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Mysteries of identity and designs of the self in Euripides' Ion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

Froma I. Zeitlin
Froma I. Zeitlin
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

The Ion is one of Euripides' most dazzling and puzzling plays. Poised on the boundary between the sacred and the sceptical, the mysterious and the mundane, the mythic and the realistic, and, as so many have noted, between the tragic and the comic, the drama dips and twists and turns and turns and turns again in a continuing series of theatrical tours de force. The birds who swoop down in the opening scene and intervene again in the most important moment of the plot at Ion's banquet might well exemplify these paradoxes of which I speak.

Defilers of the sacred temple dedications with unwanted offerings of their own (106–7, 176) and nesting in the eaves of the roof, crudely ‘making offspring’, no doubt, as Ion suspects them of doing (172–5), they are at the same time bearers of sacred messages (phēmas) to mortals from the gods (180–1), oracular portents (oiōnoi) both generic and particular (1191, 1333, 377) which will prove their worth when, later at the banquet, one of the birds drinks the poisoned wine meant for Ion and by its own lifeless form reveals the lethal plot to its interpreter (1196–211).

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) , Volume 35 , 1989 , pp. 144 - 197
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 1989

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