The Theatre Audience The Demos and The Suppliants of Aeschylus

The theatre audience, the Demos, and the Suppliants of Aeschylus *
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
The Tangled Ways of Zeus: And Other Studies In and

Around Greek Tragedy
Alan H. Sommerstein
Print publication date: 2010

Print ISBN-13: 9780199568314
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2010
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199568314.001.0001

Alan H. Sommerstein (Contributor Webpage)
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199568314.003.0008
Abstract and Keywords

This chapter argues that, in the later 5th century, the Athenian theatre audience was not
a representative cross-section of the Athenian public because they were charged a fee to
attend, which at that time was not subsidized; this helps to explain the right-wing bias
typical of Old Comedy (though even then, the audience was preponderantly anti-Spartan
and not actively anti-democratic). In the 470s and 460s, however, what we know of
Aeschylus, Sophocles, and their plays suggests that the audience more or less mirrored
the balance of political opinion in the public as a whole: perhaps in the 450s or 440s the
entrance fee was increased. Aeschylus' Suppliants can be seen as criticizing Kimon, from
a pro-democratic point of view, over his proposal to give military aid to Sparta in 468/7 or
462.
Keywords: Athenian, theatre, audience, comedy, democratic, Aeschylus, Suppliants, Sophocles, criticizing
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The tragedies and comedies composed for production at the Athenian dramatic festivals
in the fifth and early fourth centuries BC are priceless historical documents. For much of
the period they are, apart from inscriptions, the only contemporary documents we
possess emanating from Athens itself. Their historical interpretation is problematic, of
course, in many ways, some of which are discussed elsewhere in <Pelling (1997a)>. The
particular issue that I am going to take up may be approached by considering the
question which, it has been said, historians should always put to themselves in respect of
every document they use: who wrote it, for whom, and why? In the case of Greek
tragedy and comedy, we usually know the answer to the first question, and we also know
the answer to the third: the plays were composed with a view to being successful in a
competition, before a small panel of judges whose identity was not known at the time of
composition but was known at the time of performance, and who thus, even if their actual
voting was secret, in practice (as many remarks in comedy make clear)1 were very liable
to be influenced by the attitude of the mass of the audience. And as to (p.119) the
remaining questionfor whomwe know the answer to that too. Essentially the plays
were written to be seen, to be heard, to be judged, to be appreciated by those who sat
in the Theatre of Dionysos when they were first staged. There might be other audiences
later. Plays seem often to have been reperformed at deme theatres in various parts of
Attica. They had begun to be performed abroad, too, as early as Aeschylus' time, and
convincing arguments have recently been advanced 2 that in the second half of the fifth
century there were frequent productions of Athenian tragedy at least in southern Italy.*
It was no longer necessary for the Athenian masters to go and produce their plays in
person, as Aeschylus had done in Sicily; at any rate there [64] is no record of Sophocles
doing so, nor Euripides until the last year or two of his life, and presumably there were
by now people in various centres who possessed the necessary skills to produce a
tragedy from its scriptas was being done at Athens in the same period, in posthumous
restagings of plays of Aeschylus.3 The copying of playscripts may have begun because of
the needs of such producers (and also to some extent of other poets), but by the 420s an
embryo reading public probably existed for drama, and by 405 Aristophanes can take the
existence of such a public for granted.4 But except in rare cases (such as Aeschylus'
Women of Aitna, first produced at Aitna itself)5 all these other publics were derivative
from and in a sense parasitic on the original Athenian audience. A play by an Athenian
author that did not get performed in the Theatre of Dionysos normally did not get
performed anywhere else, nor did its script get copied.6 To understand fifthcentury
Athenian plays we need to understand the fifthcentury Athenian theatre audienceand
no other.
(p.120) The subject of this chapter, then, is: how was this audience composed, and did
its composition change during the period to which our surviving tragedies belong? This
question has not been discussed as much as it might have been in recent scholarship,
where there has been a strong tendency, more often implicit than explicit, to equate the
theatre audience with the citizen body of Athens.7 Such a tendency (from which I do not
pretend that I have always been immune) is very understandable. It has often and rightly
been emphasized that the dramatic festivals were civic as well as religious and artistic
occasions. Comedy explicitly, and tragedy not infrequently by indirect means, can treat its
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audience as though it were identical with the body of adult male citizens which, perhaps
within a few days, would be meeting again on the Pnyx to debate and decide major
political issues. Obviously this was not literally true. Whichever particular dramatic
performance we consider, we can be sure that many who were adult male citizens did
not attend the performance, and that many who were not adult male citizens did. It may
well be that the latter can be largely discounted. On the sorts of political and social issues
that usually concern the historian, the children who certainly constituted a substantial
fraction of the audience may safely be ignored; not that their reaction to a play would
necessarily be without effect on the judges,8 but it would be likely to be influenced by
[65] different kinds of factors, among which, in the case of comedy, costume, music, and
slapstick might well be prominent. The question of whether there were women among the
theatre spectators, and if so whether a significant proportion of them were of citizen
status, remains controversial, but for our present purposes I do not think it matters
very much. Jeffrey Henderson has argued persuasively for a revision of the accepted
view on this question; 9 but he does not dispute that comedy, from the fifth century to the
third, normally treats the audience as if it were all male, and appeals for the appreciation
of males of all ages but not of females. We have no comparable evidence for tragedy,
because the conventions of tragedy forbid it to take explicit notice of the audience's
presence at all, but (p.121) there is no reason to doubt that the attitude of tragic
dramatists was the same. In any case, I think there is good reason to be sceptical as to
the likelihood of there having been any large number of citizen women present at the
dramatic performances. In comedy it is more than once taken for granted as normal that
a husband goes to the theatre and his wife does not: the adulterer in Ar. Birds 7936, as
soon as he sees his mistress's husband in the councillors' seats, knows that she will be
alone at homehe does not need to cast his eyes up or round to the women's section to
make sure she is not there; 10 and when it is comically suggested that the mothers of
outstandingly valiant men should be given public honours, the proposal made is that just
as a man might be awarded privileged seating () at such festivals as the
Dionysia, so these women should be awarded at the Stenia and Skira, women
only festivals. The woman speaker's statement in Ar. Thesm. 386 that she has seen how
women are vilified by Euripides is not such decisive evidence as Henderson claims,11
since the verb see in such contexts (especially in the exordia of Assembly speeches, on
which the passage in question is modelled) is an oratorical clich often having little to do
with literal vision.12 At any rate, whether or not their audience actually was allmale or
even nearly so, the dramatists do seem to regard it as such. They waver rather more
over whether to regard it as exclusively Athenian: occasionally we can definitely detect
them taking an interest in nonAthenian spectators, as Euripides may be doing when he
emphasizes the common ancestry of Athenians and Ionians in Ion.13 But on the whole it is
true that the dramatists, tragic and comic alike, wrote as male Athenian citizens for male
Athenian citizens.
But which male Athenian citizens? Here we come up against a significant fact of which
surprisingly little notice has been taken in recent discussion of [66] drama and
society.14 In one important (p.122) respect the dramatic festivals arguably were not
civic occasions of a normal kind. Every spectator, citizen or alien, had paid to attend.15
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We are so used to the idea of paying to attend a performance that we do not immediately
perceive how abnormal this was in the context of Athenian democracy and indeed of
Greek society generally. Nowhere was it the case that a citizen had to make payment for
exercising a civic function. Of course in many places he might have to have a property
qualification in order to do so, and in most, perhaps all, he would sooner or later be
debarred from civic activities if he did not pay his taxes and other debts to the state; but
rules such as these are quite another thing from being required to pay a fee each time
one entered an assembly or sat on a jury. At Athens in particular, moreover, at least from
the time of Ephialtes or soon after, the expectation was the other way round: the exercise
of a large and increasing number of civic functionsthose of the courts, the council, many
of the magistracies, and later on the ekklesia tooinvolved a payment, not by the citizen,
but to him. Nor again was it at all normal to require a money payment from citizens
before they could participate in one of the religious festivals of the community.16
Eventually, as is well known, the theatre did succumb to the logic of Athenian civic
ideology, with the institution of the theorikon. This did not however occur until the middle
of the fourth century; 17 and when it did occur, the change took the form, not of
