The Maze of the Logos: Euripides, Suppliants 163-249

Abstract

In Euripides' Suppliants as one commentator remarks, ‘the play consists of talk’. Much of the talk is about ideas, which weave a tantalizing and complex intellectual dance through the debates of the central figures. The tone is set by the first debate, between the suppliant Adrastus and the young Theseus. The former makes a plea in terms that he himself seems to characterize as inadequate, while the latter rejects the suppliant with a bravura speech that offers no less than a philosophy of religion, morality and politics. Theseus' ideas are marked by severe internal contradictions, and they are subjected to further contradictions by later statements of Theseus and others. Yet this puzzling philosophy is assigned to a character who seems entirely free from the misjudgments typical of other tragic protagonists. The Euripidean tag that ‘the gods ordain things counter to expectation’ appears not to be true in Theseus' case. Here is a tragic hero who, in a just cause, plans a brief war from which he hopes to return home successful, without major harm to his people and without offense to the gods; and—unlike the protagonists of several Aeschylean plays and Adrastus in this play— the Athenian king succeeds in all his aims. Even when Theseus reverses his initial rejection of Adrastus, he is careful to point out that his initial moral assessment was and is correct (334-36). The reversal itself suggests that, if Theseus has a susceptibility to error, the hamartēma may be located in the fit between logos and ergon, thought and reality, a famous dilemma in the intellectual history of the fifth century.