Visualizing war in Euripides’ Suppliant Women: fog, clarity, and multiple perspectives

This chapter moves beyond recent recognitions of the instability and hybridity of Euripides’ Suppliant Women in order to highlight a central tension which informs the play and yet has received little critical attention to-date. On the one hand, this tragedy contains plenty of explicit acknowledgement that war is fundamentally confused, chaotic, uncertain and unpredictable. Allied to that recognition is the view that war creates painful sufferings and stark losses which are hard to make sense of, and which cannot be ameliorated by consolatory appeals to just causes or to glory. On the other hand, Suppliant Women contains many voices and perspectives which do indeed visualise war as an activity full of order, purpose and positive meaning. The play develops and juxtaposes multiple perspectives concerning war around this central tension. These diverse ‘visualisations’ constitute the play's depth and richness as serious drama for a mass audience in a war-making city-state.