BMCR 2025.01.42

Heracles and Athenian propaganda: politics, imagery and drama

, Heracles and Athenian propaganda: politics, imagery and drama. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. Pp. 176. ISBN 9781472505590.

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Heracles, the most renowned of the Greek heroes, held significant ties to communities throughout the Hellenic world. In her work, Sofia Frade offers a fresh perspective on the use of Heracles within the city of Athens.

The introduction, a captivating start to the volume, outlines the objectives of the monograph and sets the tone for the rest of the work. Frade begins by inviting the readers to envision themselves at the Theatre of Dionysus in ancient Athens, a compelling way to introduce the central question of her monograph: the interplay between Euripides’ play Heracles and Athenian politics. The introduction also underscores the importance of using textual and material evidence to comprehend texts and performances’ broader context and political significance.

The author then describes her idea of the ‘cultural surface.’ She constructs this concept by combining the idea of the ‘surface,’ defined as performance as ‘a surface in which the habitual interrogation and ethical dialogue takes part in a tension of personalized decipherment’,[1] with Barthes’ idea of ‘cultural code’. This concept is outlined as the ‘reference to a science of a body of knowledge’.[2] From these two concepts, Frade proposes that a ‘cultural surface’ refers to the ‘cultural manifestation of a group.’ Her monograph aims succeeds well in its aim of reconstructing the significance of Heracles within the context of what she refers to as the ‘cultural surface of Athens’ (pp. 9–10). To do this, she analyses various evidence pertaining to categories such as iconography, myth, religion, and, of course, tragedy. Thus, the study puts Euripides’ Heracles into the context of various ways of showing Athenian propaganda in the fifth century B.C.E.

Chapter two, entitled ‘Propaganda and Politics in Athens,’ discusses the concept of ‘polis religion’ and its relations to politics within the Athenian state. Frade includes a discussion of the idea of polis religion and its critics in this section, concluding that ‘we have enough evidence to trace a clear connection between polis and religion’ (p. 19). This is a strong conclusion, as religion and ritual do indeed contribute to solidifying group identity, such as the shared identity of the citizens of a Greek polis. It should be noted, however, that this could be equally true at the regional identity levels or in smaller tribal units.

The next section focuses on propaganda within ancient Athens, emphasising the importance of providing a proper definition of the term. Building upon previous scholarship on the concept of propaganda, Frade states that the definition of the concept as it will be applied to her work ‘implies the systematic and continuous manipulation of information, through the utilization of different media available in order to educate a certain group with the aim of creating certain beliefs and generating specific patterns of behaviour’. As examples of this definition within ancient Athens, the author uses Athenian ideas of an autochthonous heritage and the story of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. Her systematic application of the concept of propaganda to Athens, where myth and history were modified to inform the citizens, can indeed contribute to our understanding of the complexity of the relationship between politics, ideology, and culture within ancient Athens and potentially other Greek cities.

She further highlights the use of the hero Ion and Athenian Ionic and potential Panhellenic claims through the Delian League in the fifth century. Following this, Frade brings the discussion back to polis religion, arguing that whilst it is an overstatement to claim that polis religion mediates all religious discourse, it would be too narrow to remove Athenian religion in the fifth century from political discourses.

Chapter three is entitled ‘Transforming the Hero: Heracles and Athenian Ideology.’ The chapter emphasises how Heracles was transformed from his more traditionally violent ways to a more civilised hero, integrated into the Athenian system. To provide the context of Heracles within an Athenian framework during the fifth century, Frade outlines the importance of Heracles in Athens during the tyranny in the sixth century. A particularly good section of this chapter discusses the relationship between Heracles and Eleusis, promoting the theory that the use of a link between Athens and Heracles at Eleusis allowed the Athenians to promote this sanctuary as a panhellenic one (pp. 50-53). The author argues that Heracles at Eleusis and his presence across Attica are a ‘symbol of the spirit of the integration of Athens’ (p. 53).

Chapter four, ‘Forsaking the Tripod: Heracles in Athenian Architecture’, focuses on the use of Heracles in monumental architecture within Attica. It emphasises the Athenian use of Heracles at the Athenian Agora and the panhellenic sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi. Throughout, Frade provides an excellent analysis of the Athenian Heracles as a panhellenic hero in relation to the more local hero of Theseus, a mythical king of Athens. After her analysis of Heracles in Athenian propaganda at Delphi, she provides an overview of Cimon’s role in constructing parts of the Agora before moving on to two brief case studies for representations of Heracles within the Agora: The Stoa Poikile and The Hephaisteion. For the later, she follows the line of arguments by Cruciani and Fiorini, namely that the Hephaisteion was constructed as a part of Cimon’s programme.[3]

The subsequent chapters, five and six, build upon the author’s arguments in the previous chapters and analyse Euripides’ play Heracles. The fifth chapter investigates various aspects of Heracles represented in the play, such as Heracles as Kallinikos (avenger of evil), the Homeric hero, the mad hero, and the aristocrat. Through this, Frade shows the complex nature of Heracles within Euripides’ play. Following this, the author analyses the theme of friendship within the play; here, she shows excellently how the arrival of Theseus towards the end of the play represents Athens itself. Theseus here provides a definition of friendship that, as Frade convincingly argues, stands as an allegory for how Athens treats their allies. By doing this, Frade shows the role of Theseus within the play as an aspect of propaganda as set out in her definition, provided in chapter two. Chapter five finishes by comparing the representation of Heracles in Euripides’ play with that of Ajax the Great in Sophocles’ play Ajax.

