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Debating the nature of the gods was only one of the ways in which the tragedians engaged with the intellectual life of their community. Fifth-century BC Athens was a hub for intellectual speculation on topics ranging from natural science to metaphysics, ethics, political philosophy and the study of rhetoric. As Athens grew from being a minor city-state to the wealthy and powerful mistress of an empire, the city became a magnet for thinkers from across the Greek world. This atmosphere is summed up by the boast made by the politician Pericles in Thucydides: ‘[W]e love beauty without being extravagant and we love intellectual life without being soft’ (2.40.1). Tragedy developed in this culture of philosophical enquiry and reflects the preoccupations of its audience, so it is no surprise that the tragedians grapple with the same questions that concerned contemporary intellectuals.
Discussions of fifth-century thought are dominated by discussions of the sophists. The reputation of this group of philosophers (the big names include Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias, Antiphon and Prodicus) was so damaged by the negative portrayal given to them by Plato and others that the English word ‘sophist’ now means someone who uses specious arguments and irresponsible rhetoric. Plato presents the sophists as false rivals to true philosophers such as Socrates, and attacks their status as professionals who will teach for cash. Similarly, Aristophanes mocks the sophists for their interest in questions that seem irrelevant to the ordinary man as well as their dangerous skill at rhetoric. While this perspective has coloured modern attempts to understand the sophists, scholars have increasingly sought to appreciate the contribution they made to Athenian intellectual life and to take them seriously as thinkers. The sophists were in fact a diverse group with interests including natural science, law and mathematics, as well as ethics and rhetoric, and their fields of study were not dissimilar to the philosophers before them (usually known as the pre-Socratics), just as their interest in human virtue and vice resembled that of Socrates himself. Moreover, the sophists’ interest in rhetoric was nothing new, but can be traced back to Homer, where heroes are raised to be fine speakers as well as men of action, and figures like Odysseus show that from the earliest times, the Greeks were well aware that skill at language could be used to manipulate as well as to put a point across clearly.
Figure 6.1 ‘The School of Athens’ by Raphael (1509–11). (Photo by SuperStock/Getty Images.)
Scholarship on Greek tragedy has traditionally presented Euripides as the poet most attuned to philosophical questions, and as we shall see, his tragedies are full of the jargon of contemporary thought. Euripidean characters put forward philosophical views to win arguments, and give the impression as they do so of being engaged in a debate about the concepts involved. This tendency was much parodied by the comic poets and later misunderstood by biographers, who concluded that Euripides himself had studied with the philosophers. However, it would be wrong to conclude that the other tragedians lacked interest in treating such themes. As we saw in Chapter 2, the depiction of Aeschylus as anti-intellectual is based on Aristophanes’ caricatures, which are designed to create humorous contrasts between the poets. Philosophical ideas may be reflected with greater subtlety in the plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus, but they are still important. This chapter will therefore explore how all three tragedians engage with intellectual topics, focusing on three areas central to fifth-century thought: the role of nature and culture in shaping character and society, how Greeks differ from foreigners, and the role of rhetoric in public life.
Nomos and physis
One of the central questions that concerned fifth-century thinkers was the role that culture and social custom played in shaping human behaviour, and whether a person’s character is innate or can be moulded by education. Although we conceptualize this issue differently from the ancients, the idea of ‘nature vs nurture’ remains one of the major debates of our times, and advances in genetics and sociology have only made it more topical. In antiquity, the central clash was between physis (a person’s basic nature) and nomos (custom or law), and thinkers disagreed as to which played the greater role. Thus one of the major debates of the fifth century was whether virtue was teachable, or whether individuals were simply born good or bad. Plato’s dialogue Meno opens with this question, and moves on to the idea that professional philosophers such as the sophists can offer a valuable commodity to their students, since they claim to be able to teach ethics (a claim disputed by Socrates). The idea also had political ramifications, especially in a democracy, since it criticized the assumption that there was a ‘natural’ elite, whereby aristocrats were inherently better people (Greek words for ‘fine’ or ‘good’ often also carry the connotation of ‘well-born’ or ‘noble’). Contrasting nomos and physis allowed thinkers to explore the effects that social hierarchy had on an individual’s life chances.
