Biopolitics and citizenship in Euripides’ Ion

a lecture by Dan-el Padilla Peralta

I'm here today to talk with you about the value of a play written in the fifth century BCE for contemporary discussions of race, racialization, and citizenship. That play is Euripides' Ion. And what I'll do over the next few minutes is give a brief overview of the context of the play itself and what forces in 5th century classical Greek and Athenian culture shape it. From there I'll provide an assessment of how the play can be used to invigorate conversations about citizenship and belonging with an emphasis on how these intersect with formulations of race. With Euripides' Ion, we can explore a couple of features of citizenship: citizenship as security or safety for some and not for others, early definitions of who can be counted as a legitimate citizen and who cannot, and ways that classical Greek ideas about citizenship continue to inform and inflect discussions about citizenship today. Here I'll be thinking in particular about the biopolitics of citizenship and how we understand the relationship between reproduction and citizenship.

“And in the third year after this in the archonshop of Antidotos, on account of the multitude of citizens, at Pericles’ proposal they decided that no one who had not been born of two citizen parents would have a share in the city.”

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This is a description of the Athenian citizenship law of 451 BCE, as preserved for us in the constitution of the Athenians. And this is a law that operates in the background to Euripides' Ion.

But first, The Suppliants

To make our way to the Ion, we'll start by thinking with one of his predecessor playwrights in classical Athens, Aeschylus, and a production of the playwright Aeschylus that also bears on questions of citizenship: The Suppliants. Aeschylus' The Suppliants raises a question that's important for our assessment of citizenship in classical Athens: "How can a space that is open to all protect me?" This play centers the story of immigrants pleading for protection and for this reason, it's received some take-up in contemporary adaptations of Greek myth. Among the most riveting and much discussed of these adaptations was Moni Ovadia’s production on the island of Sicily some years ago, a production that was staged with deliberate emphasis on and conscious attention to the EU’s treatment of migrants and refugees.

In one of the key scenes of Aeschylus' The Suppliants, the ruler Pelasgus attempts to have the immigrant women who've attached themselves to an altar of Zeus for supplication and protection moved away from the altar to a more open public space. The Chorus Leader responds, "How can a space that is open to all protect me?" In a recent essay, the philosopher Sara Brill has mulled over this question's implications, and I'll quote her:

"But the Chorus Leader's question — 'How can a space that is open to all protect me' — lays bare the conditions of democracy in an even more profound way. We can hear in it, a deep awareness of the relation between how humans bear the weight of symbolic life and the fragility of embodied existence. Will we be safe here in this shared and open space created by human agreement?"

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The labor of creating public spaces that protect the most vulnerable is an exacting labor, and its demands aren't always, and indeed are not usually, distributed equitably. These labors and their consequences are ones that Greek tragedies are quite interested in exploring. The labor of moving towards "a shared and open space that's created by human agreement" we see from some of these tragedies is incomplete if we limit ourselves to fumbling for abstractions without thinking long and hard about how the most vulnerable are made to feel in open spaces.

Greek tragedians

The Ion, which is a tragedy by the playwright Euripides, is where I'll try to ground some of that understanding that develops in this Greek context. This is a play that emerges in the course of the 5th century BCE's ongoing negotiations of Greek identity. And in order to get a sense of the play's place in Greek life, I'll give a brief overview of what Greek tragedy looks like during this period and who the major players in the production of tragedies in Athens were.

There are three canonical tragedians. There is, first of all, Aeschylus, who lives from the 520's to 456/455 BCE, and is the author of The Suppliants. He is an author who fights in the Greco Persian wars and who enjoys a prominently visible role in public life. He scores 13 victories for his plays at the Great Dionysia, the public festival where these plays were staged. Next we have Sophocles, who was 495 to 405 BCE, who is very politically engaged, very productive. In addition to putting on plays, over 120 of which we have titles for, he is also a player on the political scene. And finally, we have Euripides, who is 40 years younger than Aeschylus, 10 to 15 years younger than Sophocles, and who, by comparison to Aeschylus and Sophocles, is not quite as successful initially, but who becomes incredibly popular in later generations. He will come to outshine the other two playwrights, 19 of his plays survive.

