Theban Autochthony and Athenian Ideology in the phoenissae

of Euripides

Stephen Nimis

Mediterranean Studies, Volume 25, Number 2, 2017, pp. 147-163 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

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Theban Autochthony and Athenian Ideology
in the phoenissae of Euripides
Stephen Nimis, American University in Cairo

abstract: Recent scenes of Syrian refugees arriving in Europe and the nationalist reflections
they have engendered recall the discourses of foreign and native in antiquity, a theme addressed
frequently in Attic tragedy. Euripides’ Phoenician Maidens is a meditation on the theme of
autochthony, a key ideological and mythological nexus of ideas about identity and commu-
nity. The ideal of a homogeneous community symbolized by Athenians’ autochthonous heri-
tage fits uncomfortably with another Athenian ideal: hospitality and openness to strangers. The
Phoenician Maidens of Euripides reflects on the theme of sameness and otherness, foreign and
native, using the resources of theater to articulate a utopian resolution of these conflicting desires.

keywords: Greek tragedy, Euripides, Phoenician Maidens, autochthony, tragic chorus, sup-
pliants, Theban myth

Euripides’ Phoenician Maidens, produced sometime between 411 and 408 BCE, is
extraordinary both in the multiplicity of characters that it brings on stage and in
the range of historical events that it invokes.1 Most Greek tragedies concentrate
on a small number of figures and the effects of individual decisions and actions,
whereas this play adduces the whole of Theban history to contextualize its central
event, the great fratricidal war led by Polyneices and Eteocles, the two sons of
Oedipus. Eteocles stubbornly refuses to abide by an agreement to share the rule of
Thebes with his brother, with the result that Polyneices leads a foreign army against
his own native city. The play’s cast of characters is larger than Aeschylus’ earlier
version of the story in his Seven against Thebes (467 BCE) or Sophocles’ account
of its aftermath in his Antigone (441 BCE): both brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices,
appear on stage, along with both their parents, Jocasta and Oedipus, who are still
alive in Thebes years after the discovery of their incest. Creon and Tiresias, familiar
from their roles in Sophocles’ Theban plays, also appear, plus the son of Creon,
Menoeceus, who seems to be an invention of Euripides, since he is not mentioned
Mediterranean Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2, 2017
Copyright © 2017 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
148 Stephen Nimis

in previous sources, and because his role is a crucial link to Athenian politics and
ideology.2 The identity of the chorus (a group of Phoenician maidens traveling
from their native home in Tyre to Delphi for religious purposes, but finding them-
selves stuck in Thebes just when the fratricidal war breaks out) brings to the fore
issues of natives and immigrants, of exiles, suppliants and their protection, in a
way that seems somewhat uncanny these days, given the waves of refugees from
Syria to Europe; but issues of foreign and native, exiles and immigrants, were
also pressing in the original context of this play’s performance. Indeed, scholars
have noted that innovations in the presentation of the story evoked contemporary
political concerns of the fifth-century Athenian audience by using the language of
political ambition (philotimia) and civil strife (stasis), as well as invoking principles
of equality (isotes) and free speech (parrhesia).3 And whatever the precise date of
the play, suffice it to say that it was first performed at a critical point in Athenian
history, after the disastrous Sicilian expedition in the Peloponnesian war of 413
and the aftermath of the oligarchic coup of 411 subsequent to that disaster.
I would like to enlarge on the link between the play and Athenian political ide-
ology by focusing on the theme of autochthony, a word meaning to be “native to
a land,” or having always occupied the “same land” (autos chthon) but which also
refers to mythic ancestors being literally born out of the earth.4 Important exam-
ples from Greek myth include the “sown men” (Spartoi) of Thebes in the found-
ing myth of Cadmus, and several legendary earthborn Athenian kings: Cecrops,
Cranaus, and Erichthonius.5 Aside from being an example of a charter myth,
which justifies the right of a certain group to a specific land (our ancestors “grew
up” here), the myth of autochthony also deemphasizes the role of women in repro-
ducing the population of a city, and provided the Athenians with a mythic basis
for an idealized, homogeneous all-male community. This theme was the focus of a
series of studies of the tradition of the funeral oration (epitaphioi logoi) in Athens
by Nicole Loraux, who also showed how these ideas were central to a number of
tragedies.6 I will argue that the Phoenissae deploys the theme of Theban autoch-
thony, particularly in the choral odes, in order to contrast it with the Athenians’
ideal of their own autochthonous heritage.

