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Garvie notes that "Zeus, upon whom everything depends, makes his appearance in the first word of the play" (1969: 70, n.4). This is indeed important, but its full significance lies in the fact that the phrase which responds to  in the first line is  (11).11 This parallelism informs the entire play; the oedipal attachment of the Danaids is to the image of Danaos projected in fantasy, Zeus as omnipotent father and lover.12 |
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The Danaids twice refer to Zeus as  (139,592), and twice they use the vocative  to refer ambivalently to either Danaos or Zeus (811,885). For Zeus to be referred to or addressed as father is not, of course, unique to the Suppliants, but the role of Zeus as double of Danaos is emphasized in the ambivalence of the two instances in which the chorus directly invokes him. After Danaos has revealed the arrival of the Aigyptids, his terrified daughters immediately call upon him as  (734) and repeat the vocative three more times in the brief kommos which follows (738,748,756). At this point Danaos leaves, but the Danaids continue their song of fear in a stasimon (776824). |
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In the third strophe they again call upon : |
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See, father,
looking upon violence
with eyes justly hostile.
Honor your suppliants,
omnipotent protector, Zeus. (811816) |
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The context and especially the postponed vocative  seem to indicate that refers here primarily to Zeus, secondarily to the absent Danaos. An analogous situation occurs in the strophe 885892, where the Danaids call upon (885) and the strophe ends with the vocative . The ambivalent reference of in these two passages is in sharp contrast |
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11 Metrically, line 11 follows a line which is paroemiac and ends in a full stop. As a result, line 11 stands in virtually antistrophic response to line 1. Syntactically,  is a typical  construction. Although a  intervenes in line 4, it is used absolutely, as the Scholiast saw:  |
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12 The word "Zeus" occurs 45 times in the Suppliants by far the greatest frequency in the extant plays of Aeschylus, with the predictable exception of the (perhaps non-Aeschylean) Prometheus (59). The figures for the other plays are Persians 5, Septem 19, Agamemnon 24, Choephori 13, Eumenides 22. |
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