Aescyhlus’ The Suppliants is considered his earliest surviving play and the oldest surviving Greek tragedy. The text of the play was not discovered until 1952. Up until that time The Persians held the title of oldest surviving Greek play. Of course the discovery of The Suppliants messed up all the academic theories of the development of Greek tragedy causing some scholars to insist that the play didn’t even belong to Aeschylus and was written at a different date.

First produced in 463 B.C.E., the play won Aeschylus first prize in the Dionysia festival. The Suppliants is the first play of the tetralogy that includes Egyptians and Danaïds and the satyr play Amymonê. It is too bad the rest of the plays didn’t survive because this is a great story.

The play’s suppliants are the fifty daughters of Danaös who flee Egypt to Argos in order to escape marriage to the fifty sons of Aigyptos. Why do we care about the fifty sons and fifty daughters? Aigyptos and Danaös are brothers and descended from Epaphos who is the offspring of Io and Zeus. Remember Io? She was an Argive princess with whom Zeus fell in love. Hera knew Zeus was going to make a move on the girl and turned her into a cow. Zeus transforms into a bull. But Hera keeps him away by placing the hundred-eyed giant Argos to guard Io the cow. Zeus gets Hermes to kill the giant. Hera sends a gadfly after poor Io who is then so tormented by this fly that won’t leave her alone she is driven from Greece to Asia. The Bosporus, which means cow-ford, gets its name from this story because Io swam it in her attempt to escape the gadfly. She finally reaches the Nile Delta and the safety of a meadow sacred to Zeus. She collapses in exhaustion. Zeus restores her to human form and with his divine breath impregnates her with Epaphos.

So here we are five generations later. It isn’t entirely clear why the fifty daughters do not want to marry the fifty sons. The flight to Argos seems to have been instigated by Danaös, the father of the girls. The play opens with the girls following their father’s directions to arrange themselves around an altar sort of area because no one would dare harm them at the risk of angering the gods. There they start chanting and singing prayers to the gods. They know Aigyptos’ sons are in hot pursuit and they implore the gods to send the “insolent sons” to their deaths:

Death before they foul this marshy land!
Turn back to sea their swift-winged vessel!
Lash them with storm winds,
sear them with lightning,
let thunder shake them and the sea rise
and swallow them in its
cascading mountains of foam!
Destroy them!
Kill!
Kill them before they make our beds unholy,
before they mount our beds of innocence,
seize us, cousins, kindred,
before they enter bodies,
brutally enter,
bodies that cannot be theirs!
Kill!

As you can see these are no shy retiring maids.

Enter Pelasgos, king of Argos. The first daughter becomes the mouthpiece for all of the daughters and presents their plea and why they have a right to claim it (Io was from Argos). This puts poor Pelasgos in a tough spot. If he accepts the girls he could quite possibly find himself at war with Egypt. If he refuses the girls he will suffer the wrath of Zeus who is not only the god of suppliants in general but a relation of the girls.

Pelasgos decides to put their plea before the people of Argos. The people–the men–vote to accept the suppliants and become their protectors. It is not long after this that the fifty sons show up and send a herald to demand the girls, “lost property,” be delivered to the ship or else. Pelasgos tells the herald to bring it on.

The play ends with the fifty daughters being escorted to the city by Argive women. The Argive women attempt to convince them that they are being silly girls, that marriage isn’t necessarily bad, and that if to marry the fifty sons is their Fate, they must accept it. The daughters sing to Zeus to save them in Justice’s name. The End.

I wish we had the other two plays, but that doesn’t mean we don’t sort of know what happens. From fragments and mentions by people who say the plays and wrote something down about them, we know that by the end of Egyptians the sons have won their claim to marriage. At the end of the second play or beginning of the third, 49 of the fifty daughters murder their husbands in the bridal chamber on their wedding night. is this a surprise given the prayers to Zeus at the start of The Supplinats? The bulk of third play we know is a trial. What we don’t know is who is being tried, Hypermêtra, the one who did not kill her husband, or the 49 who did. I find it intriguing that there is even a question of who is on trial and I imagine I am not the only one who would love to know the answer.

I very much enjoyed this play. The fifty voice chorus of the daughters must have been beautiful and powerful (even though it was men who were acting the women’s parts). And the whole notion of being a suppliant is fascinating. I felt rather bad for the girls who did not want to marry and equally as bad for Pelasgos and the Argives who are compelled to take them in at the risk of their own lives.

Now I am on to Prometheus Bound