The sixth chapter, ‘Into Athens: Old Gods and New Gods.’, continues the focus on the play itself. Frade opens this chapter by emphasising that in his play, Euripides seems to have removed the importance of Delphi in the myth of Heracles and stresses that the playwright does the same with the myth of Orestes in the play named after this hero. She puts this in the context of Spartan influence at Delphi during the Peloponnesian War. This is one of several places where Frade excellently signposts other points within her volume by stressing the link to Chapter Three and the Athenian attempt to elevate the Eleusinian festival to a Panhellenic level for much the same reason. In preceding chapters, several signposts like this make it straightforward for the reader to connect the various strains of Frade’s argument.

The chapter includes a discussion of the representation of the gods within the play and a comparison between Euripides’ play and Aeschylus’ Oresteia. She emphasises that justice is a significant theme within both Aeschylus’ trilogy and Euripides’ Heracles, as well as the need to change the old, polluted world for a new one that only has a solution in Athens. Her analysis of the theme of justice in these Greek plays also includes an analysis of the role of the gods within the play, and she argues that “Outside Athens, there is chaos, even for the gods” (p. 111). Thus, she elucidates how we can think about these plays as representing a form of Athenian propaganda, showing the new system in Athens as a just and fairer system than the system of other poleis in Greece.

As a comparison, she offers the portrayal of Thebes, the leading polis in the neighbouring region of Boeotia. This analysis takes place in two sections of the chapter, “Heracles in Athens: The Chorus” and “A Tale of Two Cities: Athens vs Thebes”. After an analysis of the chorus, she concludes that “the message of Heracles is clear: you can be a hero anywhere, but it is only worth being so if you are in Athens, where true friendship, i.e. allyship, resides” (p. 115). Athens is juxtapositioned with Thebes as a polis that represents the opposite of democratic Athens, as a city of anti-democratic patterns. Frade emphasises that the Thebes in Euripides’ play should not be read as the city in Boeotia but rather as a literary construct. After all, as emphasised by Froma Zeitlin, Thebes is a centre for tragic mythical events and, as such, an excellent choice as a city to represent the opposite of just and democratic Athens.[4] Still, Athens and the Boeotian Federation, with Thebes as the most influential city, were on opposite sides of the Peloponnesian War, which was ongoing when Euripides’ play was performed. This may also have been a part of Thebes’ choice as a city that was politically the opposite of Athens in Athenian propaganda at the time.

The conclusion perfectly summarises the volume and brings this intriguing new analysis of Heracles in Athens to an excellent close. Frade’s examination of the role of Heracles in Athenian propaganda provides a first-rate analysis of the use of this panhellenic hero in an Athenian context. Her conclusion proposes that Athens used Heracles to stake claims on the mainland by making him Athenian, in a similar vein as they used Ion for their claims in Ionia. She further identifies two primary targets for the play: other poleis, primarily on the mainland, showing Athens as a welcoming and open polis. The second audience she identifies is the Athenian aristocracy, to whom the play showed ‘a model of behaviours, the choice each and every aristocrat has to make’, referring to the choice between being self-serving and being lost, or to ‘share their glory (and their power and wealth) with the city’ (p. 127). Frade proposes finally that applying her approach to other heroes represented in Attic tragedies and Athens could be interesting, a notion this reviewer agrees with.

This reviewer finds Frade’s monograph and arguments persuasive and robust, especially considering the ‘cultural surface,’ which is a strong tool for analysing the use of myth for identity and shaping political narratives. Therefore, the reviewer strongly recommends reading this excellent monograph for anyone interested in the relationship between politics and myth in ancient Greece.

 

Bibliography

Barthes, S. 1974. S/Z. New York: Hill and Lang.

Cruciani, C., and Fiorini, L. 1998. I modelli del moderato. La Stoà Poikile e l’Hephaisteion di Atene nel programmma edilizio cimoniano. Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane.

Thompson, G.F. 2003. ‘Approaches to “Performance”: An Analysis of Terms.” In P. Auslander, ed, 138-152. Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. London. Routledge.

Zeitlin, F. 1990. “Thebes: Theatre of Self and Society in Attica Drama.” In J.J. Winkler and F.I Zeitlin, eds, 130 – 167. Nothing to do with Dionysus? Athenian Drama in its Social Context. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

 

Notes

[1] Thompson, 2003, 150-151 (cited by the author on p. 6).

[2] Barthes, 1974, 20 (see note 18 on p. 130) for the author’s outline of this concept.

[3] Cruciani, C., and Fiorini, L. 1998.

[4] Zeitlin, 1990 (cited and used by Frade as well).