The Boeotians, in holding hostage the corpses in return for the holy places, were showing a far greater degree of impiety than those who were not willing to hand over the sanctuaries to get back that which they had a proper right to recover. And they [the Athenians] further made it clear to the Boeotians they must allow them to take up their own dead, not “on the condition that they leave the land of Boeotia” (for they were no longer in the Boeotian territory, but rather occupying land that they had won by the spear), but rather “in accordance with the ancestral protocols of making a truce.”
The deadlock lasted seventeen days, until the Boeotians brought in more reinforcements from their allies and formally besieged the trapped Athenian refugees in Delium. They crafted an enormous flamethrower of sorts—a hollowed-out beam through which they blasted a pressurized concoction of sulfur, coal, and pitch to send out a jellied flame into the Athenian breastworks. Quickly the garrison went up in flames. The terrified Athenians boarded ships to evacuate the sanctuary, leaving behind another two hundred incinerated Athenians.
The sordid aftermath of an accidental battle was at last over.
Euripides and the Rotting Dead
Given soldiers’ long established tendency to desecrate the enemy dead—from Xerxes’ mutilation of Spartans at Thermopylae (480 B.C.) to the Japanese and less frequent American disembowelment of fallen soldiers on Okinawa—the Boeotians’ failure to hand over immediately hundreds of Athenians who perished at Delium ranks rather low in history’s scale of atrocity. Thousands of Aztecs, for example, were simply dumped in Lake Texcoco by Cortés’s victorious conquistadors to decompose—while the Aztecs themselves often butchered the Castilians in gruesome rites of human sacrifice, eating parts of the corpses and then flaying the skins of what was left of the unfortunate Spanish remains. After the siege of Cyprus in the months before the battle of Lepanto, the Ottomans skinned and stuffed some of the captured Venetians. Fragments of thousands of arms, legs, and torsos were unearthed from the pulverized earth of Verdun for decades, as carnage from the anonymous howitzer shells of the First World War trumped the sacrilege toward the battle dead inflicted by history’s worst killers.
Yet under the accepted conditions of Greek infantry warfare, the failure of the Boeotians to hand over the corpses immediately after the battle was considered an outrage for the times. The Athenians thought it a crime against the very nomima—or unwritten “laws” of the Greeks—that guaranteed that the dead were to be returned for an honorable burial upon the conclusion of battle. “The proper observance holds together all human communities,” Euripides wrote of the Greek practice of returning the battle dead for burial.
Other factors contributed to the sense of outrage over the Boeotians’ defilement. The Athenian soldiers had fallen on the borders of Attica itself—neither at sea nor in some distant land. The violation of kin rotting within a day’s march of the Athenian acropolis further inflamed the citizenry back home. Moreover, the dead were not simply desecrated and then abandoned. Rather, they were held hostage as pawns to broker an Athenian exit from the garrison of Delium itself.
Over a year after the battle, probably during the spring Athenian festival in honor of the god Dionysus in either 423 or 422 B.C., the poet Euripides reopened onstage the painful and humiliating wound of the aftermath to Delium. While there is always controversy and uncertainty over the degree of allusion within Greek tragedy to contemporary political events, most critics agree that Euripides’ Suppliants was offered to the Athenian citizenry as an occasion to assuage the recent trauma of Delium. The Suppliants is one of Euripides’ nineteen extant plays—he purportedly wrote over ninety—and its presentation is explicable only within the larger context of the shame of Delium months earlier, and the stunning “violation of what all Greece holds to be lawful.”
By the early fifth century B.C., the best of Greek tragedy had become central to the civic life of classical Athens. The city’s most accomplished playwrights each spring presented dramas as part of the festival of the City Dionysia, the annual honorific pageant to the god Dionysus. The rules of dramatic presentation grew more or less to be standardized: each finalist in the competition presented at public expense three dramas and a fourth semicomic “satyr-play.” A panel of ten judges awarded prizes for excellence among the three finalist playwrights. The plays themselves lasted not much over an hour. They usually ranged from between a thousand and seventeen hundred lines—all chanted and sung in various rhythmic meters, making the productions somewhat akin to modern opera. Dialogue was interspliced with four or more choral odes set to music. No more than three actors were present at one time on the stage. All actors were male. And the train of nonspeaking actors and large choruses amid elaborate sets made a profound visual impression on the audience in the open-air amphitheater below the acropolis.
