EMPIRE AND ITS DISCONTENTS:
TROJAN WOMEN, BZRDS, AND THE SYMBOLIC
ECONOMY OF ATHENIAN IMPERIALISM
DAVID ROSENBLOOM
Introduction and overview
In recent years, scholars have developed a variety of models to understand the relationship
tragedy and comedy bear to the political discourses and practices of fifth-century Athens.
Central to nearly all of them is the proposition that theatrical performances are ‘interrogative’.’ Dramatic performances at Athens question polis ideology and practice within the
context of their simultaneous realization and relaxation at civic festivals.* Theatre is a form
of civically authorized interrogation; and engaged spectatorship of it is a component of
~ i t i z e n s h i p .Yet
~ the essential problem, as Jonathan Dollimore has starkly phrased it with
I
For C. Belsey, Critical practice (London 1980) 92, an interrogative text ‘refuses a single point of view
... but brings points of view into unresolved collision or contradiction ... and no authorial or
authoritative discourse points to a single position which is the place of the coherence of meaning’. This
is particularly useful for drama, which lacks a clearly marked authorial voice. Belsey (90-102) further
defines ‘declarative’ texts as imparting knowledge and ‘stabilizing’ the reader’s position and
‘imperative’ texts as issuing commands, unifying its readers in a struggle with an ‘outside’ (91). Belsey
notes that all three ‘texts’ can be present in a single work.
2 For tragedy, J.-P. Vemant, ‘Tensions and ambiguities in Greek tragedy’, in J.-P. Vemant and P. VidalNaquet, Myth a d tragedy in ancient Greece, trans. J. Lloyd (New York 1988)29-48 (33) and C. Segal,
‘Greektragedy and society’, in Interpreting Greek tragedy: myth, poetry, text (Ithaca NY 1985) 2 1-47
(24-25,41) are fundamental. See also S.Goldhill, ‘The Great Dionysia and civic ideology’, in Nothing
to do with Dionysos? Athenian drama in its social context, ed. J. J. Winkler and F. I. Zeitlin (Princeton
1990)97-129; ‘Civic ideology and the problem of difference: the politics of Aeschylean tragedy, once
again’, JHS 120 (2000) 34-56; C. Pelling, ‘Conclusion’, in Greek tragedy and the historian, ed.
C. Pelling (Oxford 1997) 224-35; Literary texts and the Greek historian (London 2002) 178-88.
N. T. Croally, Euripideanpolemic: the Trojan Women and the function of tragedy (Cambridge 1994)
17-47, combines interrogative and didactic models: ‘... tragedy performs its didactic function by
examining ideology otherwise’ (42). R. Seaford, Reciprocity and ritual: Homer and tragedy in the
developing city-state (Oxford 1994) 363-67, doubts interrogation is a function of tragedy per se,
viewing it as inherent in myth and to a lesser extent, in ritual. I am not certain that myth and ritual can
be abstracted from tragedy as autonomous functions.
3 See Pelling, ‘Conclusion’ (see n. 2 above) 235. J. Ober, Political dissent in democratic Athens
(Princeton 1998) 122-55, sees comedy as institutionalized criticism of the status quo. J. Henderson,
‘The Demos and comic competition,’ in Nothing to do with Dionysos? (see n. 2 above) 271-314;
‘Comic hero versus political elite’, in Tragedy, comedy, and the polis, ed. A. H. Somrnerstein et al.
(Bari 1993) 307-19 views comedy as institutionalizedcriticism of the elite to empower the dgmos. Cf.
C. Carey, ‘Comic ridicule and democracy’, in Ritual, finance, and politics: Athenian democratic
accountspresented to David Lewis, ed. R. Osborne and S. Hornblower (Oxford 1994) 69-83.
245
246
GREEK DRAMA 111
reference to Renaissance drama - ‘did these plays reinforce the dominant order, or do they
interrogate it to the point of subversion?’ - remains elusive?
One way to develop an answer is to focus on elements of ideology and practice that
theatrical performances value or preserve. Mark Griffith, concentrating on the Oresteia,
argues that tragedy achieves ‘solidarity without consensus’ across social classes in the
valuation of elite persons and institutions; further, he suggests, based upon readings of the
Persians and Anfigone, that the genre vests authority in and seeks to rehabilitate the figure of
the father-l~ing.~
We might say that drama interrogates and integrates pre-democratic and
potentially anti-democratic forms of authority and power into the democratic and imperial
order of the polis; its subversions are acts of conservation. This paper examines two cases in
point: Euripides’ Trojan Women and Aristophanes’ Birds. Performed at successive City
Dionysia in 415 and 414 BC at a critical moment in Athenian history - the eve and the
midpoint of the invasion of Sicily - both plays can be read as subversive texts, symmetrical
but generically opposed performances of Athenian communal identity and practice. The
Trojan Women laments and memorializes the extinction of a society constructed upon an
alliance of self-sufficient and aristocratic households as the cost of naval imperialism.6The
Birds enacts and trumps the city’s imperialist desire only to reconstruct the tyranny of such
an oikos in the cosmos. Both plays subvert the city’s political order by valorizing the form of
hegemony that democracy and naval imperialism superseded - the solidarity of small and
J. Dollimore. Radical tragedy: religion, ideology, and power in the drama of Shakespeare and his
contemporaries,2nd edn (Durham NC 1993) xxi. acknowledging over-simplification. Many consider
the staging of subversive voices a tactic to contain them within the dominant order. See S.Greenblatt,
‘Invisible bullets: Renaissance authority and its subversion, Henry IV and Henry V‘, in Political
Shakespeare: new essays in cultural materialism, ed. J. Dollimore and A. Sinfield (Manchester 1985)
1847. For Attic tragedy, see V. Wohl, Intimate commerce: exchange, gender, and subjectivity in Greek
Tragedy (Austin TX 1998) 100-17; cf. Seaford, Reciprocity and ritual (see n. 2 above) 327.
5 M. Griffith, ‘Brilliant dynasts: power and politics in the Oresteia’, ClAnt 14 (1995) 62-129 (109-10);
‘The King and Eye: the rule of the father in Greek tragedy’, PCPS 44 (1998) 20-84.
6 By self-sufficiency, I mean a psychological relationship to property: ‘my property is sufficient to give
me what is sufficient to me’ (rh pEv yhp t p k ... k a v k Larrv tpoi rrapEXeiv r h Lpoi aproCvta.
Xen. Oec. 2.2.4; cf. Hes. Op. 342-67). The minimum condition for a self-sufficient oikos is the
production of one’s own food, and not merely the capacity to exchange for it (Ar. Pol. 1257b 10-22,
1258a 18-58b 9). See M. M. Austin and P.Vidal-Naquet, Economic and social history of ancient
Greece: an introduction (London 1977) 13-17, 40-47. The aristocratic oikos is self-sufficient,
4
supplemented by noble birth, education, fame, public gratitude, and so on. See,e.g., Andoc. 1.146-47;
Arist. Pol. 1291b 28-30. Seaford, Reciprocity and ritual (see n. 2 above), observes in connection with
the Antigone that ‘although the self-destruction of an introverted ruling family can only benefit a
democratic polis, as theatre audience the polis acquires emotional cohesion by lamenting this selfdestruction’ (364). He explains this ‘paradox’ as a hold-over from hero-cult. I take the object of such
lament to be the costs of the polis-order itself, and consider it resistance to the pressures democratic
imperialism exerted on the oikos to convert its substance to the public sphere or to allow its destruction.
The governing value of tragedy is that ‘the eye of the house may not fall to total ruin’ (A. Ch. 933-34).
The Eurnenides celebrates the polis as it preserves Orestes’ oikos, returns him to the ‘land of his
fathers’, and restores his patrimony (754-60).
DAVID ROSENBLOOM: EMPIRE AND ITS DISCONTENTS
241
large landholders, farmers and aristocrats, based upon self-sufficiency, inheritance, marriage,
and the hoplite defence of the land.’
On the eve of the invasion of Sicily, when ‘desire fell upon all alike’ (Thuc. 6.24.3-4; cf.
13.1, 33.2) to invade Sicily in a gambit to ‘rule all Hellas’ (6.18.4) and to extend empire to
its western limits - Southern Italy and Carthage (15.2,34.2; 90.3; 7.66.2; cf. Ar. Eq. 173-74,
1300- 15; Vesp. 700) - Euripides staged a ‘tragedy of empire’.’’ The Trojan Women depicts
imperialist violence as the destruction and enslavement of the ‘other’ which mirror the
alienation of the society that inflicts the violence, inviting the audience to experience the costs
of empire and to lament them with the Trojan women: the reduction of nobility to slavery; the
destruction of the oikos as it relates wife to husband, parents to children, living to dead, in
bonds of affection and ritual communication; the loss of patrimony and the annulment of the
aristocratic contest system, which includes hoplite warfare; the alienation of everything ‘one’s
own’ ( O ~ K E ~ C Lthe
) ; death of a city and of a culture. When Astyanax crowns his father’s shield
and fills a makeshift grave (1221-23, a type of oikos and the polis derived from it pass into
history as the ‘songs of future generations’ (1240-45).
Helen represents these costs. The drama frames the problem of Helen in terms of Athenian
naval imperialism, which traced its origin to the city’s liberation and salvation of Hellas
during the Persian Wars, but was viewed in Hellas as the equivalent of Persian despotism.
I use ‘hegemony’ in A. Gramsci’s sense: ‘the “spontaneous” consent given by the great masses of the
population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this
consent is “historically” caused by the prestige ... which the dominant group enjoys because of its
position ... in the world of production’, Selections from the prison notebooks, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare
and G. N. Smith (New York 197 1) 12; cf. 57, 18 1-82. See J. Williams, Marxism and literature (Oxford
1977) 105-14; T. Eagleton, Ideology: an introduction (London 1991) 1 12-23. For applications of the
concept to ancient Greek texts and rituals, see D. Rosenbloom, ‘From ponsros to pharmukos: theatre,
social drama, and revolution in Athens, 428-404 BCE, ClAnt 21 (2002) 284 n. 6, to which add,
V. Wohl, ‘Hegemony and democracy at the Panathenaia’, CdiM47 (1996) 25-88.
8 For the ‘erotics’ of the Sicilian invasion see V. Wohl. Love among the ruins: rhe erorics qfdemocracy
in classical Athens (Princeton 2002) 171-214. A. M. van Erp Taalman Kip, ‘Euripides and Melos’,
Mnemosyne 40 (1987) 414-19, argues that Euripides composed the Trojan Women before he knew the
outcome of the Melian campaign or the vote on the Sicilian expedition. They are not relevant to an
interpretationof the play. The lacunose record we possess does not warrant such confidence. One might
argue that the Melian campaign presupposed the invasion of Sicily and was a calculated message to the
home base that revolt during a western campaign would bring certain annihilation which Sparta was
powerless to prevent, and that this was a matter for public discussion while he composed his play. In
any case, we should interpret the meaning of the drama at its (known) time of performance, rather than
at its (unknown) time of composition, and adopt a broader concept of ‘meaning’ than ‘the author’s
intention at the time of composition’; cf. Croally. Euripidean polemic (see n. 2 above) 232 n. 170.
J. Roisman, ‘Contemporary allusions in Euripides’ Trojan Women’,SlFC 15 ( 1 997) 38-47 (43), infers
from the referencesto western locations at Tr. 202-29 that ‘the author shared with his contemporaries
in the excitement that preceded Athens’ most far-reaching act of military aggression’; cf. P. Green, ‘War
and morality in fifth-century Athens: the case of Euripides’ Trojan Women’,A HB 13 ( 1 999) 97- 1 10
(100). This neglects Cassandra’s prediction of Odysseus’ westward sufferings (435-44) and the fact that
the drama represents the horrors invasion inflicts on victors and vanquished alike. Moreover, the play’s
extra-dramatic world is ill-omened for an invasion: the gods will shatter the invaders’ fleet (48-97) and
their victims will achieve reciprocal vengeance (353-64, 403-05, 456-61). A play that re-writes the
tradition of the Trojan War as blame poetry for the Hellenes is difficult to interpret as an endorsement
of invasion.
7
248
GREEK DRAMA 111
Helen declares ‘her marriages’ the salvation, liberation, and security of Hellas (924-37), while
Hecabe defines the wealth, arrogant luxury, and power of eastern despotism as the object of
Helen’s desire (987-97, 1020-22; cf. 1168-70). Helen is a figure for exploring imperialist
desire, appropriation, and justification? Yet the Trojan Women blocks identification between
Athens and Helen, representing the transgressive desire for Paris’ wealth and power and its
catastrophic effects as doubly ‘other’- as both female and Spartan. Helen embodies the
objectives and costs of Athenian naval imperialism and distances the Athenians from them.
The object of desire who also plays out the transgressive and mimetic subjectivity of
imperialism, Helen maps the territory of the city’s ‘political unconscious’.’”
As the Trojan Women pits Helen’s claim to the liberation and defence of Hellas against
Hecabe’s charge that she desires and imitates eastern tyranny, it positions Athens in the drama
in relation to Salamis, site of the defence of Hellas that earned the city the title ‘saviours of
Hellas’ (Hdt. 7.139.3, evoking the location of the battle (799-803, 1089-99) and its
aftermath, Athens’ ascent under the power of Eros (804-45). The Athenian Acropolis towers
above toppled Troy in the play. Helen claims that she deserves a ‘crown’ (orC@wov)for
saving Hellas (937); Athens boasts a ‘heavenly crown and ornament’ (olip&v~ovo r l ~ a v o v
Arxapaiai <rc> K ~ I J ~ O V’AB&vai<803), the olive shoot that Athena revealed to defeat
Poseidon and to become the patron goddess of the city. The epithet ‘ricldglistening’
(Acrrcapai)and the olive shoot represent Athens as the hegemonic city of Hellas. The latter
evokes the city as protector of suppliants and avenger of the gods’ and Hellenes’ moral order.
