“Donald Trump has been committing the same assault on America and on American culture and society that E. Jean Carroll has credibly described him committing and that almost 20 other women have also described,” writes nhmeems
Illustration: Anna Park The earliest known depiction of democracy appears in an ancient Greek play that I can’t stop thinking about, called The Suppliant Maidens, by Aeschylus. It’s about the 50 daughters of a man named Danaus, who flee their home to escape forced marriage to their cousins. The refugee women arrive in Argos and ask for protection and permission to settle there, and the rest of the play is about whether or not they should be allowed to stay.
This point is illustrated nicely in The Suppliant Maidens about halfway through the play. Pelasgus is about to go offstage and tells the women to head over to a pleasant grove and take a breather. But the women know better. They ask, “Why in the world would we blunder into an area where anyone could walk!” In other words, it isn’t a sanctuary, it’s just a grove with no protection. The way asylum works in modern terms is that you have to cross the border to formally request it.
It reminded me of the scene in another Greek play, The Trojan Women, where the herald Talthybius has to come in and tell Hecuba and Andromache that Hector’s son, the child Astyanax, is to be thrown from the walls of Troy. It was the same dynamic. Also the same maneuver. In the play, the Greeks put the child to death to make a political point: to show that they can. It’s a wholly unnecessary gesture. Just as Trump has been doing for over a year now, using children as pawns — to show that he can.
Earlier this month, with the publication of E. Jean Carroll’s account of being sexually assaulted by the president of the United States in a department store fitting room many years ago, I started thinking of Greek tragedy again, this time in connection with the word “hubris.
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