Euripides explores these ideas with particular force in his Electra, where the aristocratic Electra has been married to a peasant. We are repeatedly told how shaming this alliance is, yet the play also contrasts the generous and considerate behaviour of the peasant with the wickedness displayed by the aristocrats. The idea that nobility of character is distinct from nobility of birth was not new, and can be found in Homer’s depiction of the virtuous swineherd Eumaeus in the Odyssey, but Euripides uses the language of contemporary debate to criticize traditional assumptions as to what gives someone social worth. Thus when the peasant welcomes the disguised Orestes to his house, he comments, ‘[E]ven if I am poor by nature (ephun), there is no need for me to show bad breeding in my character’ (362–3). This formulation inverts our expectations, as it presents poverty as something rooted in physis rather than circumstance, and yet insists that a poor man has the choice as to whether to be ill bred (dysgenês). Similarly, when Electra criticizes the peasant for taking in guests accustomed to higher standards of hospitality than they can provide, he responds, ‘[I]f they are as well-bred (eugenês) as they seem, surely they will be happy among the modest and the great alike?’ (406–7). The peasant redefines the concept of ‘breeding’, suggesting that it has everything to do with attitude and is unconnected to wealth or family background. Conversely, Orestes, a naive young aristocrat, is surprised by the peasant’s virtue, which prompts him to reflect on the relationship between character and situation, beginning with the claim that the physis of men is mixed up (368). Unlike the peasant, Orestes assumes that someone’s physis should perfectly reflect his social position, and is troubled by the failure of the world to live up to this ideal. This theme recurs later in the play, when Electra taunts the dead Aegisthus for having based his self-worth on wealth rather than character, and speaks of the supremacy of physis (941–4):
It is nature (physis) that is steadfast, not wealth. Nature stands by a man forever and overcomes his troubles, but riches that accompany injustice and stupidity fly out of the house after blossoming only for a short time.
Sophocles explores similar ideas in his Philoctetes, where the young Neoptolemus has to choose between remaining true to his physis (and so being a blunt and honourable man of action like his father Achilles) or adopting the pragmatism espoused by Odysseus, who claims that the social good justifies deceit. Early in the play, Odysseus acknowledges that Neoptolemus’ physis would not normally allow him to scheme (79–80), but believes that he can be persuaded to abandon this temporarily, and therefore that a man’s physis is something that can be moulded according to circumstance. Neoptolemus initially succumbs to Odysseus’ persuasion, and is able to trick Philoctetes with a lying account of how he became alienated from his fellow Greeks, but his guilty conscience eventually makes his physis reassert itself. As Neoptolemus hesitates over whether to tell Philoctetes the truth, he laments how distasteful it is for a man to abandon his physis (902). When he finally decides to support Philoctetes, Philoctetes tells him, ‘[Y]ou have shown the physis from which you were sprung’ (1310–11), meaning that as a son of Achilles, Neoptolemus is bound to resemble his father and reject the values of an Odysseus. Neoptolemus’ physis, it turns out, is harder to change than Odysseus imagines, and reasserts itself against his own will, and in the face of persuasion and logical argument. Indeed, it is not surprising that Odysseus fails to understand the importance of physis in governing behaviour, since it is his own physis that makes him adaptable and able to do whatever he regards as most expedient.
If Electra and Philoctetes suggest the primacy of physis, other texts offer different approaches to the conflict between physis and nomos. Philosophers such as Democritus and Protagoras examined the role that nomos played in human society, and the idea that nomos was a civilizing influence is found in the tragedians, where people who ignore nomoi and prioritize their ‘natural’ desires are shown to be selfish and socially disruptive. In Euripides’ Phoenician Women, for example, Eteocles claims that justice is merely a social construct, and therefore justifies his desire to be a tyrant (499–506). In Sophocles’ Ajax we see the consequences of being true to one’s physis at all costs, for Ajax ignores the harm his actions will cause his wife, child and companions. This play also reinforces the importance of obeying nomoi with regard to proper treatment of the dead, and Odysseus warns Agamemnon that ignoring these because of his personal feelings is unjust (1332–45). The same point is also made in Antigone, where Antigone reminds Creon that the nomoi of burial are not arbitrary but rather laid down by the gods as a fundamental tenet of morality, and insists that they are more important than any individual’s personal preferences (450–7). Despite the importance of physis in Philoctetes, we are also shown the role that nomoi play in helping people live in harmony, for Philoctetes’ insistence on pursuing the demands of his ingrained stubbornness makes him choose to live like a wild animal and reject human society. At the end of the play, the intervention of Heracles requires him to set aside his anger and return to civilized society, and it is only by doing so that he can be cured of his wound, since medicine is part of civilization.
