New Approaches to Classics Lecture: Professor Melissa Mueller

Title: Democracy and the Earth in Aeschylus’ Suppliants Abstract: In offering asylum to the Danaid chorus in Aeschylus’ Suppliants, the Argives exercise their public decision-making power, a cornerstone of democratic ideology. But democracy requires more than the will of the people. In this talk I explore both the form of this tragedy, with its extended parodos, and the autochthony myths that are reactivated around the Danaids’ appeal for protection, and I argue that the grant of metic status in Argos to the women speaks to the interdependence, vital to democracy both ancient and modern, between the land (earth as environment) and the polis. The Danaids’ presence in Argos, I suggest, not only reminds the male citizens of their earthly origins and democratic commitments, but also prompts the earth’s intervention, activating collective memories of the exile of their bovine ancestor, Io.