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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2013
Thirty-three lines in the Ion are devoted to describing the tent in which Ion celebrates his new-found status as heir to Xouthos and the royal line of Athens. The passage may properly be called an ἔκφρασις, a description in language of an artistic object constructed in another medium. An ἔκφρασις in drama differs from those occurring in narrative because material objects in drama retain the potential to be made material, i.e. to appear on the stage, thus dramatically closing the gap between word and world that the ἔκφρασις so patently opens. While this gap remains, the ἔκφρασις makes especially complex demands on the audience's imagination, and in the Ion on their patience too – for the ἔκφρασις must be the antithesis of the action and drama, the progression of the play, a version of which the audience presumably wants and expects from the panting messenger.
2. The regularity of the diurnal course could be described by Presocratic thinkers in terms of justice and morality; see e.g. Herakleitos B94 and Parmenides B 1.6–9 in Diels-Kranz. The tapestries of the roof also recall the imagery of Ion's entrance song (82–5).
3. It might be argued that this ambiguity is already present in the scheme that I am attempting to elaborate, for order and disorder are not only separated by the tapestries of the tent but also mutually implicated in them. While the roof is dominated by the regularity of the sky's motion, it also displays Orion the hunter and Arktos the bear, thus importing elements from the wall-hangings. Similarly although the walls seem characterized mainly by images of conflict, warfare and the hunt are themselves structured practices and can moreover play an important part in the proper development of the young male.
4. Hence the force of Medea's, outburst at Medea 250–1Google Scholar. Vernant, J-P. writes in Myth and society in ancient Greece, trans. Lloyd, J. (1980) 23Google Scholar, ‘Marriage is for the girl what war is for the boy’.
5. For the antithesis between Amazons and Greek women, in the words of the Amazons themselves, see Herodotos 4.114.3.
6. As unmarried girl in her father's house. Kreousa weaves the sampler that she later has to use to wrap up her child (1417). It remains ‘unfinished’ (1419) until she finds the child again. Her language is characterized for half the play by a necessary evasion, and Ion's injunction at 1410, παûσαι πλέκουσα, suggests the use of terms from weaving to describe such language. The Chorus-women as weavers are connected to the wider myth-making activity of their society; at 196–7 the same scenes appear on their looms as on the sculptures of the temple, and at 505 κερκίδες and λόγοι appear as two different ways of telling stories. Weaving in this play also seems to provide a rudimentary form of female solidarity; Kreousa calls her women the companions of her loom (747–8), just before they demonstrate their loyalty to her (and to the Athenian royal house) by breaking the silence imposed on them by Xouthos. See further Bergren, A. L., ‘Language and the female in early Greek thought’, Arethusa 16 (1983) 69–96Google Scholar.
7. See Burkert, W., ‘Kekropidensage und Arrhephoria’, Hermes 94 (1966) 1–25Google Scholar for this analysis of the Arrephoria. Loraux, N., Les enfants d'Athéna (1981)Google Scholar exhaustively examines the implications of the ‘sexuality and reproduction’ aspect of the rite for our understanding of the play but does not investigate weaving.
8. Herakles also displays a sexual complication which may have relevance for our play. At one point in his career he was in thrall to a woman and forced to wear female clothing. Such transvestism is a feature of adolescent rites of passage; see Vidal-Naquet, P. in Gordon, R. L. (ed.), Myth, religion and society (1981) 156–8Google Scholar. The woman who had such power over Herakles was named Omphale, a name with obvious significance at Delphi.
9. See e.g. the choral ode on Herakles', labours in Herakles Mainomenos 348–429Google Scholar.
10. See Vidal-Naquet in Gordon (n.8). The relevant articles are ‘The Black Hunter and the origin of the Athenian ephebeia’, and ‘Recipes for Greek adolescence’. Study of the ephebeia and the status of the ephebe is difficult because the evidence for the actual rite is late and scanty, although the rite can also be approached by study of similar institutions in Sparta and Crete. Vidal-Naquet makes a useful differentiation between the ‘technical’ and ‘symbolic’ manifestatons of the ephebeia (p. 162); this paper is concerned mainly with the symbolic. The Ion is one of the plays marked by a ‘trace’ (Vidal-Naquet 177) of the ephebic ritual; indeed the traces of both ephebeia and Arrephoria are present, as befits a play which is in part at least a meditation on the processes of becoming Athenian.