Racialized reproduction

The Athenian citizenship law of 451 BCE is important for understanding one of Euripides' plays, the Ion. And to clarify the relationship of that citizenship law, I'll turn to a passage from Susan Lape's recent book. In Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy, Susan Lape writes:

"By requiring that future citizens have two native parents, the law fostered the idea that the citizen body was a descent group or genos in the specific sense of an interbreeding group. In so doing, the citizenship law brought new political salience to Athenian women and their reproductive work. [...] By identifying Athenian or native women as the only women capable of producing Athenian citizens, the law tapped into both gender and ethnic national or racial categories. To put it another way, the law attached ethnic national or racial salience to Athenian women and to their reproductive work. In this way, it created a regime of racialized reproduction."

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This regime of racialized reproduction is grounded in, among other things, the production and reproduction of myths on stage. And the philosopher Arlene Saxonhouse has given a lot of thought to this in her writing in Fear of Diversity. In particular, she's drawn attention to how the diversity entailed in heterosexual creation is at the center of some of the most anguished debates about citizenship and belonging in classical Athens.

Crucial to these debates and to the myths that coalesce around them is the premise that Athenian identity is rooted in the land of Attica. This is a racial script. It is a script of autochthony, of belongingness to the soil, and it's a bedrock principle of Athenian civic identity. The givenness and the constructedness of the biological, in this context, and the relationship between the biological and the land requires examination. Euripides' Ion gives us one framework within which to conduct that evaluation. In this play, we see the interrelation of sexual violence, civic origin stories, and structures of citizenship, all of which receive concentrated but powerful treatment in the play. The Ion is a play put on in the years after the Periclean citizenship law of 451 BCE. And one way of reading this play is as an extended meditation on who gets to feel safe and who does not get to feel safe in an Athenian context.

Who was the Ion for?

But first, let's dig a little deeper into the life and context of its author, Euripides. As I noted earlier, Euripides is the third of the canonical Athenian playwrights whose productions between them account for the lion's share of our knowledge about classical Greek tragedy and Greek intellectual culture in the fifth century. It's important to recognize that these plays are spaces for thinking-out-loud-about issues of significance and salience for the Athenian community. All of these plays are put on at the Great Dionysia Festival in honor of the god Dionysus at Athens, for which three tragedians were chosen to compete. Each year, each tragedian had to stage four plays, and at the conclusion of the multi-day cycle of performances a victor was chosen. The three canonical Athenian playwrights about whom we know the most happen to have lived long and incredibly productive lives. There's much that we wish we knew about the staging of the plays themselves and their original incarnation. We're decently well-informed about their authors and about the festival context in which the performances took place, but the question of who precisely was allowed to be in the audience for these plays, plays whose roles were all acted by men, remains a point of contention.

If, as one school of thought holds, the overwhelming majority of those in the audience were men, then, as the philosopher Arlene Saxonhouse has commented, in the case of plays that have strong female roles such as Euripides' Ion, "the city of adult males saw on stage the powerful portrayal of women—women whose existence, as the playwrights reflected on the human condition, could not be denied as curtly as Pericles had chosen to do in his funeral oration." Here, Saxonhouse is referring to the funeral oration delivered by the Athenian statesman Pericles that's reserved for us in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. This is a funeral oration that sidelines women, not addressing them until the very end, where Pericles avails himself of a few very slighting remarks to these women after having spent much of the speech extolling the virtues of Athens.

Autochthony and Athenian civichood

We'll come back to that speech in a moment, but for now, I want to focus on how Euripides' Ion in particular brings out some of the tensions between gender roles and identities in civic space, and how these tensions in turn inform the representation of the biopolitics of citizenship and the biopolitics of race. Euripides' Ion, like many of the other Greek tragedies during the fifth century, constructs a space for the negotiation of fundamental questions concerning Athenian society's organization around sex/gender difference, precisely as this difference structures the physical and intersubjective spaces in which the plays are put on and are processed by their viewers.

