DAVID LAN
Introduction to ION
Ion takes place at the most famous shrine of the classical Greek world, the oracle of Apollo at Delphi.
Even at the time our story begins and Creusa travels over the hills from her home in Athens to ask Apollo what’s become of her lost child, the site had been sacred for hundreds of years. Delphi, in fact, was a massive religious complex. A triumphal arcade wound up the hillside to tiers of marble staircases leading to the towering temple with its mighty pillars and porticoes, its triumphal friezes and splendid courtyards. There were guesthouses, a theatre, spring baths, sacred groves and a spectacular view over miles of awe-inspiring countryside.
At the heart of this world-renowned and no-doubt profitable establishment was something very simple: a cave. A dark place, a hollow, in which a mysterious event might or might not occur. A possible meeting point between the world in which people are born, give birth, kill and die and the eternal world, the world of ‘the truth’ in which things remain always the same.
In all countries and cultures shrines tend to start their careers as places where ‘something happened’. Someone has an experience that moves them and changes them. A rock marks the spot. And then the rock is the spot and someone builds a shelter to protect it. And then, perhaps, a snake is seen to have a particular fondness for the early morning sunlight that falls across it. And then, intrigued by the snake and the rock, people start to visit and to feel something they don’t feel anywhere else. And maybe someone does some carvings on the rock. Or discovers carvings on the rock that no one else had noticed. And if the visitors have travelled far and become exhausted by their unusual experiences, where are they going to rest and recover? So someone puts up a guesthouse. And maybe there’s a refreshing spring of pure water not too far away.
And then one day the snake happens to speak through one of the guests and she decides she’s never going home ever again. And over time she comes to be referred to as the snake-priestess or Pythia. And there’s a right and wrong way to approach her and someone has to do something about all the people who are approaching her incorrectly. So he forms a committee who know how. And in time the committee is able to raise enough capital to build a temple and you turn around and there’s Delphi. But the important part is still the rock Or the cave. Or wherever the meeting between us and whatever-it-is, between now and forever – privately, quietly, mysteriously – still does or does not take place.
By the time Creusa arrives at Delphi the pattern is that visitors with questions for the oracle make a sacrifice to Apollo and descend to the cave deep in the temple’s bowels. There they find a priest. They tell him their question, he goes behind a screen and puts it to the Pythia. In a trance induced by special herbs, perched on a sacred tripod, she chants the god’s answer, speaking with her own tongue his raw, inchoate, enigmatic words.
This was the orthodox pathway to ‘the truth’. The irony of the play is that the only pronouncement by the oracle we ever actually hear of turns out to be a deliberate and cynical lie.
Delphi, however and paradoxically, was also the doorway to another path to the truth. According to tradition, carved into one of the walls of the temple were the simple words ‘Know Yourself’.
Ion is about what you know about yourself and what you really know even if you’re unable to acknowledge it, even to yourself. From one point of view, it’s an ingenious box of tricks. From another, its complex, subtle heart beats with oldest wisdom in the world, available from all shrines at any time anywhere, namely that the only way to ‘the truth’ is, as Nietzsche put it, to ‘become the man you are’. Or woman in the case of Creusa, the heroine of the play.
* * *
Creusa, daughter of the King of Athens, is barren. She longs for a child. She comes to the temple of Apollo, god of the sun and the sky, to ask if she’ll ever have one.
At least, that’s the story she’s told her servants. The truth is different. Many years before, victim to her own great beauty, she was seduced by Apollo. A child was born. Overwhelmed by shame and remorse, she abandoned the boy in a cave. Now, facing the prospect (or punishment?) of a childless life, she wants to know if the child survived.
The first person she meets is the young man whose job it is to keep the temple clean and greet the visitors. She tells him of ‘a friend’ who, in her youth, was seduced by Apollo. He, in turn, tells her how, as a baby, he was found in a basket on the temple steps . . .
So neither of the central characters of the play themselves know who they are. Nor are they what they seem. Creusa says she is not a mother, knows secretly she has been one but doesn’t know if she is a mother still – though we do, because Hermes in his prologue has just told us. In the most literal way, Ion also has no idea who he is. He never knew his parents, he has no kin ties, he doesn’t even know his name.
The third character who doesn’t seem to know who he is is the god Apollo. When Creusa tells Ion ‘her friend’s’ story, he claims not to believe it.
CREUSA
Then listen. My friend . . . Apollo . . . he slept with her.
ION
With a woman? A mortal? That’s impossible.
CREUSA
It’s true!
And there’s more! She gave birth to his child.
ION
I won’t listen!
But alone with Apollo he speaks more frankly:
The truth is this: if that day came
when you, your brother Poseidon and Zeus
paid fines for all the women you’ve seduced
your temples would be bankrupt. You give in to every urge.
