Papers by ei42@columbia.edu Irwin
Summary
This article explores the relationship of Euripides’ Medea to the politics of 431 BC and... more Summary
This article explores the relationship of Euripides’ Medea to the politics of 431 BC and the outbreak of the Atheno-Peloponnesian war. It begins by suggesting suggesting that details of the entirely unmotivated entrance of Aegeus into the plot allow certain correspondences to be drawn with the political situation contemporary with the play’s performance. I argue that the explicitly circumscribed alliance Aegeus makes with Medea (ll. 720-730) can be read as a mythic recounting of the unusual defensive alliance that Athens forged with Corcyra (Thuc. 1.44.1). Just as Aegeus’ pact with Medea will in future place him and Athens at odds with Corinth and binds him into protecting a filicide should she succeed in reaching Athens herself, Athens’ alliance with Corcyra can be similarly described: her alliance with brought her into conflict with the Corinthians and amounted to Athens offering to protect a ‘filicide’ since Corcyra, as the mother-city of the colony Epidamnus, had chosen to wage war against her own ‘children’. On a basic level, then, one may read the Aegeus scene as absolving Athenians of what proved to be a destructive alliance: Athenians didn’t know what ‘Medea’ would go on to do, and her rhetorical sophistication, no less than that of Thucydides’ Corcyraeans, made it impossible to resist an alliance which seemed to offer security for the future – children for Aegeus in the mythic plot, and alleged safety for Athens’ children in the face of an inevitable war. Building on this apparent correspondence between mythic plot and historical background, this article will argue for further points of convergence between Euripides’ handling of the myth and the play’s historical moment as recounted by Thucydides. It will also consider the implications of its interpretation for ongoing debates about the political function of Athenian tragedy, emphasizing the importance of fine-grained attention to historical temporality when reconstructing the salient (geo-)political horizons for a given play.
The passages that formed the basis of the article on Theseus and Decelea.
All the passages that went into the article.
Extended HO of paper given at the biennial conference of the Classical Association of South Afric... more Extended HO of paper given at the biennial conference of the Classical Association of South Africa, 24 November 2023
M. Kõiv et al. (eds.), Crisis in Early Religion, Universal- und kulturhistorische Studien. Studies in Universal and Cultural History,, 2022
Cambridge Companion to Thucydides ed. by Polly Low, 2023
Herodotus Encyclopedia, 2021
Offprint version. This entry in The Herodotus Encyclopedia (ed. C. Baron, Wiley, 2021) rehearses ... more Offprint version. This entry in The Herodotus Encyclopedia (ed. C. Baron, Wiley, 2021) rehearses the evidence adduced for dating the publication of Herodotus’ Histories, both as oral performance and written text, considering testimony from the biographical tradition, purported allusions to Herodotus in Attic drama and Thucydides, and finally the evidence from the Histories themselves. It goes on to summarize the case for the extant text’s knowledge of the very last years of the Atheno-Peloponnesian Wars, and addresses the possibility of revised re-publication.
Interpreting Herodotus, 2018
in R. Rollinger (ed), Weltbild und Welterfassung zwischen Ost und West / Worldview and World Conc... more in R. Rollinger (ed), Weltbild und Welterfassung zwischen Ost und West / Worldview and World Conception between East and West. Papers of an international conference in honor of Reinhold Bichler, held in Obergurgl, Tyrol, 19-22 June, 2013. Classica et Orientalia (Harrasowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden)
Uploads
Papers by ei42@columbia.edu Irwin
This article explores the relationship of Euripides’ Medea to the politics of 431 BC and the outbreak of the Atheno-Peloponnesian war. It begins by suggesting suggesting that details of the entirely unmotivated entrance of Aegeus into the plot allow certain correspondences to be drawn with the political situation contemporary with the play’s performance. I argue that the explicitly circumscribed alliance Aegeus makes with Medea (ll. 720-730) can be read as a mythic recounting of the unusual defensive alliance that Athens forged with Corcyra (Thuc. 1.44.1). Just as Aegeus’ pact with Medea will in future place him and Athens at odds with Corinth and binds him into protecting a filicide should she succeed in reaching Athens herself, Athens’ alliance with Corcyra can be similarly described: her alliance with brought her into conflict with the Corinthians and amounted to Athens offering to protect a ‘filicide’ since Corcyra, as the mother-city of the colony Epidamnus, had chosen to wage war against her own ‘children’. On a basic level, then, one may read the Aegeus scene as absolving Athenians of what proved to be a destructive alliance: Athenians didn’t know what ‘Medea’ would go on to do, and her rhetorical sophistication, no less than that of Thucydides’ Corcyraeans, made it impossible to resist an alliance which seemed to offer security for the future – children for Aegeus in the mythic plot, and alleged safety for Athens’ children in the face of an inevitable war. Building on this apparent correspondence between mythic plot and historical background, this article will argue for further points of convergence between Euripides’ handling of the myth and the play’s historical moment as recounted by Thucydides. It will also consider the implications of its interpretation for ongoing debates about the political function of Athenian tragedy, emphasizing the importance of fine-grained attention to historical temporality when reconstructing the salient (geo-)political horizons for a given play.
This article explores the relationship of Euripides’ Medea to the politics of 431 BC and the outbreak of the Atheno-Peloponnesian war. It begins by suggesting suggesting that details of the entirely unmotivated entrance of Aegeus into the plot allow certain correspondences to be drawn with the political situation contemporary with the play’s performance. I argue that the explicitly circumscribed alliance Aegeus makes with Medea (ll. 720-730) can be read as a mythic recounting of the unusual defensive alliance that Athens forged with Corcyra (Thuc. 1.44.1). Just as Aegeus’ pact with Medea will in future place him and Athens at odds with Corinth and binds him into protecting a filicide should she succeed in reaching Athens herself, Athens’ alliance with Corcyra can be similarly described: her alliance with brought her into conflict with the Corinthians and amounted to Athens offering to protect a ‘filicide’ since Corcyra, as the mother-city of the colony Epidamnus, had chosen to wage war against her own ‘children’. On a basic level, then, one may read the Aegeus scene as absolving Athenians of what proved to be a destructive alliance: Athenians didn’t know what ‘Medea’ would go on to do, and her rhetorical sophistication, no less than that of Thucydides’ Corcyraeans, made it impossible to resist an alliance which seemed to offer security for the future – children for Aegeus in the mythic plot, and alleged safety for Athens’ children in the face of an inevitable war. Building on this apparent correspondence between mythic plot and historical background, this article will argue for further points of convergence between Euripides’ handling of the myth and the play’s historical moment as recounted by Thucydides. It will also consider the implications of its interpretation for ongoing debates about the political function of Athenian tragedy, emphasizing the importance of fine-grained attention to historical temporality when reconstructing the salient (geo-)political horizons for a given play.