The Ion foregrounds autochthony as a racial script before proceeding to more extensive comment on sexual assault and violence as charter-myths for the civic foundation story of Athens. This is a story that is of interest to many of our Athenian sources and many of our Greek sources on Athens. And in the history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides has the Athenian statesmen, Pericles, spell out the implications of autochthony quite explicitly. "In this land of ours, they have always been the same people living from generation to generation up until now." The Ion invests this idea with some real heft by grounding Athenian roots in the soil of Attica. But here's where some of the tensions that are associated with this myth begin to come into focus. These tensions are at the heart of the conflicts in the play. 

For these tensions, it's important to have a vocabulary for thinking about race and for articulating race. And for this, we'll turn again to Susan Lape, who has argued that the idea of Athenian autochthony is a racial formation. With many definitions of race that we can bring to bear on the material in Euripides' Ion, I'm going to examine two that can provide us with a foundation for calibrating the relationship between these stories of autochthony and racial discourse in fifth century Athens.

The first is from Michael Omi and Howard Winant's classic Racial Formation In the United States: "Race is a concept," they explain, "which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies... an unstable and 'decentered' complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle.” For Omi and Winant, racial formation is a technology for constructing difference through typologies and hierarchies of the human body.

A second definition, one proposed by Barbara and Karen Fields in their 2012 book, Racecraft, has race "standing for the conception or the doctrine that nature produced humankind in distinct groups, each defined by inborn traits that its members share and that differentiate them from the members of other distinct groups of the same kind but of unequal rank."

It's the second definition that can help us get a grip on the racializing properties of autochthony as guiding the myths that are told about Athenians and that Athenians tell themselves about their origin: the collective embrace of the myth that Athenians descend from people who are literally born from the soil. This is the story that according to some of our sources begins with the god Hephaestus' effort to rape Athena, and in his failure, his ejaculation on the ground then produces Erechtheus, the first Athenian, is a story that separates Athens from other Greek communities. The story's racial underpinnings are suggestive of some of the strategies that were available to civic communities in the archaic and classical Greek world and communities that were seeking to reinvent themselves, especially in the fifth century BCE context. The myth of autochthony was important to an Athens that was on the way to claiming a kind of superpower or hegemonic status among other Greek city states, and paired that rise to hegemonic status with escalating investments in slavery and colonialism. But the myth is also important for us if we want to use Euripides' Ion as a way of thinking about citizenship's dependence on fictions. 

Citizenship as fiction

This is a story that invests the Athenian state with an abstracted coherence. It's predicated on the intersection of civic identity with biological kinship, and it relies for its reproduction as a story that people buy into on its staging by Euripides among others. The fiction operates on a number of different levels, beginning with one of the fictions that is central to the narrative arc of Euripides' Ion itself. One of the fictions subjected to scrutiny in Euripides' Ion itself is the fiction of paternity. Xuthus, the husband of Creusa, one of the protagonists of the play, is tricked into believing that he is Ion's father. Germane to the work of interrogating Athenian citizenship's interaction with kinship and with false kinship as laid out in the Ion is another point brought by the philosopher Arlene Saxonhouse.

In Fear of Diversity, she has this very powerful insight into the significance of the birth of Erechtheus from the soil of Attica. This is a coming into being that productively varies the virgin birth or parthenogenesis myths that circulate in other Mediterranean and Eastern Mediterranean contexts. "The city in its idealized and mythologized origins,” Saxonhouse writes, "is peopled from a single source: the earth, and is not dependent on the diversity entailed in heterosexual creation."

On this reading, in its canonical form, the myth of Athens' origins erases both racial and sexual difference because it postulates a unitary Athenian community that doesn't descend from the licit and consensual union of a man and a woman. But what the Ion does is to challenge this in part by demonstrating that this origin myth is encased in all kinds of fabulations about, first of all, the consent or non-consent of those individuals who are necessary to the biopolitics of the Athenian state. And second, the participation, willing or unwilling, of folks from the outside who are required to legitimate the project of Athenian civichood, even as they are denied access to its full benefits.