It also suggests Athens’ rise to towering heights from the ashes of the Persian sack the shoot
blossomed the day after the Persians burned it (Hdt. 8.55).“
If the Trojan Women stages naval imperialism as tragedy, as the exchange of the best part
of the self for Helen, the Birds dramatizes it as comedy, the exchange of the worst part of the
self for Basileia, Zeus’ epikEros, to attain cosmic empire, to restore the birds’ sceptre, and
with it, a primordial world of pleasure, wealth, and fecundity - the very world destroyed and
lamented as extinct in the Trojan Women. The Birds recreates Troy as Nephelococcygia: it
returns ‘Phrygian slaves’ (522-23) to their ancestral kingship, rebuilds its walls to rival those
of Babylon (550-52, 1124-31; cf. Tr. 45-47, 814-19), reinstates its ‘celebrated name’ (dvopa
... TI p k y a K ~K AI E I V ~ V809-10; cf. Tr. 1277-78, 1319-22). and restores its ‘blessedness’in
a hieros gamos (1720-65; cf. Tr. 308-41, 365-66, 1168-70). The Birds enacts the Trojan
Women as comedy. The comic city in the air parallels, resists, excludes, and transcends the
Athenian empire. The worst part of the self exchanged for Basileia is the culture of Athenian
imperialism: its uses of tyranny as a commodity that both satisfies the desire for it and
Arrowsmith, ‘Aristophanes’ Birds: the fantasy politics of eros’,Arion I (1973) 119-67 (133-34).
sees Helen primarily as the object of imperialist desire.
10 For F. Jameson, The political unconscious: narrative as a socially symbolic act (Ithaca NY 198 1)
20, the function of the ‘political unconscious’ is to uncover a Marxist narrative of class struggles and
their outcomes, ‘restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental
history’. My terms differ: the ‘fundamental narratives’ involve overlapping hegemonic struggles
between Persia and Hellas, Athens and Sparta, and factions within the polis in which class is one
element.
I I For the klados of supplication, an olive branch crowned with wool, see A. Eu. 40-46. Such tokens
are ‘treasures’ (ay6Apara.A. Supp. 190-93). ‘Glisteninglrich’ (hxapai)evokes Athens’ defence of
Hellas at Salamis (Pi. fr. 76 [Snell]); cf. Ar. Ach. 633-40.
9 W.
DAVID ROSENBLOOM: EMPIRE AND ITS DISCONTENTS
249
imposes it upon others; its positioning of the agora and commodity exchange at the heart of
the city; its use of the courts to steal from ‘strangers’; its inspectors, decree-sellers,
sycophants, oracle-mongers, demagogues, sophists and nebulous poets. Peisetaerus plays
these roles to create a place where they cease to exist. What the Trojan Women dramatizes
as tragedy - the failure to kill Helen as a phumakos for imperialist violence, to celebrate a
blessed marriage, and to renew an oikoslpolis- the Birds accomplishes, scapegoating imperial
culture, celebrating a blessed marriage, and renewing an oikoslpolis.
The analysis below stresses the subversive qualities of these performances; but the Trojan
Women and the Birds can also be experienced as imperative or interrogative performances.
The tragedy presents Spartans and Peloponnesians as perpetrators of brutal violence against
Troy and the Trojan Women, galvanizing audience emotion against them, while representing
Athens as the Acropolis of civilization.12 The drama also has a powerful interrogative
dimension: if Hellenic freedom and barbarian slavery depend upon the annihilation of Troy
as a founding act, which itself transforms Hellenes into barbarians (764-65; cf. 265-67,
1158-66, 1189-91) and provokes divine retribution (48-97), is the distinction a mirage of
violence? Does a civilization which bases its freedom and mastery upon the rape, murder,
enslavement, and pillage of a barbarian ‘other’ undermine itself at its origins?
Aristophanes’ Birds allows a comparable pair of readings. The hero Peisetaerus performs
a quintessential Athenian act, controlling the food supply of gods and men, which he uses to
gain Zeus’ cosmic tyranny.” The reversal of the Athenians’ initial aim - they voluntarily leave
litigious Athens to find an uprugm6n ropos (30-45), but realize polyprugmosyneas a superlative form of hybris and tyranny, ‘having everything’ (153 1-43, 1574-1765),14and feast on
anti-democratic birds (1579-85) - provokes a question: is the imperialist urge part of Athenian
nature, the ‘tyrant that hybris spawns’? (S. OT 873-95; cf. Plato, Rep. 573c 3-5)ls
The order of operations in what follows is first to examine what I term the symbolic
economy of naval imperialism, the expenditure of what is ‘one’s own’ ( O ~ K C ~ C in
X ) exchange
12 See Roisman, ‘Contemporary allusions’ (see n. 8 above) 43-47, esp. 47. Cf. E. Hall, lnventing the
barbarian (Oxford 1988) 215-18.
1 3 Peisetaerus is often interpreted as a figure for Alcibiades. See Arrowsmith, ‘Fantasy politics of eros’
(see n. 9 above) 134-35, 140-45; K. J. Reckford, Aristophanes’Old and New Comedy (Chapel Hill NC
1987) 341-42; M. Vickers, Pericles on stage: political comedy in Aristophanes’earlier plays (Austin
TX 1997) 154-70.
14Pofypragmosym5isthe intervention in others’ affairs which diminishes their autonomy and honour,
to achieve self-interest, often with legal and institutional sanction. Athenian imperialism (lsoc. 8.108)
and litigiousness (Ar. Ach. 833; PI. 913) are its two primary expressions. See V. Ehrenberg,
‘Polypragmosynt?a study in Greek politics’, JHS 67 (1 947) 46-67; K. J. Dover, Greek popular morality
in the rime of Plato and Aristotle (Oxford 1974) 188-90; A. W. H. Adkins, ‘Polupragmosyne and
“minding one’s own business”: a study in Greek social and political values’, CP 7 1 ( 1 976) 301 -27. For
the apragm6n. see L. B. Carter, The quiet Athenian (Oxford 1986).
15 D. Konstan, ‘Birds’, in Greek comedy and ideology (Oxford 1995) 43-44 reads the Birds as an
interrogative text which enacts antithetical positions, the drive for imperial mastery and the yearning
for a disengaged life of pleasure and peace. Arrowsmith. ‘Fantasy politics of eros’ (see n. 9 above)
146-56, interprets the play as a ‘tragicomic’performance of the city’s desire for empire. Others read the
Birds as dystopia. See,e.g., T. K. Hubbard, ‘Utopianism and the sophistic city in Aristophanes’, in The
city as comedy: society and representation in Athenian drama, ed. G. Dobrov (Chapel Hill NC 1997)
23-49 (23-36).
250
GREEK DRAMA 111
for what is ‘someone else’s’ (ahh6rpia)which then must be converted into the sphere ‘one’s
own’ ( o k c i a )at a higher level, as a collective possession. Helen, the wife whose diversion
from her oikos defines the space of Hellas against that of the barbarian, embodies Hellenic
mastery over the barbarian as a ‘treasure’ (&yahpa).She is a figure for this economy which
enables the exploration of empire as a form of value. Next I turn to the debate between Helen
and Hecabe in the Trojan Women as a dramatization of the rhetoric of imperialist desire
through which claims of ‘natural necessity’ and of rational piety clash. The voices of the
‘Melian Dialogue’ flow through the debate, which performs the symbolic murder of Helen and
defence of Troy, but confirms Helen’s tragic necessity. From there, I assess the role of the
virgins Iphigenia and Cassandra in this economy as its initial and penultimate terms, the
expenditure of oikeia (Iphigenia) and the appropriation of allotria (Cassandra) as
compensation. In the Trojan Women, Cassandra subverts the economy of imperialism as the
alienation of all value. I then read the burial of Astyanax as a memorial to the extinction of
the hegemony of the self-sufficient and aristocratic oikos. Finally, I interpret the Birds as a
reversal and inversion of the Trojan Women, an enactment of imperialist desire which purges
it by nullifying its formulas for exchange, restoring to the centre of the cosmic order the
hegemony that the tragedy laments and memorializes. The comic hero takes over the cosmos
to recreate the oikos as its hegemonic institution.
Helen, or the symbolic economy of naval imperialism
In Thucydides’ funeral oration, Pericles enjoins citizens to regard the polis and its power they are indistinguishable- as if they were its lovers:
n 6 h c o ~66vaprv) daily in its reality and
regarding the power of the city (rqv r f j ~
becoming lovers of it (K& Cpaurh~yryvopdvoy aGrfjc),and whenever it seems to you
to be great, bearing in mind that men who dared and understood what they had to do and
who showed shame in their acts acquired these things. and that even when they failed in
an attempt at something, not for this reason did they think it right to deprive the city of
their excellence but expended the most beautiful contribution (Epavov) on it. (Thuc.
2.43.1-2)
Periclean imperialism is a form of investment: citizens regard the power of the city as its
lovers, realize its magnitude, recall that their ancestors devoted their arert? to it and made ‘the
most beautiful eranos’ - loan, favour, or contribution to it.I6 Then they imitate them. In
exchange for the lives and labours of citizens, the polis offers symbolic capital - ‘recognition
from the group’ - praise, glory, a memorial that transcends time and place, a narrative of
future generations (2.43.2-3,64.3-5).”
As the one woman for whom the Achaeans died in the Trojan War (e.g. A. Ag. 1455-58,
E. Tr. 368-69.780-8l), Helen occupies the place of the polisldynamis in Pericles’ formula for
expenditure and compensation, which itself derives from and surpasses the kleos of the Trojan
16For the reciprocity involved, see S. Monoson, ‘Citizen as erasfes:erotic imagery and the idea of
reciprocity in the Periclean funeral oration’, Polifical Theory 22 (1994) 253-76. For the eranos, see
P. Millett, Lending and borrowing in ancienf Arhens (Cambridge 1991) 153-59.
1 7 For ‘symbolic capital’ as ‘recognition from the group’, see P.Bourdieu, Language and symbolic
power, trans, G.Raymond and M. Adamson (CambridgeMA 1991) 72-76.
DAVID ROSENBLOOM: EMPIRE AND ITS DISCONTENTS
25 I
War (Athens’ empire exceeds Homer’s capacity as laudator, Thuc. 2.41.4). As the Achaeans
expended their lives and ‘most beautiful toils’ (E. Cyc. 603), the ‘toils of Troy’ that won ‘the
kleos of Troy’ ( T ~ O I K~hdos,
~ V E. Hel. 845, 1603), so the ponos of the Athenian fathers
constitutes the kleos of empire (2.36.2,62.3).” Helen is the exchange value of Achaean lives;
hence she uniquely ‘destroys souls (@x&s)’ (Ag. 1455-57, 1465-66; E. Tr. 1213- 15; Hel. 5253). Exchange value is conceived as the alienation or negation of use value.19
Helen is a form of value. More precisely, she is an agalrna, a ‘treasure’ (A. Ag. 741 ;cf. [A.]
PV466).” An agalmu is a monumental form of symbolic capital, a return on the expenditure
of vital energy (7~6~0s):
‘reverentponos is a beautiful treasure for cities and possesses gratitude
for eternity’ ( K ~ A c6‘>
~ V &yahpan6htm.v &GuepQqx6vos I x & p ~ t’
v E X E ~t h v Cs aici, E.
Su. 373-74):’ One ‘glories in’ (&y&hhopaL)an agalmu: it is a trophy of victory and an effigy
of the defeated. Hector ‘glories in’ the a m o u r of Achilles he stripped from Patroclus (If.
17.472-73; 18.130-33). An agalmu embodies the pride of victory, especially in war.”
As an agalrna, Helen symbolizes what the Hellenes possess and the barbarians lack:
freedom and mastery. She is the wife whose recovery means that Hellenic women are not
dragged from their homes, raped, and enslaved by barbarians (cf. E. / A 1378-82). Isocrates
claims that when Helen went to Troy, the Hellenes ‘were upset as if all Hellas had been
1 8 For the Trojan War as ponoslmochthos,see A. A g . 330,354,555,567,806; fr. 131 ; S. Aj. 1 185-91 ;
Ph. 1421-33; E. Cyc. 107 ( “ ~ w K o~~16~ 01)
282,347.350-52.603; cf. Tr. 873; IT 661; Hel. 703, 735,
1446; Hdt. 9.27.4. For Helen as giver of ponos, see E. Hel. 620-21 , cf. I9 1-212; Or. 1660-63. For
Helen’s ponos, see E. Andr. 680-8 1 ; Hel. 1 107-16.
