[Theseus] Moreover, where the dêmos is euthuntês of [in L, authentês for] the land, it takes pleasure in a reserve of young citizens, whereas a man who is a king regards this as a threat and kills the best people [the aristocrats] and those he regards as clever out of fear for his tyranny. And how could a city none the less be strong when someone cuts and removes the flower of the young men like ears of corn in a spring meadow? Why, too, should you acquire wealth and the means to live for your children, for your efforts to result in a more opulent lifestyle for the tryant? Or raise daughters as good parthenoi [that is, to be chaste] in [the proper confines of] your house that are sweet pleasures for a tyrant whenever he wishes and make those who prepare them weep? May I die on the spot if my children are to be forced into bed against my/their will!
In two widely used texts of Euripides’ Supplices—the OCT and James Morwood’s edition—line 442 now ends εὐθυντὴς χθονός (as above).Footnote 1 And in the Loeb edition, where the line ends αὐθέντης χθονός (as in L), 442–55 are bracketed for deletion, primarily because the way αὐθέντης is used is said to be impossible for Euripides.Footnote 2 My aim here is to show that εὐθυντής is not consistent with the imagery of the passage it introduces, unlikely in tragedy and probably a word coined by Plato some time after Euripides’ death; and to make a case for the retention of αὐθέντης.
I start by arguing for the rejection of εὐθυντής, the conjecture of a textual critic ranked second only to Bentley among English scholars that acquired new weight when it was accepted by the OCT.Footnote 3 The case against αὐθέντης, and for εὐθυντής, was first advanced by Markland, and has been cited and echoed by editors and commentators ever since.Footnote 4 Elsewhere, Markland states, Euripides always uses αὐθέντης to mean ‘killer’, whilst here something like ‘ruler’ or ‘director of the land’ (‘rector terrae’) is needed.Footnote 5 He then refers to Hec. 9 (λαὸν εὐθύνων), Ant. 178 (εὐθύνων πόλιν) and Euripides’ Suppl. 418 (εὐθύνειν πόλιν) as support for his conjecture.
But though regularly applied to killers, αὐθέντης does not mean ‘killer’ in any literal or straightforward way in any Classical text. The Cambridge Greek Lexicon (CGL), to be sure, claims that its two main senses are ‘person responsible (for an action); perpetrator (w.gen. of a crime)’; and ‘person responsible (for a death, esp. a murder); killer, murderer … (w.gen. of someone)’.Footnote 6 But it is not clear, first, that there is a meaningful difference between them. The definitional phrase is the same in both cases, and it has been shown that ‘killer’ and ‘murderer’ are both problematic as translations.Footnote 7 The implication—in the shift from ‘person responsible’ to ‘perpetrator … of a crime’ in the first definition—that the term is used only to attribute negative responsibility is also inaccurate. In Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica, the Argonauts are termed Amycus’ αὐθένται (2.752–5), though Polydeuces alone inadvertently killed (not murdered) him in the course of a boxing match (2.90–7). And because they admire the Argonauts for having put an end to the career of an arrogant, excessive and monstrously transgressive figureFootnote 8 —that is, as corporately ‘responsible’, in a positive way, for his demise—the Mariandyni make a formal pact of friendship with them.Footnote 9 Chantraine’s neutral ‘auteur responsable’ (from which the CGL’s definitional phrase derives) is therefore a better basis for more nuanced translation of the term’s earliest instances, and compatible with Beekes’s recent advocacy of an etymology from αὐτός + ἁνύω (from IE *senH- ‘win, accomplish’) and his suggestion that its primary sense is ‘author’.Footnote 10 And we should accept that there is no reason in principle why αὐθέντης could not be used to describe the positive exercise of responsibility.
We should be wary, too, of Markland’s claim about the sense that the text ought to convey. It is natural, in context, to anticipate a simple contrast between power exercised by the dêmos and that of a tyrant, and thus likely that his ‘rector’ is prompted or at least influenced by the post-Classical sense, ‘master’, which Collard suggests αὐθέντης already has here.Footnote 11 Indeed, the conjecture can be seen as an attempt to achieve the sense L already conveys if αὐθέντης is a synonym for κύριος, but via a less problematic term.Footnote 12 So we should start by clarifying the specific emphasis of the point that line 442 introduces in the on-going contrast between tyranny and democracy that is central to the Herald’s and Theseus’ debate.
