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NARRATIVE SETTING and EURIPIDES' ION Setting May Be

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NARRATIVE SETTING and EURIPIDES' ION Setting May Be CHAPTER TWO NARRATIVE SETTING AND EURIPIDES' ION Setting may be used most often to introduce the traditional tales of tragedy and, more obliquely, the poets' interest in them, but in some few extant plays spatial definition is central to and insepa­ rable from the poet's construction of his meaning in the whole of the tragedy. In the final two plays of Sophocles, discussed in the previous chapter and subsequently in Chapter Six, 1 the physical context of the dramatic action is used to define evocatively the character and situation of the protagonist not only at the plays' beginnings but throughout. The same might be said of the harsh environment of Prometheus' punishment in the Prometheus Bound, or of Thetis' shrine in the Andromache, or of Thebes and Mt. Cithaeron in the Bacchae. 2 In these tragedies, in different ways, the verbal definition of setting is extensive and crucial to the meaningful structure of the tragedy and must be evaluated as part of a larger reading of the tragedy as both a verbal and a performa­ tive text. In order to explore some of the extensive and diverse uses of setting in tragedy, I focus in this chapter on a single play, Euripides' Ion, in which the significance of setting for the thema­ tic development of the play includes but extends beyond the intro­ ductory naming either of Delphi, the play's geographic locale, or of Athens, which provides a larger context to the events at Delphi enacted in the play. Examination of the ways in which setting is used in this drama will allow fuller detailing of the expressive capacity of setting as a device of drama and provide a useful intro­ duction to the discussions that follow of cult settings in suppli­ cation scenes, discussed in Chapter Three, and of the character­ defining antinomy of home and not-home discussed in Part Two. This complex drama of recognition, in which Ion, who is to be the father of the Ionian race, discovers that Apollo is his own 1 Above, pages 29 ff. and below, pages 133 ff. 2 Spatial definition in these plays is discussed below: Prometheus Bound, pages 195 ff.; Andromache, pages 98 ff.; Bacchae, pages 153-6. NARRATIVE SETTING AND EURIPIDES' ION 39 father, is drawn from the traditional stories of Athens3 and tied to contemporary Athenian political aspirations, and yet Euripides has located the enacted events outside of Athens before Apollo's temple at Delphi.4 In shifting Ion's story away from Athens to Delphi and making events there always look back to Athens, Eu­ ripides invites a more detached consideration of this city which visibly defines the context of the tragic performance and, to a significant extent, the identity of its audience. But the playwright 3 The story of Ion treated here is an expression of the connection, rein­ forced by a shared dialect, that was felt to exist between Athens and Ionia (A. J. Graham 1983: 11, 216). Having no part in the pan-Hellenic mytho­ logy, Ion's story evidently arises late, for he is absent from the traditional king-lists of early Athens. He takes his existence from Ionia, as the epony­ mous hero of that place and in many accounts its founder (Wilamowitz 1926: 1-10, Gregoire, 1965: 155-8, Owen 1939: ix-xvii, Conacher 1967: 270-3). He is made a member of the Athenian royal house as the son of Creusa, daughter of Erechtheus; the identity of his father is ambiguous in the tradition and, of course, the question the drama seeks to solve. Our only source before the fifth century identifies Ion as the son of Xuthus, in the tradition, the foreign husband of Creusa ( Catalogue, fr. 9, Merklebach and West 1967; see Owen 1939: x-xi.). Subsequent writers offer conflicting evidence: Herodotus, Apollo­ dorus, Pausanias, and Strabo all name Xuthus as his father, but Plato and Arrian contend, and others seem to imply, that he is the son of Apollo (Xuthus: Herodotus 7.94, 8.44; Apollodorus I 7.3; Pausanias I 31.3, II 14.2, VII 1.2; Strabo 8.7.1. Apollo: Plato Euthyd. 302d; Arrian. Anab. 7.29; for further discussion and references see Owen 1939: xiii-xvi.). In establishing Apollo as the father of Ion, Euripides is exploiting and combining two separate traditions. By providing Ion with a divine father, he elevates the traditional founder of Ionia to status as a hero, and in doing so, enhances the status of Ionia. And by locating at Apollo's oracle at Delphi Ion's discovery of this fact and the prediction that he shall father the founders of Ionia, he is exploiting the tradition and real practice of colonists who would seek sanc­ tion for their colonizing efforts at Apollo's oracle (Parke and Wormell 1956: 53-4, Graham 1983: 25-8). Delphi provides a connection for this drama to the real role of the oracle in Greek colonization and to the god who is made resfonsible for the events. Because the Delphic setting so clearly influences the shape and mean­ ing of the Ion, scholars have long tried to discover whether the choice of setting is an innovation of Euripides. Some have assumed that Sophocles in the Creusa, which is thought to have treated the same story, was the first to set the story at Delphi (See Conacher 1967: 271, n. 12 and references there.). The fragments assigned to the earlier work, however, offer no evidence for the locale of the drama (Fr. 350-59, Radt; these are discussed also by Sutton 1984: 33-5). Dalmeyda 1914: 43-50 finds in the play itself evidence that Sopho­ cles' play was set at Athens; see also Burnett 1971: 103 and n. 4.). Colardeau 1908: 430-4 answers Dalmeyda. In the absence of evidence this debate must remain without sure conclusion, but what is clear is that the story of Ion belongs at Athens and the decision to move his story to Delphi is a radical one that is critical to Euripides' treatment of the story (Burnett 1971: 103-5 and Whitman 1974: 71f.). .
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