‘A Greek and Not a Barbarian’: The Barbarian Woman and Civic Ideology in Greek Tragedy

Marie Valverde (Indiana University)

Following the Persian Wars, universal stereotypes of barbarians surfaced, most notably in tragic performances, Edith Hall argues, and distinctions between eastern and Greek political and social customs—eastern luxury and Greek simplicity, despotism and democracy, and rule by law and lawlessness, to name just a few—became more prominent and apparent. “The notion of the barbarian as the universal anti-Greek against whom Hellenic—especially Athenian—culture was defined,” Hall claims, is an invention of the fifth century tragedians, and the very process of writing about and performing the barbarian is “an exercise in self-definition.”[1] According to Hall, tragedy, and specifically the recurring role of the barbarian in tragedy, served to endorse democratic ideology: “It was one function of the tragic performances at Athens, which took place at the City Dionysia, to provide cultural authorization for the democracy and the inter-state alliances: the enormous interest in the barbarian manifested in the tragic texts can therefore partly be explained in terms of the Athenian and Panhellenic ideology which the poets both produced and reflected.”[2] When she examines specific tragedies, Hall broadens her definition of the role of tragedy by indicating that the tragedians’ focus on ethical components, such as clothing, music, morals, and political customs, illustrates the civic character of tragedy “as a vehicle for political and ethical pronouncements.”[3]

Though Hall’s study of the prominence of barbarians in tragedy provides an insightful means of assessing and understanding the function of tragedy, as well as its possible relationship to democracy, Hall tends to conflate Panhellenic, civic, and democratic ideology (as do a number of scholars). While I agree that tragedy flourished under and possibly even because of democracy, representations of the barbarian as anti-Greek does not necessarily imply an expression or reaffirmation of democracy, particularly since Aeschylus’ the Suppliants is the only extant tragedy that portrays a direct contrast between barbarian political practices and Greek democracy. Nonetheless, Hall’s argument that the tragedians engaged in a process of self-definition through their presentations of barbarians offers greater insight into the role tragedy played in the fifth century. Following the Persian Wars, Greeks experienced an intensified sense of Panhellenism, and tragedy promoted and reflected a Panhellenic community, a civic ideology; it echoed and produced a sense of what it means to be a citizen, a member of a Greek polis. As a whole, tragedy is, I would argue, not a defense or even affirmation of democratic values; rather, it acts as a means of defining and constructing identity, an identity that was implicitly civic.

Using Hall’s assessment of the role of the barbarian in tragedy as my starting point, I will argue that tragedy in the fifth century both endorses and constructs civic ideology by identifying and formulating the citizen in relation to the (transgressions of the) Other. By “Other,” I am specifically referring to barbarian women (not all barbarians); I limit discussion to the barbarian woman because she stands as a two-fold representation of the conflict between the insider and outsider dichotomy around which the dramatic action of every play is organized. Though by and large the movement from one sphere to another is not by choice, the woman transgresses boundaries by moving from the oikos to the polis and the barbarian by moving from a foreign world to a Greek polis. The barbarian woman’s movement into opposing spheres highlights and reaffirms the social and political practices of the Greeks. Through her interactions with Greek (men and women), the barbarian woman serves to define the role of the citizen and emphasize the civic ideology of the community for which the play is performed. I focus my discussion around Aeschylus’ Suppliants and Euripides’ Medea, Andromache, and Hecuba because in these plays barbarian women find themselves in foreign land, and as they negotiate their way through it, distinctions between Greeks and barbarians become evident. The role of the barbarian woman demonstrates that one of the primary functions of tragedy was not the endorsement and reflection of democratic but civic ideology.