The Suppliants by Aeschylus - This is the prelude to suffering and slavery.

That is almost literally what The Suppliants or The Suppliant Women (463 BCE) is, the prelude to what is likely a more tragic, more interesting pair of plays that we have lost.

The fifty daughters of Danaus, rejecting a forced marriage with their fifty male cousins, have fled Egypt for refuge in Greece, in Argos, the home of their distant relative Io, who was turned into a cow and raped by Zeus in the form of a bull.  (I love how everyone in the play just takes all of that for granted).  The Argives have a dilemma – reject the Danaids and break taboos of hospitality and religious sanctuary, or protect them and risk war with the Egyptians.  “I have entered this dispute to my own ruin,” worries the Argive king (67).  The Greeks make the latter choice, pretty clearly the ethically correct one, and the suppliant women are saved.  Hooray!  Curtain.

I don’t know how long the intermission was between plays in the Athenian theater.  Presumably long enough for some fish cakes, some wine, some discussion of the play.

Last week, in Seven Against Thebes, we saw the women of Thebes deliver a long, powerful song about their terrible fate if an army sacks their city.  In The Egyptians, the play that follows The Suppliants, it is likely that the Argives lose their bet, the city is sacked, or almost sacked, and the Danaids are forced to marry their cousins.  The play would end just before, or just after, forty-nine of the fifty brides simultaneously murder their husbands in bed.  This is what I take as the more interesting part of the story.

Anybody’s guess what happens in the third play.  One tradition is that the Danaids spend eternity in Hell futilely carrying water in leaky vases, as depicted in René Jules Lalique’s 1926 glass vase, this particular one now in the Dallas Museum of Art.  But more likely there is a reconciliation of some kind, like we will later see in The Eumenides.

I wonder if – no, I am certain that – there has been a production of the play in Greece where the Danaids are portrayed as Syrian refugees.  It would not take much tinkering.  The Danaids constantly emphasize – or the Philip Vellacott translation emphasizes – that the women are rejecting male violence:

And grant that we, descendants of Io his holy bride,

May escape the embrace of man,

And keep our virginity unconquered.  (58, repeated in a kind of chorus)

They are being pursued not by lust or gain but, they sing, “the male pride of the violent sons of Aegyptus” (55), and when an Egyptian character threatens war he hopes that “the male cause gain the victory and rule” (82).  A director does not have to wander too far from this text.

What else is in here?  This is the third play in a row with an altar in the center of the stage.  We’ll break the streak with the next one. 

The massive irony of the great-great-etc. granddaughters of one of Zeus’s many rapes appealing to Zeus for protection from rape is never addressed in the text that I could see, unless the curious arguments of the women’s maids at the very end are obliquely bringing it up.

How many people are on stage, anyway?  How big is this chorus?  All fifty women, plus their fifty maids?  Or more likely only twelve (plus maids).  Who knows.

One song of the chorus is especially beautiful, although horrible, the one where the suppliants imagine the peace of a sublime death:

Could I but find a seat in the blue air

Where drifting rain-clouds turn to snow,

Some smooth summit where even goats cannot climb,

A place beyond sight, aloof,

A dizzy crag, vulture-haunted,

To witness my plunge into the abyss,

To escape a forced marriage my heart refuses! (78)

The Suppliants is my least favorite Aeschylus play, but there is still plenty in it for a good rummage.  I wonder why it was preserved?  But I wonder that with most of the plays.

Next week we read Prometheus Bound, another first in a trilogy, and another strange one.  The date is unknown, and even the authorship of Aeschylus is an open question.  Talk about interesting.

The title quotation is on p. 77 of the Vellacott Penguin.