Euripides: ‘Ion’

 When she was a girl, Creusa was raped by Apollo. The Athenian princess had her baby in a cave and left him in a cradle full of her things, hoping the god would take him. Apollo did, and the boy grew up in the god’s temple at Delphi.

Creusa married Xuthus, an ally who helped Athens in a war. They were childless and came to consult the oracle.

Xuthus was told that the first man he met on leaving the temple was his son. Of course that man was the lad known as Apollo’s servant, Creusa’s lost child. Xuthus named him Ion.

As the men reveled, Creusa thought she was being pushed out of her kingdom by Xuthus and his heir. She planned to murder Ion with a drop of Gorgon’s blood. But Ion poured a libation. When a dove drank from the spilled wine and died, the plot was exposed.

Creusa took refuge at Apollo’s altar. Ion, once a pious temple lad, was about to kill her anyway when Apollo’s priestess came in with the cradle that Ion had been found in. It was filled with trinkets, the kind a girl might make and value, and Creusa could describe everything in it, sight unseen.

Athene arrived with a message from her brother Apollo, confirming what mother and son know. The goddess said Ion would found a race, the Ionians. Creusa And Xuthus would have sons who would become the fathers of the Dorians and Achaeans. 

For a play with happy ending — tragicomedy, rather than tragedy — this play strikes me as serious and dark. Euripides relentlessly points out the two standards of justice for men and women — and of course two standards of justice is the definition of injustice.

Most of the great lines are from Creusa, who rails against the “ungrateful betrayers of women.”

But I like this passage, spoken by a chorus of women who are serving Creusa:

 

Of women, see how much we surpass

In virtue the unrighteous race 

Of men. Let a song of different strain

Ring out against men, harshly indicting

Their love. 

 

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The chapter “New Tragedy: Euripides’ Tragi-Comedies” is on pp. 327-47. Ion, translated by Ronald Frederick Willetts, is in Euripides III in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 177-255. The quotations are on pp. 222 and 232.