L. A. Swift - The Hidden Chorus: Echoes of Genre in Tragic Lyric

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Echoes of Genre in Tragic Lyric

L. A. SWIFT

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L. A. Swift 2010

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For my parents

THIS book began life as a doctoral thesis funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant which I held as a student at Magdalen College, Oxford. The process of converting the thesis into a book was done while I was a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Oxford, and I am tremendously grateful to Trinity for the support which it provided during this period.

Two sections of the book are based on articles which I have published elsewhere. Parts of appear in my article How to Make a Goddess Angry: Making Sense of the Demeter Ode in Euripides Helen, Classical Philology 104.4 (2009). I would like to thank both journals for their permission to reprint this material.

A far more personal debt is owed to those individuals who have helped shape my work. For the initial stages, my doctoral supervisor, Armand DAngour, and my former tutor, Oliver Taplin, provided me with a great deal of support, and their advice has always been much appreciated. I am profoundly grateful to my two examiners, Chris Carey and Chris Pelling, who were kind enough to provide a great deal of feedback on the thesis. Without their comments the book would be much the poorer. I am also extremely grateful to Gregory Hutchinson, my adviser to the Press, who read the manuscript with a keen eye for detail and whose suggestions have been most helpful and thought-provoking. I would also like to thank Patrick Finglass for his comments on early drafts of several sections, and David Wallace for his help with genre-theory and methodology.

Finally, special thanks are due to Bill Allan, not only for his detailed comments on the entire book, but also for his constant encouragement and support in both academic and non-academic ways.

L.A.S.

Oxford, March 2009

Journal abbreviations are as in LAnne Philologique.

For the sake of simplicity, when citing tragedy I use the most recent OCTs unless otherwise stated: for Aeschylus, the edition of D. L. Page; for Sophocles, the edition of H. Lloyd-Jones and N. G. Wilson; for Euripides, the edition of J. Diggle.

All translations are mine.

When referring to lyric genres, I use the transliterated form of the Greek word in italics (e.g. paian not paean; hymenaios not hymenaeus). I also use the English adjective that derives from these nouns (e.g. paeanic, hymenaeal), for which the Anglicized spelling is used. However, when I am talking about how a particular Greek word is used, without prejudice to whether it is in fact a reliable genrename, I give the Greek word untransliterated (e.g. the Greeks use the word with a range of connotations).

I use the uncapitalized form chorus when referring to the chorus as an institution, or the tragic chorus in general, and the capitalized form Chorus when referring to a particular chorus in a play. Thus the tragic chorus has a range of functions, but the Chorus of Medea show their loyalty to the protagonist.

IN recent years, scholars of Greek tragedy have become increasingly aware that our reading of the plays is enhanced when we view them in relation to the society that produced them. This has proved an important development, and the analysis of tragedys relationship to Athenian politics, ideology, and religious practice has enriched our interpretation in many ways. Yet this contextually driven approach has, to date, told only a partial story. We must read tragedy not only as drama, but also as choral song.

For the Greeks, music was fundamental to civic education, and participating in or watching choral performance played a central role in musical and cultural life. Our fullest account of the importance of choral song is found in Platos Laws. As the dialogue turns to educational theory, the Athenian expounds a new way of ensuring good moral training: a carefully regulated set of choruses, designed to instil correct attitudes in the citizens from an early age, and to maintain these values throughout their lives (2.664b667a). What is of interest here is not the system that Plato suggests, but the parameters within which he seems to be working. For, while the three choruses he suggests for his ideal state may be contentious philosophy that requires justification, the importance of choral training per se is taken entirely for granted in the text. The chorus is regarded as the natural medium to educate citizens, and to pass on the values of the community. Indeed, the definition of an uneducated man the Athenian gives is someone who is (chorus-less), and his interlocutor, Cleinias, readily agrees (2.654a).