Hesitate? Reflect? So by what right
do you dare to punish mankind for its sins?
All they do is follow where you lead them.
His dilemma is this: how badly can gods behave and still deserve to be treated as gods? Or, to put it more generally, if gods are immoral where is the moral centre of human society to be found?
The fourth character with a need to know himself is Creusa’s husband, the foreign mercenary Xuthus. In this case Euripides plays the trick the other way round. Like Creusa, Xuthus has come to Delphi to ask Apollo for a child. To his good fortune, Apollo, anxious to rid himself of an unexpected paternity suit, decides to give him Ion. Speaking through the oracle, Apollo declares that Xuthus’ son will be the first person he sees on leaving the shrine.
So Xuthus is a man who believes he is not a father, who discovers he is one and who goes on believing this to the end while we, the audience, and all the other characters in the play know he’s been deceived. Only at the end of the play does an embarrassed Apollo send his sister Athene to admit that he is Ion’s father after all.
What did Euripides mean by writing about gods whose truth supposedly emanates from an ancient and holy shrine but who nonetheless lie and cheat and send other gods to help them wriggle out of shameful situations? Is he launching an attack on all gods, all oracles, all gullible mortals fool enough to believe in their powers?
The climax of the play is Ion’s great wail of moral anguish: ‘If the gods lie, how can we ever know the truth?’ Or, to put it more specifically, it’s all well and good to smugly carve the words ‘Know Yourself’ on a temple wall. The difficult question is: how? How can we do it? How can we become ‘the men we are’?
When Creusa discovers Apollo has given Xuthus a son and that Xuthus is planning to take him back to Athens as heir to her city, she explodes into an astonishingly violent rage. She needs little encouragement to decide that Ion must be got rid of. It’s only by luck (or fate, or an intervention of the gods) that the plot to poison him is uncovered.
When Ion discovers that Creusa was behind the attempt on his life, his mind too fills at once with murder, blood, revenge. He rages round the city, sword in hand, desperate to find Creusa ahead of the crowd so that he can cut her throat before they stone her to death.
The transformation of Creusa from wry sophisticate with a bandaged heart to murderous fiend, and of Ion from fly village charmer to blood-toothed hell-hound ought to ring false. And yet it doesn’t. And the reason it doesn’t is because it’s so easy to believe that to lose a child or never know a mother would generate in these two people black wells of fury and despair. And the person they’d most likely direct this anger against would be a woman who resembles the imagined mother, a young man who fits to a ‘T’ the image of the long longed-for son.
Just as Ion is about to take his revenge by stabbing Creusa, his foster mother the Pythia emerges from the cave. Put most simply, what she tells Ion to do is grow up. He has to come to terms with his anger. The means she offers to help him through this crisis are two kinds of mother’s love.
First, there is her love which is the pure unselfish kind. She wants this to set him free. He responds to it without hesitation and it does. Second, there is the distorted love of his real mother who, though she abandoned him, first wrapped him in a protective cloth she had made with her own hands and decorated him with the gold ornaments appropriate to a child of his high status. This is the same love that has curdled within her, poisoning her life and sending her, so many years later, over the hills to Delphi to try to make good the wrong she has done.
What Creusa has to face is that it wasn’t the gods or Fate that made her abandon her child. She herself wanted him dead. Given the chance, she has come within an ace of killing him again. And both times her actions spring from her refusal to acknowledge what she is: before, that she was a mother; now, that she never will be.
Witch doctors, shamans, spirit mediums, priestesses: for all of them, a part of the therapy they provide is of the psychotherapeutic variety. I tried not to let this influence the way I wrote her part, but when the Pythia emerges from the cave to speak the truth which is no generalization, no abstraction but simply: ‘You may have forgotten but long ago this is how things were. Here is the cradle, here the baby clothes. I put the facts before you, make of them what you will’, I can’t help thinking of those other caves or, more prosaically, quiet rooms, in which damaged people are invited to revisit those distant times when ‘something happened’ to them and to transform themselves into speakers of their own truths, oracles of their own destinies.
By accepting the love of both these ‘mothers’, by denying himself the enormous gratification of killing one of them, Ion begins the last stage of his journey towards self-knowledge. To complete it he will need not only love but also courage. Perhaps, he reasons, Creusa’s story that he is the son of Apollo is just another convenient lie. He can’t be truly himself until he has risked everything and thrown down a challenge to the lying god himself.
CREUSA
Where are you going?
ION
To make Apollo answer my question. . . .
I have to hear from his own mouth
whose son I am.
