Wandering Greeks Read Online Free PDF Page B

rebuilt in 316 but on a much smaller scale than its predecessor.
    JOCASTA : What’s its character? What hardship befalls exiles?
    POLYNEICES : The worst is that you no longer have freedom of speech.
    JOCASTA : You mean you’re a slave because you can’t say what you’re thinking?
    POLYNEICES : You have to endure the ignorance of those who have power over you.
    JOCASTA : This is indeed painful, to have to suffer in silence the stupidity of others.
    POLYNEICES : You have to act as a slave, against your nature, in order to make money….
    JOCASTA : Didn’t your father’s guest-friends give you assistance?
    POLYNEICES : They would if I’d have been wealthy. They don’t do anything for you if you’re not.
    JOCASTA : Your aristocratic birth didn’t advance you socially?
    POLYNEICES : Not having any resources was the evil. My birth did not fill my belly.
    JOCASTA : It seems that one’s fatherland is the dearest thing to mortal man.
    Polyneices’ remarks are an indictment of the evils of exile. As we shall see later, they were later used by philosophers, who refuted them point by point to demonstrate that exile was in fact a tolerable, even desirable condition for the man who is set on the path of enlightenment.
    And yet Polyneices’ fate is hardly that of the typical refugee, not least because he had the good fortune during his sojourn abroad to marry the daughter of Adrastus, the king of Argos. He thus speaks from a position of immense privilege, even though, being the citizen of a city-state that values freedom of speech, he bemoans the fact that he had to keep a close watch on his tongue. Having to work for his living was no less irksome to him. He says nothing, however, of the physical hardship endured by refugees, of which he presumably knows nothing. In short, Euripides presents Polyneices’ experience from a highly privileged, Athenian perspective. This, we may note, contrasts sharply with Sophocles’s portrayal of the elderly and blind exile Oedipus, who is almost pathologically fearful of being dishonored by anyone whom he encounters ( OC 49–50). Polyneices’ most revealing statement is that his Argive guest-friends refused to lend him any assistance on account of his poverty—an interesting and no doubt realistic commentary on the limitations of charity in the Greek world even when the two parties were bound by ties of obligation.
    Oratory
    With good reason, given their personal agenda, defendants in Athenian lawsuits commonly described exile as a fate worse than death. “If I go into exile as a result of your verdict,” says a fictitious defendant, “I shall become a beggar in a foreign country, an old man who is apolis ,” First Tetralogy 2.9). “No fate is worse than having nowhere to go, being without a city-state, enduring hardship every day, and being unable to look after one’s family,” says the representative of a group of Plataean exiles who are seeking to settle in Athens (Isoc. 14.55).
    The most detailed account of a refugee’s existence is found in Isocrates’s Aegineticus , so-named because it was written on behalf of an unnamed political exile from Siphnus, who had been granted permanent residence in Aegina. In it the speaker describes what happened to his family when they sought to settle at Troezen (19.22–23):
    As soon as we arrived we succumbed to such severe diseases that I myself only just survived, though within thirty days I buried my young sister who was just fourteen years old, and not five days later I buried my mother as well. Previously in my life I had not known suffering, but now I had experienced both exile and having to live among foreigners as an alien. I’d lost my fortune, and in addition I’d witnessed my mother and my sister being expelled from their homeland and ending their lives among strangers in a foreign land.
    Though the speaker has good reason to play on the