Overview

This 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 contemporary terms, emphasising the encounter between newcomers and natives. Although some scholars read Suppliant Women as modelling successful social integration, Geoffrey W. Bakewell argues that the play demonstrates, above all, the difficulties and dangers noncitizens brought to the polis. Rigourously historical, Bakewell situates Suppliant Women in light 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 dramatised 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 indirectly, he casts the newcomers as metics and their stay in Greece as metoikia. Bakewell maps the manifold anxieties that metics created in classical Athens, 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 historical Athenians, they opted for metoikia because they lacked better alternatives.

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"""Besides being one of our oldest plays, Suppliant Women is the first depiction, in any genre, of what happens when women fleeing 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, University of Victoria"

Besides being one of our oldest plays, Suppliant Women is the first depiction, in any genre, of what happens when women fleeing 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, University of Victoria

Author Information

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. He is coeditor of Gestures: Essays in Ancient History, Literature, and Philosophy Presented to Alan L. Boegehold.

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