19See Aristotle’s discussion of use and exchange values at Pol. 1256b 40-58b 9. Use value is ‘proper’
or ‘native’ ( O ~ K E ~ C to
C ) an object, exchange value is not ( O ~ O
K ~ K C ~ C Cthe
) ; latter is unlimited, while the
former is limited by nature and the needs of living well in the polis; ultimately food and coin are
opposed to one another as useful and useless components of wealth; cf. Achaeus fr. 25. See S. Meikle,
Aristotle’s economic thought (Oxford 1995) 43-86; R. K. Balot, Greed and injustice in classical Athens
(Princeton 2001) 34-44. In Hesiod’s myth of the origin of exchange value, the sacrificial offering to
Zeus, the parts devoted to the god are useless but disguised as sumptuous (Th. 535-41 ). A phurmakos
has an exchange value but is useless (Schol. Ar. E9. 1 136c; cf. Schol. Ra. 730). At Ar. Ach. 929-58,
the use value of a sycophant consists in exchange (i.e. he has no use value); cf. the pongroi at Ar. Ra.
718-37.
20 For the agalma as a form of value, see L. Gernet, ‘The mythical idea of value in ancient Greece’, in
Theanthropologyofancient Greece, trans. J. Hamilton and B. Nagy (Baltimore MD 1981) 73-1 1 I , esp.
100, ‘The finely wrought object that represents the thing full of magical properties and fulfills the
function of a talisman is in this instance the same object wherein one finds “economic” value’. See also,
L. Kurke, The traflc in praise: Pindar and the poetics of social economy (Ithaca NY 1991) 94-97.
Wohl, Intimate commerce (see n. 4 above) 83-99, argues that Helen functions as a ‘universal
equivalent’, embodying the commodity fetish and collapsing the difference between agalmu and
ploutos: she is pure exchange value devoid of value. Not all ploutos is exchange value, as fifth-century
usage and Aristotle’s analysis indicate. If Helen were pure exchange value, she could be spent/expelled
as a phurmakos;that she cannot is the tragedy of her form of value.
21 Cf. S. Ant. 703-04; E. Her. 357-58, 425-29. For the role of ponos in the formation of value, see
N. Loraux, ‘Ponos:some difficulties regarding the term for “labour”’, in The experiences of Tiresias:
the feminine and the Greek man, trans. P. Wissing (Princeton 1995) 44-58 (45); cf. J. -J. Goux,
Symbolic economies afer Marx and Freud, trans. J. C . Gage (Ithaca NY 1990) 59.
22 See Archil. 5.1, 128.4-5; cf. Ar. Pax 1298-99; E. Or. 1434-35. See further, 11. 12.1 13-15; 16.91;
Thuc. 2.44.2.63.1; 3.62.2.82.8; 4.95.3; 6.41.4. An agalma figures pride in one’s offspring or nature:
11. 2.462; 20.220-22; S. Ant. 1 1 15-17; E. Hec. 455-65; IT 272-74; Ades. Trag. fr. 126.
252
GREEK DRAMA Ill
sacked’ while the barbarians were ‘asproud as if they had dominated us all’ (10.49). Hellenes
and barbarians fought as partisans of Europe and Asia, ‘thinking that in whichever of the two
her body (&pa) resided, this land would be more prosperous’ ( E ~ % X L ~ O V ~ U T E51).
~ ~ VFor
,
Isocrates, ‘Helen is the reason [Hellenes] are not the slaves of the barbarians’ (67).
Agalmata begin as commodities -products of human labour and objects of exchange (Zl.
4.141-47) - but their period in circulation is brief. Once brought into the oikos from the
outside, like a wife (cf. E. Hipp. 630-33), an agalma occupies a fixed position that defines
both a value and a status: it is a K E I ~ ~ $ . ~ o va, bearer of prestige value and a symbol of rank
which others yearn to possess (Zl. 4.143-44). Anthropologists classify such objects as
‘enclaved’ or ‘~ingularized’.~~
Cultures limit their exchange, even as individuals and societies
seek to alienate them for private profit or communal benefit.24Only once in extant drama do
agalmata appear as objects for sale - in a comic fragment proclaiming the expensive fad of
raising quails ‘crazy’ - one could buy two agalmata for the cost (Anaxandrides fr. 29). In
epic, agalmata often fail as means of exchange.25In tragedy, they are objects of one-way or
‘terminal’ exchange: one transfers them to the dead (A. Ch. 200; E. Alc. 61 1-13;Her. 702-03;
Or. 1434-35), to a bride or groom (E. Tr. 1218-20; Hel. 1431-35), or to a victor (E. El.
866-73; Her. 425-35; Tr. 1210-15).26
The list of objects Pericles enjoins citizens to expend for the dynamislpolis also includes
their houses and land (1.143.5, 2.62.3) and their children, fathers, and brothers (2.44-45).
Pericles declares that if he thought he could persuade the Athenians to destroy their land and
houses to demonstrate their resistance to the Peloponnesians, he would do so ( I . 143.5). To
defend empire and its imperative never to yield to another requires the exchange or
destruction of objects that have no acceptable exchange values - house, land, family cult
(Thuc. 2.14-17). As Aristotle might put it, ‘these things have not come to be for the sake of
exchange’ (LAAayfjc EVCKEV, Pol. 1257a 13-14).
Pericles realizes that the pofis’ treasures might be spent in the defence of empire. He tries
to hearten the Athenians by listing them - five-hundred talents of un-coined gold and silver,
dedications to the gods, sacred implements for processions and contests, spoils from the
Persians, even the chryselephantine agalma of Athena, covered in forty talents of refined gold
- were available as money if required ‘for salvation’ (FXoorqpiq, Thuc. 2.13.4-6).Golden
agalmata of Athena Nike and other treasures were converted into money in the period
23 I.
Kopytoff, ‘The cultural biography of things: commoditization as a process’, in The social life of
things, ed. A. Appadurai (Cambridge 1986) 64-91 (83).
For culture and economy as exerting opposed pressures for singularization and exchange, see
Kopytoff, ‘The cultural biography of things’ (see n. 23 above) 72-77.
25 Od. 3.273-75; 4.600-02; 8.505-10; 12.345-47; 18.299-300. Od. 3.430-38 is the sole success; cf.
19.256-57. In tragedy, a virgin sacrifice i s an agalma: A. Ag. 208; cf. E. Hec. 558-62.
26 The most common form of agalma in the fifth century is the divine statue, especially as an object of
supplication or recipient of sacrifice,a substitute for the presence of a god: A. Th. 258,265; Eu. 155;
24
S.OT1378-79;E.Hipp. 116,1399;Andr. 115,246,859;IT87,112,997,1oOo,1014,1385,1441,
1448, 1480 Ph. 632. Ades. Trag. 117,618; Ar.Nu. 299-313. Agalmata also figure mindless bodies (E.
El. 387-88; fr. 282.10-1 1 ) or greed (Ar. Ec. 776-83; cf. Metagenes fr. 10). Like Helen, agalmata are
objects of theft (E. IT 87-92, 110-12, pass.; [E.] Rh. 498-502).
DAVID ROSENBLOOM: EMPIRE AND ITS DISCONTENTS
253
409-04.*’ Helen is a relevant figure: because she cannot be alienated, she transforms
everything else into a commodity.2x
During the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians retreated inside their walls and allowed the
Spartans and their allies to destroy their property rather than submit to their demands
(1.140-46, 2.13-22). Pericles’ strategy for defence is not merely the exchange of what should
not be exchanged. Its power consists in the capacity to renew the origins of empire in the act
of ‘destroying our own property (r& o k i a 6ta($B&ipavr&<)
rather than submitting to the
invading Persians’ (Thuc. 1.74.2; cf. 1.141.7; 2.21.2; 6.82.4). Such destruction is a
‘potlatch’.2y The Athenians ‘buy’ freedom, power, prosperity - the ‘honours’ (rrpai) of
empire’ - by allowing the destruction of their property (2.62.3).”) Athenian imperialism made
the widespread belief that ponoi ‘purchase’ or ‘give birth’ to symbolic capital its central
principle.3’ The principle subtends expenditure on the invasion of Sicily: ‘if one had
calculated the public expense of the city and the private expense of those going on campaign
... many talents in all would have been discovered taken out of the city’ (Thuc. 6.3 1.5). The
sum boggles Thucydides’ mind, but the principle is clear: naval empire is founded, justified,
defended, and expanded by the prodigious expenditure and destruction of wealth.32
The symbolic economy of Athenian naval imperialism - the destruction and expenditure
of ‘one’s own’ (ohceia) to acquire ’someone else’s’ (drkk6~pra)
as compensation, and then
to incorporate it into the polis as oikeiu, part of the collective ‘oikos’- has affinities with
potlatch.3’ This is a formula for ‘conversion’, the re-positioning of value from the private to
See L. Samons 11, The empire of the owl: Athenian imperialfinance. Historia Einzelschriften Heft
142 (Stuttgart 2000) 281-93.323-24.
28 For K. Marx, Capital, 3 vols, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York 1967) I, 60, a commodity
is an object with a use and an exchange value; cf. 35,41,47. Appadurai, ‘Commodities and the politics
of value’ (see n. 23 above) 3-63 (8-13)defines a commodity as ‘anything intended for exchange’ whose
exchangeability is a ‘socially relevant feature’. A commodity has a ‘phase’ when it is exchanged, a
propensity for exchange, and a context for exchange. See also Kopytoff, ‘The cultural biography of
things’ (see n. 23 above) 64-91.
29 For the potlatch, see M. Mauss, The gifr:forms andfunctions of exchange in archaic societies, trans.
1. Cunnison (New York 1967) 4,72. It also involves the xenoi Archidamus and Pericles: fearing that
27
Archidamus might leave his land intact, either as a favour or to create tension between himself and
Athenian landholders, Pericles allows his land to be destroyed or promises to donate it to the polis if
it is untouched (Thuc. 2.13. I).
30 Cf. Mauss, The g$t (see n. 29 above) 12.
31 See esp. ‘The gods sell all goods to us for ponoi’ (rOv x6vov ltwhoihv tjpiv ltavtcr thyae’oi
€ h i ,Ps. Epicharmus ap. Xen. Mem. 2.1.20).Cf. A. fr. 315; E. frs. 237.3. 474, 1052.7.
32 L. Kallet, Money and the corrosion ofpower in Thucydides (Berkeley CA 2001) 48-66, stresses the
antithesis between proper use and display of wealth in Thucydides’ narrative, but J would argue that
the identity of potlatch and rational expenditure is an original element of Athenian imperialism.
33 The word o i ~ c i a
designates property and persons belonging to an oikos; hence the word means
‘akin’, ‘one’s own’, and finally, ‘native’, ‘natural’ and ‘proper’. The term collapses the distinction
between socially constructednatural and privatdpolitical. Oikeia and politika are opposed (Thuc.
2.40.2;cf. 65.4);but collective assets and liabilities, such as land, power, interests, risks, expenditures,
freedom, wars are all oikeia in the sense of ‘shared by the polis’ (1.32.5, 60.1; 2.43.3, 87.6; 3.13.5,
39.8.45.2; 4.6.1.60.2, 120.3; 6.17.3).Oikeia and allotria are related dialectically. See T. K. Hubbard,
The Pindaric mind: a study of logical structure in early Greek poetry (Leiden 1985) 33-60. Cf. Kurke,
Traffic in praise (see n. 20 above) 21, on the ‘loop of nostos’ in epinician.
254
GREEK DRAMA 111
the public, from the oikos to the polis, from the sphere of short-term transactions, which serve
private pleasure and profit and can destabilize the community if not properly subordinated to
it, to the sphere of long-term transactions, which insure the well-being and prosperity of the
entire community.” ‘Desiring someone else’s property’ (txa0upCw Lh-Aorpiov) defines the
imperialist urge.35Expending oikeia to appropriate allotria and then to convert them to a
higher sphere of value as the oikeiu of the polis constitutes its economy.
Helen prefigures and justifies this economy: she is the oikeiu who becomes allotria and
must be made oikeia again, restored to her oikos, at a higher level, as symbolic capital for
Hellas, as ‘Trojan kleos’. To fight for Helen is also to fight ‘for all the property’ (mtvra
Ktqpara) that follows her from Sparta to Troy ([I. 3.69-72, 90-93, 281-91; 22.1 14-22; cf.
3.458-59;7.350-53,362-64) and for an indemnity that affects future generations (3.282-91,
456-60).Helen prefigures the victor’s right to appropriate ullotriu as oikeia as compensation
( O ~ K E ~ W ~ SThuc.
,
4.98, 128.4; 6.69.3) that is the heart and soul of imperialism. Indeed, the
Athenians consider themselves ‘deprived of oikeiu’ ( O ~ K E ~ O VordpeaeaL tjyo6vrar) if they
fail to acquire their intended objects (Thuc. 1.70.7).At the same time, Helen figures the utter
loss of oikeia - person, property, and polis - among the vanquished (KpatoupEvov pbv ybp
Exiaraa0e 671 x&waLAA6rpia, Xen. Ana. 3.2.28;cf. Cyr. 7.5.72-73).
Helen transcends the status of allotria. To gaze upon her is to desire her as ‘one’s own’
(oiKeia). When Theseus saw her ‘he was defeated by her beauty ... he did not think life’s
present goods had any value without marriage to her’ (Lveu r f i x~p b E~ K E ~ V O
~ V~ K E ~ ~ T T ) T O S ,
Isoc. 10.18-19).Similarly, to retrieve Helen, the property taken with her, and the wealth of
the polis that houses her is to take what is ‘one’s own’. Paris agrees to return the property he
stole and to add more ‘from his house’ (oko0ev); but he refuses to return Helen (7.362-64,
389-93). Oikeia are exchanged, spent, and destroyed to prevent her alienation or to restore her
to the oikos. Like treasure dedicated to a god, which the divinity may loan but not alienate the value must return to the temple with interest - Helen returns to the house of Menelaus,
bringing Trojan wealth with her.36
Helen, then, is good to think with as a figure for naval imperialism. That she embodies the
Periclean construction of archdas an object worth defending at all costs is an implication of
Cratinus’ Dionysalexandros (POxy. 663), though the date of the play and the exact form of
34 For ‘conversion’ and ‘spheres of transaction’, see J. Parry and M. Bloch, ‘Introduction: money and
the morality of exchange’, in Money and the morality of exchange, ed. J. Parry and M. Bloch
(Cambridge 1989) esp. 23-28. See also S. von Reden, Exchange in ancient Greece (London 1995) esp.
