Wandering Greeks Read Online Free PDF

them had been sold legally, others illegally, still others had fled through compelling necessity. They no longer spoke the Attic tongue, as is the case when men wander in all directions.
    We should bear in mind that Solon composed these lines in order to depict himself as an enlightened reformer who did outstanding service on behalf of his compatriots. The suggestion that the returnees had forgotten their mother tongue can only have been true of those who were children at the time of their departure.
    Tragedy
    The solitary wanderer features in tragedy. In Aeschylus’s Prometheus we are told, evocatively, that Zeus has “thrown” her wanderings at Io forhaving rejected his advances (l. 738). When Oedipus discovers the horrific nature of the crimes he has committed, he repeatedly asks Creon to grant his request to become apolis (without a city) (Soph. OT 1381–82, 1440–41, 1518). We never discover whether Creon agrees to this, notwithstanding the fact that Apollo’s oracle had previously ordered “the expulsion of the unholy one” (ll. 96–98). Euripides reverses the picture. The last scene of the Phoenician Women is devoted to Creon’s banishment of Oedipus, which he administers in accordance with the seer Teiresias’s pronouncement that the city will not prosper so long as he resides in it (ll. 1589–94). In response, Oedipus describes the awfulness of such a fate for someone like himself, who is blind, elderly, and without anyone to attend him. “If you expel me, you will kill me,” he states flatly (l. 1621). Even so, his dignity prevents him from supplicating Creon to reverse his decision. His daughter Antigone, who was betrothed to Creon’s son Haemon, condemns Creon for the hubris he has perpetrated against her father and then accompanies him into exile. “Banishment with a blind father is a disgrace,” Oedipus warns her (l. 1691). “Miserable sufferings await you far from your homeland and the prospect of death in exile,” Antigone responds, undeterred (ll. 1734–36). In Euripides’ Bacchae , whose ending is known only from a twelfth-century Medieval adaptation titled Christus Patiens , Dionysus banishes Agave and her sisters from Thebes on the grounds that they have become polluted murderers through the killing of Pentheus.
    Only once in tragedy does an exile describe his experiences abroad. This occurs in an exchange between Polyneices and his mother Jocasta in Euripides’ Phoenician Women . Polyneices has just returned to Thebes after having been exiled by his brother Eteocles. Eteocles had refused to give up the throne to him after a year as had been agreed, and Polyneices returns with the intention of wresting it from him. In the interim he had been living in Argos (ll. 387–406):
    JOCASTA : The first thing I want to know is what’s it like to be deprived of one’s city? Is it a terrible misfortune?
    POLYNEICES : It’s the greatest misfortune—greater than can be put into words.
    FIGURE 2 Silver statêr (the largest coin struck by a polis ) from Thebes, ca. 480–56. The obverse depicts a Boeotian shield, a pun on the word bous (“ox”). Because Greek shields were covered with oxhide. The reverse depicts an amphora in an incuse (that is, recessed) square. Ill-advisedly, Thebes sided with the Persians when Xerxes invaded Greece in 480—an act of betrayal that the Greeks deeply resented. After the Battle of Plataea, the Greek coalition besieged Thebes and forced it to give up its Persian sympathizers. On the eve of the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War several unfortified Boeotian towns sent their civilians to Thebes for protection, thereby doubling the size of Thebes’s population. Thebes was conquered by Philip II of Macedon in 338. In 335 it revolted unsuccessfully against Alexander the Great, who razed it to the ground. Some 30,000 men, women, and children were enslaved. The city was