abolishing the admission charge, but of providing from public funds the money with which
it could be paidmoney which the recipients could not be prevented from spending on
other things if they chose to do so.18 Even when it was thus subsidized, attending the
theatre remained an option, not a duty. In the fifth century it had been an option with a
(p.123) far from negligible cost. Two obols was a third of an oarsman's or building
worker's daily pay,19 or twothirds of a juror's; alternatively, it was the price of four
pieces of meat each large enough to fill the maw of a Herakles.20 And two obols was the
price per head; and while the head of a household would normally not [67] be taking his
wife along,21 the evidence of comedy shows clearly that his sons would expect to be
taken once they were old enough to enjoy the performances, and there might often also
be an elderly father (retired, like Aristophanes' Philokleon, from the active management of
the household) who would not much appreciate being left behind. The charge seems
likely, too, to have been payable for each day of attendance; we hear nothing of the issue
of tickets or tokens on the first day which could be used to gain free admission on
subsequent days, and we know22 that when the theorikon was first introduced its
amount was not two obols but a drachma, perhaps (as PickardCambridge suggested)23
to cover the three days of the tragic competition. Thus in the fifth century, to see the
whole of the tragic and comic contests, lasting three or four days, might involve admission
costs, for a family of four males, of up to thirtytwo obols or more than five drachmas.
Chickenfeed, of course, for most of those whom we meet in the pages of the orators, but
a substantial sum for many a poor citizen, and perhaps also for some quite prosperous
peasants if they did not participate, or participated only marginally, in the money
economy.24 Metics, on the other hand, being mostly craftsmen or traders, and living
overwhelmingly in the city and the Peiraeus, will in general have been much more cash
oriented, and it (p.124) is quite possible that the proportion of metics in the theatre
audience was higher than in the free population of Attica as a whole. Is it an accident that
already in the second quarter of the fifth century, two surviving plays of Aeschylus
Suppliants and Eumenidesare about a community which welcomes the arrival of a
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group of metics, explicitly so described?25
Thus even if we confine our attention henceforth to that part of the theatre audience
which consisted of adult male citizensand once we subtract children, women if any,
visitors, and metics, we may well be left with less than half of the whole audiencewe still
cannot regard it as a representative sample of the citizen body. It consisted of those who
had paid; in other words, of those who wanted and could afford to come. We cannot take
it for granted, as Dover once did,26 that the audience which had acclaimed Knights
proceeded to elect Kleon general. Neither the audience nor Kleon's electorate was the
whole citizen body. They were both parts of it, and overlapping, not identical parts.
Nevertheless, they could both be addressed as if they were the whole, in the same way
that a speaker addressing a jurya much smaller portion of the community, and likewise
unrepresentative in that it excluded men under 30could use the second person plural
indifferently to denote the instant jury, a [68] differently constituted jury in another
case, the ekklesia, an Athenian military or naval force, and so on.27
Can we say anything with any approach to confidence about the social composition of that
portion of the citizen body who could be expected to attend the theatre? One or two
things, perhaps. On average they will certainly have been more affluent economically than
the citizen population as a whole. On average, too, they will have been better educated;
Aristophanes' compliments in Frogs and elsewhere to the intellectual and literary
sophistication of his audiences28 need not (p.125) be taken at face value, but he did
devote half of that play to a contest in technical skill and ethical merit between two tragic
poetsand what is more, it was the second half, the part that would be fresher in the
judges' memoriesand the play did win him first prize. The political biases of Old
Comedy* are fully in line with this view of the balance of its audience; as de Ste. Croix and
Cartledge have shown in the case of Aristophanes,29 the dramatists regularly adopt a
position of hostility to those politicians whom they present as relying strongly on the
support of the poorer citizensin the 430s to Pericles, in the 420s to Kleon, after his
death to Hyperbolos, and so onand of some degree of sympathy for those who were
perceived as their enemies, such as Thucydides son of Melesias,30 Archeptolemos,31 or
Nikias (in Eupolis' Marikas).32 The antiwar stance of Old Comedy, which is not confined
to Aristophanes (consider Kratinos' Dionysalexandros, in which, we are told, Pericles was
very effectively satirized by implication as having brought war upon the Athenians),33
should be regarded as part of the same pattern; our evidence strongly suggests that the
wars which Old Comedy regarded as bad were those which subjected Attica to enemy
invasion and devastation (and in which, therefore, those who owned land lost out by
comparison with those who did not), while there is virtually no condemnation of external
wars of conquestat least not until after they have failed.34
All this points, certainly for the period of the Peloponnesian War, to an audience distinctly
rightwing by comparison with the population as a whole.35 [69] For earlier periods
things are more difficult. (p.126) The passing of a decree in 440/39 which restricted in
some way the freedom of comic satire36 suggests that the gap between Assembly opinion
and theatre opinion already existed then. Going back beyond 440, the evidence of
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comedy more or less dries up, since it now seems likely that almost all the plays of
Kratinos of which substantial fragments survive belong to the 430s and 420s.37 A window
of more or less reliable information in the 470s and 460s suggests a somewhat different
picture. In that period the theatre seems to have been something of a political
battleground. In 476 Themistokles was the victorious tragic choregos,38 in 472 Pericles39
(whose father, Xanthippos, had succeeded Themistokles as commander of the Athenian
fleet in 479); 40 probably on the first occasion,41 certainly on the second, the successful
production was wholly or partly devoted to the Persian War, in a notable departure from
the conventions of the genre, and both times with strong emphasis on the naval side of
the conflict, so closely associated with Themistokles, who had created the navy and who
had contrived the stratagem (recalled in Persians 353ff.) that had won the victory of
Salamis.42 This does suggest that at that time (p.127) the theatre audience was not felt
to be prejudiced against leftwing personalities. On the other hand there is the well
known anecdote in Plutarch's life of Kimon43 about the competition in 468, when
Aeschylus was defeated by Sophocles after the audience had allegedly demanded that
Kimon and his fellow generals be appointed judges of the contest; this, however, is not
only of dubious historical value,44 but even if true it [70] would not in itself show that the
theatre audience had a rightwing bias in 468, since Kimon was also at that time a
dominant figure in Athenian politics generally. Nothing in the evidence we have is
inconsistent with the hypothesis that in the 470s and 460s the theatre audience more or
less faithfully mirrored the balance of political opinion in the population as a whole (or at
least in that part of it which normally attended the Assembly), whatever that balance
might at a given moment happen to be.
Yet by 440in a period when, despite occasional successes for their opponents in the
lawcourts, the Periclean left was in complete command of the Assemblythe theatre
audience had become preponderantly rightwing and antiPericlean. It no longer
contained an even crosssection of the civically active citizens: the poorer, more strongly
democratic part of the population was less well represented in the theatre than it had
been a generation before. Why should there have been this change? May it be that the
theatre admission charge, which I have suggested acted in the later fifth century as a
deterrent for some of these poorer classes, had been less of a deterrent in the 470s and
460s? Not that a charge of two obols is likely to have been significantly more affordable in
the 470s than it was in the 430s. Rather the reverse, if anything: in the 470s Athens was
still recovering from the Persian devastation, there was no public building programme
and no state pay except on campaigns. It is more plausible to suppose that the admission
charge itself was then lower. One can (p.128) understand why it might have been
raised at some stage. Between the 470s and the 430s there was a very substantial
increase in the population of Attica, both citizens and, we may be sure, metics too.45
During the same period the City Dionysia in particular became more and more an
international event, especially when the centre of the Delian League was transferred to
Athens and the Dionysia became the occasion for the delivery of tribute. These
developments must have put pressure on the capacity of the theatre.
The first reaction, in the 460s, may have been to expand the capacity; the details are
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uncertain, but we know from the plays themselves that the theatre underwent some sort
of physical remodelling in the late 460s,46 and this may well have involved an enlargement
of the spectator space. The site, however, imposed physical limits to any further
expansion, and meanwhile Athens went on becoming ever more populous, more
prosperous, and more visited. In these circumstances there were only two things that
could be done. One was to ration demand by regulation (for example by limiting the
number of foreigners or of children who could attend); the other was to ration it by
price. As any successful football club can witness, the former alternative would have been