As Collard notes, 442 launches a passage (442–55) ‘contrasting attitudes of democracy and tyranny towards their rising generations’.Footnote 13 How can a city be strong, Theseus will shortly ask, when a tyrant, fearful for his position, ‘cuts and removes the flower of the young men like ears of corn in a spring meadow’ (ὡς λειμῶνος ἠρινοῦ στάχυν | τομαῖς ἀφαιρῇ κἀπολωτίζῃ νέους: 448–9). What is the point, he continues, in accumulating resources for one’s children, or in raising daughters to be creditable parthenoi, if both can be appropriated on a whim for a tryant’s profit and pleasure (450–4)? Where the dêmos is αὐθέντης, things are very different: ‘it takes pleasure in a reserve of young citizens’ (ὑποῦσιν ἀστοῖς ἥδεται νεανίαις: 443);Footnote 14 phrasing which, I suggest, anticipates the explicit agricultural imagery by referring to the youths as if they were a crop or harvest, sprung from the land, available for use or held in reserve by the city.Footnote 15 This section of Theseus’ case is, above all, concerned with the stark contrast between the tyrant’s slaughter of the ‘best’ and cleverest citizens (445–6), and a vivid image of the wilful appropriation/destruction of young men likened to developing crops, with scenarios in which young people of both sexes are nurtured, prepared, and financially and materially equipped for their respective roles as citizen warriors and respectable wives. It focusses on the manner in which the power of the dêmos is exercised—its good husbandry—rather than the fact of its control.
This makes it a difficult context for εὐθυντής, whose connotations one would naturally take to be maritime rather than agricultural,Footnote 16 because in all of Markland’s parallels εὐθύνειν means ‘steer’ or ‘direct’—not ‘rule’—the ‘city’ or ‘people’; imagery that invokes the common metaphor of the ship of stateFootnote 17 —though in 442 it is not the city or people, but the ‘land’ (χθονός), for which the OCT’s dêmos is εὐθυντής.Footnote 18 Conscious that εὐθυντὴς χθονός is closer to ‘steerer’ than ‘ruler of the land’, Morwood strikes a careful balance and translates ‘regulator of the land’,Footnote 19 but thereby occludes the nautical aspect which makes εὐθυντής (if it primarily means ‘steerer’ or ‘steering’) an odd way to introduce a passage rich in agricultural imagery. It is not, of course, impossible that the crop of youths is credited to the dêmos’ ‘steering’ or ‘direction’, but the admission of εὐθυντής construed as ‘steerer’ arguably results in a mixed metaphor.
Nor can we ignore a difficulty inherent in the ship of state metaphor where a group, rather than an individual, is concerned, as the Herald has just used it to question whether the dêmos is capable of keeping the city on course (πῶς ἂν μὴ διορθεύων λόγους | ὀρθῶς δύναιτ᾽ ἂν δῆμος εὐθύνειν πόλιν; 417–18),Footnote 20 and will soon use it with the same implication when he urges Theseus, alone, to save ‘your city’ from war (κυμάτων ἄτερ πόλιν | σὴν ναυστολήσεις: 473–5). If εὐθυντής is admitted, it is certainly attractive to see it as a pointed rebuttal of the Herald’s use of the metaphor. But in that case χθονός is surprising. It is strange, too, that the reason for the Herald’s scepticism about the dêmos’ steering—his assertion that it is incapable of making or judging speeches correctly (417; quoted above)Footnote 21 —is ignored, when Theseus so evidently reworks his image of the poor farmer too busy to engage in politics (420–2) in figuring the dêmos’ good husbandry as in fact the source of the city’s strength. More likely is that Theseus counters the Herald’s maritime imagery with agricultural imagery in order to emphasize that democracy is more concerned with nurture than control.
The verb εὐθύνειν is not the noun/adjective εὐθυντής, and it is worth noting that, unlike other terms derived from εὐθύνειν (εὐθυντήρ, εὐθυντήριος), εὐθυντής is not found elsewhere in tragedy or in any Classical poetic text.Footnote 22 Its admission in place of αὐθέντης (which is relatively common in tragedy) presumably, therefore, implies editorial conviction that it was a normal part of tragic diction, though sufficiently unusal that it was displaced by αὐθέντης here and failed to survive in other contexts.Footnote 23
But it is precisely this belief that appears to have led most editors and commentators to overlook the fact that the only evidence from the Classical period indicates that εὐθυντής does not in fact mean ‘steerer’ or ‘steering’, let alone ‘ruler’ or ‘ruling’. It comes from Plato’s Laws, and the relevant passage is as follows (945b5–c2):Footnote 24
τῶν δὴ τοιούτων εὐθυντὴς τίς ἱκανός, ἄν τίς τί εἴπῃ σκολιὸν αὐτῶν <ἢ> καμφθεὶς ὑπὸ βάρους μὲν τὴν ἀρχὴν πράξῃ, τῆς δ᾽ αὑτοῦ δυνάμεως ἐνδείᾳ πρὸς τὴν τῆς ἀρχῆς ἀξίαν; ῥᾴδιον μὲν οὐδαμῶς εὑρεῖν τῶν ἀρχόντων ἄρχοντα ὑπερβάλλοντα πρὸς ἀρετήν, ὅμως δὲ πειρατέον εὐθυντάς τινας ἀνευρίσκειν θείους.
