and Rhetoric.....p.146 4.3 Gender Roles and Conflict: Men, Women, and the Polis: The Chorus.....p.150 4.4 Men: Creon, Teiresias, Oedipus.....p.153 4.5 Myth.....p.156 4.6 Women and Ritual: Marriage, Sacrifice, Death.....p.163 4.7 The Death of Menoeceus.....p.166 Conclusion.....p.171 3 Appendix A: The Exodos.....p.173 Appendix B: The teichoskopia.....p.190 Appendix C: 1104-40.....p.194 Bibliography.....p.201 4 Introduction Aims Euripides‟ Phoinissai exemplifies Athenian drama at its most mature and sophisticated. Produced towards the close of the „Golden Age‟ of Classical tragedy, the play is intensely rich and diverse in its mythical and thematic representation. Euripides is here at the height of his literary and dramaturgical powers in a drama marked by an unusual innovativeness in its sustained exploitation of its several dramatic and poetic influences. The play follows in the footsteps of Sophocles and Aeschylus in drawing upon the familiar Oedipus theme but is unique in extant tragedy in combining the Labdacid myth with that of Theban pre- history and the city‟s autochthonic origins. This unusual variety and complexity of the play‟s mythical fabric is appropriate to the drama‟s position in the late Euripidean corpus, which reveals a tendency towards the „open‟ style of composition – that is, the plays tend to demonstrate less interest in establishing a sense of the plot as self-contained, with a firm beginning and ending, but incline instead to encompass more wide-ranging topics and themes. Phoinissai presents a more loosely-connected, almost episodic, combination of themes than the „closed‟ form1 - admired by Aristotle - which has a more simple structure and a tighter unity of subject and action: thus, for instance, the Oedipus Tyrannos of Sophocles, which was produced approximately two decades before Phoinissai.2 Late fifth- century tragedy, especially late Euripides, generally contains a broader cast of characters and a greater tendency towards „narrativity‟ which permits a more extensive and developed account of events. This creates a more panoramic dramatic focus which adds to the impression of the play as verging on the epic in its theatrical scope.3 The maturity and sophistication of tragedy in general increase with time. Phoinissai exemplifies this in its extensive, almost episodic structure of separate yet inter-connected dramatic events and particularly in its sustained revisitation in the Choral odes of Theban history and the impact of the past on the present. These features in turn lend additional room for the exploration – or exploitation – of the dramatic form itself; on this point, a peculiarly elusive study in a genre which generally resists overt self-reference, Phoinissai is intriguingly experimental. The play bears in addition a distinctive contemporary flavour, staged as it was at a time of constitutional instability at Athens: in its sustained exploration 1 On the differences between the „open‟ and „closed‟ forms in drama see Pfister (1988) 239-45. 2 On the dating of Phoinissai, see below under „Production‟. 3 On this feature as characteristic of late Eur. with a particular focus on IA see Michelini in Cropp, Lee, and Sansone (1999/2000) 41-57. 5 of contemporary political and intellectual cultures, the drama engages closely with late fifth-century „real-life‟ experience and thus bears a particular historical interest for the modern critic. It is therefore surprising that there exists no full-scale literary study of the play. Scholars of the twentieth century continued the earlier tradition of lemmatic commentaries (Pearson, 1909; Powell, 1911) in focusing largely on the play‟s text. The late twentieth century saw the appearance of two editions with commentaries: the massive linguistic commentary of Mastronarde (1994), and the shorter edition of Craik (1988). Still more recently there has appeared the full-scale exegetic French-language commentary of Amiech (2004). Even so, Phoinissai is still comparatively neglected in scholarship when one considers the plethora of publications on other more familiar Euripidean dramas, such as Medea or Hippolytus. The play has in the last half-century inspired a number of articles and smaller-scale works, but its particular thematic interest merits a more in-depth and extensive analysis. Recent years have seen the emergence of a trend in monographic studies on Euripidean dramas in particular: Zacharia on Ion (2003), Allan on Andromache (2000), Croally on Trojan Women (1994). In 2010 there appeared Lamari‟s study of Phoinissai, which focuses on the play‟s myths and intertexts from a narratological perspective. Lamari‟s particular interest is in the artistic design and coherence of the play. This study concerns itself more with the complexity of theme and character. Of course, all these studies differ in structure (thematic vs. linear) and emphasis; but all share a concentrated focus on the individual work. Our analysis of the play aims broadly to situate itself within the thematic approach. It is presented as a literary study rather than as a commentary. The themes discussed are not exhaustive; those chosen are of foremost relevance in the play and generally occupy a prominent position in modern Euripidean and tragic scholarship. Each chapter begins with an introduction to the relevant theme – gender, for instance, or politics - as presented in tragedy as a genre with a brief analysis of modern scholarship on the subject. The main bulk of the chapter examines the theme as presented in Phoinissai. The intention throughout is to explore and elucidate aspects of the play which have of necessity been beyond the scope of the lemmatic commentator. The study aims in addition to situate the play in its contemporary context by examining its themes in relation to late fifth-century life. In this way it may also help to provide an interpretation of the main problems and concerns of tragedy as a genre. Though our interest is in the issues explored by the play and its relationship with its larger environment (both literary and socio-political), no discussion of a play can ignore questions of staging 6 and performance; particular features of dramaturgy – such as the innovative staging of the early teichoskopia scene on the palace roof – are addressed where necessary. It is to be hoped that this analysis of Phoinissai will offer a deeper understanding of the play and in the process stimulate further study. Myth The Oedipus myth of Phoinissai was by the late fifth century already a highly popular theme in tragedy and earlier genres. Homer‟s Odyssey mentions the incestuous marriage of Oedipus and his mother Jocasta and the latter‟s subsequent suicide, and the Iliad alludes to the siege of Thebes by Polynices.4 Hesiod refers to the assault on Thebes by the Sphinx and to the fraternal discord over Oedipus‟ inheritance.5 The fragmentary epics Oidipodeia and Thebaid clearly dealt with the family „curse‟, as did the lyric Thebaid attributed to Stesichorus, the extant fragments of which reveal the conflict between the two sons of Oedipus and Jocasta, Eteocles and Polynices. There are in addition allusions to the myth in fifth-century lyric.6 Of the tragedians Aeschylus produced a trilogy which treated the family‟s unhappy history: the fragmentary Laius and Oidipous are generally accepted to have included the illicit conception of Oedipus in contravention of Apollo‟s oracle and the subsequent realisation of the god‟s prediction that Laius would die at the hands of any son he fathered. These plays are also likely to have contained the pronouncement by Oedipus of a curse on his sons and (possibly) the breakdown of the fraternal relationship.7 The sole surviving drama in the trilogy, Seven against Thebes, which was staged in 467, presents the fraternal battle over the city‟s leadership and the Argive assault on Thebes, events which were to be dramatised in Phoinissai over half a century later.

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