The theme and scope of Athenian tragedies were equally stereotyped: the playwright typically resurrected a standard heroic myth known to all the audience—the Trojan War saga, the house of Oedipus, or perhaps the grim stories surrounding the great heroes such as Theseus, Jason, Perseus, or Heracles. The script stayed fairly true to the well-known legends. The dramatists did not radically alter the received outlines of the myth: Jason and Medea could not be reconciled, Antigone would not be saved, nor Oedipus spared his eyes. But the actual dialogue, characterization, and action of the tragedies gave the playwright ample leeway to comment on issues and controversies of the fifth century germane to the contemporary world of the Athenian audience—thinly disguised, of course, beneath a mythic veneer.
New awareness over the role of stalwart women in Athenian society of the mid-fifth century, for example, might prompt Sophocles to rework the Antigone myth to create a strong female who was the moral superior of every male in her midst. The passing of an old generation of Athenian antidemocratic and heroic figures finds resonance in the uncompromising stance of Sophocles’ Ajax or Philoctetes. Euripides laments the ongoing repercussions of the Peloponnesian War upon civilians by recreating the suffering of the innocent mothers and sisters of fallen Trojans; his Trojan Women was staged in 415 B.C., a few months after the final Athenian slaughter and enslavement of the neutral Melians.
In any case, in 422 B.C., Euripides chose to rework the mythical attack by seven heroes on ancient Thebes to present commentary on the recent disaster at Delium, the nature of Athenian society, and the unique differences between Athens and her Peloponnesian War antagonists. In The Suppliants—named for the chorus of mothers of the dead Argives who seek the return of the corpses of their sons—both of Athens’s contemporary adversaries are castigated in no uncertain terms: Thebans are odious folk who “are violent and deprive the dead of their due burial,” while “Sparta is savage and duplicitous in its character.”
Euripides’ audience knew intimately the general outline of the traditional myth of the Seven against Thebes. The exiled son of the blinded and discredited Oedipus, Polynices, gathers six champions from Argos to help reclaim the kingdom of Thebes from his brother Eteocles. The seven attackers march northward only to be soundly defeated while scaling the walls of Thebes. The sibling rivals Polynices and Eteocles kill each other in battle; King Creon, the new regent, then decrees that Polynices and his dead companions from Argos are to be denied proper burial—postmortem punishment for the insurrectionists’ introduction of civil strife into Thebes.
Aeschylus and Sophocles also had resurrected the same general myth for their own various purposes of civic enlightenment. The Antigone of Sophocles, for example, instead focused on the sister of the two slain brothers, Antigone, and her valiant attempt to bury Polynices—presenting the imperial Athenians with the growing dilemma between what is moral (the time-honored custom of burying the dead) and what is legal (Creon’s edict to ensure postmortem punishment to the invaders). Aeschylus’s even earlier Seven Against Thebes emphasizes the inevitable course of events that follows hubris, folly, and sin, as the failed attack on Thebes is proper punishment for the tragic flaws of the seven invaders while the crime of the victors of exposing the dead in turn will prompt a second—and successful—return by the children of the slain.
Yet for Euripides the old myth conjured up the new dual themes of the antidemocratic nature of Thebes and the burying of the dead—specifically the opportunity to offer a timely commentary on the recent disastrous battle with the Boeotians in 424 B.C. and the reassurance to the audience that they nevertheless had enjoyed a long-held moral superiority over the Thebans: although they had recently won a battle, the Boeotians remained the historic moral inferiors of the Athenians.
In his play, the Seven attack Thebes for the cause of justice in precisely the same manner as had Athenian democrats in 424 B.C. The Argive mothers of the dead (the “suppliants” who make up the eponymous chorus of the play) travel along with their king Adrastus to Attica to beg King Theseus of Athens to help in forcing the Thebans to return the bodies of their fallen: “The mothers wish to bury in the earth the corpses of those destroyed by the spear,” Aethra, mother of Theseus, reminds her son. After some wrangling and being pressured by his mother, Theseus consents to the Argives’ request. “Save the corpses, take pity of my misfortunes, and on the mothers whose children have been slain,” Adrastus, king of Argos, begs Theseus.
