- Title Pages
- Acknowledgments
- 1. Euripides’s Poetic Game and Law of Composition
- 2. Anthropomorphism
- 3. The Protection of the Self and the Role of <i>Sophia</i>
- 4. Some Connotations of <i>Sophia</i>
- 5. Polyneices’s Truth
- 6. Hecuba’s Rhetoric
- 7. Eros in Euripides’s Poetics: Sex as the Cause of the Trojan War
- 8. The Lewd Gaze of the Eye
- 9. The Power of Love: Who Is Aphrodite?
- 10. Phaedra
- 11. Hermione: The <i>Andromache</i>
- 12. Female Victims of War: The <i>Troades</i>
- 13. The Survival in Poetry
- 14. Figures of Metalepsis: The Invention of “Literature”
- 15. The Failure of Politics in Euripides’s Poetics: Politics in the <i>Suppliant Women</i>
- 16. Political Philosophy: A Universal Program of Peace and Progress
- 17. How to Deliberate a War
- 18. Democracy and Monarchy
- 19. The Battle
- 20. The Rescue of the Corpses
- 21. Return to Arms
- 22. The Polis’s Loss of Control and Authority
- 23. The Bacchants’ Gospel and the Greek City
- 24. Pentheus and Teiresias
- 25. Dionysus’s Revenge: First Round
- 26. Revenge Prepares Its Murderous Weapon
- 27. Initiation and Sacrifice
- 28. Victory and Defeat
- 29. Euripides’s Poetry
- Bibliography
- Subject Index
- Index Locorum
The Battle
The Battle
- Chapter:
- 19. The Battle
- Source:
- Euripides’s Revolution under Cover
- Author(s):
Pietro Pucci
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
This chapter focuses on the battle between Athens and Thebes in Suppliant Women. Critics and commentators seem especially concerned to extrapolate, from the Messenger's description of the battle, the location of the actual territory before the wall of Thebes that Euripides's text describes to the audience. This description repeats some important episodes and tactics of the “battle of Delion” in 424 B.C., as told by Thucydides. Historians and critics have shown that the odd episode described in lines 678–79 resonates as an allusion to the presence in the Theban army of a special elite body of 300 warriors called parabates. In Diodorus's description of the battle of Delion, these warriors are fighting in front of the Theban army; in the Suppliants they descend from the chariots and fight, aided by the charioteers. This chapter considers the similarities in the tactics of the battle in Euripides's and Thucydides's texts.
Keywords: battle, Athens, Thebes, Suppliant Women, Euripides, battle of Delion, Thucydides, parabates, warriors
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- Title Pages
- Acknowledgments
- 1. Euripides’s Poetic Game and Law of Composition
- 2. Anthropomorphism
- 3. The Protection of the Self and the Role of <i>Sophia</i>
- 4. Some Connotations of <i>Sophia</i>
- 5. Polyneices’s Truth
- 6. Hecuba’s Rhetoric
- 7. Eros in Euripides’s Poetics: Sex as the Cause of the Trojan War
- 8. The Lewd Gaze of the Eye
- 9. The Power of Love: Who Is Aphrodite?
- 10. Phaedra
- 11. Hermione: The <i>Andromache</i>
- 12. Female Victims of War: The <i>Troades</i>
- 13. The Survival in Poetry
- 14. Figures of Metalepsis: The Invention of “Literature”
- 15. The Failure of Politics in Euripides’s Poetics: Politics in the <i>Suppliant Women</i>
- 16. Political Philosophy: A Universal Program of Peace and Progress
- 17. How to Deliberate a War
- 18. Democracy and Monarchy
- 19. The Battle
- 20. The Rescue of the Corpses
- 21. Return to Arms
- 22. The Polis’s Loss of Control and Authority
- 23. The Bacchants’ Gospel and the Greek City
- 24. Pentheus and Teiresias
- 25. Dionysus’s Revenge: First Round
- 26. Revenge Prepares Its Murderous Weapon
- 27. Initiation and Sacrifice
- 28. Victory and Defeat
- 29. Euripides’s Poetry
- Bibliography
- Subject Index
- Index Locorum