At the play’s end boy has become man. Ion is ready to claim his rightful place in the political arena of Athens. Despite the unscrupulousness of the gods, this conclusion should not be thought of or played as ironic. It is a true consummation. Through the redemptive power of love and courage Ion and Creusa have transformed themselves utterly into the very simple things they (and we) always knew they were: a mother and a son.
But lovers of irony need not go home disappointed. The happy conclusion to the story of Ion and Creusa sparks off a number of complex ironies which time and cultural distance have obscured, rendering them no longer immediately available to reader or audience. But they remain where Euripides placed them, like limpet-mines, below the waterline of the play.
So far, the injunction ‘Know Yourself’ has been directed squarely at individuals. But the play is constructed so as to rub the nose of Euripides’ whole society in it as well.
All the surviving plays of the three great classic dramatists – Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides – are drawn from the great oral epics: the epic of the siege of Troy; the epic of the house of Atreus and so on. Only Ion is an original story, the character of Ion probably Euripides’ invention as well.
For a start, his name is formed by simply breaking off the first syllables of the word Ionian, referring to the people who live around the Ionian Sea. To its original audience, Athene’s pronouncement that they are all Ion’s descendants would have been an obvious joke. It’s rather as if the claim were made that all the people of Scotland were descended from an ancient ancestor called Scotty. (‘Ion’ is related to the Greek word meaning ‘to come out’. In naming him, Xuthus – in the original – puns on this word. He says: I name you Ion because I first saw you as I was coming out of the temple.)
In other plays, such as The Trojan Women, Hecuba and Iphigenia in Aulis, Euripides selected incidents from the epic of Troy and transformed them into indictments of the endless debilitating wars Athens fought with its neighbouring city states. Ion is also a public intervention but of a rather different kind.
The political question Euripides addresses is: who has the right to own and rule a particular territory? Is it those who descended from the first people ever to live there? Or is it those who, armed with greater military power, can enforce their claim with knives and spears?
Right at the start Creusa tells us she is descended from the founder of Athens, Erechtheus, who, as Ion puts it, ‘was born from a hole in the ground’. Only his descendants are true Athenians, tied to the land by bonds so strong that the soil of Athens and their flesh are almost the same thing.
Xuthus is a foreigner. Years before, he was drafted into the Athenian army to help raise a siege. His reward was Creusa. When he announces that Ion is his son and that he intends to make this non-Athenian heir to the throne of Athens, Creusa’s fury knows no bounds. True it is fuelled by her envy of a husband who has gained a son while she remains childless. But the way she expresses her anger is as a determination that the sacred city of Athens will never be ruled by a member of an alien lineage.
She plots to kill Ion. He finds out and rushes off to kill her. The crisis is resolved by the discovery that Ion is not in fact Xuthus’ son but the son of the god Apollo. Ion, therefore, has no earthly father. The consequence is that, even if he were to become king of Athens, there will be no foreign lineage in a position to make a claim through him to the land of Athens. The house of Erechtheus will remain in control for ever.
Moreover, as Apollo’s sister Athene is the founder of the city, Ion can claim to be heir to the territory’s soil through his mother and to its city, the human society that inhabits that territory, through his father. What greater claim to legitimacy could there be?
However, the crucial point in this reading of the play is still to come. Through Athene, Apollo recommends that no one tell Xuthus that Ion isn’t his son. Let the foreign warrior remain deceived. Let him live convinced that it is his descendants who will inherit political legitimacy. Let him go on believing that there is anything to be gained by laying claim to territories to which you have no ties, in which your flesh and the soil are not at all the same thing.
What Euripides implies is that the whole business of who has the right to claim what territory whether by right of birth or of conquest is a ridiculous and dangerous farrago of convenient inventions and deliberate deceits.
Athene brings the play to a close by prophesying that Ion’s descendants will form the four classes that make up social life: nobles, soldiers, farmers, craftsmen.
They’ll make their homes
on the slopes of my hills but their offspring will settle
the fertile islands called Cyclades
building harbours, roads and towns
each a powerful ally of Athens.
Spreading north and south on both sides of the strait
they’ll conquer Europe and Asia. In his name
the Ionians will achieve undying fame.
In terms of the domestic emotional turmoil we have just seen resolved, this is satisfying. Ion is our hero. We’ve been on his side from the beginning. We can go home happy.
But at the same moment, by the obvious absurdity of Athene’s claim, it’s revealed that what we’ve been watching is also a bitter satire. It’s as if in this magnificent play Euripides offers his audience a profound vision of its own humanity and capacity for redemption – and then at once tears it aside mocking: ‘If you believe that, my friends, you deserve all the horrors that come your way.’
© Copyright David Lan
August 1994
[Introduction reproduced from 'Euripides: ION, A New Version by David Lan', Methuen Drama, 1994]