Both Thucydides and Euripides may have been present when Corinthians, Corcyraeans, and Athenians debated the proposed alliance. Both are likely to have known about the quarrel that prodded Corcyra, despite a long history of avoiding alliances, to seek Athens’ help. And, as we have noted, there is a certain overlap of themes in Medea and the first book of Thucydides’ history. Yet no one would argue that Thucydides modeled his account of the quarrel between Corinth and Corcyra on Euripides’ tragedy or, conversely, that Euripides took inspiration from the quarrel between Corinth and Corcyra. The interrelationships between the two narratives are at once more subtle and more pervasive. To begin with, the questions they raise are not peculiar to them or to 431 bce. In meetings of the assembly and in the law courts - in other tragedies as well - Athenians will have witnessed debates in which honor competed with expedience and conflicting obligations clashed. Moreover, although Euripides’ tragedy ends with its protagonist about to flee from Corinth to Athens, the Corinth of Medea is not the Corinth of the fifth century, nor is Athens of the tragedy the Athens of Euripides’ audience.
What is the relationship between tragedy’s mythical past and the fifth-century Athenian audience’s present? The goal of this chapter will be to lay the groundwork for answering this question. In order to suggest the range and direction of the movement between past and present in surviving tragedies, I will interleave with a brief overview of fifth-century Athenian history discussions of different facets of the interplay between tragedy and history. These subjects are, of course, more complex, and the scholarly debate much more nuanced, than I can convey in a short survey. Indeed, even the terms ‘‘tragedy’’ and ‘‘history’’ require some preliminary explication.
By ‘‘tragedy’’ I mean simply one of the thirty-two surviving dramas produced by Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides and performed at the dramatic festivals, presumably in Athens (on lost tragedies see Cropp, chapter 17 in this volume). Not all of these tragedies, as it will turn out, lend themselves to a historical approach. ‘‘History’’ is more complicated. In one sense it refers to what Pelling calls ‘‘real-world events’’ (1997b, 213). But ‘‘history’’ does not consist of empirical facts to which poetry responds. Historians as well as tragic poets compose narratives. The narratives of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon provide the basis for our understanding of Athenian history of the fifth century (on sources see Rhodes 1992a, 62-63), but they also reflect their authors’ purposes and bias and are colored by their historical circumstances (as is true of my own historical overview). Nonetheless, as products of the same culture as tragedies, ancient historical narratives are likely to ‘‘reflect its categories and concerns, whether psychological, social, or political’’ (Boedeker 2002, 116, on myth and history).
The tragedies under discussion fall into two broad categories. In the first, the poet alludes directly to fifth-century events or developments, but moves them back into the mythological past. In this category I place Aeschylus’ Persians and Oresteia. Tragedies in the second group generally avoid overt references to fifth-century events or figures; paradoxically, they also draw the mythological past into the present (see Sourvinou-Inwood, chapter 18 in this volume). The bulk of the plays in this category are by Euripides. Strains of fifth-century Athenian rhetoric, sketches of political types, and reflections of Athens’ institutions and society lend plays of this category a distinctly fifth-century Athenian flavor. The emphasis in Euripides’ Orestes on political factions, for example, is directly relevant to the Athens of 408 bce.
Sophocles contributes to both categories; indeed, one of his tragedies moves in both directions. Although Ajax’s followers resemble fifth-century Athenian rowers more than heroic-age spearmen, the first half of Sophocles’ Ajax draws the audience toward the epic past. Following the hero’s suicide, however, the play’s historical motion reverses direction. Sophocles’ Agamemnon and Menelaus, with their meanness and flawed rhetoric, have more in common with what we know of politicians of the second half of the fifth century than with characters in epic or, for that matter, in any of Aeschylus’ extant dramas. Questions raised by Philoctetes (409 bce) concerning the relative power of nomos and phusis (roughly ‘‘nurture and nature’’) locate it squarely in the midst of a fifth-century sophistic debate. The suspicion of rhetoric Philoctetes generates, as well as the conflict in the play between appearance and reality, also project its mythic past into the world of Athenian politics of the final decade of the century.
Sophocles locates Oedipus at Colonus(406 bce; his last tragedy) in the mythological past of Athens under King Theseus. The poet distances the action from contemporary Athens by shifting the setting from the heart of the polis to its outskirts at Colonus. This move, as we will see, allows the tragedy to gesture toward a future that bodes well for Athens.
World History