79- 126, 17 1-94.
35 For imperialism as the
‘desire’, ‘seizure’ and ‘possession’ ofallotria,see [Lys.] 2.56; Isoc. 8.17,22,
26,30,34,84; cf. A. Pers. 825-26; Thuc. 4.61.3.6.69.3; [Lys.] 2.21.25; Lys. 33.6; Isoc. 14.25. Isoc.
4. I 10 denies Athenian imperialism took this form. The operation of this economy within the polis is
(1) pon&ia, the treatment of koina as allotria, and conversion to private property (Xen. Mem. 3.5.16);
see Rosenbloom, ‘From ponEros to pharmukos’ (see n. 7 above) 300-12; (2) sycophancy, ‘desiring
someone else’s property’ ( h 8 u p b v alAospiov, e.g. Isoc. 17.1; a form of stasis, cf. Lys. 18.17,
25.17); (3) parasitism, ‘eating someone else’s property’ (aAAbtpta taeiciv/6cLxveiv, Eubulus fr. 72;
Alexis fr. 213; Antiphanes fr. 252, etc.). See Isoc. 7.24.
36 E.g. Thuc. 2.13.5. Athenian military finance took the form of loans from sacral funds. S e e Samons
11, Empire ofrhe owl (see n. 27 above) 47, 152-63. For the inalienability of sacral value, see T. Linders,
‘Gods, gifts, society’, in Gifrs to the gods, Proceedings of the Uppsala Symposium 1985, ed. T. Linders
and G. Nordquist, Boreas 15 (Uppsala 1987) 115-22.
DAVID ROSENBLOOM: EMPIRE AND ITS DISCONTENTS
255
its allegory are disputed.” To produce Helen as a form of value requires naval power, since
she is not retrievable by land; Helen must be tracked across the sea (e.g. A. Ag. 689-98; E.
Hec. 629-37; cf. Thuc. 1.9). To retrieve her entails invasion: the Hellenes do not fight for
Helen at the gates of their cities, just as the Athenians do not defend their empire in Attica.
After death, Helen achieves immortality, ‘giving salvation to sailors’ (E. Or. 1633-37).
As the object of imperialist desire and the ‘political unconscious’ of Athenian naval
imperialism, Helen’s double is history. After the Sicilian disaster, Euripides imagines her as
an ‘agalma of cloud’ (vec$Chq~hyahpa, Hel. 705, 1219), a figment which substitutes for
Helen as the object of imperialist violence.3xThe ‘real’ Helen wishes that her beauty could
be ‘wiped away like an agalmu’ (262) and represents the symbolic economy she embodies as
hateful to the gods (tkhh6zpia p h q c i v pq6’ k@aipeidai pi? 908). This Helen speaks
for the sufficiency of the oikos, yearning to dower her daughter and to ‘enjoy the property in
my oikos’ (933-35).
The economy of imperialist expenditure, appropriation, and incorporation which Helen
embodies and justifies is the object of loathing and lament in the Trojan Women. For
Andromache, Helen is the daughter, not of Zeus, but ‘of many fathers’: the avenging curse,
Envy, Murder, and Death, ‘asmany evils as the earth nourishes’ (E. Tr. 766-69). The Trojan
Women depicts Helen as cause of dispossession, focalizing the audience’s consciousness of
its imperialism as the loss of oikeia through the Trojan Women, who have lost their oikeia in
the pursuit of Helen. In this way, the play resists Helen as a monument of value and refuses
to transform the bloodshed, brutality, and booty of the Trojan War into symbolic capital. That
the play’s agalmata are stolen, ruined, or represent a lack of value is symptomatic of the
drama’s discontent. Hecabe describes herself as ‘a lifeless agalnza of corpses’ in her
catastrophic fall from ‘the honours of rule’ to slavery as a door-keeper or nurse (190-96).
Hecabe is a lifeless image of slavery, itself a metaphor for commodification and loss of
s e l f l ~ o o dCassandra
.~~
performs a sparagmos on the agalmata that symbolize her status as a
virgin sacred to Apollo and Dionysus (451-54). She will be a feast for wild beasts and no
longer ‘glory in’ the sacred feasts of Troy (Copzhg ... afs .ilyahh6pqv 452). She tears the
agalmata from her body, ‘while it is still pure’ (453).
As forms of value, Helen and naval empire are homologous. Each is a talisman of freedom
that is difficult to distinguish from its antithesis, enslavement and tyranny. The desire for each
converts life and labour into kleos as compensation; each blurs the line between ‘one’s own’
and ‘someone else’s’ and can transcend the difference because each is inalienable to the degree
that everything thing else enters the domain of exchange to ensure it remains or returns ‘in the
house’. The homology is so close, that when Helen speaks, she imitates the rhetoric of Athenian
imperialism.
B. Mattingly, ‘Poets and politicians in fifth-century Greece’,in Greece and h e eastern Mediterranean, ed. K. H. Kinzl (Berlin 1977) 231-45, dates the play to the early 430s and refers it to the
reduction of Samos. M. Vickers, Pericfes on stage (see n. 13 above) 193-95, dates it after Pericles’
death. For Aspasia as Helen, see Eup. fr. 267. Cf. Ar. Ach. 5 14-39 for the de-mystification of Helen as
‘three prostitutes’. See also this volume, pp. 172-86.
38 That Euripides performed his palinode in 412 is not coincidental,pace N. Austin, Helen ofTroy and
her shamelessphantom (Ithaca NY 1994) 139-40.
39 Cf. E. Hec. 359-66; Kopytoff, ‘The cultural biography of things’ (see n. 23 above) 84.
37 H.
256
GREEK DRAMA 111
Helen and the rhetoric of empire: the ag6n of the Trojan Women
In the central ag5n of the Trojan Women Helen proclaims her value: she is the saviour and liberator of Hellas and defender of its security (924-37)? Athena offered Paris the gift of a generalship that would drive the Hellenes from their homes (926), while Hera promised him ‘that he
would hold tyranny over the boundaries of Europe and Asia’ (927-28). Helen asserts that ‘my
marriages benefited Hellas: you are not dominated by barbarians, either by defeat in battle, or
by tyranny’ (932-34). Helen positions herself in myth as Athens locates itself in history, as the
‘saviours of Hellas’ from eastern tyranny (cf. Hdt. 7.139.5; Thuc. 1.73-77,89-96.1, 128-138).
Helen uses the ‘embellished language’ of imperial justification which contemporary speakers
admit lacks persuasive power (Thuc. 6.83.2; cf. 5.89). As a benefactor owed gratitude for
Hellas’ good fortune, Helen receives reproaches instead of the crown she deserves (935-37; cf.
963-64). Compare the Athenians: after praising the moderation of their empire, they complain,
‘from our fairness, ill-repute rather than praise surrounds us, unjustifiably’ (1.76.4).
Hecabe speaks as a critic of this position. She invokes Zeus as the ‘necessity of nature’
( ~ v C Y @doeoc)
K~
or ‘mind of men’ (voijc P P O T ~ V886) to preview the ideas of divinity on
which her and Helen’s cases will d e ~ e n d . In
~ ’the Melian Dialogue, Thucydides depicts the
problem of imperialist desire as a universal and eternal law applicable to gods and mortals
alike, who are both driven ‘by necessary nature (6x6@dueoc kvaylcaiac) to rule whatever
it has the power to rule’ (5.105.2).“* The Athenians invoke ‘necessary nature’ in response to the
Melian avowal of faith that the gods will defend them as men who stand ‘holy’ ( ~ O L O Lagainst
)
the Athenians, who are ‘not just’ (06 GIKafouc, 5.104, cf. 112.2). ‘Natural necessity’ makes
imperialists objects as men and gods compete to attain the same desire, to rule others. The
Athenians are not to blame for subjugating the Melians: they are the objects of a ‘a necessary
nature’.
This ag6n has been discussed as a rhetorical display piece. R. Scodel. The Trojan trilogy of
Euripides, Hypomnemuta Heft 60 (GUttingen 1980) 93-100, concludes that the ag6n is a triumph of
40
spectacle over argument. This is also the fatal ‘imperial effect’, from Gyges to the Sicilian expedition
(e.g. Thuc. 6.30.2-31.1, 4, 6; 46; cf. 11.4; 2.39.3). See further, M. Lloyd, ‘The Helen scene in
Euripides’ Troades’, CQ 34 (1984) 303-13; The agon in Euripides (Oxford 1992) 99-1 12; Croally,
Euripidean polemic (see n. 2) 134-62; N. Worman, ‘The body as argument: Helen in four Greek texts’,
CfAnt 16 ( 1997) 15 1-202 ( 180-200); M. Gumpert, Grafling Helen: the abduction of the classical past
(Madison WI 2001) 76-83.
41 Cf. J. Gregory, Euripides and the insrruction ofrhe Athenians (Ann Arbor MI 1991) 173.
42 This sentiment is unparalleled in the history of Athenian imperialism both as a statement of natural
law and as an inference about the divine. Scholars cite Thuc. 1.76.3 as a parallel, but the Athenians
admit only that it is ‘always established for the weaker to be limited (Kareipyeaeat) by the stronger’.
They likewise adduce 4.61.5, where Hermocrates stresses the natural tendency of the stronger to rule
what yields and the corresponding natural tendency to resist invasion, blaming those who are ‘too ready
to be imperial subjects’. See J. de Romilly, Thucydides and Athenian imperialism, trans. P.Thody
(Oxford 1963) 301-10; W. R. Connor, Thucydides (Princeton 1984) 152; A. B. Bosworth, ‘The
humanitarian aspect of the Melian Dialogue’, JHS 113 (1993) 30-44 (38-44).
DAVID ROSENBLOOM: EMPIRE AND ITS DISCONTENTS
251
Helen voices this position in the debate. Aphrodite is ‘the necessity of nature’: ‘she enslaves
even Zeus, who dominates the other gods, but is her slave’:? Aphrodite brought Helen to Troy
(945-50). To punish Helen is a misguided wish to punish Aphrodite and to ‘become mightier
than Zeus’ (948; cf. 963-65). As an object of exchange between Aphrodite and Paris, Helen
deserves ‘forgiveness’ (950); she is but a symptom of ‘the disease of the gods’ (1042-43).
Helen figures the alienation of oikeiu for allotria. In the Trojan Women, she represents herself
as a victim of the process: she was ‘sold by her beauty’ (eGpop@iq npaeeioa 935-36): ‘for
those things that are my own ( t h 6’ okoeev) I got bitter slavery (ITIKP&)SC6odAwa’) instead
of rewards for victory’ (963-64).44Helen claims she is a commodity and a slave. The
Athenians represent imperialism as subjection to a necessity to rule others to avoid being ruled
(Thuc. 6.18.3). As imperialists, they are ‘conquered’ and ‘forced’ to expand their empire by
‘fear, honour, and profit’ (1.75.3,76.2).
Hecabe’s arguments elaborate the Melian position. She defends the goddesses against
Helen’s ‘unjust’ claim. Helen’s goddesses are inconsistent with a pious interpretation of
divinity; Helen would not persuade ‘the wise’. Goddesses would not traffic in their poleis to
win a prize for beauty (969-82; cf. Il. 4.40-64). Hecabe, like the Melians, fashions the gods
as defenders of a moral order against Helen, who, like the Athenians, argues that a ‘necessity
of nature’ justifies her action.
Hecabe’s central argument is that ‘Zeus’ (i.e. Aphrodite) is the ‘mind of mortals’. Helen’s
mind became Cypris when she gazed upon Paris (988). Hecabe’s Aphrodite is folly: ‘all folly
( t h pOpa x0iv.c’)for mortals is Aphrodite and her name correctly begins with the absence
of sense’ (&@poadvq~
989-90).45Folly is associated with city-sacking (95-97) and faith in
the security of success (1203-06) in the play. These elements emerge in Thucydides’ narrative
of the invasion of Sicily (Thuc. 6.13.1, 23.3-24.3). Indeed, Alcibiades boasts that his ‘folly’
( & v o ~ aentitles
)
him to lead (6.17. I).
Helen defines herself as a commodity and object; Hecabe defines her as a desiring subject:
she yearns for Trojan wealth and power. When she saw Paris gleaming with gold, she ‘went
out of her mind with greed’ (991-92; cf. E. Cyc. 179-87). Menelaus’ house was insufficient
for her decadent luxury and arrogance (996-97): ‘you exercised your arrogance in the house
of Alexander and you wanted to be paid servile obeisance to by barbarians’ (1020-22). Helen
‘hoped to flood the polis of the Phrygians, which flows with gold, with expenditures’
(994-96). Gold is an ambivalent substance in fifth-century Athens. It occupies a place above
and below the Hellenes - the worlds of gods and of luxurious barbarians.MFrom the Hellenic
The ‘necessity of nature’ is the sexual drive, particularly as it strives to dishonour others and to
destroy fundamental social boundaries. It features in the Unjust Logos’ justification for adultery in the
Clouds (1075-82; cf. Av. 554-60). Prostitutes are an acceptable medium for its expression (Philemon
fr. 4.1-9). The ‘necessity of nature’ makes a slave think he is free (Ades. Com. fr. 134 Kock).
