{"product_id":"aeschylus-s-suppliant-women","title":"Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women","description":"This book offers a provocative interpretation of a relatively neglected tragedy, Aeschylus's \u003cem\u003eSuppliant Women\u003c\/em\u003e. Although the play's subject is a venerable myth, it frames the flight of the daughters of Danaus from Egypt to Greece in starkly contemporary terms, emphasising the encounter between newcomers and natives. Although some scholars read \u003cem\u003eSuppliant Women\u003c\/em\u003e as modelling successful social integration, Geoffrey W. Bakewell argues that the play demonstrates, above all, the difficulties and dangers noncitizens brought to the polis.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRigourously historical, Bakewell situates \u003cem\u003eSuppliant Women\u003c\/em\u003e in light of the unprecedented immigration that Athens experienced in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. The flow of foreigners to Attika increased under the Pisistratids but became a flood following liberation, Cleisthenes, and the Persian Wars. As Athenians of the classical era became increasingly aware of their own collective identity, they sought to define themselves and exclude others. They created a formal legal status to designate the free noncitizens living among them, calling them \u003cem\u003emetics\u003c\/em\u003e and calling their status \u003cem\u003emetoikia\u003c\/em\u003e. When Aeschylus dramatised the mythical flight of the Danaids from Egypt in his play \u003cem\u003eSuppliant Women\u003c\/em\u003e, he did so in light of his own time and place. Throughout the play, directly and indirectly, he casts the newcomers as \u003cem\u003emetics\u003c\/em\u003e and their stay in Greece as \u003cem\u003emetoikia\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBakewell maps the manifold anxieties that \u003cem\u003emetics\u003c\/em\u003e created in classical Athens, showing that although citizens benefited from the many immigrants in their midst, they also feared the effects of immigration in political, sexual, and economic realms. Bakewell finds \u003cem\u003emetoikia\u003c\/em\u003e was a deeply flawed solution to the problem of large-scale immigration. Aeschylus's Argives accepted the Danaids as \u003cem\u003emetics\u003c\/em\u003e only under duress and as a temporary response to a crisis. Like the historical Athenians, they opted for \u003cem\u003emetoikia \u003c\/em\u003ebecause they lacked better alternatives.","brand":"University of Wisconsin Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55555096183128,"sku":"9780299291747","price":28.5,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9780299291747_babd5140-2ba2-4562-905e-eeedc5a6d438.jpg?v=1777988761","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/aeschylus-s-suppliant-women","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}