Euripides in his tragedies exploits the consciousness on the part of the audience of the co-existence and interplay between the world of the theatre
(the real 'here and now' of the performance, comprising the stage, set and actors) and the world of the drama (the fictional place, time and characters of the play). In this section, I shall be focusing on the hermeneutic differences - the different models of explanation applied to the same events by characters in the world of myth, on the one hand, and spectators in the world of the theatre, on the other. The aspect I have chosen to elucidate is this: the audience live in an increasingly rational world (in which traditional myths are subjected to ever more sceptical scrutiny), but from the prologue onwards are invited to acquiesce in a mythical model, while the play's male characters live in a world of myth but tend to prefer rationalistic explanation; in so doing, the latter reflect contemporary tendencies of the end of the fifth century BCE, formulated mainly by the philosophical movement of the sophistic school and the simultaneous development of rhetoric in the agora and the law courts.
Easterling (1985) has examined how ancient Greek tragedians incorporated the inherited
epic mythical tradition into their plays by setting their plays in the heroic past, but at the same
time allowed for the obvious connections to be made between the enacted myth and
contemporary reality, taking care not to cross the boundary too often or too drastically; there is
no mention of books (p. 5), or of the theatre itself (p. 6), or of coined money (p. 6). She
concludes that this conventional mythical setting did not restrain the dramatist's imagination
but offered them 'a stimulus and a challenge'. While Easterling draws attention to the dramatic
convention of avoiding conspicuous anachronisms, Croally (1994: 207-215) examines
closely Eur. Suppl. in an effort to unearth the function of the overt anachronistic elements which permeate this play. He argues that 'Supplices with its peculiar temporality, could be said to be taking myth and making it unmythical in order to exemplify the problems of using myths
for didactic purposes' (p. 213) and that 'out of that crisis (of myth) new forms of myth and new
forms of timelesness (the stock characters and plots of New Comedy) may have emerged' (n.
134). Croally continues with a thorough and sophisticated examination of the Troades (pp. 215-258), exposing the distinctive dramatic world of the play, which is 'constructed in a
conflation of the mythical and the contemporary, the other-worldly and the (political, rhetorical and ideological) here and now' (p. 234). The distinctiveness of the dramatic world of that play
In the Ion quite frequently there is a tension between the evocation, on the one hand, of the dramatic world of Ion and Kreousa as part of a glamorous past and that, on the other, of values, attitudes and styles of reasoning that have to do with the actual present of the spectators, i.e. with contemporary fifth-century attitudes. Sometimes the dramatist stretches this tension to the extreme, making matters difficult for those characters who come from and still live in the heroic past but are judged by other characters whose argumentation derives straight from the day-to-day experience of a fifth-century Athenian.
Of particular interest are the instances in which we are given a mythical account of divine births, erotic pursuits and violent assaults against feminine figures by gods, for divine wedlock is at the core of the Ion. It appears from the outset, when Hermes in the first four lines of his opening speech introduces himself as the offspring of Zeus and Maia, currently at the service of the gods (ôaipôuwr XdrpLi^ss) Shortly after comes the first mention of Kreousa's rape by Apollo (10-11; note 'Piai'-'perforce'), also the first mention of the earthborn Erichthonios' mythical upbringing by the virgin goddess Athena (20f.), and Xouthos' ancestry (63) as son of Aiolos and grandson of Zeus. Hermes has given the audience in a single block all the information needed about the imaginary place, time, protagonists of the drama and their past history. His account lies wholly within the mythical world.
is mirrored by the distinctiveness of its didactic function, which is itself the object of Euripides'
questioning; because of the complexity of the otherness of the dramatic world, the audience
is encouraged to hold 'an ironic attitude to the authority of this particular representation and of
representation in general' (p. 255).
On the comic element that may be discemed in Hermes' self-characterisation, see above n.
Erichthonios' upbringing is mentioned again (268; 1429), as well as other mythical divine births, such as Athena's birth from Zeus' head (452f.) and Apollo's birth from the Titanis Leto who mated with Zeus (919-22); the Gorgon's birth is a true parthenogenesis from Vf\ (988-90); Kreousa is likened to an 'è'xiôi^a' by the furious Ion and referred to as offspring of the river Kephisos (1261) who was transformed into a bull. The myth of Herakles subduing the Amazons, a myth which expresses the archetypal struggle of male against female and the perennial Greek conflict with the barbarian, is alluded to in the messenger speech (1144-5), where the Amazons are said to be the first owners of the tapestries with which Ion decorated his tent. On the tapestries a series of heavenly bodies is depicted, among which is Orion, who is said to be pursuing the Pleiades with his sword ever drawn, a figurative expression (or emblem) of his repetitive violent assaults against female figures (1152-3; cf. '^i4)npr|', 1 2 5 8).56 Ion refers rather disapprovingly to the mythical rapes committed by Zeus, Poseidon and Apollo (445f.).
Kreousa's story is presented in a mythical context at 492-508 by the chorus in lyric language; the women of the chorus conclude by taking up a stance that often appears in tragedy, namely that 'the children of Gods and mortals do not ever come to good' (507-8). Kreousa narrates four more times her rape by Apollo in mythical language: the first time in her dialogue with Ion at 338f; then, when she sings her monody, which is a hymn to Apollo in reverse and makes allusions to the story of Persephone's abduction by Hades (881); then again in her dialogue with Erechtheus' old tutor (936-51); and, finally, in her recognition scene with Ion (1479f). Athena comes at the end of the play to confirm Ion's divine parentage (1560-62; 1595f.).