Reproductive labor

I'll now set out three passages in the Ion that foreground several dimensions of the fundamental paradox of Athenian civichood. Namely, that there could be no Athenian civichood without the reproductive labor of Athenian women, even though Athenian men and the intellectual productions with which they were associated sought insistently to exclude or marginalize women from the necessary biopolitics of the city.

Beginning with lines 10 and 11 of Euripides' Ion, which tee up the centrality of sexual trauma and violence to the experiences of Creusa, one of the protagonists of the play. Early in the play, we receive a very brief description of the experience that Creusa has had. "Phoebus compelled Erechtheus' daughter Creusa / to accept his violent embrace," in conjunction with Creusa's words to Ion at lines 251 to 254, "Unhappy women! What things that gods ought err! And where / shall we turn for justice when we are being destroyed / by the unjust actions of those who are much stronger?"

These verses call up the constitutive violence by which the divine and human heteropatriarchy comes into being in Athens and how it enters into conversation with debates about the meanings and limits of justice, especially as these bear on the trauma of sexual assault. This trauma is excavated for its bearing on the content and extension of justice in the Athenian polity and it's presented to us, in the second set of lines I quoted, from the perspective of a victim. At the same time though, one of the more harrowing features of Euripides' Ion is that at the very end of the play, Creusa, the victim of the sexual assault, is made effectively to forget the trauma that she has experienced after rediscovering and reconnecting with the child who was born as a consequence of this sexual assault.

Access to citizenship

Another dimension of these debates concerning citizenship is brought out in the description of another of the characters whose arc is central to the plot of Euripides' Ion. This is Xuthus, Creusa's husband, for whom we get a brief description of his background, followed by more extensive presentation of his perspective in the play.

At lines 59 and following, we receive some background information about Creusa's husband, Xuthus: "...a war rose between / Athens and Chalcodon's people in Euboea; / Xuthus as an ally helped to end the strife / and though he was not a native, but Achaean / son of Aeolus, son of Zeus, the prize / he won was marriage to Creusa. But / in all these years, no children have been born."

What's noteworthy here is Creusa's marriage out to a foreigner for whom marriage into Athenian society is a reward. The implication of the phrase, "though he was not a native," is that normally marriage to Athenian women was reserved for Athenian-born men. In other words, that Athenian society was endogamous. And this is a state of affairs that is solidified by the Periclean citizenship law and the social opprobrium against exogamy that we can detect in the exclamation of Ion himself to Creusa at line 293: "A foreigner! How could he marry an Athenian!"

Middling ideology

Later on in the play, lines 485 to 490 and again at line 625 and following, we as readers are put in the position of being able to connect the dots between the play on the one hand and the elaboration of what Ian Morris and other scholars of Greek culture have termed a "middling ideology" in Greek culture. This middling ideology seeks systematically to level distinctions between Athenian male citizens, while also presupposing in the background that these male citizens will enjoy privileges that are denied to other more vulnerable or minoritized communities.

Here's the Chorus in Euripides' Ion: "For myself," the Chorus sings, "I would choose, rather than wealth / or a palace of kings, to rear / and love my own children: shame to him who prefers / a childless life, hateful to me. / May I cling to the life of modest possessions / enriched by children."

Ion himself channels the same ideological commitment. In the play, we hear him say, at 625, "I would prefer to live / as a happy citizen than be a king / who must choose to have the evil as his friends / and must abhor the good for fear of death. / You might reply that gold outweighs all this... Let me avoid distress, seek moderation."

This is a recapitulation of middling ideology. It's an ideology that values the capacity to enjoy a moderated existence as a member of the polity that comes with some obligations—having children, being a participant in the reproductive system that defines the capacity of the Athenian state to sustain itself—but that distinguishes sharply the average Athenian citizen from people aspiring to wealth, or seeking to accumulate wealth, or seeking to differentiate themselves from other citizens via the accumulation of goods. What makes this middling ideology particularly significant for our purposes is that it is really bound up with racial principles. It's bound up with autochthony and with an understanding of the enduring significance of autochthony to the constitution of Athenian civic life.