an administrative nightmare, [71] and it seems that the latter was chosen. Perhaps at the
same time some of the misthoi paid (to citizens only) from public funds were increased in
compensation, and this may be the explanation of the claim in some sources that the
theorikon was instituted by Pericles; for the change we are talking about must have
happened after the start of Pericles' ascendancy, and probably after the move of the
League treasury to Athens in 454/3.
Clearly Pericles and his supporters cannot have intended to turn the theatre, with all its
prestige, into a platform for their political opponents. Obviously they realized that fewer
people would attend the theatre, but it did not occur to them that this would change the
sociopolitical makeup of the audienceparticularly if, as I have (p.129) suggested, the
increase was effectively subsidized for the poorer citizens. They may have forgotten two
things: first, that the cost of attending had to be thought of in terms not of individuals but
of families (or at least of all the males in a family); second, that people's positive reasons
for attending the theatre varied considerably, that a sharp rise in price would force them
to reexamine those reasons, and that the slighter their education, and the tighter their
financial circumstances, the more likely they were to decide that they had better things to
spend their money on, subsidy or no subsidy. At any rate this was apparently the result.
It will have taken a year or two for dramatists (mainly comic dramatists, no doubt) to
notice the change in the balance of audience reactions and to adjust their political angle
accordingly. And by that time it was too late to do anything about it. Comic sniping became
an unavoidable fact of life for leftwing politicians, and it was protected both by the
parrhesia typical of democratic Athens in general and by the special parrhesia which, as
Halliwell has argued,47 was associated with festal occasions.* Occasionally a politician
might try to bite back, as Pericles probably did in 44048 and as Kleon did when he tried
to prosecute Aristophanes in the 420s,49 but on the whole they seem to have accepted
the situation. In the end it proved, under normal circumstances, not to be as threatening
as all that; to paraphrase Dover,50 the theatre audience acclaimed Knights, but that
couldn't prevent the Assembly from electing Kleon general. It could no more be
anticipated that one day a restaging of Frogs would help procure the execution of a
Kleophon51 than it could be anticipated that one day a lingering memory of Clouds would
help procure the execution of a Socrates.
From all this it follows that there are considerable, though not insuperable, difficulties in
the way of using the texts of tragic dramas as an index of public opinion at the time when
they were producedquite apart from the difficulties [72] inherent in the nature of the
(p.130) genre itself, whose conventions did not allow direct reference to contemporary
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persons and events. The public whose opinions mattered to the dramatists was not the
same as the public whose opinions mattered to the politicians. A play which seems to us to
have a distinct political slant, and which might have made the same impression on a
representative sample of Athenians, may in reality simply have been reflecting, rather
than seeking to influence, the views of the decidedly unrepresentative sample of
Athenians who were actually likely to see it. In some cases, however, more positive
conclusions may be possible.
Taking first the later period when the composition of the audience was skewed
rightwards, added significance automatically attaches to any play or plays that can be
seen as having political implications which such an audience would not be likely to find
congenialbitter hostility to Sparta, say, or robust, principled defence of democracy,
such as we find respectively in Euripides' Andromache of about 42552 and in his
Suppliants of 423 or 422.53 In such cases two main lines of explanation are open to us.
One is that the dramatist held a particular view so strongly that he was determined to put
it before his audience even at the risk of failure in the competition. The other is that the
view in question had such overwhelming support among the population as a whole that it
was in fact the majority view of the theatre audience as well. In the two cases I have
mentioned the parallel evidence of comedy each time suggests that the second
explanation is preferable. In Aristophanes' Acharnians, which must be very close in date
to Andromache, the hero, Dikaiopolis, while explicitly and repeatedly emphasizing that he
is pleading on behalf of the Spartans,54 feels compelled nevertheless to insist that he
hates them and desires their destruction.55 As a matter of fact hostility to Sparta seems
to have been both deep and constant in Athens from the 440s, if not earlier, to the end of
the century. The Spartan Menelaos, who is (p.131) quite an attractive character in the
Iliad and Odyssey, in surviving tragedy is invariably presented as a fool, a knave, or a
coward.56 And even in Euripides' Trojan Women, which has often been seen as an attack
on the aggressive, expansionist spirit that was soon to launch the Sicilian expedition, and
which was produced at a time when Athens and Sparta were at peace, the chorus go out
of their way 57 to express their special loathing of the thought that they may find
themselves living as slaves at Sparta of all [73] places. As regards Theseus' defence of
democracy in Suppliants, it has often been noted that while Old Comedy, and
Aristophanes in particular, frequently criticizes aspects of the Athenian democratic
system which seemed dispensable but were really crucial to its effectiveness (such as the
payment of jurors, or the activities of the demagogue and the sykophant), there is no
open criticism of the system itself:58 it may from time to time be insinuated that there is
something absurd about poor citizens holding high office,59 it is never suggested that
there is anything wrong with their having an equal vote in the Assembly. This sort of
evidence about the degree of public support for particular attitudes and policies can be of
real value. We know a fair bit (though, of course, not as much as we would like) about the
decisions that were taken on various issues by the Athenians in, say, the last third of the
fifth century. We only rarely know by what margins the decisions were taken; in
particular, the procedure of the Assembly made the recording of voting figures
impossible, and it is exceptional for us to be told, as we are by Thucydides about the vote
on the fate of Mytilene,60 that a decree was passed by a narrow margin.
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(p.132) When the theatre audience is a skewed sample, then, as it was in the 430s and
later, a play which seems to be slanted against that bias may be of considerable
significance to the ancient historian even while another play with an equal and opposite
slant might tell us, politically speaking, little or nothing that we did not know already. In
Aeschylus' time, when the theatre audience may (as we saw earlier) have reflected fairly
closely the current balance of political opinion in the population as a whole, there is
likewise much to learn from plays whose own political standpoint is not, or not
unambiguously, that which seems on our other evidence to have been currently most
popular. To some extent we are hampered here by the notorious chronological
uncertainties of this period. Was Aeschylus in Persians seeking in some measure to
defend the record of Themistokles at a time when he was already under threat, or was
he paying to a popular hero a tribute for which he could expect popular endorsement?
We cannot be sure, because we do not know exactly when Themistokles was
ostracized,61 nor for how long feeling had been building up against him. It is perhaps,
however, significant that Aeschylus felt it necessary in 473/2 to return to a theme which
had been handled by Phrynichos, with memorable success, probably only four years
earlier, and which, if it was going to have an effect on people's attitudes to current political
leaders, would certainly help Themistokles, the architect of victory, as against Kimon
whose personal role had been no greater than that of many an ordinary citizen.
[74] There is of course a lot to say, and I have said a lot before now,62 about the political
implications of the Oresteia.* Here I only wish to draw attention again to the remarkably
strong backing given in Eumenides, in words put into the mouths of no less than four
superhuman powersAthena, Apollo, the Erinyes (alias Semnai (p.133) Theai), and
Orestes in his capacity as a future cultheroto an adventurous, aggressive, proArgive
and therefore antiSpartan, foreign policy for Athens,63 even to the extent of wishing war
upon the Athenians as a blessing (864) and naming Ares as one of their special patrons
(918). Coming as all this does at the end of the trilogy, repeated as it is over and over
again, it would have made so powerful an impression on the audience and the judges, and
been so impossible for them to ignore, that one is almost bound to conclude, not only that
Aeschylus himself was strongly in favour of this policy with all that it implied, but also that
not just a majority of Athenians, but a very large majority, favoured it too, despite the
heavy casualties it had already incurred.64 Otherwise we would have to suppose that
Aeschylus was seriously jeopardizing his chances of success in the competition merely in
order to rub home by repetition a message already delivered with perfect (and in terms
of tragic drama, highly abnormal) clarity.
I want to end, however, by considering another play of Aeschylus, The Suppliant
Maidens. Here we are again in the grip of chronological uncertainty, since we do not
know for sure the date of the play itself, but I think it may be possible to use two features
of the play to help establish that date.* These features are both connected with the play's
most important character, Pelasgos, king of Argos: they are his insistence on the
democratic character of the city he rules, and the means by which he persuades that city
to grant asylum to the Danaids even at the risk of war with Egypt. George Forrest in a
wellknown article65 associated the portrayal of Argos in this play with the welcome Argos
Page 9 of 22