Yet these mythical narratives are repeatedly challenged by passages
which seem to reject the possibility of divine parentage^^. Thus, the prophetess Pythia in seeing the exposed baby in the basket assumes that it must have been the outcome of an illicit union of a Delphian woman (43f.; of. 1365f.); Ion supposes that he was the fruit of a woman's wrong (325); when Kreousa reports her story of the rape as that of her imaginary friend, Ion dismisses it and takes it as a cover-up for her violation by some man (338f.). After the false recognition between Ion and Xouthos, Ion asks if his mother was rfj Xouthos dismisses this idea by arguing that 'the ground bears no children', in a rationalistic way that strongly challenges one of the fundamental tenets of the myth of Athenian autochthony. His version about Ion's mother is more mundane; he guesses that well before he married Kreousa, in a Bacchic festival at Delphi, he must have raped a Delphian Maenad while he was in a drunken state (540f.). As one scholar has rightly remarked, Xouthos is the character in the play 'farthest from the mythical world'58; in this light, one might, perhaps, detect a certain playfulness on the
For the same technique, of. Eur. Her., where Lycus (147-8), Amphitryon (339-347) and the chorus (353-4) challenge Herakles' divine paternity from Zeus; on line 353, see Bond, 1981.
Helen in Hel. 16-22, 256-61, Andromache in Tro. 766-71 and the chorus in I.A. 793-800, all in their turn express their scepticism about the story of Leda and the swan who traditionally were
thought of as Helen's parents. Andromache cannot believe that Helen, who caused the death
of many Greeks and Trojans, could have had divine parentage: 'never were you daughter of
Zeus, but many fathers, I say, sired you: Vengeance, Envy, Slaughter, Death, all the ills that
earth brings forth' (Tro. 766-71, trans. Grene & Lattimore; of. Iphigeneia in IT. 380-91 and Herakles in Here. 1341-46). Euripides placed myth under pressure; in his tragedies there is a clear trend towards the demystification of mythical allegories and the humanisation of gods
and heroes.
Wolff, 1965: 183. Ruck (1976: 247-51) goes further, suggesting that there is a profoundly
antithetical relationship between the dramatic figures of Xouthos and Apollo, i.e. between the
surrogate and the real father of Ion; he claims, on the one hand, that a similarity can be traced
between Xouthos' name and Apollo's epithet Xanthos and, on the other, that the mortal father
part of the playwright, if, in the world of the theatre, the actor who spoke the prologue of the play as Hermes, the mythical god, later doubled not only as Xouthos, the rational mortal, but also as the Pythia and Athena.59 Later, the paedagogue offers Kreousa his own version of events concerning the begetting of her husband's newly-found son; according to him, Xouthos, in finding that Kreousa was barren, decided to impregnate a slave-girl so as to get an heir for his throne (815f.; 837). Finally, Ion, after his final recognition of his mother Kreousa, takes her aside and questions her about the real identity of his father; he supposes that behind the story of her rape by Apollo she hides a more mundane tale, and he is about to enter the temple in order to question the god himself about his father (1547f.), when Athena's timely appearance thwarts the sacrilege.
This clash of discourse in Euripides is not random: there is a consistent juxtaposition of different perspectives. Such a juxtaposition of the mythical perspective with the contemporary one, in the Ion, urges the audience to reflect upon the peculiar parentage of the protagonist: he was
whose representative Is the Delphic Python, an association marking even more clearly his
opposition to Olympian Apollo. Though Ruck seems to have searched hard for mythical
evidence to substantiate his hypothesis. I.e. the complete antithesis between Ion's two
fathers, In the end his whole argument sounds quite far-fetched and of little relevance to the
dramatic plot.
PIckard-Cambridge (1988: 146), In the distribution of parts between the three tragic actors,
argues that the third actor would certainly have played the roles of Xouthos, the Pythia and
Athena, and might also have played Hermes, though the latter may also have been assigned
to the second actor, who played Kreousa. Though the question cannot be resolved with
certainty due to the lack of relevant evidence, I would argue, for what it is worth, that a more
theatrical effect would have been accomplished If the third actor played the roles of all the
three emissarles-agents of Apollo, who, along with the ignorant Xouthos, secured the
realisation of Apollo’s plan. In a sense, one might even go so far as to say that this is the actor
the offspring of divine rape, was brought up as an orphan with the priestess as his foster mother and Apollo as his spiritual father, later was led to believe that Xouthos was his father and an unknown Delphian maiden his alleged mother, only to discover that it was Kreousa, Xouthos' legal wife, who was his real mother and Apollo his real father, with Xouthos being reduced to the status of a foster father who was to remain ignorant of Ion's true origins. All these complications were necessary conditions if the Athenian throne was to be bequeathed to a legitimate heir who would combine the best of two worlds, namely Olympian blood via Apollo and the divine protection of the city goddess, as well as autochthonous mortal blood via his mother Kreousa; the convenient silencing of Xouthos guaranteed Ion's smooth accession to the throne (see 2.1.2, 2.2.).