Biopolitics

I've been making use, from time to time, of the term biopolitics. And in order to clarify how autochthony and racialization work hand-in-hand, I need to say a few more words about what biopolitics entails–what the regulation of life and reproduction at the hands of the state have to do with the capacity of Athenians to develop and inhabit a biopolitical order. Anxieties about reproduction are at the heart of the Ion and other classical Athenian sources. One of Pericles's encouragements to those who have lost their children in the early stages of the Peloponnesian War is to keep making more babies. Not only because, as Pericles says, these new children will prevent you from brooding over those who are no more, but because, Pericles continues, they will be a help to the city, both in filling the empty places and in assuring her security: "For it is impossible for a man to put forward, fair and honest views about our affairs if he has not, like everyone else, children whose lives may be at stake."

Reproduction within the family unit and its relevance to the affairs of the city state are subject to continuing interest in later decades of Greek historical writing and Greek political theory. So for instance, in Aristotle's Politics, a lot of space and time is given over to explaining how, why, and under what circumstances children should be brought into the world for the purposes of defending and shoring up the city state.

One of the things that's at stake in the interweaving of citizenship and politics, in our Athenian and Greek sources, is nothing less than the indexing of full civic identity to childbearing capacity: if one cannot have children or chooses not to have children, can one even be a good citizen? Can one even be a citizen in the first place? Does legitimate civic standing require the production of children? To what extent should the state actively intervene in the management of the family so as to promote practices it deems most beneficial or conducive to the overall good of the citizen body? To what extent should the state interfere in people's exercise of agency over their own bodies? These persist as living and explosive issues in Greek philosophy from the late fifth century, well into the fourth century BCE.

And in the case of Euripides' Ion, though, we are also faced with still another dimension of citizenship that brings out the implications of the Periclean citizenship law for not just the biopolitics, but the substantive rights held by members of the Athenian city state.

At lines 670 to 675, Ion says, "If I may do so / I pray my mother is Athenian / so that through her I may have rights of speech. / But when a foreigner comes into a city / of pure blood, though in name a citizen / his mouth's a slave: he has no right of speech."

In bringing up biopolitics earlier, I was channeling the French philosopher Michel Foucault. What I want to do in thinking about this passage from Euripides' Ion is develop one of Foucault's insights into the relationship between biopolitics and the capacity to speak in the city. And to that end, I'll read a passage from one of Foucault's lectures. In his lectures on “The Government of Self and Others”, which were originally delivered at the Collège de France, 1982 to 1983, Foucault devotes a section to a brief discussion of the Ion, in which he writes:

"We see someone in search of his birth who does not know his mother, and so who wants to know what city and community he belongs to. Why does he want to know this? He wants to know precisely so that he knows if he has the right to speak. And since he is searching for this woman, he hopes that the mother he will eventually discover will be Athenian and thus belong to his community, this dēmos, et cetera, and that by virtue of this birth, he himself will have the right to speak freely, to have parrēsia. For he says, in a town 'without stain,' that is to say, within a town which keeps its traditions, in a town in which the city state, the constitution, the politeia has not been debased by tyranny or despotism or by the abusive integration of people who are not truly citizens, so in a town which has remained without stain and in which the politeia has remained what it should be, only those who are citizens have parrēsia. Beyond this general theme which structures the search for this single personage's mother and which links the right to speak to membership of the dēmos, it's worth keeping hold of two things. The first," Foucault continues, "is that the right to speak, parrēsia, is transmitted in this case by the mother. Second, you see too that the stranger status is defined and appears in contrast with that of citizens who have the right to speak, and so far as the town is without stain, his tongue is servile. Exactly: his mouth is a slave. To ge stoma doulon. That is to say, the right to speak, the restriction on the freedom of political discourse is total. He does not possess this freedom of political discourse; he does not possess parrēsia."