In the first half of the play Euripides takes pains to emphasize that unlike the Thebans, the Athenian Theseus operates in a democratic society (“a city based on an equal vote”). Therefore, before mustering the army he must seek the ratification of the Assembly. In an exchange with a Theban herald, Theseus reminds the audience that the rule of law and equality are innate to the Athenian character—and Athens’s sense of justice should properly extend across the borders of Attica. His motherland is thus bound to intervene in the affairs of other Greek cities to ensure justice for the oppressed: Athens will suffer much in the process but therein win great “good fortune.” Euripides presents the audience with the proposition that Athenians went into Boeotia—both in the mythical past and the horrific present—as benign rather than grasping imperialists, and to bring the civilizing aura of good government to the backward and uncivilized Boeotians.
“The city,” Theseus further boasts of Athens to the Boeotian herald, “is not governed by a single man, but is free. And the people themselves rule, and the offices are held by annual turns. Nor does the citizenry assign the highest honors to the rich, but the poor also have an equal share.” The theatergoers—many of them no doubt surviving veterans of the disastrous Delium campaign—are not so subtly reminded that a little over a year prior they, along with their fathers, brothers, and sons, were in Boeotia fighting oligarchy and attempting to extend democracy to the peasants of Boeotia.
In a final long messenger’s speech (most all action in Greek drama occurs offstage and is reported by heralds and messengers), we learn that Theseus and his Athenian hoplites are successful in defeating Creon and the Thebans. They recover the Argive bodies and in general demonstrate the morality and strength of democratic Athens. In his battle report the Athenian messenger also recounts how Theseus routed Creon’s forces in a manner that makes the mythical Athenian victory almost follow the course of the contemporary defeat at Delium. Thus recently vanquished Athenians in the audience are reminded by Euripides that their mythical ancestors fought identically as they did and for a similarly noble cause.
The messenger in addition relates that Theseus and the elite held the place of honor on the right wing in the fanciful battle just as the general Hippocrates and his cohorts had led the Athenian right at Delium. The Athenian left—as also was true at Delium—was overwhelmed by the weight of King Creon and the Theban right. Euripides says of the mythical fight that since both right wings of the respective adversaries were victorious it was “a struggle evenly balanced.” As the audience knew, so for a time had been the recent fighting at Delium.
At this point in the play the description of the battle must undergo the expected reversal from recent history: the audience is to be reminded not of Athens’ recent inglorious defeat, but rather of its ancestral victory. Euripides thus has Theseus and his Athenians on the right—not the Thebans, as actually happened at Delium—send a relief squad to their beleaguered left wing: “making their way over to the struggling wing of the army.” Thereupon King Theseus routs the Theban right, the entire Theban army then collapses, and the Athenians chase the defeated right into the city of Thebes itself—in precisely the manner that Pagondas at Delium had sent a relief squadron over to panic the victorious Athenian right wing, to shatter the morale of the entire army, and then to cause a general rout all the way back into Attica.
In the mythical world of The Suppliants, Euripides has nearly replicated the Theban tactics, but now transposed Athenians for Thebans—and thus before the defeated Athenians in the audience he has reinvented a magnificent victory! We moderns find such contorted reinterpretation of recent history bizarre if not farcical, but nevertheless we should remember that it is not a practice exclusive to the ancients. The Soviets broadcast films of the defeat of the Teutonic knights to remind their people of their recent victory over the Nazis, just as Hitler promised a final German victory in the manner of Frederick the Great’s dramatic and unexpected resurgence against his numerically superior enemies. Ostensibly a mythical tragedy, The Suppliants ends positively for the Athenians in a way the tragedy of Delium of course did not.
The Suppliants concludes with a prophecy of the goddess Athena that the sons of the Seven, the so-called Epigonoi, will return to Thebes to avenge their fathers’ deaths, sack the city, and thereby obtain everlasting immortality. Euripides’ forecast is clear: just as the Argives at first failed to take Thebes and then were avenged by their victorious sons, so too the Athenians will raise another generation to wreak havoc on Thebes for their treatment of their dead elders.
