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Aetiologies are a peculiar feature of Greek tragedy in general and of Euripidean drama in particular. The gesture by which Athena, for example, announces that Ion will give his name to the Ionian peoples (Ion 1581-88) has few good parallels in Western drama.' This is partly because of the peculiar content of Greek tragedy. Unlike subsequent Western drama, which tends to portray fictional characters and situations, Greek tragedy re-enacts "real" people and situations from the mythical but non-fictional past. The closing aetiology thus allows the drama to come to terms with the gap between past events involving Ion and Creusa, and the present world of the Athenian audience. In relating events of the plot to the world of the spectator, aetiologies provide interesting material for students of Athenian culture.
This material has generally been approached in a naive manner. If an aetiology refers to a city in Arcadia or a rite in Athens, scholars tend to assume that it does so simply or transparently: we can assume that the city or the rite is just as the drama describes it, and that the aetiology is a transparent window upon details of the ancient world.2 This cultural fundamentalism assumes that there is a prior, knowable world of ritual and civic institutions, and that the aetiology marks the drama's dependence upon the original or more substantial world of Athenian culture.' Less common is the opposite approach which is largely indifferent to the institutions involved. This literary fundamentalism assumes that the dramatic text is knowable on its own, without reference to cultural practice, and that the aetiology is a literary device to command belief or to mark the end of the play.4 I have elsewhere proposed a different approach, arguing that aetiologies, especially in Euripides, explore in sophisticated and creative ways the relation between past and present, between text and cultures In this paper I argue more fully for a reading of aetiologies that is non-fundamentalist. Aetiologies are neither independent of, nor dependent upon, their cultural context, but are (in a sense I shall explain) rhetorical figures or tropes that engage with, and comment upon, this context. Aetiologies in general construct tendentious views of Greek culture, and in Euripides in particular they often do so reflexively or self-consciously,...