Euripides and the Origins of Democratic «Anarchia»

Erga-Logoi

卷:7

Jonah F. Radding¹ 

[1] Northwestern University;

关键词: aeschylus;    anarchy;    anti-democratic rhetoric;    democracy;    euripides;    anarchia;    democrazia;    eschilo;    euripide;    retorica antidemocratica;   

DOI  :  10.7358/erga-2019-001-radd

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

In this essay, I argue that the terms anarchia and anarchos had become associated with critiques of democracy before the final quarter of the fifth century BCE. I begin with a review of archaic and early classical uses of the term, with a particular focus on two instances in Aeschylus’ Oresteia. I then examine Euripides’ two uses of anarchia/anarchos, one in Hecuba and the other in Iphigenia at Aulis. In each case, we see that the concept of anarchic behavior is associated with democratic bodies; that charges of anarchia are laid by characters who engage with critiques of democracy throughout the dramas; and that the term itself is embedded within discourses that are laden with the language and rhetoric of anti-democratic discourses found in Thucydides, Herodotus, and the Old Oligarch. Given that Euripidean references to anarchia are embedded within terminology that was already current in contemporary anti-democratic thought, I conclude that the concept of democracy’s ‘anarchic’ tendencies had already been developed by the final quarter of the fifth century BCE.

【 授权许可】

Unknown