Theban and Athenian Autochthony

Theban mythology is a rich and varied tapestry, but it is important to remember

that most of our evidence for Theban myth is Athenian, especially Athenian trag-
edy. Apparently the Athenians delighted in observing dramatized in their theaters
 Theban Autochthony and Athenian Ideology 149

the misfortunes of the city of Thebes, their traditional enemy. As Froma Zeitlin has
noted, Thebes often served the Athenian playwrights as a kind of “anti-Athens,”
a negative image of their own city, where the audience could observe with some
aesthetic distance crucial issues of society and politics that applied to their own
city.7 Of particular interest is the contrast between Athenian and Theban myths
of autochthony. The key autochthonous event in the history of Thebes occurs
when Cadmus is about to found the city. With Athena’s encouragement, Cadmus
slays the dragon of Ares and sows its teeth in the ground, whence are born the
“Spartoi,” the sown men. The sown men are fierce warriors, but when Cadmus
throws a stone among them, they fight each other (each one thinking that the
other had cast the stone) instead of fighting Cadmus, until only five are left. These
last five sown men populate the new city of Cadmus. This literal autochthony of
Thebes is regularly associated, again by the Athenians, with fratricide and incest,
and these associations have been an enduring legacy.
The myth of Thebes as a whole was the subject of a famous methodological
essay by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1955), whose analysis depended on reading Theban
myth paradigmatically rather than syntagmatically: that is, by ignoring the actual
narrative order of the events and rearranging them into thematic “bundles” of
meaning that are defined by difference. The purpose of myth, in Lévi-Strauss’s
view, is to mediate real social contradictions by providing them with imaginative
resolutions. In the case of the story of Oedipus and his family, the myth addresses
the contradictions between autochthony and live birth—born from one, born
from two—and its relationship to the incest taboo.
In a subsequent essay on structuralist method, Jack Peradotto (1977) noted
that Lévi-Strauss’s account of Theban myth failed to provide any examples of the
mediation of these contradictions, which is central to Lévi-Strauss’s own method
with Amerindian myth. Peradotto suggested that Athenian myths of autochthony
included plenty of examples of such mediating figures, and thus would provide
better material for the structuralist method. Of these Athenian myths, the most
important is the birth of Erichthonius/Erechtheus, which is well-attested in art
and literature.8 Briefly, the story is as follows: Hephaestus becomes enamored of
Athena and pursues her, but she flees; unable to catch her, Hephaestus ejaculates
on her thigh. Athena wipes the semen off her thigh with a piece of wool and it
lands on the earth, whence Erichthonius is born. The story, Peradotto notes, has
a plethora of mediating figures and elements. The birth of Erichthonius is “at
one and the same time autochthonous and a product of a bisexual transaction”
(Peradotto 1977: 94). In addition, each of the “parents” in the story of his birth
(Hephaestus, Athena, Earth) is in their own way “born from one”: Hephaestus
150 Stephen Nimis

from Hera, Athena from Zeus, and Earth from Chaos. Peradotto argues that the
birth of Erichthonius is the last in a series of autochthonous kings (after Cecrops,
Cranaus, and Amphictyon), and that these earlier figures were unsuccessful at
producing a continuous line of kings: in each of the earlier cases, the autoch-
thonous line died out. According to Peradotto, the Athenian autochthonous
myths must be read syntagmatically, not paradigmatically, so that Erichthonius
can be seen as a successful culmination: “In this way, the meaning [of the birth of
Erichthonius] is validated by its absent alternatives, by its difference from them”
(Peradotto 1977: 98).
Peradotto’s account of Athenian autochthony is to me completely persua-
sive, but I would add that it is no accident that Theban myth lacks mediating
figures while Athenian myths of autochthony possess them in such abundance.
Tragic portrayals of Theban myth can be assumed to be produced for and from
the perspective of Athenian audiences. Indeed, one could go further and say that
the story of Athenian autochthony is itself an “absent alternative” to accounts of
Theban autochthony when they are played out in Athenian tragedies.9 In con-
trast to its Theban “other,” Athenian autochthony produces harmony and equality
among its male citizens (instead of incest and fratricide). Athenian autochthony,
in its positive aspects, is a major theme in Athens’s annual state funeral orations,
where it is presented as an inherited trait that all true Athenians possess.
In the case of the Phoenissae, however, Athenian autochthony is not merely an
“absent” alternative, but is explicitly evoked in the play: When the seer Tiresias
enters, he states that he has just returned to Thebes from Athens, where King
Erechtheus and his city were under attack by an invading army (Phoen. 852–57). In
that war, which was dramatized by Euripides in his own patriotic play, Erechtheus,
there was a prophecy that Athens would survive only if Erechtheus’s daughter were
sacrificed. The surviving fragment of Euripides’ lost play contains a lengthy speech
by the wife of Erechtheus, who, in response to the oracle’s frightening demand,
gladly agrees to offer her daughter’s life in exchange for the safety of the city, citing
the special character of Athens in a way that is found regularly in funeral orations:

There is no state I count more worthy to accept my gift than Athens, peo-
pled by no alien race. For we are of this soil (αὐτόχθονοι δ᾽ ἔφυμεν), while
other towns, formed haphazardly as in a game of dice, take their inhabitants
from diverse parts.10

