What have the Suppliant Women subverted?

This article presents the way in which Euripides uses the power of the ritual lament to present on stage how the principles and values of an existing political system are subverted during the war. As an example, passages of laments from the Suppliant Women are used, who succeeded in overturning political decisions on burial issues and inciting the Athenian public to resist Thebes’ decisions on its refusal to return soldiers’ corpses for burial during the first period of the Peloponnesian War. The same laments, directed by Nikos Charalambous in 1978, try to present the feelings of anger and despair of the Cypriots who, after the Turkish invasion and occupation of a part of the island (1974), have not yet managed to locate their lost people and dead compatriots. Charalambous staged Suppliant Women at the Theatrical Organization of Cyprus and discovered the way to appeal not only to the memory of his audience, who recognized their oikeia kaka through the lament of the mothers of Argos, but also, by reading alternatively the tragedy, he tried to use their recent tragic experiences in order to overturn the prevailing political situation after the invasion.