Thread by @nhmeems

The earliest known depiction of democracy occurs in one of the lesser-known tragedies of Aeschylus, The Suppliant Maidens, about a large family of people who arrive on foreign soil seeking asylum.

The play concerns the 50 daughters of Danaus who've fled their native land to escape a forced marriage with their cousins. The women arrive in Argos and ask for protection and permission to settle there. The rest of the play is about whether or not they should be allowed to stay.

The way democracy comes into it is this: the men pursuing the Danaids (as the women are called) have made known their intention of making war on anyone who harbors the women. This puts Pelasgus, the King of the Argives, in a bind.

He's hesitant. On the one hand, he doesn't want to put his own people in jeopardy for a lot of strangers. If he helps these foreigners, Argive men may die--and for mere women!

On the other hand if Pelasgus turns the Danaids away, he will incur the wrath of Zeus, who loves and protects refugees. Rather than make a decision himself about what to do, Pelasgus turns the matter over to the people, the *demos.*

When The Suppliant Maidens was first performed, in 470 BCE, the form of tragedy was fairly new, and democracy itself was also comparatively young.

I asked @sentantiq to check for me whether the word "democracy" actually appears in the play, which was what I thought I remembered from my undergraduate days. He said no, the word *democracy* itself doesn't appear, but the word "demos" occurs six times.

One of these is in the phrase "the powerful hand of the people." My Greek isn't what it was once, and my Aeschylus was never anything to write home about (it's tough stuff), so I'm not sure, but I think that phrase can also be translated "the ruling hand of the people."

The Suppliant Maidens is one of two Greek tragedies I've had on my mind fairly consistently for over a year now--and for obvious reasons. The form is full of wanderers and refugees, people buffeted by fortune and reduced to the most abject circumstances.

The characters who inhabit Attic tragedy are by and large the hopeless and the homeless, the stateless and bereaved, the wholly dispossessed. Aporia, a word meaning "a lack of resources," "the state of being without," is the word I remember coming up most frequently in tragedy.

The Aeschylus has been on my mind because it chiefly because it offers such a detailed portrait of the process by which a nation decides whether or not to grant someone asylum. Curiously, what happens in the play is not all that different from the way it works today in the U.S.

So every time in the past year that the Trump administrations attempts to change the laws that govern asylum seeker, altering rules and regulations, redefining words, issuing executive orders--all with a view to getting around existing laws so as to make things illegal...

...I've gone back to the Suppliant Maidens and thought for days about the meaning of asylum. The words derives from an ancient Greek adjective (asulon) that means "inviolable," "unassailable," "not allowed to be seized."

In ancient Greek culture, a place of asylum was an sacred area--a temple or altar or sacred grove--that was dedicated to a particular god. Whoever stood in that area was thought to be protected by that god, and to violate that law would have been unthinkable, a sacrilege.

This is illustrated nicely at one point in The Suppliant Maidens. Pelasgus is about to go offstage and tells the women to go and stand in a particular place and rest. They say: But how will we be safe there? It's not an altar!

In modern terms the way this works is that you have to cross the border to seek asylum. You have to be on American soil. That's base, that's safe-haven. So every time the Trump administration has raised the subject of altering the rules of asylum, I've gone a little daft.

Every time they've started talking again about how people should apply for asylum from somewhere else--from Mexico, or from their own country, or through their consulate, I've beat my breast and rent my hair. "How can they do that," I've cried.

And every time someone on Twitter or on the news has describes asylum-seekers entering the country "illegally," I think my head might explode. "That's not how it works," I meme to myself. "That's not how any of this works." You have to be here, you have to set foot on US soil.

Very few physical acts in modern life retain that sort of ancient mystery, but asylum does. We have no sacred groves or altars in our public spaces. What we have is our border. That's the sacred grove toward which people in extremity have always migrated, seeking safety.

The other tragedy that's been on my mind a lot in the past year is Euripides' The Trojan Women, about the widows and mothers and children left alive after the fall of Troy.

I began thinking about that play this time last year, the night that Rachel Maddow had to cut short her broadcast because she couldn't read aloud from a news item that had been handed to her, a story from the AP wire about the existence of something called "tender-age" shelters.

We already knew about the family separation policy. Earlier that same evening, then-Secretary of DHS Kristin Nielsen had been hounded from an upscale Mexican restaurant by a small crowd of protesters calling out "End family separation" and "Abolish ICE," among other things.

It's rare for a broadcast journalist to experience the news *as news*--simultaneously with the viewer. Newscasters are a little like the messengers in Greek tragedy in that regard: their job, by and large, is to deliver information that they already know themselves.

The stage messenger brings onstage word of something that has happened a long way away. He's had time to frame his story, to figure out how to say what he's going to say. Maddow, that night, was finding out about the extent of what the US was doing at the same time that we were.

It was a glitch. It reminded me of the scene in 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: it's wholly unnecessary, a gesture. Which was precisely what Trump was doing, using children as pawns because he could. And there is a wall in this story too.

After Maddow's broadcast was when people first began talking about concentration camps, I think, much to the disapproval of some. They were the same people who disapproved of Secretary Nielsen being made so uncomfortable over her expensive meal that she had to leave the cantina.

That was when people began tweeting and preaching about "civility," and later that week, when Sarah Sanders got booted from another expensive restaurant, the same folks preached and tweeted arguing that it was bad to embarrass people and worse to describe bad things than do them.

Well, a year has passed. And this week Trump began talkling about rounding people up, and the Times published a story about the four-month-old baby who turned out to be the youngest detainee separated from his family.

And 6 children have died, and there was a new AP story tonight about immigration officials representing the Trump administration in court, trying to argue that it's okay to let kids sleep on concrete in freezing cages without soap or toothpaste.

And they've stopped giving the kids recreational time and classes, and here we are. And people are still arguing about whether or not the US is putting people in concentration camps and arguing about ... civility. //

*This thread is part of something I've been working on for a while and haven't been quite able to sort out. I'd hoped that approaching it in this way would help me to work it out. I reserve the right to add to or alter it.

Sorry about all the typos. I pushed the wrong button halfway through and sent it out early, and after that it was sort of a race against time to make it make sense.