had given to the suppliant Themistokles some years before:66 the political message which
he saw in the play was that Argos had been prepared to fight the right wars and had had
the right constitutionand, by implication, that Athens ought to follow her example. How
far I do and do not agree with this will become evident presently.
(p.134) As is well known, the group of persecuted suppliants appealing to the ruler of a
city is a frequent feature in tragedy.67 Usually the ruler (especially if Athenian) readily
grants them asylum. Pelasgos has all the more reason to act [75] thus when he learns
that, far from being aliens from another continent as their appearance suggests, they are
themselves of Argive descent (Supp. 274326). He is, however, reluctant to do so, and
argues (3659) that as the Danaids have taken refuge at an altar belonging to the city
rather than to him personally, it is the city that must decide what is to be done. To the
Danaids this is a distinction without a difference (3705): is not Pelasgos the ruler of the
city, and can he not therefore act on behalf of it, as Theseus (say) often enough does in
tragedy on behalf of Athens? But he will not: I will not make a definite promise before I
have consulted all the citizens on this matterI have already said that I will not do this
without the people's consent, even though I have the power ( ), lest
hereafter the people should say, if something untoward were to result, You set store by
a band of aliens, and ruined your city (3689, 398401). Even when the Danaids
attempt to blackmail him by threatening suicide (45565) he agrees only to bring the
matter before the people (51719), which he had in effect already agreed to do before
the threat was made. He is no coward desperately seeking a way to avoid war: that is
shown by the way he is ready to face the even greater danger of the wrath of Zeus
Hikesios (cf. 347, 35964, 3856, 41316, 4789) rather than commit his city without
consulting its people. When the assembly is held, too, emphasis is put on aspects of its
procedure which resemble that at Athens,68 particularly the vote by show of hands (604,
607, 621), the formal language of decrees (60914), and even the typically Athenian
punishment of or loss of citizen rights (614 ). The very word

