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Aeschylus' Suppliants:
A Psychoanalytic Study |
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"If you want to know more about femininity, enquire from your own experiences of life, or turn to the poets . . ."
(Freud1933: 135) |
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The New Date of the Suppliants |
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For several reasons, not least the role of the chorus as protagonist, the Suppliants was long regarded as the earliest extant Greek tragedy. Basing their theories on the twin assumptions that an artist's style must evolve in a progressive organic continuum and that the art form itself evolves by a similar logic, critics regarded the play as closest to the supposed choral predecessors of genuine tragedy.1 But the publication in 1952 of a papyrus fragment (Oxy. Pap. 2256.3, Lesky 1954), showing that the play must have been produced after 467, probably in 463, placed the Suppliants in the same period as the Oresteia and the Prometheus and implied that Aeschylus used the chorus as the protagonist not because he had to, but because he wanted to. |
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Now that the dating of the play seems to have been settled, it might be thought that other questions, previously decided by reference to the supposedly primitive nature of the Suppliants would be open to different approaches and fresh answers. For it is clear that the new dating, while it demonstrated the inadequacy not only of former interpretations but also of former methods of interpretation, did not in itself provide any new solutions. Nevertheless, forty years after the papyrus publication many important questions still remain, both specific (e.g., the role of the chorus as protagonist, the characterization of Danaos, the significance of Io, the meaning of Zeus) and general (how are we to understand this strange drama, so full of love and death, of politics and fantasy?). |
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1 "The Supplices or Suppliant Women of Aeschylus is generally regarded as the earliest of extant Greek plays. It is certainly the most primitive, and perhaps, in the common opinion of scholars, the most stiff, helpless, and unintelligible." Murray (1930) 7. |
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