Owen
GOSLIN Supplication and Proskunesis
in Euripides' Orestes
Scholars have
often regarded Euripides' Orestes as the darkest of the playwright's
works, and as a reflection of the increasing factionalism
of late fifth-century Athenian politics (Schein, 1975:
66; Euben 1986: 222 calls it a play about "political
corruption"). I will argue that the many instances of
supplication are central to understanding this social
dysfunction in the play and that the Orestes is in many
ways an examination of the fragile underpinnings of
supplication itself. I draw attention to the way in which
three key scenes of supplication or other appeals for
soteria
mark the increasingly violent course of the plot:
Orestes' personal supplication of Menelaus (380-469;
632-724), Orestes' plea for pity before the Argive
assembly (reported by the messenger at 931-42), and the
Phyrgian slave's proskunesis
of Orestes (1506-36). While the assembly speech and
proskunesis are not
supplications in the proper sense of the term (as
formulated in Gould 1973 and elsewhere), nevertheless I
argue that the play encourages us to read these scenes as
a single commentary on the obligations of the powerful to
the powerless. The failure of the first two pleas for aid
represents a breakdown in such fundamental social values
as reciprocity (charis),
nomos, and
obligations of philia. The
Phrygian's proskunesis, on the other
hand, succeeds because it strips away the pretensions of
the earlier scenes and discloses that the only real
principles at work in supplication (at least in this
play) are the desire of the suppliant to live at all
costs and the power of the supplicated to do as he
wishes. That Orestes is now the one holding power over
another has led many critics to see the Phrygian as a
mirror of the Orestes earlier in the play, in which we
now see his depravity clearly. I modify this
interpretation by showing that the form of the
proskunesis itself can be
seen as a degraded form of the earlier supplication in
terms of nomos,
philia, and
charis. Orestes is
openly disdainful of the legitimacy of the Phrygian's
barbarian nomos in a Greek
land (1507), and cruelly tests whether someone so
different from himself might also feel fear (1518).
Orestes precludes any attempt at flattery, forcing the
Phrygian to swear an oath that he not speak of
charis (1514-6). I agree with Porter
1994:247-50 that Orestes shows his own kind of
(troubling) logic here and is not merely depraved; but I
add that this logic rests in his 'realist' interpretation
of supplication, which views power as unfettered by
social obligations.
Finally, I briefly note two contemporary Athenian texts
that show how, as in the Orestes, a breakdown
in supplication was thought to be illustrative of a wider
dysfunctional political system. The Corcyrean
stasis (Thuc. 3.81), for instance, reaches
its apogee with the disregard of all proper procedure and
the dragging of suppliants from temple sanctuaries.
Similarly Philokleon's excursus on supplication
(Wasps 550-75)
reduces the practice to nothing much more than the
pleasure of wielding power over others.
Abstracts
Index