democracy itself, as Victor Ehrenberg pointed out more than forty years ago,69 appears
thinly disguised twice in the play (604 , 699
) for what may be the first time in any surviving Greek text.70 This is the proper
(p.135) way for a polis to take a major decision: by vote of the assembled people.*
And yet Pelasgos is shown as obtaining that consent by blatant manipulation. Careful
preparation is made for the assembly meeting: suppliantbranches are to be placed on the
city altars for all to see (481ff.), but the men escorting Danaos into Argos are ordered
not to divulge anything about him until the assembly meets (5023). When it is held,
Pelasgos persuades the people to grant asylum to the Danaids by warning them of the
wrath of Zeus Hikesios if this is not done, without saying a word about the danger of war
with Egypt if it is (61520). Having the decision, as it were, in his pocket, he then defies
the Egyptian herald and accepts the declaration of war in the name of his people (942ff.)
without further consultation. And we know the result: this war, though fought apparently
in the holy cause of protecting suppliants, ended unhappily both for the Danaids and for
Argos: the Danaids were left with no alternative [76] but to accept marriage with their
hated cousins, Pelasgos was almost certainly killed, and Danaos (who already has a
Page 10 of 22

bodyguard at 985ff.) probably became tyrannos of Argos.71 What we see is a democratic
state, very like Athens itself, deceived with tricks of oratory (623
) into voting for a war that was to prove disastrousa war which, to judge by
Pelasgos' tactics, they never would have accepted if the issue had been put to them
honestly. None of the almost cheerful militarism72 of Eumenides here!
Let us be a little more precise. The political leader of a democratic state comes before its
Assembly together with a lone foreigner, who has made himself a suppliant at the city's
altars and asked for the city's help. The foreigner claims a personal connection with the
city. He seeks the city's assistance against enemies from his own country, in a cause
whose justice is by no means clearcut (note the question raised by Pelasgos in 38791,
which the Danaids do not answer; and note also the probability, raised in important
recent articles by Sicherl and Rsler, that Danaos has in reality quite different motives for
seeking Argive protection against the Aigyptiads, never avowed in (p.136) this play).73
The politician presents a carefully crafted case to the Assembly, in which some crucial
facts are suppressed (among them the dubious justice of the suppliant's cause), and
secures the passage of a decree giving the city's full support to the foreigner and those
on whose behalf he had made his supplication. This involves the city in a dangerous and
ultimately humiliating military campaign, and in the end the foreigner becomes its
tyrannos.
Now this synopsis, all but the last clause, is extraordinarily similar to a series of events
that occurred at Athens, probably in 462.74 The political leader was Kimon. The lone
foreign suppliant75 was Perikleidas the Spartan, who may well have been a proxenos of
the Athenians at Sparta (as Kimon was of the Spartans [77] at Athens76) and had named
his son Athenaios (as Kimon had named his Lakedaimonios).77 The threatening enemies
from his own country are the slaves,78 or helots, or Messenians, at Ithome. The
campaign (p.137) that followedthe first which Athenians had ever fought in the
Peloponneseended in the Athenian force being ignominiously sent home, as if they were
hired labourers who were no longer needed. Soon afterwards Kimon was ostracized
and no doubt there were those who said that had he not been stopped, he would have
turned the Athenians into subjects or slaves of the Spartans.
If the similarity between the two episodes is not coincidental, it would imply that the
Danaid trilogy was produced not long after the PerikleidasIthome episodeperhaps in
the spring of 461, and quite possibly just before the vote of ostracism was due to be
held 79 (the holding of such a vote will have been decreed two or three months earlier,
and had probably been anticipated for much longer than that). The date usually assigned
to the trilogy is 463, the archonship of Archedemides; but this depends on the
assumption that [ in POxy 2256 fr. 3.1 is the beginning of the archon's name rather than
of his title of office, an assumption which, as West notes, finds no support in the didascalia
of Laios which occurs in another fragment of the same book.80 In my view a stronger
objection to a date as late as 461 would be the absence in Suppliant Maidens of any sign
of a skene; there is evidence for a visible skene not only in the Oresteia but also in the
testimonia and fragments of two or three other late Aeschylean productions,81 and it is
Page 11 of 22

therefore prima facie surprising to find no such evidence in a play produced only three
years before the Oresteia. We may note, however, that there are parts of the Oresteia
itself in which the skene is ignored, namely the first half of Choephoroi (where the action
is centred on the tomb of Agamemnon, and the palace is supposed to be somewhere
offstage)* and the greater part of Eumenides (if Rush Rehm is right to suggest that the
image of Athena, which Orestes clasps, is at the thymele in the centre of the orchestra,
where he can be entirely surrounded by the (p.138) chorus as they weave their
bindingspell about him).82 it may be that the Danaid trilogy resembled the Oresteia in
this respect,83 and that the odd emphasis on housing provision [78] towards the end of
the surviving play (Supp. 95761, 100911) may look forward to later scenes in which a
house became a crucial part of the actionno doubt the house within which fortynine
bridegrooms were murdered in a night (a record which makes the palace of Atreus, with
a mere six murders in the space of a generation, almost virtuous by comparison).
If Rsler's reconstruction of the Danaid trilogy 84 is on the right lines, there is a positive
argument in favour of bringing its date down as low as possible. He envisages the final
play as containing a trial of Hypermestra, accused by her father and acquitted after
Aphrodite intervenes. Such a scene would require three actors,85 which is not known to
be true of any other genuine Aeschylean scene before the Oresteia.86 The introduction
of the third actor might have coincided with the creation of the skene or might have been
subsequent to it: it may have taken a little time for dramatists to become aware that the
new configuration of the acting area, with the possibility of entries (p.139) from, and
exits in, three directions instead of two, and of keeping a character in a house just
offstage from which (like Klytaimestra in Agamemnon) he or she could appear repeatedly
at short notice, created a wealth of new dramatic options for which the old twoactor rule,
designed for a different theatre, could not cater. At any rate there is distinctly less
Aeschylean evidence for a third actor than there is for a skene, and correspondingly
more reason to assume a late date for a trilogy in part of which a third actor has to be
posited.87
I conclude, therefore, that there is no positive reason to reject the view that the Danaid
trilogy was produced in 461, and that aspects of its action were designed to recall recent
events involving Kimon and AthenianSpartan relations and to strengthen feeling against
him ahead of the ostracism vote.88
[79] On this occasion, as he had done in 472 and was to do again, I believe, in 458, and as
Phrynichos had done before him, Aeschylus was using tragedy as a political weapon, and
using it in the cause of that demokratia which may have been coined as a political
catchword about this very time, a catchword whose echo is heard in the text of Suppliant
Maidens.89 It was left for Aristophanesor maybe for (p.140) others who used himto
exploit the name and fame of Aeschylus, fifty years later, in Frogs for the purpose of
undermining that same demokratia, before an audience who could still be addressed as if
they were the demos of Athens but who in reality no longer properly represented it.90
Addenda
The main thesis of this chapterthat the theatre audience cannot be regarded as a
Page 12 of 22