In the Phoenissae, Tiresias claims that he delivered the prophecy by which Athens
was saved. And this prophecy will be soon paralleled in Thebes by Tiresias’
 Theban Autochthony and Athenian Ideology 151

announcement that only the death of a virgin male descendant of Cadmus can
save the city. This virgin male descendant turns out to be Menoecus, the son of
Creon, who is clearly intended to provide a parallel to the daughter of Erechtheus
in Athens. In addition, the Phoenissae ends with Oedipus’s departure with his
daughter Antigone to his destined place of rest, which is none other than Athens
itself, the generous receiver of suppliants.11 Euripides has thus gone way out of his
way to draw both a connection and a contrast between Athens and Thebes.
References to Athens’s autochthonous myth often suggest that autochthony
is actually an inherited trait, as the phrase cited above shows: “For we are of this
soil.” This, however, is a piece of mythic thinking, since Athenians certainly knew
about human mothers, and in fact had a law that required both mother and father
to be citizens for a male child to acquire citizenship. But in the context of the
annual state funerals, the equality and brotherhood of all Athenian males were
emphasized by this very claim to be “of the soil.” Here the role of women, the
notoriously competitive character of Athenians, and even differences of class and
wealth, are all glossed over in the name of an ideal unity that is grounded in the
autochthonous origin of Athenians. Also glossed over is the nativist exclusivity of
this “birthright,” even when juxtaposed to another source of Athenian uniqueness,
the pride that Athens took in her tradition of allowing suppliants and foreigners
to have a place in the city. The Athenians prided themselves on their openness to
foreigners, even though there were severe restrictions on foreigners’ participation
in Athenian civic life.12 Indeed, the aid given to the Argive suppliants after their
defeat by the Thebans is a topos of the state funeral oration, as well as the theme of
Euripides’ patriotic play of 423, the Suppliants.13 In Pericles’ famous funeral oration
of 430 BCE, as recounted by Thucydides, Athenian openness is contrasted to the
Spartan tradition of expulsion of foreigners (Thucydides 2.39):

Our city is open to the world, and we have no periodic deportations (xenela-
sia) in order to prevent people from observing or finding out secrets which
might be of military advantage to the enemy. (trans. R. Warner)

As in the analogous case with women, who were part of the city but not part of
the male politeia, and were thus in a sense outsiders who had a special limited role
inside, Athenians allowed foreigners a limited, mainly economic, role in their city.
Thus the presence of skilled and wealthy foreigners helped to make Athens the
vital place that it was, despite the dangers that other aliens might have been seen
as posing. If, as Pericles famously states (Thuc. 2.41), the Athenians saw them-
selves as a school for all of Greece by their example, and if they saw Sparta as their
152 Stephen Nimis

main competitor as schoolmaster of Greece, it can be said that the Athenians saw
Thebes as their worst student, failing in ways that are regularly contrasted with
Athenian success. And the Athenian version of the Theban myth of autochthony,
characterized as it was by incest and fratricide, was seen (by the Athenians) as a
prime example of Theban failure.

The Chorus of the phoenissae

Athens has been called a “choral state” (Kowalzig 2004). A large number of
Athenian boys and girls participated in many public choral competitions through-
out the year, of which tragedy is only the most famous. The civic nature of these
choruses has been seen to recapitulate essential aspects of democratic society that
were at the heart of the Athenian experience of their community as a whole.14 In
the context of Attic drama, the ritual and civic character of the choral perfor-
mances was never completely supplanted by the tragic mimesis. That is, no matter
who the chorus was pretending to be in the drama itself, they were always also
Athenian male citizens making a choral performance in a festival dedicated to
Dionysus, the dancing god par excellence. This ritual character of choral poetry
is emphasized by Sourvinou-Inwood and others, who note various “proximat-
ing” devices that elide the difference between the dramatic and performative time,
between dramatic illusion and cultic enactment.15 A. Heinrichs calls attention to
the tendency of tragic choruses to make reference to choral dancing in general,
“projecting” their own performance to dances in other times and places.16 This
instability of the chorus’s identity and of the field of reference for their voices con-
tributes to their mediating function in drama, and this can be shown to operate on
many levels.17 Deictic particles, for example, that refer to “this here city” can have
the uncanny effect of applying both to Athens and the fictive setting of the play,
in this way drawing connections between the “here and now” of the audience of
the play and the “then and there” of the actors on the stage.
The cross-dressing young men who make up the chorus of Phoenician maidens
in Euripides’ play are a good example of the polyvalence and ambiguity of tragic
choral activity. They are native sons of Athens playing the role of foreign female
suppliants, in a play that is set in the city of Thebes, but performed on a stage at the
great Athenian festival dedicated to the Theban god, Dionysus. Despite its setting in
Thebes, this performance would be in broad daylight where the many monuments
of Athens would be plainly visible to the spectators. As such this chorus has prima
facie a powerful mediating function by virtue of staging an uncanny combination
 Theban Autochthony and Athenian Ideology 153

