The Bad Boy of Athens: Classics from the Greeks to Game of Thrones. Daniel Mendelsohn

heroic and aristocratic past.

For this reason, the conflicts between tragedy’s males and females are never merely domestic spats. Clytemnestra, asserting the interests of the family, obsessed by the sacrifice of her innocent daughter Iphigenia (an act that represents the way in which the domestic and individual realms are always ‘sacrificed’ to the collective good in wartime), kills her husband in revenge, but is herself murdered by their son – who later is acquitted by an Athenian jury. Antigone, for her part, prefers her uncle’s decree of death to a life in which she is unable to honour family ties as she sees fit. To be sure, this is a schematic reading, one that doesn’t take into account the genius of the Attic poets: men, after all, who had wives and mothers and daughters, and who were able to enhance their staged portraits of different types of females with the kind of real-life nuances that we today look for in dramatic characters. But it is useful to keep the schema in mind, if only as a counterbalance to our contemporary temptation to see all drama in terms of psyches rather than polities.

      Two recent productions of works by Euripides illuminate, in very different ways, the dangers of failing to calibrate properly the precise value of the feminine in Greek, and particularly Euripidean, drama. As it happens, they make a nicely complementary pair. One, Medea, currently enjoying a highly praised run on Broadway in a production staged by Deborah Warner and starring the Irish actress Fiona Shaw, is the playwright’s best-known and most-performed play, not least because it conforms so nicely to contemporary expectations of what a night at the theatre should entail. (It looks like it’s all about emotions and female suffering.) The other, The Children of Herakles, first produced a couple of years after Medea, is Euripides’ least-known and most rarely performed drama: Peter Sellars’s staging of it in Cambridge, with the American Repertory Theatre, marks the work’s first professional production in the United States. That this play seems to be characterized far more by a preoccupation with dry and undramatic political concerns than by what we think of as a ‘typically’ Euripidean emphasis on feminine passions is confirmed by classicists’ habit of referring to it as one of the poet’s two ‘political plays’. And yet Medea is more political than you might at first think – and certainly more so than its noisy and shallow new staging suggests; while the political message of The Children of Herakles depends much more on the portrayal of its female characters than anyone, including those who have been bold enough to stage it for the first time, might realize.

By far the more interesting and thoughtful of the two productions is the Cambridge Children of Herakles. Euripides’ tale of the sufferings of the dead Herakles’ refugee children, pursued from their native land by the evil king Eurystheus and forced to seek asylum in Athens, has been much maligned for its episodic and ostensibly disjointed structure: the Aristotle scholar John Jones, writing on the Poetics, summed up the critical consensus by calling it ‘a thoroughly bad play’. But the imaginative if overcooked staging by Peter Sellars, who here effects one of his well-known updatings, suggests that it can have considerable power in performance.

      The legend on which this odd drama is based was familiar to the Athenian audience, not least because it confirmed their sense of themselves as a just people. After his death, Herakles’ children are pursued from their native city, Argos, by Eurystheus – he’s the cruel monarch who has given Herakles all those terrible labours to perform – and, led by their father’s aged sidekick, Iolaos, they wander from city to city, seeking refuge from the man who wants to wipe them out. Only the Athenians agree to give them shelter and, more, to defend them; they defeat the Argive army in a great battle during which Eurystheus is killed – after which his severed head is brought back to Herakles’ mother, Alcmene, who gouges his eyes out with dress pins. (There was a place near Athens called ‘Eurystheus’ Head’, where the head was supposed to have been buried.) The legend was frequently cited in political orations of Euripides’ time as an example of the justness of the Athenian state – its willingness to make war, if necessary, on behalf of the innocent and powerless.

And yet Euripides went to considerable lengths to alter this mythic account precisely by adding new female voices. In his version, the two most significant actions in the story are assigned to women. First of all, he invents a daughter for Herakles, traditionally called Macaria but referred to in the text of the play simply as parthenos, ‘virgin’; in this new version of the famous patriotic myth, it is not merely the Athenians’ military might that saves the day, but Macaria’s decision, in response to one of those eleventh-hour oracles that inevitably wreak havoc with the lives of Greek tragic virgins, to die as a sacrificial victim in order to ensure victory in battle. The playwright also makes Alcmene a more vigorous, if sinister, presence: in this version, it is she who has Eurystheus killed, in flagrant violation of Athens’s rules for the treatment of prisoners of war. The play ends abruptly after she gives the order for the execution.

      Classicists have always thought the play is ‘political’, but only because there are scenes in which various male characters – the caustic envoy of the Argive king, the sympathetic Athenian monarch Demophon, son of Theseus – debate what the just course for Athens ought to be. (Come to the aid of the refugees and thereby risk war? Or incur religious pollution by failing to honour the claims of suppliants at an altar?) But it’s only when you understand the political dimensions of the tragedy’s portrayal of women that you can see just how political a play it really is. The contrast between the two female figures – the self-sacrificing Macaria, and the murderous Alcmene; one concerned only for her family and allies, the other intent on the gratification of private vengeance – could not be greater.

In symbolic terms, the terms familiar to Euripides’ audiences, the play is about the politics of civic belonging. Herakles’ children, homeless, stateless, are eager to re-establish their civic identity – to belong somewhere; Macaria’s action demonstrates that in order to do so, sacrifices – of the individual, of private ‘family’ concerns – must take place. (In her speech of self-sacrifice, she uses all of the current buzzwords of Athenian civic conformity.) Her bloodthirsty grandmother, on the other hand, eager to avenge a lifetime of humiliations to her family, dramatizes the way in which private concerns – she, like Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra, is the representative of clan interests – never quite disappear beneath the smooth façade of public interest. ‘I am “someone”,’ too,’ she hotly replies, during the closing minutes of the play, in response to an Athenian’s statement that ‘there is no way that someone may execute’ Eurystheus in violation of Athenian law.

      It is a shame, given the trouble Euripides goes to in order to inject vivid female energies into a story that previously had none, that Peter Sellars (who you could say has made a speciality of unpopular or difficult-to-stage Greek dramas: past productions include Sophocles’ Ajax and Aeschylus’ Persians, a work that has all of the dramatic élan of a Veterans Day parade) has focused on those issues in the play that appear ‘political’ to us, rather than those that the Athenians would have understood to be political. Because there are refugees in the play, Sellars thinks the play is about what we call refugee crises – to us, now, a very political-sounding dilemma indeed. He has, accordingly, with his characteristic thoroughness and imaginative brio, gone to a great deal of trouble to bring out this element, almost to the exclusion of everything else.

Indeed, the American Repertory Theatre’s performance of Children of Herakles is only one third of a three-part evening. It begins with a one-hour panel discussion – the guests change each night of the play’s run – hosted by the Boston radio personality Christopher Lydon, that focuses on refugee crises around the world. The night I saw the play, his three guests were Arthur Helton, the director of Peace and Conflict Studies for the Council on Foreign Relations; a female asylum-seeker from Somalia called Ayisha; and a Serbian woman from the former Yugoslavia who’d emigrated to the United States after suffering during the Balkan wars. Then comes the performance of Euripides’ play, which lasts two hours; and then a screening of a film. The latter represents, in the words of the programme, ‘an artistic response to the current crisis – a series of films made in countries that are generating large numbers of refugees’.

      This probably sounds more pretentious and gimmicky than it really was. It’s true that a lot went wrong the night I saw the play: the