Encyclopedia of Greek and Roman Mythology (Facts on File Library of Religion and Mythology) by Luke Roman Monica Roman

Author:Luke Roman, Monica Roman [Roman, Luke Roman, Monica]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: ISBN-13: 9780816072422, Facts on File
Published: 2011-01-16T23:36:28.503000+00:00

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Ion

to be dead, and each experiences pity for the into which Creusa is born as a princess has other’s lot. In both cases, moreover, key char-an appropriately dark history. Hephaestus, acters (Iphigenia, Orestes, Creusa) experience attempting to rape Athena, spilled his semen severe doubt regarding the designs and basic on the ground, and the Earth was impregnated decency of the gods. Finally, at the close of both with Erichthonius (whose name refers to his plays, the goddess Athena makes an appearance status as earthborn). Athena hid him in a chest ex machina to bring about a satisfactory plot and forbade the three daughters of Cecrops resolution and, at the same time, to reassure the to look at him; two looked, and all three were main characters of the rationality of the gods’

driven to madness and leapt to their deaths designs. In both instances, she sends the two from the Acropolis. In the next generation, family members to Athens, where they will lay King Erechtheus, Creusa’s father, to satisfy an some of the foundations of Athenian civiliza-oracle that demanded the sacrifice of virgins tion. We are seeing here the conjunction of a set to repel an invader and thus save Athens, sac-of concerns specific to Euripides’ later work, in rificed his own daughters. Creusa was the only particular, an interest in etiology, Athenian and one not to be sacrificed, as she was a newborn non-Athenian cults, and the self-consciousness child. When she arrives at Delphi and meets of Athens in relation both to other Greek cities Ion, he questions her about the details of and to the broader world.

precisely these myths—the defining myths of Yet whereas the mythological content of Athens, from his viewpoint as a Delphian.

Iphigenia among the Taurians, as of most Eurip-Creusa, then, belongs to a series of Athe-idean tragedies, belongs to the broader mythonian princesses who come to a bad end: Her logical fabric of the Trojan War, and turns own sisters were sacrificed by her father. Still, emphatically toward Athens only at the close, the house of Erechtheus cannot quite compete the Ion concerns a specifically Athenian set of with the house of Atreus, with its long list of myths. Euripides demonstrates that Athens, ghastly crimes extending back to Tantalus and like other states with tragic myths, can boast of Pelops, nor with the horrors of the Theban its own doomed royal house with a cross-gen-royal family. Presumably, this is a good thing.

erational history of violence. This tragic vision The misfortunes of Creusa’s kin are alluded to of Athenian legend is significant, given that the in the play but do not weigh as heavily on her as Ion, like other late Euripidean dramas, has been the family histories of Antigone and Electra occasionally characterized as more comic than weigh on those characters. The play’s broadly tragic, or somehow occupying a transitional optimistic ending confirms that Athens’s tragic point between the two genres. As always, such legacy is not as intractable and deadly as that of characterizations are misleading.

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