City of Suppliants: Tragedy and the Athenian Empire (Ashley and Peter Larkin Series in Greek and Roman Culture) (Hardback)
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Short Description for City of Suppliants With close readings of suppliant dramas by each of the major playwrights, this book explores how Greek tragedy used tales of foreign supplicants to promote, question, and negotiate the imperial ideology of Athens as a benevolent and moral ruling city
Full description- Publisher: University of Texas Press
- Published: 16 August 2012
- Format: Hardback 236 pages
- See: Full bibliographic data
- Categories: Literary Studies: Classical, Early & Medieval | Literary Studies: Plays & Playwrights | European History | Classical History / Classical Civilisation
- ISBN 13: 9780292737167 ISBN 10: 0292737165
- Sales rank: 1,065,476
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Full description for City of Suppliants
After fending off Persia in the fifth century BCE, Athens assumed a leadership position in the Aegean world. Initially it led the Delian League, a military alliance against the Persians, but eventually the league evolved into an empire with Athens in control and exacting tribute from its former allies. Athenians justified this subjection of their allies by emphasizing their fairness and benevolence towards them, which gave Athens the moral right to lead. But Athenians also believed that the strong rule over the weak and that dominating others allowed them to maintain their own freedom. These conflicting views about Athens' imperial rule found expression in the theatre, and this book probes how the three major playwrights dramatized Athenian imperial ideology. Through close readings of Aeschylus' Eumenides, Euripides' Children of Heracles, and Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, as well as other suppliant dramas, Angeliki Tzanetou argues that Athenian tragedy performed an important ideological function by representing Athens as a benevolent and moral ruler that treated foreign suppliants compassionately. She shows how memorable and disenfranchised figures of tragedy, such as Orestes and Oedipus, or the homeless and tyrant-pursued children of Heracles were generously incorporated into the public body of Athens, thus reinforcing Athenians' sense of their civic magnanimity. This fresh reading of the Athenian suppliant plays deepens our understanding of how Athenians understood their political hegemony and reveals how core Athenian values such as justice, freedom, piety, and respect for the laws intersected with imperial ideology.