4-1 Reading Dobree’s tbo6A.o~’with Diggle. For a different reading, see K. H. Lee, Euripides Troades
(London 1976) on 961-65.
45 Cf. Isoc. 8.85, ‘but they came into this degree of folly (a@pou6vq<):they hoped to rule Italy, Sicily,
and Carthage, when they did not even control their own property ( o ~ K ~ ~ outside
u v ) the walls’.
46 Persians etal.: A. Pers. 3,9,45,53,80, 159; Phrygiansnrojans: E. Hec. 492; Andr. 2; El. 3 14- 18; IA
70-79; Lydians: E. Ba. 13-14; non-Greek luxury (xkt64):E. Andr. 2; Ba. 154; IA 74; Hellenic women:
S. OT 1268-69;Tr. 924-25;E. Andr. 147-54; gods: S . Aj. 9 1-93;E. Heracl. 9 15- 16; Hipp. 69. I 274-75;
43
Hec. 465; Supp. 975; Her. 35 I ; Tr. 254,820,856, 1074; Ion 459,887-88; Ba. 553; IA 458.
258
GREEK DRAMA 111
perspective, gold is a material form of symbolic capital: it measures and stores value and
belongs ‘in the house’ where it makes its possessor ‘honoured’ (zipros, E. fr. 142);’ Helen
expends gold as money, diverting it to the short-term sphere of private pleasure, spending
what should be enclaved in the oikos. Her diversion of gold from Paris’ oikos parallels her
own diversion from Menelaus’ oikos.
What distinguishes symbolic capital and money? Alcibiades’ hippotrophy presents this
problem in contemporary Athens. Do his expenditures create symbolic capital for the polis,as
he maintains, or do they bankrupt him and cause the diversion of wealth from the polis and
incur risks for it as his opponents claim (Thuc. 6.12, 15.2-3; [Andoc.] 4.32)? What is the
relationship between treasure and money? In Thucydides’ narrative, the Egestaeans show
Athenian envoys gold and silver sympotic ware and ritual implements in the temple of
Aphrodite at Eryx as seductive symbols of wealth -can they be converted to money or do they
represent a fraction of the community’s total wealth? Their capacity to represent value to the
eye is far greater than their modest potential as money (6.46.3). The perception of their value
is a loss of reason (EKxAq[aG, 46.4): the Athenians thought ‘they saw much money’ (46.4):’
Helen figures this kind of vulnerability: she ‘captures the eyes of men with desire’ (Tr. 892).
Hecabe’s Helen desires allorria in the form of barbarian wealth, luxury, and despotism,
confusing value and money, quality and quantity, self and other, expending what should
remain ‘in the house’. The founding myth of the Athenian empire expels this figure: the
Spartan Regent Pausanias son of Cleombrotus ‘who had the desire to become tyrant of Hellas’
(Epora o x t v rijs ‘EAl66o~
rljpclvvo~yevboear, Hdt. 5.32; Thuc. 1.128.3):’ The desire
makes him an imitation Persian despot (1.95.3). He serves Persian feasts, wears Median
clothing, travels with a Median and Egyptian body guard, and violently treats the allies (Thuc.
1.95.1, 130). The Ionians and those ‘recently liberated from the king’ beg the Athenians to
take the hegemony from him (1.75.2.94-96.1). Athens acquired empire without desire for it;
rather, it arose in the suppression of a PersiadSpartan desire for empire.
The Trojan Women depicts the desire for Paris’ wealth and power as female and Spartan.
The figure of Helen replaces and represses Athenian self-consciousness. Yet Athenian
imperialism had been characterized as an imitation of Persian despotism in the decades before
the Trojan Women (Thuc. 1.69.5; 3.62-64). The annihilation of Melos and the invasion of
47 Gold
belongs ‘in the house’ (E. Med. 542; Hec. 27, 1245; [E.] Rh. 178). though aretsis superior as
symbolic capital (E. fr. 542). Cassandra uses gold to symbolize the sufferings of the Trojans in contrast
to those of Odysseus, which fail to produce kleos (E. Tr. 431-33; cf. A. Ag. 438-47). Gold is seldom
a medium of exchange (E. Cyc. 138-39;Ba. 8 12) or payment (E. El. 33; cf. Supp. 875-77). Gold objects
are sacral or enclaved (Hec. 527-29, 543-45; Ion 434-36. 1165-66, 1 173-76, 1 181-82, 1427-30; IA
1565-67).
48 A. W . Gomme, A
historical commentary on Thucydides, ed. A. Andrewes and K. J. Dover (Oxford
1970) IV, 3 12-13, denies the Athenians miscalculated the monetary value of the treasure; rather, they
inferred from it a nonexistent wealth; Kallet, Money and the corrosion ofpower (see n. 32 above)
76-77, offers a similar though more subtle version.
49 Polycrates of Samos is the first such figure in Hellenic history (Hdt. 3.122.4). Kallet, Money and the
corrosion ofpower (see n. 32 above) 8 1, notes that Herodotus’ Polycrates is present in Thucydides’
narrative of the Athenian deception at Egesta, and ‘associates the tyrant’s greed with that of the
Athenian collective’.
DAVID ROSENBLOOM: EMPIRE AND ITS DISCONTENTS
259
Sicily reinforced the parallel (6.33.5-6; 76.3-4).’” Like Pausanias and the Persian despots, the
Athenians desire ‘to rule all Hellas’ (6.18.4,90). Pericles claims that posterity will remember
Athens because ‘as Hellenes, we ruled the most Hellenes’ (2.64.3). The polis incorporated the
Athenian-Persian equivalence into self-representations. Eupolis’ Muricus (42 1 ) depicted
Hyperbolus as ‘Maricas’, a new Xerxes (fr. 207; cf. Ach. 100-22).” Similarly, the Inspector
of the Birds is the Assyrian despot Sardanapallus (1021). Athenian society acknowledged
Persian culture as a mark of high status (Ar. Vesp. 1 135-56).” The Spartan, whether Pausanias
or Helen, mediates between Athens and Persia, blocking equivalence, but also encoding it.
Imperialist desire is inassimilable to the Athenian identity - it is a Spartan flaw. Yet it is
familiarly Athenian.
Thucydides’ Pericles describes the dilemma Menelaus faces in the Trojan Women: ‘it is not
possible for you still to stand away from [empire], even if some ... want to be good by
refusing to intervene in others’ affairs (&npaypoa6vy), for the empire you hold now is like
a tyranny, the seizure of which seems unjust, but giving it up is dangerous’ (2.63.2-3).
Menelaus cannot ‘crown Hellas worthily of yourself and kill [Helen]’ (1030-3 1 ;cf. 1033-35).
The ug6n dramatizes the fact that Helen, like empire, ‘makes all men who use it worse’ (Isoc.
8.94).s3 The pursuit of Helen precludes justice; it is a form of appropriation that overrides
moral consideration^.^^ Not to pursue her risks humiliation and enslavement. Like empire,
everyone desires her; but only her possessor can call himself master.
The ug6n enacts Hecabe’s symbolic vindication of a moral order - she composes a logos
that ‘will kill [Helen] so she has no escape’ (908-10) and she ‘defend[s] children and
fatherland’ (966) - reversing the dramatic action. Neither myth nor history allows Helen to
be a scapegoat for the violence unleashed to restore her to the oikos (E. Hec. 260-70; cf. Plut.
Mor. 314~5-1
l).“ The ug6n of the Trojan Women expresses the spirit Thucydides captures
in the ‘Melian Dialogue’. Both are debates between a ‘necessity of nature’ and rational
morality. In both cases, the defence of a moral order is the last act of speech before the silence
of annihilation and enslavement. Helen must survive, the picture of hateful aristocratic
privilege: ‘the daughter of Zeus happens to hold golden mirrors, the charms of virgins’ ( 1 10708). The virgins whose golden charms she holds are Iphigenia and Cassandra.
so Cf. Dionysius of Halicamassus’ appraisal of the Melian Dialogue (On Thucydides 38). with Connor,
Thucydides (see n. 42 above) 155-57.
S I Old Persian Marik- approximates the Greek kinaidos; see A. C. Cassio, ‘Old Persian MARIK-,
Eupolis Marikus and Aristophanes Knights’, CQ 35 (1985) 38-42.
52 For the importation of Persian culture into Athens, see M. Miller, Athens and Persia in thefifth
century BC: a study in cultural receptivity (Cambridge 1997).
53 Green, ‘Warand morality’ (see n. 8 above), omits this tradition of self-criticism. The imperial polis
becomes a ‘tarted-up woman’ (ahciCovay u v a k a ) bought with the allies’ money (Plut. Per. 12.2) or
a kind of licence that is a hetaira, making men ‘desire’ her and then ‘destroy[ing]them when they use
her’ (Isoc. 8. 103).
54 Cf. Isoc. 8.30-35: ‘thinking that taking allotria is the greatest good’ is a choice of ponEria over
justice and reverence. Cf. Balot, Greed and injustice (see n. 19 above) 177.
ss Cf. Gregory, Euripides and the instruction (see n. 41 above) 174-75.
260
GREEK DRAMA 111
Cassandra and the impossible conversion: allotria into oikeia
Cassandra enters the economy of imperialism as the allotria who must be made oikeia to
compensate for Iphigenia, the oikeia expended to gain Helen. The form of value Iphigenia
assumes at the end of the process, Cassandra substitutes for the daughter Agamemnon killed
to launch the fleet. She is the ‘select gift’ the army gives its highest ranking member to mark
his status (E. Tr. 249; 413-14; A. Ag. 954-55) and to satisfy his perverse desire (41-44,
248-59, 41 1- 15, 618-19). Unlike Aeschylus’ Cassandra, Euripides’ rejects this entire
economy, both its form of investment and its returns.s6 She realizes in her person and
represents in her speech naval imperialism as blameworthy self-alienation unworthy of kleos.
According to the Corinthians, when it comes to their polis, the Athenians ‘treat their bodies
(aOpaorv) as most alien’ (hllozprorhzorc) but their ‘mind as most their own’ (yvhpn
O ~ K C ~ O T (Thuc.
~ T ~ )1.70.6). Cassandra is entirely alienated from her body, envisioning it as
a corpse washed down a ravine, an offering for ‘wild beasts to feast on’ (448-50). Yet her
mind is ‘most her own’ when it comes to her oikos and polis. As the symmetrical ‘other’ of
the symbolic economy of imperialism, Cassandra mirrors its mind/body dualism.
Cassandra defines the sacrifice of Iphigenia for Helen as a bad exchange of ‘what was
nearest and dearest for what was most hateful, giving the pleasures of children in the oikos
(q6ov&ct&c okoeev / t6Kvov) to his brother for a woman, who went willingly and was not
taken by force’ (370-73). Iphigenia embodies the private attachment, the ties of affection that
constitute relations with oikeia. Pericles calls family property ‘the mere show garden and
cosmetic of wealth’ compared to the value of naval power (2.62.3; I . 143.3-5; cf. Iphigenia,
66pov &yaApa,A. Ag. 208). Aeschylus’ Agamemnon sharpens this antithesis: Iphigenia’s
sacrifice is ‘a preliminary sacrifice of ships’ (np0tdA~wVC~CIV,
A. Ag. 227), the cost of
launching a fleet to recover Helen. Her sacrifice figures the origins, defence, and renewal of
the polidempire in the destruction of oikeia. Cassandra represents this form of exchange, as
well as the society and type of warfare derived from it, as morally inferior to corresponding
Trojan forms. Such a society cannot defend its land, offer its citizens the kleos of dying to
defend the patris, or return warriors’ corpses to their oikos for lament and burial. On the
contrary, it destroys the oikos and the ritual economy that links generations within it.
Cassandra promises to demonstrate ‘that this polis is more blessed ( p ~ l ~ a p i o t d p athan
v)
the Achaeans’ (365-66). The Achaeans have no right to make war: neither their frontier nor
’high-towered fatherland’ is at risk (375-76). Defenders occupy a morally superior position
because they die ‘on behalf of their fatherland, the most beautiful glory’ (tb Kh)LkLUTOV
K A ~ o /~ bnkp
,
nhtpac &evnaKov386-87). Cassandra implies that kleos is the expenditure
of oikeia to preserve oikeia.” Debates in tragedy over Iphigenia’s sacrifice hinge on this
principle. Clytemnestra would forgive Agamemnon ‘if he killed one on behalf of many to
defend against the sack of the city or to benefit the house, saving the rest of the children’
56
Aeschylus’ Cassandra speaks for Agamemnon. See Wohl, Intimate commerce (see n. 4 above)
110-17.
57 Cf. Thuc. 2.39.2-3; 6.68.3. Gregory, Euripides and the instruction (see n. 41 above) 164-65, sees
Cassandra’s speech as contrasting the Achaeans’ voluntary and the Trojans’ compulsory actions.
Roisman, ‘ContemporaryAllusions’ (seen. 8 above) 41 and Green, ‘War and morality’ (see n. 8 above)
100, argue that war was forced on the Achaeans and this implicitly justifies the Peloponnesian War,
which was forced on the Athenians.