of past and present, foreign and native, male and female.18 Because of their status as
“­foreigners” arriving to Thebes from Cadmus’s own native Phoenicia, the chorus of
maidens are implicitly compared and contrasted not only with the Phoenician immi-
grant Cadmus himself, whose slaying of the dragon of Ares initiated the autoch-
thonous origin of the royal family, but also with other “foreign” arrivals in Theban
history, such as the Sphinx, who brought a curse on the city, and Oedipus himself,
who was mistakenly thought to be a foreigner, with disastrous consequences. It is the
chorus itself who mainly draws attention to this distant past, and only they make ref-
erence to the world beyond the city of Thebes (e.g., Phoenicia, Sicily, the Ionian sea,
Delphi) and thus invite the Athenian audience, in the words of Lamari, “to gaze cho-
rus-like at distant places and past times to make sense of the here and now” (Lamari
2010: 169). Indeed, Euripides repeatedly exploits the uncanniness of the dramatic
scenario to elide the difference between dramatic time and performance time. Often
the chorus highlights aspects of the past in order to apply them to the present crisis in
Thebes in a way that also applies to Athens itself. For example, when Menoeceus pre-
pares to sacrifice himself, he states gnomically and democratically (Phoen. 1015–18):19

If every man were to take whatever useful thing he might do and examine it
thoroughly and apply it to the common good, then cities would suffer less
and prosper more.

This language picks up the political themes of civic responsibility aired in the
opening episodes by Jocasta and her sons, but applies forcefully to late fifth-­
century Athens as well.
In praising Menoeceus’ willingness to sacrifice himself in the ode that follows
this scene, the chorus says (Phoen. 1060–62):

γενοίμεθ᾿ ὧδε ματέρες

γενοίμεθ᾿ εὔτεκνοι, φίλα
Παλλάς, ἃ δράκοντος αἷμα
λιθόβολον κατηργάσω,
Καδμείαν μέριμναν
ὁρμάσασ᾿ ἐπ᾿ ἔργον,
ὅθεν ἐπέσυτο τάνδε γαῖαν
ἁρπαγαῖσι δαιμόνων τις ἄτα.

Grant that we be mothers in this way!

Grant that we be blessed with such children (euteknoi)! Dear
154 Stephen Nimis

Pallas Athena! you who inspired the serpent’s bloody death

by stoning,
and set the effort of Cadmus
on the path to completion,
from which deed there rushed against the land
the snatching ruinous hand of heaven.

In praying to be mothers to sons like Menoeceus, the chorus has somewhat violated
its fictive role as maidens dedicated to divine service (hierodouloi).20 Although this
can be explained away in various ways, the sentiment seems to be a kind of apos-
trophe to the audience that expresses the same kind of hope that the Athenians
themselves would have for their own children, a hope for the kind of sons that the
Athenian actors playing the Phoenician maidens would themselves like to father,
and in this way be euteknoi, a word that can apply to male or female parents. The
slippage between Athenian chorus member and Phoenician character is augmented
by the fact that the maidens invoke Athena, who is the patroness of Athens, not
Thebes. Athena, a virgin goddess, born parthenogenetically and as a result famously
not aligned with mothers,21 is not the most appropriate deity to invoke regarding
childbirth, but she is one of the key participants in the autochthonous origin of
Erechtheus and is his most important guardian after his birth. The choral passage
goes on to cite Athena’s role in encouraging Cadmus to slay the dragon, and locates
this act as the origin of subsequent Theban disasters.22 Athena’s role is thus a linchpin
connecting the two cities’ autochthonous myths, but with contrasting outcomes.
Moreover the sentiment expressed by the chorus about Menoeceus corresponds to
similar sentiments expressed by the wife of Erechtheus in Euripides’ earlier play:23

My country, were the love of all your sons as great as mine! You could not
suffer ill, and we possessing you would live secure.

Thus there is also an explicit intertextual dimension that takes us from Thebes to
Athens.24

The Second Stasimon (phoen. 784–832): Ares and Dionysus

With these general remarks in mind, I want to turn to one of the choral sections,
the second stasimon (784–832), and show in more detail how the chorus articulates
a utopian image of Athens by negation, that is, by contrast to Thebes.25 The second
 Theban Autochthony and Athenian Ideology 155

stasimon develops a sustained contrast between Ares and Dionysus in Dionysian

terms, by describing the “revelry” of Ares and the men he inspires.26 The two gods
have been juxtaposed already in the first stasimon, a choral ode on the topography
of Thebes, where they are both linked to the spring of Dirke (Phoen. 649–58):

In that place Bromius’ (= Dionysus’) mother gave birth to him  .  .  . the

­Bacchic god worshipped in dancing by maids and matrons of Thebes. In
that place was the deadly serpent of Ares, fierce-tempered guardian.

