Euripides: ‘The Suppliant Women’

 This is the story about the world’s stupidest war. Maybe only a person like Euripides could tell it, a person who believed that the human tragedy is having the capacity to reason — the intelligence to avoid suffering — and yet letting that capacity be undermined by fear, superstition, custom and other goblins.

The story picks up after the disaster that we know as the Seven Against Thebes.

Adrastus, king of Argos, was dazzled by a weird oracle telling him he should marry his daughters to a lion and a boar. Oddly, he was certain he understood what it meant. Shunning advice, he married his daughters to two ruffians, one of whom was Oedipus’s son Polyneices. When Polyneices wanted to lead an expedition against Thebes to get what he saw as his kingdom back, Adrastus backed him.

It was a disaster.

The Argives were slaughtered. Creon, king of Thebes, decreed that none of the dead would be buried.

In this play, Adrastus goes to Theseus of Athens and begs him to get the bodies back. He’s accompanied by the mothers of the dead champions, who make up the chorus. They appeal to Aethra, the mother of Theseus, to persuade her son.

The play has a side story. Evadne, the wife of one dead champion and the brother of another, tags along with the suppliant women. When Theseus and the Athenians bring the bodies back to Athens, she leaps on the funeral pyre, unwilling to live without her husband.

Her father, Iphis, who had come to collect the bones of his son, tries to talk her out of it but fails.

Euripides’ decision to tack on the tale of Evadne and Iphis is one of the criticisms of the play. 

Professor H.D.F. Kitto, who has been my guide to the tragedies, says Euripides theme is that war is generally stupid, and that the stupidity brings suffering on the entire community. Euripides makes the point twice: with an account of the general suffering of the mothers of the dead champions, and then an account of the intense suffering of one individual.

In the final scene, Athene appears, ex machina, and reminds Theseus to exact promises from Adrastus, binding Argos to Athens. But she also tells the sons of the dead champions, who are carrying their fathers’ bones back to Argos, that they will one day get revenge.

It’s not a great thing to tell little boys. If you were hoping that reason would prevail over folly, you had the wrong playwright.

This play drives some critics crazy. In addition to the complaint about the Evadne-and-Iphis story, critics have objected to a long funeral speech and digressions about democracy vs. autocracy. But the play also has quotable lines on dozens of topics.

The most quoted are those on the folly of war. But I like the lines about the folly war stories. Theseus is speaking:

 

Vain

To tell or hear such tales — as if a man

In the thick of combat, with a storm of spears

Before his eyes, ever brought back sure news

On who was hero.

 

We suffer from war, in part because we can’t even talk about it.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on The Suppliant Women is on pp. 232-40. The Suppliant Woman, translated by Frank William Jones, is in Euripides IV in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 51-104. The quotation is on p. 89.