David Sarkies's Reviews > Suppliant Women

A Question of Burials
30 June 2018 – Grafton

Well, I am slowly getting through the last few plays of Euripides that I have yet to complete and it is interesting that the commentator at the beginning of this play seems to want to write it off without giving it much thought. In a way he seems to believe that it is one of those forgettable plays, however I would beg to differ namely because it does address some rather interesting aspects of Ancient Greek society, and in fact there is one idea that I feel confronts us every so often as well.

The story occurs after the events in Seven Against Thebes, namely when the sons of Oedipus go to war, Polynices who is attempting to regain the throne after his brother Etocles refused to step down, despite there being an agreement that he would do so. Basically, the two sons kill each other, leaving the throne of Thebes to Creon, and the invaders’ bodies are basically left outside the city to rot. The wives and mothers of the dead then flee Thebes to Elusius and make a case to Theseus, King of Athens, to help them in their need. Initially Theseus is reluctant to help, but then he marches on Thebes, drives back the defenders, and retrieves the bodies and returns them to Athens, where all but one, Capaneius, are burnt in a pyre. Capaneius, who was struck down by Zeus, is placed in a sacred tomb, due to the fact that he was struck down by Zeus.

One idea that is explored here is the idea of leaving the dead unburied. In our minds that might not be such a problem, yet even in our secular age there still seems to be this desire to bury the dead, or even simply leave a memorial. This, I doubt, has any real religious reason as to the unburied dead having a tormented afterlife and more to do with there being a memorial. There are many graves that are in fact empty. However, this wasn’t the case with the Greeks, who had a vastly different view of the afterlife than we do, and having a proper burial, or even having their bodies burnt in a funeral pyre, was of utmost importance. In a way it is still this idea of remembering the dead, but also a way of showing respect to those who have also died. In a way, leaving the corpses of the dead unburied was a means of heaping scorn upon those who had died, and was also a means of dealing with one’s enemy and having a tormented afterlife.

Once again, the play was written and performed while Athens was at war, and can be considered an anti-war play, as was the case with a lot of the plays at the time. One interesting thing about the battle here (all battles occurred off stage and generally had a messenger come along to report on what happened, no doubt a reflection on how plays basically developed from what one could consider poetry readings) is that Theseus does not press his advantage. He basically goes in, meets his goal, and then leaves. His goal is not to overthrow Creon, but to retrieve the bodies of those who had fallen. This is also an important idea in that when one goes to war, sometimes, if one is not careful, a victory can pretty quickly turn into a defeat if one lets one’s emotions run too high. In this case the war had nothing to do with overthrowing Creon, and everything to do with retrieving the bodies of the fallen. In a way it reminds me of the first Gulf War, where the objectives were to liberate Kuwait, and not to overthrow the regime in Iraq. We all know what happened when we then decided to go down that road ten years later.

Not surprisingly, there is also a debate about the merits of democracy. The totalitarian argues that a democracy is nothing short of mob rule, and there are those that are simply persuaded by those with fine sounding arguments. It is interesting that our modern democracies aren’t direct democracies like those of the Ancient Greeks. In a way there is a system of checks and balances, if only to make sure that some idiot with a fine sounding argument doesn’t come along and create laws that could be incredibly disastrous (and Nazi Germany is a case in point here). Sure, we have our limits, and our flaws, but where we have a system where everybody votes on laws directly, then we could come up with some incredibly worrying trends.

Yet there is an argument in favour of a dictatorship, and that is that dictatorships get things done. However, there are flaws in that unless you have a benevolent dictator, then you are going to find that your freedoms are curtailed. Sure, a dictator gets things done, and China is a case in point here, but when you discover that not only is freedom of speech curtailed, but you will also find that a lot of other freedoms simply do not exist. In fact, it is rare that you will find a dictatorship where everybody benefits, or has any freedoms at all. Sure, there might be economic progress, but you will also discover that there will also be an awful lot of scapegoats. In the end the end goal of the dictatorship is for the dictator to maintain his power. Oh, and as for economic progress, well, you’ll probably discover that somewhere along the line the regime has basically cooked the books.

One interesting thing I noticed in the play is that one of the characters, Evadne, bemoans the death of her son, and how with her son’s death her life is now a misery. Well, this was important back then, especially since women had no rights whatsoever, and the children were responsible for the care of the elderly. Well, when it came to the men being elderly wasn’t really something that happened all that much, with having to go and fight wars and such, but this is not really the case with the women. They needed progeny to survive, and when children were killed then it is likely that they would be left out in the cold. The other thing Evadne mentions is about having a second chance at life so that she could avoid the mistakes that she made in the first go. Well, that would be wonderful, wouldn’t it, if it wasn’t for the butterfly effect. Basically, if you avoid one mistake, well, you will pretty quickly discover that the life you are now living is nothing like the life you lived previously, and all of the sudden you are faced with a new set of challenges. Yeah, it would be great to avoid the mistakes that we made the first time around, but sometimes our situations are beyond our control, and sometimes the mistakes that we avoid mean that we end up missing out on the good times that we have had. Still, one does sometimes wander what would have happened if only …