representative sample of the Athenian citizen bodyis greatly strengthened if the now
widely accepted view is correct that the capacity of the Theatre of Dionysus was much
smaller than has usually been assumed hitherto, probably no more than 7,000 (see
Csapo 2007: 97100; and Goette 2007); after allowing for hundreds of officials, priests,
etc., for the relatives and friends of chorus members, and for resident and visiting
foreigners (including official delegations from up to 200 allied states), the number of seats
left for ordinary Athenians and their families can only have sufficed, on any one day, for
quite a small proportion of the citizen body. See, however, MitchellBoyask (2008) for the
possibility that some potential spectator space has been disregarded in these calculations.
p. 119plays produced outside Athens: Euripides' Andromache was one such play,
according to Andr. 445, and his Melanippe the Captive, with its South Italian setting,
may have been another. On tragic productions abroad see now also Taplin (2007). Two
Attic comedies of the late fifth (or possibly very early fourth) century, Nicophon's Sirens
and Metagenes' Thouriopersai, were not produced at Athens (Ath. 6.270a); the South
Italian connections of the latter are obvious (and fr. 6 refers to the river Crathis whose
mouth is near Thurii), and the Sirens too, like the other divinities and monsters that
Odysseus meets on his wanderings, will have been thought of as located somewhere in
the west (they were later placed on islands off Campania, e.g. Strabo 1.2.1213).
(p.141) p. 122 n. 15see now also P. J. Wilson (2007: 916).
p. 122 n. 17 P. J. Wilson (2008: 945) is still on balance disposed to accept the evidence
of some ancient sources which associate the origin and development of theoric
distributions with the names of Pericles and of the early fourthcentury politician
Agyrrhius, though he inclines to the view that in the fifth century such distributions were
made only occasionally, and that even in the first half of the fourth century they were not
as regular as they became after the 350s. I remain more sceptical still. Wilson (95 n. 32)
and likewise Roselli (2009)discount much too readily the silence of comedy, which took
an intense interest in all matters connected with the theatre; this silence is broken,
precisely when on Ruschenbusch's view we would expect it to be, in the third quarter of
the fourth century by Theophilus (fr. 12.8). The case for scepticism had already been
excellently put by Cawkwell (1963: 55 n. 53).
p. 125the political biases of Old Comedy: I study these, via an analysis of the comedians'
choices of persons to satirize (and, in a very few cases, to praise), in Sommerstein
(1996b). On the antiwar (more accurately, proSpartan) stance of Aristophanes, see
Sommerstein (2009: 20911, 22336).
p. 126 n. 36on the decree of 440/39, and subsequent attempts at political interference
with comedy, see Sommerstein (2004a, b).
p. 129the special parrhesiaassociated with festal occasions: I now believe this to be a
myth, and hold that neither in theory nor in practice was comedy above the law: its
freedom of speech was no greater and no less than that of every Athenian (Sommerstein
2004 a: 216), though there came to be a general cultural understandingthat
Page 13 of 22

comedy's privileged access to a vast (and, at the City Dionysia, an international) audience
did not require it to be held to any higher or more restrictive standards than the law
imposed on all alike (Sommerstein 2004 b: 167).
p. 129 n. 49the reference to Mastromarco (1998)which had not yet appeared when
this chapter was originally published, and was then known to me only as a 1993
conference paperwas an error; that (excellent) study does not in fact discuss the
evidence for the attempts to prosecute Aristophanes, but accepts them as factual without
argument. See rather Sommerstein (2004b).
(p.142) p. 132the political implications of the Oresteia: see also Sommerstein (1996a:
28895, 392402, 41621, 42730).
p. 133establishing the date of Suppliants: I would now be very much more reserved
about the possibility of establishing a specific political context for the Danaid trilogy (cf.
Sommerstein 2008: i. 286).
p. 134 n. 67see now also Grethlein (2003).
p. 135Pelasgus' refusal to commit Argos to war without securing the people's consent
by persuasion should probably be regarded as one aspect of a major theme of the
trilogy, the opposition of consent and coercion; this theme is discussed, in relation to sex
and marriage, in Chapter 6 above (especially the last paragraph) and in Sommerstein
(2006).
p. 136 n. 73see Chapter 6 above and the Addenda thereto.
p. 137the palace in Choephoroi: Scullion (1994: 714) has convinced me that in the first
half of Choephoroi, as in the second half, the palace is represented by the skene, and that
the chorus (unusually) make their entrance (during lines 1021) from the skene door.
This is in full accordance with the pattern whereby the only persons to emerge from this
door in the first half, and more, of the Oresteia are Clytaemestra and those executing her
ordersthough in Choephoroi several of them (the chorus, Electra, the nurse Cilissa)
proceed to sabotage those orders. The pattern terminates abruptly with the death of
Aegisthus (Cho. 869).
p. 138 n. 86even if (as is probable; see Ch. 1 above) Psychostasia was given its title only
at a later date, it is unlikely to have been named after an event which the audience did not
see. It is preferable to accept that the play did require a third actor, in which case it must
either have been written shortly before (or even after) the Oresteia, or else, as
proposed by West (2000: 3457), be the work of someone other than Aeschylus.
p. 139 n. 87I should have added that in Choephoroi a third actor is also needed for the
very small, but far from trivial, role of Pylades (in the climactic scene only; in earlier
scenes, where Pylades is silent, the role can be taken by an extra).
Notes:
Page 14 of 22

(*) The first half of this chapter is the same, with minor variations and revisions, as the
first half of my paper The theatre audience and the Demos (Sommerstein <1998>). I am
grateful both to <Christopher Pelling> and to Juan Antonio Lpez Frez for allowing and
indeed encouraging me to publish both versions of the paper; and also to all those who
commented on the two versions when they were presented, respectively, at Oxford in
October 1992 and at Madrid in March 1993.
(1) Cf. Ar. Knights 54650; Birds 4456; Eccl. 11412; and the criticism of Pl. Laws 659a.
(2) Taplin (1993).
(3) Aesch. test. 717 and 1.512 Radt.
(4) Cf. Ar. Frogs 53, 943, 1114; Dover (1993: 345).
(5) Aesch. test. 1.334 Radt.
(6) Hence the great contrast in productivity between dramatists of the fifth century and
those who lived later, Aristophanes for example writing an average of one play a year
throughout his career (40 between 427 and c.386 BC), Menander, with plenty of
opportunities for getting plays produced abroad, composing something between three
and four plays a year (105 or more between 321 and c.292: Proleg. de Com. III 60
Koster, Apollod. ap. Aul. Gell. 17.4.5). Just as Athens in [Menander's] age imported
dramatists, she also exported plays (Gomme and Sandbach 1973: 12).
(7) Exemplified by many of the contributors to Winkler and Zeitlin (1990), including
notably Goldhill (1990); Ober and Strauss (1990); and Henderson (1990).
(8) Cf. Ar. Clouds 5389; Men. Dysk. 967, Sam. 733.
(9) Henderson (1991b).
(10) Cf. also Ar. Thesm. 3957 where a woman complains that husbands coming home
from the theatre eye us suspiciously and straight away make a search, in case we've got
a lover hidden in the house.
(11) Henderson (1991b: 1423).
(12) See e.g. Ar. Eccl. 176; Thuc. 6.20.1; Dem. 5.1, 9.1, 14.3, 16.2, Prooem. 5.1, 6.1, 44.1.
(13) Cf. also Sommerstein (1977c: 11718) on Aristophanes' City Dionysia plays; and
Cassio (1985: 10518 on Peace.
(14) <P. J.> Wilson <(1997)> is a heartening exception.
(15) For the ancient evidence see PickardCambridge (1988: 2658).*
(16) It was not for nothing that these festival were officially described not just as of the
Page 15 of 22

