Dramatic Means and Ideological Ends

We begin at the end. Endings are vital to the way we experience a play: how we interpret it as it goes along is determined in part by where we think it will end up, and our perception of its structure is shaped by our "anticipation of retrospection" from a fixed point of closure. This is true of all drama, but especially of ancient drama, where the audience already knew the outcome of the myth. Athenian playwrights had quite a lot of freedom in presenting mythic material, but they seem rarely, if ever, to have changed a major plot point. So Euripides could set his Electra on a farm and have Electra married to a farmer, but apparently couldn't have the farmer kill Aegisthus and Clytemnestra: mythically speaking, that's Orestes' job. Greek tragedy is structured, then, less by the suspense of not knowing how things will turn out than by the suspense of not knowing how things will manage to turn out the way they have to, of fearing that we may not be able to get there from here—a suspense, in other words, between dramatic means and mythic ends.

This tension between means and ends generates for the spectators a desire that binds our attention and impels us through the temporal experience of watching the play. This desire, as Peter Brooks has argued, is essentially a desire for the end. We want the story to end, we want to know how it ends, but we don't want that ending to come prematurely: it has to feel right. Closure, in this view, is more psychological than phenomenological, more feeling than thing. Brooks is writing about novels, but this teleological desire is even more definitive in the case of plays. With a novel you can flip forward or go back, pick it up and put it down, but the experience of drama is linear: a play builds toward a determinate endpoint and won't release you, if it can help it, until you get there. Aristotle says that a dramatic action must have a beginning, middle, and end (Poetics 1450b21–34). How the play gets from one to the next—the plot's enchainment—is key to its unity, its "wholeness," and its quality as an aesthetic experience. Aristotle favors tight logical enchainment: events should follow one another "according to probability or necessity" (kata to eikos e to anankaion). He disapproves when things happen randomly or by chance (tukhe) since, he says, the greatest emotional impact is produced when chance events seem actually to have happened for a reason (Poetics 1451a36–1452a11).

This explains in part why Aristotle so admires Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus. In that play, every individual event seems to happen according to tukhe: Oedipus happened to come from Corinth to Thebes, happened to kill an old man at a crossroads, happened to solve the riddle of the Sphinx and marry the widowed queen Jocasta. Likewise in the unfolding of the drama on stage: a messenger happens to come from Corinth telling Oedipus the man he thought was his father is dead; in the course of the scene he happens to mention that Oedipus was not really his son; and so on. Every event is linked to the prior one by chance, and yet all of them add up to the inevitable discovery that Oedipus killed his father and married his mother. In this play, probability takes on the force of necessity as the action moves ineluctably toward its telos—the revelation that the divine prophecy has been fulfilled—and its sweep is so forceful that it lends that ending a sense of finality even though the prophecy has not, in fact, been fulfilled entirely. That telos is also the arkhe (beginning): the tragic action was completed before the play even began, and what unfolds onstage is its dramatic realization. This gives the play a feeling of inexorable teleology, an almost claustrophobically tight enchainment in which the means are always—whether Oedipus knows it or not—defined by the end.

Contrast Euripides. In Euripides' plays, as in Oedipus Tyrannus, the end is often known from the beginning. Many of his plays open with an extradiegetic prologue, delivered more or less directly to the audience, often by a god, telling us from the start how things will end. In these proleptic prologues, the play's beginning anticipates its telos, and yet the route from the one to the other is so circuitous and indirect that for much of the play we are uncertain where we are headed and whether we will ever actually get there. Between beginning and end, events are enchained not by a probability that verges on necessity, as Aristotle prefers, but often by pure accident, tukhe. Episodes are linked by chance events or the random comings and goings of the myriad characters; actions do not follow one another in a clear and singular path, but double back and repeat themselves, stop and start and head off down dead ends. And whereas in Oedipus Tyrannus these random acts of tukhe all contribute to the final ananke, in Euripides means and ends seem never to fully cohere. In fact, sometimes the plot goes so radically askew that it takes a deus ex machina to bring it back into line. So, in Orestes, as we shall see in chapter 5, Apollo has to come down at the last minute to ensure that the plot ends the way, mythically, it has to. The necessary telos is accomplished, but it requires some mechanical tweaking to make it happen. In place of an adamantine teleology, we are left with a sense that the end doesn't fully circumscribe the means nor the means fully justify the end.

