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Apollo in the Ion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

George Gellie
George Gellie*
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne
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Extract

There was a time, not so very long ago, when the Ion of Euripides was read and discussed with an unwavering solemnity. The serious approach commended itself for a number of reasons. Common decency and good taste made it difficult to talk lightly about rape and attempted murder. Whether the Apollo of the play was respected or despised, the judgement of him was seen as a ‘religious’ and therefore a straight-faced judgement. Those who wanted to use the play as a document of the times may have feared that a light-hearted play would be suspect as a source of historical record. Most potent of all, there was the long tradition of reverential handling of anything called ‘tragedy’. A play so called was expected to display the preoccupations of an Aeschylus or a Sophocles: the steady look at human pain, the moral search, the cosmic connection, the pursuit of value, the sober criticism of life. It was not always easy to find these things in the Ion, but they could be assumed in a ‘tragedy’ and therefore read into the play. In the two most widely-used translations of the play into English, Vellacott's in the Penguin series and Willetts' in the Chicago series, the translator has added stage-directions to suggest an unexpressed dissatisfaction in Ion which reverses the apparently warm and happy tenor of the text Both scholars have made a case for their ironic reading of the play's ending in subsequent critical writing.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , 1984 , pp. 93 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 1984

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References

1. Euripides, The Bacchae and Other Plays, tr. P. Vellacott (London 1954); Ion, tr. R.F. Willetts in The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. Grene & Lattimore (Chicago 1958). The stage-directions were removed in later reprintings of Vellacott’s translation.

2. Vellacott, P., Ironic Drama: A Study of Euripides’ Method and Meaning (Cambridge 1975), 21, 89, 123Google Scholar; Willetts, R. F., ‘Action and Character in the Ion of Euripides’, JHS 93 (1973), 209Google Scholar. Murray, Gilbert, Euripides and his Age (London 1918), 125Google Scholar, agrees with the idea behind the stage-directions: ‘Creusa forgives the god; Ion remains moodily silent.’

3. Whitman, C.H., Euripides and the Full Circle of Myth (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 100CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Strohm, H., ‘Epikritisches zur Erklarung von Euripides’ Ion’, WS 10 (1976), 79 n.42Google Scholar, speaks strongly against the use of the word ‘comedy’ or the suggestion of affinities with New Comedy.

4. Kitto, H.D.F., Greek Tragedy (London 1939), 312CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Lucas, D.W., The Greek Tragic Poets (London 1950), 208Google Scholar; Friedrich, W.H., Euripides und Diphilos (München 1953), 10Google Scholar; Knox, Bernard, ‘Euripidean Comedy’, in The Rarer Action: Essays in Honor of Frances Fergusson, ed. Cheuse & Koffler (New Brunswick N.J. 1970), 68Google Scholar: ‘Euripides, in these plays but especially in their culmination, the Ion, is the inventor, for the stage, of what we know as comedy’; Burnett, A.P., Catastrophe Survived: Euripides’ Plays of Mixed Reversal (Oxford 1971), 107Google Scholar: ‘It is to be noted, however, that this Apolline play of return is always of the sort we would call comic.’

6. Knox (n.5 above), 80. As he indicates, the explanation was already there in von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U., Euripides Ion (Berlin 1926), 111Google Scholar: ‘an erotic attack’. Cf. Friedrich (n.5 above), 12f., and Taplin, O., Greek Tragedy in Action (London 1978), 137fCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. See Conacher, D.J., Euripidean Drama: Myth, Theme and Structure (Toronto 1967), 270ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Wassermann, Cf. F.M., ‘Divine Violence and Providence in Euripides’ Ion’ ,AJP 71 (1940), 589f.Google Scholar: ‘The god cannot declare his love and ask the girl whether she likes him…despite a full anthropomorphism precisely in this relation, he belongs to a different world and cannot share any human family life.’

9. Wolff, Cf. C., ‘The Design and Myth in Euripides’ Ion’, HSCP 69 (1965), 192 n.21Google Scholar: ‘Breaking the dramatic illusion by calling attention to the myth is…akin to the practice of comedy which so often plays with the fact of its own fiction.’

10. Cf. Friedrich (n.5 above), 18.

11. Lucas (n.5 above), 205, comments on the passage: ‘What exactly is the tone of this?…It is, I think, very sophisticated, the beginning of an Alexandrian playfulness.’ Winningtonlngram, Cf. R.P., ‘Euripides: Poietes Sophos’, Arethusa 2 (1969), 128Google Scholar: ‘…a piece of cleverness intended to amuse; it is sophisticated fun, or wit.’

12. Burnett (n.5 above), 127, speaks of ‘the ingenious manipulation of the multiple plot for the creation of an unprecedented pile of positive effects in the end’.

13. Cf. Wassermann (n.8 above), 588.

14. Cf. ibid. 602; Friedrich (n.5 above), 24f.

15. Neither is Creusa altogether blameless. Euripides makes much of her abandoning of the child (18f., 27, 954ff., 1369ff, 1492ff., 1544, 1597) and her explanation (965) that she expected the god to save his child is not much help in extenuating her guilt.

16. See Burnett (n.5 above), 124, 128: ‘And when the god proves to have been careful of his mortal accomplices, to have been moved by serious purposes and not by lust, and to have willed the best for all, he is surely exonerated even from the irrelevant charge of ungentlemanliness.’

17. According to Verrall, A.W., The Ion of Euripides (Cambridge 1890), xi–xlvGoogle Scholar, the play was a rationalising attack on Apollo and Delphi; Ion was really the son of Xuthus and the priestess but was foisted on Creusa for political reasons. Norwood, Cf. G., Greek Tragedy (London 1920), 238ffGoogle Scholar.

18. See Burnett (n.5 above) 125: ‘a golden god, blinding in his beauty’; Wolff (n.9 above), 181: ‘Her feeling seems dissolved by the beauty of the images which accompany it’; Taplin (n.6 above), 119: ‘The song purports to be a denunciation of Apollo, full of loathing; but it is at the same time a hymn of praise…Euripides strains syntax, vocabulary and the formulae of the hymn to their limits to convey this passionate extreme of ambivalence.’ There is a good study of the language of the monody in Barlow, S., The Imagery of Euripides (London 1971), 48ffGoogle Scholar.

19. As Creusa makes clear (1540ff.). See Burnett (n.5 above), 106 and n.6.

20. Whitman (n.3 above), 81.

21. Cf. Winnington-lngram (n.ll above), 137: ‘The characterisation built up with such subtlety…seems to go for little when the intrigue develops. Euripides is after other game.’ See also Burnett (n.5 above), 119; Conacher (n.7 above), 283.

22. Knox (n.5 above) has an excellent section on the subject (87f.).

23. Cf. Friedrich (n.5 above), 25f.

24. See e.g. Conacher (n.7 above), 280, who speaks of ‘that most disastrous shaft against the god of prophecy’s repute: the discrepancy between his own plans for Ion and the actual course of events’. Hamilton, R., ‘Prologue Prophecy and Plot in Four Plays of Euripides’, AJP 99 (1978), 279ff.Google Scholar, gives a good defence of Apollo against such criticisms.

25. See e.g. Murray (n.2 above), 125.

26. Cf.Forehand, W.E., ‘Truth and Reality in Euripides’ Ion’, Ramus 8 (1979), 185Google Scholar: ‘Apollo’s oracles do work out, not within the realm of absolute truth, but at the level of real action where presumably the characters will continue to function successfully within the framework that Apollo has given them.’