Elsewhere (Phoen. 931, 935) Tiresias calls the dragon “earthborn,” which is nor-
mal for serpent-monsters, but here he is “of Ares” leaving the relationship vague:
the dragon could be “of Ares” because Ares is his father, a common theme, or
because he guards the spring sacred to Ares.27 In any case Ares is the one who
demands payment for the serpent’s slaying (Phoen. 931–35). But Harmonia, the
wife of Cadmus, is traditionally the daughter of Ares and his lover Aphrodite, so
Ares’ participation in Theban history involves both autochthony and heterosexual
reproduction. The mention of Semele giving birth to Dionysus also belies the
more famous story of Dionysus’ birth from Zeus himself, upon the premature
death of Semele.28 The peculiarities in the Theban roles of Ares and Dionysus in
the first stasimon prepare for their contrast in the second stasimon.
In the second stasimon Ares, the god of war, is said to inspire (epipneuo) men
to deal death, compared to Dionysus who inspires music and dancing. Ares is
described as paramousos, “out of harmony” with the festivals of Dionysus. The
conceit is worked out in detail in the first stanza (Phoen. 784–95):

O Ares, god of toils, why are you possessed by bloodshed and death, why are
you out of tune with Bromius’ festivals (Βρομίου παράμουσος ἑορταῖς)?
Not for you, amid the fair garlands that lovely youth wear to the dance
(καλλιχόροις στεφάνοισι), to spread your loosened locks and sing, to the
breathed melody of pipes, the songs in which resides the grace of dancing;
no, having inspired (ἐπιπνεύσας) the Argive army upon Thebes’ race, with
armed men you lead the chorus (προχορεύεις) in revelry unfit for the pipe,
not on ecstatic feet, dressed in fawn skin. Rather with chariots . . . and you
inspired (ἐπέπνευσας) the Argives to meet the race of the Sown Men (i.e.
the Thebans).

The chorus’s expression of the realm of Ares in terms of negating the performances
dedicated to Dionysus, with metaphors of inspiration, music, and dancing, is
156 Stephen Nimis

highly self-referential. The music and dancing of this chorus of Phoenician

women occur as part of the Great Dionysia in Athens, one of the very festivals of
Dionysus (Βρομίου ἑορταῖς) to which Ares is said to be alien.29 As a result, the
musical and visual spectacle of the chorus dancing and singing in unison already
provides a positive alternative to the subject of their song: the disastrous history of
Thebes and the fratricidal war in which it culminates. At the same time, although
Ares is frequently represented in myth and legend as a “hateful” god, bringing
death and destruction to good and bad alike, war was still for the Athenians a
privileged sphere for the production and display of manly virtue. As the chorus of
Athenian men make the case against Ares’ activity in Thebes verbally, their choral
performance and their own identity (as men who are or will soon be soldiers in
the Athenian army) embodies a mediation between warfare and dancing. Ancient
war craft, after all, whether on land or sea, required a kind of coordination and
harmonious action comparable to a choral performance. If Ares “leads out a cho-
rus” in Thebes that is “unfit for the pipe,” that is perhaps endemic to Thebes rather
than a characteristic of Ares in general. The fluid identity of the chorus and their
song—dancers or soldiers, men or women, Phoenicians or Athenians—allows us
to wonder how the opposition between Ares and Dionysus would play in Athens.
In Theban legend Dionysus himself is a liminal figure, both an insider and
an outsider, one who returns home but is perceived as a foreigner, like Oedipus,
or even Polyneices, and who exacts a severe revenge against his compatriots for
their refusal to accept him. He is thus not so completely benign in comparison
to Ares, the other “insider” who seeks revenge against the Thebans by leading a
foreign army against them. Lamari, who sees the Phoenissae as a political allegory,
has argued that the other two plays performed in a trilogy with the Phoenissae
were the Antiope and the Hypsipyle, and that these plays centered around pairs of
brothers, each of which united a musical brother with a warrior double: Zethus
and Amphion, and Euneus and Thoas. According to her view of the trilogy as a
whole, Eteocles and Polyneices constitute a dystopian contrast to those earlier
pairs.30 But Ares and Dionysus, who are both sons of Zeus, are also a parallel to
the earlier pairs of brothers and represent the same combination of musical and
warrior brothers. Once again, the double character of the chorus invites a compar-
ison between Thebes and Athens. Whereas Dionysus, the great god of Thebes, was
rejected by his own citizens, and retaliated by causing the death of King Pentheus
at the hands of his mother, that same god receives the cultic homage of the chorus
in the here and now of Athens at his best-known festival. Even the peculiar birth
of Dionysus from the body of Zeus after the destruction of his mother, Semele,
recalls the birth of Athena from the body of Zeus. So also Ares, a key figure in the
 Theban Autochthony and Athenian Ideology 157

