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The Ion in the Euripidean Corpus

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The Ion in the Euripidean Corpus CHAPTER FOUR THE ION IN THE EURIPIDEAN CORPUS Kt (mou Ka'tEXEl va J.UAf] J.LE yYOOO"T}Kat J.LE 'tp07t0 KUVEl Kat KAatO"lV Kat yeA.ou 'tfx J.lU'tla 'tOOV av9poomo Whoever knows how to speak with wisdom and with style makes the eyes of men weep and laugh Vizentzos Cornaros, Erotokritos (tr. Trypanis 1971) Life is full of the comic and is only majestic in its mner sense Dostoevsky on Brothers Karamazov, letter to a friend (1879) 4.1. TRAGIC, CoMic, SERious Ion has often been seen as a generic puzzle: is it a tragedy or a comedy or a tragi-comedy, a hybrid? My own conclusion is that the Ion is certainly a tragedy. 1 The categories tragedy, comedy or even tragi-comedy do not, of course, exhaust the possibilities. Comic can be opposed to the tragic-though it is not its proper opposite,2 but it can be also opposed to the serious. Thus, the first flawed recog­ nition scene between alleged father and son has clear comic over­ tones, witness, for instance the inept and hasty way that Xouthos jumps to conclusions and Ion's alarm and dismay at overtures which he misinterprets; and the main recognition scene between Ion and Kreousa is happy and serious but not comic. I would like briefly to outline the main argument of my earlier paper on the generic issue by considering why and how the comic episodes are incorporated into the play's more serious and 'tragic' 1 Zacharia 1995. 2 Silk 1998 and 2000: 42~97 persuasively shows that comedy is autonomous; 'Aristophanes' . active role in the eventual, momentous process of convergence with tragic drama' (p. 52) is to be seen as an intentional attempt by Aristophanes to arrive at a definition of comedy (p. 97). THE ION IN THE EURIPIDEAN CORPUS 151 scenes so as to produce an integrated and satisfying overall effect. Episodes in the Ion that have been commonly identified as having a lighter comic tone ('comic elements')3 are: the playful treatment of Hermes;4 Ion's 'business' with his broom and arrows; the contrast between the ordinariness of the Athenian handmaidens and the evo­ cation of the heroic past which they are deciphering on the sculp­ tures of the Delphic pediment; the recognition scene between Ion and Xouthos; the playful laughter aroused amongst the feasters in Ion's tent by the old tutor (1171-73), an obvious allusion to the Homeric Hephaestus (fl. 1. 595-600);5 and, the characterization of Xouthos as a gullible foreigner and a precursor of the miles gloriosus of New Comedy. The identification of such comic episodes and themes in the Ion does not, I argue, make the play any less of a tragedy. There is every reason to suppose that fifth-century Athenians knew what they meant by 'tragedy'.6 And by the fourth century we find in Plato's Laws the strongest possible assertion of the need to uphold generic integrity. But it has been recently noted7 that the same Plato for his own purposes often 'disrupts the generic boundaries'. His method is to "'incorporat(e)" texts and genres into his dialogues' in his act of exploring the boundaries of his discipline with respect to other ear­ lier and contemporary discursive practices: Plato stages a kind of dialogue between different genres in his effort to construct philoso­ phy.8 Plato thus in a way carries out the program he makes Socrates 3 I use this term as in Seidensticker 1978: 305 'a general term for the laughable ('to yEA.o1ov) in its manifestations and tones'. 4 On Hermes' self-characterization as 'hired servant of the gods' (OatflOVrov Aa'tptv, 4) and the incongruity between his foretelling in the prologue and the outcome of the plot in the Ion, see Zacharia 1995: 48. Such a characterization of him was already a commonplace in fifth-century literature; cf. Aesch. Prom. 941 ('tpoxtv, 'courier', 'messenger'), 966 and 968 (Hermes' Aa'tpda, hired service, to Zeus), 983 (imT)pE'tl]V, 'servant'); Soph. !nachos fr. 269c line 35, fr. 269d line 22 (Ml'tpt~) TGrF. 5 See Meltzer 1990, for a list of the comic elements in Homer's works. Taplin in a sequel to his 1986 article and Gredley in his response (Silk 1996: esp. 190-91 and 206ff.), discuss the relationship between comedy and tragedy, especially the curious phenomenon of laughter (y£A.ro~) in tragedy. But they do not discuss Ion 528, where the possibility of y£A.~ is explicitly denied-and thus implicitly asserted; see Zacharia 1995: 54. 6 Silk 1996: 6; see also the incisive discussion on the definition of the term by Van Erp Taalman Kip 1996: 131-36. 7 Nightingale 1995: 1-12; quotations from pp. 2 and 5. 8 For this idea, see Nightingale 1995: 3. .
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