Shadows on the son: Aeschylus, genealogy, history

This dissertation examines genealogy and history in Prometheus Bound, Seven against Thebes, and Persians. It asks how a character's relation to his own family history affects his perspective on the past. I argue that in each play the conflict between a son and a father, say between Xerxes and Darius, is replicated at the level of a theory of history. Genealogy suggests two different relations between the past generations and the present, since it is both a reproduction of the same (the ideal son who takes after his father) and a production of difference (the son can never be identical to the father). These two genealogical relations correspond to two theories of history: what I identify as a retrospective view of history, which transfigures discrete historical events into teleology and inevitability, where history becomes the movement of necessity; and a prospective one, which sees historical events as only the trace of desire, hope, potential and human agency, where history becomes the movement of what could have been, the contingent unfolding of unlimited possibilities. In the Prometheus Bound, for example, Aeschylus stages the discord between Zeus and Prometheus as a conflict between two views on history: Prometheus leverages a secret about Zeus' sexual desire against him because he sees a necessity of repetition in Zeus' genealogical past; but Zeus, the play stresses, is fully capable of reason, compromise, and collaboration, and thus his future (unlike his predecessors') remains open to will, desire, and choice. My project combines recent historicizing approaches to tragedy and close attention to the literary qualities of the plays. Drawing on diverse theories of history, it poses historical and political questions but seeks to answer them through detailed philological analysis.