Greeks and foreigners
The debate over nomos and physis leads into another important issue in Greek thought: the question of what it meant to be Greek, and whether differences between Greeks and foreigners (or as Greeks would call them, barbarians or barbaroi) were inherent (a question of physis) or due to different cultural beliefs (nomoi). The historian Herodotus enthusiastically catalogues the practices of various peoples, and in a famous passage argues that every culture believes its own nomoi to be the best, and hence that nomoi must be understood relative to the culture that uses them (3.38). A fifth-century medical treatise known as Airs, Waters and Places also deals with the question of national character, and argues that it is determined by geography. Thus, for example, since the climate of Asia is milder than that of Europe, so too the people are gentler and less courageous, while peoples who live in harsh climates are warlike and savage. Since Greece was believed to lie at the centre of the world, the assumption underlying theories such as these was that Greeks had the perfect balance both of climate and of temperament, and this reflects the pervasive idea that Greeks were superior to all other races. This is made explicit in some thinkers: for example, Aristotle argued that barbarians were naturally slavish (Politics 1252b5–9), and this belief would have been reinforced in the minds of his Greek reader by the fact that nearly all the slaves they encountered would have been non-Greeks.
The trauma of the Persian Wars, when the Persians invaded Athens and burned the temples on the Acropolis, had led to a hardening of attitudes towards foreigners, especially Easterners, while the victory over the Persians also confirmed a growing sense of Greek superiority. Thus while we find some suspicion of foreigners in archaic literature, it is a far less significant strand in Greek thought than it became in the fifth century. The audiences of tragedy would have included people who had fought against the Persians (as did Aeschylus himself), and people who had lost family members or been driven from their homes during this conflict. Nevertheless, not all thinkers agreed with the simple polarity of Greeks versus barbarians, and we find dissenting voices. For example, a fragment of the sophist Antiphon appears to stress the factors that unite humans, arguing that ‘we all breathe the air through our mouth and nostrils, we all laugh when we are happy and weep when we are sad’ (fr. 44B). Similarly in tragedy, we rarely find a simple affirmation that Greeks are inherently better than non-Greeks. Rather, the tragedians encourage their audience to reflect upon what constitute Greek values, and how one must behave to live up to them.
Aeschylus’ Persians depicts the Greek victory over the Persians in the naval battle at Salamis, and was produced in 472 BC, only eight years after the events it describes. It tells the story from the Persian perspective: the chorus of elderly Persians learn with horror of their army’s terrible defeat, and the Persian king himself, Xerxes, appears on stage grief-stricken by what has happened. Yet the tone of the play is far from triumphalist, and the Persians are not demonized but presented with compassion, as fellow human beings whose suffering is important. Aeschylus encourages us to feel great sympathy with the rank and file Persians, and to reflect upon what the consequences of their defeat are. For example, the chorus imagine the mourning of the Persian women who have been widowed, and dwell upon the anguish of the young brides who have lost their husbands before they could begin their new life as a married couple (532–48). Their words remind the audience that the Persian army they have defeated are not only enemy combatants but also family men who are loved and missed by their relatives. The fate of the women left behind is embodied in the character of the Queen Mother, who tells the chorus of her fears for her son and how her nights are constantly disturbed by anxious dreams (176–214). The chorus also sing of the aged parents whose sons will never return to them, another reminder of the devastating effects of warfare on family life (579–83). The idea of the Persians as individuals rather than a barbaric collective is captured in a passage where the chorus ask Xerxes what has happened to the individual warriors who accompanied him (956–65):
Figure 6.2 A Persian archer fleeing (sixth century BC). (Photo by DEA PICTURE LIBRARY/De Agostini/Getty Images.)
CHORUS: Where are the rest, that multitude of your friends? Where are the men who stood beside you? Men like Pharandaces, Susas, Pelagon and Damatas and Psammis and Susicanes, who set out from Agbatana?
XERXES: I left them dead, fallen from a Tyrian ship off the shores of Salamis, striking the rocky cliffs.
By the naming of these men, we are reminded that each dead warrior is an individual with his own story, while Xerxes’ description of the corpses battered against the rocky shore adds poignancy to their deaths. That Aeschylus could humanize the enemy who had so recently invaded and devastated his audience’s homeland is remarkable.