origins of Thebes,31 who now provokes detestable civil strife there, also provides
a contrast to Athena, the benevolent caretaker of Erechtheus and the goddess of
patriotic valor in the “civilizing” wars of Athens against the forces of barbarism.
The rewriting of Ares in terms of Dionysus in the context of Thebes can be seen
to negatively evoke the Athenian ideal of manly valor combined with a devotion
to culture.32 The chorus is the perfect vehicle for this double message since they
themselves embody both the beauty of the Dionysian dances as well as being in
reality present or future members of Athens’s citizen army.
In the first stasimon, a full account of the slaying of the dragon by Cadmus and
the sowing of the dragon’s teeth was given (Phoen. 662–75). In the final stanzas of the
second stasimon, this central element of the Theban autochthonous myth is char-
acterized first as “barbarian hearsay” or “barbarian tale” (barbaron akoen) and then
as a most beautiful reproach (kalliston onedios). Here is the passage (Phoen. 817–18):

ἔτεκες, ὦ Γαῖ᾽, ἔτεκές ποτε,

βάρβαρον ὡς ἀκοὰν ἐδάην ἐδάην ποτ᾽ ἐν οἴκοις,
τὰν ἀπὸ θηροτρόφου φοινικολόφοιο δράκοντος
γένναν ὀδοντοφυῆ, Θήβαις κάλλιστον ὄνειδος:

You spawned, O Earth, you spawned once

(so runs the barbarian tale I heard, I heard once upon a time at home)
the race sprung from the beast-bred serpent with crimson crest,
a race which grew from its teeth, a most beautiful reproach for the Thebans.

The two expressions are paradoxical and must be understood in terms of the
opposition between inside and outside.33 In their own homes (oikois) in Tyre, the
Phoenician maidens once heard a barbarian tale: but barbarian in what sense?
because it is Greek and in this way foreign to them as Phoenicians? and does this
imply that the tale was Greek? or because it is barbaros in the usual sense of the
word, “non-Greek,” and hence barbarous and brutal? The liminal status of the
chorus within the play, as both outsiders and insiders, and within the context of
Athens itself, as cross-dressing males, allows them to articulate this double per-
spective on Theban autochthony. This double perspective is intensified by the
oxymoron kalliston oneidos, “a most beautiful reproach.” Theban autochthony is
most beautiful (kalliston) from within the walls of Thebes, and is the basis for
excluding outsiders by determining who the insiders are. But from the perspective
of outsiders, such as an Athenian audience, the myth can be an object of revulsion
(oneidos), laced as it is with brutality and fratricide.
158 Stephen Nimis

This passage is followed by a brief overview of Theban history, highlighting

events of Thebes’ founding, all of which “coordinate claims of fame and good
fortune”: the marriage of Cadmus and Harmonia, Amphion’s magical creation
of the great walls, and Io, the great progenitor of the Cadmean kings. But the
praise seems disingenuous. These events are all described as being caused by a
process of “alternating” or “exchanging” (metameibomena) some good things for
others (heterois heteras).34 The two words heterois heteras (“some for others”) occur
in a mannered juxtaposition of feminine and masculine forms of the same word.
The whole passage, in fact, seems to highlight the heteronomy and contingency
of these “exchanges” in Theban history that are a result of its malignant origins.
Note, for example, the repetition of words in the passage (ἔτεκες, ἐδάην; “you
spawned,” “I heard”) and the use of the particle ποτε, “once” or “once upon a
time.”35 In contrast to Theban history, Athens’s own ideal for itself is to achieve a
kind of permanence that transcends and survives the coming and going of indi-
viduals, who are exchangeable and equal to each other, one of the key elements in
the ideal of autochthony. Loraux points out that we frequently find expressions of
this “permanence within transience” in Athenian institutional decrees:

Referring to the rotation of public duties, with every year seeing new magis-
trates presiding over the political life of the polis, the institutional language
of the decrees used an “always” [αἰεί—the opposite of ποτε] in which the
perpetual commencement of the same was expressed, and, with its “magis-
trates always in office” [τῶν αἰεὶ ἐν ἀρχῆ ὄντων] the city confirmed its own
identity, preserved above and beyond the diversity of individuals.36

This ideal is negatively invoked in this choral passage as a contrast to the het-
eronomy and contingency of Thebes, even as that account is performed by the
Athenian chorus itself. Paradoxically, it is the “closed” character of Thebes, with
its “most beautiful” autochthonous myth, and its impregnable walls which pro-
duce ever novel forms of duplicity and doubleness, incest and fratricide, while it
is Athens, with its openness to the impact of the other, that preserves and renews
its unity and wholeness.
As Loraux has argued, the cemetery at the foot of the Acropolis where the
funeral orations for fallen soldiers were conducted is where the ideal of autoch-
thonous Athenians was celebrated by appeals to male bonding and equality, all
benefits of being “born from one.” There citizen-soldiers, rich and poor, residents
of city and countryside, were all buried side by side, without patronymics, in the
same monument. The Panathenaic festival, meanwhile, celebrated the whole pop-
ulation of Athens and culminated in a procession to the top of the Acropolis (site
 Theban Autochthony and Athenian Ideology 159

