The Politics of Youth in Greek Tragedy: Gangs of Athens by Matthew Shipton

Author:Matthew Shipton [Shipton, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Ancient, Greece, Literary Collections, Ancient & Classical, Literary Criticism, Social Science, Violence in Society
ISBN: 9781474295086
Google: bGpHDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2018-02-08T23:52:20.217746+00:00

6

Friendship and Generational Loyalty in Euripides’ Orestes

So far, we’ve seen how the plotlines of extant tragedy are taken from a wide variety of myths (and in one case, Persae, directly from historical events) but there are two dominant clusters that are repeatedly drawn upon. The first is those stories associated with Thebes and the family of Oedipus. The second is the myth of the Atreidai. This second group is particularly important for discussion of how Athenian tragedy is shaped by historical events due to the precedent set early in tragedy’s history, in Aeschylus’ highly political Oresteia, that established Orestes’ association with Athens and the city’s political institutions.1 Sophocles’ Electra and Euripides’ Orestes, Electra, Iphigenia at Tauris and Iphigenia at Aulis all cover events relating to the Atreidai and, through the admittedly patchy evidence available, look likely to have been written towards the end of these tragedians’ careers.2 Mining the same vein of myth, it is unsurprising that these plays display similarities in plotline. In all except Iphigenia in Aulis, a central triadic relationship between two young men and a woman results in conflict that ends, or threatens to end in murder. There are striking similarities in the relationships between these plays’ principal characters, the alliances they form in the face of adversity and their preparedness to use violence to achieve their aims. Foremost in this group, it is perhaps Euripides’ Orestes that presents the most interesting picture of youth in tragedy. This is a play that not only makes a highly innovative departure from the myth of the house of Atreus but features three young characters who form an exclusive group in order to implement a highly aggressive plot.

Between the restoration of democracy in 410 and the Athenian defeat at Notium in 406, a renewed sense of confidence seems to have been established in the city (albeit beginning with a period of political recriminations and show trials). Historical sources for 408 do not reveal any new tensions at Athens, other than those noted in the previous chapter on the different views on how aggressively the Athenian imperial strategy should be pursued and there appears to be relative social and political continuity, if not stability. While the supporters of the oligarchic revolution had been defeated politically, the networks of influence that sustained oligarchic sympathies in Athens would have persisted. One visible manifestation of this network were the hetairiai – often glossed as ‘clubs’ – perceived after 411 as associations for oligarchic conspirators.3 The most well-known picture of hetairiai is sketched in Thucydides, at 8.65. There, he records: ‘Some of the younger men had formed a group amongst themselves and had murdered a certain Androcles …’. The description of an exclusive group, created in order to carry out violence, appears earlier in Thucydides’ work, at 3.82, when he describes that membership of a hetairiai (hetairias) required loyalty to your peer group rather than kinship in times of civil war. The reference in Book 8 makes specific mention of the group formed by

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