Of people of this kind [the Athenian refers to euthunoi, the officials who conduct euthunai], then, who will be a suitable εὐθυντής, if any of them says or does anything crooked, either because he buckles under the weight of his office or because he lacks the force to act as he ought in his official capacity? It is far from straightforward to find an official who is ethically superior to exercise authority over other officials, but the attempt must nevertheless be made to discover εὐθυνταί who rise above normal human concerns [literally, ‘godly’ ones].
It seems clear that, in this passage, the Athenian is using εὐθυντής to denote an official with authority to conduct euthunai for euthunoi, and the lexicographical evidence that εὐθυντής is a synonym for εὔθυνος is therefore accurate.Footnote 25 That equivalence, and the emphatic contrast between εὐθυντής and the twistedness and bentness (σκολιόν, καμφθείς) in the passage above, indicate that (like εὔθυνος and εὔθυνα) the primary sense of the term has to do with straightening or correcting, rather than steering or directing (that is, is more closely related to εὐθύς than εὐθύνειν).Footnote 26 It is difficult to see how Plato could have used εὐθυντής with that sense in this passage, if it already meant ‘steerer’ or ‘steering’ elsewhere. Conversely, in the absence of evidence for any meaning other than ‘straightener’ or ‘corrector’, it is hard to see how, in Supplices, the dêmos could be the equivalent of a euthunos in relation to the land, or how the land’s ‘straightening’ or ‘correcting’ could result in healthy reserves of young citizens.Footnote 27 The role that the Athenian envisages is not one that existed at Athens, and because there is no evidence that the term existed before Plato, and it is never used by any other literary author,Footnote 28 it is probably an ad hoc coinage (formed by substituting -τής for -ος and immediately comprehensible in context). εὐθυντής is therefore likely to be a term that Euripides and his audience would not have recognized, and so implausible as a conjecture at Supplices 442.
But this is just the first step in the rehabilitation of αὐθέντης. The second is also to rule out the other possible alternative—εὐθυντήρ, a conjecture attributed to Paley by the OCT.Footnote 29 In his school edition of 1888 the note on 442 reads as follows, however:
αὐθέντης. Markland conjectured εὐθύντης. Hesych. αὐθέντης· ἐξουσιαστής, αὐτόχειρ φονεύς. In the sense of ‘slayer of kin’ it seems to refer to Oedipus who had killed Laius and married Jocasta (reading γάμων for δόμων) in frag. 1030, 4, ἢ τοῖσιν αὐθένταισι κοινωνῇ γάμων. Similarly Eum. 203, οὐκ ἂν γένοιθ᾽ ὅμαιμος αὐθέντης φόνος. Another form (Oed. T. 107) is αὐτοέντης. But the required sense ‘ruler of the land,’ is gained by the change of α and ε [my emphasis]. The form εὐθυντὴρ [sic] occurs Aesch. Suppl. 717. The word (whence by a singular change of meaning authentic comes) was primarily used of arbitrary putting to death, and thus in the time of Polybius came to signify the having absolute power.
