Hiketeia

TLDR

Professor E. R. Dodds’ comparative ethnographic approach has reshaped our understanding of Greek literature and its social context, highlighting the importance of supplication scenes in the Iliad, Odyssey, and the political significance of suppliants in Athenian and Spartan propaganda.

Abstract

To Professor E. R. Dodds, through his edition of Euripides' Bacchae and again in The Greeks and the Irrational , we owe an awareness of new possibilities in our understanding of Greek literature and of the world that produced it. No small part of that awareness was due to Professor Dodds' masterly and tactful use of comparative ethnographic material to throw light on the relation between literature and social institutions in ancient Greece. It is in the hope that something of my own debt to him may be conveyed that this paper is offered here, equally in gratitude, admiration and affection. The working out of the anger of Achilles in the Iliad begins with a great scene of divine supplication in which Thetis prevails upon Zeus to change the course of things before Troy in order to restore honour to Achilles; it ends with another, human act in which Priam supplicates Achilles to abandon his vengeful treatment of the dead body of Hector and restore it for a ransom. The first half of the Odyssey hinges about another supplication scene of crucial significance, Odysseus' supplication of Arete and Alkinoos on Scherie. Aeschylus and Euripides both wrote plays called simply Suppliants , and two cases of a breach of the rights of suppliants, the cases of the coup of Kylon and that of Pausanias, the one dating from the mid-sixth century, the other from around 470 B.C. or soon after, played a dominant role in the diplomatic propaganda of the Spartans and Athenians on the eve of the Peloponnesian War.