Colonial citizenship and autochthony

At the conclusion of Euripides' Ion, we are left with several questions, all of which Euripides poses to the audience and invites Athenians, and possibly non-Athenians in the audience, to engage. The first concerns the extent and expansiveness of citizenship in the Athenian world. In the play’s final movements, we see a vision of the future after Ion, the future of the community that will descend from Ion as that community extends across the Aegean Sea, and in the process, anticipates by several centuries the substantive colonization that the Athenian empire will itself undertake in the fifth century BCE. So, foregrounded for Euripides' audience is the question of what it means to be a citizen of an Athenian community that has extended well beyond Athens, but that is still claiming this rootedness in the soil of Attica. How do the imperatives of autochthony, and imperialism, and settler colonialism interact with each other? But relevant to this question is another one that is more intimately embedded in the reproductive logic of this community. It is a question that arises on either end of the Athenian citizenship law of 451 BCE and that, as given shape and form by the experiences of Creusa in the play, guides the play's own intervention in these debates, and also steers the conversation that I think Euripides intended his audience to have.

What is the place of women, and what is the place of gender and gendering in the construction of the Athenian civic community?

Noted earlier that in Thucydides' account of the Periclean funeral oration, held and delivered on the occasion of the commemoration of the war dead in the early stages of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian statesman Pericles, instrumental in the passage of the citizenship law, effectively sidelines women, addressing them directly only at the very end of his speech. At the same time, though, at various points in the speech, it is clear that without the reproductive labor of women in the Athenian community, there is no future to the Athenian community. The expectation and the burden is that for those families who have lost children in the conflict, this reproductive labor will continue to be carried out. This labor imposes demands, it triggers tensions, and some of these tensions are ones that we can read into Euripides' Ion. And that I think in some cases, especially when we see the fraught conversations between Xuthus and Creusa, on the one hand, and Creusa and Ion on the other, are ones that the playwright very intentionally frames in the course of developing the narrative momentum of the play itself.

A final question to take up concerns the formation of the Athenian civic body along racialized premises in the fifth century BCE. From the beginning of my effort to contextualize Euripides' Ion, I've drawn attention to the works of Susan Lape and others that have made a pretty compelling case for understanding the citizenship law as racializing, in that, among other things, it locks Athenian identity and Athenian citizenship into a biological and birthright paradigm. What one can do to recover more fully the dynamics of racialization in the Athenian world of the fifth century BCE and the greater Greek world beyond Athens, is to think about how the citizenship law intersects with or diverges from developments in other Greek communities.

Here, it's important to emphasize that by Euripides' time, and certainly in the generations after Euripides, his plays and other plays put on stage in Athens in the fifth century BCE are circulating to other parts of the Greek world. How are communities, Greek speaking communities in the south of Italy, for example, or in Sicily, or on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, wrestling with the content and messaging of this play? How does this play and other plays invite them to engage questions concerning the Greekness and the definition of Greekness that was such a contested topic in Athens itself and in other communities during this period? Most importantly of all, from the perspective of thinking with and about race in the fifth century BCE and after, how are racial concepts embedded in the vocabulary and concept worlds of Greeks themselves?

We have noted that autochthony, the myth of Athenian rootedness in the soil, is one potent mechanism by which Athenians and other Greek speakers lay out a set of authoritative claims concerning the coherence, the presumed biological coherence, and ontological coherence, of a community. There are, of course, other ways of imagining the formation of communities that were available to and were trafficked heavily by Greek speakers during this period. For instance, migration narratives and the idea that some Greek communities had originated not from the soil, but directly as a result of diasporic or migration and its trajectories over the Mediterranean world in the seventh, sixth, and fifth centuries BCE create circumstances for other Greek speaking communities to assert that their identities had come into being and shape in the course of movement, not in the course of stasis or residence in one place. 

Athenians themselves are on the move, and as I noted a minute ago, one of the tensions that's bubbling to the surface in the period when this play is put on is how to reconcile the facts of Athenian mobility with the presumed facts of a kind of proto-national ethnic racial coherence. That tension and its foregrounding in Euripides' Ion makes it an exceptionally suggestive text for thinking about dilemmas of citizenship, belonging, and racialization. And its confrontation with biopolitics and the imperatives of reproduction also make it a valuable text for thinking about the overlays and intersections of racialization and gender.