Playing the Tyrant: The Representation of Tyranny in Fifth-Century Athenian Tragedy by Theodore Adam Graham Department of Classical Studies Duke University Date: Approved: Peter Burian, Supervisor William Johnson, Chair José González Jed Atkins Al Duncan Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Classical Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University 2017 Abstract Playing the Tyrant: The Representation of Tyranny in Fifth-Century Athenian Tragedy by Theodore Adam Graham Department of Classical Studies Duke University Date: Approved: Peter Burian, Supervisor William Johnson, Chair José González Jed Atkins Al Duncan An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Classical Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University 2017 Copyright c 2017 by Theodore Adam Graham All rights reserved except the rights granted by the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial Licence Abstract In my dissertation, I trace the depiction of the tyrant-figure in fifth-century Athenian tragedy, and how this figure reflects Athenian changing self-identity over the course of the fifth century. Given the crucial function of tragedy in both Athenian civic display and introspection, the figure of the tyrant was deeply encoded in the matrix of tragedy. The “tyrant” was the most significant referent in the Athenian political imagination, the threatening Other that helped shape Athenian self-identity by inversely defining what values the city should hold. I consider tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, considering the socio- political context for each playwright’s staging of tyranny. I begin with a reading of Aeschylus’ Persians, which stages the Greek victory at Salamis from the Persian point of view. By situating the drama in a foreign court, the tragedy foregrounds the non-democratic aspects of Persian monarchy and society, defining the anti-democratic aspects of the Great King’s court to better articulate Athenain democratic values. The Prometheus Bound, similarly distanced from contemporary Athens, takes place under the tyranny of Zeus; by portraying the god as the worst possible instantiation of a hubristic, violent human ruler, Aeschylus performs a reductio ad absurdum of tyrannical ideology that would seek to portray the human tyrant as divine. In Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone, by contrast, tyrants embody the ideological strain of the exercise of power that Athens experienced at the head of the Delian League. Both tragedies portray tyrants who, with praiseworthy motives iv (and even, at times, with reasonable, democratic rhetoric), struggle under a burden of governance that they cannot sustain. Unlike the Aeschylean Xerxes or Zeus, who are distant, barely-seen figures that loom over their respective tragedies, Oedipus and Creon are the focal-points of their dramas. The tragedies exploit the tension between the Athenian political conception of tyranny, as a totally negative phenomenon opposed to equality and democratic freedom, and an earlier, Panhellenic (insofar as it did not originate in any one polis) conception that casts tyranny in a more equivocal light, as something worthy both of fear and of jealous awe. Invoking both views together, these tragedies problematize the straightforward depiction of tyranny as something wholly good or bad. Writing in the last decades of the fifth century, during which time Athenian democ- racy grew increasingly embattled and unpredictable, Euripides’ tragedies collapse the tyranny/democracy dichotomy entirely. In the Suppliant Women, Theseus, a monarch, is cast as the robust defender of Athenian democracy, the overseer of a system in which logically he would have no place. While this contradiction is inherent to a traditional formulation of Theseus, the tragedy highlights the incongruity of the situation by imbuing the king’s dialogue with strikingly modern rhetoric, and making him proficient in contemporary sophistic modes of argumentation. Inversely, Euripides repeatedly employs the motif of the “tyrant mob”; in Hecuba and Iphigenia at Aulis, the tyrannical power of a quasi-democratic body exerts a terrible influence on events, unyielding to both logic and justice. The weaknesses of democracy, the poisonous power of persuasion and the unthinking nature of collective action are portrayed as the inseparable flip side of its virtues: mass participation and equality of speech. Behind all three tragedians, the archaic moral conception of the tyrant stands as a model and foil. The traditional traits of tyranny are either reinforced or subverted, embodied in Zeus or given a new ideological charge by their application to collectives. v The figure of the tyrant (both in its political and moral conceptions) is an ideological reference point whose trajectory mirrors that of Athenian democracy itself, from a system predicated on opposition to sole rule and with mechanisms to prevent the consolidation of power to the means by which, by the end of the Peloponnesian War, single individuals wielded undue influence over a polis that itself ruled a significant portion of the Greek world. vi Iordani optimae uxorum >Iord 'anh| >ar'isth| gunaik ~wn vii Contents Abstract iv Acknowledgements xi 1 Tyrants and Tyranny1 Preface......................................1 Tyranny as History...............................7 Attempting a Definition.........................7 Historical Tyranny............................9 Tyranny as Ideology.............................. 21 Archilochus................................ 21 The Panhellenic Model of Tyranny................... 31 The Athenian Model of Tyranny..................... 34 Solon.................................... 34 2 Aeschylus 39 Introduction................................... 39 The Persians .................................. 42 Introduction................................ 42 Greek Perceptions of Persia....................... 49 Xerxes the Tyrant............................ 58 Xerxes the Hubristes ........................... 70 viii Prometheus Bound ............................... 78 Introduction................................ 78 Zeus as Tyrant.............................. 85 3 Sophocles 101 Introduction................................... 101 Oedipus Tyrannus ................................ 105 Introduction................................ 105 Oedipus the God............................. 106 The Title Turannos ............................ 111 Oedipus the Tyrant?........................... 121 Antigone ..................................... 126 Introduction and Impressions...................... 126 Creon’s Law................................ 130 Creon the General............................ 137 Creon the Tyrant............................. 139 4 Euripides 147 Introduction................................... 147 Suppliant Women ................................ 151 Introduction................................ 151 The Myth................................. 152 Theseus and the Herald......................... 154 Contemporary Political Discourse.................... 166 Phoenician Women ............................... 174 The Tyrant Mob................................ 181 Hecuba ................................... 182 ix Iphigenia at Aulis ............................. 193 5 Conclusion 199 Bibliography 203 x Acknowledgements I must thank foremost my wise and wonderful wife, Jordan MacKenzie, who has been a constant source of encouragement and love. I literally could not have completed this dissertation without her. I must also thank my parents for their life-long generosity and support. I thank as well Professor Peter Burian (no tyrant, he) for his kind tutelage and his patience, and also Professors William Johnson, José González, Jed Atkins and Al Duncan for their insightful feedback. I thank Al Duncan once again for his wonderful advice, without which this document would have been much the worse. I also thank my colleagues who have helped shape this dissertation: Elizabeth Baltes, Kathryn Langenfeld, Cliff Robinson, Carl “Tripp” Young and Mack Zalin. I thank, finally, Rosie, hound dog extraordinaire, and Liddell & Scott, both lexigraphic and feline. xi 1 Tyrants and Tyranny Preface The tyrant occupies a crucial position in the Athenian political imagination. To an Athenian citizen, an inhabitant of a city that relied on public deliberation to make major political decisions, and that intentionally dispersed authority among different bodies and offices, the tyrant was the absolute ideological Other: the individual who forces a singular will upon a collective citizen body, whose whim instantly becomes law and who holds absolute authority over the entire community. The ideological significance of tyranny at Athens is attributable to the unique course of the city’s history. Like many poleis in the archaic period (c. 800–480 BCE), Athens was for a time subject to a tyrannical regime: that of Peisistratus and his sons Hipparchus and Hippias, known collectively as the Peisistratids (564–508).1 This aligns Athens with other contemporary poleis: with the notable exception of Sparta, whose inhabitants took pride in having been a>ie`i >atur'anneutoc, “forever ungoverned by a tyrant” (Thuc. 1. These dates, as with most dates in this chapter, are approximate. Nothing in my argument hinges on an exact chronology. 1 1.18.1), a period of tyrannical governance is a common element among the histories of many Greek city-states.