DAVID ROSENBLOOM: EMPIRE AND ITS DISCONTENTS
26 I
(E. El. 1024-26; cf. E. fr. 50.14-15 [Austin]). The expenditure of oikeia to acquire allotria
forfeits kfeosto the defenders (Thuc. 6.33.5-6; cf. 7.66-68). If the Achaeans had remained at
home (ei 6’ 4aav O~KOI.),no one would know Hector was ‘noble and good’ ( x p r p z 6 < ) or that
Paris married a daughter of Zeus (394-99).
Cassandra makes the opposition between warfare for the defence of oikeia and for the
appropriation of allotriu the basis for praise and blame:
Whoever has sense should flee war. But if it should come to this, to die nobly is no
shameful crown for a city, but not to die nobly is disgraceful ( . . . a r d @ a v o < O ~ aKi a X p b <
n6hci I KahGs 6hka0ai, pq K a h G C 62 6ua~A&d<).
(Tr.400-02)
‘Not to die nobly’ is the condition of invaders: they lie in a foreign land, their corpses unseen
by their children and deprived of their wives’ final rites. The ritual disorder of their deaths
abroad is replicated in their households (zh 6 ’ 0 i ~ 0 ~oio6’bpoi’
1
C y i y v c r o 379): wives die
widows and parents die ‘childless in their homes, having raised children for others’ (&hhoi<
~ K VkK€IpC$avze<
’
380-81).’* Ritual contact between generations at the grave site ceases
(381-82). The Trojans, by contrast, lived at home with their wives and children, pleasures the
Achaeans lacked ( ‘ A X a r o i < &v &nfpav q6ovai 390-93). Trojan dead returned intact to their
homes (kc O~KOUG);their loved ones ritually dressed them for burial under ‘mounds of earth
in the land of their fathers’ (387-90).
Cassandra’s speech rejects the exchange of oikeia for allotria. It constructs the oikos and
oikeia as forms of inalienable value, combining the pleasures of the oikos and the defence of
the patris in a single concept.“ She upholds the right of the family to see and to prepare
ritually the corpse of a warrior, to bury it in the land of its fathers, and to communicate with
it over generations. The circuit of life and death proceeds from the oikos and back again for
burial in the patr6ia g8, the earth that is the citizen’s patrimony. In the Trojan Women,the
oikos is the domain of value: patrimony replicates it over generations; marriage reproduces
it; victory in athletic contests and hoplite defence are its ured; the shield symbolizes its
hegemony in society.
The chorus’ reaction to Cassandra’s speech, ‘how pleasurably you laugh at your own
sufferings’ (KaKOiU1V oiK&ioi< 406) underscores Cassandra’s insistence on oikeia as a value.
Herodotus declares that if men brought their own sufferings (zh o k q i a K a K 6 ) to exchange
at market, they would peek at others’ and return home with their own (7.152.2). Humans
refuse to exchange oikeia kuku.Cassandra depicts the sufferings of Achaeans and Trojans as
symmetrical and interchangeable.Achaean warfare undermines their oikoi and consumes their
oikeia as an investment in the acquisition of allotria. The Trojan disaster mirrors the forms
of dispossession that result from naval imperialism. The retrieval of Helen destroys the self-
58 Reading x a i 6 q with PQ in 377 and & k k o ~in
c 381 with VPQ. See Lee, Troades (see n. # above)
ad loc.
59 The keywords of Cassandra’s song and speeches are lrarqp (316,327,360,459); xatpis (3 16,376,
458); xoirpa (387,434); natp@os (389); o i ~ (364,388);
o ~
O ~ K O L(379,397); oiKoeev (371); 66~0s
(359,380,399,443,461). For ‘father’ as ‘most related of all’ see Aesch. 2.77-78: 06 yhp nap& rQv
IJ
txuveav6pqv; cf. PI. Ly. 21Oc 2.
a k k o t p i o v , a k k h xaph rof xoivrov O ~ K E L O T ~ T O sacra
262
GREEK DRAMA 111
sufficiency of the oikos,its capacity to defend the parris,60and its ability to maintain cult, both
in Troy and in Hellas.
Cassandra’s speech expresses the values of Old Comedy, which plots the self-sufficient
farmer’s (atroupy6q) repossession of hegemony in the polis,defining the just, authentic, and
useful citizen as chraros and aurourgos, and forging an alliance among large and small
landholders - farmers and aristocrats!’ Democratic imperialism sought to transcend this
socio-economic and moral order.62 Pericles claims that the Peloponnesians’ principal
deficiency is that they are ‘self-sufficient farmers’ (a6roupyoi). Their society cannot
perceive, articulate, and act upon its collective interest (1.141.2-7). Such men are ‘as willing
as possible to defend themselves, but want to destroy their own property as little as possible’
(he f l ~ i o r ar&O ~ K @e^Ipat
E ~
141.7; cf. 2.20.4). Nor do aurourgoi yearn to acquire
allotria: ‘for whom what they have suffices most yearn least for someone else’s’ (ole y&p
pdliara 78 xap6vra aplcei fl~iora
r&v alhorpiov 6pCyovrai, Xen. Sym. 4.42).
Cassandra’s speech articulates the tragic loss of these values, eulogizing outmoded forms
of oikos and polis. Her speech expresses the opportunity cost of Athens’ claim to be ‘the most
self-sufficientpolis for all in both for war and peace’ (Thuc. 2.36.3)and the Athenian citizen’s
status as a ‘self-sufficient person’ (r6 o&pa ahaplttc 2.41.1; but cf. 2.51.3):the sufficiency
of the oikos as a social, economic, political, and religious unit of society. Cassandra’s speech
performs the oikos’ last act of vengeance. As Hecabe symbolically kills Helen, a figure for
empire as a form of value, Cassandra symbolically murders Agamemnon, ‘the greatest lord
of the Panhellenes’ (413, cf. 358) and mythical model for the naval imperialist, replacing
Clytemnestra as his killer.63Cassandra will achieve the reciprocal sack of his oikos as
restitution for her brothers, father, and oikos (359-60,460-61;cf. 364).
If Athenian society were structured according to this principle of domestic sufficiency,
Athens might be in Troy’s position -an extinct form of social and political organization. The
Athenian concept and practice of defence consisted in sea-borne invasion. Even the invasion
of Sicily was a defence of the fatherland (Thuc. 6.18.3.83.4).A sublime poetry of heroic death
complemented the city’s imperialism and compensated for a conspicuous absence: the corpse.
A man left for war as a member of an oikos,but returned in death as a form of value for the
polis (cf. A. Ag. 427-55). A warrior’s individual and family identity vanished at death; his
bones and ashes mingled with those of his tribesmen and were buried in the d&zosion s h u
(Thuc. 2.34).@The family could not see a warrior’s corpse, ritually prepare it, or offer it burial
and family cult. It is telling that during this period, the ideal Athenian deaths in battle
60 Cf. Isoc. 8.77-78, ‘instead of defeating those who attacked them, their power educated citizens not
even to dare to meet their enemies before the walls’.
61 See Rosenbloom, ‘From poneos to pharmakos’ (see n. 7 above) 3 18-29.
62 For this order, see V. D. Hanson, The other Greeks: the family farm and the agrarian roots of
Western civilization (New York 1995) esp. 127-78. In ‘Hoplites into democrats: the changing ideology
of Athenian infantry’, in L&wkratia: a conversation on democracies, ancient and modern, ed. J. Ober
and C. Hedrick (Princeton 1996) 289-312, Hanson seeks to recover the subjectivity of the Attic farmer
and to explain his commitment to democracy and imperialism, but oddly ignores Old Comedy.
63 See D. Rosenbloom, ‘Myth, history, and hegemony in Aeschylus’ in History, tragedy, theory, ed.
B. Goff (Austin TX 1995) 91-130.
64 See C. W. Clairmont, Patrios nomos. Public burial in Athens during thefifrh and fourth centuries
BC, 2 vols (Oxford 1983).
DAVID ROSENBLOOM: EMPIRE AND ITS DISCONTENTS
263
remained those of the previous form of polis: Tellus and the dead of Marathon, who were
buried where they fell defending the polis (Hdt. 1.30.4-5; Thuc. 2.34.5). Cassandra’s speech
praises this form as ‘more blessed’, calculating the cost of Helen as everything oikeia: the
oikos, hoplite defence, kleos, family lament, burial, cult, and ritual contact between
generation^.^^
Astyanax’ burial memorializes the blame Cassandra accords the Achaeans: ‘What would
a poet write on the tomb? The Argives once killed this child out of fear? The epigram is
shameful for Hellas’ (aiaxpbv ... ‘EAA66r 1188-91). The burial reconstructs the plane where
the values of the self-sufficient and the aristocratic oikos intersect.
Over the sign of the shield: the burial of Astyanax
Andromache laments, ‘I am led away as booty with my child: nobility has come to slavery,
having such great changes’ (614-15).&Nobility is the supreme liability of naval imperiali~m.~’
The primary target of destruction and object of pity in the Trojan Women is the royal and
aristocratic oikos (esp. 472-5 10,583, 657-705hmHector’s nobility (dykvera)kills Astyanax
(742-43); the ‘report’ of Andromache’s nobility ruins her (657-58). The Hellenes ‘invent
barbarian evils’ (764-65): they destroy the oikos of an aristos and with it, the Trojan polis.
Talthybius reports Odysseus’ victorious argument in the assembly of the Panhellenes: ‘do not
raise the child of a noble father’ (Lpiarou ... narp6q 723; cf. 395,709,723, 1195). The play
voices unchallenged resistance to it.
Astyanax’ burial and lament reconstruct the aristocratic and self-sufficient oikos at their
moment of its extinction.6’ The burial substitutes for moments in Astyanax’ life that would
have endowed it with meaning: coming to manhood, marriage, the acquisition of ‘godlike
tyranny’ (1 169), leadership of his age-group in the performance of Hecabe’s burial rites
(1 180-86), victories in chariot racing and archery (1209-13). The burial enacts the transfer of
agalmata - symbols of aretE and status - from father to son (hy6Apara I thv a6v
n6r’ dvrov 1212-13). Hecabe names Helen as the thief of his agalmata and patrimony: ‘as
it is, Helen, hated by the gods, robbed you, and in addition, she killed your soul and destroyed
your entire house’ (+uxfiv a6e&v I kKr&iv& ~ a n6vr’
\
O ~ O t[an4A&aev
V
1213-15). Helen
kills the aristocratic oikos, destroying its capacity to replicate itself and to redistribute
agalmata across generations. Helen is constituted by the appropriation of agalmata.
I. Morris, ‘Everyman’s grave’, in Athenian identity and civic ideology, ed. A. Boegehold and
A. Scafuro (Baltimore 1994) 67-10]. argues for various kinds of elite resistance to this form of burial
in the decade before the Trojan Women.
66 See Scodel, Trojan trilogy (see n. 40 above) esp. 1 1 1-21.
61 For chr&toi/gennaioi/plouioi/beltistoi as objects of violence in the conduct of Athenian democracy
and imperialism, see [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 1.13-15; 2.14-16, 18-19; 3.10-1 1; Thuc. 6.53.2-3; Isoc. 8.88-89.
The depiction of Athenian society in these terms is typical of Old Comedy. See, e.g.. Ar. E9. 264-65;
802-04; Pax 639-48; Vesp. 575-602; Av. 285; Ra. 718-37.
68 For the slippage between ‘royal’ and ‘aristocratic’ see L. Kurke, Coins, bodies, games, and gold the
politics of meaning in archaic Greece (Princeton 1999) 53.
69 For this scene, see M. Dyson and K. H.Lee, ‘The funeral of Astyanax in Euripides’ Troades’,JHS
65
120 (2000) 17-33.
264
GREEK DRAMA I11
Astyanax’ burial recreates the bond between father and son, transferring the essence of his
patrimony to him, Hector’s shield (1 192-93).70Hector’s shield is an emblem of the alliance
between aristocratic and the self-sufficient households in the institutions of private property
and hoplite fighting (cf. 1136-39). The shield bears the last vestiges of Hector’s ‘toils’
(sc6vouc) defending the polis (1 196-99). When Astyanax crowns it, the union of father and
son, hoplite and aristocrat, oikos and polis achieves immortality in extinction:
You, who were once the mother of countless routs in glorious victory, dear shield of
Hector, be crowned. For you are dead, though you did not die along with the corpse: you
are much more worthy of honour than the arms of clever and ignoble Odysseus (TOG
a0406 KCXICOGr’ DGuaaCw~).(Tr. 1221-25)
The father’s shield is the ‘mother of countless routs’, uniting the family in labour that creates
value in the oikos, defends the polis, and wins k l e o ~ .The
~ ’ shield merges ideals of male and
female ponos expended in the reproduction and defence of the oikos and p 0 1 i s . ~Hector’s
~
shield wears the crown Cassandra bestowed upon the Trojans: noble death in battle fighting
for land, walls, and fatherland (401) even as it marks the failure of the hoplite, ancestral walls,
and the gods, who built the walls, to preserve the polis (4-7,45-47,782-85, 1173-74).
Hecabe declares Hector’s shield ‘much more worthy of honour than the arms of clever but
ignoble Odysseus’ (1224-25). Sophocles’Ajax associates his failure to win Achilles’ armswith
a shift in hegemony within the Achaean army; he passes his shield to his son as a gesture of
resistance ( S . Aj. 545-82).73Achilles’ shield evokes an outmoded and glorious order (El.