demos () but as paid for by the demos (, cf. Thuc. 2.15.2; Dem. 21.53;
Deinarchos fr. 18.3 Conomis).
(17) Ruschenbusch (1979).*
(18) These are two reasons why I find it hard to accept the suggestion of <P. J.> Wilson
<(1997: 97100)> that the admission charge and the theorikon were from the start
closely connected and designed to signalize the distinction between members of the
citizens' club (who did not have to pay the charge) and others (who did). See, however,
p. 128 below for a suggestion that an increase in the admission charge in the midfifth
century may have been coupled with a compensating increase in state misthoi paid to
citizens.
(19) Oarsman: Thuc. 6.31.3; building worker: e.g. IG i3. 475.2536, 27285.
(20) Ar. Frogs 5534. Dover (1993: 264) thinks (comparing Eupolis fr. 156.3) that half
obol portions of meat were rather small; but the Eupolis fragment does not necessarily
have that implication, and Dover's claim that it is entirely in character that the Innkeeper
should think of such a [small] portion as fair and proper finds no positive corroboration in
anything else she or her companion says. If these innkeepers are being presented as
stingy and grudging caterers, how comes it that they serve meat (normally a special
occasion food) at all?
(21) Above, p. 121.
(22) Philochoros, FGrH 328 F 33.
(23) PickardCambridge (1988: 267).
(24) The contrast between urban casheconomy and rural bartereconomy is
interestingly discussed, with particular reference to Aristophanes' Acharnians, by Olson
(1991). The hero of Acharnians claims (35) that in his home village the word buy was
unknown.
(25) Aesch. Supp. 609, 994; Eum. 1011, 1018.
(26) Dover (1968: p. lvi).
(27) Cf. e.g. Aischines 1.173 (where you denotes both the present jury and that which
had tried Socrates fiftyfour years earlier), 3.86 (an expeditionary force to Euboia about
twenty years before the date of the speech), 3.125 (a meeting of the ekklesia).
(28) Ar. Knights 233, 5056; Clouds 521, 527, 535, 575; Wasps 101314; Frogs 676,
700, 110918.
(29) De Ste. Croix (1972: 35576); Cartledge (1990).
(30) Ar. Ach. 70312.
Page 16 of 22

(31) Ar. Knights 327, 7945.
(32) Eupolis fr. 193 KA.
(33) POxy 663 (= CGFP 70 = Kratinos, Dionysalexandros test. I KA), ad fin.
(34) In Lysistrata, produced in 411, the decision to launch the Sicilian expedition is
regarded as an act of folly (Lys. 3917 and perhaps 51718, cf. 58990); in Birds,
produced three years earlier while the campaign was in progress, the only (implicit)
criticism is of Nikias' dilatory generalship (Birds 640).
(35) I define a rightwinger as one who favours the active use of the power and
institutions of the state to maintain or extend privilege and inequality among those under
its jurisdiction, and a leftwinger as one who favours the active use of the power of the
state to reduce or eliminate such privilege and inequality. Strictly, therefore, all Athenian
politicians were rightwing, since they all supported legal discrimination against slaves,
women, and aliens. But I will follow their own practice and confine the universe of
discourse to adult male citizens, which is only what we always do when we speak of
classical Athens as a democracy.
(36) Ar. Ach. 67; the historicity of this decree is accepted by Halliwell (1984: 87; 1991:
579), despite his scepticism regarding the reliability of ancient notices of similar decrees
said to have been enacted c.415 or later.*
(37) There are twentyfive plays of Kratinos of which four or more fragments survive.
Kassel and Austin (1983: 112267) offer or report suggested dates for nineteen of
these; only one of these dates (that for Drapetides, which may be associated with the
foundation of Thourioi in 444/3) is earlier than 439. See, however, Mastromarco (1992:
368), who places three antiPericlean plays of Kratinos in the late 440s and sees them as
partly motivating the decree of 440.
(38) Plut. Them. 5.5.
(39) IG ii2. 2318.911.
(40) Hdt. 8.131.3, 9.11421. It was Xanthippos who, having captured Sestos, brought
back to Athens the cables of Xerxes' bridge over the Hellespont, of which so much is
made in Persians (6872, 10913, 1301, 7226, 736, 74451).
(41) The victorious dramatist was Phrynichos, and it is generally supposed (though it
cannot be proved) that his production on this occasion included his Persian War play(s)
the celebrated Phoinissai and possibly also (cf. LloydJones
1990: 2334 = 1966: 223).
(42) I discuss the political aspects of Persians more fully in Sommerstein (1996a: 41013).
For a sceptical view (and references to other discussions), see Pelling <(1997b)>.
Page 17 of 22

(43) Plut. Kimon 8.89.
(44) The suspicion inevitably attaching to anecdotes of this kind in the absence of early
evidence in their support (on which see Lefkowitz 1981) is deepened by a chronological
point raised by C. W. Mller (1984: 70ff.). It is known that Sophocles' first victory was in
468 (Marm.Par. A 56), and Mller argues that Aeschylus is not likely to have been
competing against him then, since Aeschylus produced the Theban tetralogy in 467 and
tragic dramatists do not normally appear to have put on productions at the City Dionysia
in successive years.
(45) The most useful attempt to establish population statistics for classical Athens is
Hansen (1985).
(46) The skene, the ekkyklema, and, in my view, the mechane all make their first
appearance at this time; see respectively Taplin (1977: 4529); Garvie (1986: pp. liiliii);
and Sommerstein (1989b: 153).
(47) Halliwell (1991).
(48) See n. 36 above.
(49) Cf. Ar. Ach. 37782 with scholia, 5023 with scholia, 6302; Wasps 128491; Ar. test.
1.1921 KA. That at least one prosecution was actually attempted cannot be seriously
doubted; see Mastromarco <(1998)>.*
(50) See n. 26 above.
(51) See Salviat (1989); Sommerstein (1993).
(52) Eur. Andr. 44553, 594600.
(53) Eur. Supp. 42655; for the date of the play, see Collard (1975: 814), Cropp and Fick
(1985: 23).
(54) Ar. Ach. 30914, 356, 369, 482, the last three times each marked by the striking
anapaestic rhythm (in iambic trimeter verse) of the phrase .
(55) Ar. Ach. 50912.
(56) The relevant plays are Sophocles' Ajax and Euripides' Andromache, Trojan Women,
Helen, Orestes, and Iphigeneia at Aulis.
(57) Eur. Tro. 21013. In contrast with the tirades in Andromache, the tone of this
passage cannot be attributed merely to wartime feelings; when Trojan Women was
being written and produced, Athens was not at war with Sparta but only with Melos (and
that campaign had probably ended by the time the play was performed) and, in a
desultory way, with Corinth (Thuc. 5.115.2).
Page 18 of 22

