Page 28 - The University of Wisconsin Press Spring 2013
Basic HTML Version
S
PRING
2013
CLASSICS / LITERATURE & CRITICISM / DRAMA
Politics, sex, and refugees in the ancient world.
s book offers a provocative interpretation of a relatively neglected tragedy,
Aeschylus’s
Suppliant Women
. Although the play’s subject is a venerable myth, it
frames the flight of the daughters of Danaus from Egypt to Greece in starkly con-
temporary terms, emphasizing the encounter between newcomers and natives.
Some scholars read
Suppliant Women
as modeling successful social integration,
but Geoffrey W. Bakewell argues that the play demonstrates, above all, the dif-
ficulties and dangers noncitizens brought to the polis.
Bakewell’s approach is rigorously historical, situating
Suppliant Women
in the
context of the unprecedented immigration that Athens experienced in the sixth
and fifth centuries BCE. The flow of foreigners to Attika increased under the
Pisistratids but became a flood following liberation, Cleisthenes, and the Persian
Wars. As Athenians of the classical era became increasingly aware of their own
collective identity, they sought to define themselves and exclude others. They
created a formal legal status to designate the free noncitizens living among them,
calling them
metics
and calling their status
metoikia.
When Aeschylus dramatized
the mythical flight of the Danaids from Egypt in his play
Suppliant Women
, he
did so in light of his own time and place. Throughout the play, directly and indi-
rectly, he casts the newcomers as
metics
and their stay in Greece as
metoikia
.
Bakewell maps the manifold anxieties that
metics
created in classical Ath-
ens, showing that although citizens benefited from the many immigrants in
their midst, they also feared the effects of immigration in political, sexual, and
economic realms. Bakewell finds
metoikia
was a deeply flawed solution to the
problem of large-scale immigration. Aeschylus’s Argives accepted the Danaids as
metics
only under duress and as a temporary response to a crisis. Like the histori-
cal Athenians, they opted for
metoikia
because they lacked better alternatives.
Geoffrey W. Bakewell
is professor of Greek and Roman studies and director
of the Search for Values in Light of Western History and Religion Program at
Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.
Photo: theatrical masks created by set and costume designer Thanos Vovolis.
PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
AUGUST
LC: 2012032674 PA
176 PP. 6 X 9
E-BOOK $24.95 ISBN 978-0-299-29173-0
Wisconsin Studies in Classics
William Aylward and
Patricia A. Rosenmeyer,
General Editors
“Besides being one of our old-
est plays,
Suppliant Women
is the
first depiction, in any genre, of
what happens when women flee-
ing sexual violence in their home
monarchy seek asylum in a nearby
democracy. With his sensitivity to
both philological and theatrical
issues, his lovely clear style and
sober, erudite judgment, Bakewell
is an ideal guide through this
uncannily resonant ‘tragedy of
immigration.’”
Jennifer Wise, Univer-
sity of Victoria
28
THE UNIVERSIT Y OF WISCONSIN PRESS
•
O f r e l a t e d i n t e r e s t
A verse translation by David Mulroy,
with introduction and notes
“This version is far superior to any transla-
tion of
Antigone
known to me. For the
modern reader,
Antigone
is now a rich
and rewarding play in English.”—Robert J.
Rabel, author of
Plot and Point of View in
the “Iliad”
PUBLISHED JANUARY 2013
LC: 2012015581 PA 104 PP. 5 × 8
E-BOOK $7.95 ISBN 978-0-299-29083-2
Wisconsin Studies in Classics