432-86; cf. 699-746; IA 1068-75), as Hector’s does in the Trojan Women. Odysseus is the
leader who supplants them, the villainous sophist and demagogue, the speaker who forms the
shifting alliances that determine group action such as the murder of Astyanax; he also owns
Priam’s wife and queen of Troy (Tr.277-92, 721-23).’4 Odysseus’ possession of Achilles’ arms
parallels the shift in hegemony from aufourgoi, aristocrats, and warriors to speakers and
consumers of oratory, from chr&oi who earn symbolic capital through ponoi, to ponEroi who
gain financial capital through the production and exchange of linguistic and marketable
commodities.” The antithesisbetween Hector’s and Odysseus’ shield recapitulates the political
thrust of the Trojan Women.The new order derives from the destruction and debasement of the
old.
70 For
the shield in the transfer of royal power, see Gernet, ‘The mythical idea of value’ (see n. 20
above) 82.
71 ‘Good children (xpquroi)are the most beautiful possession, better than wealth’ (E. fr. 518). For the
chorus of Peace. Trygaeus, plouros consists in barley, wine, figs, and children (Ar. fax 1320-28).
72 Child-bearing and nurture are theponoi of women (A. fr. 99.7; E. Supp. 918-24, 1134-37; Her.
280-8 1; Ion 948; f h . 30-3 1, 1433-35;cf. A. Eu. 58-59; S. EL. 1 14345).
73 Ajax depicts the leaders of the Achaeans as rhetors and sham noblemen who fix votes and slander
the genuine nobility. See D. Rosenbloom. ‘Ajax is megas: is that all we can say?’, frudenria 32 (2001)
109-29, esp. 116-25.
74 For Odysseus in tragedy, see W.B. Stanford, The Ulysses rherne, 2nd edn (Oxford 1962) 102-17.
75 See Rosenbloom, ‘Frompon&os to pharmakos’ (see n. 7 above) 292-312.
DAVID ROSENBLOOM: EMPIRE AND ITS DISCONTENTS
265
Peisetaerus is the most Odyssean of comic heroes: a consummate sophist, demagogue and
trickster (430-3 1). He establishes friendship with former enemies (327-461) and gains control
over them by twisting language, creating the fiction that birds were the first kings and gods
of the cosmos (464-549). He advises the birds to enclose a city in walls and to replace the
Olympians as the recipients of sacrifice, starving gods and men into submission ( 162-93,
550-52, 848-50, 862, 1230-37, 1262-66, 1515-24, 1574-76). Ultimately he wins Basileia and
cosmic tyranny as his prize. Does the Birds celebrate the pursuit of Helen and the domination
of Odysseus as comedy?
Birds: imperialism as commodification
William Arrowsmith observes, ‘The real name of ... Helen is . . . the same as Aristophanes’
Basileia (imperial sovereignty) or Thucydides’ ar~h,5(empire)’.~~
Arrowsmith, I believe, fails
to see how Helen and Basileia are analogous but antithetical ways of conceptualizing archE
Helen represents empire as a Hesiodic ‘beautiful evil’, the origin of pain, labour, sacrifice,
exchange value, the commodification of life which alienates its value.77Pandora and Helen
stand for principles of expenditure, exchange, appropriation, imitation, and conversion.
Basileia is a tamias who stores and distributes. She presides over the de-commodification of
life and the inversion of the pattern of the Trojan Women.
The idea of Nephelococcygia, a fortified city in the air, is a comic displacement of Athens,
a fortified ‘island’ on a peninsula (1.143.5; cf. [Xen.] AP 2.13- 16). Athenian imperialism
controlled the circulation of sea-borne commodities (Thuc. 2.62.1-2; [Xen.] AP 2.1-6, 1 1-12)
and excelled at land and sea blockade, preventing access to supplies not stockpiled within a
polis’ circuit walls, starving the recalcitrant into submission (e.g. Hdt. 7.107; Plut. Cim. 7.2
with Aesch. 3.184-85; cf. Thuc. 3.86.4; 5.1 14; 6.90.3-91). Peisetaerus enacts the basic
principle of Athenian imperialism: he commodifies all food in the cosmos. Gods and men
must pay the birds tribute to access it (179-93), just as Athenian subjects pay Athens for
access to food and other sea-borne commodities. The birds then blockade the sacrificial
smoke to the gods (1263-66, 1515-24, 1574-76) and threaten to destroy the agricultural
economy of men by gulping down seeds (576-80, cf. 230-33) and blinding plough animals and
sheep (582-83). As is typical in comedy, exchange value operates in the lowest rank of
transactions: its value is food. Bdelycleon imagines the tribute as convertible to sumptuous
feasts for 20,000 dgmotikoi (Vesp. 706-12). Tribute is symbolic capital: it represents the
labour (x6vos)of the empire’s founders ( I 1 13-16; cf. 1097-1 101; Lys. 648-55).7x
Peisetaerus next stops the circulation of birds as commodities, transforming them from
slaves into masters. Not even their labour is a commodity ( 1 152). The first birds to appear in
76 Arrowsmith, ‘Fantasy politics of
eros’ (see n. 9 above) 133-34.
See J.-P. Vernant, ‘At man’s table: Hesiod’s foundation myth of sacrifice’, in The cuisine ofsacrifice
among the Greeks, ed. M. Detienne and J.-P. Vernant, trans. P. Wissing (Chicago 1989) 2 1-86. For
Pandora, see F. 1. Zeitlin, ‘Signifyingdifference: the case of Pandora’, in Playing the other: gender and
society in classical Greek literature (Chicago 1996) 53-86. L. K. Taafe, Arisrophanes and women
(London 1993)4445, argues that the birds reverse Hesiod’s myth of Prometheus: they block the smoke
to Zeus, forcing him to yield Basileia, making the bird-man, Peisetaerus. a god. Taafe sees Basileia as
77
Pandora and Peisetaerus as Epimetheus.
Reading Dobree’s sr6vov for the MSS y6vov at 1016.
78
266
GREEK DRAMA 111
the play, the jackdaw and crow, were bought from Philocrates for an obol and triobol
respectively (13-18; cf. 1077-87). Epops’ slave bird appears next. His function is to satisfy
his master’s appetites and desires for food (70-79). The slave bird provides a model for the
subversion of the master-slave relationship in the play: the birds will use control of food to
gain mastery over their masters and to regain their lost kingship and divinity: ‘before, all
considered you great and holy; but now they think you’re slaves and stupid Manes’ (522-23;
cf. 1077-87). The Birds inverts the Trojun Women, which dramatizes the transformation of
Trojan kings into Phrygian slaves.79
Peisetaerus commodifies food and stops the circulation of birds as commodities, he then
seeks to remove tyranny from circulation. The scenes of beating ufuzones from the stage
dramatize the increasingly complicated and pernicious means by which tyranny becomes a
commodity.” The play excludes this commodity at the origins of the city.
Before Peisetaerus makes the founding sacrifice of Nephelococcygia, a beggar-poet and
aristocrat-slave (9 11) enters and recites Pindar, addressing Peisetaerus as Hieron, tyrant of
Sicily, and asking for an unspecified gift (924-30). Peisetaerus offers him his slave’s jerkin
(93 1-35). The Muse accepts the gift (Mo6oa 63pov 66xe.rai 937). The poet then mocks
Straton, whose jerkin goes ‘unsung’ ( C ~ h e qbecause
~)
it lacks an undergarment (Pi. fr.
105a-b=926-30,941-44). Peisetaerus feels compelled to benefit the poet (946), who claims
descent from Homer, Simonides, and Pindar as a teacher and a ‘wise poet’ (907-10.912-14,
924-45,934). He gives him his slave’s undergarment (946-47).
Remove this exchange from the gift-economy and oral, aristocratic tradition in which it is
embedded, and it fails. The Chresmologus is a case in point. He reads Peisetaerus an oracle
from a text that prescribes gifts and privileges as payment for the actual prophecy, ‘you will
become an eagle in the sky’, the Athenian &-mod favourite oracle: it prophesies its world
empire and Heraclean beatitude (Ar.Eq. 1011-13 with 1086-87, criezb~&C yiyvei K C Z ~
ntaq< yfjs paaihe6ei~;cf. Av. 1337). The Chresmologus offers the promise of tyranny as
a thing for sale. It takes the form of a written text which authorizes payment in advance of
delivery. The Chresmologus repeatedly refers to his ‘book’ (974,976,980); Peisetaerus beats
him from the stage with his ‘book’ (98 1-86,989).
If the movement from the Poet to the Chresmologus marks the transformation of tyranny
from a gift to a commodity, Meton’s arrival threatens to institute commodity exchange at the
heart of the city.” He plans to inscribe an agora as a squared circle at the centre of the pofis
(1004-09). This contradicts the first principle of bird life: its lack of money. As the Epops
describes it ‘the way we spend our time is not without charm: in the first place it’s necessary
to live without a wallet’ (156-57). Euelpidesreplies: ‘you’ve removed much that’s counterfeit
x;
Tr. 28-29, 140-42, 156-58, 184-85, 190-234,490-99,506-10.562-76,600.614-15,660,677-78,
1269-7I , 1279-80, 1310-1 1, 1 329-30.
80 A. M. Bowie, Aristophanes: myth, ritual, and comdy (Cambridge 1993) 174-75, believes the scenes
demonstrate that ‘escapefrom things Athenian is not possible, even in fantasy’. No character enters the
city, however, and only one gets what he wants, the poet. Reckford,Aristophanes (see n. 13 above) 337,
is closer to my view.
81 For the opposition between gift and commodity, see C. A. Gregory, Gips and commodities (London
1982) 10-28. Meton also prepares Nephelococcygia for a colony or klerouchy by dividing its air into
parcels. The tale that Meton burned down his house to save himself and his son from service in Sicily
is not credible (Plut. Nic. 13.7-8;Afc. 17.5-6;cf. Aelian VH 13.12).
79
DAVID ROSENBLOOM: EMPIRE AND ITS DISCONTENTS
267
(KIP6qhiav)from life’ (158). Money is a counterfeit form of value; its exclusion as a medium
of exchange is central to the old comic insistence on the preeminence of use value.’* The birds’
form of value is useable (xp~@ipov
372-74,381-82; Xpquz6v 452-59). As gods, they provide
wealth (xlouteiv 592; 729-36) from agriculture (588-91, 1058-70), mining (593), and
overseas trade (Cpnopia 594-95; cf. 717-18) - but not from commodity exchange.
Nephelococcygia is a fantasy of the self-sufficientfarmer. Peisetaerus and Euelpides are old
men (320,337) who live outside the walls of Athens, and reject jury service (108- 1 1) and courtimposed fines (30-45). Like the ugroikos Strepsiades, they refuse to repay their debts (1 14-16).
They are hoplites (343-450, esp. 352-61,387-99).They yearn for an uprugw-n topos, ‘a fleecy
city to curl up in, like a soft blanket’ (120-22), outside the ambit of the Athenian fleet ( 1 45-48;
cf. 1202-04, 1229), where they can take without the reciprocal obligation to give, and where
fathers will censure them for not fondling their sons (128-42).
Peisetaerus and Euelpides desire self-sufficiency of the kind that money and commodity
exchange cannot attain. Nephelococcygia resembles Sparta in its lack of a money economy
and courts; and it replaces Sparta for Laconophile, literate Athenians (1277-89), though it will
not be named Sparta (812-16). Peisetaerus tells Meton that Spartan xendusiui are transpiring
in Nephelococcygia and makes him a victim of it. His expulsion is brutal: he imperils
Nephelococcygia as a place without money, commodities, and courts.R3
The Inspector arrives next as a ‘Sardanapallus’(102 I), the last of the Assyrian kings, who
was proverbial for rryphG as a vice distinctive to and destructive of empire. The Athenian
institution of the Episkopos is a likely modification of the Persian ‘King’s Eye’ and the
character may wear a Persian costume.” The Inspector carries the ‘rotten book of Teleas’, a
copy of Teleas’ motion to send him to Nephelococcygia (1024-25). His text represents the
imposition of the h-mos’ authority on Nephelococcygia, for which the subjected polis must
pay the official’s ‘wage’ (p1006~3.~’
The terms of sale are dictated, imposed, and enforced
by Athenian law. Peisetaerus wants to bribe the official to leave without causing trouble
(1025). The Inspector would prefer to attend an assembly at Athens and to take the credit for
the Persian Pharnaces’ latest move, which he engineered (1025-28). A beating is his ‘wage’
and ‘assembly about Pharnaces’ (1029-30). The Trojan Women’s Helen desires eastern
despotism; the Birds expels this desire from Nephelococcygia.R6
The culmination of the process is the appearance of the Decree Seller who sells tyranny in
its most authoritative and intrusive form: the decrees of the dEmos, which order the subject
cities to pay for their inscription on stone and their erection in the agora and elsewhere
82 D. F. Sutton, Selfandsociety in Aristophanes (Washington DC 1980) esp. 58. Old comic exchange
is barter (Ach. 719-835; Pax 1197-1269).
83 Bowie, Aristophanes (see n. 80 above) 170, considers Meton’s expulsion proof of Peisetaerus’
arbitrariness;but there are reasons for his expulsion within the terms of the drama.
84 See 1. M. Baker, ‘The Athenian Inspector and the Achaemenid “King’s Eye’”, AJP 98 (1977)
252-63. For the suggestion that the Inspector wears Persian clothes, see N. Dunbar, ArisrophanesBirds
(Oxford 1995) on 1021.
