Troades’ remarkable agon
Neil Croally
Introduction: the agon
I do not mean to analyse the agon scene in and of itself, as a stand-alone set-piece debate (interesting though that is). Instead, I want to consider the agon in relation to the rest of the play, most particularly but not only to the preceding Andromache scene. For it is in this relation that we shall see how extraordinary the debate between Helen and Hecuba is. 1 Of course, the agon is a pervasive feature in archaic and classical Greek culture, and can describe everything from athletic competitions to set-piece debates for display, from genuine debates in the law courts to war itself. Athens in the democratic fifth century was not only involved in some form of military activity on most days somewhere in the Greek world; it was also known for being (and knew itself as) a famously litigious society, as Strepsiades’ remark at Aristophanes Clouds 208 makes clear (he has just been shown a map and has asked to be shown where Athens is):
ἐ π ε ὶ δικαστ ὰ ς ο ὐ χ ὁ ρ ῶ καθημεʆ νους
[It cannot be Athens] because I do not see jurors in session
And Cleon, at least the Thucydidean Cleon, is happy to disparage those attending the Assembly as eager ‘spectators of speeches’ ( theatai ton logon ; Thuc. 3.38.4). The agon is also a feature of tragedy, as Simon Goldhill says: In the democratic polis, the law court and Assembly are analogous institutions to the theatre, and these three great public spaces for the performance of logoi – speeches, arguments, language as display – strikingly interrelate. 2 More specifically, the agon is a feature of Euripidean tragedy. While we might disagree with Michael Lloyd that the earliest examples of the tragic agon appear in Sophocles’ early plays Ajax and Antigone (what of Eumenides ?), we can agree with the same critic’s identification of thirteen clearly definable agones in Euripidean tragedy. 3 Lloyd also notes that Euripides very often clearly marks out his agones as separate scenes. 4 That separation has also been a cause for criticism: Bond, for instance, finds the debate in HF quite ungermane; 5 Collard makes this general point about Euripidean agones . They demonstrate
. . . self-indulgent digression for the sake of rhetorical display, at the cost of dramatic continuity and relevance . . . 6
Lloyd, while not quite agreeing with Euripides’ shortcomings as a dramatist, believes that the
1 This paper was origanally delivered at a conference on The Trojan Women in Ravenna, February 2015. In expnaded form it will be published in a collection of the conference papers in 2016. 2 Goldhill 1997: 132. On the agon in Epic, Historiography and Tragedy, see now Barker 2009. On the pervasiveness of the agon in Greek culture, see Croally 1994:120-22. 3 Lloyd 1992: 1 – 3.
4 Lloyd 1992: 2, 4, 14. 5 Bond 1981: 108-9. 6 Collard 1975: 59.
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