The Representation of Tyranny in Fifth-Century Athenian Tragedy

244 Pages·2017·1.11 MB·English

by  Theodore Adam Graham

Playing the Tyrant: The Representation of
Tyranny in Fifth-Century Athenian Tragedy
by
Theodore Adam Graham
Department of Classical Studies
Duke University
Date:
Approved:
Peter Burian, Supervisor
William Johnson, Chair
José González
Jed Atkins
Al Duncan
Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Classical Studies
in the Graduate School of Duke University
2017
Abstract
Playing the Tyrant: The Representation of Tyranny in
Fifth-Century Athenian Tragedy
by
Theodore Adam Graham
Department of Classical Studies
Duke University
Date:
Approved:
Peter Burian, Supervisor
William Johnson, Chair
José González
Jed Atkins
Al Duncan
An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Classical Studies
in the Graduate School of Duke University
2017
Copyright (cid:13)c 2017 by Theodore Adam Graham
All rights reserved except the rights granted by the
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial Licence
Abstract
In my dissertation, I trace the depiction of the tyrant-figure in fifth-century
Athenian tragedy, and how this figure reflects Athenian changing self-identity over
the course of the fifth century. Given the crucial function of tragedy in both Athenian
civic display and introspection, the figure of the tyrant was deeply encoded in the
matrix of tragedy. The “tyrant” was the most significant referent in the Athenian
political imagination, the threatening Other that helped shape Athenian self-identity
by inversely defining what values the city should hold.
I consider tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, considering the socio-
political context for each playwright’s staging of tyranny. I begin with a reading
of Aeschylus’ Persians, which stages the Greek victory at Salamis from the Persian
point of view. By situating the drama in a foreign court, the tragedy foregrounds the
non-democratic aspects of Persian monarchy and society, defining the anti-democratic
aspects of the Great King’s court to better articulate Athenain democratic values.
The Prometheus Bound, similarly distanced from contemporary Athens, takes place
under the tyranny of Zeus; by portraying the god as the worst possible instantiation
of a hubristic, violent human ruler, Aeschylus performs a reductio ad absurdum of
tyrannical ideology that would seek to portray the human tyrant as divine.
In Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone, by contrast, tyrants embody the
ideological strain of the exercise of power that Athens experienced at the head of
the Delian League. Both tragedies portray tyrants who, with praiseworthy motives
iv
(and even, at times, with reasonable, democratic rhetoric), struggle under a burden of
governance that they cannot sustain. Unlike the Aeschylean Xerxes or Zeus, who are
distant, barely-seen figures that loom over their respective tragedies, Oedipus and
Creon are the focal-points of their dramas. The tragedies exploit the tension between
the Athenian political conception of tyranny, as a totally negative phenomenon
opposed to equality and democratic freedom, and an earlier, Panhellenic (insofar as it
did not originate in any one polis) conception that casts tyranny in a more equivocal
light, as something worthy both of fear and of jealous awe. Invoking both views
together, these tragedies problematize the straightforward depiction of tyranny as
something wholly good or bad.
Writing in the last decades of the fifth century, during which time Athenian democ-
racy grew increasingly embattled and unpredictable, Euripides’ tragedies collapse
the tyranny/democracy dichotomy entirely. In the Suppliant Women, Theseus, a
monarch, is cast as the robust defender of Athenian democracy, the overseer of a
system in which logically he would have no place. While this contradiction is inherent
to a traditional formulation of Theseus, the tragedy highlights the incongruity of
the situation by imbuing the king’s dialogue with strikingly modern rhetoric, and
making him proficient in contemporary sophistic modes of argumentation. Inversely,
Euripides repeatedly employs the motif of the “tyrant mob”; in Hecuba and Iphigenia
at Aulis, the tyrannical power of a quasi-democratic body exerts a terrible influence
on events, unyielding to both logic and justice. The weaknesses of democracy, the
poisonous power of persuasion and the unthinking nature of collective action are
portrayed as the inseparable flip side of its virtues: mass participation and equality
of speech.
Behind all three tragedians, the archaic moral conception of the tyrant stands as
a model and foil. The traditional traits of tyranny are either reinforced or subverted,
embodied in Zeus or given a new ideological charge by their application to collectives.
v
The figure of the tyrant (both in its political and moral conceptions) is an ideological
reference point whose trajectory mirrors that of Athenian democracy itself, from a
system predicated on opposition to sole rule and with mechanisms to prevent the
consolidation of power to the means by which, by the end of the Peloponnesian War,
single individuals wielded undue influence over a polis that itself ruled a significant
portion of the Greek world.
vi
Iordani optimae uxorum
᾿Ιορδα΄νηͺ α᾿ρ΄ιστηͺ γυναικω῀ν
vii
Contents
Abstract iv
Acknowledgements xi
1 Tyrants and Tyranny 1
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Tyranny as History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Attempting a Definition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Historical Tyranny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Tyranny as Ideology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Archilochus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
The Panhellenic Model of Tyranny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
The Athenian Model of Tyranny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Solon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
2 Aeschylus 39
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
The Persians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Greek Perceptions of Persia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Xerxes the Tyrant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Xerxes the Hubristes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
viii
Prometheus Bound . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
Zeus as Tyrant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
3 Sophocles 101
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Oedipus Tyrannus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Oedipus the God . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
The Title Turannos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Oedipus the Tyrant? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Antigone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
Introduction and Impressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
Creon’s Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
Creon the General . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
Creon the Tyrant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
4 Euripides 147
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
Suppliant Women . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
The Myth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
Theseus and the Herald . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
Contemporary Political Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
Phoenician Women . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
The Tyrant Mob . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
Hecuba . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
ix
Iphigenia at Aulis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
5 Conclusion 199
Bibliography 203
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