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Geoffrey Bakewell finds in Aeschylus' Suppliants ‘an invaluable perspective on Athenian attempts at establishing their own identity in the late 460s bce’. The play presents a ‘displaced self-portrait of Athens’, and the ‘ambivalent welcome to exotic immigrants’ and ‘wariness towards outsiders’ makes that portrait ‘not entirely flattering’ (ix). I am not sure whether this judgement is meant to express a modern perspective, or that of Aeschylus' audience. Bakewell claims that metics ‘by their very nature constituted an existential threat to the democratic city and its self-understanding’ (8), and that they were perceived as ‘threatening’ (19), but provides no supporting evidence. To illustrate Athenian attitudes to metics he appeals to the Old Oligarch (not, perhaps, the most representative of witnesses), citing his frustration at not being allowed to assault foreigners; there is no mention of Dicaeopolis (Ach. 507–8). It is, of course, true that in Suppliants Argos is imperilled by the refugees' arrival: but that is because they are pursued by an army determined to enforce a legal claim on them, which Athenian metics typically were not. The view that tragedies gave spectators a ‘mental license to think through a pressing issue in an extended way, and at a safe remove’ (123) is widely held, and may be right. But its application ought not to depend on disregarding crucial features of a play's distinctively tragic scenario.
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References
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