Nevertheless, it would be misleading to claim that Aeschylus presents the Persians as being ‘just like us’, and the play also foregrounds cultural differences between Greeks and Persians and suggests that these are what led to the invasion and to the Persian defeat. Throughout Greek thought we find the idea of a moral difference between Greek freedom and Persian tyranny, and Aeschylus presents the Persians struggling to understand Greek values. When the Persian queen questions the chorus about Greek culture, she automatically asks who their master is, and when told that they are not the slaves or subjects of any man, she finds it hard to understand how they can then martial an army in their defence (241–3). The idea that the Greeks are fundamentally unlike Asians in their desire to live free is also reflected in her dream, where Xerxes tries to yoke two women to his chariot, one representing Greece, the other Asia. While the latter submits willingly to the harness, the Greek woman smashes the yoke and topples Xerxes (181–99). The Persian system of governance is shown to be responsible for their suffering, since it is Xerxes’ pride and greed that has led him to invade Greece. This moral is reinforced by the ghost of Xerxes’ father, Darius, who warns that the defeat in Greece is a punishment for Xerxes’ arrogance, which has angered the gods (823–31). Thus the Greek audience is able to take pride in their superior political and moral values, while nevertheless respecting the individual Persians who died fighting them.
The superiority of Greek nomoi, and the Greek desire for freedom, is often implicit in tragedies that depict Greeks coming into contact with foreigners. In Euripides’ Helen and Iphigenia among the Taurians, a Greek woman is abandoned in a strange land and at the mercy of a foreign despot. In Helen, the Egyptian tyrant Theoclymenus will not abandon his attempts to marry Helen himself, despite the promise made by his father to keep her safe. While in Iphigenia, the heroine is forced to participate in the sacrifice of any Greek who has the misfortune to come to Tauris. Both plays reinforce the idea that non-Greeks are ruled by autocrats (as in Persians), and the caprice and cruelty of the tyrants in question confirm the problems with this system. At the end of the plays, the gods intervene to uphold the Greek characters and their claim to freedom. However, as in Persians, individual non-Greek characters are presented as sympathetic and admirable, and this is particularly clear in Helen, where the virtuous prophetess Theonoe risks her life to help Helen escape.
However, having good nomoi is no guarantee of good behaviour. Euripides’ Trojan Women resembles Persians in that it presents a Greek victory over an Eastern enemy, but goes still further in encouraging the audience to feel sympathy with the losers, by depicting the fate of the captive women after the fall of Troy. Throughout the play we see the Greeks behaving oppressively, killing Hecuba’s daughter Polyxena to appease the ghost of Achilles and insisting on the death of the child Astyanax. In Andromache’s speech where she laments the loss of her son, she refers to the supposed polarity between Greeks and barbarians, calling her persecutors ‘Greeks who devise barbaric cruelty’ (764). The portrayal of Greeks as worse than barbarians is unsettling, and even the Greek herald who has to report the army’s decisions makes it clear that he finds them wrong (709–11). The immorality of the Greeks is underscored by the opening of the play, where Athena requests Poseidon’s help in punishing the Greeks for their behaviour during the sack of Troy, where they have desecrated her shrine by the rape of Cassandra. Arrogance incurs divine punishment, and the Greeks’ behaviour at Troy will lead to their downfall. Thus the play suggests that moral superiority is something based on actions rather than something inherent in the Greek race, and Greeks must work to live up to the ideals they claim to value.
Euripides also critiques the idea of natural Greek superiority in Medea by putting it in the mouth of Jason, the play’s least appealing character. In an attempt to exculpate himself from the charge of abandoning his family and breaking his oaths, Jason tries to claim that he has done Medea a favour by bringing her to Greece, where she can benefit from a more enlightened society (535–8):
You got more than you gave in return for my safety, as I shall explain. For a start, you live in Greece instead of a barbarian land, and you understand justice and the rule of law instead of giving way to force.
Jason draws on deep-seated stereotypes about Greeks and foreigners that would have been familiar to the audience, yet it is clear that he is co-opting these ideas to justify his shameful behaviour. Moreover, the claims he makes are hollow, since the audience knows that coming to Greece has put Medea in a desperate situation. Jason argues that justice is a uniquely Greek value, and yet he is shown to be a liar and an oath-breaker, a fault for which the barbarian Medea repeatedly criticizes him (160–3, 492–8, 1391–2). Thus while at the end of the play Jason claims that it is because Medea is a barbarian that she has resorted to murdering their children (1340), the audience can see his own responsibility for what has happened. Jason believes that Medea kills because, as a foreigner, she is irrational and excessive, but Medea’s own account of her motivations stresses her desire to avenge her honour and to avoid being mocked by her enemies (795–7), values which are traditionally associated with Greek heroes. The audience is not only encouraged to reflect upon whether ‘Greek’ and ‘other’ can be reduced to a simple polarity, but also to consider the ways in which traditionally Greek nomoi can lead to disaster when misapplied.