of the temples of Athena and Erechtheus), that enumerated the diversity of the
democratic polis: sexes, age groups and social classes all mingled together. These
two sites (the public cemetery and the Acropolis) represent two images of Athens
that exist in tension with each other: the exclusively male politeia and the cosmo-
politan diversity of Athens as a whole. Between these two extremities of the city’s
symbolic landscape is the space of tragedy, where mythic and civic discourse meet
in another format in order to confront the contradictions of Athenian ideology.
The Phoenissae is one of Euripides’ darker plays, but insofar as it is addressed to his
fellow Athenians, it also articulates, particularly in the performance of the chorus,
the aspiration for an ideal of community. At the conclusion of the play, Oedipus
is led into exile from Thebes by the maiden Antigone, this time never to come
back. Instead of another disastrous “return” of the kind that fills Theban history,
their journey will be a one-way trip to Athens to be welcomed there as suppliants,
where Oedipus will be received into the Athenian soil and where his presence will
be a blessing to the city. The future reception of this powerless exile draws a strong
final contrast between Athens and Thebes, one that has been repeatedly prepared
for by the performance of the chorus of Phoenician maidens.37

Stephen Nimis is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of English

and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo. He is also an
emeritus Professor of Classics at Miami University, where he taught for over thirty
years. His research interests are in the semiotics of major narrative forms. He
has published a book on the epic tradition, Narrative Semiotics in the Epic Tradi-
tion (Indiana, 1987), and many articles on the ancient novel, including “Egypt in
­Greco-Roman History and Fiction,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 24 (2004):
34–67; “In mediis rebus: Beginning Again in the Middle of the Ancient Novel,”
in Stelios Panayotakis, Maaike Zimmerman, and Wytse Hette Keulen, eds., The
Ancient Novel and Beyond (Brill 2003), 255–69; and “The Prosaics of the Ancient
Novels,” Arethusa 27 (1994): 387–411. He has also written a previous article on the
topic of autochthony in tragedy: “Autochthony, Misogyny, and Harmony: Medea
824–45,” Arethusa 40 (2007): 397–420.

Notes

Many thanks to Susan Shapiro and the anonymous referees for many useful suggestions on an
earlier draft of this paper.
1. For the probable dates of the play, see Mastronarde (1994: 11–14).
2. For this and other innovations of Euripides, see Mastronarde (1994: 17–30); Papadopoulou
(2001). In versions prior to Euripides’ play, Creon has a son older than Haemon named
160 Stephen Nimis

Megareus. In Aeschylus’ Seven he is a fierce warrior sent to defend one of the seven gates
(473–80). In the Antigone (1301–5), we are told that Eurydice grieved for Haemon and the
“glorious fate of Megareus who died before,” as she herself prepared to die. In neither case is
there a hint of a prophecy or a suicide, so that, besides the name change, the role Menoeceus
plays in the Phoenissae is unparalleled in these earlier sources.
3. The significance of the choral odes of this play have been interpreted in many ways, rang-
ing from a general delineation of the “curse of civilization” (Arthur 1977) to a specific political
commentary on the oligarchic coup of 411 (Lamari 2012). For the prominence of political dic-
tion, see Podlecki (1962), Luschnig (1995), Hartigan (2000), and Burian (2009).
4. For the meaning of the term and its evolution in Athenian public discourse, see Rosivach
(1987).
5. For Athenian myths of autochthony in art and literature, see Shapiro (1998). For Theban
myth, see Vian (1963).
6. Loraux (1986; 1993). Other discussions of autochthony and tragedy include Zacharias
(2003), Saxonhouse (1986), Nimis (2007). Sanders (2014) makes an astute analysis of the empha-
sis on mediation in the Phoenissae, especially the emergence of Antigone as an ideal mediator in
the play’s conclusion.
7. Zeitlin (1986). Besides Sophocles’ Oedipus, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus, we have
Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes (which was part of a Theban trilogy that included a Laius and
Oedipus) and Euripides’ Suppliants, Bacchae, and Phoenissae (which was probably performed
with the lost Antiope).
8. The names Erichthonius and Erechtheus are confused in the sources: the former name
generally applies to the autochthonous child; the latter to the same person in his role as king. I
will use the two interchangeably along these lines.
9. For an example in the Medea, see Nimis (2007). Plausible views of tragic Thebes as an
analogue to Athens rather than an “anti-Athens” include Natanblut (2003), Lamari (2012), and
Sanders (2014).
10. Fr. 360, 3–6 = Lycurgus, Against Leocrates 100 (trans. J. O. Burtt).
11. The end of the play with its references to Oedipus’s arrival in Colonus has been thought to
be a post-Euripidean addition, but there is no need for this assumption. Oedipus’s exile makes
him a candidate for the generous reception by Athens, as it was later enlarged by Sophocles in
his Oedipus at Colonus (401 BCE). For the late fifth-century connection of Oedipus and Theseus,
see Mills (1997). For the textual issues, see Mastronarde (1994, ad loc).
12. See Loraux (1986: 67–69); Strauss (1994); Mills (1997: 58–64); Loraux (2000: 128–34). Also
see Zeitlin (1986) on the “closed” character of Thebes.
13. Lysias 2.7–16; Plato, Menex. 239b; [Dem.] 60.8; Hyperides 6.5. Cf. Isoc. 4.41. Another
famous example of Athenian piety toward suppliants is the myth about the reception of the
children of Heracles, also dramatized in a play by Euripides, Heraclides. For the suppliant theme
in tragedy, see Mills (1997) and Tzanetou (2012).
14. Winkler (1990), for example, on the chorus and the “ephebic corps.” See also Longo
(1990); Bacon (1994–95).
15. Sourvinou-Inwood (2003). For comedy, see Bierl (2009). For this element in the Phoenissae,
see de Sousa (2015).
16. Heinrichs (1994–95; 1996). For this element in the Phoenissae, see de Sousa (2015).
17. On mediation as a critical function of the chorus, see Gagné and Hopman (2013).
18. The classic discussion of this characteristic of tragedy is Vernant (1988, 29–48). For the
chorus, see Calame (1994–95; 1999; and 2011) and Gould (1996); for gender in particular, see
Rabinowitz (1995; 1998).
19. Lines 1013–18 have been eliminated by some editors because of their poor relationship to
what precedes; see Mastronarde (1994, ad loc). But the repetition in lines 1013–14, seemingly
clumsy, could be designed as a transition to the emphatic apostrophe that follows.
 Theban Autochthony and Athenian Ideology 161