11. The lines in Herakles Mainomenos (188–203) are the locus classicus for the bow as characteristic of the solitary warrior and as opposed to the ethos of the hoplite phalanx. A simple description of the bow's significance within this play is of course complicated by the presence of Apollo.
12. Pembroke, S., ‘Women in charge: the function of alternatives in early Greek tradition and the ancient idea of matriarchy’. Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967) 1–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also his ‘The last of the matriarchs: a study in the inscriptions of Lycia’, Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 8.3 (1965) 217–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘Locres et Tarente: le rôle des femmes dans la fondation de deux colonies grecques’, Annales ESC 25 (1970) 1240–70Google Scholar.
13. Bamberger, J., ‘The myth of matriarchy: why men rule in primitive society’ in Rosaldo, and Lamphere, , Women, culture and society (1975)Google Scholar.
14. The play abounds in womb-like enclosures; for instance the cave in which Ion is conceived and later exposed, the cradle in which he is laid, and the grove of Delphi itself. Each of these also presents him with the threat of death at different times. Other hollow or circular references include Athene's shield and aigis (210, 995), the Gorgon's hollow vein (1011), the bracelets encircling Kreousa' wrists (1009), and the circling months of Kreousa's pregnancy (1487). References to the breast and to suckling occur at 318, 762, 962, 1372, 1375 and 1492. As rites of passage are commonly figured as forms of rebirth, initiands are frequently represented as neonates.
15. See also Hippolytos 422, where Phaidra wishes to pass on παρρησία to her children despite being deprived of it herself.
16. Zeitlin, F., ‘The dynamics of misogyny: myth and mythmaking in the Oresteia’, Arethusa 11 (1978) 149–84Google Scholar. The quotation is from p. 167.
17. Turner, V., The forest of symbols (1967)Google Scholar.
18. For previous accounts of this ambivalence, see Loraux (n.7) 239 and bibliographical note. Such studies have not as yet made a connection with the tent.
19. However, at 398–400 Kreousa can speak of good and bad women being ‘mixed’ (μεμειγμέναι in the speech of men.
20. These lines (585–6) on the difficulty of clear sight echo and distort Ion's lines on Kreousa at 238–40. On Athens as both here and there, see Loraux (n. 7) 209–12.
21. Diggle prints ψόγου and cites El. 904 and Theogn. 287 in support. These refer respectively to a φιλόψογος and a κακόψογος πόλις, neither of which is Athens.
22. On this speech see now Carter, L. B., The quiet Athenian (1986) 155–62Google Scholar. Carter seems to make no distinction between the views of Ion and those of Euripides (e.g. (158) ‘the author has taken this opportunity to unburden himself of some opinions’).
23. Diggle's edition, in line with recent opinion, dates the play to around 413 (see also Carter (n. 22) 155 n.1). The tide of the war would then be definitively turning against Athens, and any reference to p. 54 the allies and to empire would become more pointed and more difficult to reconcile with a generally patriotic outlook.
24. See note 21.
25. One may be reminded of the benign threat which the Erinyes pose at the end of the Eumenides. The Ion shares with the Eumenides the movement from Delphi (its ὀμφαλός also marked by the Gorgon, 49) to Athens and the mythic genealogies resulting in new political forms – perhaps also an appreciation of the precarious nature of the πόλις ideal.
26. Cf. Owen (p. 146): ‘The narrative is kept waiting for a long ἔκφρασις.’
27. We may compare Euripides' Elektra, where ‘recognition’ has social, sexual and moral overtones far beyond the actual mechanics of the recognition scene.
28. On the various implications of the figure of Hermes see Kahn, L., Hermès passe: ou les ambiguités de la communication (1978)Google Scholar. Hermes invokes the position of the audience as he leaves (77): 
.
29. This line is 232 in Diggle's edition.
30. The play cannot of course be described as strictly linear; all readings of it will have to describe a more complicated movement. Other ἐκφράσεις perhaps share this characteristic of challenge to an apparent linearity; e.g. the shields of Achilles and of Aeneas, the cloak of Jason in Argonautica 1Google Scholar, the bowl in Theokritos, , Idyll 1Google Scholar. See further du Bois, P., History, rhetorical description and the epic from Homer to Spenser (1982)Google Scholar.
31. Gellie, in ‘Tragedy and Euripides' Elektra’ BICS 28 (1981) 1–12Google Scholar writes of the play that its theme is ‘How do you read the signs?’