Rhetoric and speech
The rise of the sophists in Athenian culture is above all associated with their influence on rhetoric. The importance of persuasive speech in Greek culture was nothing new, for Homer’s heroes were expected to be speakers of words as well as doers of deeds. In Athenian democracy, the ability to speak well took on new importance, since anyone who could persuade the Assembly to his thinking could influence public policy. Thus any ambitious Athenian needed to be an accomplished speaker, while all citizens would have been familiar with the tropes of public speaking, whether in the Assembly or the law courts. A large part of the sophists’ appeal was their claim to be able to teach public speaking and argumentation, as parodied in Aristophanes’ comedy Clouds, where Socrates’ philosophical school produces young men who can argue their way out of any difficulty. Aristophanes’ negative portrayal highlights an anxiety about how rhetoric can be misused to dress up specious arguments or to hide immorality. This too was a longstanding fear, as shown by the Iliadic Achilles’ comment that he ‘hates like the gates of Hades the man who hides one thing in his heart but speaks another’ (9.312–13). However, the Athenian system gave a dangerous level of power to deceptive speakers, and the Athenians were well aware of this issue. Nevertheless, listening to eloquent speech was a source of pleasure, and while Greek tragedy incorporates contemporary fears about rhetoric, it also celebrates its importance.
Freedom of speech was a point of pride in Athens, and this is often reflected in tragedy, especially where it is challenged by a character with less enlightened views. For example, in Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women, the Greek king Pelasgus presents himself as a democratic ruler, thus aligning himself to the values of the Athenian audience. When confronted by an aggressive Egyptian herald, he stresses his pride in his freedom of speech (946–9). In Euripides’ Suppliant Women, the anti-democratic Theban herald criticizes the Athenian system for allowing social mobility, since a poor man has an equal chance at achieving prominence in the city if he can speak well (423–5). From the audience’s perspective, the snobbish views of the herald would only confirm their pride in the equality that Athens (at least in theory) offered all her citizens, and the role that rhetorical skill played in making this possible.
Nevertheless, tragedy tends to depict the failure of social institutions, and just as tragic marriages are disastrous more frequently than they are happy, so too speech is often used for manipulative ends. Euripides depicts the dangers of rhetoric vividly in Orestes, where Orestes must defend himself against the charge of matricide in front of the Argive Assembly, rather than in a formal trial. This debate is reported by a messenger, and Euripides uses it to offer characterizations of types of public speakers. For example, Agamemnon’s former comrade Talthybius is portrayed as a manipulative speaker who uses language to cloud his intentions. Too cowardly to attack Orestes directly, he wishes to side with his detractors to further his career, and so we are told, ‘[H]e spoke ambiguously, admiring your father greatly but dispraising your brother, and weaving words that were fair-seeming but foul’ (889–92). A still more malicious speaker is described later, someone ‘with no check on his tongue, whose strength lies in his boldness’ (903). This man, it emerges, is a demagogue for hire: he speaks in favour of stoning Orestes to death, but he is doing the bidding of Clytemnestra’s father Tyndareus. Through these characters, Euripides shows how self-interested factions can hijack the mechanisms of democratic debate and how a crowd can be gulled into going along with a plausible speaker, regardless of whether his arguments are sound. Nevertheless, it would be misleading to argue from these vignettes that Euripides offers a thoroughly pessimistic view of democratic speech, since the messenger also describes how Orestes was supported by a man who summarizes the ideals of Athenian democracy (918–22):
He was not handsome in his appearance, but he was a brave man, one who rarely came into contact with the town or the marketplace circle, a man who worked the land himself, the type who alone keep the earth safe, but clever and willing to grapple with the arguments.
This peasant-farmer whose worth is shown by his actions rather than his appearance represents the core aim of democracy, that of giving voice to the humble and virtuous, not just to the wealthy. Though the messenger notes that ‘the better sort of men’ approved of his arguments (930), within the dysfunctional world of the play, his words have less impact than the flashy speeches of the rhetoricians. So although Orestes warns the audience that they must be alert to the dangers of being manipulated by clever speakers, it also offers a positive model for what a public speaker can be like, and how rhetoric can benefit the community.