85 Cf. R. Meiggs, The Athenian empire (Oxford 1972) 586.
86 Dunbar, Birds (see n. 84) on 102 1-34, considers the scene an attack upon ‘self-importantand selfseeking officials’, rather than a critique of imperialism. But the ‘rotten book of Teleas’ represents the
&-mos’
authority.
268
GREEK DRAMA I11
(1037-38; ML252.57-64 for expense).” This is the most egregious example of the power of
written word to dictate authority and to authorize a price for imposing its tyranny. The Decree
Seller enters the stage reading the text of the law which Peisetaerus broke when he beat the
Inspector from the stage (1035). Then he parodies the decree that imposed Athenian weights,
measures, standards, and coinage on the cities of the empire under penalty of death ( 1040-41;
ML2 45).R8By adding ‘decrees’ to the list, the Decree Seller sells a super-commodity that
mandates its own authority and dictates the form exchange value must assume in
Nephelococcygia.
Unlike the other villains beaten from the stage, the Inspector and Decree Seller return. The
Inspector summons Peisetaerus to trial on a charge of hybris (1046), threatening to indict him
for a ten-thousand drachma fine (1052). Finally, the Decree Seller turns to sycophancy:
‘Remember when you defecated on the stele in the evening?’ (1054). The attempt at blackmail
disgusts Peisetaerus; but birds routinely defecate on statues and temples of the gods (cf.
524-28, 11 14-17; E. Ion 154-83). The Decree Seller identifies the use value of imperial
decrees (cf. Ach. 579-90; Pax 1210-64).
When the ‘lovers’ of Nephelecoccygia come as colonists in search of wings, Peisetaerus
drives another series of villains from the stage (1337-1469). A youth who ‘acts as a sycophant
against strangers’ (1430-31), using the laws and the courts of Athens to steal from subjects
in the cities ([Xen.] AP 1.14; Lys. 25.19), is the last villain driven from the stage. Peisetaerus
lashes him with a Corcyrean whip ( 1462-69).89
Peisetaerus stops the birds from circulating as commodities and settles them in a polis
restoring their kingship and divinity by controlling the divine and human food supplies. He
removes tyranny from circulation as texts that flatter, dictate, and enslave while authorizing
their price. Now he needs to ‘enclave’ tyranny in his oikos. For this, he requires marriage.
Empire as a marriage strategy: Basileia, Helen, Cassandra
Peisetaerus’ vision for cosmic empire derives from Euelpides’ chance remark on the birds’
diet: ‘you live the life of bride-grooms!’ (161). The mention of marriage prompts Peisetaerus’
vision of a ‘plot and power among the race of birds, if you would allow me to persuade you’
(162-63). Yet Peisetaerus does not envision Basileia as the object of his desire. Prometheus
instructs him to demand the birds’ sceptre and Basileia (1533-43). He describes her:
she is the most beautiful girl who dispenses ( r a p ~ e d eZeus’
~ ) thunderbolt, and everything
else too: good decision-making (ehPouAia), good political order (ehvopkx), moderate
self-control (ao@poo6vq),the ship-sheds, slander, the paymaster, the triobol (1537-41).
87 Texts in
these scenes suggest a nexus of writing, commodification, and tyranny. See D. T. Steiner,
The tyrant’s writ: myths and images of writing in ancient Greece (Princeton 1994) esp. 127-74, who
does not discuss the Birds.
88 For recent discussions, see C. Figueira, The power of money: coinage and politics in the Athenian
empire (Philadelphia PA 1998). who accepts a mid-century dating, and with it, the joke that the Decree
Seller, who claims to sell new laws, actually sells old laws (1037-38); Kallet, Money and the corrosion
of power (see n. 32 above) 205-26, dates it to 414/13 in connection with the substitution of an eikostc?
for tribute. The Decree Seller sells very new laws indeed.
89 For sycophants in comedy, see M. Christ, The litigious Athenian (Baltimore MD 1998) 104-17.
DAVID ROSENBLOOM: EMPIRE AND ITS DISCONTENTS
269
Basileia ‘dispenses’ Zeus’ thunderbolt, the highest force in the cosmos, and the principles of
political order that distinguish hegemony from repression. She also ‘dispenses’ the material
forms of Athenian power. In comedy, women seek to introduce the principles of storage and
thrifty distribution into the polis (Ar. Lys. 486-500; Eccf. 208- 12, 599-600, taptcu6pcvolt
K C ~ \ @x66pcvai; fr. 305).” Thucydides’ Alcibiades claims that the city cannot ‘regulate’
(mptcbcoeai) the amount of empire it wants; an empire needs to expand continuously and
to suppress its subjects to avoid subversion (6.18.3). Basileia figures the regulation of
imperialist desire and power.”
Peisetaerus forms his ‘empire’ by replicating the paternal oikos. The return of the birds’
sceptre restores their inherited kingship, depriving ‘the father (sc. Zeus) of his tyranny’
( 1605).Y2The epikEros Basileia brings the patrimony of her oikos to the marriage. The ‘tyrant’
household is often constituted by a marriage alliance and derived from the wife’s father’s
oikos.y3Peisetaerus replaces Zeus by marrying his epiklgros, ending his power to prevent
succession, which is predicated on the withdrawal of his epikfgros from ~irculation.”~
The
husband of an epiklgros is a father-substitute, replacing his wife’s father as producer of his
heir. Peisetaerus forces the enclaved epikfgros into the sphere of exchange, compelling
succession and inheritance while ‘killing’ the father and becoming his replacement; at the
same time, he restores a primordial order and renews the oikos of Zeus.
Diverting Basileia from her enclaved position threatens to transform her into Helen and to
force a ‘war over one woman’ (1638-39).Peisetaerus plays the demagogue and sophist to gain
hegemony over the birds; he plays the sycophant to steal Heracles’ patrimony.Y5Quoting
Solon’s law on inheritance to ‘prove’ that the nothos Heracles cannot inherit because he has
no place in the anchisfeia,Peisetaerus foils Poseidon’s attempt to win Heracles’ resistance,
for Poseidon would take Basileia himself as Zeus’ next-of-kin ( I64 1-75). Peisetaerus
displaces the comic Heracles - glutton and nothos who knows only edible value - as Zeus’
heir. But he also compensates Heracles with ‘tyranny and the milk of birds’ ( 1 67 1-73). As the
son of Zeus, Heracles’ patrimony is ‘godlike tyranny’. Peisetaerus monopolizes tyranny,
distributing it within a closed circle of gift exchange.
Both Trojan Women and the Birds realize imperialist desire in a marriage strategy: kill the
father (Hector/Zeus), take the heir’s patrimony and ‘godlike tyranny’ (Astyanax/Heracles),
and marry the epikfgrosof the line (BasileidCassandra). In the Trojan Women,Helen is the
90 They can also be spendthrifts and thieves. See J. F. Gardner, ‘Aristophanes and male anxiety: the
defence of the Oecos’, G&R 36 (1989) 5 1-62 (53-55).
91 For the wife as rarnias, controllingexpenditure while the husband generates income, see Xen. Oec.
3.15; Cf. Ar. Th. 418-21.
92 The birds’ patrimony is kingship (466-70.477-78,48I-82,499-500,504,548-49),
symbolized by
the sceptre (480,508-10.629-36. 1535-36, 1600-01, 1626-27, 163 I). The cock ‘used to be tyrant’ of
the Persians (483-87); otherwise the Paarhcu- root rather than the rupctvv- root applies to them.
93 Tyranny derived from the wife’s oikos:Cylon (Thuc. I . 126.3); Peisistratus (Hdt. I .60.2); Pausanias
(Thuc. 1.128.7;Hdt. 5.32). See Gernet, ‘Marriages of tyrants’, in The anrhropology ofrhe Greeks (see
n. 20 above) 289-302, esp. 300.
94 M. Arthur, ‘Cultural strategies in Hesiod’s Theogony: law, family, society’, Arerhusn 10 (1982)
63-82.
95 For Peisetaerus as a sophist, see Hubbard, ‘Utopianism and the sophistic city’ (see n. 15 above)
24-50.
GREEK DRAMA I11
270
cost and the final objective of this strategy, which renders extinct the self-sufficienthousehold
and its hegemony in the polis. The Birds renews the house of the father even as it ‘kills’ him,
purifying imperialist desire by enacting it to reconstitute the self-sufficient oikos, halting the
processes of commodification.The Birds retains the marriage strategy of the Trojan Women,
but transforms it into comedy by a fiction of renewal, recreating the paternal, royal,
aristocratic, self-sufficient oikos as the tyrannical institution of the cosmos.%
Basileia is a condensation of Helen and Athena (cf. 1652-54),an epik&os and tamius, who
has access to where the thunderbolt is stored (cf. A. Eu. 827-28)- She reproduces her father’s
oikos, circulating only within the anchisreia. The comic hero diverts her from her path,
threatening a war that never materializes. Helen is the opposite principle: the daughter of Zeus
who is diverted from her oikos to that of the ‘other’, prompting ‘war for one woman’ whose
dowry is death (A. Ag. 406) and who forces the commodification of everything oikeia. The
Birds restores the oikos and its principles of autonomy, self-sufficiency, and survival;98the
Trojan Women laments their extinction.
The Trojan Women transpires while Athena goes to get Zeus’ thunderbolt to shatter the
Achaean fleet (92-94). The Birds enacts the transfer of the thunderbolt from Zeus to
Peisetaerus through Basileia. It is probably no coincidence that Alcibiades wears the emblem
of Eros brandishing the thunderbolt on his shield (Plut. Ale. 16.2).The thunderbolt expresses
the hopes and desires, ambiguities and anxieties of the year 415/14. Would the Athenians
suffer a pathos no less than their drama, as Hermocrates and some Syracusanspredict (6.33.46, 35. l), or would they conquer, achieving ‘godlike tyranny’? The Trojan Women transfers
the thunderbolt to Athena to destroy the Achaeans in their homecoming; the Birds transfers
it to Peisetaerus. who joyfully brandishes it in the play’s finale, while the chorus celebrates
it (1 743-54). If Athena’s appropriation of the thunderbolt is a threat to aspirations for naval
invasion, then the Birds transforms the threat into exultant joy.
Peisetaerus’ marriage to Basileia is a hieros gamos that makes bride, groom, race of birds,
and their polis ‘blessed’ (1707, 1720-25). Prometheus arranges this marriage. It inverts the
marriage of Cassandra and Agamemnon in the Trojan Women.Euripides’ Cassandra plays the
roles of Prometheus and Basileia. Like the Titanic rebel, she foresees the marriage that will
cause the king’s downfall - a marriage to herself. Like Basileia, she is her father’s epiklgros,
who makes a ‘royal marriage’ that creates a ‘blessed’ community (Tr. 308-41, 354; cf. 259).
and makes herself (312). her husband (3 1 l), her father (326-28) and her polis (365-66)
‘blessed’,While the Birds celebrates the creation of a ‘tyrannical oikos’ (1706-08),Cassandra
celebrates the destruction of Agamemnon’s oikos.
Conclusion: Troy, Nephelecoccygia, and the apragm6n polis
As the Trojans are the ‘other’ of Hellenic polis ideology, so the apragmh is the ‘other’ of
Athenian imperialist ideology. Thucydides’ Pericles and Alcibiades identify the apragm6n as
96 Cf. E.
fr. 86 (Austin): ‘children and a wife are a great tyranny for a man’ (pyc3.q rupavvic drvbpi
r k x v a K a i yuvfi).
97 Cf. C.
H. Whitman, Aristophanes and the comic hero (Cambridge MA 1964) 197-98.
for Aristophanic comedy as the
defence of the oikos.
98 See Gardner, ‘Aristophanesand male anxiety’ (see n. 90 above) 61,
DAVID ROSENBLOOM: EMPIRE AND ITS DISCONTENTS
27 1
a man who refuses to take the risks required to maintain and expand empire. Their apragm6n
is parasitic upon the energetic action of imperialism: if the city followed him, it would fall into
slavery (2.63.2-3).Only the apragm6n blames the accumulation of power and glory that are
the rewards of empire (2.64.4),and only the Athenians regard such a man as ‘useless’ (2.40.2).
Alcibiades declares that apragrnosyne would destroy Athens (6.18.7; cf. 18.6). At the
apotheosis of Athenian polypragmosynR the theatre staged two dramas that in generically
determined ways yearn for an apragm-n polis. The Trojan Women stages the truth of Pericles’
dictum - apragmosynif is the path to slavery - as tragedy, lamenting, memorializing, and
valorizing the apragmGn polis as an extinct ideal. The Trojan Women dramatizes how the
symbolic economy of naval imperialism, which produces ‘Helen’ as its objective and highest
value-form, its agalma which must be restored to the oikos, commodifies everything else: it is
the alienation of oikeia which wins material benefit, but generates blame, shame, hatred and
divine retribution instead of kleos. As an agalma, Helen signifies the value of what the Trojans
lack; but she also embodies the absence at the heart of empire. Neither naval imperialism nor
a sacked, burned, mutilated and raped city has anything to call ‘its own’. The two can be
lamented together: the pursuit of Helen imposes symmetrical forms of alienation on master and
slave alike.
The Birds adopts every cunning trick of the polypragm6n to create an apragmGn topos:
Peisetaerus uses theft, sycophancy, father abuse, demagoguery, sophistry, and hybris to forge
an order that excludes them. The Birds takes over the cosmos to reconstruct the space of the
oikos, which, as its hegemonic institution, is a synecdoche for the polis.
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