PRUEBA DE HIPÓTESIS: SEGUNDA HIPOTESIS ESPECÍFICA

The word p^TpowoXig does not occur in the Ion, but is is difficult to imagine that it was not in the minds of Euripides and of many members of his audience at the end of the play. The word has two meanings, both of which are activated by Athena's address to Ion and Kreousa. The first, in terms of chronological attestations, is 'one's mother-city, mother-country, home'^^^: at the end of the play, Kreousa will return to the city that she has always acknowledged as her home, and Ion discovers that the city which is his only true home is not Delphi, where he was raised, but Athens, where he was born. The definitive return of both figures to the city they had come from provides a harmonious ring structure both for the fabula of the play (for Ion's birth is exodramatic) and for its szujet (which had begun with the successive entrances of four different visitors to Delphi, Hermes, Ion, the chorus, and Kreousa), thereby permitting an emotionally satisfying close to its plot full of turmoil and surprise. Euripides could easily have concluded his play on this note of return, restoration, repetition.

Instead he has chosen to add a second element which surely comes as somewhat of a surprise to the audience: Athena's lengthy prophecy that the descendants of Ion will go on to establish colonies throughout Europe and Asia (1575-87). Athena's mention of colonization recalls the second meaning of priTpoTToXiç, which first occurs in authors contemporary with or slightly earlier than Euripides: 'mother state, as related to her colonies'.^"'® The mother-city to

^ LSJ s.v. 2: Pindar, Soph.

which Kreousa and Ion will return will itself become a mother state, not only for the citizens born within its confines, but also for those who belong to the colonies it will now be able to found. In a certain sense, not only Kreousa will be cured of her barrenness: Athens too will become a mother. The cure of Athens will permit her, henceforth, to give birth to colonies.

For in the Ion Euripides is taking the framework of myths of ritual transition and building upon it stories of rites of passage undergone not only by Kreousa and Ion, but also by Athens itself. The repetitive failures that had characterised the generations of the race of Erechtheus in the generations before Ion had signalled the limitations not only of the members of one family, but also of the city whose destiny was ineluctably intertwined with them. Trapped in its dogmatic vision of autochthony, Athens too had been barren, in the sense that it had not been able to develop from within itself the forces necessary to project it into a vital future. Euripides shows us in his play that Athens too has evolved: having gone through those unsuccessful attempts it can now not only survive into the future itself, but also initiate colonization and, thereby, set other existences into the world. For colonization for a city is a little like exogamy for a male and childbirth for a woman: it is the movement outwards from oneself which is necessary if the self is to survive not in its doomed individuality, but at least in the deputised form of children.

This movement outwards at the end of the play goes so far that, to a certain degree at least, it is even capable of including Xouthos. For Athena announces to Kreousa that she will have children, a 'kolvov yévos\ with Xouthos (1589). Athena's point is not only that the outsider can be allowed in and can receive at least a partial justification on the basis of the saved integrity

of the inside. On the contrary, her message, and Euripides', must be stronger: that the outsider must be allowed in if the inside is to be rescued. Thus, when Kreousa wonders how the children of Aiolos could possibly have anything to do with those of Athena (t o l ç AloXo v 8è -n-wg jieTfjy rfjç TTaXXd5oç...' 1297)‘•‘•Q, she

is mistaken: it is only by the inclusion — limited to be sure, but inclusion nonetheless — of the imported graft of the children of Aiolos that the children of Athena can possibly flourish. Thus the ending of the play does not so much propagate the discourse of exclusion that so many scholars see in it^^O; the outsider can and, indeed, must be incorporated under new terms if the saving difference is to be established within the pattern of repetition. Viewed in this light, the Ion is not only 'patriotic' or merely pan-Hellenic: it is also humanistic, in that it sets no clear limits to the scope of its liberal vision. Mutatis mutandis we may be reminded of the last book of the Iliad, in which the partial, but deeply moving recognition of the common humanity of Achilles and Priam displays something of the same movement outwards. Those scholars who see only the patriotic and xenophobic aspects of the ending of the play seem to be trapped within the perspective of Kreousa: obsessed as she is with purity and interiority, they may not have recognized that the whole point of the play is to move beyond that obsession, to transcend the interior so as to allow in the outsider as well. In fact the play is far more humanistic than modern scholarship has sometimes allowed. Kreousa's mistaken obsession with autochthony has made

^ This is an unmistakeable reference to Xouthos, who was first introduced by Kreousa as 'AloXou Aïoç [...] QTTo' (292).

^20 See Walsh, 1976; Loraux, 1993: 205ff.; Saxonhouse, 1986 and 1992. But cf. Zeitlin,

1989:177-182, who draws attention to the Euripidean effort to balance the two contradictory

her less than fully human; only when she learns to accept Apollo and Xouthos will she be permitted to accept Ion as well.

We are now in a better position to understand Euripides' purpose in emphasizing the importance of repetitions with a difference. As we saw earlier in this chapter (2.2.1), for the audience of this play such a technique creates expectations which Euripides is at pains to frustrate: just when his spectators expect an exact repetition of familiar motifs, the poet surprises them by placing familiar elements in unfamiliar contexts and assigning them unexpected consequences. Euripides seems to be suggesting that the audience too should learn not to seek the exact repetition of familiar models and traditions, but to confront honestly the complexity and ambiguity of reality. If so, then the cure of Athens will take the form of a cure of Euripides' Athenian audience.

Chapter Three Apollo in the Ion