The assembly of Orestes is unusual in tragedy in that its purpose is to reach a decision. The most common vehicle for tragic rhetoric is the agôn, a formal debate between two characters with contrasting views. The agôn is a particular feature of Euripidean tragedy, and allows the poet to show his skill at constructing arguments. Yet unlike speeches in a real law court or assembly, tragic agônes rarely reach any resolution. The characters are unable to persuade one another, and often end with their positions more polarized than at the outset. Thus tragedy most frequently depicts the failure of rhetoric, and the disastrous consequences that ensue when people are unable to communicate or compromise.
The failure of speech is a central theme of Euripides’ Hippolytus, beginning with Phaedra’s fatal decision to give in to the persuasion of her Nurse and reveal her secret. The agôn between Theseus and Hippolytus is portrayed as a form of trial, where Hippolytus must defend himself against the charge of rape before a judge who is also his prosecutor. Thus just as Orestes showed a breakdown in democratic governance, Hippolytus portrays a miscarriage of justice. Euripides plays up the legal and rhetorical language in this scene, for example Hippolytus complains that Theseus fails to follow the proper procedure such as examining his oath and sworn testimony (1055–6). In his defence speech, Hippolytus draws on tropes that would be familiar to an audience versed in law court speeches, for example his appeal to sympathy because he is not a skilled public speaker (986), and his use of the ‘argument from probability’, when he claims that it is not plausible that he would decide to rape his father’s wife (1009–20). However, Hippolytus’ unwillingness to break his oath of silence means that he cannot simply tell the truth, thus undermining any possibility of a strong defence. The injustice of this situation is compounded by the fact that Theseus has decided on Hippolytus’ guilt before the trial begins. He proclaims his sentence of banishment at the end of his ‘prosecution’ speech and before Hippolytus is given the chance to speak in his defence (973–5), while he invokes Poseidon’s curse in Hippolytus’ absence, before he even knows what he has been accused of (887–90). Thus the trial becomes a futile exercise that fails to engage with the basic principle that justice requires an impartial arbiter. By contrast, in Trojan Women Euripides presents an agôn over Helen’s culpability for the Trojan War that resembles a fair trial, in that it has a judge (Menelaus) as well as prosecution and defence speakers (Hecuba and Helen) and Menelaus rules in Hecuba’s favour, condemning Helen to death. Yet the audience knows (and Hecuba fears) that Menelaus’ desire for Helen will prevent him from carrying out his decision. The legal trappings of the agôn and Hecuba’s persuasive speech turn out to be meaningless, since the judge’s verdict will be overturned by his personal feelings. Even in plays that lack the formal structure of the agôn, attempts to persuade usually end in failure and acrimony, as in the opening of Sophocles’ Antigone, where Antigone and Ismene attempt to explain their perspective to each other but their speeches drive a wedge between them.
However, tragic persuasion and rhetoric are not always doomed. Aeschylus’ Kindly Ones depicts the origins of the justice system, where a jury rather than a single individual must collectively reach a decision after listening to the arguments of both sides. The rhetoric used during the trial itself is troubling at times, especially Apollo’s specious argument that the mother has no relationship with her child and so Orestes’ matricide should not count as kin-killing (657–66). Any legal ruling is liable to anger the losing party, as Athena observes when she sets up the trial (477–81), and the verdict itself appears to offer no resolution, as the Furies threaten to poison Athens in their anger (780–7). The culmination of the play is not Orestes’ acquittal, but the scene in which Athena persuades the Furies to give up their anger. Their transformation into beneficent fertility goddesses is then celebrated in the triumphant procession that marks the close of the trilogy. After Athena appeals to ‘holy Persuasion’ (885), the Furies cease their repetitive lamenting and instead begin to negotiate with her about their future. As she reassures them, they acknowledge that they are charmed and soothed by her words (900) and then agree to become protectors of Athens (916–26). The trilogy as a whole has shown the failure of persuasion, as each injured party can see no recourse other than retribution, but Athena demonstrates how the Furies can give up their anger without losing honour: they are to retain their status and powers, including the right to take vengeance, but will now use these for the benefit of the community which has taken them in. The reconciliation of the Furies not only showcases the new justice system, but also foregrounds the value of persuasive speech within a healthy community.
In conclusion, tragedy has a great deal to say on the topics which engaged contemporary philosophers, and Plato’s suspicion of tragedy can at least partly be explained by his perception that it was a rival to philosophy in its ability to participate in debate and offer moral guidance. The tragedians’ role in this process was not passive, for by critiquing these ideas, they helped shape the debate. When we consider the size of the tragic theatre, and the number of ordinary people who attended a play, it becomes clear how significant a role tragedy played in the development of fifth-century intellectual thought.