Two Readings of the Tragic Barbarian: Hall and Saïd

Edith Hall’s Inventing the Barbarian (1989) and Suzanne Saïd’s chapter “Greeks and Barbarians in Euripides' Tragedies: The End of Differences?” (1984) share the same object of study: the representation of non-Greek peoples in fifth-century Athenian tragedy. However, they significantly differ in their conclusions. Reading them together is a clarifying exercise in how racializing discourse operates in ancient texts. They disagreement is not about the evidence but about the modality of the discourse that the authors perceived.

Hall’s argument is synthetic and broadly materialist. Under the pressure of the Persian Wars, the expanding slave economy (in which almost all Athenian slaves were non-Greek), and the democratic ideology that made “free” and “Hellenic” effectively synonymous, the tragedians invented a systematic vocabulary for characterizing non-Greek peoples. This vocabulary — ethnic stereotypes (Thracian violence, Phrygian cowardice, Egyptian cunning), theatrical conventions (the singing Barbarian, the prostrating court, the eunuch attendant), borrowed ethnographic material from Herodotus — had not existed in epic. Homer’s Trojans are not Barbarians in any systematic sense. The tragedians radicalized the tradition, and the result was the mythical Barbarian as a foil for Hellenic identity: servile where Greeks were free, tyrannized where Greeks governed themselves, excessive in passion and luxury where Greeks practiced moderation, cowardly where Greeks were courageous. Hall treats this as functional ideology, and the analysis is deliberately non-ironic. When the Phrygian slave in Orestes throws himself at Orestes' feet wailing in a high singing voice while the Greeks speak in trimeters, the theatrical convention is working as designed.

Saïd’s argument operates at a different level and reaches opposite conclusion, specifically about Euripides, not the tragic corpus as a whole. She begins from the observation that every anti-Barbarian argument in Euripides is voiced by a character who is either the play’s villain, a hypocrite, or someone who contradicts himself within a hundred lines. Menelaus proclaims Barbarian inferiority in Iphigenia in Aulis and then forgets his own argument the moment a personal convenience presents itself; Jason declares that “no Greek woman would have dared to do this” in Medea while standing as a man who has violated the laws himself; Agamemnon frames the expedition against Troy as a liberation of Greece from Barbarian tyranny while being, as Euripides makes explicit, a slave of the mob driven by vanity. The panhellenic rhetoric is present and detailed — Saïd is not arguing that Euripides ignores it — but its dramatic context is systematically ironic. “This anti-Barbarian talk, whose spokesmen are very suspect, is always invalidated by the context.”

The same passages read very differently through the two lenses. Hall treats Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris as a case of Herodotean ethnography transposed to the stage: the Taurian human sacrifice and cliff-top impalement are drawn directly from Herodotus 4.99–103, giving theatrical specificity to the “savage Barbarian” topos. Saïd reads the same play as continually paralleling Taurian and Greek crimes — Agamemnon very nearly sacrificed Iphigenia himself, the Tantalid line runs on human offerings — until the ending, which confirms that the Taurian rite was demanded by Artemis, and the Greek heroine Iphigenia tells her Barbarian interlocutor that “Greece knows nothing of trustworthiness.” The Bacchae is even starker: Hall reads the presentation of Dionysus as arriving from Asia and Thrace as a containment strategy, externalizing the irrational aspects of an accepted Greek cult by marking them as foreign. Saïd reads it as the total dissolution of the Greek/Barbarian boundary — Thebes is progressively Barbarianized by contagion, Pentheus ends dressed as a Maenad and becomes “the double of the Barbarian,” and Cadmus learns that he will be exiled to lead a mixed army of Barbarians to Greece, having apparently considered himself Greek all along.

The different conclusions follow partly from the different historical frames each author applies. Hall grounds her analysis in the Persian Wars and the democratic triumphalism that followed Marathon: Aeschylus, who fought there, is the paradigm case, and tragedy served a mass democratic audience that needed its collective identity performed. Saïd situates Euripides in a later intellectual moment — the generation of the sophists, Hippias arguing that all men belong to the same family by nature, Antiphon declaring that “from the point of view of nature, all men are alike in every way, whether they are Greeks or Barbarians.” This is not only biographical context; it explains why Hall’s framework fits Aeschylus better than it fits Euripides, and why Saïd reads Euripides as an anomaly within the corpus Hall is describing rather than a straightforward participant in it.

What makes the comparison productive for thinking about racializing discourse more generally is that Saïd does not deny that the stereotypes are present and substantive in Euripides. They are there: the Phrygian cowardice, the Barbarian servility, the luxury of Troy. Her argument is about the frame around them, not their absence. This creates a difficult interpretive question: when a racializing argument is staged in order to be discredited — placed in a suspect mouth, immediately undercut, turned ironically against its speaker — is the discourse still doing racializing work? The rhetorical structure is still available for uptake. The commonplaces about natural Greek superiority can be extracted from their Euripidean context and cited without the irony, which is exactly what fourth-century panhellenic rhetoric did with them (Saïd notes that the arguments in Andromache, Trojan Women, and Helen can be found “almost word for word” in Isocrates). The staging is critical; the material is real. Hall and Saïd are both right, at different levels of analysis, which is probably the most one can say.