The vital sentence occurs in the course of the wider discussion of the meaning of αὐθέντης in tragedy and the development of a rather different significance in later Greek. And the reference to ‘the change of α and ε’ relates to what Paley prints in his main text: *εὐθύντης χθονός (the asterisk marking his intervention). Which means that the subsequent ‘The form εὐθυντὴρ occurs Aesch. Suppl. 717’ is unlikely to be a conjecture, and indicates that Paley took εὐθυντήρ to be an alternative form of εὐθυντής. The conjecture should therefore be attributed to Blaydes.Footnote 30
In favour of εὐθυντήρ is that fact that it appears in tragedy (albeit via Turnebus’s conjecture). But this sole instance—where it qualifies the rudder that ‘steers’ or ‘directs’ the Egyptian ship towards the Danaids (οἴακος εὐθυντῆρος, Aesch. Suppl. 717)—tends to confirm that, in tragedy, the primary sense of adjectives (as here) or nouns related to εὐθύνειν would be ‘steering’ and ‘steerer’. The maritime aspect of εὐθυντήρ is further attested by a range of later evidence that it was used to refer to what was normally called an οὖρος or ‘following wind’.Footnote 31 It is therefore vulnerable to the same objections as εὐθυντής (if the latter meant ‘steerer’ or ‘steering’) with which I began, and only marginally better attested as likely tragic diction.Footnote 32 Since -τής is preferred to -τήρ (where metre permits) for nomina agentis in tragic trimeters, it also has a weaker claim than εὐθυντής if we are prepared to make the leap of assuming that the latter already existed in the fifth century.Footnote 33
My last step is to suggest that αὐθέντης is not merely unobjectionable but fundamental to the impact of the passage that it introduces. Since I have already argued that its primary sense is ‘(person) responsible (for)’, the first issue to tackle is the dependent genitive, χθονός. Both of the CGL’s definitions of αὐθέντης (used as a noun) imply that, where followed by the genitive, it indicates ‘responsibility’ for some kind of action; and at first sight responsibility for ‘the land’ might appear not to fit that requirement. But I contend that it is in fact met. It is implicit in the whole thrust of this part of Theseus’ argument that the dêmos is beneficially active in managing and cultivating its metaphorical land (as opposed to governing the city or its people), and the use of χθονός—presumably with reference to the whole of Attica and its populace—signals that from the start. In similar fashion, Heracles’ reference to himself as παίδων … αὐθέντην ἐμῶν (‘responsible for [the deaths of] my children’, Her. 1359) implies the action of killing, as does αὐθένται Ἀμύκοιο (‘responsible for [the death of] Amycus’, Ap. Rhod. Argon. 2.754), and the same could be the case at Soph. OT 106–7, if τούτου θανόντος can be taken to be dependent on τοὺς αὐτοέντας.Footnote 34
It is vital, finally, to recognize that the passage from 442–55 features two themes regularly linked with αὐθένται elsewhere: transgressive behaviour particularly exemplified by (but not confined to) illicit killing, and the overthrow and destruction of tyrannical figures.Footnote 35 The first is, here, the mark of the murderous, avaricious and sexually exploitative tyrant. The second is implicit in the tyrant’s hostility to, and fear of, the ‘best’ and cleverest products of the dêmos’ ‘responsibility’ for the land (444–6). It is true that, in the surviving evidence, the threat that the αὐθέντης poses to the tyrant is mostly, and more explicitly, explored in eastern settings, and can have an ambiguous edge. But the case of Amycus discussed above shows that there is no reason in principle why, in a patriotic context, the challenge to tyranny that Athens represents should not be emphasized and celebrated via an unambiguously positive αὐθεντία (to use a later noun).Footnote 36
Euripides uses αὐθέντης in a typically sophisticated manner to heighten, to an emotive extreme, the contrast between the behaviour of a tyrant and that of the dêmos. It anticipates the dêmos’ explicit personification, when described as ‘taking pleasure’ in its youth (ἥδεται: 443), and through its stem in αὐθ- stresses the gulf between the dêmos’ unselfish concern with fostering the city’s corporate strength, and the tryant who rules alone, ‘with the law as his own exclusive posession’ (τὸν νόμον κεκτημένος | αὐτὸς παρ᾽ αὑτῷ, 431–2), to the detriment of weaker citizens (432–8)—the image with which Theseus began his argument. By casting the cultivation of young citizens as taking ‘responsibility’ for the land, it prompts Theseus’ audiences, internal and external, to recognize Athenian aversion to tyranny as the ethically admirable opposite of behaviour that epitomizes the worst kind of αὐθέντης. To put it another way: even as they are invoked, αὐθέντης is pointedly distanced from its typical contexts and associations in tragedy (in particular, but also elsewhere), and used quasi-paradoxically of the dêmos’ good husbandry in a manner that strongly imputes its negative connotations to the literally murderous tyrant.
Doubts about αὐθέντης prompted by a mistaken belief that it means ‘killer’ elsewhere in Euripides have been countered by claims that it—only here in the Classical period—means ‘master’, rather than by pointing to its contribution to the imagery and affective impact of the claim it prefaces.Footnote 37 If we rid ourselves of both convictions and entertain the possibility that here, as elsewhere, it means ‘(person) responsible (for)’, we need no longer feel anxious about a term that appears regularly in tragedy—albeit generally, and unsurpisingly, where responsibility for negative action is at stake.