The Suppliants can be seen partly as catharsis and partly as morale-building for the Athenians, mired in the eighth year of what would prove to be a twenty-seven-year war and recently reeling over the tragic destruction of their army a few miles from the theater itself. Unfortunately, unlike their mythical ancestors, no Athenian army arose to exact revenge for the desecrated dead.
To Euripides, both in the past and during the Peloponnesian War, Thebans had predictably shown a propensity to transgress the laws of the Greeks and dishonor the battle dead. Thucydides says that the Athenians who trekked across the border were the older men of the citizenry, a sort of home guard who had not quite expected to encounter the crack infantry of Thebes. Euripides perhaps had that tragic notion of an ad hoc muster in mind when he makes the Theban herald remark of democratic armies: “Whenever the issue of war comes before a vote of the people, no one reckons on his own death; that misfortune, he thinks, will come to others than himself. If death stood before his eyes as he cast his vote, Greece would not be self-destructing from a madness for the spear.”
While The Suppliants is not considered to rank among Euripides’ tragic masterpieces such as Hippolytus, Bacchae, Medea, or Trojan Women, it nevertheless contains some of the most striking paeans to Athens and the ideal of democracy in extant Greek literature. In that sense, The Suppliants remains a fountainhead of expression for the core values of Western culture. Moreover, rarely do Greek authors so cogently explain why the middle class—mostly the group of Athenian infantrymen who marched out to Thebes—is the glue that holds together any consensual society. “There are,” Theseus proclaims, “three classes of citizens. The rich are of no use and always lusting after more gain; the poor who lack a livelihood are dangerous folk, who invest too much in envy, trying to goad the rich, as they are hoodwinked by the tongues of wicked leaders. But of these three classes those in the middle save states, since they preserve the order which the city has established.” And the mythical Theseus (at a dramatic date centuries before democracy) brags further of contemporary democratic institutions at Athens: “Freedom is simply this: Who has a good proposal and wishes to bring it before the citizenry? He who does so, enjoys repute, while he who does not merely keeps silent. What can be more just for a city than this?”
What prompted this rare tribute to democracy and middle-class egalitarian culture in large part was the now forgotten battle and macabre fate of hundreds of Athenian citizens on a November afternoon along the Attic border. Quite simply, we owe the very existence of Euripides’ Suppliants to the memory of the dead of Delium, and the sense of moral outrage over the transgression of the protocols of civilization itself. The Athenians, the historian Aelian tells us, as self-appointed custodians par excellence of Hellenic civilization, uniquely observed a law that required anyone coming upon an unburied corpse to bury it—and they seemed especially sensitive to any charge that the battle dead were left unattended.
Some eighteen years after Delium, in the aftermath of the last and greatest Athenian sea victory of the Peloponnesian War at Arginusae (406 B.C.), the democracy itself executed several of its own victorious commanders on grounds that they had been derelict in recovering the bodies of their own Athenian dead. On the eve of that battle at Arginusae, a soon-to-be-executed general had experienced a dream in which he and his companions in command were in the theater at Athens watching competitors put on Euripides’ Suppliants—a clear warning to him of things to come the next morning when the victorious commanders were nevertheless condemned for not burying the dead. As Theseus sums up the morality of proper burial and custom, “Let the dead be covered by the earth, and let each thing return to that place from whence it came into the light of day, the spirit of a man to the upper air, his body back into the earth. For we do not possess our bodies altogether as our own: we live our lives in them and then the earth, our nourisher, must take them back.”
I leave it to literary critics to judge the lasting importance of Euripides’ Suppliants in comparison to both the playwright’s body of work and the history of European drama in general. Yet the ripples of Delium perhaps did more than just prompt this single Greek tragedy. As the first bloody hoplite battle of the Peloponnesian War, and one fought in the environs of Athens itself, Delium helped shape Euripides’ developing disgust over the war—and his growing propensity to use his drama to critique contemporary culture even in Athens’s darkest hours. In that sense the rotting dead were not forgotten, but were catalysts that helped the playwright define a peculiarly Western tradition of writers, artists, and intellectuals, freely saying what they pleased about the conduct of atrocity in their midsts.