20. Mastronarde (1994, ad loc) explains away the implausibility as an example of the kind of
general advice often given by choruses. Swift (2009: 81) sees it as indicative of the “transitional”
character of the chorus, which suggests similar transitional rituals in Athens. Either way it can be
seen as an example of the chorus stepping out of its character.
21. See Aeschylus, Eumenides, 736–40 for her “preference for the male in all things.”
22. See Phoen. 657–68, where Athena’s role is recounted more fully and where she is called
ἀμάτορος Παλλάδος, “motherless Pallas.”
23. Erechtheus fr. 360, 53–55 = Lycurgus, Against Leocrates 100.
24. Mastronarde (1994) notes this parallel as a possible defense of the genuineness of Phoen.
1013–18 (see above, note 19).
25. A stasimon is a song performed by the chorus after they have taken their positions in the
orchestra, and is composed of strophes and antistrophes.
26. In the Rhetoric (3.4.4 1407a4) Aristotle uses the exchange of imagery between Dionysus
and Ares as an example of proportional metaphor (i.e., the sword is the “cup of Ares”), so the
conceit expanded here is perhaps a commonplace.
27. See Masaracchia (1987: 170, n. 7).
28. The story of Dionysus’ birth from the thigh of Zeus is best known from Euripides’ Bacchae
(404 BCE), but is also found in the earlier Homeric Hymn to Dionysus.
29. Mastronarde (1994 ad loc) rejects a metatheatrical reference, but see the works cited in note
15 above, and de Sousa (2015: 88–92) on the breaking of the dramatic illusion here and elsewhere.
30. Lamari (2012). She notes that the representation of the brothers Euneus and Thoas is a
Euripidean innovation that emphasizes the parallelism.
31. Masaracchia (1987) notes the greater prominence given to Ares’ double role in Thebes in
Euripides’ version of the story in comparison to Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes.
32. For the Athenian ideal as reflected in numerous genres in addition to tragedy, see Mills
(1997: 62–78), who argues that Athens is consistently portrayed as a civilizing city, and that “the
military and the cultural are not separable from each other” (48, n. 12). So also Lamari (2012: 236).
33. Different interpretations (optimistic and pessimistic) are summarized and discussed by
Mastronarde (1994, ad loc) and more recently by Sanders (2014), who makes the point that a dual
perspective is created by the passage.
34. On these problematic lines, see Parry (1967), Bremer (1980), Mastronarde (1994, ad loc).
35. Suggestive repetitions occur in other odes. See Phoen. 678–81, 1019, 1030, 1054, 1291–93,
1296–98, 1568–69. For ποτε see 784, 808, 818, 939, 1026.
36. Loraux (2000: 17). For the expression “magistrates always in office” or “the magistrates in
office at any time” (τῶν αἰεὶ ἐν ἀρχῆ ὄντων), see, for example, Pericles’ funeral oration (Thuc.
2.37). Mills (1997: 50) notes the universality that Athenian character assumes in public discourse.
37. For the textual problems of the final scene, see note 11 above.

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