Aeschylus's Suppliant women : the tragedy of immigration / Geoffrey W. Bakewell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bakewell, Geoffrey W.

Series:

Wisconsin studies in classics

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Aeschylus. Suppliants--Criticism and interpretation.

Aeschylus.

Metics.

Athens (Greece)--Emigration and immigration.

Athens (Greece).

Physical Description:

x, 209 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Madison : The University of Wisconsin Press, [2013]

Summary:

This book offers a provocative interpretation of a relatively neglected tragedy, Aeschylus's Suppliant Women. Although the play's subject is a venerable myth, it frames the flight of the daughters of Danaus from Egypt to Greece in starkly contemporary terms, emphasizing the encounter between newcomers and natives. Some scholars read Suppliant Women as modeling successful social integration, but Geoffrey W. Bakewell argues that the play demonstrates, above all, the difficulties and dangers noncitizens brought to the polis. Bakewell's approach is rigorously historical, situating Suppliant Women in the context of the unprecedented immigration that Athens experienced in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. The flow of foreigners to Attika increased under the Pisistratids but became a flood following liberation, Cleisthenes, and the Persian Wars. As Athenians of the classical era became increasingly aware of their own collective identity, they sought to define themselves and exclude others. They created a formal legal status to designate the free noncitizens living among them, calling them metics and calling their status metoikia. When Aeschylus dramatized the mythical flight of the Danaids from Egypt in his play Suppliant Women, he did so in light of his own time and place. Throughout the play, directly and indirectly, he casts the newcomers as metics and their stay in Greece as metoikia. Bakewell maps the manifold anxieties that metics created in classical Athens, showing that although citizens benefited from the many immigrants in their midst, they also feared the effects of immigration in political, sexual, and economic realms. Bakewell finds metoikia was a deeply flawed solution to the problem of large-scale immigration. Aeschylus's Argives accepted the Danaids as metics only under duress and as a temporary response to a crisis. Like the historical Athenians, they opted for metoikia because they lacked better alternatives. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Charter Myth for Metoikia 17

2 Spoken Like a Metic 34

3 The Cypriote Stamp 59

4 Sons of Earth 87.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 179-191) and index.

ISBN:

9780299291747

029929174X

9780299291730

0299291731

OCLC:

809789679