This non-congruence of ends and means is part of what Donald Mastronarde terms the "open structure" of Euripides' dramas. In contrast to the inexorable progression of a play like the OT, in Euripides events are juxtaposed without explicit ligatures, just as at the thematic level, conflicting viewpoints are presented without being reconciled. This thematic and formal openness, Mastronarde argues, produces a sense of disequilibrium that poses a "challenge to the audience to make sense of the whole," and in this way to participate actively in the interpretation of the play's action and the construction of its meaning. Euripides' open structure has seemed to many to be a particularly suitable aesthetic for Athens's radical democracy. Forcing the citizen-spectators to weigh different positions and reach their own conclusions, this way of structuring action seems to confirm the claim of the character Euripides in Aristophanes' Frogs that his tragedy is the most democratic because it teaches the demos to think (952–79). In its gleeful break from traditional mythic and narrative probabilities and its openness to contingency and reversal, Euripidean tragedy seems to mirror contemporary democracy, its structural freedom a mimesis of the democracy's eleutheria.

This idea is exceptionally appealing to us today. As postmodern democrats, we like the thought of political and literary openness, the sense of freedom and infinite possibility that comes with the loosening of formal constraints. But openness can generate anxiety as well as exhilaration, and an open structure can produce a paradoxical longing for closure, both dramatic and ideological.

This is what I think happens in Euripides' Ion. In this play the tension between means and ends is particularly strained and the political stakes particularly high, for its telos is the arkhe of Athens's arkhe, the origin of its imperial power. The play stages Ion's assumption of his identity as forebear of Athens's pure autochthonous lineage and Ionian empire. The muthos is governed by tukhe: a circuitous tale of abandoned babies, mistaken identities, and failed murder plots. Indeed, the play contains more occurrences of the word tukhe than any other extant Greek tragedy and it marks all the key moments in the plot. But the telos is pure ananke: no less than in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, that end is written from the start. We know all along that Ion is really the progenitor of Athens and its Ionian empire: his destiny is fixed in advance and the only question is how he will fulfill it. The play thus pits the ideological certainty of the end against the contingency of the dramatic means: we know where we have to end up, but we spend most of the play uncertain that we will ever get there. It is precisely this uncertainty, however, that makes us determined to reach that telos and makes us so invested in it as a telos. It makes the audience long for their own national and imperial destiny even as they are shown its essential contingency. What ultimately secures this precarious destiny is their own spectatorial desire, the longing for an ending that the play induces through the openness of its structure and contingency of its plotting.

In this way the play's formal structure leads the audience toward a psychic attachment that withstands any critique, even those the play itself poses. It is in this formal psukhagogia that I locate the play's ideological force, not in what it says about Athenian citizenship and imperialism (although, as we shall see, it has much to say on those topics), but in the way it makes us feel about them, in the imaginary relation it produces toward them. This shift of focus from ideology as determinate content to ideology as affective structure allows us to move beyond a critical impasse in political approaches to this play and to tragedy as a whole, that is, the debate as to whether tragedy celebrates or contests Athenian ideology. Ion has provided support for both readings. To some its patriotic myth and explicitly political ending make the play a glorification of Athenian unity and imperial power in harmony with the overall ideological tone of the City Dionysia. Others stress the violence and deception necessary to secure this glorious future, and take Ion as a trenchant critique of Athens's foundation myth and the civic self-image and imperial policies built on it.

But if ideology is less a determinate set of beliefs than an affective relation to those beliefs, then these seemingly contradictory readings are in fact mutually compatible, for the affect may be sustained even if the beliefs are demonstrated to be ungrounded, false, or pernicious. Ion shows the Athenian ideologies of autochthony and imperial hegemony to be arbitrary and contingent, as all ideologies are. But it makes its audience long for those ideologies nonetheless, and all the more so the more arbitrary they are shown to be. With its digressive plot and happy ending, Ion has sometimes been labeled a "romance." We might consider it an ideological romance. Its muthos not only depicts the passionate attachment of ideology; it psychagogically enacts it, as its drama of tukhe and telos arouses a spectatorial desire that makes the contingent seem destined and transforms luck into necessity.

