44 pages • 1 hour read
Ed. John C. Gilbert, EuripidesIon
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Lines 510-724Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Lines 510-724 Summary: “Second Episode”
When Xuthus emerges from the temple, he is overjoyed, and he greets Ion as his son. Ion, confused, pushes Xuthus away, claiming that he is nothing more than an unknown foreigner. Xuthus explains that, when he was in the sanctuary, the god told him that the next person he saw would be his son.
Ion asks whether Xuthus ever had a lover before his wife, to which Xuthus responds that he has. Ion and Xuthus determine that the latter did indeed consort with maenads (female followers of Dionysus, god of wine and festivity, among other things) at a festival of Bacchus many years ago. They conclude one of these women must have fallen pregnant with his child, which she later exposed. Ion privately expresses interest in knowing his mother.The chorus admits that they, as Athenians, are also invested in Creusa’s fate.
Ion also privately admits his misgivings about living in Athens with Xuthus. First, he fears that he will be ostracized for being a foreigner born out of wedlock. He also fears his birth mother will resent him should he earn fame in Athens. Finally, Ion expresses his happiness living in the sanctuary, where he enjoys tranquility.
Xuthus reassures Ion that his life will be equally happy in Athens, and furthermore, that he will hold a celebratory banquet for his son in Delphi before departing. Xuthus also names Ion for the first time, according to the Greek participle “going,” since Ion was the first to greet Xuthus at the shrine. Xuthus threatens death to the handmaidens if they share the news of Ion’s parentage to Creusa, for fear that she will become angry at Xuthus’s love trysts.
Despite the good fortune of his transport to Athens with a noble family, Ion still longs to know his birth mother. The chorus commiserates with Ion and wonders whether the god has a grudge against their mistress Creusa. The chorus then turns their attention to Xuthus, cursing him in absence for bringing his illegitimate son to Athens while Creusa remains childless.
Lines 510-724 Analysis
This section highlights social differences, both between Athenians and foreigners and between the noble and servile classes. Ion experiences a significant reversal of fortune when he is offered a home in Athens. Xuthus pronounces to Ion, “thou hast won / The ties of home and love, who erst had none” (570-71). Though Ion has not led an unhappy life in the sanctuary, as he later realizes, he lives there as a vagabond. Not only was Athens a distinguished place by virtue of being the chief polis (city-state) of the fifth century BCE, but it held special importance in the classical world by virtue of the myth that the Athenian people were “autochthonous” (ancient Greek for “sprung from the earth”). This moniker indicates that the Athenians, unlike other Greeks, were notionally indigenous.
In the ancient world, people frequently moved around the Mediterranean (especially during the period of Greek colonization that preceded the classical period). Legend holds that the Athenians were exceptional in that they were not colonizers from elsewhere. Greek mythology holds that when the goddess Athena wiped semen from the netherworld god Hephaestus after she rebuffed his advances, the god’s semen impregnated earth, Gaia, in the location of modern-day Athens, and Erichthonius was literally born from the earth (Erichthonius being an early king of Athens).
This distinction to which ancient Athenians lay claim in the classical period (roughly 500-336 BCE) took on a special importance during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE), which Athens waged against the Delian League, led by the Spartans. Euripides’s play was produced during this costly war that pitted Greek against Greek, and so lines such as “Most would I pray it were a woman born / In Athens were my mother” (669-70) held special resonance for contemporary Athenians. The chorus, in allegiance to Creusa, rejects Ion, declaring, “Let not that alien youth to my / Belovèd City” (716-17). Their lines, here and elsewhere, establish foreign people as inimical to Athens. Even Xuthus, himself native to the Peloponnese (the region with whom Athens was at war), was considered a foreigner; he was given to Creusa for his gallantry on behalf of the Athenians in a previous war against Eubeoa. Ion reminds Xuthus of this when he expresses his own misgivings about leaving Delphi for Athens:
Athens! A folk born of the soil, not brought
From other lands at all, so I am taught,
Has made that city. Think; should I not bear
A twofold stain, to come intruding there,
My father alien and myself base-born?
How should I bear that twofold weight of scorn? (Lines 590-95).
Finally, this enhances the dramatic irony established in the prologue, as Ion’s deep-seated wish is to meet his birth mother, Creusa, who is of noble Athenian blood.
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