Love and Death in the "Suppliants" of Aischylos

Abstract

DESPITE ITS LACK OF PHYSICAL ACTION, Aischylos' Suppliants contains a wealth of dramatic movement in its language and imagery, especially at those points where the playwright expands the statements of his characters to include implications beyond what the characters themselves perceive.' Robert Murray has already described much of this movement in his study of the use of the myth of Io:2 the Danaids' appeal to Zeus to save them from the lust of the Egyptians, made as it is in the name of his own lust for their ancestor, underscores the central paradox of their position. Their very existence is the result of that ancestral coupling, and the protector of suppliants whom they invoke is himself a prime proponent of physical love, without which there would be no one to protect. The play's images often reflect a similar bias; the broader understanding achieved by Io remains only a potentiality for the Danaids. Thus what might be a laying-on of hands is to them still the physical violence of rape, and the gentle on-breathing of Zeus becomes the fierce blast of the storm.' This incompleteness of vision extends to many aspects of the Suppliants; here I should like to focus on one particular device of Aischylos, namely the ironic contrast between the Danaids' suppliant posture and their oft-hinted-at future aggression against their cousins. The murders to come are not, of course, any part of the initial plot, yet the play's language-through pun, double meaning, and innuendo-reminds us again and again of the brutal denouement to their suit. Love and death fuse into a grim perversion of the process by which life is created, and the Danaids' repeated references to growth and fertility in the context of their refusal to procreate merely underline the weakness of their stance. The technique is not dissimilar to that at work in the Agamemnon ;4 here