Suppliants (Aeschylus)
Also known as: Suppliant Women, The Suppliants, Suppliant Maidens, Hiketides, Hiketidai, Supplices
A chorus of Danaids, led by their father Danaus, flee forced marriage with their Egyptian cousins and supplicate the Argive king Pelasgus for protection. After a civic debate, Argos grants asylum and confronts an Egyptian herald, asserting sacred obligations to suppliants.
Description
Aeschylus’ Suppliants dramatizes asylum and civic responsibility through the Danaids’ flight from coerced kin-marriage to the altars of Argos. Bearing suppliant boughs and invoking Zeus Hikesios, they plead with King Pelasgus, who must balance piety, diplomacy, and the will of his people. The play’s chorus-driven form emphasizes collective female voice and ritual language as political claim. A hostile Egyptian herald arrives to seize them; Argive authority intercedes, affirming protection under divine and civic law. Surviving as the only complete play of Aeschylus’ Danaid trilogy, Suppliants frames a tense threshold moment whose larger mythic arc (in lost plays) extends to the Danaids’ marriage and its consequences.
Historiography
Suppliants survives complete in the medieval manuscript tradition, unlike its companion plays Egyptians and Danaids, which are fragmentary. Ancient scholia and later testimonia preserve elements of the trilogy’s sequence and mythic arc. The prominence of choral lyric and metrical features has informed debates over the play’s relative date within Aeschylus’ career. Modern scholarship reads the drama in contexts of asylum ritual, Argive myth-history, and Athenian reflections on collective deliberation.
Date Notes
Date uncertain; often placed in the early–mid 5th century BCE, sometimes around c. 463 BCE based on historical allusions; earlier datings have also been proposed.
Major Characters
- The Danaids
- Danaus
- Pelasgus
- Aegyptus
- The Sons of Aegyptus
Myths
- Flight of the Danaids from Egypt
- Supplication at Argos
- Repulse of the Aegyptiad Suitors
Facts
- The chorus of Danaids functions as the play’s central voice and protagonist group.
- Suppliant ritual is staged with olive boughs wrapped in wool placed at altars.
- Pelasgus consults the Argive people, foregrounding collective decision-making.
- The play belongs to Aeschylus’ Danaid trilogy; the companion plays are fragmentary.
- An Egyptian herald appears to seize the women, testing Argive protection.
- Zeus is invoked as Hikesios, guardian of suppliants and sacred asylum.
- Marriage by compulsion versus consent is a central ethical conflict.
- The drama intertwines mythic Argos with broader Greek ritual norms.
- Dating is debated; stylistic features suggest an early phase of Aeschylus’ career.
- Only this play of the trilogy survives complete; others are known from fragments and testimonia.