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Ion is a story of reunion between a boy and his mother. Creusa, daughter of the Athenian king Erechtheus, had been raped by Apollo and in shame had exposed the baby, leaving him in a cave to die. But Apollo had taken care of his child: he sent Hermes to transport him from Athens to Delphi, where the boy, Ion, grew up as a temple servant, ignorant of his true parentage. In the first scene we meet Ion, a charming naif whose joyful devotion to his holy duties is tinged with the melancholy of an orphan. It just so happens—the first of many such lucky coincidences—that Creusa and her husband Xuthus have come to Delphi to inquire of the oracle how they can remedy their childlessness. Creusa and Ion happen to meet, and mother and son feel an immediate sympathetic bond, although they do not know the other's identity. Xuthus, meanwhile, has received an oracle that, unbeknownst to him, he already has a son, and that son will be the first person he meets as he is going out of the temple. Who would that be but Ion, whom Xuthus names "Ion" from the verb "to go": "I name you Ion, a name fitting this lucky encounter" (Iona d'onomazo se tei tukhei prepon, 661). Xuthus, overjoyed at his newfound heir, plans to take Ion back to Athens to establish him in the seat of power. This false recognition, based on a false prophecy, sets in motion a series of near catastrophes: Creusa, in despair at her own ostensible childlessness and the thought of this intruder on her family throne, tries to kill Ion. She poisons his wine, but when a bird dies after it chanced to drink some of the spilt liquid, the plot is discovered. Pursued by the Delphians, Creusa takes refuge at the altar of Apollo, where Ion finds her and is about to kill her. But just at that moment—lucky timing—the Priestess who had raised Ion reveals the tokens she had found with the abandoned baby: a young girl's weaving, a golden snake necklace, and a garland of olive leaves, still green after all these years. These items identify Ion as Creusa's long-lost child, and the play ends (or, as we'll see, almost ends) with the joyful reunion of mother and son.

A happy ending, then, and for the Athenian audience a necessary one, for they would have known that this is not just any ordinary mother and son. Creusa, as the play constantly reminds us, is the daughter of Erechtheus whose father Erichthonius was Athena's offspring, born from the very soil of Attica. The Athenians claimed descent from this original monarch and through him they imagined themselves as autochthonous, born of the earth, and brothers united by this royal lineage. This autochthonous origin was vital to the Athenians' communal identity, rooting it in the soil and the blood, and was codified in the Periclean law that defined an Athenian citizen as the son of two Athenian parents. "Athenian-ness" was not just a legal status but a matter of phusis (nature, birth, heredity), a point on which the play insists by emphasizing the outsider status of the Euboean Xuthus, who is eugenes but not engenes, noble but not native (291–93). This autochthonous Athenian bloodline is nearly broken by the separation of Ion and Creusa and is resecured—along with the civic identity it entails—in their reunion. At the same time, Athenian audiences would have known that Ion was not just the simple boy we see happily sweeping the temple steps, but the progenitor of Ionia, the Greek area of Asia Minor that formed the core of Athens's empire in the fifth century. So when they heard the name Ion, they would have thought not of the chance encounter of Xuthus going out of the temple, but of Athens's imperial destiny, a destiny inherited along with their pure autochthonous blood from this early Athenian king. Ion's name thus encapsulates the play's paradox of means and ends, bringing together the pure contingency of the former—"I name you Ion, a name fitting with tukhe"—and the historical necessity of the latter.

Ion opens with a proleptic prologue delivered by the god Hermes, who tells us in advance how everything will work out. He tells of Apollo's rape of Creusa and her exposure of the child, affirming both his divine paternity (35) and his relation to "the autochthonous people of famous Athens" (29–30; cf. 9–11, 20–26). Hermes presents the background to the plot—Ion's upbringing in the temple, Creusa and Xuthus's longing for children—and concludes: "Apollo is driving tukhe to this point, and it has not escaped his notice, as it seems" (Loxias de ten tukhen es tout' elaunei, k'ou lelethen, hos dokei, 67–68). He then sets out Apollo's plan and, we presume, the play's plot: Apollo will tell Xuthus the child is his, Xuthus will take Ion back to Athens where he will be recognized by Creusa and will come into his rightful inheritance without their secret affair ever being made public. "Thus he will name him Ion, founder of the Asian land, a name famous throughout Greece" (74–75). The prologue ends with a patriotic flourish and Hermes withdraws to watch the action unfold.

So we know how the play has to end and we're told from the beginning how it will end. And in fact that is, more or less, how it does end. After mother and son are reunited, Athena appears to put the play's events in their larger civic context, an ideological epilogue, as it were. She confirms Ion's divine paternity and the autochthonous maternity that, she says, make him worthy to rule over Athens and famous throughout Greece (1573–75). She also predicts the civic destiny that will be his legacy to the Athenians: Ion will have four sons who will give their names to the four tribes of Attica; their descendants will settle the islands of the Aegean and the coast of Asia Minor that, Athena says, "give strength to my land" (1584–85). "The Ionians, named for Ion, will have glory" (1587–88). The ideological consequences of the story are spelled out in no uncertain terms: in fact, we are rather hit over the head with them. The telos is thus heavily overdetermined in every way: ideologically, dramaturgically, even theologically, as Athena reaffirms the justice of Apollo, which has been openly questioned throughout the play. Her brother, Athena tells us, has "managed everything well" (1595). And so she bids Ion and Creusa farewell and proclaims "a happy fate for you after this cessation of suffering" (1604–5).