(58) A point made strongly by Dover (1972: 334).
(59) Particularly, it seems, when poor men serve as ambassadors: cf. Ach. 61417
(Lamachos and the aristocratic but allegedly insolvent Megakles) and Wasps 126774
(Amynias).
(60) Thuc. 3.49.1.
(61) The dates of Themistocles' ostracism and condemnation [for treason] cannot be
established (Rhodes 1970: 398); see more recently Podlecki (1975: 198) (ostracism in
472/1), Lenardon (1978: 106) (476470), Frost (1980: 18792) (condemnation 471/0,
ostracism a year or two earlier), Hornblower (1991: 220) (some time in the late 470s
early 460s).
(62) Sommerstein (1989b: 2532); cf. Bearzot (1992), who draws attention to the anti
democratic language which Aeschylus puts into the mouths of Klytaimestra (Ag. 8835)
and Aigisthos (Ag. 161718)in contrast, we may note, with his Agamemnon, who, when
his attention is drawn to possible political difficulties awaiting him at Argos, replies that
they will be the subject of deliberation in public assemblies.
(63) Aesch. Eum. 28995, 397402, 66773, 76277, 8645, 91315, 91821, 10089.
(64) For these cf. IG i2. 929 <= i3. 1147> = ML 33.
(65) Forrest (1960).
(66) Thuc. 1.135.3; Plut. Them. 23.1.
(67) See Kopperschmidt (1971); Taplin (1977: 1923).*
(68) Cf. Friis Johansen and Whittle (1980: 487501).
(69) Ehrenberg (1950: 522).
(70) In remarkable contrast, and its derivatives are entirely absent from the
Athenian portion of Eumenides, where the Athenian people are called the or
.
(71) WinningtonIngram (1961: 142 = 1983: 57); Garvie (1969: 1989); Friis Johansen
and Whittle (1980: 4350).
(72) Sommerstein (1989b: 253).
(73) Namely, to keep his daughters unmarried because an oracle has warned him that he
will be killed by his soninlaw (the crucial evidence for the relevance of this version of the
legend is Supp. 37, ): see Sicherl (1986); and
Rsler (1993), who argues powerfully that for this and other reasons it is likely that Supp.
was the second play of the Danaid trilogy and that its audience knew about the oracle
Page 19 of 22

because it had been mentioned in the preceding play, Aigyptioi.*
(74) For the appeal cf. Plut. Kimon 16.910, Ar. Lys. 113844; for its consequences, Thuc.
1.1025. Since the Areopagos council was stripped of its political power, on the initiative of
Ephialtes, while Kimon's expedition was in the Peloponnese (cf. Plut. Kimon 15.23) in the
year 462/1 (Arist. Ath.Pol. 25.2), the expedition must have been sent in the campaigning
season either of 462 or of 461; the former is more likely, given that the earthquake at
Sparta, which triggered the helot revolt, occurred at about the same time as the Athenian
disaster of 465/4 at Drabeskos (Thuc. 1.100.2101.2; for the date, Thuc. 4.102.23 with
Aischines 2.31 (p. 64.2067 Dilts), cf. D.S. 12.32.3; Hornblower 1991: 1547). See
however n. 89 below.
(75) Ar. Lys. 1144 actually refers, in connection with Kimon's expedition, to a suppliant
branch (), presumably placed on an altar by Perikleidas; this detail is not
mentioned in Aristophanes' text and probably derives from a fourthcentury historian,
perhaps Philochoros (so Henderson 1987: 201, comparing Lys. 1138 = Philochoros
FGrH 328 F 117; it is more than merely a paraphrase of Ar. as Jacoby terms it in his
note ad loc., FGrH iii. b (Suppl.) (1954) I 455 and ii. 365).
(76) Theopompos, FGrH 115 F 88; the family's proxenia is also mentioned by Andokides
3.3 in the course of his wildly inaccurate summary of AthenianSpartan relations in the
fifth century (trustingly copied out in Aischines 2.172).
(77) Athenaios: Thuc. 4.119.1; Lakedaimonios: Thuc. 1.45.2, Plut. Kimon 16.1.
(78) So termed in the AthenianSpartan alliance treaty of 421 (Thuc. 5.23.3, cf. Thuc.
1.101.2).
(79) The decision whether to hold an ostracism was made in the sixth prytany (Arist.
Ath.Pol. 43.5); the ostracism itself was probably held in the eighth prytany (seeJacoby,
FGrH iii. b [Suppl.] [1954] I 316), on Philochoros 328 F 30).
(80) West (1990a: 125), comparing POxy 2256 fr. 2 (Aesch. test. 58 Radt) ()
[]
.
(81) See Taplin (1977: 4556), who finds evidence for a skene in Hiereiai, the satyrplay
Theoroi, and, less securely, in Edonoi (part of the Lykourgos tetralogy).
(82) Rehm (1988: 2978) (which appeared too late to be taken into account in
Sommerstein 1989 b).
(83) As in some other and more important respects: see Herington (1970), and now
Rxsler (1993), who revives (mainly on the basis of Paus. 2.19.6) the idea that a trial of
Hypermestra, the Danaid who did not kill her husband, was a central feature of the final
play.
(84) See nn. 73 and 83 above.
Page 20 of 22

(85) Even on the assumption that Lynkeus, Hypermestra's husband, played no part in
the trial. He must, on the SicherlRsler view, have been a crucial figure in the trilogy's
conclusion, since he is the only soninlaw of Danaos who is in a position to fulfil the oracle
and bring about Danaos' death. I am, however, sceptical about the whole hypothesis of an
onstage trialscene in Danaids; for an alternative reconstruction of this play (using two
actors only) see <Ch. 6 above, pp. 10413>.
(86) I take it that the present final scene of Seven is spurious, and that Prometheus Bound
is either (and more probably) spurious (see Griffith 1977; West 1990 b: 5172; Bees
1993) or, if genuine, later than the Oresteia. On Psychostasia see Taplin (1977: 4312),
and note that Plut. Mor. 17a,
does not necessarily imply that Plutarch believed that the
weighingscene took place onstage (any more than Ar. Lys. 1879 '
' ;; ' , implies
that Aristophanes believed that in Seven against Thebes the oath of the Seven was taken,
and a beast slaughtered, onstage).*
(87) That the surviving Suppliant Maidens does not require three actors is not in itself
counterevidence: in Agamemnon a third speaking actor is used only for the Kassandra
scene, in Choephoroi only for the trifling part of the Servant (875ff.).*
(88) The assertion by Rsler (1993: 22) that es ist gewi kein Zufall, sondern
hochsignifikant, da wir auf solche [demokratische] Akzenten gerade im zeitlichen
Umkreis der Reform des Ephialtes treffen becomes even more to the point if the trilogy
was indeed produced in 461 rather than, as Rsler assumes, in 464 or 463.
(89) The essential features of the above argument would not be affected if one were to
accept, with Badian (1993: 8996), the evidence of Plut. Kimon 16.417.3, combined with
Ar. Lys. 1144, that Kimon led two expeditions to aid Sparta against the helotMessenian
revolt, the first of them in 468/7, and that Perikleidas' mission was on the earlier occasion
(when Sparta was in real and considerable danger). In this case the Danaid plays could,
from the point of view of their political subtext, have been produced at any time between
466 and 461 inclusive; there is of course no difficulty in supposing that, like Persians and
like the Oresteia, they may have referred back to events of several years before which
remained vitally relevant to current political debate. We can be fairly sure that enemies of
Kimon had been endeavouring, though unsuccessfully, to bring about his ostracism (or
otherwise remove him from the political scene) well before 462/1. An earlier date of
production than I have assumed in the text would also make it unnecessary to raise any
questions about a skene or a third actor. I am grateful to <Christopher Pelling> for
drawing my attention to Badian's discussion.
(90) This chapter was originally published inC. B. R. Pelling (ed.), Greek Tragedy and the
Historian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) 6379.
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The Theatre Audience The Demos and The Suppliants of Aeschylus

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