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HECUBA AND THE DEMOCRATS: POLITICAL POLARITIES IN EURIPIDES' PLAY*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2014
Extract
In an article in The Classical Quarterly in 2009 I suggested that it was high time that those Euripides scholars who believe that the demagogues were ‘a bad thing’ woke up to the fact that historians of the fifth century had long since discredited that view and had been portraying them in a favourable light. The Euripideans' conviction that the passages in the plays which denounce democracy were objectively justified had led them to confuse what the playwright's characters say with what he himself felt, which of course is unknowable. I focused then on Suppliant Women and Orestes. In this article I turn the spotlight onto Hecuba, understanding of which I feel has been damaged by a failure to take on board the clear polarizing of democratic Greeks and royalist Asians upon which the tragedy insists.
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 2014
Footnotes
*
This article began life in 2012 as a talk at Sydney University. I am grateful to Frances Muecke for asking me to give it, and to Alastair Blanshard, Paul Roche, and Peter Wilson for their helpful comments.
References
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7 It is a mistake to think that Euripides generally employs the word with a pejorative meaning. In his surviving work, neutral or laudatory uses are significantly in the majority. Context is all-important.
8 I am grateful to Peter Wilson for this quotation.
9 See Ar. Thesm. 338–9, with Sommerstein's note at 331–51.
10 See Ar. Av. 1074–5, with Dunbar's note ad loc.
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12 Sometime in the future I would like to examine the passage in the posthumous Iphigenia in Aulis where the Greek kings Agamemnon and Menelaus criticize Calchas and Odysseus on the grounds that they might actually communicate their hugger-mugger dealings to the Greek army (513–27). Menelaus even suggests that they kill the seer and Agamemnon seems unfazed by the idea (519–20). What would the first audience have made of this lack of transparency among Greeks?
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15 Matthiessen (n. 3), 37. It is true that, according to Thucydides, Nicias, an Athenian general in the calamitous Sicilian expedition of 415–413, allowed his fear of what the soldiers would say when they got back to Athens to influence his strategy on Sicily (Thuc. 7.48.4); but he is being held up as an example of bad leadership.
16 Hall (n. 4), 256. See also the hostile estimate of Jaroslav Daneš, Political Aspects of Greek Tragedy (Červený Kostelec, 2012), 92: ‘Euripides’ Odysseus in Hecuba is portrayed as a model of a demagogue who manipulates the crowd and disseminates brutality and violence in order to increase his prestige'.
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